|
"From the Seen to the
Told": the construction of subjectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved
by Jeanna Fuston-White
In the final chapter of Beloved, the narrator repeats, "It was not a
story to pass on." Nonetheless, like the ghost in the novel that haunts
124 Bluestone Road, that draws the life out of Sethe, the story is
beloved. The "dearly beloved," those buried, burned, thrown overboard,
who cannot or should not be forgotten, create this story that must be
known and told. In the telling, Morrison not only "rememories" the
experience of slavery, but she also ties her work to the production of
critical theory as she deconstructs the Enlightenment notion of
subjectivity to make room for what bell hooks calls a "radical black
subjectivity." Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical
challenge to the Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language,
history, and identity. Then, in the open space remaining, she
reconstructs knowledges, histories, and identities, all of which allow
for the inclusion of the African American subject and the African
American experience.
However, this
is no easy task. The Western intellectual tradition works against the
establishment of alternatively legitimate modes of knowledge. It is not
only a white intellectual tradition that has required the black
experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens. African
American intellectuals have similarly tried to gain social advancement
through mastery of white language and knowledge. Influenced by his
Enlightenment world view, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the "Talented
Tenth" that "knowledge of life and its wider meaning has been the point
of the Negro's deepest ignorance" (Writings 852), thus "underestimating
the capacity of everyday people to 'know' about life," argues Comel
West (58), (1) and embracing instead the Modernist tradition of
power/knowledge. Enlightenment thought constructed a white,
heterosexual, patriarchal hegemony that marginalized those outside the
"fixed" center. Similarly, Du Bois's social philosophy for the
betterment of his race depended implicitly upon the Modernist vie w of
subjectivity and language, which necessitated the presence of a
rational, coherent subject. It was upon the shoulders of this
"enlightened," "exceptional" man that Du Bois placed the burden to save
the race, for he was far more likely to act on behalf of the common
good than were the uneducated masses.
However, within the bounds of Enlightenment thought, neither Du Bois
nor any other member of a socially marginalized group (2) could cast
himself as a thinking subject because he was necessarily constituted as
Other. Enlightenment tradition alienated African Americans from
knowledge and all its rewards--history, identity, language. This
exclusion from American culture has formed an "unrelenting attack on
black humanity," producing the "fundamental condition of black
culture--that of black invisibility and namelessness" (West 80). For
many marginalized groups in America, the "historical status of
subjectivity is precisely that of never having existed," because
members have lacked the power imperative to conceive of oneself as a
centered, whole entity (Harper 11).
Because Du Bois's agenda for social improvement proved incompatible
with the philosophy under which it was conceived, African American
intellectuals have been compelled to find theoretical alternatives
which would allow for the creation of presence and voice through which
to articulate their experience and history. The subversion of the
monarchical rule of Enlightenment thought which discredits
alternatives, multiplicitous representations, or varying knowledges
appears essential for African American intellectuals who would empower
themselves to create a "radical black subjectivity" and identity
outside of hegemonic prescriptions. Henry Louis Gates defines this
opposition to the hegemony as "the most fundamental right that any
tradition possesses.. . to define itself... [and] its very own
presuppositions." If African Americanists fail to accomplish this task,
"we shall remain indentured servants to white masters...and to the
Western tradition" (Gates 29). bell hooks argues that postmodern
theory, with its crit ique of essentialism and deconstruction of
antiquated notions of identity, might offer a paradigm within which
African Americans could constitute subjectivity:
we have too long had imposed on us ... a narrow constricting notion of
blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge
universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture
and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the
construction of the self and assertion of agency. (hooks, "Postmodern"
online)
Essentialized
representations of blackness, established in both academic scholarship
and popular culture, have stifled the African American quest for
subjectivity and agency. To achieve a uniquely African American
critical theory, which allows for self-definition outside of hegemonic
limitations, the hegemony must be disrupted, the center must be
dissolved, thus removing marginality. (3)
Toni Morrison's Beloved illustrates the construction of subjectivity
and presence by deconstructing the foundations that have marginalized
and essentialized African Americans. For Morrison, the tenets of
Modernity through which Du Bois expected social progress for his race
do not mark the only path to subjectivity, agency, and knowledge. In
fact, they do not even constitute a viable path for a black
subjectivity. Morrison's characters, who might have been rendered
voiceless and helpless by their society, speak, command reason, and
demonstrate agency. While Morrison uses a narrative form, Beloved has
far-reaching theoretical implications. By reconfiguring knowledge and
subjectivity, Morrison reconstitutes blackness outside of essentialist
traditions which have defined it superficially and secondarily. bell
hooks maintains that racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated
exclusively with concrete experience that has no connection with
abstract thinking and the production of critical theory ("Postmodern"
online). Morrison demonstrates the intertwining of the two by
generating critical theory while representing concrete experience. In
"Canon Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition:
From the Seen to the Told," Gates defines theory as "a form of
cognition modeled upon (public) utterance rather than upon (private)
perception,...a public, institutional act of certification which
assumes the authority to 'effect the passage from the seen to the
told.'" Like hooks, Gates fears the dissociation of the African
American literary tradition from the generation of abstract thought:
"When we mindlessly borrow another tradition's theory, we undermine
this passage from the seen to the told--from what we see to how we tell
it--this basis for our own black public discourse, this relation
between cognition and utterance" (30). Thus, both agree that the
generation of a uniquely African American critical theory is vital. If
told using the critical theory of the white, male hegemony, Morrison's
tale of the "se en" (slavery) would be undermined by the way that it
must be "told." Therefore, she creates a new way of knowing and of
telling the story of slavery, a way of telling that empowers the
powerless, that recalls the "disremembered and unaccounted for," those
"Sixty Million and more" who died as captives in the Middle Passage,
never making it into American slavery (Morrison 274).
