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Narrative and
community crisis in Beloved
by D. Scot Hinson
Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) teems with violence. Morrison, who
claims that "aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white
women," has written that "there's a special kind of ... violence in
writings by black women--not bloody violence, but violence nonetheless.
Love, in the Western notion, is full of possession, distortion, and
corruption. It's a slaughter without the blood" (qtd. in Tate 122,
123). Toni Morrison acknowledges that the secrets of violence are
safeguarded within the African American communities she writes about.
She claims that she chose the first line of The Bluest Eye, "Quiet as
it's kept," for its conspiratorial quality, for the phrase signified
that between "black women conversing with each other" at the back gate,
a "secret" was about to be shared, some "secret between us and a secret
that is being kept from us," a "conspiracy" both "held and withheld,
exposed and sustained" ("Unspeakable Things" 21). The violent secret in
The Bluest Eye, for example, is the secret of "illicit, traumatic,
incomprehensible sex coming to its dreadful fruition" and the secret of
a "pollution, ... a skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things"
("Unspeakable Things" 21). Morrison's Beloved discloses the "secrets
`we' shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world
outside the community" ("Unspeakable Things" 21).
In Beloved, Morrison reveals that the violence within African American
communities is originally imposed from outside by white oppressors,
whose search for scapegoats translates into a similar search within the
black community. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes
how oppressed peoples, who have no other recourse, vent their
frustration and anger on each other:
If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and
devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves
they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between
themselves since they cannot face the real enemy.
(Preface 18-19)
In Beloved, the community denies its propensity to focus its anger and
humiliation on its weaker members. The community represses and is
unable to identify the violence, white oppression, that is the root of
its collapse and entrapment in cycles of violence. Consequently,
Beloved labors to return to the more immediate origins of violence in
the community, a system of slavery that pits members of the same
community against each other, creating conflicts that must be reckoned
with before the community can find peace in the present. Those horrors
from the past constantly intrude on the text, dominating both it and
the lives of Beloved's characters, demanding that they be acknowledged
and worked through as past. Beloved departs from Morrison's other
novels in its willingness to identify slavery and white oppression as
the roots of violence in African American communities. (1) Morrison
depicts how, when a white man rides into Sethe's yard to take her and
her children back into slavery, she strikes out at one of her own,
exerting herself in the only way possible in the face of the violence
of slavery. She shows how Beloved's murder continues a chain of
reciprocal violence that entangles the community in the past and
initiates a plot which is equally bound to the past. The community's
crisis of violence is reflected in a recursive narrative pattern,
shaped out of repetitions and returns of the repressed memories of
white violence in slavery. Through this recursive narrative, Beloved
speaks the unspeakable secret of violence in the African American
community.
In Violence and the
Sacred, Rene Girard writes of communities embroiled in mimetic desire
and reciprocal violence. In Girard's terms, at the heart of the chaos
in the community surrounding 124 Bluestone is a destructive desire to
possess that which another possesses: underprivileged black communities
desire the wealth, privilege, and status that the dominant white
society possesses. Girard terms this desire "mimetic" (145-49). In
Beloved, the African American community abandons its traditional values
in favor of those of the dominant culture. In Girard's schema, "mimesis
coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict"; conflict
invariably leads to violence (Violence 146). Violence breeds more
violence as members of the community seek revenge, forging a chain of
reciprocal violence.
Moreover,
mimetic desire and cycles of reciprocal violence contribute to and are
fueled by a breakdown of differences within the social order (Violence
49). Gender differences, differences in economic and social standing
within the community, familial roles, and many other distinctions among
members of the community help members of the community "maintain their
`identity,'" their particular place within the social structure:
"`Degree' or gradus is the underlying principle of all order, natural
and cultural. It permits individuals to find a place for themselves in
society" (Violence 49-50). Girard observes that the breakdown of
difference sometimes manifests itself in "deliberate violations of
established laws and taboos" (Violence 119). Girard cites hierarchies
within families and society overall, particularly relationships between
children and parents and between servants and masters as examples of
relationships affected by the crisis of difference.
Moreover, once mimetic desire has a foothold and violence has spread
within the society, differences among members of the community
evaporate as those members become rivals for privilege and as they
become both victims and perpetrators of violence. Girard writes,
"negative reciprocity, although it brings people into opposition with
each other, tends to make their conduct uniform and is responsible for
the predominance of the same" (Scapegoat 13-14). Girard asserts that
"the antagonists caught up in the sacrificial crisis invariably believe
themselves separated by insurmountable differences. In reality,
however, these differences gradually wear away.... As the crisis grows
more acute, the community members are transformed into `twins,'
matching images of violence" (Violence 78-79). The resulting chain of
reciprocal violence can be terminated only through sacrifice, or "pure"
violence.
Within the communities
Girard describes, the guilt bred by rampant violence is debilitating
and must be expunged through sacrifice, an act of violence that is
community-sanctioned and that reenacts the original act of violence.
