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  • "They Stood like Men":Horses, Myth, and Carnophallogocentrism in Toni Morrison's Home
  • Claudia Alonso-Recarte (bio)

Toni Morrison's mythopoesis and reliance on animal imagery has long attracted scholars to her fiction, and yet to date there has been insufficient critical commentary on the essential role that equines play in her tenth novel, Home (2012). The novel's linguistic and mythographic construction of these horses must be read not only in the context of Morrison's stylistic preferences when it comes to animal imagery but also in relation to the significance of equines both in African American history and in classical myth. The horses that open Home serve as a symbolic epicenter through which themes such as race, masculinity, community, violence, and ingestion are reflected and refracted, offering a tantalizing landscape for the rhetorical exploration of trauma. Jacques Derrida's schema of carnophallogocentrism, furthermore, provides the exegetical tools through which to rearticulate and piece together the scattered motifs, images, and rhetorical devices that gravitate around the symbol of the horses. By understanding the value of the horses within this mythic-carnophallogocentric complex, we may better trace the connections between rituals involving meat-eating, the primal parricide, and proper burial, all of which give closure to the characters' quest for spiritual healing and emotional restoration.

Myth and Animality in Morrison's Work

Much of the scholarship dedicated to Toni Morrison's work suggests that to critically engage with her fiction is to immerse oneself in mythography. At Howard University, Morrison studied Classics as her minor while majoring in English in the early 1950s. In her Tanner Lecture "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature" (1988), she refers to the connections between Greek tragedy and "Afro-American communal structures (the function of song and chorus, the heroic struggle between the claims of community and individual hubris) and African religion and philosophy." "I feel intellectually at [End Page 87] home there," she states (125). Indeed, scores of Morrison scholars have provided valuable insight as to how the mythical translates onto her page. Most notably, Tessa Roynon's Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture (2013), which includes what is probably the first published mythographic reading of Home, presents a comprehensive articulation of her oeuvre in the key of classical archetypes, forms, and genres. Prior to Roynon, Cynthia A. Davis and Jacqueline de Weever acknowledged the mythopoetic endeavor in Morrison's early novels. At the same time, the Africanist influence in her work has attracted the critical eye of several scholars who have examined how African archetypes, folktales, magic, vernacular language, myths, and rituals underlie the structural and symbolic landscape of her fiction.1 Likewise, Home sparks similar discussions related to myth criticism. Aside from Roynon's perspicacious analysis, in which she decodes the novel as a simultaneous revision of the Odyssey and the Iliad, other critics have focused on other European and African influences on the narrative.2

Within the vast amount of critical material on Morrison's mythopoesis broadly and on Home in particular (of which the above is but a handful), nonhuman animals stand out as essential, multi-signifying components in her craft. As metaphors, metonymies, and synecdoches of the human bodies and emotions that populate the text, these animals seem more prone to mystification than perceived to exist as full, conscious subjects themselves. In other words, Morrison takes full advantage of animal representation and imagery at the expense of providing them with a species-specific language or with a subjectivity that may cohesively explain their behavior or emotions—what Josephine Donovan terms the "animal standpoint" in literature ("Aestheticizing"). This is not to say that the existence of a consciousness is fully denied to them; rather, Morrison seems to acknowledge their subjectivity and their sentience not as an end in itself but as instrumental in the crafting of her characters' mostly fractured psyches and universe. Animals are relevant because they stand as reflections or refractions of the more essential characters, motifs, or themes in the text, and as such, they strengthen the sense of unity. There have been attempts, however, to search for some semblance of an anti-speciesist agenda in Morrison's work, although...

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