Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Introduction

As a quintessential faculty of human psyche, memory “has entered public discourse to an unprecedented degree” (Antze & Lambek, 2016, p. vii). Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the studies of memory from the sociocultural perspective. This paradigmatic shift in memory studies (from physiology and psychology to socioculturology), however, has by no means been recently initiated. As early as the 1920s, Maurice Halbwachs (1952/1992), French philosopher and sociologist, proposes for the first time the concept of “collective memory” with its “social frameworks” and asserts that

we preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually reproduced; through them, as by a continual relationship, a sense of our identity is perpetuated . . . Our memories, especially the earliest ones, are indeed our [originally italicized] memories. (pp. 47-49)

Collective memory, despite its early genesis, remains quite underdeveloped until the 1980s when Jan Assmann, German Egyptologist, refines it into “communicative memory” and “cultural memory.” J. Assmann (1992/2011), in his representative work Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, states that “communicative memory comprises memories related to the recent past” (p. 36), while cultural memory “is a matter of institutionalized mnemotechnics” (p. 37) which functions to shape memories and scaffold identities through fixed objectifications like “texts, dances, images, rituals and so on” (p. 38). In the meanwhile, Aleida Assmann (1999/2011), professor of English and literary studies in Germany, systematically explores such spatial media of cultural memory as writing, images, bodily practices, places, and monuments. As has been demonstrated, theorization of cultural memory emphasizes not only the social constructiveness of memory but also its influence on individual and collective identities through different objective media. Cultural memory “is evoked to heal, to blame, to legitimate. It has become a major idiom in the construction of identity, both individual and collective, and a site of struggle as well as identification” (Antze & Lambek, 2016, p. vii). As one of the media of cultural memory, literature intersects with the former in multiple ways (Feng, 2017, p. 54). Diasporic literature, compared with other literary branches, possesses a more natural connection with cultural memory, for one of its recurring motifs is the identification of the diasporic individual with his or her cultural matrix.

As an exceptional African diasporic novel, A Mercy (2008) by Toni Morrison has attracted much attention from the scholars of African American literature over the past decade. To date, scholarship has fruitfully examined the novel from a wide range of critical perspectives, such as ecofeminism, African feminism, trauma, narratological studies, literary ethics, body politics, psychoanalysis, and so on (Sui, 2017, p. 94). On closer inspection, however, A Mercy presents a network of ethnic cultural memories woven from communicative memories of diasporic characters. Regrettably, it remains little explored as to the way how this cobweb of cultural memories has formed and why it matters. In “Traumas, Memory, Narrative Therapy—On A Mercy by Toni Morrison,” Biwu Shang (2011b) points out that the novel “is the product of the memories of the wounded” (p. 87) and mainly analyzes the process of Florens’s healing trauma through narrative. In “Personal and Cultural Memory in A Mercy,” Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber (2014) touches upon “the power of bodily stored memory” to facilitate the diasporic characters’ construction of subjectivity (p. 81). Jesse A. Goldberg (2016), drawing on the theory of circum-Atlantic memory by Joseph Roach, demonstrates in detail how “dismembered origins are re-membered, re-vised, and re-turned to” by reading A Mercy as a recounting of the American origins narrative (p. 118). There is no denying the fact that the above-mentioned literatures have, to varying degrees, offered insights into the memory issue in the novel. Two deficiencies, however, need to be noted. One is that they focus on communicative memory rather than cultural memory. Even though the title of Schreiber’s article contains “cultural memory,” what she actually means and also discusses in the article is “memory of culture,” which should not be completely equated with the “cultural memory” defined by the Assmanns as objectification of communicative memory. The other is that they tend to assume African female Florens as the protagonist, thus ignoring characters of other ethnicities. Actually, the memories of other characters in A Mercy are also worth studying because “the novel boasts of a multi-perspective, three-dimensional structure, in which each character is a protagonist” (Lei, 2017, p. 25). To some degree, it is exactly the cross-references between these intertwined memories that make it possible for the reader to interpret the novel.