The scapegoat (sacrificial victim) functions to carry away the sins of
the community and to suffer exile or death without the fear of
retaliation. Similarly, the community surrounding 124 Bluestone Road
cannot hope to escape this chain of violence without addressing its
root in oppression by the white society. Furthermore, the community
must reexperience the originary violence in order to escape cycles of
reciprocal violence.
Because
originary violence within the community resembles a trauma that has
been repressed and must be reenacted through sacrifice, the history of
violence within the community is comparable to the process through
which Freud's analysands experience trauma, repress it, repeat it, and
finally work through it in the psychoanalytic process. Patterns of
behavior for the analysand continually "repeat" the original trauma; as
a result, the present is dominated by repetitions of the past, and the
difference between time present and time past is effaced. The analysand
experiences the return of the repressed memory, perhaps even achieves
awareness that the trauma is real in the past, yet never reexperiences
or works through it (Beyond 149). According to Freud, "we may say that
the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and
repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an
action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating
it" ("Remembering" 12: 150). The analysand can break free of the
pattern of repetition only through reproducing or reenacting the trauma
as opposed to simply repeating it; the analysand must reexperience the
trauma and its concomitant anxiety. Freud notes that "the process has
no curative effect if, by some peculiar chance, there is no development
of emotion. It is apparently these emotional processes upon which the
illness of the patient and the restoration of health are dependent"
("Origin" 8).
A psychoanalytic
narrative model is particularly appropriate and useful for a study of
Morrison's works and for relating Morrison's thematic concerns to her
narrative strategy, for, as she writes in playing in the dark, "the
narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully
in certain kinds of psychoanalysis" (v). Peter Brooks' narrative
dynamics, which emphasize trauma, repetition, and the crisis of
difference, resemble Girard's theory of violence and social dynamics
within communities. Brooks writes that "plot starts ... from that
moment at which story, or `life,' is stimulated from quiescence into a
state of narratability, into a tension, a kind of irritation which
demands narration" (103). Brooks asserts that traditional narrative
begins with "an inactive collapsed metaphor and works through to a
reactivated, transactive one, a metaphor with its difference restored
through metonymic process" (7). The metonymic process depends on the
substitution, in a sequence, of a series of metonymies for the novel's
totalizing metaphor, with each metonymy representing a repetition of
the novel's metaphor. Together this sequence of metonymies constitutes
the novel's plot (29). The meanings we derive from these metonymies are
"provisional": "what remains to be read will restructure the
provisional meanings of the already read" (23). In other words, "prior
events, causes, are so only retrospectively, in a reading back from the
end"(29). Those metonymies repeat some disruption of order that incites
the narratable. To name the cause of the narrative would make the
narrative itself unnecessary.
Brooks also suggests that
repetitions are ... both returns to and returns of: for instance, returns
to origins and returns of the repressed, moving us forward ... toward
elucidation, disillusion, and maturity by taking us back, as if in
obsessive reminder that we cannot really move ahead until we have
understood that still enigmatic past, yet ever pushing us forward, since
revelation, tied to the past, belongs to the future. (125)
Brooks refers to these returns of the repressed as detours or deferrals
of the forward-moving plot. The energies that serve to hold the plot
together, to maintain it through deviance and detour, are the energies
of the "textual hero's career" and the energy of the reader's desire
for the end, or a return to quiescence (108). He suggests that plots
move in two directions at once, both forward through the metonymic
process and backward through repetitions that serve to return the
narrative to its origins in trauma. Brooks' theory of narrative
dynamics and Girard's system of social dynamics depend on the
repetition and reenactment of trauma. In Girard's model, acts of
reciprocal violence that repeat an originary act of violence (the
original "trauma") are comparable to the returns of the repressed for
the analysand in Freud's theory and to Brooks' repetition through
metonymic process. In each case, metonymies or substitutions are allied
together by resemblance [and difference] to form plot, either the plot
of the novel or the "plot" of the history of violence within the
community. The original violence of slavery might be said to be
repeated in each instance of unsanctioned, reciprocal violence, just as
incidents in the plot might be said to repeat an original trauma.
Furthermore, in communities, each act of violence moves plot forward
and backward: each is at once a detour, a return to the origins of
violence within the community.
The
novel, Brooks writes, must actually describe the experience of the
original trauma before it can achieve closure and return the narrative
to order, or "the non-narratable." Similarly, sacrifice in a Girardean
sense releases the community from violence. Sacrifice has been defined
by Girard as the "reenactment of a `prior event,'" and "the `prior
event' that all ritual killings rationalize and represent in various
`substitutions' is a collective murder, an act of mob violence"
(Violent Origins 8). In Girard's terms, to gain some control over
violence, an act of unanimously sanctioned violence, or sacrifice, must
take place. And, to restore the narrative to the non-narratable, there
must be what Brooks has termed "reproduction" or reenactment (124). For
Brooks, there must be a repetition with a difference within the plot if
difference is to be restored within the narrative. Thus, in both the
community and in the analysand's "text," reproduction and sacrifice
name the trauma, incorporating the past as past within the present. In
Beloved, incidents in the plot metonymically repeat dominant white
society's oppression of black communities. This oppression must be
named if the novel is to escape plot and the chain of metonymic
repetitions. As is true of the narrative structure in Beloved, the
community surrounding 124 Bluestone is concerned with finding a "cure"
for violence. Both seek a return to order, a reinstatement of the
difference(s) that has collapsed.
