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In Toni Morrison's Sula, spacing-that is, closing down or opening up distances between things and persons-has extraordinary urgency. Houses and bodies are the sites of hyperactive mechanisms of containment and expulsion working to effect identity and distinction: of inside and outside, of self and other. Spacing, moreover, becomes crucial to issues of representation and meaning in the Bottom, the place in which most of the action of the novel occurs. Houston A. Baker, Jr., has called attention to the importance of place in the novel: "What Morrison ultimately seeks in her coding of Afro-American PLACE is a writing of intimate, systematizing, and ordering black village values," he suggests (237). Identifying this ordering with female domestic labor and rituals of cleaning, Baker argues that Morrison "places" African American experience by means of "manipulations of the symbolic," countering conventions of displacement by affording "a mirroring language . . . in which we can find ourselves" (258).
But although the manipulation of persons and things in space can effect a symbolic order, Morrison also uses other means of locating experience in Sula. In my discussion of the novel, I want to distinguish between systematic spacing arrangements, of the kind necessary to a symbolic order, and Morrison's placements of experience that orderly representation misses. Two places in the novel that indicate her concern to locate missing experience are "the place where Chicken Little sank" in the river (61) and the place Eva Peace's missing leg once occupied, "the empty place on her left side" (31). Neither of these is quite what one would expect a place to be, since neither is the present location of anything.
Like the empty spaces in a symbolic order, these places mark an absence. In The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt, Mark Wigley emphasizes the spatial character of representation in Derridean deconstruction: "Spacing is the 'distance' of representation: both the spatial intervals between signifiers and the effect of substitution, the production of the sense that the material signifier 'stands in for' something detached from it, the sense that space is an exterior domain of representation detached from that of presence, which is to say, the sense of an exterior divided from an interior" (70). Derrida writes, "[s]pacing designates nothing, nothing that is, no presence...