Beloved represents a working out of subjectivity through the
representation of history, a history so brutal and dehumanizing that it
is unrepresentable, (4) a depiction of community, which is often torn
apart by the circumstances of slavery, and a construction of identity.
The passage from the seen to the told, the telling of the tale of
Africans who did or did not survive the Middle Passage and slavery is
central for the healing of her race. That story which was "not a story
to pass on" (Morrison 275) and, as a result, has been erased from the
collective cultural memory, must be known, woven into the fabric of
history. And vital to this agenda is the acceptance of multiplicities,
in which there is not a single history that represents "truth" but
numerous truths, each affected by experience. The near invisibility of
the African experience in slavery undermines the formation of identity.
Morrison has said:
There is no
place here where I can go, or where you can go, and think about, or not
think about, or summon the presences of, or recollect the absences
of--slaves....Something that reminds us of the ones who made the
journey, and those who did not make it. (qtd. in Rody 98) (5)
Morrison found that American slave museums represented slavery through
works of handicraft made by slaves, rather than with chains or
restraining devices (Broad 94). This course of "hegemonic whitewashing"
designed to make the past more palatable (Fischer 221) denies the
"black sadness and sorrow, black agony and anguish, black heartache and
heartbreak," a "cry and moan, the deep black meaning [of which] goes
back to the indescribable cries of Africans on the slave ships during
the cruel transatlantic voyages to America" (West 81-82).
This cry and moan sustain black culture, argues West, giving shape and
strength to body and language (82). Knowledge bereft of experience, as
propounded by the Western philosophical tradition, cannot foster an
understanding and communication of black culture, and it is for this
reason that Morrison must deconstruct the Modernist view of knowledge
and subject, an epistemological construct which places her on the
outside as Other. (6) Therefore, in order to challenge the repressive
reign of "knowledge," Morrison constructs a scenario so horrific that
it cannot be ignored, but it can be reasonably explained, despite its
brutality.
The first difficult
task for African Americans, writes West, is "to ward off madness and
discredit suicide" as a means of dealing with the "ontological wounds,
psychic scars, and existential bruises of black people" (81-82).
Undoubtedly, Morrison recognizes this task through her beleaguered
protagonist Sethe, who must ward off insanity and the urge toward
self-annihilation as she faces her psychic scars and existential
bruises. But what for the white observers who discover the runaway
slave surrounded by three bleeding children was a descent into madness,
Morrison represents as a reasonably justifiable act, despite its
apparent senselessness. To the slave catchers, Sethe had "gone wild,"
the result of the "mishandling of the nephew who'd overbeat her."
Slaves, like horses or hounds, had a limit beyond which beating could
not educate, but served only to create wildness (Morrison 149).
Juxtaposing sanity and madness, Morrison begins to blur the dichotomous
representations which in Enlightenment thought so easil y categorized
truth and falsehood, good and evil, history and myth.
The horrifying scene of Sethe swinging her infant toward the wall while
her three other children lay bleeding is described in the novel from
varying perspectives, each processsed by the teller. (7) Sethe'
"rememory" of the act shows its distance from madness, its proximity to
agency. Sethe is a thinking subject who acts and uses reason to form
what appears to her a logically and rationally determined resolution to
kill/save her children:
And if she
thought anything it was No. No. Mono. Nonono. Simple. 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.
Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (163)
For Sethe, tormented by the indignities of enslavement, death by their
mother's hand held more compassion for her children than did slavery.
"The desperate strategy of infanticide," as Morrison called it in an
interview (see Wolff 417), proved the only course of action for the
slave mother who loved children she did not own and could not otherwise
protect; thus, the immorality implicit in her infanticide lay with the
slave system, not with the slave mother. Throughout the novel, Sethe
expresses great concern that Beloved, her slain child, understand why
she was killed, what black objectification/commodification meant:
What it meant--what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the
little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold
her f ace so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could
absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body,
plump and sweet with life.... worse than that--far worse--was what Baby
Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw, and what made Paul D
tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything
that came to mind. (251) (8)
It
was not madness, but the reality of slavery, that drove Sethe to kill
her child, fully aware of the act and its brutality, as well as its
compassion.