The communicative memory of each character in A Mercy serves to shape his or her individual identity. More importantly, through his or her own efforts, the individual manages to transform the communicative memory into the collective cultural memory. By creating an intricate network of ethnic cultural memories in A Mercy, Morrison probes the experiences and histories of the ethnic groups that have been previously glossed over or “un-remembered” by the mainstream culture. Through the lens of cultural memory defined by the Assmanns, this article intends to discuss the relationships between the representation of cultural memory and the construction of individual and ethnical cultural identity. I argue that in A Mercy, Morrison highlights and manipulates three major media of cultural memory underpinning the novel: the architecture, the inscription, and the body, to interrogate and challenge the validity of numerous historical monuments and museums in America that are eviscerated of their complicity and function as tools in the atrocity of instituting slavery.

Jacob’s Mansion: Instituting the Slavery Culture

Studies on communicative memory in relation to the physical space date back to the legendary story by Ancient Greek poet Simonides, which is widely acclaimed as the origin of mnemotechnics. In the story, relying upon his acute sense of placement, Simonides helps the relatives of the deceased identify the extremely deformed corpses caused by the downfall of a hall immediately after his departure. The idea that the architecture (the hall) is the carrier of Simonides’s memory is furthered by Aleida Assmann with her notion of the architecture as a metaphor for cultural memory. Assmann’s concept spurs a broad discussion of physical spaces as media of cultural memory, such as the house, the temple, the monument, the tombstone, and so on. The core physical space in A Mercy is the double-story mansion that Jacob Vaark, a European farmer, insists on building despite his wife Rebekka’s opposition. The mansion “is not a utilitarian edifice to be used by family, but rather a symbol of rank” (Babb, 2011, p. 155). Its significance, as will be shown in the following analyses, lies more in the metaphorical aspect as a medium of cultural memory. Construction of the mansion not only externalizes Jacob’s communicative memory but more importantly molds the cultural memory that is shared by the entire community of early slave owners.

The decision of Jacob to build a magnificent mansion has much to do with his communicative memory, which exists in an individual’s daily practice of recalling the past. In A Mercy, Jacob’s memory of a mansion results from his experiences of traveling as an itinerant trader and lender. On one journey for collecting debt, Jacob is stricken dumb by the grandeur of a plantation called Jublio, the manor of his debtor, a Portuguese gentleman, D’Ortega. The omniscient narrator in the novel vividly describes Jacob’s appreciation that his first sight of the incomparable manor gives rise to:

Jacob Vaark climbed three brick steps, then retraced them to stand back from the house and appraise it. Two wide windows, at least two dozen panes in each, flanked the door. Five more windows on a broad second story held sunlight glittering above the mist. He had never seen a house like it. The wealthiest men he knew built in wood, not brick, riven clapboards with no need for grand pillars suitable for a House of Parliament. (Morrison, 2008, p. 15)

The two-story mansion, with its quality building materials and grandiose architectural design, reminds Jacob first and foremost of the solemn parliamentary house rather than a common residence. Jacob’s admiration for the appearance of the manor, however, is soon mixed with self-abasement, disagreement, and even aversion. His complicated emotional world relates first to the strong sense of humiliation he feels thinking that he, as a trader and lender, is invited by a landed gentleman to discuss the latter’s debt. Worse still, his bedraggledness makes a stark contrast with the gentleman’s embroidered silk and lace collar. The most important factor is that D’Ortega’s pompous dressing and extravagance have evoked in Jacob a tinge of repulsion as he learns that the former’s excess of life comfort is premised on exploitation of the African slaves. The discrepancies in social status and values, however, are eventually conquered and blurred in Jacob’s welling envy of the magnificence of the building. As Herman Beavers (2018) remarks, “Looking at Jublio, with its house made of honey-colored stone, the iron fence enclosing the property, and the rows of slave quarters, Jacob experiences a mixture of revulsion and envy” (p. 167). Even when he is leaving the mansion for home, Jacob

once again, in spite of himself, envied the house, the gate, the fence . . . . And realized, not for the first time, that only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them. So mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property? (Morrison, 2008, p. 27)

The moment Jacob departs from Jublio for home in Virginia is a turn-of-fate moment for him, with his previous seeded awareness about social hierarchy blooming. The idea is reinforced in him that the physicality of materials, especially those in a man’s possession, is the root and backup of his social status and prestige. Later in the evening, the sweet dream Jacob falls into “of a grand house of many rooms rising on a hill above the fog” (Morrison, 2008, p. 35) not only reflects his memory of the mansion but also hints at his later conversion to a slave owner from a lender and trader and his determination to build an equally marvelous mansion regardless.

