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Trauma and the
specters of enslavement in Morrison's Beloved.
by R. Clifton Spargo
Reading Beloved specifically, this essay considers the explicit tension
between trauma as a trope for recovered history and those therapeutic,
empiricist-minded narratives that require a subject to progress beyond
and locate herself rationally outside the traumatic moment.
In the literary world populated by ghosts that eventually became
synonymous with the Gothic tradition, the plot of haunting figures its
social concerns as metaphysical matters, even to the point where the
dramatic spectacle of the ghost makes it hard to trace the social
meaning of which it is a spectral emanation. The social relevance of
the ghost seems especially obsolete when the haunting coincides with a
narrative of fatalism, as if the one who experiences the ghost and the
one who suffers history must alike submit to a symbolic social order
overdetermined by the spirits of ancestry and cast too strongly in the
die of the past. Toni Morrison's Beloved, through its turn to Gothic
tradition, recovers an untold history of suffering, which seems both
the product of such an overdetermined past and a criticism of our
conventional historical narratives. As Valerie Smith has argued,
Morrison's method of circling her story back upon itself marks a
suspicion about the "limits of hegemonic, authoritarian systems of k
nowledge" (346). But it also marks, within the world of the story, the
characters' inability to become adequate to a historical sense of
themselves and thus to trace the social meanings behind their
sufferings--a point made all too clearly when Paul D becomes frustrated
with Sethe's inability to offer a linear, rational account of herself.
Part of the problem, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, is that Sethe cannot
construct herself by means of a teleological social narrative in which
she would figure as an agent who chooses her own actions, and so, in
Bhabha's view, we are forced to read the inwardness of the slave world
from the outside--that is, through the ghostly returning memory of
Sethe's infanticide (16-18). Like many readers of Beloved, Bhabha views
this ghostly return as intimating a reclamation of Sethe's voice and a
restoration of an interpersonal social reality eclipsed by the fatalism
of slavery, so that history survives beyond the question of its overt
visibility, if only in the "deepest resources of our amnesia, of our
unconsciousness" (18).
Bhabha's
use of psychoanalytic categories veers so close to the contemporary
discourse of trauma as to make him complicitous--say, from the
perspective of empiricist-minded critics who yield to the trauma all
the status they would grant a ghost--with the trauma's most
unreasonable tendencies. Lived as a resistance to an empirically
conceived realism about persons, events, and, most significantly, time
itself, trauma is a phenomenon that violently interrupts the present
tense of consciousness, occurring for the first time only by being
repeated. By virtue of this structure of repetition, trauma poses a
challenge to historical knowledge, since it is always the symptomology
of trauma that one confronts and never the event itself, much as it is
always the lack of knowledge that perpetuates the traumatic effect. As
an excess or afterlife of the event, trauma refers to an act not yet
encountered--as it were, to a specter of the past. To the extent that
it testifies, to borrow Cathy Caruth's phrase, to "a reality or truth
that is otherwise not available"(4), the trauma depends by definition
on the inadequacy of our knowledge in the present order. For this very
reason, the trauma has come to function for many critics as a trope of
access to more difficult histories, providing us with entry into a
world inhabited by the victims of extraordinary social violences, those
perspectives so often left out of rational, progressive narratives of
history. Indeed, in this respect the trauma functions rather as a ghost
of rationality, that which announces a history haunting the very
possibility of history.
The
problem, to recuperate Bhabha's conceit, may partly be conceived as a
question of whether one stands inside or outside of traumatic history.
In the case of Beloved, this is a question already pronounced by
Morrison's revisionings of the Gothic and its rather fluid dualism,
articulated, on the one hand, in the demand that we participate
imaginatively in events beyond the scope or confidence of reason and,
on the other, in a call for us to offer our resistances in the service
of rationality and to demystify the story's supernatural logic. Much as
therapists observe traumatic phenomena from the outside, we might argue
that history arises not so much from traumatic consciousness as from
those allegorical significances existing just beyond the characters'
self-consciousness. In this view, the historically minded reader
performs an act of intellectual intervention by restoring the sufferer
of trauma to a more reasonable narrative. Yet such an intervention,
modelled on the therapist's compassionate but critical listening, runs
the risk of conceiving of history as finally in opposition to the
private pathologies of history's victims. By contrast, Caruth espouses
a reading of the trauma from within the structure of its symptomology,
so that history speaks meaningfully through a content that we might not
otherwise acknowledge, through the repetitions and pathology of the
trauma. Strictly speaking, Caruth assigns trauma a meaning absent from
Freud, who steadfastly insists upon an act of remembrance capable of
dispelling the grip of the past on present consciousness. For Freud, as
for the empirical historian, history must be built upon the possibility
of an intervention, an intervention that develops as a reasonable and
even compassionate opposition to the trauma.