Speaking through the
voice of universal morality, Schoolteacher's nephew cannot understand
why Sethe would bring harm to her children. Stunned by the scene, he
repeats, "What she want to go and do that for?" Although he had been
beaten himself, he is witness to an inconceivable act, lacking any
perceptible logic. He suspends experience from his judgment because
transcendent morality expels circumstances from valuative judgment.
Schoolteacher's nephew represents a dismissal by whites of the
dehumanizing qualities of slavery. While he may have suffered beatings
(which he parallels to those borne by Sethe), he did not undergo the
humiliation that Sethe faced when the white boys nursed from her
breast, taking the milk that her child awaited, commodifled to such an
extent that even the milk in her breasts was not hers to own. Although
Paul D places judgment on Sethe's murder of her daughter-"what you did
was wrong Sethe .... There could have been a way. Some other
way"--Morrison refrains from judgment, allowing "p lenty of holes and
spaces" where the reader may enter the story (Tate 125) and pose
his/her own challenge to universal morality, which increasingly appears
socially constructed as the novel progresses.
Morrison also exemplifies the exclusive appropriation of reason through
Sixo, the character who can be most closely identified with the active,
rational subject (while not conforming to the coherent, centered,
Modernist subject). He effectively uses right! white reason, as well as
a mastery of Schoolteacher's language in his explanation of the shoat.
Schoolteacher marches Sixo through a line of logic which will
invariably lead him to the conclusion that the shoat has been stolen.
However, Sixo out-masters the master in this game of language and
logic:
"Did you steal that shoat? You stole that shoat."
Schoolteacher was quiet but firm, like he was just going through
the motions-- not expecting an answer that mattered. Sixo sat
there, not even getting up to plead or deny ....
"You stole that shoat didn't you?"
"No Sir," said Sixo, but he had the decency to keep his eyes
on the meat.
"You telling me you didn't steal it, and I'm looking right at
you?"
"No Sir. I didn't steal it."
Schoolteacher smiled. "Did you kill it?"
"Yes, sir. I killed it."
"Did you butcher it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you cook it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, then. Did you eat it?"
"Yes, sir. I sure did."
"And you telling me that's not stealing?"
"No sir. It ain't."
"What is it then?"
"Improving your property, sir."
"What?"
"Sixo plant rye to give the high piece a better
chance. Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crops.
Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work."
Clever, but Schoolteacher beat him anyway to show
him that definitions belong to the definer--not the
defined. (191)
Morrison's narrator validates Sixo's logic; however, as Other,
Schoolteacher affirms that logic does not belong to Sixo. Neither does
language belong to him. Definitions/language, which has traditionally
served as legitimation for Western thought and culture, belongs to the
definers, those with power and authority. This stands in stark contrast
to Enlightenment thought, which accepts language only as a medium
through which absolute meaning is made conscious, possessing no power
to construct. (9) By beating Sixo for using language and logic, by
asserting ownership of definitions, Schoolteacher illustrates the
social and linguistic construction of meaning, and the absence of
absolute meaning. (10) Asserting ownership of definitions, of meaning,
undermines any transcendent quality. Again the ownership of language is
emphasized as Sixo rejects the language of the master because "there
was no future in it" (25). He cannot command it because it is governed
by Schoolteacher and its use still renders him voiceless. The master's
language which silenced slaves exacted an especially harsh penalty on
those in the Middle Passage, who had proven so easily erased from the
cultural text. When offering them a voice through Beloved, Morrison
must face their utter lack of a comprehensible language that could
create a cultural presence. Not only have tradition and history all but
ignored them, language has been denied them. Even Cornel West, who
appreciates the tragedy and heartbreak of the Middle Passage,
attributes only an "indescribable cry" (82) to its victims. Morrison
equips her named characters with a command of language, thus lending to
their identity formation, but those in the Middle Passage have no
language that can give them presence. They are caught in an "oceanic"
space, suspended between cultures and languages. Forcibly severed from
the old, unaware of the new, those who died in the Middle Passage died
in no place (Spillers 67). Morrison reflects this "no place" through a
discourse of imagery which lacks punctuation and resides in that
"oceanic" space, seemingly alienated and disjointed, much like those
Africans who awaited an uncertain destiny.
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 too I am always
crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth
smells sweet but his eyes are locked some who eat nasty themselves I do
not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we
have none (210)
Morrison is able
to translate this space into a discourse that is accessible to those
who have not seen the images, while retaining its imagery of alienation
and uncertainty. (11) The fruit of her translation of disjunction and
alienation into language is a fuller understanding of the utter and
complete unmaking of those removed from Africa to satisfy America's
"peculiar" institution. Furthermore, Morrison employs the postmodem
turn toward a plurality of first-order discourses, each of which merits
legitimation (Fraser and Nicholson 23). (12)
Africans stolen from their homeland were forced to abandon their
African language and culture and replace it with a new language and
culture of oppression. Sethe's back carries this new code under which
she is to live, the code of domination in which the definer may
inscribe his definition upon the very flesh of the defined. According
to Hortense Spillers, the oppressed bodies carry on their flesh a
"cultural text" which can explain the values of the culture (67). Such
is the case with the tree that grows on Sethe's back. While the scarred
flesh is dead, the tree is "growing." The cultural text remains alive
and continues to speak in a discourse of oppression.
