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'BELOVED' AND THE
PROBLEM OF MOURNING
by TERESA HEFFERNAN
How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the
keeper of the holocaust where all was lost?
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
Making a space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is
essential to any effort to create a context for transformation.
bell hooks, Black Looks
At the heart of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe, at a critical
moment, is unable to tell her lover, Paul D, the story of her dead
child. "Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him,
the subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it
down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off--she
could never explain."(1) Paul D, at this point, has already seen the
newspaper article featuring Sethe's picture and a story about a
run-away slave who kills one of her children when the owner catches up
with her. Desperate, he confronts Sethe, wanting an explanation. But
she realizes that it is not a question of filling in or countering this
"official version" with her own version: "Sethe could recognize only
seventy-five printed words (half of which appeared in the newspaper
clipping), but she knew that the words she did not understand hadn't
anymore power than she had to explain" (B, p. 161). For Sethe, language
cannot contain the event.
Yet,
despite her insistence about the failure of language to explain her
story, much of the critical literature on Beloved emphasizes the
importance of the novel in terms of the "writing" or "recovering" of
it. Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that the characters in the
novel are forced by Beloved (the ghost of Sethe's child) to confront
traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins the process of
healing, which she describes as "conscious meaning making about what is
inherently incomprehensible."(2) And Jean Wyatt, in a tempered Lacanian
reading of Beloved, argues that "the hope at the end of the novel is
that Sethe, having recognized herself as subject, will be able to
narrate the mother-daughter story and invent a language that can
encompass the desperation of the slave mother who killed her
daughter."(3)
In this paper, I
want to challenge these readings of Beloved and suggest some of the
reasons why the novel frustrates storytelling, bearing, what Gayatri
Spivak refers to as, "the mark of untranslatability."(4)
Lost Archives
The Europeans who travelled to what they imagined to be a New World and
who envisioned America as "mankind's last great hope, the Western site
of the millennium," a place of freedom and possibility, were, of
course, also fleeing religious persecution, social ostracism, and
economic hardship in Europe.(5) This transference of libidinal energies
from the Old World to the New is what Freud understands as the "normal"
process of mourning, where the loss of "one's country, liberty, an
ideal, and so on" is overcome in the process of mourning.(6) The
process involves an identification of the object that has been lost and
a "reality-testing" that determines that the object no longer exists.
This testing "proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn
from its attachments to that [lost] object" and that the object be
incorporated into memory.(7) The process of representing loss,
translating it into symbolic language,(8) then allows the "freed"
libidinal impulses to be redirected at a new object.
As several critics have pointed out, the "New World" model is
inappropriate in the context of African-American history. Maxine Lavon
Montgomery describes the European experience as involving "a gradual
decline in social, economic, and moral conditions, a major catastrophe,
then a new beginning--an unreliable model when imposed upon the Black
American experience."(9) And, as Susan Bowers writes, for the
African-American (unlike Europeans travelling to America) "It]he good
life lay not before them, but behind them; yet, every attempt was made
to crush their memories of the past."(10) For the African in America,
then, the "normal" process of mourning cannot take place given that
there is no new object (certainly not the New World) at which the slave
can be expected to redirect his or her libidinal impulses.(11) Yet,
neither can there be a conscious identification of the lost object,
given that, in some cases, the memories of it have been destroyed.
There are, in some instances, no testimonies or documents that preserve
in memory this "lost Africa"--the people, the genealogies, the
practices.(12)
Although Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. writes of Africans in the New World that "[n]o group
of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a
large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal
property of another human being,"(13) there is also a pervasive silence
around--as Morrison's dedication to Beloved puts it--the "Sixty Million
and more" who died as slaves, many in the Middle Passage. Referring to
those who died en route, Toni Morrison writes: "Nobody knows their
names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never
survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these
people. The people who arrived-there is lore about them. But nothing
survives about ... that."(14)
The
destruction of the records of these memories happens in several ways.
