Euphoria of Composition and Decomposition in Sula

Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him;
and as he died he spattered me with the dark red
and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood
to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers
of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.
– Aeschylus' Oresteia, trans. Lattimore

Joy unravels here in soft flowing ribbons of burgundy wine; they deny themselves none. This is, of course, the Dionysia: a festival honoring Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and insanity where drunken revelers, believing intoxication to be a form of divine possession by Dionysus' spirit, ritualistically reenact his mythological death and rebirth. The followers chant and dance in lost mystery rites as they imagine themselves traversing unbound between life and death in hallucinations mistaken for liberation. After the festival ends, they leave behind nothing but the carrion of dismembered bulls symbolic of Dionysus and garlands stained red by libations or by blood. In the same spirit, Toni Morrison's Sula dissects the states of composition and decomposition and the boundaries between them through conflicting philosophies held by Sula Peace and Nel Wright. Through competing twin imagery assigned to each character, the novel reveals how, whereas Sula believes that composition functions to constrain the self in its full vitality, Nel believes that composition functions to constrain the grief of death and loss. This difference distinguishes Sula and Nel: while Sula seeks the disintegration of the barriers constructed to make people fundamental strangers of each other in a final act of life before the death of self that such assimilation brings, Nel chases a reconstruction of life from grief symbolized by decomposition and rot. Ultimately, however, the novel suspends itself, as Dionysian revelry does, at the liminal threshold between composition and decomposition, life and death, repeatedly through Sula and Nel's lives-spanning relationship and the collapse of the River Road Tunnel; this suspension exists not for the clarity that it might or might not bring, but for the euphoria that inherently erupts in the crossing.

The archaeological and sculptural imagery of Sula's mental surgery of Ajax and the loam underneath him embodies Sula's urge to assimilate through decomposition. That she dreams to “[scrape] away at the gold... [take] a chisel… and [tap] away at the alabaster, [which] will crack then like ice under the pick,” illuminates how, for Sula, to know someone is endlessly intertwined with the disintegration of boundaries (Morrison 130). The imagery of gold and alabaster immediately evokes the gilding of friezes and carving of sculptures. As such, it transmutes Ajax's supple skin into a statue, the firm contours of which directly parallels the external, constructed part of a person that must be shattered to access and understand their internal workings. Thus, Sula's desire to “see the [fertile] loam” that lies beneath the statue's surface, to “put [her hands] deep into [Ajax's] soil… [and to] water [it]” is a manifestation of the urge to know someone completely (131). Through literal imagery of fertile soil and water, Morrison purposefully correlates this process with decomposition and assimilation and emphasizes the inability of one's personhood to contain itself without externally imposed societal constraints. Sula's actions, which closely resemble an unearthing, deconstruction, and cultivation, then serve as a metaphor for that inherently transgressive act which she desires: to break the guarded boundaries that separate one from another, the natural from the forged. Moreover, Shadrack's recollection of Sula's childhood visit mirrors the imagery of alabaster and loam but also contrasts Sula's desire of decomposition with his own undercurrent of fear at the prospect. Shadrack's “[seeing] the skull beneath [Sula's face]... [and trying] to stop the hurt from spilling out” highlights the awareness shared by Sula and Shadrack that people are defined by their boundaries with the outside world (157). Like Sula, Shadrack sees the physical skeleton of the human body as a containment device for some sort of human essence that lies within; however, he also perceives it as a volatile threat ready to flood – a deluge inevitable and laced with fear. For Shadrack, this decomposition happens physically through the change of natural aging – “the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone beneath” – and produces such fear that he advocates for National Suicide Day, a day to defy the disintegration of self through natural aging by a self-chosen, abrupt end which he describes as “neat and sweet” in opposition to the mess and stench of rot (157; 158). For Sula, however, the disintegration of the self is intense, yes, but also infinitely more desirable and exciting as she willingly devotes her water to mix with her lover's soil. The desire to know someone so deeply that the fundamental barrier between self and stranger rots and crumbles overpowers, for Sula, the fear that the self, left unguarded and unconstrained, will spill over carelessly into the world.