The differences within the narrative that reenactment and "sacrifice"
attempt to restore have primarily to do with the degree of sameness and
difference among incidents within the plot. Narrative difference also
has to do with time, with the relative linearity or circularity of the
plot. Within a recursive or circular plot, time present and time past
lose their distinction as time past intrudes on time present. Beloved's
linear, forward movement is interrupted by repetitions and the return
of the repressed. Within these detours, characters recount their pasts;
they narrate the violence and trauma that have driven them to
perpetuate violence in the community. Beloved's narrative struggles to
reinstate the difference between the present and the past, thus
escaping compulsive repetition of the past in the present. Narrative
difference also involves the distinctions between narrative voices and
the consciousnesses that are rendered in the texts. Often the identity
of Beloved's narrators becomes blurred, reflecting the crisis of
difference within the text and within the novel's community. It is
difference on these levels that is restored when an incident in the
plot can be said to reenact originary violence.
Beloved depicts both a narrative crisis and a communal one. Rather than
confining white violence to the margins, as she does in her earlier
works, in Beloved Morrison concentrates on exposing the atrocities of
slavery as the origin of violence within the community around 124.
Beloved's desire to return to origins traps both community and text in
cycles of repetition and reciprocal violence. According to Peter
Brooks, in narrative, "the return to origins [leads] to the return of
the repressed" (126). Beloved returns four centuries into the history
of Africans in America to expose slavery as a primary source of
violence within contemporary African American communities. By focusing
on the horrors of slavery, Morrison offers a reenactment of originary
violence that frees the community from reciprocal violence and the
narrative from a crisis of difference and deferral.
In Beloved, Morrison clearly demonstrates how slavery places pressure
on African American communities, pressure that, in the narrator's
words, creates in them "a new kind of whitefolks' jungle" (199).
Powerless to confront their oppressors, the community strikes out
against equally powerless members of their own community. Thus,
violence instigated by whites spreads within black communities of its
own accord, perverting and twisting emotions. (2) Morrison shows how
the threat of white violence has conditioned former slaves not to
attach themselves too strongly to the things they love. Within the
"wonderful lie" of Sweet Home, the farm where he and Sethe had been
slaves, Paul D says the only safe love was a "little love," the only
possibility was "loving small and in secret" (221). Within the context
of slavery, where to love too fiercely is dangerous and potentially
ruinous, Paul D believes that Sethe's love is dangerous and "scary," a
"too thick love" (164).
The crisis
in the community begins with Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's lost
husband, and her overgenerous expression of love, the "reckless
generosity on display at 124" (137). Baby Suggs' "bounty" meets with
community disapproval: "Too much, they thought. Where does she get it
all, Baby Suggs, holy? Why is she and hers always at the center of
things? How come she always knows exactly what to do and when?" (137).
The community finds in Baby Suggs a suitable target for its anger
(137). As a result of their willingness to project their anger,
Beloved's murder can be traced directly to the community's refusal to
warn Baby Suggs and Sethe that the slavecatchers were returning to take
her and her children back to Sweet Home: "the party ... explained why
nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut 'cross a
field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering
while the riders asked questions" (157).
Once begun, this community crisis manifests itself in a loss of
distinctions among community members. Girard writes that the
sacrificial crisis is characterized by a loss of individuality and
identity "that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the
same family or social group at one another's throats" (Violence 49).
Institutionalized slavery itself tended to disallow individuality and
to categorize African Americans as a group without individual traits.
More often than not, slave owners denied slaves their very humanity.
This tendency is evident in Beloved where "Schoolteacher," a
slavemaster at Sweet Home where Sethe and Paul D were slaves, carefully
classifies the animal and human traits of his slaves. Within the
community around 124, initially the difference between the community
and its victimizers is effaced when the community begins to target its
own members, ostracizing Sethe and Baby Suggs. Denver, especially,
suffers as an outcast from the community. (3) Difference is further
effaced when individuals within the community begin to lose their
defining traits. Animosity and suspicion spread rapidly within the
community, threatening social institutions and eroding traditional
values. For example, when Paul D finally leaves 124, unable to
understand or accept Sethe's rationale for killing Beloved, he ends up
sleeping in the church's cold and damp cellar. When Stamp Paid learns
about Paul D's situation, he becomes incensed and confronts Ella about
why no one has offered him work or a bed to sleep in: "Why he have to
ask? Can't nobody offer? What's going on? Since when a black man come
to town have to sleep in a cellar like a dog?" (186). Sethe's and Baby
Suggs' transgressions engender a range of breaches of social conduct
within the community.