Chance encounter with Jublio sparks Jacob’s pent-up desire for maximum profit which is, in 17th-century America, almost synonymous with the inexhaustibility of African bodies. In the first few years in the New World before the debt-collecting travel, Jacob and Rebekka are immersed into the bliss of a self-sufficient farm life. However, with his eventual acceptance of D’Ortega’s offer of one of his slaves, the 8-year-old African girl Florens to honor his debt, Jacob becomes susceptible to his unconscious propensity for the privileged class and begins to “throw off the exigent consciousness of the immigrant, whose object was merely to subsist and survive, and embrace contingency as it takes the form of membership in a religious sect or the financial elite” (Beavers, 2018, p. 171). Every time he returns home, he brings Rebekka such unrealistic items as silver tea sets, delicate combs, lace collars, and silver-framed mirrors, and so on. Ironically, these items, as symbols of the lifestyle and values exclusive of the landed gentry, used to be despised by Jacob as the results of barbarian slavery. Jacob’s memory of D’Ortega’s extravagant life, therefore, has taken its toll on his change of identity, which is demonstrated to the fullest by his great project of building a mansion.

Jacob’s communicative memory of Jublio as well as the high social status it symbolizes is eventually externalized in his act of constructing a mansion imitating the former. Stemming from daily experiences, communicative memory is unstable and thus short lived, and it can be perpetuated only through external objectifications. Desire for rise to the landed gentry symbolized by materials drives Jacob to externalize his communicative memory into a substantial spatial existent. This is well exemplified in his dispute with Rebekka over the necessity of a third superfluous two-story house:

“We don’t need another house,” she told him. “Certainly not one of such size.” She was shaving him and spoke as she finished.

“Need is not the reason, wife.”

“What is, pray?” Rebekka cleared off the last dollop of lather from the blade.

“What a man leaves behind is what a man is.”

“Jacob, a man is only his reputation.”

“Understand me.”

He took the cloth from her hands and wiped his chin. “I will have it.” (Morrison, 2008, pp. 88-89

Jacob’s insistence on building the unpractical mansion strikes root in his conceptual equation of the proof of a man’s existence value with the materials he leaves posthumously. As Beavers (2018) remarks, “All of the characters in the novel are seeking a way to verify their efforts” (p. 169). Jacob is no exception. The paramount importance he attaches to what still remains in the world after his demise is, in the largest sense, an epitome of the ambition that the early slave owners nourish to perpetuate communicative memory, which sees huge opportunities in external materials. Together with the intangible reputation, materials in their possession are essentially external continuation of brain memory.

The process itself of building the mansion speaks to two major characteristics of cultural memory, that is, group participation and festivity, as it involves everyone on and outside the farm, absorbed in the “festive mood and the jittery satisfaction” (Morrison, 2008, p. 43). Moreover, construction of the third house renders Jacob excited and energetic. As one of his slaves Lina observes,

And Sir—she had never seen him in better spirits. Not with the birth of his doomed sons, nor with his pleasure in his daughter, not even with an especially successful business arrangement he bragged about. It was not a sudden change, yet it was a deep one. The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment. (Morrison, 2008, p. 44)

With his forays into the rum industry that entails exploitation of slave labor, Jacob has gained the profit required for building the magnificent house. More care should be taken, however, of the exquisite and significant design of the manor’s gate, whose two parts, when closed, form a pattern of kissing snakes. This particular pattern alludes to Satan in the Bible and can thus be read as the incarnation of the vicious and atrocious slavery in antebellum America. Through Jacob’s design of the gate, Morrison means for the reader to see that “the house symbolizes both Edenic paradise and the subsequent fall from grace” (Beavers, 2018, p. 177), which implicates at once Jacob’s rising to fame and eventual falling victim to smallpox. The gate, in this sense, symbolizes the passage to both heaven and hell, a paradoxical space where the early slave owners are doomed.