Morrison suggests that the classic slave narratives involved, in the
"rushing out of bondage into freedom," a "veiling" of "proceedings too
terrible to relate."(15) Both the psychological need to escape the
horrors of slavery and the limitations around what could be put into
slave narratives, given their largely white audience, contributed to
this "veiling." This desperate need not to remember left the Africans
in the Middle Passage "disremembered."
Furthermore, in the Master's records, there is little evidence of
documentation of the histories of the Africans who were transported on
slave ships. In "Names of American Negro Slaves," Newbell Niles Puckett
comments on the lack of records of names of slaves and cites one
collection that lists evidence of only 65 names prior to 1700.(16)
Puckett attributes this lack to the general tendency of early slave
traders to see slaves as undifferentiated, as mere merchandise, and
points to a slave ship's journal (1675) that refers simply to a
"neaggerman" that died suddenly and a New England slave notice that
advertises a "negro man" for sale (p. 158). It is precisely this loss
of names which plagues the "Dead" community in Morrison's Song of
Solomon. As one of the characters, Macon Dead, reflects: "Surely, he
thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with
onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was
real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name
that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this
lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or
to, could never be known. No. Nor his name."(17)
Finally, in the interests of sustaining the Master's myth that Africans
had no culture and no history, there was an intentional destruction of
the archive in the separation of Africans who spoke the same languages,
who were of the same families, and who practised the same traditions,
making it difficult for slaves to communicate with one another, but
also making it difficult for stories to be passed on and histories and
names to be traced. Throughout Morrison's novel Beloved, there are
questions about the nameless and the lost. Children, friends, and
spouses,. "moved around like checkers," are untraceable. Sethe, an
ex-slave, remembers Nan, the woman who nursed her, telling her of her
mother in her mother's language, "which would never come back," of the
other babies she bore in the Middle Passage, the product of rapes by
the crew, whom she threw away "without names" (B, p. 62). Baby Suggs,
Sethe's mother-in-law, referring to her lost children, tells Sethe: "My
first born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned
bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I
remember" (B, p. 5). When Mr. Garner asks Baby Suggs what she calls
herself, although she has many names-given to her by her husband (whom
she never locates), Garner, and her former owner-she answers "I don't
call myself nothing" (B, p. 142). And at the end of the novel, it is
Beloved, herself, the ghost/child of Sethe and the voices of those who
died in the Middle Passage, who disappears so completely that "[b]y and
by all trace [was] gone" (B, p. 275).
The question that remains about the exact number of those who died in
the Middle Passage, which is signalled by the "and more" in Morrison's
dedication to Beloved, suggests an "occurrence" which has not and
cannot be recorded, documented, quantified to the satisfaction of
historians. According to the laws of knowledge that have governed the
writing of history, then, there can be no "unveiling"; the "veil"
cannot be ripped away to disclose the records of the names of the
"disremembered and unaccounted for" (B, p. 274).
How do we write or remember a history without documents, without "any
songs or dances or tales"? How do we read the story of the "unaccounted
for"? Morrison's novel is a testament to this untranslatable loss, a
loss that is embodied in Beloved, and that explains, in part, why Sethe
cannot tell her story. Beloved, the figure through which the murmurings
of these millions who were dislocated, who lost their names, languages,
families, traditions, and lives are transmitted, is herself an
impossible figure to represent: "Everybody knew what she was called,
but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for,
she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they
were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?" (B, p. 274).
Yet, in the novel, the past, whether recorded or unrecorded, is also
what cannot be kept at bay. It lives alongside the present, seeking
revenge, haunting the living: Stamp Paid thinks about "the mumbling of
the black and angry dead" that surround 124 (B, p. 198), and Baby Suggs
realizes that "`[n]ot a house in the country ain't packed to its
rafters with some dead Negro's grief'" (B, p. 5). These ghosts, like
Beloved, are a reminder that the past can never really be past, that it
cannot be escaped or ignored, because it is always already living
alongside the present, dismantling the authority of the word,
interfering with the linear narrative of history:
"Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see
something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A
thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to
somebody else. Where I was before here, that place is real. It's never
going away. Even if the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies.