It is upon the difficult premise of such an intervention in traumatic
history that I focus in this essay. Although a number of critical
readings of Beloved, such as Homi Bhabha's, cause us to focus our
attention on the obliquity of a testimonial voice emerging in spite of
violent repression, or (according to a reading through trauma) perhaps
because of it, such readings speak impossibly from the inside of the
trauma as a way of filling in history. This is to bypass the empiricist
problem as also the therapist's concern, with its focus on the peculiar
relation an indirect and incapable consciousness--which is to say, a
traumatized one--bears to history. Among those who have brought the
trauma to bear on questions of history, Dominick LaCapra has perhaps
been most insistent on listening to trauma from the hitherside of the
therapist's couch, privileging a rationality that remains outside the
trauma. The therapist, as also the good student of history, should
experience an "unsettlement" that is also "empathic," yet, as a lesson
for history, the trauma will become meaningful, in LaCapra's account,
only once it has been worked through (to use Freud's idiom); and so, in
his own brief reading of Beloved, LaCapra gives heavy emphasis to the
exorcism of Beloved's ghost as the moment in which community finds its
place. If LaCapra's approach seems thoroughly reasonable, it may
nevertheless be difficult to maintain such sensible interpretive
strategies in relation to the history offered in Beloved. This is so
because Morrison has so closely configured the history she recovers
with the evidence of the trauma itself. As Beloved opens toward
abandoned history, Morrison demands that her readers encounter
characters who inhabit history through the symptomology of trauma,
apart from and before the acts of imaginative or rational intervention
through which we might return them to a myth of American progress that
we have made the equivalent of reason itself. Beloved is a novel
especially hard on a history so conceived precisely beca use the
benevolence of our reason and the possibility of intervention suppose a
separation from--and by definition, an opposition to--the very
phenomena upon which we would focus our attention. Just as there is a
cynicism that may occur from outside the trauma in the name of
reason--say, as the indifference to those people or events that do not
fulfill the general progress of society--there is also a cynicism that
may occur from inside suffering. Throughout the novel, we are made to
wonder whether the symptoms of haunting necessarily contest history
conceived as a narrative of subjects with the capacity to intervene in
their own and others' histories. By figuring the recovery of history as
an involuntary or traumatic phenomenon, and by suggesting that
characters inhabit such a history at the expense of their own freedom,
Morrison enacts a fundamental tension between the history of injustice
that needs to be recorded and remembered and an ethics of corrective
action that hovers, if only spectrally, over the im aginative moment of
our witness.
We live in a land
where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in
which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The
past is absent or it's romanticized. This culture doesn't encourage
dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past."
This is Morrison from a 1988 interview (10-11), describing the myth of
America as a land that cancels all debts in the name of freedom and its
imagined privileges, yielding to the past only what it will give back
to an understanding that cooperates with the freedoms of the future.
Despite its etymology, we often give to understanding the very
character of an action, that is, a modality of knowledge that
intervenes in the past and so resolves the claims it makes on present
consciousness. Having provided the condition for moral decisions and
actions in the present, once our understanding makes the past serve a
present course of thought and action, it puts to rest and, for all
intents and purposes, contains the past f rom which it speaks. Such a
view of understanding is evident in LaCapra's reading of the trauma.
Much as the survivor begins to exercise "some measure of conscious
control, critical distance, and perspective" with regard to extreme
experiences and to work through loss by realistically positioning
herself between the compelling past and the present in which she must
be capable of acting, the historian, or secondary witness, will try to
help a victim re-establish boundaries between the past and the present
(Writing 90). It is the establishment of these boundaries--quite
literally an intervention--that enables the subject to become cognizant
of historical injustices without being merely determined by them. In
the absence of intervention, the trauma might continue unabated,
involving its survivors in the patterns of the precipitating violence,
while also--and perhaps more importantly for our historical
sense--exercising a mystifying influence on our social narratives of
agency.
