|
Is Morrison also
among the prophets?: "psychoanalytic" strategies in 'Beloved.
by Iyunolu Osagie
In our efforts to consider the structure of "rememory" in Beloved, we
should call to mind what Toni Morrison once said:
Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take
seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often extremely hard to
seek out both the stimulus and its galaxy and to recognize their value
when they arrive. Memory is for me always fresh, in spite of the fact
that the object being remembered is done and past. ("Memory" 385)
In Beloved, Morrison takes up the challenge of excavating "buried
stimuli" of the slave past by employing psychoanalysis to retrace
footprints of journeys "done and past." This paper examines the method
Morrison employs to (de)construct historical records about a particular
incident that happened in 1855.(1) Struck by the incident but
dissatisfied with the amount of information reported, Morrison, like a
seer for whom time creates no boundaries, proceeds to give an account
of this century-old occurence. She creates a narrative with this
incident by exploring the psychic dimensions of American slavery, a
dimensio that is often glossed over in the general enumeration of human
and material loss. Morrison shoulders the task of reinventing the slave
past because the facts of slavery are elided, suppressed, and even
forgotten in many recorded accounts. Employing a narrative strategy
that offers several possible interpretations of the novel Beloved,
Morrison displaces the "comfortable" historical positions we might take
on the matter of American slavery.
Morrison's narrative strategy--much like the structure of
psychoanalysis--acts as a conditional operative, offering her creative
opportunities to deal with the real, the fantastic, and the possible
events that make up slave history. Her narrative strategy functions in
Beloved as a project in historical mythmaking. Utilizing both Western
and African interpretations of the psyche, Morrison succeeds in
destabilizing stereotypic "re-memberings" on slavery. She suggests,
through the multiple meanings her narrative provokes, that recorded
history (which often presents certain information to the exclusion of
some other) is a social construction reflecting a particular
consciousness, a particular agenda. Indeed, with the lingering shadow
of dark memories and the appearance and disappearance of ghosts in
Beloved, Morrison states simply: There is more than meets the eye in
the construction of history.
Morrison constructs the "interiority" of a slave experience in Beloved
by straddling the ontological borders of race. She utilizes her double
heritage (African American), her "double consciousness," as Du Bois
puts it (45), to rewrite the history of slavery. As both an insider and
an outsider to the Western tradition in literature, Morrison ruptures
the representations of the literary canon by bringing an African
dimension to it. She usurps the canon and forges it to fit her own
constructions of a "fictionalized history" or a "historicized fiction,"
as the case may be.(2)
Yes,
Morrison can be counted among the prophets of psychoanalysis. Her
application of psychoanalytic material, as a rhetorical strategy,
deliberately calls attention to, and lays claim to, the double status
of the African American as a split subject. This strategy also arms
Morrison with a prophetic voice that heralds on stage a contemplation
on what a slave past means for the African American, without bracketing
the multiple hermeneutic possibilities such a contemplation provokes.
Just as Shoshana Felman uses psychoanalysis in a cultural
context--something which is and is not there at the same time,
conscious and unconscious, the exemplary description of the trace
(11)(3)--so also Morrison uses the principal structure of recovery and
displacement in psychoanalysis as a model for understanding Beloved.
Consequently, tensions build up across many layers of semiotic
representations in the novel. The characters as well as the reader must
become part of the dramatis personae of this intra-psychic drama on the
"reconstruction" of a slave past.
My aim in this essay is to examine the characters, the reader, and the
author herself in the role each plays while seeking to elicit certain
meanings through a reconstruction of reactions and responses. I will
also highlight Morrison's use of psychoanalytic material to account for
the "herstory" of an African past. For where history (as written) has
failed to account for the African past, Morrison accords respectable
significance to the oral and the psychic representations of history.
The oralization of history which gives preeminence to its fictionalized
construction(4) will, in my analysis, be explored through the psychic
structure/stricture of psychoanalysis that Morrison so cleverly
exploits. The singular project of psychoanalysis--to elicit meanings
from external reality through the exploration of psychic space--creates
a vestibule for the exercise of the imaginary. Thus, in creating a
fictional--that is to say, possible--account of history, psychoanalysis
provides an environment conducive to both the production and resistance
of narratives. Where Western psychoanalysis readily aids the
understanding of Beloved, Morrison's text aptly fits into the literary
canon, and where the text sometimes resists a Freudian and Lacanian
reading, Morrison ruptures the Western canon by producing African
alternatives of reading the psyche. I refer to this African alternative
of reading as psychoanalysis.
I
would make a distinction between this alternative reading and the
Freudian institution (and its legacies) the Western world is most
familiar with under the name psychoanalysis. Although both are related
and often complement each other, the two forms of pysychoanalysis
should not be conflated. Freudian psychoanalysis has its foundation in
the oedipus complex.(5) African psychoanalysis has its roots in the
social and cultural setting of its peoples--in their beliefs in
concepts such as nature, the supernatural realm, reincarnation, and
retribution. Psychic trauma in the African world usually stems from the
immediate historical, social, and political environment, and is
responded to in various ways: It can be resisted through the oral
transfer of (historical) information, through storytelling, dancing,
and exorcism, to name a few examples. Nonetheless, I use the word
psychoanalysis in this essay to mean, simply, the operations of the
psyche. When either African or Western interpretations of the psyche
are assumed in the essay they are so specified. Indeed, African and
Western interpretations of the psyche sometimes merge in the novel's
rationale, yet this is not evidence of a confused blurring of sites and
moments of operation but a confirmation of the usefulness of
psychoanalysis as an explanatory theory for the psychic space of
possibilities in the fictive realization of history-in-the-making. As
Hortense Spillers confirms in Comparative American Identities, it is
this fictive space of "corpulative potentials" (6) that orchestrates
the possibilities of canonical ruptures, of cutting borders, not as
"the seizing of discursive initiative" (8) by a select race, but as
"the shifting position of the socionom" (16).
Morrison's copious use of psychoanalysis as a literary device(6) in
Beloved serves the author's ultimate purpose of outlining the
deliberate indeterminacy of the text's meaning. Traversing the boundary
between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the spiritual,
the conscious and the unconscious, she fully exploits the polyvalent
nature of psychoanalysis. She (re)defines psychoanalysis not just as a
model for examining the "interiority" of her characters but also for
involving the reader in an intimate way. The reader becomes part of the
storytelling, unraveling and flowing with the currents of the
eccentricities, paradoxes, and collaborations that make up the plot.