This language of oppression is the same language which Stanley Elkins
would argue gives birth to "Sambo," his caricature of the broken slave
in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life.
In his history, Elkins describes the "Sambo" phenomenon which he argues
plagued male slaves. The product of a system that required complete
conformity and deference, the lazy and docile Sambo exhibited a
child-like dependence upon his master. Those few who resisted
Sambo-ism, according to Elkins, became the fomenters of rebellion, such
as Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. (13) Elkins's Sambo
caricature, which was grounded in Southern antebellum representations
of the Negro, (14) became an integral figure in the cultural
understanding of the slave personality. (15) However, Morrison shows
this same text inscribed on Sethe's back, the text that forces Sixo to
renounce the master's language, that drives Stamp Paid to snap his
mistress's neck, that tires Baby Suggs's marrow, and that does not
breed docility and subservience, but "wildness" and a burning desire
for liberation, either through death, as is the case for Sixo, who
laughs as his feet cook, or through escape.
The "wildness" so often cited by whites as the most base animality in
the African character becomes a site of agency for Morrison's
characters. Although Morrison undermines any notion that this
"wildness" is fundamental to Africanness, she demonstrates what Judith
Butler characterizes as "strategies of subversive repetition [which
are] enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities
of intervention through participation in precisely those practices of
repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the
immanent possibility of contesting them" (147). This "wildness"--that
enables Sixo, "the wild man" (11) to "laugh once--at the very end" (23)
so they will know what a real man is; that empowers Sethe to liberate
her children, even if it means their destruction; that forces Sethe's
Ma'am to smile when she doesn't want to--becomes a "site of
resistance," "a central location for a counter hegemonic discourse"
(hooks, "Marginality" 34), which is precisely what Sixo accomplishes as
he c asts himself as property in his word-play with Schoolteacher. This
"wildness" which reinforced white prejudice served as a site of
repression, justifying the reduction of African Americans to animality,
but hooks insists that the margins, the same sites of repression, must
be understood as sites of resistance as well. (16)
In the minds of Southern whites, however, this "wildness" was more
conveniently attributed to an animality that existed in the African
character, and they contrived scientific evidence to "prove" it. As the
"exemplar of the right use of reason" and the "paradigm for all true
knowledge," Enlightenment thought valorized science and the scientific
method as the objective/neutral use of reason that could unlock the
secrets of nature for the benefit of social progress (Flax 41).
However, Schoolteacher exemplifies the flawed use of science in the
decades preceding the Civil War. As abolitionists intensified their
attacks on slavery, Southern intellectuals propounded the positive
social benefits of slavery for "uncivilized" Africans. (17) The
scientific evidence emerged to satisfy a social agenda, increasing in
abundance in direct relation to the attacks on slavery. For
generations, white Southerners accepted slavery as a "necessary evil"
without which the economy and social structure of the South could not
survive. However, in the decades preceding the Civil War, the Southern
view of slavery was transformed to a "positive good." Thus, "objective"
science fell into the service of a tainted social interest outside of
rational discourse.
Certainly
Sethe's murder of her baby served only as greater evidence of the
depraved African brain that required the "humanizing" and "civilizing"
influence of whites lest it sink into the madness and cannibalistic
brutality that was its nature. Surrounded by Sethe and what remains of
her community (Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, and on-lookers), the sheriff
finds himself left with the "damnedest bunch of coons [he'd] ever
seen," a testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed
on people who "needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them
from the cannibal life they preferred" (151).
"Coons," the sheriff calls them. To him, it is testimony to African
nature; for Morrison, testimony to the animality that whites
constituted within them. But Morrison is able to break down that
animality and reconstruct the Negro as entirely human. At the same
time, she breaks down the humanity of white people, fashioning them as
animalistic--inhumane, therefore inhuman. Morrison illustrates the
socially constructed Negro "animal" and the blurred boundaries between
human and animal, a gray area in which the slave was forced to dwell.
Schoolteacher, using Sweet Home as his laboratory, hypothesizes that
Africans have animal-like features, as well as human characteristics.
He engages his nephews in this social experiment, instructing them to
list the human features of a particular slave and then match up the
corresponding animal feature (193). Those features listed as
animal-like clinch Sethe's isolation from humanity and, therefore, from
reason, because it belongs exclusively to the human subject.