With his interventionist
understanding of the trauma, LaCapra is highly dubious of any
hermeneutics that promotes the excesses of traumatic experience as
significations of the real itself, worrying that such a system of
thought veers toward a negative sublime that may have affinities with
theories of sacrificial violence and even with the Nazi belief in
regenerative violence (Representing 100-10; Writing 92-95). Though he
is suspicious of redemptive narratives in which the suffering of others
becomes uplifting or central to the identity formation of a person or
group, LaCapra nevertheless embraces the narrative progress entailed in
the psychoanalytic process of working through loss. Endorsing a
therapeutic ethic that would make the past accessible to present
consciousness, he seeks to put to rest, as much as possible, the
specter of injustice, which disturbs and limits both dialogic exchange
and "ethically responsible agency" (Writing 90). What LaCapra wants to
impress upon us is the capacity of a subjectivit y that, having
experienced a trauma, comes to inhabit its history rather than be
inhabited by it. Many critics have proposed reading the ending of
Beloved as an achievement on this order, with the communal exorcism
denoting both an act of working through or moving beyond a traumatic
relation to loss and, at the same time, an ethical intervention
consistent with the therapeutic ethic. When Ella leads the communal
charge to defeat the incarnate ghost, which is quite literally
destroying Sethe's talent for surviving, the community finally comes to
terms with the specter of its own indifference and recuperates the
pariah in its midst, as well as her daughter. If we are to read the
novel's ending as truly recuperative or redemptive (and I have my
doubts on this point), such an ethics would be anticipated earlier in
the novel by the scene in which Baby Suggs preaches in the clearing:
And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck
unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it,
stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as
soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love
it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than
eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than
your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now,
love your heart. (88-89)
Strictly
speaking, this passage does not differ all that radically from a
cynical remark that Baby Suggs makes at the start of the novel (though
later in the chronological time of the story). Discouraging Sethe's
plans to move out of a house haunted by a "baby's venom" (3), Baby
Suggs declares, "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters
with some dead Negro's grief" (5). To the extent that the present is
always a product of the past, there seems little one can do to alter
the past and perhaps even less that falls to one's own agency apart
from the determinations of cultural and social history. In each case,
Baby Suggs accepts the rule of a hostile world enacting its traumatic
injustices on the body parts of a community barely separated from the
reality, never mind the memories, of slavery. As Baby Suggs advocates a
care for self that might redeem some of the violences of the world, her
counsel amounts to an ethics of self-intervention. According to the
syntactical flow of this speech, the more ov ertly poetic turns of
language ("love your neck unnoosed and straight" or "the beat and
beating heart") involve rhetorical reversals of traumatic phenomena,
which is to say that they are constituted as figurative redemptions of
the violences of history. These traumatic references do not require the
intervening understanding of a reader more perspicacious than the
novel's represented audience. Morrison supposes that the ex-slaves who
hear mention of the noose will remember those they have lost to the
violence of the slaveholding culture and experience some anxiety about
a fate of persecution awaiting each of them at any moment. When she
refers them to their necks "unnoosed and straight," she sounds the note
of traumatic fatalism, as if what has occurred to others also awaits
them and cannot realistically be avoided. Yet the time of the figure
suspends the universalized threat of the noose, imagining a valuation
of self bracketed within the vulnerability to history, an opportunity
to cease dwelling within the t raumas of the past and to embrace freely
the ephemeral joys of their own bodies. Although she does not demand
from her audience a mythic confidence in American innocence, progress,
or opportunity, Baby Suggs hypothesizes a future temporarily redeemed
by their holding close to a present care for self and imagining the
past as pure exteriority. Corresponding to this inversion of traumatic
history, then, is the introverted movement of valuation persuading each
member of her audience to appreciate what she or he still possesses,
even if it is only those "inside parts" that--according to a social
logic barely distinguishing the lives of blacks from animal
existence--might as well be food for hogs.
As Baby Suggs testifies, however obliquely, to the traumatic hold of
the past on the black community's present consciousness, her turns of
phrase imply that she is, to employ LaCapra's words, "working over" the
past and "possibly working it through" (Writing 89). This is imperfect
redemption at best, as the parody of Pauline language in Baby Suggs's
sermon suggests. Though Baby Suggs most likely is not meant to be privy
to the allusion, she here revises a famous conceit from First
Corinthians: "For as the body is one, and hath many members and also
members of that one body, being many are one body, so also is Christ.
For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body" (12:12-13). The
Pauline allegory erases individual distinctions under the rubric of
communal faith, denying the affliction and individualism (and an
affliction that is tantamount to individualism) of any particular part:
"If the foot shall say, 'Because I am not the hand, I am not of the
body'; is it therefore not of the body?" (12:15). The spi ritual
progression from part to whole is parodied and secularized when Baby
Suggs converts the transcendent touch of grace into a physical caress
no longer divinely abstract and no longer dependent upon the hands of
another ("So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it"). What is
especially remarkable about the passage is the conversion of the excess
of the spirit, which is like the excess of trauma, into an ethic of
self-love. Working by way of a reduction from the claims of
transcendence and communal universalism, Baby Suggs's sermon revises
the corporate body, which stood for the community of faith in Paul,
into a collection of unassembled corporeal parts, loved in their
separateness and pain.
Though much
of this language sustains the complexity that LaCapra attributes to the
process of working through, Baby Suggs does not presume to imagine for
any of the afflicted a final reincorporation into the communal whole. A
note of traumatic ambiguity persists in any claim she makes for the
present, with the act of self-valuation opening only vaguely toward the
future, pushing only haltingly past the isolation of the trauma, and
all the time preserving the idiom of the violent past. Thus, when she
speaks of the "beat and beating heart," she refers to an existential
condition founded on the interchangeability of the social violences
done to the heart (the times the body has been beat, which are
inscribed now on the heart) and the rhythm it lives from (a beating
that cannot quite keep at bay the word's more violent connotation).
Here is voiced, before the full advent of her cynicism, the fatalism of
traumatic existence: knowing no other reality, the victim of violence
accepts it as a given and seeks a redemp tion only from within
violence. As she refers each of her listeners to his or her lungs "that
have yet to draw free air," Baby Suggs imagines only a postponement of
future injustice, an upholding of self against the imminence of
violences still to come. She speaks as though lapsing from the idiom of
working through into the language of trauma, offering at best a
troubled testimony to her oppression. As Naomi Morgenstern observes,
testimony in Morrison's novel always runs the risk of re-traumatizing
the subject as it reproduces the past (see esp. 116-18). Since trauma
remains the novel's language of historical witness, the fact that Baby
Suggs never quite gets beyond trauma may intimate not only that
therapeutic intervention is at its best an incomplete project but also
that history might be lost if such an intervention were to be
completed.
