Abstract.
This essay argues that the wider geopolitical terrain of the Cold War into the world of 1950s’ America occurs through the literary device of screen narratives and their subsequent destruction. Screen narratives, operating through ambiguity and omission, hint at underlying histories, traumas and their accompanying guilt that shape the present. Through a violent eruption of the suppressed, the novel itself is a testimony to Morrison’s belief that the past, and all the deaths it has seen, inevitably finds its way into the present. With the collapse of the dichotomy between past and present, those of self and society, periphery and centre, home and world also collapse. This then necessitates a complete re-understanding of the world, now no longer an unfractured totality.
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“The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It's bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one's ever assumed responsibility for. “(Morrison 247)
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Morrison’s authorial ethos of undoing binaries, surfaced in a 1988 interview in relation to Beloved (1987), is one that ostensibly undergirds her entire corpus of work. Twenty-five years after the publication of Beloved, Home (2012) continues Morrison’s project of piecing together a coherent identity, rooted in history, for the black individual whose many experiences contradict one another. Frank Money, Home’s black protagonist, is American by nationality, yet the colour of his skin causes his exclusion by the very country he fought for in the Korean War. In Home, Frank Money, the narrator’s voice, indicated by italics throughout the novel, manifests as eruptive “unveilings” of false coherence on the levels of both form and plot; it is a challenge for him to simultaneously embody both a black and an American identity. As Morrison’s protagonist shows us, a seamless black American identity exists only in theory. Screen narratives which operate through ambiguity and omission facilitate the development of falsely coherent memories, betraying Frank’s desire to integrate himself into mainstream American society by leaving his traumatic past as a black war veteran behind. Yet, these screen narratives, functioning as modified, idealised versions of the past, nonetheless hint at underlying histories, repressed traumas and interminable guilt which inevitably shape the present. The stark contrast between the two voices are a baring of the dissonance between desired and material reality. Morrison achieves this by superimposing an omniscient screen narrative over the central first-person narrative; i.e., the one surrounding Frank Money’s lived experience of trauma. Therefore, I argue that these “unveilings” map the wider geopolitical terrain of the Cold War into the world of 1950s’ America. The novel is a survey of Frank’s identity as a black war veteran whose blackness and Americanness are constantly at odds. It is a revelation of how the American aggressor’s war trauma and guilt confuse his marginalised American identity further. Can one be both perpetrator and victim?
Using the vocabulary of past versus present, self versus society, periphery versus centre and home versus world, this act of mapping the international onto domestic landscape captures how concepts of ‘world’ must be considered in formations of ‘home’. These formations inform the (black) “American’s” identity, capturing the struggle to reconcile inherent differences in skin colour, cultural history and lived experience with the desire to belong. Here, Frank’s position as a disenfranchised black man in America is simultaneously haunted by his role as aggressor during the Korean War. Standing at the exact interstices of the false dichotomies Morrison seeks to undo, the question perhaps is not whether one can be both perpetrator and victim; the question is how to grapple with this reality that condemns the black man from all sides, essentially forcing his existence as a vessel for both criminality and victimhood.
Frank’s disruptive revelations are an indication of how the black American identity, despite perpetually striving towards coherence, is doomed to failure. These revelations are strategically placed at uncanny moments in the novel, always after the solace of some peaceable realisation that is later revealed to be deceptive. They typify how progress towards an unfractured identity is necessarily truncated. For instance, the transition from Chapter Thirteen to Fourteen is one where Frank’s continued failures to overcome his traumatic experience of war result in an abrupt implosion of violent self-condemnation. His positive self-assurance that his beloved sister, Cee, can overcome infertility caused by a white doctor’s unforgiving eugenic experimentations on her is overshadowed by Frank’s innate knowledge that he sexually assaulted and killed a young Korean girl after the act. While his beloved “[Cee] could know the truth [of her suffering], accept it, and keep on quilting” (Morrison 132), living as a survivor, Frank’s dead victim cannot do the same.