Crisis is
also manifested in a loss of values and a breakdown of social and
religious institutions. In direct response to Beloved's murder and the
slavecatcher's threat, Baby Suggs relinquishes her role as the
community's spiritual leader. As a result, the community's religious
underpinnings falter, threatening it with a deepening of the crisis.
(4) Girard writes that "When the religious framework of a society
starts to totter, ... the whole cultural foundation of the society is
put in jeopardy. The institutions lose their vitality; ... social
values are rapidly eroded, and the whole cultural structure seems on
the verge of collapse" (Violence 49). This deepening of the crisis is
also evident in the community's response to Baby Suggs' death. The
narrator tells us that "Baby Suggs, holy, having devoted her freed life
to harmony, was buried amid a regular dance of pride, fear,
condemnation, and spite. Just about everybody in town was longing for
Sethe to come on difficult times. Her outrageous claim, her
self-sufficiency seemed to demand it" (171). Thus, the townsfolk are
entangled in cycles of violence that threaten their community.
With the appearance of Beloved, the ghost of Sethe's murdered daughter,
and Paul D, the crisis of difference extends to the realms between the
living and the dead, effacing crucial differences for the community and
further weakening the difference between a past believed to be dead and
the present. However, it is important to remember that Sethe and others
in her community do not admit firm distinctions between past and
present. Even before Beloved manifests herself in flesh and blood,
Sethe believes that the past has existed along side the present,
especially since Beloved has never stopped being a presence at 124, as
a ghost, as the "pool of red" (8) that Paul D. encounters as soon as he
walks through the door. Karla Holloway notes that "the relatively
limited idea of time as being either in the past, the present, or the
future is inadequate for a text like Beloved" ("A Spiritual" 521). (5)
Beloved's arrival contributes to this sense that the boundaries between
past and present are not fixed. More importantly, perhaps, Beloved's
arrival leads to the erasure of difference between Sethe, Denver, and
Beloved, whose identities and roles within the family begin to shift
and merge. Sethe sustains her role as mother until she acknowledges
that Beloved is her daughter, at which point their roles as mother and
daughter begin to blur. Beloved and Sethe seem to exchange roles
completely: "Then it seemed to Denver the thing was done: Beloved
bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child" (250).
Denver too exchanges roles with her mother, becoming the caretaker to
her dependents: "Neither Sethe nor Beloved knew or cared about it one
way or the other. They were too busy rationing their strength to fight
each other. So it was she [Denver] who had to step off the edge of the
world and die because if she didn't, they all would" (239). The crisis
within 124 and the community surrounding 124 demonstrates how,
throughout Beloved, the past usurps the present and how the persistence
of the past disrupts Sethe's and the community's growth and struggles
for harmony. Difference within the community can only be restored
through a community-sanctioned sacrifice.
Morrison mirrors this crisis of difference within the community in a
narrative crisis that collapses temporal differences and differences in
narrative voice. The linear narrative progression within the novel is
thwarted by returns of the repressed, by repetitions of the originary
violence of slavery which force their way into consciousness. (6) Sethe
attempts to repress the memories of having murdered her daughter and to
forget everything about her past life as a slave at Sweet Home. (7)
Sethe tells us that
she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately
her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running
practically.... Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes
and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy
lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home
rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes. (6)
However, sparked by Paul D's return, Sethe's memories begin erupting
into consciousness against her will, thwarting her attempts to forget
and interrupting her daily life. The past, Sethe argues, "comes back
whether we want it to or not"(14). Similarly, the forward movement of
Sethe's plot is deferred by these returns of the repressed. Thus, the
text is subject to a compulsion to repeat the past, in which the past
struggles to work its way into the consciousness of the text. Because
Sethe's memories are "unspeakable," too painful to be allowed into
consciousness, the narrative strategy in the novel resembles a slow
circling, a recursive plot movement that integrates time past with time
present. Sethe's secrets only slowly emerge through a series of detours
and deferrals: "Circling, circling, now she was gnawing something else
instead of getting to the point" (162). (8) Sethe is aware that "the
circle she was making around the room, him [Paul D], the subject, would
remain one" (163). Even when she tries to tell the story for herself,
Sethe detours, gets as far as into the shed where she killed Beloved,
and can go no further:
She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of
her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged
them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt
them.... Sethe paused in her circle again and looked out the window. She
remembered when the yard had a fence with a gate that somebody was always
latching and unlatching in the time when 124 was busy as a way station.
(163)
Many of Sethe's stories are not incorporated as past, but are
contemporaneous with the present; in essence, they are unconscious
repetitions of the past in the present within the text. It is as if the
surface of the text were a consciousness into which memories previously
repressed emerge, the product of the text's compulsion to repeat. As
the text progresses, more and more often stories of the past emerge in
this way, heightening the textual crisis. For example, once Sethe
identifies Beloved as her daughter, she begins to allow memories that
she has desperately tried to suppress to enter her consciousness. These
memories erupt into the text without being identified as memories and
outside of any specific storytelling context. Beloved's arrival further
heightens the text's temporal crisis. Her presence constitutes a
physical return of the repressed and the existence of time past within
time present. The glimpses Morrison provides into Beloved's
consciousness reveal that she is the living memory of a race of
oppressed and enslaved people. Moreover, Beloved is the manifestation
of the past's demands on the present, its desire to usurp the present
and to deny Sethe and Denver and the entire community their right to
live in the present. Her return is a violence and an
accusation--reciprocal violence incarnate; the claim she stakes at 124
translates into a violent entrapment in the past.