The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never
was there--if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will
happen again ..." Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there,
waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."
Sethe looked right in Denver's face.
"Nothing ever does," she said. (B, p. 36)
"Rememory" impedes the logic of symbolic language, which cannot master
loss but is only a mechanism that allows for a documentation of history
that leaves much of the past suppressed, repressed, buried in the name
of order and outside of the order of the name. Whether the past is
crushed or forgotten, the novel suggests, it never really goes away
because the present does not rule it, just as the symbolic does not
rule loss.(18) Beloved, who returns from the dead to disrupt Sethe's
household and the community, refuses to allow the present to feel "at
home"--comfortable and reconciled with the past. She refuses to
participate in the museum of history, to be part of a past that is
exchanged, or sacrificed, for a future ideal. This ghost/woman is a
reminder of lost futures, of futures that have failed to be, and thus
she counters the dreams of a future to come that reconciles itself to
the past. While, at the end of the novel, Beloved disappears without a
trace, she "disappears," paradoxically, pregnant, carrying a future,
like her own, that will not have been.
Beloved foregrounds what Rebecca Comay refers to as "countermemory
which calls all accounting memory into question." Accounting-memory
seeks redemption from and reconciliation with the past. Countermemory
"memorializes itself as the will-have-been of what was-not-to-be: a
future whose only moment inscribes the missed moment of betrayed and
relinquished hope. Its presence is thus its forgone absence, its
possibility just its impossibility: its self-disclosure just the gap
left by its prior failure to appear."(19) This understanding of loss,
which destabilizes historical accounts, is not a rejection of history,
but rather an acknowledgement that loss is a condition of history.
The Logic of the Symbolic
When Paul D goes to visit Sethe at the end of the novel, she, still
tormented by the memory of Schoolteacher telling his students to list
her animal characteristics, says to him, "`I made the ink, Paul D. He
[School-teacher] couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink.'" (B,
p. 271). In order to prevent her own child from undergoing this
listing, she slits her baby's throat, convinced that this is a better
fate than being written into the order of language, which could
"[d]irty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so
bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up" (B, p. 251). The
loss of identity that Sethe fears at the pen of Schoolteacher is, in
her mind, worse than death.
Why is
it that symbolic language proves so destructive that Sethe would choose
to kill her child rather than have her named by it? We can begin to
understand the problem of the symbolic if we consider it in the context
of both African-American history and Helene Cixous' critique of Freud's
model of mourning. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that the Old World was abandoned in
favor of the New World, to some extent, because it was overly "free."
The state had turned its back on God's laws and the aristocrats had
forsaken their sense of duty. The Old World was rife with
licentiousness and lawlessness, and it tolerated the abuse of many. The
desperate and persecuted, in turn, fled to the New World. Thus,
Morrison writes, "[t]he desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a
yearning for God's law is born of the detestation of human license and
corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall of poverty, hunger, and
debt."(20)
Arriving in America
with expectations of liberty, the immigrants continued to be haunted by
this dark side of freedom, a fear that was displaced onto the large
African population, where anxiety about the "terror of freedom" (the
unbounded, the unrestricted, the uncivilized) could play itself out on
the bounded black body, leaving the concept of freedom as an escape
from tyranny a cherished national dream. Morrison concludes: "[i]n
other words, this slave population was understood to have offered
itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the
abstractions of human potential and the rights of man."(21)
If we contemplate Cixous' critique (which investigates the question
about what is lost to the symbolic order) in this framework, one of the
central dilemmas in the novel becomes clear. Cixous argues that the
Freudian model of mourning, which encourages the translation of loss
into symbolic language, originates in the fear of castration. Mourning,
the incorporation of the lost object, allows the lost object to be
recovered in the language of the symbolic, so that you can "refuse to
admit that something of your self might be lost in the lost
object."(22) In the privileging of the symbolic, the fear of loss is
displaced onto what it names as other in order to avoid losing the
self. Hence castration anxiety, which stems from an imagined unity of
self, also virulently opposes the other within, which threatens this
unity. Cixous writes:
Man cannot live without resigning himself to loss. He has to mourn. It's
his way of withstanding castration. He goes through castration, that is,
and by sublimation incorporates the lost object. Mourning, resigning
oneself to loss, means not losing. When you've lost something and the loss
is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of yourself might be
lost in the lost object. So you "mourn," you make haste to recover the
investment made in the lost object.(23)
Reading Cixous into Morrison, the newly arrived Americans mourn the
loss of their freedom in the Old World and withstand castration by
refusing to admit that something of themselves has been lost to the
lost object. The then-sublimated object--freedom as an ideal--is
incorporated and mourned. The dream of freedom remains pure, while the
anxiety about castration (the self lost to freedom) is displaced onto
the black body. In Beloved, where the white masters imagine the black
body as uncivilized and animal-like, the "dream" of freedom finds
expression when Schoolteacher and company witness Sethe's attempt to
save her children from enslavement. Schoolteacher concludes that
Sethe's violent protest is "[a]ll 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" (B, p.
