ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with how place in Morrison’s novel A Mercy is foregrounded through the characters’ placial relations, understood with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl as the lived body’s relation to place, and through literary allusion. It suggests that the idea of articulation, in its dual sense of joining and expression, permeates the writing of place in the novel. The writing of the landscape is analysed through characters’ traversing of it and through manuscripts revealing an increasing focus on the significance of place. The natural world is displayed through characters’ relations to place, exposing land as comforting as well as inhospitable. Morrison’s working material suggests that Jacob Vaark’s first two houses are formed through a writing based on historical documents, while his third—and pompous—house resonates with heirless houses in the Western literary tradition. Florens’s writing on the walls and the floor of Jacob’s house forms the house into a place of articulation. Morrison’s manuscripts indicate an increasing emphasis, in the writing process, on Jacob’s third house as the site of inscription, thus shifting the intertextual resonances from William Faulkner to the first published African American female writer Phillis Wheatley.