The psychoanalytic models Morrison employs offer different strategies
for reading the novel Beloved. The basic story is that Sethe runs away
from Sweet Home with a full-term pregnancy, having sent her other three
children ahead of her. She successfully reaches her mother-in-law's
place in Cincinnati, where she reunites with her family, without her
husband, in freedom. About a month later, recognizing the hat of her
captor coming down the road for them, she quickly gathers her children
to kill them in a shed in the yard before anyone else figures out what
is going on. Her attempt proves successful with the "crawling-already?"
(93) baby girl. From then on, Sethe and her family are haunted by their
memories of the murdered child. This is the backdrop against which the
story of the present is played out. However, the ambiguity surrounding
the facts of the story's present time accounts for the many possible
explanations of the past, and because the fictional present is hinged
to the past, without the pieces of the present (and supposedly the
future), the past remains an unfinished puzzle. What really happens
eighteen years after the "crawling-already?" baby is murdered? Is the
young woman who enters Sethe's life her daughter come back from the
grave? Is Beloved someone else whose identity must be discovered? Does
Beloved really exist?
One school
of thought assumes that Beloved is Sethe's dead child come to avenge
itself on its mother, the child's murderer. The strong history of the
baby ghost in the house, coupled with the strange appearance of a young
lady, Beloved, makes the characters in the text and the reading public
believe that the "crawling-already?" baby has returned in human
form.(7) Another school of thought assumes that Beloved is no kin to
Sethe. This second reading seeks to defend itself against the more
popular reading. The probable story, this latter school believes, is
that Beloved is a captive from Africa who escapes from the hands of her
sexually-abusive captor, a white man, and she now "mistakes" Sethe for
her real mother who committed suicide by jumping into the sea from the
slaveship's deck.
This second
reading, exemplified by Elizabeth House's interpretation of the story
in her essay "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who is not Beloved,"
contradicts the first reading in many ways. Though House criticizes
this first reading and supplies another version of reading Beloved, her
reading is no more than another probability because, while she points
out evidence to show that Beloved could be other than a ghost, she
fails to disprove evidence that supports the earlier reading. By using
psychoanalysis where the text warrants, I will illustrate how these
rather contradictory readings are not exclusive of each other but
complementary. I will also show how this complementarity (knitting
together plots, sub-plots, and counter-plots) creates a powerful and
affecting work of art.
Signs and Wonders
There is plenty of evidence for the reading public to assume that
Beloved is a ghost returned in human form. All the paraphernalia needed
for the reader to believe that this is no mere fictive realism of a
text are laid out from the very first page: "124 was spiteful. Full of
a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children"
(3). 124 is "suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness
of the dead" (3-4), and we soon agree with the dying Baby Suggs that
"every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road" (3). We are
immersed into the spooky world of the novel before we get a chance to
rationalize or distance ourselves from its context. As though in the
world of magical realism where ghosts and goblins control the human
realm, a certain familiarity with the unfamiliar imposes itself on us,
compelling our mind to accommodate the world of the text. The
hard-to-explain supernatural happenings stand as evidence that, first
of all, there is a ghost in the house, and furthermore that the
family's unfeigned relationship with this ghost determines their fate
and the decisions they make in life. The story clearly suggests that
Sethe's boys leave home because of the manifest presence of the baby
ghost (272). The women also recognize the presence of the ghost. Sethe
and Denver, the two family members remaining after the death of Baby
Suggs, learn to live with and to love the ghost. Ostracized from the
community since the grisly murder of the baby, and remembering Baby
Suggs's statement that" 'not a house in the country ain't packed to its
rafters with some dead Negro's grief'" (5), Sethe, along with Denver,
welcomes the ghost into the house.
They live with this state of affairs until Paul D, the last of the
Sweet Home men, arrives on the scene. Recognizing the presence of a
ghost by "a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he
stood," Paul D asks:
"You got company?" ...
"Off and on," said Sethe.
"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil
you got in here?" (8)
Sethe describes this "company" as her "daughter. The one I sent ahead
with the boys" (10). With this indelible memory of a ghostly presence
in our minds, we are quick to believe that Beloved is the ghost
returned.
We also confirm our
impressions about this ghostly presence when a shadow joins hands with
Sethe and Denver to and from the carnival. Again, when we are
introduced to a "fully dressed woman" walking out of water, our now
somewhat conditioned minds begin to look at her as, perhaps, another
ghostly manifestation. Our minds hasten to make conclusions about her
because she seems imbued with a certain kind of inertia, a deathly
stillness. Also, we are introduced to her more by her clothing--"a
straw hat with a broken brim," "the bit of lace edging her dress"
(50)--than by a description of what she looks like. Having to make do
with only a description of bits and pieces of her "body," the reader is
struck by the deliberate withholding of important details and the
highlighting of seemingly unrelated and irrelevant information. For
example, we are told that "the rays of the sun struck [Beloved] full on
the face, so that when Sethe, Denver and Paul D rounded the curve in
the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it,
and Here Boy [the dog] nowhere in sight" (51). The uncanniness of this
information resides not only in the image of an absent body but in the
strong presence of a lack--the lack of a face, and a missing dog.
Although "the rays of the sun struck [Beloved] full on the face," and
the reader expects a description of the details of that face, the
narrative suppresses the presence of the face and rather highlights the
absence of the dog. This narrative structure foreshadows a major theme
in this novel: the reluctance of the author to draw a line between
inside and outside, visible and invisible, image and reality, history
and fiction.
Morrison's message
here, that what we may be seeing is not there at all and what is open
and revealed we may not be seeing, questions the whole idea of truth
and certainty. Sethe, Denver, and Paul D see Here Boy, who is nowhere
around, but fail to see Beloved's face, which is exposed to the full
view of the sun. It is not incidental that, when Sethe moves close
enough to see Beloved's face, her "bladder fill[s] to capacity" (51).
Sethe's full bladder, which she empties just outside the outhouse, is a
metaphor for the link between seeing and telling. Morrison demonstrates
that being able to see always produces narratives. It is while Sethe
stoops over her own urine that she recalls events of her past, such as
her child-hood days with Nan and Denver's birth in a sinking boat. All
these memories, of course, are tied to her being able to see Beloved's
face. Seeing has to do with reading the past, and how one sees is
directly related to the kinds of narratives that are produced. Sethe's
link with the past, manifest in her relationship with the ghost, is
unmistakably played up in the presence of Beloved.
Consequently, the reader is tempted to tie up Beloved's appearance at
124 with the ghost which has recently been driven away from the house.
So many incidents piled up on each other prompt the assumptions the
reader makes that Beloved must be a ghost. For instance, the dog Here
Boy, having moved out of the house at the presence of the ghost (12),
now moves out of the compound at the arrival of Beloved (55).
