3 - Time and Space

Question 1

What is time ?

Answer 1

Time is geography

Question 2

Evolution du personnage

Answer 2

The way he evolves = faithful to the path he follows. Le temps est figé, c’est l’espace qui vient défiger cette fixité du temps. 1ere partie = état vegetatif et à mesure qu’on progresse dans le roman, et qu’il se déplace dans envt américain il comprend son histoire. North VS south

Question 3

Time is geography
Susan Willis quote sur Milkman’s quest

Answer 3

“Milkman’s quest is a journey through geographic space in which the juxtaposition of the city to the countryside represents the relationship of the present to the past.” (…) Susan Willis
⇒ Time is to be understood within the dimension of spatiality, it requires a displacement and has little to do with linearity.

Question 4

Time is geography & Milkman

Answer 4

• Example of Milkman who lacks a “coherent self” and needs a backward journey to the south allows him to fully inhabit his own self.
  His initial self makes him an aimless wanderer: “all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told.”
  ⇒ knowledge is only sth that will come after his displacement

Question 5

Milkman’s memory or dreams

Answer 5

• Milkman does not particularly wish to remember the past and confuses memory and dreams. Walking the street, he realizes he “had remembered something. Or believed he remembered something. Maybe he’d dreamed it and it was the dream he remembered” (77). ⇒ fictional potential of memory.
• Note also the bond between memory and the community, memories are often not personal but derive from a collective effort of reconstruction.

=> Roman qui met en avant l’individuel pour la quête d’une communauté. Les deux se nourrissent en permanence.

Question 6

Ruth’s relation to the past

Answer 6

Ruth’s toxic relation to the past

*Unable to be a mother and a wife, trapped in childhood memories. Often described as “the daughter of Dr Foster”

*The symbolic water stain that Ruth tries to wash away symbolizes Ruth’s complex relation to the past: obsession for it

⇒ Ruth’s whole life revolves around that circular trace, revealing some fetishistic relationship with the past.

*Her son Milkman is a marker of time passing. He embodies the dead love of the couple:

Question 7

Macon’s belief in progress and future

Answer 7

• Macon is not comfortable with the past and mostly tries to forget it, believing and evolution and progress.
  → that’s why Milkman is ignorant : a man that is always looking for : knowledge, is past, his family because his father kept things away from him, his father is not comfortable with it.

*Macon’s disdain for Pilate’s “southerness” suggests the disdain with which he treats her blackness, as a form of regression back to Africa → Brother & sister are ++ different

⇒ Macon seems uncomfortable with his skin color and even changed his southern accent: When Macon tells Milkman about the South and the death of his own father:

Macon believes in money and ownership

Question 8

Pilate’s immobility (or stasis)

Answer 8

Contrary to her brother Macon, no sense of progress in Pilate’s house but rather immobility and backwardness

*Her bag of bones and rocks connects her to the past which literally hangs in the center of the house in a heavy green bag → she holds on to her forefathers and keeps her past in the present.
=> The content of the bag of bones takes on various meanings: - supposed bones of the man killed in childhood, - a bag of gold, - the father’s bones.
=> The bag’s interpretation changes according to the locations where characters travel from North to South and back to North.

Pilate’s refusal of social mobility and social evolution shows in her house which differs from the bourgeois house of her brother. Pilate’s house is devoted to non-accumulation, no surplus value, raw materials suggesting rural and agricultural society. Property is purely symbolic as it is a bag of bones # Macon’s display of wealth. → Contre-modèle de la parfaite famille américaine de Macon (qui avait aussi ses travers cf sa voiture = hearse (=corbillard))

Question 9

From South to North / From North to South
historical context ?

Answer 9

• Macon Dead and his wife moved North to settle, like forty-six million African Americans who left the South between Reconstruction and World War II ⇒ Context of the « Great Migration » (1910-1970).

Question 10

From South to North / From North to South
citation Susan Willis

Answer 10

“Migration to the North signifies more than a confrontation with the white world. It implies a transition in social class… Macon Dead’s attitude toward rents and property make him more “white” than “black”.” (Susan Willis)

Question 11

From South to North / From North to South

Answer 11

⇒ Milkman is the final product of this migration: he belongs to a generation which has lost all contact with the South + Macon Dead reminds his wife how her father Dr. Foster despised his people: “Negroes in this town worshipped him. He didn’t give a damn about them, though. Called them cannibals.” (71) Note how he treats Guitar as well.

• Milkman does the reverse migration ⇒ anti-slave narrative pattern, going South to chase freedom and undertake a spiritual journey.
• The South is not described as a place where slavery happened but as the starting point of racial history on the American continent, but Africa remains the original birthplace.

Question 12

The North

Answer 12

The North : a place of longing and restlessness

• Geography and space are often considered as a longing. The Great Lakes region is at the periphery, at the border but no sense of escape, rather of entrapement.

Question 13

The South

Answer 13

The South : a place where clock time is irrelevant
* The passing of days is as irrelevant as that of hours, the rhythm of life is different: “…but it was supposed to be ready yesterday. …Milkman waited four days for the car to be ready” (236).

• His watch becomes much commented upon: ⇒ End of chapter 14 : his watch is not returned to him and has become an attraction for local people.

Question 14

Milkman & direction ?

Answer 14

Milkman’s lack of direction
* Milkman is an outcast, accepted neither by the whites nor the blacks,

• All he wants is to own, possess, and have a good time, as he tells Guitar: “But I know where I’m going. …Wherever the party is” (106).”