151). Schoolteacher's anxieties about the dark side of power and
freedom, about his own abusive behaviour in the "free" world, are
displaced onto Sethe, signalling his desire to keep pure the dream of
freedom in America. The more radical his attempts to separate himself
from the other (the dark side of freedom--the wilderness, the cannibal,
the jungle), the less able he is to recognize "the screaming baboon"
that "live[s] under [his] own white skin" (B, p. 199). Motivated by the
fear of castration (the loss of self), Schoolteacher understands
freedom in terms of mourning (the translation of loss into the
symbolic) and thus perpetuates an even greater loss in displacing the
otherness of freedom onto Sethe. It is this greater loss that Sethe
interrupts in killing her child and that finds expression in the figure
of Beloved.
Both Sethe's violent
act and Beloved's return disrupt the Freudian model of mourning,
exposing the logic of the symbolic and challenging the idea of a
unified self.(24) Sethe's "barbarous act of love upon her child,"(25)
as one critic has described the killing, is also an act against
herself-self-mutilation, which puts in crisis the boundaries between
self and other and rends the master/slave hierarchy. In Morrison's
other work, as Susan Willis has pointed out, self-mutilation is a
common strategy and "represents the individual's direct confrontation
with the oppressive social forces inherent in white domination."(26)
This act stops Schoolteacher, momentarily, "in his tracks"--confronted
with the transgression and confusion of identities, boundaries, and
names, he is destabilized, implicated in the violence, enslaved by his
own image of the slave, an image he quickly steps away from.
After watching Sethe slit the throat of her baby, Schoolteacher
dismisses her as having "gone wild," but the description of Sethe
looking "him dead in the eye," holding "something in her arms that
stopped him in his tracks" (B, p. 164), while the nephew stands shaking
and lost in a confusion that his uncle had warned him against (B, p.
150), suggests that the violent event exceeds the explanations of the
witnesses. Schoolteacher's "place of knowing," the Law of the
Father/Master, is momentarily usurped by the bodies of Sethe's
children. Sethe's act--the killing of her child-suspends the order of
the word, exposes the implicit violence of the symbolic, points to the
arbitrariness of a system that names her as slave and Schoolteacher as
master, and traps the messenger in his own message and the definer in
his own definition. Or, as Stamp Paid finally comes to realize: "`She
ain't crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the
hurter'" (B, p. 234).
Beloved, on
her return, continues this confusion of identities. She cannot be
translated into the symbolic and relegated to memory because she is the
other that invades and constitutes the self: "You are my face; I am
you. Why did you leave me who am you? / I will never leave you again /
Don't ever leave me again / You will never leave me again / You went
into the water / I drank your blood / I brought your milk" (B, p. 216).
The milk and blood suggest the embodiment (as opposed to the
symbolization) of loss, while the confusion of pronouns--the "I" that
is at once Denver, Sethe, Beloved, and the slaves of the Middle
Passage--renders fluid the barriers between self and other.