But the humanity that African American slaves seemed to lack was not a
feature of their Africanness, or a quality which science could isolate
as having a biological cause. It was, rather, a social construction,
placed in them by the inhumane and inhuman treatment they suffered at
the hands of the uncivil and uncivilized white man in his service to
knowledge and social progress. Few things reduced the slave to
animality so effectively as the bit in the mouth which stripped him/her
of language and humanity, replacing it with that same "wildness" that
could become a site of resistance. Sethe recalls the wildness that
"shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back," a wildness
that lingered long after the bit was removed:
"People I saw as a child," she said, "who'd had the bit always looked
wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn't have
worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn't any." (71)
Paul D can testify to the agony of grasping humanity once again, and
removing the wildness, after having the bit: "There's a way to put it
there and there's a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven't
figured out yet which is worse" (71). The marginality which hooks
insists must be viewed jointly as a site of resistance and repression
remains solely a location of oppression for Paul D, a construction
which must be overcome. And Sethe, with her tiring marrow and aching
spirit, tells Paul D, "I made the ink Paul D. He couldn't have done it
if I hadn't made the ink" (271). She, too, fails to recognize her
marginality as a locus of contestation, even after she has tapped into
her own "wildness." It was only in this space, a space constructed by
the oppressor, that slaves could act. Judith Butler writes that
"construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of
agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes
culturally intelligible" (147).
Stamp Paid's anguish over the unending pain and suffering that he
observes gives voice to the natural/animal construction that whites
embedded into blacks as a part of the slavery system.
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin
was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons,
sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way,
he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their
strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and
loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites
of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and
more tangled the jungles grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks
brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was
the jungle whitefolks planted in them. (198)
A witness to Sethe's horrific act against her children, Stamp knows the
pain of the struggle to maintain humanity. He understands Baby Suggs's
tired marrow, the consequence of humanity, identity formation, and
subjectivity for African Americans. It is through Stamp Paid that
Morrison articulates the integral question of white humanity. Tormented
by what he has seen, Stamp asks, "What are these people? You tell me,
Jesus. What are they?" (180). The use of what, rather than who, and
Sethe's reference to "those white things" who "have taken all I had or
dreamed" (89) challenge the humanity of the white man. Thus, by
contesting his very constitution as human, Morrison also questions his
relationship to reason and his position as thinking subject.
By throwing Enlightenment ideas off balance, Morrison makes way for the
formation of identity for her black characters. Like bell hooks,
Morrison recognizes that "black identity has been specifically
constructed in the experience of exile and struggle" (hooks,
"Postmodem" online) and does not attempt to separate the two. Baby
Suggs's discovery of her identity dramatically incorporates her history
of struggle. Her freedom purchased by her son, she begins to feel her
heart beat and realizes that it is her heart. She owns it. In the
Clearing she tells the people to love their flesh, demonstrating an
opposition theory of the body as she embraces that very site of her
oppression:
"Here," she said, "in
this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, flesh that dances
on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they don't love
your flesh. They despise it....And O my people they do not love your
hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love
your hands! Love them....the beat and beating heart, love that
too....For this is the prize." (88-89)
As slaves, flesh had been all they were, their sole identity. Likewise,
that flesh had been the source of their victimization. But, in freedom,
they have room to own and to love that flesh.
Baby Suggs has learned that all she has, all she could expect to have,
is herself. Therefore, her identity must be forged through her/self.
Sethe, allowed to keep and nurse her children, finds this a harder
lesson, tying her identity to them. After the loss of her ghost child,
Sethe retreats to Baby Suggs's bed, where she might safely examine
colors and be free from pain. "She left me ... She was my best
thing"--after a lifetime of Otherness and objectification, seizing an
identity which belongs to her is inconceivable:
He leans over and takes her hand.
With the other he touches her face.
"You your best thing Sethe. You are."
His holding fingers are holding hers.
"Me? Me?" (273)
By confronting her ghosts, by rediscovering her history, Sethe is able
to break down her constructed Otherness, but "can't nothing heal
without pain" (78).
Hidden inside
124 Bluestone Road, afraid to leave unaccompanied and finding her only
companionship with the ghost of her deceased sister, Denver lacks an
identity, which is in turn contingent upon her lack of history and
community. Denver attempts to center herself in her history, wanting
only to hear the story of her birth and nothing of the time before. In
so doing, she separates herself from that identity which is constructed
in the experience of struggle and exile. Thus, Denver secures her own
absence and alienation as she attempts to construct a single history
through which she might orient herself to the objective world. Only
through the discovery of other histories, other truths, can Denver
begin to develop an identity and shed the shame she has felt while
living on the margins of her community, both literally and
figuratively. Stepping outside of 124 Bluestone Road brings community
to Denver. Offerings of food, work, and friendship liberate her,
granting her confidence, dignity, and presence in a worl d that has all
but forgotten her.
Alice Walker
writes in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens that "the truth about any
subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together,
and all their different meanings make one new one" (49). In order to
capture "truth," Denver must uncover all of the stories, and Beloved
lays all of the different tales of the characters alongside one another
so that these, in turn, may be laid alongside the already existing
story of slavery and the African American experience. Morrison artfully
demonstrates this melding of stories when she recounts the death of
"crawling already? girl." This one story becomes many as the narrator's
perspective shifts from that of Baby Suggs, to the slave catchers,
Stamp Paid, and Sethe. Each takes the event from the "seen" to the
"told," but each tells a different story, a multiplicity of truths, all
of which merit legitimation. Not only is a single, universal history
through which the Enlightenment subject might orient himself to the
objective world not possible, but such a n action would ignore the
multiplicity of stories and leave its disciples isolated and alienated
from truth.