As in The Bluest Eye, where Morrison signals narrative and communal
collapse through the loss of punctuation, the lack of punctuation in
Beloved's monologue reflects the crisis of narrative difference.
Because Beloved's monologue erupts into the forward-moving plot and is
rendered in a stream-of-consciousness narrative style, it also
emphasizes the persistence of those memories, their unwillingness to
die or be repressed. The use of stream-of-consciousness in Beloved's
monologue further suggests the eruption of memory into consciousness.
Reaching centuries into a collective past, Beloved's monologue
describes the passage from Africa, the overcrowding on slaveships,
where the dead are left to rot among the living, who subsist on the
worst food, and with insufficient water and little air to breath: "All
of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not
crouching and watching others who are crouching ... the man on my face
is dead ... the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink
we have none at night I cannot see the dead man on my face" (210).
Beloved's narrative crisis manifests itself not only in temporal or
chronological collapse, but also in the collapse of difference among
narrative voices. Eventually the narrative crisis reaches a point at
which the identity of the narrators is impossible to determine.
Morrison frequently shifts point of view, sometimes relying on the
third-person narration that dominates the text, but at times slipping
into a first-person narration. At times, it is unclear who is narrating
or whose consciousness is being rendered. (9) Any one of the characters
might be relating a particular memory, and we come to sense that these
memories are shared, that the history they refer to is a communal one,
important for and belonging to all of the characters. They speak to the
history of a people and as such can be said to belong to no one
narrator in particular.
In one
example, Denver begins to tell Beloved the story of her own birth, a
story that is repeated in fragments and through fits and starts several
times throughout the novel. Initially, the narrative renders Denver's
consciousness in the third person: "Denver was seeing it now and
feeling it--through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her
mother. Seeing how it must have looked" (78). However, signaled by two
skipped lines in the text, the narrative lapses into a third-person
narration that speaks through a shared consciousness, both Denver's and
Sethe's: "In an effort so great it made her sick to her stomach, Sethe
turned onto her right side. Amy unfastened the back of her dress and
said, `Come here, Jesus' when she saw. Sethe guessed it must be bad
because after that call to Jesus Amy didn't speak for a while" (79).
The chapter ends without returning to the linear, forward-moving plot
or the storytelling context.
The
story of Denver's birth is continued in the next chapter in passages
that are clearly Sethe's memories, Sethe's consciousness. The
continuation of the story is marked only by the narrator's comments
that "however many times Baby denied it, Sethe knew that the grief at
124 started when she jumped down off the wagon, her newborn tied to her
chest in the underwear of a whitegirl looking for Boston" (90). In
another instance, Denver's monologue becomes a "duet as the two of them
lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose
pleasure was to overfeed the loved" (78). As Denver proceeds with the
story, Morrison slips out of Denver's voice and into the voice of a
limited omniscient narrator, a slip that suggests a conflation of
voices belonging to Denver, Beloved, Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and
indeed a whole people. By fusing past and present, and by fusing the
consciousnesses of the characters, Morrison emphasizes the importance
of the former slaves' shared past and provides an emotional and
historical context for the lives of her central characters and the
community in the present.
Through
her narrative strategy, Morrison emphasizes the need for the characters
to claim their past and to see that past as a shared, communal
experience. Sethe believes her daughter has returned to be with her and
that she must justify her actions to her, but most of all her monologue
lays claim to Beloved: "BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She
come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a
thing. I didn't have time to explain before because it had to be done
quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But
my love was tough and she back now" (200-01). Denver is equally
possessive of Beloved: "Love her. I do. She played with me and always
came to be with me whenever I needed her. She's mine, Beloved. She's
mine" (209). Sethe, Beloved, and Denver's chorus arises to give voice
to their mutual claims on each other and to emphasize the shared nature
of their experience as oppressed African American women: "you are
mine," the voices say (216). Finally, however, the conflation of their
voices signals an intense lack of narrative difference.
The cycle of violence that plagues Sethe's community and the effacement
of narrative difference can only be resolved through narrative and
communal sacrifice. The reenactment of the original trauma by both
Sethe and the community, who relive and reproduce the anxiety repressed
at the time, resolves both the crisis of difference within the
community and the narrative crisis, restoring the novel to time present
and the community to a state of enlivening distinction. Peter Brooks
writes that "the repetition of traumatic experiences in the dreams of
the neurotics can be seen to have the function of seeking
retrospectively to master the flood of stimuli, to perform a mastery or
binding of mobile energy through developing that anxiety which earlier
was lacking--a lack which permitted the breach and thus caused the
traumatic neurosis" (100). Thus when Morrison stages the reenactment of
the slavecatchers' invasion of Sethe's yard, she allows for a
reproduction of anxiety and an escape from textual neurosis.
