Name: Sula: Crash Course Literature #309
Uploaded: 2018-02-12T13:21:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi. I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today, we're talking about Toni Morrison's novel Sula.

Sula is a story about the power and peril of friendship in adolescence, but it's also a fascinating study of how places and families make us up.

Morrison's slim novel explores many of our
biggest questions:

Are we fated to a certain life by race and
class and gender and upbringing?

Is human life better when we honor the conventions
of our social order, or should we defy them?

And how can good and evil truly be opposites
when they so often resemble each other?

You probably don't read Sula in your high
school English classes, but you should.

God knows it's better than Lord of the Flies.

Stan, I know I need to let it go, but I'm still mad at you for making me make a video about Lord of the Flies.

So, the novel opens with a description of a mostly African American neighborhood situated above the fictional city of Medallion, Ohio:

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

It stood in the hills above the valley town
of Medallion and spread all the way to the river.

It is called the suburbs now, but when black
people lived there it was called the Bottom.”

So, Sula is a eulogy for this place of nightshade and blackberry – plants that it's easy to associate with black rootedness, which has been torn out to build a golf course.

But nightshade and blackberry serve other
metaphorical functions, too.

Like, in an essay called “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison explains that nightshade is an “unusual” plant that produces “toxic” berries.

While Blackberry is a “common” plant that
produces “nourishing” fruit.

So we see the nourishing and the poisonous situated together immediately in the novel, as well as the common and the rare.

And we're told that both thrived there together,
in that place when it was a neighborhood.

So, this is an internally diverse, multidimensional community – and Morrison refuses to portray it, or her characters, as simply one thing or another.

We also learn in Sula's opening pages about
the fraught history of the name, the “Bottom.”

A farmer promises a slave freedom and land at the bottom of the valley if he completes a bunch of difficult chores.

The slave manages to finish the tasks, and then the farmer gives him rocky land in the hills.

The farmer justifies this treachery with a
turn of phrase, saying:

“when God looks down, it's the bottom […]
the bottom of heaven – best land there is.”

So this is a world in which the bottom is not necessarily under the top, which, for one thing, undermines a tendency to privilege whiteness as above blackness.

But this is also one way that Sula encourages its readers to reconsider assumptions that emerge from binary thinking.

So, Binary thinking, or distinguishing between opposing items like hot OR cold, light OR dark, good OR evil, is deeply embedded in Western philosophy.

In the structuralist literary theory proposed
by people like Ferdinand de Saussure,

binary oppositions give units of language their meaning, because each unit becomes defined by its complementary relationship with another term.

Like, you know goodness by knowing evil; you
know hot by knowing cold; etc.

But there are big problems with binary thinking, especially when it comes to language,

because one term tends to dominate, or at least become culturally privileged over, the other.

The post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, for
instance, considered binary thinking to be

“a violent hierarchy” where “one of
two terms governs the other.”

Like, in Western thought, the concept of light
tends to dominate the concept of dark.

Light is associated with knowledge and truth and revelation; darkness with evil, ignorance, and confusion.

And when that sort of binary thinking gets projected onto race, the consequences are disastrous.

We tend to view gender as binary, even though
it isn't, any more than race is.

But we often define femaleness in the context
of maleness.

If we think men should be strong, aggressive, leaders, then binary thinking can lead us to conclude that women should be weak, timid followers.

By inverting “bottom” over top, by valuing both the nightshade and the blackberry,

and by presenting both the main female characters in the novel without judgement,

Morrison encourages the reader to reconsider undervalued identities, and to set aside the false binaries that truly can make language a tool of oppression.

So, while I consider Sula to be an elegantly crafted refutation of binary thinking, Morrison later found flaws in the book's design.

In 1973, when Morrison published Sula, she felt that she needed to create a “threshold” through which the reader could enter the text.

So she opened the novel from the perspective of a “valley man,” that is, a white male farmer.

And Morrison later wrote that she found the accommodation of what she called an “outside-the-circle” gaze “embarrassing.”

Morrison later wrote, in “Unspeakable Things
Unspoken,”:

“The stage-setting of the first four pages
is embarrassing to me now,

but the pains I have taken to explain it may be helpful in identifying the strategies one can be forced to resort to

in trying to accommodate the mere fact of
writing about, for and out of black culture

while accommodating and responding to mainstream
'white' culture.

The 'valley man's' guidance into the territory
was my compromise.

Perhaps it 'worked,' but it was not the work
I wanted to do.”

But Sula quickly pivots away from the valley man to focus on the beautifully wrought friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace.

Nel is a quiet girl, raised by her imperious
mother, Helene Wright.

As the narrator explains, “Under Helene's
hand the girl became obedient and polite.

Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter's imagination underground.”

But Nel eventually discovers the power of
independence.

In one of my favorite passages from the novel,
she thinks,

“I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me.”

Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her like a power, like joy, like fear...

And then, sinking deeper into the quilts,
“I want…I want to be… wonderful.

Nel connects being “wonderful” with her friend Sula, who was raised in very different circumstances.

Sula was raised in her grandmother's house
slash boarding house,

a “…wooly house, where a pot of something
was always cooking on the stove;

where the mother, Hannah, never scolded or gave directions; where all sorts of people dropped in;

where newspapers were stacked in the hallway, and dirty dishes left out for hours at a time in the sink,

and where a one-legged grandmother named Eva handed you goobers from deep inside her pockets or read you a dream.”

Sula's mother, Hannah, also lives in the
house.

And Hannah regards sex as “pleasant and
frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.”

She has sex with boarders and her friends'
husbands purely for pleasure.

So, Sula has been raised outside the conventions
of the social order,

and she seems almost magically free to Nel, whose upbringing was all about becoming “obedient” and “polite.”

And as an adult, Sula continues to be wonderful.

She travels, she takes on lovers, she refuses
to sacrifice herself to anyone.

Which for her, is part of not making sacrifices.

We might think of Sula as the novel's nightshade, “unusual” and compelling, but also at times “toxic.”

By contrast, Nel follows the more socially
sanctioned path of marrying and raising children.

So we might think of Nel as the novel's
blackberry, “common” and “nourishing.”

Because this is a novel that exposes the limitations of binary thinking, and we're made to see throughout the novel how these opposites in many ways aren't.

Like, let's look at the internal differences
within each of these characters.

Consider how each reacts to the great traumatic
moment of their childhood.

The girls are playing together in the grass on a river bank, and a little boy called Chicken Little appears in the trees.

The girls tease him and playfully swing him
in circles.

But then Sula loses her grip on Chicken Little,
and he falls into the water.

“The water darkened and closed quickly over
the place where Chicken Little sank.

The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula's palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water.

They expected him to come back up, laughing.
Both girls stared at the water.”

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Sula: Crash Course Literature #309

stuff

concept

term

fascinating