Many historians are
critical of the use of fiction to understand the past, for they believe
the factual record must be the foundation upon which history is built.
However, historian Deborah White recognizes that the historical record
regarding female slavery is sparse. Plantation records offer little
insight into the lives of slaves, and many slave narratives that exist
today were authored by men. Therefore, historians must make inferences,
she asserts (24). The alternative would be to accept the absence of
sources and, consequently, the historical absence of black women in the
antebellum South. Morrison's novel, while fiction, tells the painful
story of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave who killed her
three-year-old daughter rather than have her returned to slavery. (18)
A story "bounded by silence--[that] no one wants to tell and no one
wants to hear" (qtd. in Wolff 417), Morrison reconfigures it, giving
the power of voice to the slave mother who is historically voiceless.
But if no record or monument can e xist within the white man's
history--and until recently it has not, Morrison believes--then black
women must find alternatives to move their experience from the seen to
the told. Just as Sixo was forced to renounce the master's language
because there was no future in it, just as the bit disabled the tongue
so the slave could not speak, just as Sethe was beaten and scarred for
speaking, the white man for generations silenced the black voice in
official histories. Morrison bypasses the master's history so that she
might speak and the experience may be known. She also abandons the
master's way of writing history in favor of the African style of
storytelling called griot, which moves in a non-linear motion through
the story.
However, Morrison
places herself firmly within an African American literary tradition,
offering Beloved as an unconventional slave narrative in which the
tales of several slaves' journeys into freedom/selfhood are told. These
narratives allowed slaves to write "their selves into being" through an
account of the condition of being a slave, an idea which Hazel Carby
traces through the African American literary tradition. Similarly,
Deborah McDowell emphasizes the liberation implicit within the slave
narrative:
The only way he can
assert his existence as a subject is by rebelling against the system
that renders him an object. In the act of rebellion, the slave realizes
himself, gives order to the chaos of his condition, and claims what we
might call an existential authenticity and freedom while still in
bondage. (65)
However, Morrison
struggles against such an oversimplified realization of subjectivity in
which liberation of the self is delivered neatly in the package of a
slave narrative. For her characters, subjectivity is a "process" of
becoming. They will never become static entities of subjectivity, a
condition which McDowell acknowledges in "Boundaries: Distant Relations
or Close Kin."
Like the ghost
child called Beloved, the most tragic stories of slavery have not been
lost because no one is looking for them, thus creating what Carby calls
a powerful" 'absent' presence" (126). Beloved lies within the presence
of slavery, within "the shadow of a deep disappointment [which] rests
upon the Negro people" (Du Bois, Souls 4) that pervades the African
American literary tradition. But Morrison demands that these stories be
inscribed, made a "present" presence rather than an "absent" presence
masked by a people's amnesia. And these stories must not only be the
tales of tragedy but those of triumph, the tales of those who survived,
as well as those who did not.
Thus, each of Morrison's survivors comes to subjectivity, but by
different paths and with different experiences. Morrison is careful not
to essentialize the black experience, acknowledging the pain implicit
therein, but not breaking down Enlightenment reason and truth only to
replace it with an equally constrictive interpretation of universal
knowledge. (19) She does not simply generate a coherent subject who is
of African descent, but she dismisses the integrated whole in favor of
the fragmented self, most eloquently illustrated in her narrative
style.
Postmodern theory accepts
that the view of the human psyche as an integrated whole is a
misconception; more accurately, the subject can be described as
incoherent, fragmentary, or decentered. Morrison's text, like the
African griot, is developed as a series of fragments of the past that
unfold throughout the novel. Pieces that have been "disremembered" and
suppressed rise to the surface and must be integrated into text and
into the characters' experiences. However, this integration is never
complete. Holes remain; pieces of the story remain unexplained, like
what happened to Halle and who hung from the tree wearing Paul A's
shirt. Paul D recalls Sixo's explanation of his love for the
Thirty-Mile Woman in terms of his fragmentation: "She gather me, man.
The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in the right
order" (273). In the novel, the pieces must be gathered and put in some
order. Like the characters, the reader must translate and order the
fragments for him/herself. In this ordering, subjectivity coexists with
plurality.
"Part of our struggle
for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct a
self and identity that are oppositional and libratory," writes bell
hooks ("Postmodern" online). Beloved, while receiving the praise and
adoration of critics and gaining access to the canon of great American
literary works, remains an oppositional and libratory work because it
confronts head-on the intellectual tradition which has structured
Western thought for centuries. By removing the center, it breaks down
marginality. By subverting reason and the master's language, it gives a
strong, authoritative voice to black culture. Through its fragmented
narrative, it legitimizes the decentered self. And, ultimately, it
challenges the construction of Otherness which has traditionally
objectified African Americans, as well as other marginalized groups in
society.
Notes
(1.) West points out that, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's most
notable work, the author makes frequent references to "black, backward,
and ungraceful" folk. Du Bois also expresses his intent "to scatter
civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters,
but of life itself" (qtd. in West 58).