Furthermore, Beloved's seemingly unquenchable thirst (she drinks cup
after cup of water) and Sethe's uncontrollable passing of urine at the
same time (51) establish irresistible connections between them.
Morrison hints at a mother-child relationship between them when she
states that "there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb
and there was no stopping now" (51). The idea that Sethe is
symbolically giving birth to Beloved also ties up with any immediate
interpretation for Beloved's "new skin, lineless and smooth, including
the knuckles of her hand" (50).
An African Fable: The Devil Child
A very popular African tale(8) bears close similarity to the suspicion
the reader holds about Beloved's too-flawless appearance: Once upon a
time there was a very beautiful young girl who was being wooed by many
suitors. She was widely known for rejecting all her suitors on the
grounds that they were not good-looking enough for her. Suitors came
from far and wide but could not meet her expectations. A demon in a
far-off country heard of her beauty and reputation for refusing
eligible bachelors. He decided to try his chance. But first, he stopped
at several locations on the way to borrow the most beautiful body parts
he could find. Eventually, fitted out to "kill," he arrived in the
girl's village riding gallantly on a beautiful horse. Seeing the most
handsome man of her dreams, she decided to marry him and insisted,
against her parents' wishes, to follow this total stranger to his own
country. On their way, he had to return the parts he had borrowed.
Realizing her husband's deceit, she was, of course, most alarmed to
find that the man of her dreams was nothing but an ugly demon. What she
thought she had was certainly not "there" at all.
The manifestation of Beloved as a ghost returned in the flesh follows
much the same pattern as the demon of the African story. In an African
tale, a demon may sometimes have the same characteristics as a ghost.
For example, they are often presented as speaking the same way--through
their nose. As a concept, the term demon is sometimes interchangeable
with the term ghost. Even Beloved, believed to be a ghost, is sometimes
called the "devil-child" by Ella's troop of praying women (261).
In thinking about this African tale, one immediately calls to mind
Beloved's new skin, new shoes, and expensive clothing. The text
suggests that she might not only have borrowed (actually, she claims to
have taken) the things she has on, she might have borrowed her body as
well. With "her soft new feet ... barely capable of their job" (53),
with her head supported in "the palm of her hand as though it was too
heavy for a neck alone" (56), as if she was just learning to use
unused-to corporeal material, the puzzle she holds for the reader is as
great as that bothering Paul D:
"Something funny 'bout that gal," Paul D said, mostly to himself.
"Funny how?"
"Acts sick, sounds sick, but she don't look sick. Good skin, bright
eyes and strong as a bull."
"She's not strong. She can hardly walk without holding on to
something."
"That's what I mean. Can't walk, but I seen her pick up the rocker with
one hand." (56)
The reader is also fascinated by Beloved's own preoccupation with her
"borrowed" body. Indifferently pulling out a back tooth from her mouth,
Beloved thinks:
This is it. Next
would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one
at a time, maybe all at once.... It is difficult keeping her head on
her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among
the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she
could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. (133)
Beloved's breathtaking appearance at 124 is equaled by her vanishing
act at the end of the novel. No one knows for sure what happens to her.
Like Ella and the women in the story who witness her "disappearance,"
the reader may easily assume that, as a ghost, she goes the way she
came--into thin air. Like the devil-child that she is, she "erupts into
her separate parts" (274), leaving nothing "but wind in the eaves, or
spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather" (275).
Specular Constructions
As a ghost, or the devil-child, as Ella chooses to call her, Beloved's
appearance and relationship to each person in the text are particularly
distinct. The embodied ghost whose detachable body eventually "erupts
into her separate parts" plays a significant role in the black
community, especially in the lives of the residents of 124. For
instance, Paul D's role as lover to Beloved strikes us with horror
because we have, by now, accepted that she is a ghost. His suspicion
and dislike of Beloved and her unparalleled hatred of him translate
into a sexually explosive scene in the novel. In this seduction scene,
in which she lures him into the cold house to possess him, they
interlock in a sexually-potent power play. It would seem that having
driven the disembodied ghost out of the house with "a table and a loud
male voice" (37), Paul D should be able to confront an embodied spirit
who is bent on using her sexual powers over him:
"I want you to touch me in the inside part."
"Go back in that house and get to bed."
"You have to touch me in the inside part. And you have to call me my
name." ...
"No."
"Please call it. I'll go if you call it."
"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. (117)
If we keep in mind that the restored-to-life phantom of a baby ghost,
though a grown-up girl when she appears in human form, is,
nevertheless, a baby in her mind and in her mental development (she
cannot even tie her shoe laces [65]), we may better appreciate their
sexual encounter. Her mental development accounts for her rather
possessive behavior and her tendency to be selfish. But given this
limited development, one might wonder how she possesses the knowledge
to take her mother's lover.
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality is perhaps a way to explain the
rather unusual relationship among her, Sethe, and Paul D. One can argue
that, as a "crawling-already?" baby who has not quite entered the
symbolic order, which could help her differentiate between herself and
her mother--in other words, her identity is still confused with her
mother's--she desires her mother as a symbol of identification with
her. Thus, her mother's desire becomes her own. That is to say that her
sexual encounter with Paul D is not done through any perverse sexual
knowledge but through a childish desire to be the center of her
mother's love. This explanation is perhaps justified by the fact that,
as soon as she gets what she wants--that is, to drive Paul D away from
her mother--she stops "visiting" him. It also seems evident from the
text that Beloved learns her sexual plan against Paul D when she
watches the turtles making love beside the stream. The same action of
hoisting up her skirt and dropping it while she watches the turtles in
the stream at the back of the house is repeated when she seduces Paul
D. Indeed, she "turned her head over her shoulder the way the turtles
had" (116); this gives the impression that she has just learned how to
do such a thing. The "animality" of the act, and the manner in which
she does it, demonstrates some kind of innocence.(9)
Paul D's painful past, which he had locked up in a rusted tobacco tin
of a heart, is unlocked by this contact between the living and the
dead. Touching Beloved "in the inside part" is equivalent to keeping in
touch with his own past, opening up himself enough so as to confront
the past and negotiate the future. When Paul D thinks back on all he
suffered in his attempts to escape from Schoolteacher's brutal
empire--Sweet Home--he has to admit to himself that there is no
forgetting the past. The memory Paul D has to live with, a memory in
which Schoolteacher plays a significant role--Sixo burnt alive, Halle
insane, Paul A sold, and himself with a bit in his mouth--confirms this
past. Through Beloved, Paul D is able to reappraise the past and to
survey possible opportunities for the future. His cry for a red heart
during his sexual encounter with Beloved partially restores his
manhood.