The initially-welcome fact that Frank’s alleviated worries about his sister allows him the headspace to “sort what else was troubling him and what to do about it” (132) thus becomes the gateway to intense self-hatred in Chapter Fourteen. A disavowal of the self occurs when Frank questions “how could [he] like and accept [him]self, even be [him]self, if [he] surrendered” (134) to his identity as a child rapist. His act of killing the child he assaulted, his choice to be a murderer, his willed belief that becoming a murderer would erase his rape, are mired in and structured by intense self-hatred and self-disgust. As Frank himself reveals, he could not “let her live after she took [him] down to a place that [he] didn’t know was in [him]” (134); his murder is a direct refusal of his own basal mistake. Frank prefers to construct his identity as a loving brother, a brave war veteran and a morally upright individual. Morrison’s structure of Cee’s recovery alongside Frank’s admission of sexual assault and ruthless murder disturbingly links his experiences at home and in the world, first with Frank as protective older black brother and then as an American aggressor. This is the sign of a split identity––Frank, inevitably, is both victim and aggressor. The Cold War’s fractures are implied through Frank’s experiences during the Korean War as the latter is a proxy war between the Eastern and American blocs setting the stage for the Cold War. Correspondingly, Frank’s rape of the young Korean girl as an American soldier hinges on the war dynamic that disenfranchises the defenceless Korean civilian proxy. Without explicit mention of the Cold War, Home makes visible its haunting ripple effects that reverberate internationally.
Following Frank’s shocking admission, the screen narrative in Chapter Thirteen, an attempt to reinstate normalcy, is presented as the fallible mime of an idealised reality that is necessarily disrupted. This manifests as a failure of the Freudian phenomenon which defines a screen memory as “one in which an early event is screened by a later memory” (Freud Ch. 4) which, arguably successfully, suppresses it despite the early event’s desire to resurface. Morrison tells us that trauma and guilt refuse eternal burial. It is thus that Frank must re-contend with his identity in light of his confession. His question to himself, “What type of man is that” (Morrison 166), surpasses the circumstance of his sexual assault; it is also a question of how he can live with himself through and after contending with the cruel, primal and destructive side of himself he did not know existed previously. An inability to even be himself gestures towards a complete split of identity that the novel’s end reaffirms through the image of the tree that pervades Frank’s consciousness. The tree, ostensibly symbolic of Frank, and by extension, the Black-American war veteran he represents, is “Hurt right down the middle/ But alive and well” (185). Perhaps, this suggests that the black American’s identity is destined to be scarred and traumatised, yet not to the point of death, this being both the blessing of life and the curse of suffering. The uncomfortable truth of this irreconcilability must rise to the fore with Frank’s admittance of his sexual aggression. It rips apart the fragile screen that implies the black American identity, existing as two halves of an unconnectable whole, can only be contended with in the wake of violent eruption that sets the truth of its disjunction out.
Hence, given their refusal to settle for superficial normalisations of reality, Frank’s first-person recollections in chapters interspersing the entire novel act as unwanted yet inevitable radical disturbances. Disordering attempts to develop a present without past, home without world, centre without periphery and self without society, these disturbances are suggestions that Frank must be positioned vis-a-vis his past and his communities. Similarly, it is impossible to position America as centre and as home without its relationship to the rest of the world. This is made known from the way in which Frank’s trauma from the war creeps into his post-war life, whittling his relationship with Lily, his newfound girlfriend after returning to America, from something to nothing. The fact of his trauma in the outside world structures his subsequent experience of home, insofar that his baseline for an existence is to “stay alive” (76). When readers first approach the novel, we learn that Lily has already left Frank. It is impossible for her to build a home with him when his everyday reality is so severely infected by traumatic war flashbacks. His emotional responses to the war are transposed onto home, clear when Frank behaves abnormally, such as bolting from the everyday, quotidian church convention Lily brings him to. The novel never explicitly explains what it is about the “little girl with slanty eyes” (76) that triggers Frank when “she gave him a broad smile of thanks” (76) after his kind gesture of pushing a platter of food closer to her. It is only later in the novel with Frank’s sudden admission of his sexual assault that the image of a smiling girl, almost oddly specific with its racist reference to slanted eyes, makes sense to the reader––she reminds Frank, despite his best attempts to repress the memory, of the young Korean girl he brutally raped then killed out of his own cowardly shame. Clearly, even before he willingly admits to it, Morrison’s readers bear witness to how traumatic memories bubble beneath the surface of sanity Frank has to exert immense energy to sustain. War memories, incompatible with civilian codes of normality, inevitably create a division between the Black American war veteran and society that manifests in his inability to reintegrate himself with America before confronting his personal traumas from the war.
