ABSTRACT
In Phaedrus, Socrates praises the dialectician who can "survey scattered particulars make a regular division and discover a characteristic mark of each class", and who can divide the classes "into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is". When Socratic rhetorical division is applied to social organization, it becomes clear that skin color is among the significations that have historically allowed human beings to be ranked, properly or improperly, within a hierarchy of oppositions. Miss Rosa is the model of the reducing, signifying drive of reading, and she begins the novel as if to center the narrative's reducing efforts. Mergings of black and white are still more striking. In a society that defines black skin as a signifier of absence or "invisibility", it seems remarkable how often the supposedly reliable white males are absent. Freud's textual or narrative "hiatus" is indeed the Platonic "joint" where the dominant/subordinate divisions of the South stand ready to be slain.