On the whole, Beloved's
return in the flesh is therapeutic. In the case of Sethe, her assumed
mother who has been literally ostracized from the community not only
because she has murdered her own child, but because she is too proud,
Beloved will become the link that will bring her into the community
again. Stricken with guilt for having killed her daughter and looking
for a way to make up for it, Sethe welcomes the "resurrection" of
Beloved. In this way, she revises the past. Beloved becomes a symbol
that banishes Sethe's pathogenic link with her murdered child. With
Beloved's disappearance at the end of the novel, one is wont to believe
that 124 experiences relief. Paul D returns and Denver receives good
advice to try life out. Although Beloved's presence will continue to
haunt the neighborhood in a very effervescent sense, it is best (in
Morrison's advice to the characters/readers) to "disremember" her and
to avoid her as "unaccounted" (274) for. It is best to pass on--to the
present.
Moreover, an exorcism of
the past will leave Sethe room for self-realization. Without the
incapacitating presence of the past about her, she can now begin to be
herself and not live for a ghost. As Paul D tells her, "'You your best
thing'" (273). Sethe understands that a real claim to freedom must
begin with the mind, and until she is able to deal with the past not as
a burden which must be beaten back by all means but as a factor which
constitutes the present, she will continue to be haunted and will not
enjoy total freedom. Consequently, before she can have her peace, there
is a need to examine the past and correct it where possible. Beloved's
appearance is a concrete way to resolve this psychic trauma.
I am not suggesting that Beloved's resurrection is an easy therapeutic
course that brings the past to the foreground and that her
disappearance completely exorcises the past. Indeed, the past cannot be
forgotten. This is the lesson Baby Suggs learns when her "faith, love,
her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse
twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived" (89) in
Cincinnati. Although "Baby Suggs, holy" (87), has a therapeutic
treatment for her black community that helps to counteract the spite
white people have for it, her therapy can only do that much--help her
people. In her call for them to lay everything down, sword and shield,
and her command for them to love themselves, she discovers that one
needs these weapons as a defense against love, too much love. For
sanity's sake and for the defense of one's life, one cannot lay down
everything; for instance, one cannot lay down one's guard, which Baby
Suggs does when she indulges in an excess of love at the safe arrival
of her daughter-in-law and her children. In other words, therapy is
fine if it leaves room for a serum of dead bodies, antibodies if you
will, in the mind of the living, in order to protect the living from
the dead and from all that will threaten their well-being in the real
world. The healing process must of necessity include the past.
Indeed, Sethe's relationship to the ghost-child is wholly dominated by
the past. Judith Thurman points out that the impossibility of erasing
the past is due to the fatal relationships which slavery produces. In
fact, these relationships--master-slave, motherchild, etc.--are "what
we experience as most sinister, claustrophobic, and uncanny in the
novel, and [they are] what drive home the meaning of slavery" (179).
Thurman points out that it is these relationships, and not the idea of
the novel as a ghost story, in her opinion a "deceptive and sensational
tag" (178), that make the novel so uncanny.
No matter our reaction to Thurman's point, we can agree with her that
the novel is uncanny. Freud has described the uncanny (unheimlich) as
"something which is secretly familiar [heimlich--heimisch], which has
undergone repression and then returned from it" (245). Indeed, Freud
admits in his parapsychological explanations of the uncanny that it is
a very delicate ground because what we may see as uncanny under one
circumstance may not be in another. For example, fairy tales, though
they are peopled by ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly presences, are
not uncanny in any way because they are instantly regarded as belonging
to the world of the impossible, as make-believe--which means that the
rules of normalcy do not apply. However, certain fictional texts, if
handled carefully, can produce the uncanny because the possibility of
their happening, or having happened in fact (247), haunts the present,
under what Freud would call repetition compulsion.(10)
Beloved falls into this latter category, because it presents in a very
realistic manner a fictional account that is historically true.
Morrison's novel is based on a true account of an event of 1855: A
slave woman named Margaret Garner, when chased by her owner to
Cincinnati where she had escaped to her mother-in-law's, tried to kill
her four children. Without remorse, she had preferred death for them to
slavery (Clemons 74). The reader's experience of the uncanny in Beloved
rests mainly in the realistic (historical) setting which characterizes
Morrison's novels. The landscape of normalcy upon which the
extraterrestrial is accounted for encourages the reader to read with a
certain trepidation and expectation of terrifying havoc common to all
such ghostly manifestations. To summarize Freud's "The Uncanny"
crudely, one can say that the flow of adrenaline carries with it the
often repressed, sometimes blunted, "primordial" beliefs which our
"finer" social sensibilities have discarded. To conclude, we can say
that the first interpretation of Beloved lies mainly in the reader's
capacity to accept the characters' identification of Beloved as a ghost
returned, a perception strengthened, perhaps, by our varied cultural
experiences and belief in ghosts.
Truth Constructions
The second reading tries to prove that Beloved is not Sethe's daughter
but is indeed a strange woman who walks into Sethe's compound bearing a
name (not really hers) similar to the one word Sethe could afford to
have engraved on the headstone of her murdered baby--"Beloved." In her
essay mentioned above, Elizabeth House strives to show that Beloved is
not the Beloved we think she is. According to the story House
reconstructs, Beloved is carried on a slaveship headed for America from
Africa with her mother. Since she was so young during the voyage,
Beloved cannot construct her story accurately. House writes:
From Beloved's disjointed thoughts, her stream-of-consciousness
rememberings set down in these chapters [Book Two, Sections Four and
Five], a story can be pieced together that describes how white slave
traders, "men without skin," captured the girl and her mother as the
older woman picked flowers in Africa. In her narrative, Beloved
explains that she and her mother, along with many other Africans, were
then put aboard an abysmally crowded slave ship, given little food and
water, and in these inhuman conditions, many blacks died. To escape
this living hell, Beloved's mother leaped into the ocean, and, thus, in
the girl's eyes, her mother willingly deserted her. (18)
Surprised that major reviewers of Morrison's text simply assume that
Beloved is Sethe's dead daughter come to take revenge, House cites many
examples to show why this cannot be. Indeed, her argument, as much as
it sometimes remains speculative, is largely convincing, and puts to
rest many incoherent and knotty questions as to the puzzling appearance
and identity of Beloved.
My
interpretation of this second possible reading on the following pages
is triggered by House's own reading of Beloved.(11) It is necessary to
lay out this second reading not so much to argue whether Beloved is or
is not a ghost as it is to portray that this supposedly contrary
reading is another deliberate move of Morrison's. From the numerous
images the author employs to provoke this second interpretation, we can
posit that her strategy insists on the indeterminacy of the text's
meaning.