If I have begun to read
Beloved as heir to a tradition of literary ghosts who come to seem
figures for trauma, we should remind ourselves that the critical
discourse on trauma often works in the other direction, reading from
the trauma to the specter. Here, for instance, is LaCapra describing
both the trauma and the superseding moment in which the ghosts of the
psyche are laid to rest as if they were indeed quite real. In trauma,
LaCapra says,
words may be uttered
but seem to repeat what was said then and function as speech acts
wherein speech itself is possessed or haunted by the past and acts as a
reenactment or an acting out. 'When the past becomes accessible to
recall in memory, and when language functions to provide some measure
of conscious control, critical distance, and perspective, one has begun
the arduous process of working over and through the trauma in a fashion
that may never bring the full transcendence of acting out (or being
haunted by revenants and reliving the past in its shattered intensity)
but which may enable processes of judgment and at least limited
liability and ethically responsible agency. These processes are crucial
for laying ghosts to rest, distancing oneself from haunting revenants,
renewing an interest in life, and being able to engage memory in more
critically tested senses.
(Writing 90, emph. mine)
I do not wish to accuse LaCapra of believing in ghosts; it is probably
enough for some of his critics to say that he believes in trauma.
Still, the reader cannot help noticing the logic whereby the one
afflicted with trauma achieves distance from "haunting revenants," as
if it were less likely that one could refute the unreality of trauma
than make its reality remote enough to appear unreal. I put such weight
on LaCapra's figurative language in this passage in order to draw
attention to a strange literalism lurking there: one distances oneself
from the trauma as from a ghost, which is to say, as from the reality
of a ghost. Striking a largely pragmatic compromise with the disturbing
reality of mind that threatens the real world of action, LaCapra's
victim of trauma enacts a progression into reason that refutes the
spectral reality that the trauma would otherwise re-enact endlessly in
his life. There is a split here in the very meaning of the act. The
necessary intervention of memory and language into the unco nscious
reign of the trauma assumes the capacity of the trauma not only to
refer to a past act, but to act out the departed event all over again.
Despite his figurative use of ghostly language, LaCapra hardly views
the reign of the trauma as a fiction. Rather, the trauma's reality is
so persuasive that it requires the work of memory, language, and
rationality. The ghostly image connotes both a reluctantly superseded
past and the progression beyond it, since, according to the
Enlightenment social narrative upon which the Gothic is precariously
founded, the ghost is necessarily a figure for a past quickly becoming
obsolete.
If trauma can inspire
LaCapra's turn to figurative excess, the trauma itself seems implicated
in figurative logic. Since I am here focussed on the trauma's function
in a work of fiction, we need to bear in mind that the progression from
a testimonial text to the traumatic imaginings of the literary text
resides in the latter's mediated, already interpreted, relation to the
history from which it lives or of which it speaks. If one were trying
to read the traumatic reality of African-American history as an
unconscious force in Morrison's consciousness determining her patterns
of figuration, this distinction between the unconscious and mediated
mechanics of the trauma might seem less necessary. But, as soon as one
locates the trauma as a figure on the side of an authorial (or at least
a textual) intention, the psychological phenomenality of trauma becomes
a figure for storytelling itself. In Morrison's case, this means that
she uses the Gothic apparatus to invoke the specter of trauma-first, as
a motivational f orce explaining the characters' historical actions,
and, second, as a figure for the act of a difficult transmission. As
haunting performs the work of a figure, it poses a newness within
language that hypothetically or temporarily alienates ordinary meaning
and so forces a revision or reconsideration of the very possibilities
of representation. Encountering the resistances of the trauma and the
failures in understanding that it promotes, the reader remains always
aware of what Morrison is trying to say about the history she dares to
retell. By exploring the hard edges of a traumatic recalcitrance that
is as much the author's reluctance to insert this recovered history
into the myths of progress that inform American storytelling as it is
an attempt to describe her characters' minds realistically, Morrison
brings us to the brink of an unspoken history, which should return, if
it is to return at all, only as a rupture of rationality, voice, and
ordinarily conceived intentions. The novel emerges as an act of diff
icult listening, embodied, for example, in the person of Ella as she
"listen[s] for the holes-the things the fugitives did not say; the
questions they did not ask. Listened too for the unnamed, unmentioned
people left behind" (92). To the extent that these "holes" are holes in
both consciousness and relationship, the ex-slaves' forgettings
function not only as an unconscious coping mechanism but, more
surprisingly, as the space of an intention any storyteller who is also
a listener--whether she be Ella or Morrison herself--forms against an
unmentioned, unmentionable, or traumatically irreferential past.