"The sound that broke the back of words"
In classic slave narratives, the argument is often made, the slave
moves from object to subject through the act of narration. Yet,
significantly, Sethe never "writes" her story and the affirmation of
herself as subject at the end of the novel--"`Me? Me'?"--is qualified
by the question marks. The classic slave narratives in their recounting
of the movement from old to new, from privation to salvation, echo the
European narratives of the New World. The slave narratives--for all
sorts of practical reasons having to do with the author's concern with
her/his legal status, the largely white audience, and the influence of
European literary models--move from orality and slavery to literacy and
freedom. Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates suggest some of the
inherent problems in the slave narratives' embrace of literacy and
freedom, given that these concepts, as they were developed in early
American society, were marked out in opposition to the African.
Gates writes in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self
that, according to the European model of the order of things, the human
was distinguished from the animal on the basis of literacy.(27)
Difference from the European literate tradition confirmed for the
advocates of slavery the inferiority of the African. Hence the
abolitionists were trying to publish slave narratives as proof of
blacks' humanity, while the anti-abolitionists were busy putting laws
in place that forbade the teaching of reading and writing to slaves as
a way of continuing to withhold from them the title "human."(28)
Further, as Toni Morrison discusses, the concept of freedom in America
was also complicit with slavery: "The concept of freedom did not emerge
in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom--if it did not in fact create
it--like slavery" (PD, p. 38). If, as Morrison and Gates intimate, the
white, literate, and free American defined himself against the
enslaved, preliterate, black, how can the "freed" black slave conceive
of freedom?
Although we cannot
underestimate the significance of the classic slave narratives in
aiding abolition, Beloved suggests the importance of examining the
limits of these narratives which, in their necessary acceptance of
Enlightenment notions about literacy and freedom, rejected an oral
culture and an African heritage. Part of the problem with the classical
slave narratives is that in fleeing the oppression of slavery, the
ex-slaves moved into the free states, but unlike the Europeans, who
displaced their anxieties about freedom onto another population,
African Americans had no such option. Hence, freedom continued to be
highlighted against an African past. For instance, Olaudah Equiano, an
ex-slave, writes in the dedication of his narrative (1792):
By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender
connections that were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through the
mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard as infinitely more than
compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of
the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments,
its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency
in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature.(29)
As long as the African past (the memory of "torn connections") is
"disremembered" in the name of a better future, there is no context for
Sethe's violent act, and the master/slave, civilized/uncivilized
dialectic continues to reign unchallenged in the "free" world, in her
community. In Beloved, this past is trapped in Paul D's tobacco tin and
withheld from Denver; it is something that Sethe struggles to "keep at
bay" and Bulgar and Howard run away from; it lives in exile with the
Cherokee in the forest, and Baby Suggs (and later Sethe) escapes from
it in her contemplation of the colors of a quilt--"pure" colors without
histories. With the past suppressed, the ideal of freedom continues to
be played against black bodies and Sethe finds herself the victim of
this logic. Following the incident with the four horsemen, twenty-eight
days after the feast, Sethe, locked away in 124, on the periphery of
the town, once again, is trapped, as Mae Henderson asserts, by "the
dominant metaphors of the master('s) narrative-wildness, cannibalism,
animality, destructiveness."(30) Ella, who has helped many runaway
slaves, including Sethe, claims that she does not "know who Sethe is or
none of her people" and Ella's suspicions about the "white [thing]
floating around in the woods" that helped Sethe deliver her baby
further marks Sethe as unnatural and alien (B, p. 187). Stamp Paid and
Paul D betray Sethe by trusting the white newspaper's account of her
act (B, p. 79). And, Paul D, echoing the words of Schoolteacher,
reminds Sethe that she has "`two feet ... not four'" (B, p. 165). It is
Beloved's return that finally releases the African-American body from
the anxieties about the dark side of freedom, which have been displaced
onto it, and, momentarily, offers something other than the tyranny of
the symbolic. Beloved enables the community to "break" the words that
continue to keep them hostage in the "free" world, words which have
made them forget who they are. Instead of "beating back the past" (B,
p. 73), Sethe finds Beloved allows her to talk of it, and "she found
herself wanting to, liking it" (B, p. 58). For Denver, from whom the
past is withheld, just looking at Beloved keeps the original hunger,
"the before-Beloved hunger," away, and it is not symbolic language that
Beloved provides but "[s]weet, crazy conversations full of half
sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than
understanding could ever be" (B, p. 67).