Beloved says in her reminiscence of her mother:
I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket
... she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way
(210)
In this first set of
rememberings, we are given the image of a peaceful setting in which
Beloved watches her mother pick flowers. But this settig is disturbed
by "clouds" which are "in the way." As House points out, Beloved later
describes the clouds as "clouds of gunsmoke" (214). This phrase helps
us to imagine that perhaps her mother is hiding in the grass ("she
opens the grass"), or falls down, as House suggests, when she hears
gunfire. Unable to protect her mother and overwhelmed by the smoke
herself, she is captured, along with her mother, by white slave
traders, "men without skin." Her memories of the gruesome experience
she encounters on the slaveship remain vivid; they are "pictures" in
her mind. Beloved recalls that there are many other people on the
slaveship and that they are all tightly packed into the ship. Having to
crouch on the long trip across the Atlantic, it seems to her that
"there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others
who are crouching too." They are all so tightly packed in the hold of
the ship that those who wish to die do not have enough room to do it
in. In the inhuman conditions in the hold of the ship, those who eat
the miserable food they are offered (for example, the bread is moldy,
"sea-colored") vomit it up; "some who eat nasty themselves." The white
overseers also bring them their urine and try to force the captives to
drink, but they refuse (210-11).
After a protracted period of starvation and unhealthy conditions, a lot
of people succeed in dying; in fact, there are so many that they form a
"little hill of dead people." Beloved and her mother witness this scene
because they are on the deck. We know this from Beloved's recollection
that "we are not crouching now we are standing ... the sun closes my
eyes" (211). Probably realizing that the death toll is too high under
the prevailing health conditions, the white slave traders bring the
people who are still alive on deck to get some fresh air. Apparently,
Beloved's mother's decision to throw herself overboard is prompted by
the harrowing experience of watching dead captives unceremoniously
pushed overboard with poles by the white overseers. Preferring death to
slavery, she jumps into the sea, leaving Beloved behind:
the woman with my face is in the sea ... they do not push the woman
with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in (212)
By stressing that the white men do
not push her mother into the sea but that she "willingly" jumps in,
Beloved tells us plainly that her mother commits suicide.
The indelible imprint of this traumatic experience follows her to the
shores of America. While the other slaves are sold into slavery, she is
left in the keeping of one white man, probably the ship master. This
white man not only sexually abuses her (212), but also uses her as a
prostitute: Beloved "said when she cried there was no one. That dead
men lay on top of her.... Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in
her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light" (241).
How she escapes from this setting we can only speculate about. But the
most likely interpretation is the clue which Morrison gives about "the
bridge," the one thing Beloved seems to have clearly remembered,
probably because it is the latest happening in the long line of events
in her life. The evidence we can elicit from the text lies in the
conversation she has with Denver:
"Tell me, how did you get here?"
"I wait; then I got on the bridge. I stay there in the dark, in the
daytime, in the dark, in the daytime. It was a long time."
"All this time you were on a bridge?"
"No. After. When I got out." (75)
Beloved always makes reference to "the bridge," while Denver, thinking
it is just some bridge over a river, says "a bridge." Beloved is
probably trying to say that, after she left the deplorable conditions
in the slaveship's hold, as "mistress" to her master, she had access to
the bridge where she sat night and day reminiscing about her mother. It
seems possible that she has stayed on this ship all her life and has
been used to service other men on board. On one of her lonely
rendezvous on the bridge, during the day time when she is nothing but a
bitch of whom all the white men are ashamed, the thought occurs to her
to escape from the ship by following the example of her mother--jumping
overboard. This seems to have been the case if we consider what she
says to Paul D when he asks her how she found the house: "'She told me.
When I was at the bridge, she told me'" (65). The "she" refers to the
mother she lost overboard. The obvious nostalgia suggested by her
statement "she took my face away there is no one to want me to say me
my name" (212) probably directs her to jump from the bridge into the
water where she thinks she can find her mother. What she sees when she
looks in the water, though, is her own reflection.
The details of how she gets from the bridge of the ship over, we might
suppose, a large body of water to the stream at the back of Sethe's
house is elided from her narration. But we do know that, when she swims
out of the water and sees Sethe coming down the road toward her, she is
deluded into thinking that Sethe is her mother: "Sethe's is the face
that left me" (213). The delusion she now suffers demonstrates the
intensity of the trauma she is experiencing, a trauma caused by the
stunted family relationships which slavery has forced on her. Lacking
mother love and not even remembering her own name (212), she goes by
the name which "ghosts without skin" call her in the dark--Beloved.
Once we are able to construct the sketchy account of her life, we are
then able to make sense of the conversations she has with Denver and
Sethe from time to time. Denver strongly believes in ghosts, and the
pointed questions she sometimes asks Beloved are meant to clarify and
confirm her perception of things. So, although Beloved actually answers
her questions, they have two different frames of reference in mind. For
example, once, when "Beloved let her head fall back on the edge of the
bed .... Denver saw the tip of the thing she always saw in its entirety
when Beloved undressed to sleep. "Looking straight at it she whispers,"
'Why you call yourself Beloved?'" (74-75). Denver thinks that the mark
on Beloved's neck which she is looking at is the gash left from the
wound that killed her sister.
However, the mark on Beloved's neck, from the point of view of the
second reading being pursued here, is the mark left from her experience
on the slaveship where they were held captive with "the iron circle," a
metal collar which was "around our neck" (212). Consequently, Beloved
responds to Denver's question about her name in this manner: "'In the
dark my name is Beloved.'" Beloved is referring to the night-time
rendezvous men had with her (241), but Denver thinks that "dark" refers
to the grave where her dead sister is. Thinking that her sister, whom
she thinks Beloved is, is finally confessing that she is a ghost, she
asks Beloved if she was cold because Denver believes that her dead
sister should have been cold in a wintry grave.
Morrison intertwines Beloved's and Denver's stories to create a
narrative that transcends either of their solitary meanings. Morrison
knows that meaning is not for itself and in itself but in spite of
itself. Her agenda here tells us that meaning is always a construction,
most often a production of our social environment. Colored by our
varied perspectives about life, meaning is open to a body of
interpretations, sometimes conflated, sometimes distinctive.
A seemingly eerie incident that takes place in the dark, cold house
ties up neatly with this idea that meaning is not a construct with a
singular end but is the product of semiotic layering. The conflated and
yet distinctive meanings evident in the stories Denver and Beloved
share are indicative of the questions surrounding the representation of
meaning:
"Look," [Beloved] points to the sunlit cracks.
"What? I don't see nothing." Denver follows the pointing finger.
Beloved drops her hand. "I'm like this."