As a metaphor for memory, Jacob’s mansion functions as a permanent memory of early slave owners’ experiences of striving for materials, prestige, and identity that agree with their social status. In this sense, Jacob’s mansion transcends the transience typical of individual communicative memory and becomes a symbol to which the group memory is attached, or rather a spatialized substantial medium of cultural memory. Built on slave trade and labor, however, Jacob’s mansion is no different than a secular memorial of the slavery culture.

Florens’s Writing: Inscribing African Female Enslavement

If the gaudy mansion built by Jacob at all costs is a memorial for the antebellum slave owners in the New World, then the traumatic story that Florens inscribes in one of its rooms can be interpreted as a subversive cultural memory for African female slaves embedded within the colonialist’s monument to White male culture. Morrison intends for Florens to perpetuate the African female memory in the form of writing. As J. Assmann (1992/2011) suggests, writing plays “a role in the functional areas of cultural memory” (p. 76). By inscribing (writing) her experiences, Florens transforms her individual traumatic memory into cultural memory that represents the collective experiences of African American female slaves.

The way Morrison represents Florens’s traumatic memory in A Mercy is unique because she “crafts a unique ‘author’ for a unique story” (Babb, 2011, p. 149). Adopting the first-person narration, the odd-numbered chapters of the novel focus on Florens’s recalling of her life experiences on Jacob’s farm, which is stimulated by the betrayal and abandonment from her lover, the unnamed African blacksmith. The penultimate chapter of the novel, however, reveals to the reader that the content of these chapters are in fact the stories Florens inscribes with her fingernails on the floor and the walls of a room of Jacob’s newly built mansion:

There is no more room in this room. These words cover the floor. From now you will stand to hear me. The walls make trouble because lamplight is too small to see by. I am holding light in one hand and carving letters with the other. (Morrison, 2008, p. 160)

Florens, therefore, participates in the production of the novel in her special way of writing, which is “the most fundamental means among all the fixed forms by which to preserve ethical experiences” (Nie, 2010, p. 14). As an extended form of writing, Florens’s carving, characterized by indentation, leaves much deeper marks and thus remains stable and even indelible. Writing, according to Aleida Assmann (1999/2011), makes a fundamental metaphor for cultural memory. By virtue of inscribing, therefore, Florens succeeds in externalizing her communicative memory of her unrequited love and traumatic experiences as an African female slave.

Inscribing her personal story into the physical space of a room contributes greatly to an externalized spatial construction of Florens’s subjectivity. Unlike the traditional piece of article, the carrier of Florens’s writing is a three-dimensional spatial structure. Clearly, the process of carving her traumatic memory follows certain spatial orders: from the floor to the surrounding walls and from far to near. The moment the door is closed is the moment when Florens completes the externalization of her memory and is also the critical moment when she eventually establishes her identity. Near the end of her story, Florens writes that “See? You are correct. A minha mãe too. I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last” (Morrison, 2008, p. 161). Externalization of her own traumatic memory inspires Florens to admit and embrace her identity as an African slave. As such, no longer does she pain herself to desire others’ acceptance of her enslaved status. These words, as Hansen (2018) suggests, “represent Florens’s coming into her own sovereignty. Her sovereignty—her authority—to use Morrison’s own terms, exists in and with the writing on the walls” (p. 223).