(2.) Philip Harper (12-13) concedes that the idea of social marginality
may be problematic because it connotes a fixed center in relation to
which it derives its meaning. However, the hegemonic rule of
Enlightenment thought has guided definitions and situated certain
peoples outside of what it accepts as the fixed center or, as Audre
Lorde calls it, the "mythical norm."
(3.) In Ar'n't l a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South,
historian Deborah Grey White struggles to overturn many of the
essentialized images of black slave women as either Mammy or Jezebel.
Mammy, the most popular historical image of the black woman and the
ideal woman in a patriarchal society, represented true motherhood and
devotion to nurturance and service, and this image was fortified by the
oscar-winning Mammy role in Gone with the Wind. Hollywood paraded a
string of mammies before movie-goers, all fat, happy, and posing no
threat to the femininity of the white starlet. Jezebel, morally corrupt
and opportunistic, offered the counterpart to the pure and upright
Mammy. The Jezebel caricature represented the sexually promiscuous
slave who offered herself to her master in hopes of receiving an easier
lot. Playing the role of mistress offered potential advantages that
many slave women could not resist-good treatment, sufficient food, easy
work, and possibly even freedom. In Southern culture, Jezebel
perpetuated social conceptions of base immorality and sensuality as a
part of the African character. For an extensive discussion of the
representation of African American women in American popular culture,
see Morten. As a child, bell hooks recalls the use of these destructive
stereotypes in the media. Serving as a system for the production of
knowledge and power, television and film reproduced and maintained
white supremacy through their essentialized representation of African
Americans, both male and female (hooks, "Oppositional" 117).
(4.) Jean-Francois Lyotard asserts that the unrepresentable is that for
which "every presentation of an object destined to 'make visible' this
absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate" (qtd.
In Harper 6).
(5.) Morrison goes
on to say that her book had to exist because no adequate memorial
existed to commemorate those who suffered under the system of slavery
in America. Beloved stands as a monument to those who might otherwise
be forgotten.
(6.) Morrison has
said, "Critics generally don't associate black people with ideas. They
see marginal people. There's a notion out there in the land that there
are human beings one writes about, and then there are black people or
Indians, or some other marginal group. If you write about the world
from that point of view, somehow it's considered lesser" (qtd. in Tate
121).
(7.) Morrison describes the
event in four consecutive chapters, each representing the view of a
different observer. In part 1, chapter 15, Baby Suggs is the observer,
followed in subsequent chapters by the white men, Stamp Paid, and
Sethe, respectively.
(8.) Sethe explains and/or justifies her act in several places in the
novel. For other examples, see Morrison 163, 165, 200.
(9.) Edmund Husserl believed that the world is seen as a reflection of
consciousness and speech as a reflection of absolute meanings that
exist separately from language. Pure meaning exists first as a
proverbial idea which finds expression through the human voice. It is
against this definition of meaning and language that Derrida defined
deconstruction (see Haney).
(10.)
In "Postmodern Blackness," bell hooks argues that this same linguistic
exclusionism exists within and is a fundamental shortcoming of
postmodern theory. She writes, "It is sadly ironic that the
contemporary discourse that talks the most about heterogeneity, the
decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of
otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized
audience, one which shares a common language rooted in the very master
narratives it claims to challenge" (online). Furthermore, postmodern
criticism remains the domain of white, male intellectuals whose
language remains exclusionary.
(11.) Michael M. J. Fischer, in "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of
Memory," emphasizes the importance of translation in The Woman Warrior
so that Kingston's experiences and myths might be analyzed and
understood by those who have not experienced them, in much the same way
that dreams must be translated from the visual to the verbal for those
who did not engage in the dream.
(12.) Jean-Francois Lyotard, as well as other postmodernists, rejected
singularity and universality in favor of a legitimation that is local
and plural. Postmodernists argue that it is no single common
consciousness that gives cohesion to society, but a complex
interweaving of discursive practices (Nicholson 23-24).
(13.) Gabriel led a slave revolt in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in
1822 in North Carolina, and Nat Turner in 1831 in Virginia.
(14.) Author William Drayton, writing in 1836, argues: "Personal
observation must convince every candid man, that the negro is
constitutionally indolent, voluptuous, and prone to vice; that his mind
is heavy, dull, and unambitious; and that the doom that has made the
African in all ages and countries a slave--is the natural consequence
of the inferiority of his character" (232). Drayton represents one
component of the pro-slavery argument that flourished in the decades
preceding the Civil War.
(15.)
Elkins's history was highly controversial within the discipline of
history and has been challenged by many historians, including John
Blassingame in The Slave Community. Although Elkins's caricature has
had cultural implications, it has not significantly altered the views
of historians regarding the slave personality. However, it does
exemplify a fundamental obstacle in historical thought that slavery was
so brutal and dehumanizing that it rendered its victims powerless, or,
at the other extreme, that it allowed a space for the agency of slaves,
in which case it was riot brutal and dehumanizing.
(16.) In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Deborah McDowell extends
this site of agency to include the writing of slave narratives.