Denver watches as Beloved bends over, curls up and rocks. Her eyes go
to no place; her moaning is so small Denver can hardly hear it.
"You all right? Beloved?"
Beloved focuses her eyes. "Over there. Her face."
Denver looks where Beloved's eyes go; there is nothing but darkness
there.
"Whose face? Who is it?"
"Me. It's me."
She is smiling again. (124)
Beloved is reliving her experiences on the slaveship. Her rocking
movements simulate the storms at sea she still remembers: "storms rock
us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men" (211).
What activates this memory is not so much the darkness they are sitting
in as the "sunlit cracks" which remind her of the little shafts of
sunlight that used to come into the hold of the slaveship. Her
stream-of-consciousness rememberings in the second half of the book
illuminate the meaning of the above conversation: "at night I cannot
see the dead man on my face daylight comes through the cracks and I can
see his locked eyes" (210; emphasis added).
With her mind on the past, Beloved invites Denver to take a look at the
face of her mother whom she, Beloved, pictures, with her mind's eye, at
one corner of the room. She uses the pronoun "Me. It's me" because she
has always identified her mother with herself. We can imagine that
Denver thinks Beloved is at last admitting that she is the ghost sister
she believes Beloved to be. When Denver looks, she sees nothing because
there is nothing to see beyond "the sunlit cracks" Beloved is pointing
at. Ironically, seeing nothing feeds her preconceived idea that there
is a ghost lurking around in the dark, invisible to her own eye because
she is only mortal. With that notion, she asks Beloved to name the face
she "sees" in the dark room. Beloved's response, "Me. It's me," can
only translate Denver's suspicion into fact.
My interpretation of the second reading here, as much as it seems to
prove Beloved's identity, does not in fact do so. As another reading
with speculative assumptions, it has many gaps and unanswered
questions. Thus, this interpretation adds to the enigma of who Beloved
is not, rather than who she is. Our attempts at defining Beloved are
always superseded by our knowledge of what she might not be or, more
precisely, what else she may be.
Indeed, House rightly describes Beloved's identity as ambiguous (22),
but her singular denial of Beloved as a ghost limits her reading since
this denial suffocates the varied perceptions of Beloved which Morrison
seems to insist on. This second interpretation suggests only one such
probable answer to the riddle of Beloved's identity. The first reading
is just as legitimate. Each reading ultimately has its purpose. On the
one hand, the first reading presents not only the ghosts of history
which haunt our present realities but also presents Morrison's
rhetorical strategy--psychoanalytic models--which enables the reader to
comprehend the implication of other possible readings. In other words,
because our imaginative potential is at its highest when we encounter,
or imagine that we encounter, ghosts, our capacity to produce and
accept multiple meanings applicable to a given situation also operates
at its fullest. The second reading, on the other hand, gives Beloved a
voice (she controls her own narrative) which the disembodied presence
of a ghost cannot quite muster. Moreover, Beloved's narrative
delineates incidents that remain unaccounted for in many historical
records. Both readings, however, constitute an intra-psychic experience
that clearly spells out the psychosomatic traumas of a history of
slavery.
The Writerly Text
But how is the reader to handle a narrative emplotment that begs to be
comprehended on contradictory levels at the same time? The rhetorical
sleight-of-hand which Morrison uses to seduce the reader into believing
the first interpretation, accepting the second, and contemplating other
possible readings involves the reader in an intimate engagement with
the text. Apparently, Morrison has left a lot of the interpretation
within the control of the reader because the stories about Beloved's
identity, her appearance, and her leave-taking are actually left to the
reader's imagination. Morrison trusts either the reader enough or her
craft better to believe that the reader will take up the threads where
she leaves them hanging and with the results that she expects.(12)
The multiple readings of Beloved echo the elusive nature of
psychoanalysis and its tendency to recover itself constantly; this
tendency makes psychoanalysis an uncanny representation of literature.
Its capacity to be "lost, displaced or misplaced," as Felman puts
it,(13) gives it a presence that is "never simply there, at our
disposal to apply. It is something that we necessarily keep losing and
have to keep working at to find again.... psychoanalysis always has to
be recovered" (11). To this end, the psychoanalytic device which
Morrison adopts works very well in Beloved. It is in the context of the
psychoanalytic that the reader is able to appreciate the contrary yet
complementary readings discussed above. The reader can invoke
psychoanalytic explanations for hard-to-define incidents, and at the
same time dismiss them where some other explanation seems apparent.
In the latter instance, psychoanalysis always seems out of place and
irrelevant. For example, it is easy to explain away Beloved's seduction
of Paul D as something she is well-practiced in if we assume, with the
second school of thought, that she might have been, as Stamp Paid
suspects, the "girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer
Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone'" (235). In
addition, her own confession of carnal knowledge--she admits that men
call her Beloved in the dark and bitch during the day (241)--stands as
evidence of her sexual ploy. Yet the sexual context itself, so
seductively laden with innocence, like the turtles she imitates,
quickly recovers the psychoanalytic relevance of the theory of
infantile sexuality as an explanation. The reader's arrival at one
meaning can easily be tempered by the arrival at an opposing
interpretation. This present/absent face of events is intrinsic to the
structure of psychoanalysis.
The
puzzle over Beloved's "new" body is another example of the ambiguity of
meaning which psychoanalysis can provoke. In the first reading, the
newness of her body stands as evidence of the literal "return of the
repressed"--the baby ghost. In the second reading, it seems evident
that her flawless skin, her newness, results from her confinement by a
white man; she is therefore not exposed to the types of hardship
(though confinement is just as hard) the black community generally
knows.
From these two
interpretations, we can see that the irreconcilably dialogic reading,
the "misplacedness" of meaning, registers tension in the text. This
tension is achieved, in a truly Faulknerian sense,(14) through the
rhetorical obscurity of Morrison's writing style. Part of the plot
structure is the impossibility of putting the whole picture together.
Morrison leaves the gaps open, inviting a speculative reading of
possibilities. Obviously, the reader is given the task of filling in
the gaps, but the more the reader fills in the gaps, the more conscious
s/he becomes that other possible explanations may exist.(15)
If the reader does arrive at a conclusion at all, it is not so much
(not with confidence, at any rate) about who Beloved is, or is not, as
it is about the elusiveness of the text. This elusiveness is enhanced
by the characters' difficulty in distinguishing between their inner
minds and the outer world. The blurring of inside/outside binds the
characters together. They cannot separate the past from the present.
Denver, for instance, defines the present by the past, and her resolute
belief in Beloved's identity as her ghost sister is dependent on this
factor.