Throughout Beloved, Morrison develops characters who exist as too much
or too little of themselves. And, if all of Morrison's characters in
this novel never quite coincide in their own self-consciousness with
the history they endure, it is also true that the lives they live
inside history remain incommensurate with the novel's historical
consciousness. By making her characters participate in structures of
rhetorical excess that give their words and actions meaning beyond the
immediate moment of their emplotted lives, Morrison develops a
structure of reading in which our imaginative acts of identification
are limited by the allegorical significances of excess and in which
characters who stand for history stand at the same time for the limits
of the realistic tradition of fiction with its rational account of
history. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this gap between the
reality of a character's experience and a meaning existing outside
self-consciousness occurs when Sethe takes account of the newspaper c
lipping describing her act of infanticide, knowing "that the words she
did not understand hadn't any more power than she had to explain"
(161). The failure here is not just in the white journalist's lack of
empathy but also in the words themselves, which say both too little and
too much about Sethe's act. When Paul D sees the photograph
accompanying the article, he insists, "I been knowing her a longtime.
And I can tell you for sure: this ain't her mouth. May look like it,
but it ain't" (158). Much like the holes through which Ella hears the
unaccounted history of the fugitive slaves, the photograph offers a
negative representation of the character Sethe, who becomes unreal in
relation to the official history that would record her. Morrison
exploits Paul D's obvious psychological defensiveness in order to make
us reflect upon the gap between historical experience and history,
between the reality of the trauma and the interpretations that make
sense of it. Insofar as the novel develops its story through the ph
enomenality of the trauma, the psychological explanation, much like the
historian's act of intervention, relies on a second interpretive sense
of the trauma as explanatory trope.
Morrison's relation to the Gothic is to the point here, since viewed
through the novelistic orthodoxy of empiricism, the persistent
silliness of the Gothic plot arises in direct proportion to its
rhetorical excess. It might well be said of the Gothic that it aims
less to confront the psyche with the excesses of consciousness than to
imagine the psyche as if it were already an excess in history. The most
overt markings of psychological excess are of course ghosts, those
figures through which the Gothic asks whether the spectral
phenomenality of the past refers to an inability of the mind to become
part of history or to the impossibility that history should become
subject to the mind. In the first instance, the meaning of excess, even
when it is not the actual source, would be subjective; in the latter, a
sociality working against or to the detriment of subjectivity. In
response to the dilemma of interpretation provoked by Gothic ghosts,
the modern reader most often makes a choice to account for the excesses
of plot through the distortions of subjectivity and thus to promote the
stability of our cultural narratives of rationality. Though the
irrationality of the character who sees ghosts may appeal to a reader's
imaginative bent for irrationality, the reader's ability to identify
the flaws in the character's thinking and the patterns developing from
his irrationality keeps the empirical world intact and releases the
reader from any anxiety that history might persist without answer. I
must emphasize here that in making the choice to explain away the
excesses of the Gothic as a symptom of the character's irrationality,
the reader chooses an option presented within the Gothic plot--but an
option that, if chosen too soon or too absolutely, would ruin much of a
story that has come to depend narratively on its fantastic mechanism.
Even when one can explain the extravagances of the Gothic plot as
phenomena on the horizon of a subjective irrationality, the story
itself seems to insist upon a literal return of a past that constructs
Gothic excess, so that we are forced to ask what we ought to make of a
past that lives anachronistically beyond its proper moment. As Derrida
argues through his reading of Hamlet at the beginning of Specters of
Marx, spectral plots demand that we investigate the manner in which
present-tense ideology seeks historical foreclosure. The specters of
the past--as, say, those that emerge in Marx's pronouncement at the
beginning of the Communist Manifesto that "the specter of communism"
haunts Europe--may become relevant precisely at the moment in which
they have been put to rest for ideological reasons. As he suggests that
the rules of empiricism tend to cooperate with the hegemony of the
present social moment, Derrida criticizes those claims of presence
belonging to any social order of justice, claims that omit ref erence
to the injustices that the present social order both perpetrates and
perpetuates. What the Gothic plot so well expresses is a conflict
between social narratives endorsing the progresses obtained through
empirical reason and those contrary patterns of thought through which
the past remains unbound despite our rational attempts to foreclose it.
Yet, since the Gothic specter remains an expression of the departed act
and its obsolete era, any action owing to its influences might evoke a
reactionary nostalgia for an outdated idealism or a fatalistic
obligation to ancient constructs of identity. To adhere to the hurt of
the past would be to fail the requirement of an empiricism rooted in
the present and a progressive rationality oriented toward the future,
and, if one is not simply to ignore the past and to adopt a purely
presentist and ahistorical mode of knowledge, one must translate the
hurt of the past in terms of present possibilities. The specter has a
value proportionate to its commentary on the reali ties of the present,
but it cannot maintain itself as a resistance to the present except
perhaps through the deliberate archaism of a subject still under the
spell of the past. As a reflection of partially eclipsed social
paradigms, then, the Gothic figure of haunting enacts a disjuncture
between past and present that brings with it a new requirement: to
intervene in the social narratives governing our existence in the
status quo. For Derrida, it is precisely because the specter is a
figure for the unresolved past and the missed encounter that it can
signify the future of an act not fully encountered.