Whereas Sula embraces the decomposition of self through imagery of alabaster and loam, Nel's twin imagery of rot and the gray ball of fur changes the fundamental objective of composition to the containment of grief and reverses the trajectory of the process of decomposition. In the aftermath of Sula's betrayal with Jude, Nel's internal grief-ridden turbulence, evidenced by the “movement of mud and dead leaves” and “the smell of overripe green things,” shifts the objective of composition from containing that which constitutes a living self to containing grief (107; 108). As opposed to Sula's loam, marked by fertility, Nel's imagery of objects that have already descended into rot and decomposition points to her struggle of contending with grief of people and relationships already dead. This struggle resolves only when the bound “gray ball…always floating in the light near her” breaks and “[scatters] like dandelion spores in the breeze” as Nel comes to realize that her grief, justified through missing Jude, is a manifestation of the ache of losing Sula (174). Through this comparison, the gray ball demonstrates how the goal of composition for Nel is not to constrain one's fundamental personhood, as it is for Sula, but rather to constrain the incomprehensible pain of loss and death. Specifically, the imagery of dandelion spores repeats only one other time: on her death bed, Sula's memories with Nel reappear “as lightly as dandelion spores” as Sula reminisces their youth; the imagery of dandelion spores, symbolic of an organic release of life, represents a revival of the relationship between Sula and Nel (147). Here, death is the gust of wind that forces the body, suffering an unrecoverable injury, to uproot the memories it contained and sow them again somewhere else. Decomposition (in the breaking of the gray ball), then, is not an attempt to know and assimilate with someone entirely in an imitation of death and disintegration but rather one step in the process of a reconstruction that repurposes grief into seeds of the living – Sula's rebirth in Nel's memory. The spores detach from the gray ball symbolic of her overwhelming grief and take on a strange, new life arisen from death.

No matter the direction, though, this liminal crossing between composition and decomposition produces euphoria, as evinced by the collapse of the tunnel and the imagery of teenage Sula and Nel as tightrope walkers. When, in 1941, Shadrack finds himself joined for the first time on National Suicide Day by the company of the Bottom's townspeople “in a fever pitch of excitement and joy” and leads them inadvertently to the abandoned tunnel “they were forbidden to build,” its collapse, sending them into the “[split] ice,” signifies a decomposition of societal inhibitions and the accompanying manic joy (161-162). As they take their pickaxes and bricks to the half-built tunnel, they try to shatter the boundaries that walled off the Bottom from this fraudulent insignia of hope and prosperity. The fact that this deconstruction immediately brings them a death that buries all the bodies together, ashes mixed with ashes and sinew entwined with sinew, and the fact that they fall through the “ice” of the tunnel, cracked by their destruction and spilling its “chamber of water,” both directly parallel Sula's decomposition urge, driven by the desire of assimilation and executed through the alabaster “crack[ing] like ice” (130). But in this crossing there is, as Morrison describes, feverish and overwhelming joy, as the ice that Mrs. Jackson used to stuff headlong into her mouth now consumes her and the people of the Bottom on all sides. As the mouths of the townspeople, the cold cave of ice and water opens wide. They fill each other up: a perfect fit, a perfect unity. Similarly, the description of Sula and Nel's regular excursion of walking past the lustful men of the Bottom on their way to Edna Finch's Mellow House as teenagers highlights the same euphoria. The comparison of the girls to “tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance,” reflects the excitement and joy found in the liminal space between the composition and decomposition of social boundaries (51). The slip, alluding to the possibility of the girls cavorting with adult lust, necessitates the self-restraint to keep walking with their gazes forward and to constrain the desire that threatens to sweep them off their feet and into the men's laps. Each pulling the girls in its own direction, the prospect of losing composure and the composure itself merge to form the exhilaration that propelled Sula and Nel to meet each other day after day at the crossroads that turned onto the block of Edna's House.

Sula and Nel cross the same bridge in opposite directions: while Sula pursues the complete assimilation that comes with deconstruction of interpersonal boundaries, Nel chases the reconstruction of life from the decomposed. In the context of the 20th century, as technological and scientific strides establishing order conflicted with the chaos of war, Sula continued the literary tradition of elucidating the ecstasy of the Bacchanalian tension between composition and decomposition. The conflict between Sula and Nel's assimilation and independence remains unresolved throughout the novel, from the collective (even complicit) experience of Chicken Little's death, to Nel's marriage, to Sula's betrayal and death, yet one thing is clear: this endless dance is deeply, subconsciously pleasurable. It offers an improbable suspension teetering on the threshold between order and chaos. The intoxicating euphoria stems from the beauty of the control and invention required to resist the gravity of death with a burst of life, as fruit do, being always its sweetest before it begins to rot. The grapes used to make Greek wine were picked at their ripest and then ritualistically killed and macerated to ferment into new life. On the tapestry of human experience woven with rich colors of every hue, the cup of sweet-bitter wine is knocked over, and onlookers fervently gaze upon the juices bleeding into the threads, spreading, spreading.