Antebellum slave narratives protested against total objectification of
the slave as helpless by "demonstrating the evolution of a liberating
subjectivity in the slave's life, up to and including the act of
writing autobiography itself" (61).
(17.) Numerous Southern scientists presented "scientific evidence" of
the innate inferiority of the African race. In Crania Americana, Dr.
Samuel George Morton concluded from his study of the skulls of
Caucasians and Negroes that the two races were of unique origin, with
only the white race being the decendents of Adam. Dr. Josiah Nott
expanded upon the theory of polygenesis in what he called the study of
"niggerology." In Types of Mankind, Nott asserted that African
Americans "differ from us in color and habits and [are] vastly inferior
in the scale of civilization." Morton and Nott can be positioned within
a broad scientific tradition in the pre-war South. Sociologist George
Fitzhugh argued in favor of the "humanizing" and "socializing" benefits
of slavery. He asserted that, without the moral and social influence of
whites, Africans were little more than cannibals (see Cannibals All!
or, Slaves without Masters). For a discussion of Morton and Nott, see
Fredrickson.
(18.) The Cincinnati
Daily Enquirer for Tuesday, January 29, 1856, reported Margaret
Garner's crime under the title "A Tale of Horror." The article reads in
part: "But a deed of horror had been consummated, for weltering in its
blood, the throat being cut from ear to ear and the head almost severed
from the body, upon the floor lay one of the children of the younger
couple, a girl three years old, while in a back room, crouched beneath
the bed, two more of the children, boys of two and five years, were
moaning, the one having received two gashes in its throat, the other a
cut upon the head. As the party entered the room the mother was seen
wielding a heavy shovel and before she could be secured, she inflicted
a heavy blow with it upon the face of the infant, which was lying upon
the floor." This excerpt from the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, along with
the above quoted transcription, can be found at
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~maria/beloved/enquirer.html
(19.) bell hooks argues that a critique of essentialism affirms
multiple black identities and varied black experiences and undercuts
colonial paradigms that represent blackness one-dimensionally. Because
these essentialist paradigms have been used to reinforce white
supremacy, their deconstruction could pose a serious challenge to
racism.
Works Cited
Baker, Houston A., Jr., and Patricia Redmond, eds. Afro-American
Literary Study in the 1990s. Works Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.
Broad, Robert L. "Giving Blood to the Scraps: Haunts, History, and
Hosea in Beloved." African American Review 28 (1994): 189-96.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Drayton, William. The South Vindicated from the Treason and
Factionalism of the Northern Abolitionists. Philadelphia: H. Manly,
1836.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Dover, 1994.
--. Writings. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986.
Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and
Intellectual Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.
Fischer, Michael M. J. "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory."
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James
Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
194-233.
Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters. Ed. C. Van
Woodward. Cambridge: Belknap P, 1960.
Flax, Jane. "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory."
Nicholson 39-62.
Fraser, Nancy, and Linda Nicholson. "Social Criticism without
Philosophy." Nicholson 19-38.
Fredrickson, George. The Black Image in the White Mind. New York:
Harper, 1971.
Gates, Henry Louis. "Canon Formation, Literary History, and the
Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the Told." Baker and Redmond
14-38.
Haney, William S. "Deconstruction and Sanskrit Poetics." Mosaic 28.1
(1995): 119-41.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of
Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
hooks, bell. "Marginality as Site of Resistance." Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. Russell Ferguson, et al.
New York: Museum of Contemporary Art & MIT P, 1990. 341-43.
--. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female SSpectators." Black Looks: Race
and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992. 115-31.
--. "Postmodern Blackness." Postmodern Cullture 1.1 (1990):
http://muse.ihu.edu/journals/postmodern culture/v001/1.1hooks.html.
Malmgren, Carl. "Mixed Genres and the Logic of Slavery in Toni
Morrison's Beloved." Critique 36.2 (1995): 96-106.
McDowell, Deborah. "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin."
Baker and Redmond 51-70. McDowell, Deborah, and Arnold Rampersad, eds.
Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1989.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Signet, 1991.
Morten, Patricia. Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on
Afro-American Women. New York: Greenwood P, 1991.
Nicholson, Linda J., ed. Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Phelan, Peggy. "The Golden Apple: Jennie Livingston's Paris Is
Burning." Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge,
1993. 93-111.
Rody, Caroline.
"Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, 'Rememory,' and a Clamor of a Kiss.'
" American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 92-119.
Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar
Book." Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81.
Tate, Claudia. "Toni Morrison." Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Tate.
New York: Continuum, 1983.117-31.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. San Diego: Harcourt,
1983.
West, Cornel. "Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization." The Future
of the Race. New York: Random, 1996. 53-113.
Wolff, Cynthia. "'Margaret Garner': A Cincinnati Story." Massachusetts
Review 32.2 (1991): 417.
Jeanna Fuston-White is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at
Arlington. She is currently completing her dissertation which is a
comparative analysis of postmodern approaches to history in the novels
of slavery and the narratives of the Vietnam War.
-1-
|
|