*Yet he acknowledges his disorientation in a conversation with Guitar:

*This restlessness haunts Milkman, who is lost, uprooted and confused. He doesn’t have a place, as Guitar tells him: “You don’t live nowhere” (103). Guitar and then Pilate will guide him to his individual identity and his coming to terms with his past, finding a place for himself.

Question 15

Milkman’s journey out of alienation and towards…

Answer 15

Milkman’s journey out of alienation and towards knowledge

*Already as a child in the city, Milkman senses this importance of time and the weight of the past: → feeling that the past of his mother and father will become their present.

*He mostly strives to reject the past “He just wanted to beat a path away from his parents’ past, which was also their present and which was threatening to become his present as well” (180-81).

• Milkman, the Northerner, is raised without a clear knowledge of this past. His father underlines his ignorance about slavery, and in the South, when he asks by Reverend Cooper whether his grandfather’s murderers were ever caught, he is shocked by the absence of justice:
• Milkman’s alienation from black culture means trying to cling to the white, bourgeois, urban values that his parents have given him.

Question 16

Domestic space

Answer 16

Domestic space : The Deads’ Heart(h)

• Absence of love and human contact characterises the space that the Dead family inhabits

*Ruth seeks comfort in sleeping on her father’s grave, nursing her son until he is eight years old. First Corinthians and Lena waste their lives :

*The “wide green Packard” looks like a hearse when on Sunday rides,

Question 17

Going South

Answer 17

Going South, a journey back to nature

*The trajectory South is a journey away from the urban and towards nature. It is about appropriating space and reviving the Agrarian myth.

*Back to the original land, note this sort of entranced passage where the farm speaks for itself and is personified

⇒ injunction to seize back the land that was due.
→ Réussite de Macon qui vient en quelque sorte réduire la réussite de l’autre
→ His grandfather = the one who experienced the success-story
→ Ferme donne de la vitalité à Macon Dead
→ ++ force stylistique : sonne comme une chanson.

Question 18

Geography & politics

Answer 18

Histoire ++ importante pour expansion territoriale vers ouest

• To Guitar, there is a continuity between the segregated South and the supposedly emancipated North. Dialogue between Milkman and Guitar: “Everything’s cool,” he said. “Shit,” said Guitar. “Ain’t nothing cool. “
  => Acute awareness that the American soil is contaminated with blood.

*This spatial understanding of his condition is at the heart of his political consciousness

• His remark on tea leads him even to compare it to cotton and hence establish an analogy between the situation of African-Americans in the past with the present of other colonized people of color

Question 19

politic is ?

Answer 19

=> For Guitar politics is geography, hence his attachment to the Seven Days, who, precisely, take no account of a separation between North and South.

Question 20

Time = ?

Answer 20

Time = space because evolution = according to the path that characters follow

Question 21

Space and empowerment

Answer 21

• Restrictions in movement have been imposed on women but more globally to African-Americans in general. Pilate is early made aware of her condition as a trapped being → Pilate’s fascination for geography suggests a wish for emancipation
• Questions of power are mingled with references to manifest destiny/frontier: When Ruth and Macon battle for Milkman’s education: → Again, woman is portrayed as being defeated and having no liberty of movement, losing her land.
  → man wins over woman

⇒ espace fait l’objet d’une conquête au sein communauté afro-américaine mais aussi tout particulièrement auprès des femmes, questions qui rejaillissent au sein de son couple.

Question 22

Pilate : the female pilote

Answer 22

Without moving that much she will bring Milkman to accomplish his destiny. But she isn’t moving a lot in this narrative.

• Pilate is both the guide and the real ancestor in the story. She pilots (Pilate) that quest. Macon fails to teach anything about his roots to Milkman. Male characters give only partial lessons. Macon wants his son out of Pilate’s house so that he remains ignorant about his past:

→ Macon forbids Milkman to examine his past. Encourages him to feel the present and the future with a sense of emergency. Earthly concerns must prevail over spiritual ones. The journey is thus from “owning things” to owning your self and your personal story.

• Contrary to her brother, Pilate is a figure of knowledge and of transmission though no lecturer.
  → the way she teaches is different

She is a figure of empowerment who is animated by the ghost of her father, serving as his oracle like the Greek Pythia

Question 23

quote Lincoln

Answer 23

“A divided house cannot stand” : lincoln

Question 24

Tragédie étymologie

Answer 24

Tragédie ⇒ chant du bouc = chant rituel qui accompagnait le sacrifice du bouc

Question 25

Milkman& crossroads of 2 paths

Answer 25

Soit il suit la voix de son père et arrivera proposer dans le présent
Soit il suit Pilate et arrivera a acceder a un sens de son identité par la récupération de son histoire passée
⇒ Milkman at the crossroads of 2 paths.

Question 26

Reclaiming space, reclaiming identity

Answer 26

• Importance of geography as contributing to identity. Pilate’s identity derives from her spatial travels
• Names of places bear witness to the presence of African-American people, Native people on the American continent:
  → if you know nothing about Michigan now know it’s link to extermination of indians.

Question 27

The South as “home”?

Answer 27

• The people in Shalimar contrast sharply with those in the urban North. The initial southern hospitality surprises Milkman: “All that business about southern hospitality was for real. He wondered why black people ever left the South” (263).s
• However, he soon realizes that it is a place which is not familiar yet : “In his own hometown his name spelled dread and grudging respect. But here, in his ‘home,’ he was unknown, unloved, and damn near killed” (270). Note the trajectory from hometown to home.
• It takes time before Milkman is fully accepted (trials like the fight and the hunt). When he comes back with Pilate, they are accepted in Shalimar “In Shalimar there was general merriment at his quick return, and Pilate blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn” (339). Image of fluidity and belonging.