Paul D, in his escape to a "free" America and prior to his encounter
with Beloved, having internalized the order of the symbolic, keeps the
past buried in his tobacco tin. He grows up thinking that "of all the
Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men" (B, p. 125), and he
displaces his own doubts about his self-worth onto Sethe when he
alludes to her animal characteristics (B, p. 165). Further, when he
moves in with Sethe and Denver, he tries to throw the baby ghost out of
the house: "It took a man, Paul D, to shout it off, beat it off and
take its place for himself" (B, p. 104). Trudier Harris writes: "He
therefore enters it [ 124] like the teeth-destroying tricksters of
tradition entered the vagina, in the heroic vein of conquering
masculine will over feminine desire."(31) Thus, Paul D tries to mark
his place at the expense of both the female (in the name of the male)
and the African past (in the name of the American future).
But, after Paul D's encounter with Beloved and the release of the
contents of his tobacco tin, he begins to realize that there is
something beyond the tyranny of the symbolic. When the tin springs
open, it releases memories of "Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher,
Halle, and his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of
butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper" (B, p. 113). Yet along
with these painful memories is the memory of some other past: "Each
time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and
he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward,
beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame,
he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place
he once belonged to" (B, p. 264). The "ocean-deep place" is not
recoverable or translatable, but it does allow Paul D to "want to put
his story next to [Sethe's]" rather than to throw hers out and to break
from Garner and Schoolteacher and the idea of naming as absolute:
For years Paul D believed Schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had
raised into men ... Now, plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he
wondered how much difference there really was between before schoolteacher
and after. Garner called and announced them men--but only on Sweet Home,
and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?
That was the wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D
that those two were men whether Garner said so or not. (B, p. 220)
Finally, at the end of the novel, the community come to Sethe's aid,
releasing her from the Father's/Master's metaphors by claiming what
Sethe has already claimed--the lost other as their own, which breaks
the symbolic(32) While Sethe feels like she must persuade Beloved "that
what she had done was right," Beloved sits "uncomprehending everything
except that Sethe was the woman who took her face away, leaving her
crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile" (B, pp. 251-52).
This slippage, from Beloved as Sethe's daughter to Beloved of the slave
ships, suggests that the novel is not, finally, about Sethe having to
answer for the death of her baby girl, but about the community, who
need to embrace Beloved as the lost and unaccounted for. Outside of the
order of the word, without fear, the women see the beauty of Beloved
"thunderblack and glistening." In this confrontation with Beloved, they
remember the past as something which refuses to be entombed and which
offers other possible origins of the world. Breaking "the back of
words," the tyranny of the symbolic, the women "stopped praying and
took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no
words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that
sound sounded like" (B, p. 259). It is sound that foregrounds the
undifferentiated, arbitrary nature of language and that "baptizes"
Sethe. But this remembering is temporary. At the end of the novel, put
into narrative, into "tales" that were "shaped and decorated," Beloved
once again is "deliberately forgotten," written out by the order of the
symbolic (B, p. 274). When Sethe's mother displays her branding mark,
the circle and cross that is burnt into her skin under her breast, so
that her little girl will "know" her, Sethe, as a young girl, also
wants a mark so that she too will be "known." Her mother slaps her
face, a reaction that Sethe does not understand until she has a mark of
her own (B, p. 61). This mark of identification, that is knowable,
transferrable, translatable, exchangeable, is the mark of the owner and
is already caught within a (re)productive framing. As Sethe tells the
story to her daughter, Denver, the story of the slap, like the original
slap, interrupts the understanding of identity as something to be
uncritically reproduced, as history as something to be recovered or
passed on. Comparing this scene to one in Coetzee's Foe, Gayatri Spivak
writes: "This scene, of claiming the brand of the owner as `my own,' to
create, in this broken chain of marks owned by separate white male
agents of property, an unbroken chain of rememory in (enslaved)
daughters as agents of a history not to be passed on, is of necessity
different from Friday's scene of withheld writing from the white woman
wanting to create history by giving her `own' language. And the lesson
is the (im)possibility of translation in the general sense" (OTM,p.