By objectifying her communicative memory in the form of carved writing, Florens actually aspires for a larger readership to resonate with the creepy and heart-wrenching collective experiences of African female slaves. Her ambition to spread the particular group memory can be deduced from the subtlety in regard to her choice of the narratee. On the surface, Florens’s story seems to be written for the blacksmith who abandons her because of her enslaved mentality. To note, however, in the whole process, not even once does Florens articulate the blacksmith’s name or any other endearment that clearly signals his identity. Instead, the second person “You” goes through her whole narration. As Shang (2011a) remarks, “‘You’ is a very special personal pronoun because it blurs not only the boundaries of gender, age, nationality and race, but also that between the singular and the plural” (p. 21). Florens’s traumatic experiences, therefore, may be accessible to any reader who happens on those words. Florens’s implicit desire for the general reader, in the largest sense, uncovers the dual functions of her inscription. That is, apart from being conducive to constructing her individual identity, her writing also constitutes and represents the group memory of the African female slaves. Florens’s inscription, for which there is no designated audience, is actually “a metonym for the voices resonating within” (Beavers, 2018, p. 186). Florens’s personal writing, therefore, translates into a collective cultural memory with which the community of African female slaves identifies.

Florens’s inscription as the cultural memory for the enslaved African females is rendered particularly subversive by its particular physical carrier of the room. What should never be neglected, in our attempts to explicate Florens’s act, is the fact that her story is inscribed inside Jacob’s marvelous mansion, which, as has been previously analyzed, looms as the cultural memory of the slave owners. Actually, nowhere except in the house that nobody is allowed or dares to approach can Florens write her story undisturbed. In this respect, Florens has extracted a choice out of choicelessness, and for her, the room in the house stands as a cell in a prison. Her inscription in the room, therefore, is carceral because it functions the same way writing of the incarcerated does. More importantly, as cultural memory of “unremembered” or “dis-membered” African female experiences of enslavement, Florens’s inscription imprints the colonialist monument with an African stamp and disintegrates the claimed legitimacy of the evil slavery. These words bore into the texture of the architecture and thus always lurk there with potential rebellious force. As Beavers (2018) remarks,

Hence, even as the empty house monumentalizes the wealth and privilege the southern landed gentry come to see as their due, it also represents the site of an alternative political imaginary in which African women’s writerly voices deform the dominant imaginary from within. (p. 185)

Through representation of Florens’s inscribing personal stories, Morrison emphasizes the vital importance of African female writing to the construction of both individual identity and cultural memory. Florens’s act of carving objectifies her communicative memory of traumatic experiences and leads to her spiritual freedom as a slave no longer haunted by unrequited love. Moreover, etched into the White colonialist’s memorial, Florens’s inscription functions as the culture memory for African American female slaves and as such undermines the completeness and validity of the White grand narrative that Jacob’s mansion symbolizes.

Lina’s Body: Performing Native American Culture

Besides exploration of the architecture and the writing as the media of cultural memory, as has been shown in the previous two parts, in A Mercy, Morrison also investigates how cultural memory can be embodied and performed. As Plate and Smelik (2013) suggests, “Cultural memory studies have embraced the notion of performance” (p. 6) Performing, as embodied behavior, “privileges body over speech, presence over absence and praxis over product” (Plate & Smelik, 2013, p. 9). Therefore, “performing is naturally connected with memory” (Feng, 2013, p. 267). In A Mercy, Native American female Lina takes her body as the medium and creatively performs the Indigenous Indian cultural memory, so as to survive the White cultural hegemony.

Lina suffers an unbearable sense of being exiled in her homeland. As a little girl, Lina witnesses the European colonizers’ torching her tribal community. Loss of home and tribal community is intensified by colonial eradication of Indigenous tribal culture. After the fire, Lina is “rescued” and left in the hands of Presbyterians, who claim a preference for Native women’s industry but harbor a hatred for their savageness. Lina is thus purified and forced to accept

that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one’s fingers was perverse. That God hated idleness most of all, so staring off into space to weep for a mother or a playmate was to court damnation. Covering oneself in the skin of beasts offended God. (Morrison, 2008, pp. 47-48)

It seems a cultivating act to prevent Lina from behaving as she has been culturally programmed to. To convert her into a Christian from a “heathen,” however, is actually forcing upon Lina the White standard of what make a cultivated human being. Purification, in this sense, renders Lina culturally uprooted. Lina whispers to the forest of beech, “You and I, this land is our home, but unlike you, I am exile here” (Morrison, 2008, p. 59). It is this sense of being unhomed as an outsider in her own homeland, both physically and spiritually, that prompts Lina to perform Indigenous culture for spiritual healing.