The reenactment takes place in the next-to-final scene in the novel.
Eighteen years earlier, when a white man had ridden into her yard to
take her and her children back into slavery, Sethe had struck out at
one of her own, exerting herself in the only way possible and striving
in some way to take control of a situation in which she was otherwise
powerless. Beloved's murder, however, perpetuates a chain of reciprocal
violence that entangles the community in the past, and initiates a plot
equally bound to the past. Consequently, to escape both the narrative
crisis and to end the chain of reciprocal violence, there must be a
reenactment of that original violence with a difference: the target of
Sethe's violence must be the oppressors themselves. At the close of the
novel, Sethe, believing that the white man approaching in a wagon is a
slavecatcher returned to take her "best thing" away from her again,
strikes out at the white oppressor. Although the target of her
vengeance is arguably a better man than the schoolteacher, he is,
nonetheless, white, and in Sethe's brain, Mr. Bodwins' ride up to her
gate repeats schoolteacher's invasion; as a result, his approach
produces in her the previously repressed anxiety. (10) By attacking her
white oppressors, Sethe forever names the cause of contention within
the community. This ritual reexperiencing of trauma, witnessed by the
entire community, indeed, sanctioned by the community, constitutes the
violence to end all violence, the ritual sacrifice that can restore
harmony within the community and difference within the narrative. This
reenactment of the original trauma allows Sethe to escape from the
pattern of repetition and to reclaim her life from Beloved, who
instantly and miraculously vanishes. (11) From this point the novel can
continue in the present, pushing toward an imagined future.
The reenactment of Beloved's murder, this repetition with a difference,
does not release the novel from plottedness altogether, though it does
set the stage for reconciliation and an imagined future. The final
chapter of Beloved recounts Paul D's return to 124 where his "memory"
of Beloved "turns ... into dustmotes floating in light" (264). Still,
the text of this chapter is dominated by a return of repressed memories
for Paul D. However, this return is a conscious working through of
painful memories of the past; his rememory functions to exorcize his
own ghosts. And, significantly, Paul D's detour brings him back to the
present and to 124 with this comment from the narrator: "Now his coming
is the reverse of his going" (270). Paul D and the text itself
literally backtrack their way through the past to the present,
detouring through the past to arrive at the present relieved of the
burden of the past and plottedness.
Paul D's final chapter reminds us that the novel cannot escape from
plottedness or repetition until the individual character has worked
through painful, repressed memories of the past. In part, we would
expect the novel to be released from plot with the reenactment of the
schoolteacher's invasion of Sethe's yard, and the scene does enable us
to return to the middles of Morrison's text to infuse those repetitions
of violence with meaning, to understand them in the context of that
end. However, the lack of escape from plottedness might also invite a
distinction between the types of violence discussed above. For example,
though the violence of slavery, the violent silence that the community
visits on Baby Suggs, and Sethe's murder of Beloved are all links in a
chain of reciprocal violence, it is important to point out that Sethe's
murder of Beloved is necessitated by the violence of slavery, a choice
Sethe makes based on her belief in an afterlife as well as a choice
made in a situation in which there are no choices. Despite these
distinctions in types of violence, Paul D's chapter impresses on us the
need for the individual, and indeed the entire community, to work
through the personal past consciously in order to identify the source
of violence in their midst, and thus to move forward. (12) Paul D
returns to 124 and to Sethe whole and wholly conscious of the pain he
harbors from the past, but he has clearly moved beyond this pain,
enabling him to forgive Sethe; he has finally unloaded the "tobacco
tin" of his heart in which he had buried his memories for so long.
Finally, Morrison's tour de force cannot and does not end with Paul D.
Instead, the narrator, speaking in a voice that signals the close of
plot and that speaks from outside of plot, entreats us not to pass this
story on: "it was not a story to pass on" (274). The use of this voice
clearly signals the end of plot; however, it as powerfully compels us
to return to the story, to dwell on it, even while it attempts to
persuade us to forget, as the commentary suggests the townsfolk "forgot
[Beloved] ... Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep" (275).
This narrator's pleas for readers to forget the story they have just
read forces them to reassess its meaning. I do not believe that this
would be the case if in the narrator's eyes the story is simply too
painful to remember. Clearly it has and will be remembered, and not
only will it be remembered, but it will take up residence in the
consciousness of the reader, as opposed to the unconscious of the
novel's characters. Perhaps, when Morrison's narrator asserts that
Beloved's story is "not a story to pass on," she refers to the story of
the violence within the community, and the community's tendency to
repeat their oppressors' violence in their own communities. Perhaps
what is not to be passed on is this self-destructive violence.
