blog




  • Essay / Textual Violence in "Sula and Toni Morrison's Sula"

    Textual dynamics are the dynamic interaction between the text and the responder, and how this necessarily becomes a relationship between the writer and the reader rather than simply the text. This forces us to ask ourselves whether the barrier between fiction and reality has been crossed or not. And if the work is real, can it still be considered a work of art? And if it is fake, can it be considered real? The texts “Orlando” by Sally Potter and “Sula” by Toni Morrison are both, in a sense, biographies of fictional people, challenging traditional values ​​and gender constructs. While Italo Calvino's novel "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and Marc Forster's film "Stranger than Fiction" examine and reinvent the relationships between author, reader and text. “Sula” experiments with traditional forms by blurring reality and fiction through the representation of the life of a fictional character based on a fragmented biography. The fragmentation of the narrative is represented, like “Orlando”, through the frequent jumps between periods, “1919”, “1920”, disrupting the linear progression. This forces the reader to interact and interpret the text rather than the composer. The narrative seamlessly switches between different perspectives, with “She Dragged” “Plum on the Edge….Mama, She Sure Was Something” possessing a kind of stylistic ingenuity that makes “Sula” a textually dynamic novel. Morrison uses the stream of consciousness "a very frightened twenty-two year old man...he didn't even know who or what he was..." to express the flow of a character's thoughts and feelings, aspiring to give readers the feeling of being inside the mind. of the character which in turn establishes an intimate relationship between the text and the reader. Conversations between texts can be woven throughout the novel, including the character "Eve" who constantly adopts lost children and boundaries alluding to "the mother of all things" and Eve from the Bible. These allusions to other texts depend on the fact that the reader has read them to establish an understanding and therefore an intimate relationship between the author and the reader. DueIn the very first line of the book, "You are about to start reading...", the use of the second person to directly address the reader and the use of self-reflexivity to prompt the reader to engaging with the impending “novel proper” creates an initial, intimate connection between composer and reader. However, the use of the second person is quickly abandoned and "you" is revealed to be a fictional character. Mirroring Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation", the multiple layers of reality also serve to deceive the reader into believing that there is an impending "novel proper", until our perception of what is real and fictional or indistinguishable. This deceptive fabrication is illustrated in the first incipit: the central character is no longer “you”, but rather “someone looking through a foggy window”. Thus, “If on a Winter's Night a Traveler” examines literature in a metatextual manner, often blurring fact and fiction, transforming the modern novel and, in doing so, surprising and delighting.