Experience of place plays a crucial role in Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby. When we first meet the character Son, he is working his way through the waves in an attempt at reaching the island Isle des Chevaliers. Features of the natural world, such as the trees, the river, and the clouds, perceive the brutal transformation of a place they once thought was permanently pristine. Jadine gets stuck in the swamp, desperately struggling against the swamp women trying to drag her down in the quicksand. And Son, finally, becomes part of the mythology of the island as he joins the riding chevaliers.

Less frequently noticed in analyses of Tar Baby is the role of places that are, in one way or another, absent. Often, these places appear in tensions where characters’ immediate experiences of place are contrasted with places never appearing as concretely present, but rather as conceptions of geographically remote places.

The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which absent places are suggested and presented in conjunction with and in contrast to concrete, present places. It is, I believe, on the borderline between the present and the absent that the significance of place in the novel can be discerned.