Beloved serves as a critical turning point in Morrison's quest to
resolve the problem of violence that has preoccupied her in four
previous novels. Indeed, this "ending" plunges us back into the middles
of her work, into her earlier novels, enabling us to infer meaning[s]
that has escaped us and her characters there. In a sense, Beloved
returns Morrison to her own novelistic origins even as it returns
African Americans to their ancestral past. Beginning with The Bluest
Eye, it is clear that Morrison's characters will struggle to escape the
past or to reexperience it differently. Study of the subsequent novels
reveals that Morrison's characters will not move forward without coming
to terms with both their personal and ancestral past, nor will they
escape the violence that refusal to embrace those lost traditional
values seems to inaugurate. For example, in The Bluest Eye Polly
Breedlove's attempts to distance herself from a painful past and from
her African American identity contribute to her daughter's decline into
madness. Repetitions of the past also plague her husband, Cholly
Breedlove. He rapes their daughter to help assuage the loneliness he
feels from having been abandoned as a child. Similarly, in Song of
Solomon, having adopted the values of the white middle class, Macon
Dead subjugates his own people as an unfeeling, tyrannical landlord.
Macon's sister, Pilate Dead, is murdered by Guitar whose revolutionary
goals ironically align him with the white ruling class and entrap him
in cycles of violence. Finally, in Beloved, slavery erodes the
community values that had once helped to preserve and unite the people.
Traditional values are so perverted by slavery that Sethe is driven to
murder her own daughter to keep her from slavery's horrors. Until Sethe
comes to grips with the past, her present is ruled by violence.
More importantly, however, a study of Morrison's novels shows that
Morrison herself must delve deeper and deeper into African American
history to resolve the problems her fiction poses. The Bluest Eye
returns to the Depression to explore oppression's effects on the lives
of her African American characters. Sula works its way from the
aftermath of World War I to the Depression to the mid-60s to chronicle
the ways an African American community struggles to stay united within
an oppressive social structure. Finally, Morrison begins to pose
solutions to the problems of violence and preserving cultural identity
when, in Beloved, she returns to the most devastating African American
trauma: slavery. Morrison's work as a whole is shaped by a persistent
need to narrate and thus escape an ever-more distant past. Her
characters, her individual novels, and her work as a whole are driven
by a need to understand and move beyond the past. In Jazz (1992),
Morrison still treats the problems of violence in African American
communities and the pressures that the violence of oppression places on
those communities. Thus, as a body of work, Morrison's novels drive
deeper and deeper into the past.
Beloved gives testimony to the pain that all the slave women and their
descendants have suffered and will suffer. According to Wilfred Samuels
and Clenora Hudson-Weems, Morrison has decided that she must "`rip the
veil' behind which the slave narrator was forced to hide" (97).
Morrison, as Hudson-Weems and Samuels point out, must also reconstruct
the narrative of the slave woman, whose story is seldom recorded and
then not fully. She provides "the avenue for a resurrected female slave
narrator's voice" (97-98). The story that Toni Morrison's Beloved tells
is, in her narrator's words, "not a story to pass on." Molly Abel
Travis writes that Morrison reminds us that we must "embrace the
wholeness of our personal histories and cultural histories; we must
remember even those parts we would most like to forget" (18). It is
clear that Morrison has complicated the process of memory even as she
inscribes this unwritten history and that her novels as emphatically
remind us that history, both personal and cultural, has the power to
entrap and to enslave.
Notes
(1.) Mbalia argues, as I have, that each of Morrison's novels defines
or redefines the problem of oppression, moving closer and closer to a
solution, a way to cope [with] and move beyond oppression (88).
Moreover, Mbalia identifies "the suicidal or homicidal nature of those
Africans who divorce themselves from other Africans" as a recurrent
theme in Morrison's fiction (88). "Isolation," Mbalia continues,
"literally tears apart the family--nuclear, the extended, and the
nation" (90).
(2.) Sitter suggests
that the novel "involves the way internalization of oppressor's values
can distort all intimate human relationships and even subvert the self"
(18). Sitter asserts, moreover, that human emotions are twisted and
perverted as a result of slavery's view of individuals as property so
that their value is assessed in terms of "resale value" (18).
(3.) Mbalia shows how Denver's and Sethe's isolation is "genocidal for
the race" and "serve[s] to further divide the African community and, as
a consequence, leave[s] it vulnerable to the oppression and
exploitation of the slave society" (90). Demetrakopoulos notes that
"Sethe further fixes on the past by never mingling with the Black
community, by protecting the only child who stays with her, her
daughter Denver, from the past without seeming to ever think of the
girl's future or need for community" (54).
(4.) Harris notes that "by denouncing her calling, Baby Suggs rejects
the power of folk imagination, which has clearly served a constructive
purpose for her and the entire community along Bluestone Road" (175).
Moreover, Harris notes that Baby Suggs' rejection of this role is a
"victimization" (175).
(5.)