According to liberal social theory and the rules of empirical
investigation, in order for the trauma to be the product of injustice,
we would first require proof that it occurred as a violation of a prior
and just ordering of human relations in society. Moreover, as a result
of the trauma's private mode of reference, even if we were able to
ascertain that a trauma followed from an injustice, the subjectivity of
the trauma might make the social occasion to which it witnesses seem
merely the background of the traumatic data. Pre-empting just such a
suspicion, Caruth perceives in the seemingly private character of
trauma an emergent form of sociality, an aspect of history that unfolds
from trauma and implicates each of us in one another's traumas (24).
However one construes the potentially positive connotations of the
trauma's legacy to history, since the trauma necessarily occurs in a
subject or a group of people failing to recognize either the symptoms
or the events behind them, it demands an event of secondar y witness.
Providing the very structure of the trauma's sociality, it is the
secondary witness's reception, her act of listening for the event of
injustice behind the symptoms, that should move us beyond the esoteric
testimony of the trauma. In its spectral connotations, the trauma would
not simply mystify the obsolescence of an injustice and obscure its
causes. Rather, it might be introduced as that which intervenes between
history as a departed act and history as that which impinges upon
present memory and the ethical acts that follow from it. It is surely a
deliberate irony of Beloved that not only must history return against
the grain of desire and through a figure of haunting, but, once it
returns, it must be defeated. This is the very ambiguity of the specter
of an injustice or what Morrison elsewhere refers to as the "specter of
enslavement," for, as long as she lives within her trauma, Sethe is not
only a witness to the past but also a pariah in the community. The
ending of the novel poses what is at best a highly ambiguous resolution
to a highly problematic historical truth, as the community's
intervention in Sethe's and Denver's trauma requires an exorcism of a
past that refutes the ironic witness of the trauma.
There is some evidence for reading the ending as a symbolic act of
working through the past, and Ella's self-justified and self-promoting
rationale for stirring the community's intervention offers the best
expression of this ethic:
When
Ella heard 124 was occupied by something-or-other beating up on Sethe,
it infuriated her. [...] Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn't like the
idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe's crime was
staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not
countenance the possibility of sin moving in on the house, unleashed
and sassy.[...] As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly
place--shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such--Ella respected it. But
if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other
foot. She didn't mind a little communication between the two worlds,
but this was an invasion.
(256-57, emph. mine)
What Ella objects to is an excess added to Gothic excess, as if
Morrison were playing a meta-fictional joke on us: it is one thing to
be haunted by ghosts, Ella says, representing the reader who makes
allowances for the Gothic and believes in Morrison's ghosts, but to be
beaten up by them, that is another. Ella interprets the ghost exactly
as though it were a trauma needing to be worked through or (if we are
truer to her tones) worked over, and like a highly empathetic
therapist, she cannot stand the spectacle of the past "taking
possession of the present." It is not clear to me what we are to make
of the excessive cliches through which Ella gears herself up to fight
Sethe's antagonist, unless they are supposed to demonstrate how far she
is from seeing the ghost as the allegory for history that Morrison has
made of it and how mistaken Ella maybe in reducing the ghost to a
traditionally conceived Gothic antagonist. As Ella conflates historical
memory and Gothic oppression, Morrison shows us the fallacy of the
therapeutic premise, whereby an injustice of the past can come to seem
unjust mostly as a result of the havoc it creates in the lives of those
who bother to recall it, perhaps with no choice but to remember. As was
true of Baby Suggs's preaching in the clearing, the therapeutic ethic
seems to collapse on itself--in that first instance by lapsing into the
idiom of trauma, in the second by forging a distance from trauma that
is achieved only through a cliched language of melodramatic opposition.
Falling into the cliched phraseology of her characters, Morrison
declares of Beloved, "They forgot her like a bad dream" (274). Against
the grain of most critical readings of the communal intervention (see,
for example: Harris 330-441; LaCapra, Writing 14; Rody 102-09), I hear
in this ending the endurance of Morrison's suspicion of our cultural
narratives of progress. As she presents this contrived resolution of
the past, which is either a degenerative or melodramatic resolution of
the plot of history; we seem to be in a world much like Shakespearean
tragedy, where the ending declares only perfunctorily that history;
even tragic history; shall be folded into the progress of society. To
this very end, Morrison employs an anti-novelistic and meta-fictional
refrain in the final pages, insisting that "this is not a story to pass
on" (275) and superficially negating the act of transmission that
occurs each time a reader receives this story. In negating her own
story, it is as though Morrison has declared that her characters had to
get on with their lives, that one can endure only so long in the full
consciousness of traumatic history, but that, even so, the last thing
we must do is read Sethe's survival as uplifting.