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Given this glaring split between war and home which drives him to repeatedly perceive his home as a warzone, Frank’s suppression of his war memories, where he simply responds to Lily that “yeah, [he] know[s]. It won’t happen again. Promise” (77) after one of his breakdowns is almost ironic in its emptiness. What is known is never elucidated, instead, what is apparent is a forced suppression of that which is already increasingly adamant on revealing itself. Lily points out that the breakdown of her relationship with Frank “was more of a stutter than a single eruption” (75), this another clue of a series of ruptures inevitably occurring in Frank’s construction of his post-war identity. It is through such marked absences in the omniscient narrator’s account, of the refusal to confront what lies in the periphery, that Morrison further makes her case that the black American war veteran must face each of his traumas, despite how disparate they might seem from the environment of home. The impossibility of its coherent articulation within her screen narrative Morrison has constructed also further accounts for the violent insertion of Frank’s first-person narrative within the novel as that which, by casting his memories as those of “an imaginary world, composed of fantastic, supernatural, nightmarish or simply nonexistent forms, [...] critically illuminate aspects of reality” (Lowy 205). This is a facilitation of the movement towards rationalisation of a split yet connected identity whose two halves can neither cohere nor detach completely. Considering Lowy’s proposition in simple terms, Frank’s narrative could be seen as an attempt to bring into existence non-existent forms as a means of restructuring identity. Frank is, after all, forced to contend with his nightmares, his anger, and the cruelty he has exacted upon others and others upon him.
Similarly, as Frank’s interior landscape is moulded by his war experience, America’s landscape, on a larger scale, is shaped by the external circumstances of every war despite the screen narratives’ glib elision of them. This resembles Frank’s avoidance of his war memories; statements such as “most of the young ones had enlisted in the [First World] [W]ar and when it was over didn’t come back to work cotton, peanuts, or lumber” (Morrison 45) obliterating descriptions of the war itself, transforms the language of civilian American society into that with which the effects of war are measured. The particular importance of understanding the Korean War in relation to America is apparent when the omniscient narrator claims that the war veterans at home “knew about [the] Korea[n] [War] but not understanding it did not give it the respect––the seriousness––Frank thought it deserved” (136). While failing to articulate its exact seriousness, this alludes to the importance of the Korean War as the Cold War’s originator, both in which America is involved. Morrison’s refusal to explicitly name the Cold War, gesturing to it only through Frank’s recollections of the Korean War, reflects her belief that there is a need to confront, when they erupt, the complexities encoded beneath the surface, this being the only way the black American self can return home. This then guides readers towards a parsing of Frank’s first-person narrative, to understand through him the Korean War’s “seriousness”. It is only after a confrontation with this proxy war that one can move on to decode the Cold War.
Consequently, Frank struggles to grapple with the past and the faraway in attempts at self-determination in the here and now, as illustrated by his revelation of his own sexual assault. The novel’s correlating of 1950s America and the Korean War and by extension, the Cold War, through Frank’s narrative underlines how the home and world implicate each other, and self-making. It is only after he has confronted this network of trauma, where the past, self, periphery and home cohere in an interlocking formation as microcosmic loci from which the present society, centre and world respectively develop, that Frank can finally “go home” (147) with Cee. Home then surpasses that of a physical space; it is also emblematic of a state of mind where Frank, after unravelling and moving on from his past traumas, is at peace with himself.
The only way forward, Morrison ultimately suggests, is through a narrative that strives towards a new whole founded on the interactions between its divisions. By way of conclusion, it might be productive to briefly consider how Home fares in the face of Georg Lukacs’s theorising of the novel as a means towards “created totality” (Lukacs 37) in our world where the “natural unity of the metaphysical spaces [we occupy] has been destroyed forever” (37). Adorno, in his critique of Lukacs’s theory, has aptly summarised how it proposes the “postulate of a reality which must be depicted as an unbroken continuum joining subject and object” (Adorno 176). Home’s multifaceted narrative thus destroys this vision of a coherent totality through an exemplification of how “the cleavage [between various realities], the antagonism persists, and it is a sheer lie to assert that it has been ‘overcome’ as they call it'' (176). While Adorno’s comment refers to the Eastern bloc, Morrison’s masterpiece can be understood as an assertion that the same could (and perhaps, must) be said about America, Americans, and their relationships with the rest of the world.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “Reconciliation under Duress.” Aesthetics and Politics, Verso Books, London, London, 2007, pp. 151–176.
Freud, Sigmund. “Chapter Four.” The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: (1901), Hogarth Press, London, 1995. Ebook edition.
Lowy, Michael. “The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A Moonlit Enchanted Night.’” Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2007, pp. 193–206.
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of The Novel: A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. The Merlin Press, 1971.
Morrison, Toni. Home. Vintage Books, 2012.
Morrison, Toni. “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison (Interviewed by Marsha Darling / 1988).” Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2008, pp. 246–254.