Lina’s performing is conditioned on her communicative memory of the essence of Native American culture, that is, the harmony between mankind and nature, which is primarily shown in their worship of land as sacred. Contrary to the anthropocentric values, Indigenous Indians never regard land as an object to own and exploit; instead they believe that land is people. As Hobson (1980) observes, “In many Native American languages the words ‘people’ and ‘land’ are indistinguishable and inseparable” (p. 73). The sight of European colonizers’ insatiable greed for land brands itself into Lina’s consciousness, strengthening her overwhelming feeling of being unhomed. To regain the sense of belonging that a tribe offers, Lina turns to animals and plants in Nature for help because to Native Americans “[the] tribe means . . . ceremonial exchanges with nature, and an animate regard for all creation as sensible and powerful” (Lincoln, 1983, p. 8). Lina “cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain” (Morrison, 2008, pp. 48-49). In so doing, Lina integrates herself into Nature. As a staunch believer in the consoling and healing power of Nature, Lina relieves herself of the great havoc wrought on her by the dominant cultural hegemony.

Apart from performing harmony between mankind and nature, Lina also creates what Homi Bhabha (1990) refers to as “cultural hybridity” (p. 221) to remodel indigenous cultural memory for spiritual fortification. Culturally traumatized, Lina embarks on sorting out what still remains in her memory: “the company of other children, industrious mothers in beautiful jewelry, the majestic plan of life: when to vacate, to harvest, to burn, to hunt; ceremonies of death, birth and worship” (Morrison, 2008, p. 50). This particular process activates Lina’s remembrance of the Indigenous cultural fragments, which she subsequently pieces together to achieve her spiritual welfare. Lina “cobbled together neglected rites, merged European medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things” (Morrison, 2008, p. 8). Confronted with the dominant European culture, Lina involves herself into what Svend Erik Larsen explains as “reflective nostalgia,” in which she breaks up Indian tribal tradition and “recompose it, integrate new features in the new context and abandon others” (Yu, 2016, p. 5), effectively re-contextualizing Indigenous traditions and memories. She insinuates “low” Indigenous Indian cultural fragments into the European “high” culture, creating for the subjugated Indigenous tribes a cultural Thirdspace, where the limit between the White and the Indian is blurred and the binary opposition of the superior culture vs. the inferior culture deconstructed. By drawing upon the multifaceted Indigenous cultural heritage, Lina has “framed a self that owns no allegiance to fixed cultural designations” (Montgomery, 2011, p. 631) and has also established a new Indigenous culture.

Through performing Indian cultural elements creatively, Lina activates the indigenous cultural fragments remaining in her communicative memory and by endowing them with a new hybridity, transforms them into cultural memory. In Lina’s case, cultural memory is a dynamic process of performing with the whole body involved. Lina’s memory undergoes multiple modifications until the new one takes form and into effect. Through repeated performing, Lina integrates and reprograms her endangered communicative memory into the embodied cultural memory.

Conclusion

It is central to A Mercy that communicative memory is externalized and thus transformed into cultural memory via spatial media. Jacob, as a representative of the early slave owners in antebellum America, intends to identity with the values that fits the landed gentry through construction of a mansion, which actually turns out to be monument to slavery culture. To challenge and interrogate this White memorial, Morrison fashions the figure of a writer character, Florens. By engraving with her fingernails a traumatic memory in the worldly monument Jacob builds, Florens establishes with her inscription cultural memory of the African female slaves. More importantly, Morrison also explores how the Indigenous Indian Lina integrates the quintessence of her tribal culture into her body and through performing remodels it as an embodied indigenous cultural memory. By historicizing the issue of cultural memory in American society, Morrison not only communicates the interrelations between cultural memory and ethnic cultural identity construction, but more importantly invites us to reconsider what makes a true American cultural memory.