On the question of endings, it is interesting to consider Morrison's
reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in her literary critical
study Playing in the Dark. Effectively endorsing the critical
tradition's disappointment with the novel's ending, Morrison finds
fault with Twain for abandoning the escape plot and failing to deliver
Jim into freedom at Huck's hands. The novel's deferment of Jim's
freedom is essential to its complicity with American ideology, Morrison
decides, and this is so "because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to
the text without the specter of enslavement." The focus here is on
Huck's lack of intervention, his failure to become ultimately
implicated in Jim's story. There is a pretty overt reason for this:
although The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn testifies to the "yearning
of whites for forgiveness and love," it also requires that the blacks
whom they would forgive be viewed as supplicants to the whites and that
Jim respond "to the torment and humiliation" that he undergoes with
"boundless love" (Playing 56-57). Thus the specter of enslavement of
which Jim's story remains an emanation expresses a fundamental
ambivalence of white America toward a history for which it would
confess only a limited responsibility However we read the mock escape
to which Huck and Tom subject Jim and the deus ex machina that releases
Jim as a stipulation of the already deceased widow's will, it is
evident that the novel's ending has lapsed into the traumatic idiom of
slavery. Depicting Jim as altogether lacking the willfulness he showed
in running away and Huck as failing to summon on Jim's behalf the
resourcefulness with which he secured his own freedom, Twain refuses to
give us the ending that Jim deserves and instead secures Jim's freedom
as though it were consistent with the will of the slaveholding past. A
specter of history casts itself over the agency of two characters who
had seemed to denote the future of American idealism and freedom,
indeed the emerging future of social mutuality. If there is a traumatic
force at work here, Twain does not offer any subjective explanation of
the trauma but rather employs it as a social allegory denoting the long
reach of the past into the present, even past the point at which it had
appeared to be defeated.
What is
perhaps oddest about Morrison's assessment of Twain's novel is that the
ending she would prefer would be perfectly consistent with American
idealism. In delivering Jim to freedom, Huck would express the American
belief in a freedom greater than all its contradictory evidences and
become an exception to history with whom all readers could identify. As
a true remnant of American idealism from a time in which our ugliest
history was most conspicuous, Huck would embrace his responsibility and
help us all to amend and work through the departed acts of the past.
But, if Morrison seems to require a redemptive intervention from Twain
and from his hero, her fictional rendering of a scenario that
implicitly recalls Twain is much more complicated. In the scene from
Beloved where Amy Denver intervenes to help Sethe make it through the
night, Morrison revisits the specter of Huck's failed intervention, but
she does so without providing the idealistic rendering she finds
lacking in Twain. I close by focussing on th e connotations of haunting
in this central episode of Beloved, considering Amy's behaviour as a
model of intervention that does not require the cancellation of
traumatic history through a subjective return to the empirical
rationalities of the status quo.
Any ethics that Morrison delineates through Amy's act of intervention
exists in ironic tension with the possibilities of benevolent action,
since Amy's story, narrated in two separate reminiscences, signifies a
departure not only from the idealistic narrative of ethical action, but
also from the very conception of justice arrived at through a person's
(or character's) deliberated course of action. Moreover, since Amy's
story is embedded in Denver's nostalgia for the story of her own birth,
it is especially difficult to read the ethics of intervention that
pertain to her actions apart from the question of idealism and the
novel's larger questions about outsiders' interventions in the trauma
of others. This story is part of the allegorical texture of the novel,
and it is surely incumbent upon us to remember Amy in relation to the
history that she symbolically stands against--not only thinking of Baby
Suggs's having cynically contrasted the possibility of an escape from
the traumatic past to all the available mo des of memory; but also
recalling that the haunting of Sethe has been the result of two
catastrophic interventions. The first of these is the menacing
intervention of the four white slaveholders who come apocalyptically to
bring a fugitive slave to justice and thus incite the desperation that
leads Sethe to murder her child. The concept of intervention in Beloved
always carries this spectral history with it, and so, when Paul D
strives generously to bring the reign of the ghost to an end, he brings
the past to bear more fiercely on the present. For all his better
intentions, Paul D reflects the biases of the predominant culture in
his eagerness to participate in a forgetfulness conforming all
experience to progress. What he occasions is the further degradation of
Sethe before her history and a subjective response in her not unlike
that of Twain's Jim, who not only permits his "persecutors to torment
him," but responds to their torment with "boundless love" (Morrison,
Playing 57). We may remind ourselves, when Sethe loves the source of
her humiliation just as willingly as Jim does, that she is loving the
spirit of her dead child, whereas Jim is only adoring the rights of
authority; but, to the extent that each character's action is
symptomatic of a traumatic history, it is also bound to the past in a
manner that subordinates self-love to a spectral and obsolete mode of
consciousness.