Holloway states that "Beloved held not only her own history, but those
of `sixty million and more'" (523). Holloway writes that "Beloved is
not only Sethe's dead daughter returned, but the return of all the
faces, all the drowned, but remembered, faces of mothers and their
children who have lost their being because of the force of
Euro-American slave-history" (522). "Living itself," Holloway writes,
"is suspended in this story because of the simultaneous presence of the
past" (521). Finally, Holloway suggests that "Sethe's, Denver's, and
Beloved's voices blend and merge as text and lose the distinction of
discourse as they narrate" in order to show that time and space are
collapsed, irrelevant in their shared monologue ("Beloved: A Spiritual"
520).
(6.) Mobley writes that
"while the slave narrative characteristically moves in a chronological,
linear narrative fashion, Beloved meanders through time, sometimes
circling back, other times moving vertically, spirally out of time and
down into space. Indeed, Morrison's text challenges the Western notion
of linear time that informs American history and the slave narratives"
("Different" 192). In addition, Holloway notes that "Beloved becomes a
text collected with the textures of living and dying rather than with a
linear movement of events" (Holloway and Demetrakopoulos 222).
(7.) Samuels and Hudson-Weems claim that we find in Sethe's behavior
yet another example of the slave's resistance to slavery. They note
that Sethe's inability to recall the painful experiences in her past,
is "due in part to her successful act of `disremembering,' of
consciously obliterating her painful past. Most painful had been the
denial and then severance of any semblance of a meaningful relationship
with her mother, who had been branded and later hanged because of her
daily resistance to slavery" (99). Of course, that memory is compounded
by the violence and loss she suffers at the hands of schoolteacher, Mr.
Garner's brother, who comes to oversee the plantation after his
brother's death. Finally, Morrison refers to the "complicated psychic
power one had to exercise to resist devastation" (quoted in Mobley,
"Different" 197).
(8.) Other
critics point out, as I have, that Morrison's texts keep secrets, using
the tension of withheld information to drive the plot which is thus
charged by the reader's desire for meaning. Mobley observes that
Beloved is a text that depends heavily on secrets and secrecy and that
"the text of Beloved moves through a series of narrative starts and
stops that are complicated by Sethe's desire to forget or `disremember'
the past" ("Different" 194).
(9.)
Rainwater suggests that "Morrison sometimes employs a Jamesian
technique: she temporarily merges the narrator's point of view with
that of a character, but later undercuts or problematizes this point of
view by presenting its alternatives. Such a strategy finally reiterates
her thematic message that there is no reliable ground or `mooring' from
which to know or tell the `true' version of any story" (97). More
importantly, characters are sometimes exposed to variants that "tease
them into acts of interpretation" (97).
(10.) Even the trip by Mr. Bodwin, a white man who had helped Baby
Suggs and rented the house at Bluestone to her, is a return to his
origins and a working through memory to the present: "he had promised
his sister a detour to pick up [Denver]. He didn't have to think about
the way--he was headed for the house he was born in. Perhaps it was his
destination that turned his thoughts to time--how it dripped and ran"
(259). His memories are connected with slavery and the ridicule he
suffered as a "bleached nigger" abolitionist (260). The closer he moves
toward 124, the deeper he digs in his memory for things he buried there
as a child: "the box of tin soldiers.... the watch chain with no watch"
(260). Eventually his thoughts turn to the "runaway slavewoman ...
[who] got herself into a world of trouble" (260).
(11.) Mbalia suggests that "not until the cause of separation is
clarified, is out in the open, struggled with and struggled against,
can African people come together again. Beloved must materialize into a
visible, tangible entity of which the community is aware, instead of an
amorphous apparition, an oppression of which the community is
unconscious" (91). As Mbalia points out, the community must come
together to eradicate the past, to struggle against the root of the
violence that has subjugated them and set up animosity within their
group. Moreover, in Rainwater's narrative analysis of Morrison's
novels, she points out the even while Morrison employs a third-person
narrator and gives speeches to Sethe and Denver, none can finally reach
the truth of Beloved's existence (100). In fact, the truth of Beloved's
existence can only be relived; her death must be relived before her
identity and origins can be verified.
(12.) Berger problematizes readings of Beloved that suggest that the
community has successfully overcome its divisions and exorcized the
ghost of the past. Berger is correct when he writes that "the ghost
will return to inhabit each succeeding present until the crimes that
repeat themselves are worked through in every organ of the body
politic" (415). However, Paul D's final chapter, which is so perplexing
for Berger, suggests that the process of rememory, exorcism, and
mourning must be not only a communal process, but also an individual
one. Morrison indicates that it is not enough for the community to
exorcize its communal Ghost.
Works Cited
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Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved." African American Review 26.1
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Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni
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Mbalia, Dorothea. Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness.
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Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and
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Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston:
Twayne, 1990.
Sitter, Deborah. "The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved."
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D. Scot Hinson
teaches twentieth-century American literature at Wittenberg University,
in addition to courses in modernism/postmodernism, American crime and
detective fiction, and film noir. His research interests include Toni
Morrison, Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, and,
most recently, the crisis of masculinity in Dashiell Hammett's
detective novels.
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