The trauma impelled by
this indifference of an inside/outside psychic state in the novel also
defines the relationship between Beloved and Sethe; each reads her own
historicity into the life of the other. By her attempts to "join" with
Sethe when she sees her own reflection in the water, Beloved identifies
with Sethe, claiming that Sethe's face is her face:
Sethe's is the face that left me ... her smiling face is the place for
me ... she is my face smiling at me ... now we can join (213) Sethe
also sees her life as unlivable without Beloved. As she says to
Beloved, "... when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours. I
wouldn't draw breath without my children" (203).
This reluctance to distinguish between self and other, inside and
outside, hints at Morrison's deliberate attempt to give her plot an
"ambivalent" and "indeterminate" status. The contradictions inherent in
the two possible readings elaborated above illustrate that the real
meaning of Morrison's project resides not in the readings but in spite
of them. The ambivalence and indeterminacy evident in Morrison's
conflation of two distinct stories characterize the person of Beloved,
the riddle of the text. As "a condition," to use Phil Lewis's term,(16)
Beloved resists definition by being the measure by which Morrison
encourages us to read difference in the text. Difference is the
distinctive mark of "otherness." Lewis asserts that in the articulation
of "otherness" heterogeneity rather than homogeneity results. He points
out that difference is introduced "precisely [by] what cannot be made
manageable and intelligible, what cannot be measured by a reality
principle or verification procedure, what cannot be pinned down by
homogeneous interpretation ... but rather by factoring heterogeneity
into the text" (15).
Morrison does
in fact celebrate "otherness," difference in interpretation, by the
elusive, "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't" stylistic device prevalent in
her novel. Characters in the novel theorize about what they know, or
think they know, about Beloved. The reader also goes through the text
"stranded" with an untotalizable, difficult-to-clarify, identification
of Beloved--one character that remains impossible to track down,
describe (we never really know what her features are like), or project
into for too long. She remains the enigma of the "other," "a
condition," to use Lewis's term, and to use Morrison's term, "just
weather."
Communal Neurosis
It may be pertinent at this point to end with a note on the place of
communal neurosis in the novel. By now it is obvious that it is not
only Sethe and Beloved who qualify for a place in the asylum. If black
people were to be allowed into the white people's madhouse in
Cincinnati, without an exception, the whole black community would
easily be admitted. Each of them has something to repress, or even
confess, about the past (which is also the present), because they are
virtually forced to live with their agonies--physical as well as
psychical scars.
The white
community as well suffers from a strain of madness unique to the
"peculiar institution"--slavery. Sweet Home, the seemingly ideal
slaveowner's place, is the ultimate statement about the white man's
madness. Naming and un-naming is the numbers game being run in this
territory. In this madhouse of a plantation, all the variables of
lunacy and folly can be plugged anywhere between the extremes of Mr.
Garner, who calls his slaves men, and Schoolteacher, who insists on
calling them boys.
Perhaps what is
more interesting is the manner in which we as readers shift from one
end of the divide to the other, trying to sort out our own perceptions
of the story. Our definition of reading as the masterability of meaning
is redefined by Morrison's project as the unmasterability of the
unconscious. In witnessing the novel's intra-psychic drama, we come
away recognizing the limits of our capacity to configure truth. Thus,
any (meta)commentary we make cannot be a privileged mode of truth. The
interpretation of the historical event of 1855 in Cincinnati is left to
posterity to determine. Morrison has of course taken up the challenge,
not only by rewriting and redefining the event, but also by encouraging
us to read various meanings into it.
Nonetheless, to dismiss the reader's endeavors at arriving at an
interpretation of the novel Beloved (the quest for narrative control)
is as disabling as fetishizing the character Beloved into a pure
"other."(17) Being an overdetermined character, Beloved's multiple
inscriptions call for a semantic layering of interpretations.
Certainly, no one interpretation would do; but all possible readings
can work together to give a rather persuasive picture of the past.
However, there is no final point at which the story of slavery can be
captured, as is evidenced in the no-real-address of Sethe's house, 124.
Keeping in mind that, when the significant events of Sethe's life
happened in this house, "it didn't have a number ..., because
Cincinnati didn't stretch that far," one can understand why, when it
can be identified as "the gray and white house on Bluestone Road" (3),
the house, and all it contains, exceeds interpretation by constantly
doubling itself: 1 ... 2 ... 4 ...
Apparently, the text of slavery continues to resist conclusive
interpretations: If the white man who knew the slaveship's navigational
routes could not tell the number of slaves that would survive the
journey; if most of the captives who went through the pain and
sufferings of rebellion in the Middle Passage did not have a language
to tell it in, or simply did not live to tell the story; if those who
defied the horrors of captivity in a strange land--a captivity layered
by an inevitable neurosis--forgot their past "like a bad dream" (274),
then, certainly, the author/reader's limit in space and time gives way
to a "collective hallucination."(18)
Consequently, like the role played by the demon who was able to seduce
a beautiful village girl in the African fable narrated earlier,
Beloved, the devil-child, seduces us with metonymic bits of her
life-story. The black community in the novel can all identify with bits
and pieces of Beloved's life. In fact, through Beloved's own life, we
are given a retrospective look at events in other people's lives in the
community--for example, Stamp Paid's and Ella's. It is as if Beloved
has compressed into herself borrowed pieces of everyone else's life.
Her story is the story of a whole community, a small narrative that
overflows into a larger narrative.
Evidently, the story of slavery, even when it pertains to the
individual's story, cannot wholly be captured on paper. Like Sethe, who
resists captivity, the trope of slavery also resists closed
interpretations. The gaps and transitional stages, then, which remain
unexplained in Beloved's life maintain their enigmatic status by
remaining just that--never fully captured ... never fully defined.
Notes
(1.)In 1855, a slave woman had run away to Cincinnati, where she
attempted to kill her four children when chased by her owner. this
incident inspired Morrison's writing of the novel Beloved.
(2.)Henderson refers to Morrison's task in Beloved as "the act of
historicizing fiction" (72). Comparing a historian to a fiction writer
and vice versa, Henderson cites R. G. Collinwood who, in The Idea of
History (London: Oxford UP, 1946, 245-46), argues that the historian
like the novelist uses "'the constructive imagination' to create a
'coherent and continuous picture' consistent with the available
historical data" (84).
(3.)Felman's reading of Lacan has greatly shaped and provoked my
reading of Morrison's Beloved. In Felman's reading of Freud and Lacan,
she sees psychoanalysis as something which needs to be read and
re-read, since one meaning often covers over another. For instance, in
Freud's treatment of his patients, the "real" story is often hidden
under other stories.