Having imagined
Amy's story as a parable about intervening in an oppressive history,
Morrison makes Amy stand not against but within the specters of
indifference and neglect that characterize white society's perception
of blacks. In the first telling of the story, Amy declares her
intention to abandon Sethe ("I gotta go") and does so in
unapologetically racist terms ("What you gonna do, just lay there and
foal?" [33]). There is an odd humour at work here, as Morrison denotes
Amy's emergent care but makes her character speak in an idiom of racism
reminiscent of Huck's unreformed ideology, never letting us forget the
point that Amy has a hard time perceiving her responsibility for Sethe
and her history. Amy's callous reactions function a bit like the
defensive reactions people have at horror movies, as they alternately
whisper "Get out of there" and "Oh, she's so stupid." Indeed, when Amy
says "You ain't got no business walking round these hills, miss" (78),
she may refer to the fact that Sethe startled her, al most as if she
were already one of the many ghosts populating black grief; or perhaps
she only means to suggest that Sethe has put herself in harm's way. If
her thought adopts the interpretive strategy of explaining Gothic
phenomena as though they were purely subjective emanations, we see how
easily such a course of explanation degenerates into an attitude of
blaming the victim, since it must be either Sethe's irrationality or
her moral guilt that functions as the principle of causation behind her
suffering. When Amy observes the scars from Sethe's whipping, she
concludes, "You must of did something" (80), unable quite to
acknowledge her own implication in the fate of another.
Finally, however, it is through the idiom of haunting and the
connotations of traumatic history that Morrison makes Amy an unwitting
exception to the norms of indifference in Sethe's life and suggests the
possibility of a non-benevolent ethical response to injustice in
history. Having declared her departure and then remained, perhaps only
out of curiosity, Amy expresses her ethical concern by way of a subtle
defiance of the fatalistic narrative she has so far imposed on Sethe's
life. Anticipating the future of Sethe's death suddenly, as if it were
a trauma pertaining to herself, she continues to interrogate the dying
pregnant woman at her side under the false name Sethe has given her:
"You ain't dead yet, Lu? Lu?"
"Not yet."
"Make you a bet. You make it through the night, you make it all the
way." (82)
Amy's ethical "bet" on Sethe's life rhymingly puns on the fatalism that
Amy and Sethe have expressed in conceiving of her death as something
"yet" to come, as though it were an inevitability demanding Hamletic
resignation ("If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it
will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all"
[5.2.158-60]). When we recall that in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud defined anxiety as the psychological condition that prevents
trauma by preparing the self for what is awful and to come, it is hard
to hear Amy's continued expression that Sethe will die by her side as
anything less than the imagined future of a trauma: "Don't up and die
on me in the night, you hear? I don't want to see your ugly black face
hankering over me" (82). By way of this conversion of the trauma into
that which refers not only to another's past, but to a future in which
the suffering of another will be remembered, Amy unwittingly discovers
an ethics of intervention that need not can cel the spectacle and hold
of suffering to promote an act of responsibility. It goes to the heart
of Morrison's critique of benevolence (a critique implicit, for
example, in Mr. Garner's fairer treatment of his slaves) that Amy
enacts her ethical care for another and promotes again the possibility
of self-love in Sethe only through the anti-idealistic expression of
her bigotry. Beloved asks us whether it is possible for memory to
intimate an act not yet encountered, as it were, to glimpse a future of
the self given over to ethical meanings not subordinated to a history
of intentions. Amy's intervening action is literally a coming between
Sethe and her fate and thus an expression of the paradox of
responsibility. She fails to conceive of her actions and Sethe's fate
as matters of necessity, and at the same time she fails to choose her
actions as consistent with the rationale of an empirical cultural
narrative. Her somewhat unwitting responsiveness interprets ethics as
the encounter with the excess meanings of history; with the specters of
injustice haunting the lives of others and by implication ourselves.
Too often our conventions of narrative and the accompanying mores of
empiricism underestimate the devastating trauma of injustice in order
to overcome it. In more Gothic terms, we may inherit the past
fatalistically or achieve separation from it by accounting for its
pathologies through the aberrations of subjective motive and
perspective. But for Morrison it is clear that to stand in history is
to stand within range of all its specters, to allow history to take
measure of us in our inability and still to require our response where
none is yet imagined. To the extent that history's practitioners forget
this premise, much of what counts as history may be merely an avoidance
of the injustices of the past.
WORKS CITED
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Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History.
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Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernard
Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York: Routledge 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans.
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Harris, Trudier. "Escaping Slavery but Not Its Images." Toni Morrison:
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and K.A. Appiah. NewYork: Amistad, 1993.330-41.
LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma.
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_____. Writing Trauma, Writing History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
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Morgenstern, Naomi. "Mother's Milk and Sister's Blood: Trauma and the
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Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
_____. "Living Memory" [an interview with Toni Morrison]. City Limits
(31 March to 7 April 1988): 10-11.
_____. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New
York: Random House, 1992.
Rody, Caroline. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, 'Rememory', and a
'Clamor for a Kiss."' American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 92-119.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen
Greenblatt et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Twain, Mark. Mississippi Writings: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Life
on the Mississippi; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Pudd'nhead Wilson.
Ed. Gary Cardwell. New York: Library of America, 1982.
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R. CLIFTON SPARGO is an assistant
professor of English at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
For the academic year 2000-01, he was the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum. He is completing a book tentatively entitled The
Ethics of Mourning, is at work on a second project on American
literature and the Holocaust, and has recently published articles in
Representations, Studies in Romanticism, and Religion and the Arts.
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