(4.)As
Henderson mentions, both Hayden White, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays
in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1979), and Paul
Ricoeur, in The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette
UP, 1984) and Time and Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), have
supplied sufficient evidence to prove that written history itself is
constructed through a fictionalized narrative "emplotment" (for White)
or "configuration" (for Ricoeur). In other words, both history and
fiction are characterized by the same narrative structure. Drawing on
both authors, Henderson says of Beloved: "Narrativization enables Sethe
[and Morrison] to construct a meaningful life-story from a cluster of
images, to transform separate and disparate events into a whole and
coherent story" (72).
(5.)As Fanon
argues, it is the cultural imposition of the white man on the black man
(and not the oedipus complex) that is ultimately responsible for the
"psychopathology" (141) of the black man: "A normal negro child ...
will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world"
(143).
(6.)By "psychoanalysis as a
literary device," I refer to the structure of psychoanalysis, its
capacity to be present and absent at the same time (see Felman). This
present/absent strategy aids Morrison in creating a very complex
narrative.
(7.)According to the
information given by Elizabeth House, most early reviews of Morrison's
Beloved in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Times Literary
Supplement of 1987, for example, assumed that Beloved is Sethe's
murdered baby come back. A few other reviews left the identity of
Beloved under doubtful speculation (17).
(8.)This African tale is a very popular one told along the West Coast
of Africa. It is a night-time story told orally to children in
Freetown, Sierra-Leone, where I learned it as a child. My purpose for
recounting this tale in relation to Morrison's Beloved is to show an
alternative way of reading the psyche that may, perhaps, provide a
possible logic for the characters' assumption that Beloved is a ghost.
For another version of this African tale, see Tutuola 18-24.
(9.)Although this may seem like a paradoxical reading of Freud's theory
of sexuality, which sets out to prove the sexuality of children (and
seems to strip away the innocence associated with little children's
knowledge of sexuality), I believe that Freud ends up proving that
human sexuality is not something to be regarded as socially
incriminating but as natural, innate, and inevitable. For readings on
infantile sexuality, see Vol. 3 of Freud's Collected Papers, ed. Alix
and James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1959), 296-303, 473-547.
(10.)Repetition compulsion "endeavors to make the psychic trauma
real--to live through once more a repetition of it" (Fordor and Gaynor
157). The repetition-compulsion principle is an important aspect of
Freud's theory as a whole. It features significantly not only in the
subject of the uncanny but in the issue of infantile sexuality, in the
treatment of neurosis, and in the pleasure principle. Lacan has also
identified repetition as one of the major concepts of psychoanalysis.
The repetition concept is, of course, not new to African psychotherapy,
in which psychic trauma is relived and relieved through such channels
as dramatic enactments and oral rituals (for example, speaking to dead
ancestors).
(11.)All evidence
suggested by House in my reading will be indicated; however, the
evidence I provide here consists of my own suggestions.
(12.)I disagree with Thurman's point of view that "one of the ironies
of the novel is, in fact, that its author hovers possessively around
her own symbols and intentions, and so determines too much for the
reader" (177); I believe that part of Morrison's aim is to construct a
narrative that is openended enough to provoke other interpretations.
Sale's analysis of "call-and-response patterns" as Morrison's
celebration of a "multiplicity of voices" is more in line with my
argument (42).
(13.)The issue
Felman takes up in Lacan, on the status of psychoanalysis, is
succinctly stated in Lacan's essay "Of the Subject Of Certainty":
"Appearance/disappearance takes place between two points, the initial
and the terminal of this logical time--between the instant of seeing,
when something of the intuition itself is always elided, not to say
lost, and that elusive moment when the apprehension of the unconscious
is not, in fact, concluded, when it is always a question of an
'absorption' fraught with false trails ..." (32).
(14.)I have in mind Faulkner's style of writing in texts such as The
Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!; it is more the enigma of the
reading experience than the final assertion of any definite meaning of
the text that appeals to the reader and seems to constitute, in large
part, the aim of the author. Peter Brooks sees Faulkner's works as
"offer[ing] multiple constructions of events that never are verifiable,
that can be tested only by the force of conviction they produce for
listeners and readers" (158).
(15.)For instance, Deborah Horvitz's interpretation of Beloved as both
Sethe's ghost-child and Sethe's African mother is convincing and quite
unique. Her interpretation bolsters my point about the possibilities of
meanings identifiable with Beloved. As Hortvitz herself confirms in her
essay, "Beloved operates so complexly that as soon as one layer of
understanding is reached, another, equally as richly textured, emerges
to be unravelled" (157).
(16.)Lewis defines the other in relation to the same as "ambivalent"
and "indeterminate." He also describes the other as "a condition" (14).
(17.)Mohanty argues that the
perception of the other as a pure state frees the ex-colonial from
adequately relating to his former subjects (19). He argues that, if we
are to relate to the "otherness" (Mohanty's term) of the other with
something more than incoherence, or worse, condescension, then
negotiations must begin with our commonalities--those "shared terms,
ideas and spaces" (13). Obviously, the landscape of slavery is a shared
space containing both black and white, captive and captor.
(18.)One interesting essay on the issue of "collective hallucination,"
or communal neurosis, is Nicolas Abraham's "Notes on the Phantom." "It
is a fact that the 'phantom,' whatever its form," Abraham asserts, "is
nothing but an invention of the living.... What haunts are not the
dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others" (75).
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas. "Notes on the Phantom: A complement to Freud's
Metapsychology." Meltzer 75-80.
Brooks, Peter. "The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism."
Meltzer 145-59.
Clemons, Walter. "A Gravestone of Memories." Newsweek 28 Sept. 1987:
74.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks. 1903. New York: NAL, 1969.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. London: Pluto, 1986.
Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight:
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Fordor, N., and F. Gaynor. Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.
Westport: Greenwood, 1950.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P,
1953-74. 17:219-52.
Henderson, Mae. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as
Historical Text." Spillers 62-86.
Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in
Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 17.2 (1989): 157-67.
House, Elizabeth. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved who is not
Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 18.1 (1990): 17-26.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1981.
Lewis, Philip. "Post-structuralist Condition." Diacritics 12 (Spring
1982): 2-24.
Meltzer, Francoise, ed. The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1987.
Mohanty, Satya. "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political
Criticism." Yale Journal of Criticism 2.2 (1989): 1-31.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
--. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thougght 59 (1984): 385-90.
Sale, Maggie. "Call-and-Response as Critical Method: African-American
Oral Traditions and Beloved." African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.
Spillers, Hortense, ed. Comparative
American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. New
York: routledge, 1991.
Thurman, Judith. "A House Divided." New Yorker 2 Nov. 1987: 175-80.
Tutuola, Amos. The Palmwine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.
-1-
|
|