195).
The process of translation
of loss into the symbolic, which is motivated by castration anxiety and
defers to the phallus, the Law of the Father/Master, is forcefully
interrupted in the novel, but the maternal does not replace it.
Although in Beloved, the maternal body is given a prominence not
normally allotted to it (foregrounding, pregnancy, childbirth, and
breast milk), this merely highlights how absolutely caught it is within
a reproductive framing and made to service phallic production as
Sethe's body and her children's bodies are harnessed in the name of
future profit. Schoolteacher, trying to figure out the value of Sweet
Home, calculates it in the following terms: "And maybe with the
breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be ...
Sweet Home would be worth the trouble it was causing him" (B, p. 227).
The maternal as an alternative to the symbolic is not viable in the
novel. Rather it is the "uterine social order" which services the
hierarchical binaries in the novel--white/black, male/female
master/slave--that is finally challenged in Sethe's refusal to write
her story.(33)
Beloved's ghostly
return testifies to the untranslatable, that which lies outside the
paternal/maternal order, "and before," as Spivak writes, "the
reproductive coupling of man and woman."(34) Beloved's return disrupts
the order of the symbolic, which in its insistence on the separation of
self and other, white and black, male and female, past and future,
orders both the racist and patriarchal paradigms in the novel. This
approach to documentation has made a mockery, a hopelessly inadequate
representation, of her story. Even her name, Beloved, which is
inscribed on her tombstone, is borrowed from the preacher's funeral
sermon, seven letters exchanged for the ten minutes of sex Sethe has
with the engraver. Hence, she in turn mocks the desire to represent, to
categorize, and to name. She is both adult and child, woman and ghost;
at the same time that she is the unspeakable and the unknown, she is
culturally and historically situated. The figure of Beloved dislodges
the very site of the opposition between identity and non-identity. She
cannot be named in any absolute way. In the novel she plays a multitude
of parts--she is the voices of the slaves in the Middle Passage; she is
the brutalized girl who escapes from the white man's cabin; she is the
daughter looking for her lost mother; she is the ghost of Sethe's baby
girl and the sexual female who torments Paul D; she is among the freed
slaves wandering the roads. She is the boundless, transgressive,
illegitimate, disruptive other who breaks up the peaceful ordering of
the free and non-free, who disregards the contract of presence and
absence, legitimate and non-legitimate, who disregards the laws of
gender and race; who puts in crisis identity and history; she is the
guest who refuses to accommodate the host. Even as she feeds on
narrative, her story cannot be accommodated by narrative conventions;
her words, like her body, are broken, dislocating, foreign, and she can
never be integrated into the community, "no rocking can hold [her]
down" (B, p. 276). Beloved can neither survive nor die. Hers is not "a
story to pass on" because it cannot be "passed on," documented or
effaced.
But even as Beloved
remains the "unspeakable," she offers the possibility of imagining
another origin to the world. Beloved is a call from elsewhere. As the
sister of Beloved, the daughter of Sethe, and the granddaughter of Baby
Suggs, Denver calls into question representability and permanence and
accepts in language both the possibility and impossibility of meaning.
Denver as the transitional figure, born in a river that separates the
free from the non-free, born with the help of a white woman and bearing
her name, operating in both an oral and literate culture, also
encounters a schoolteacher, but one who, instead of confining names,
opens up the possibilities of language, "the beauty of the letters in
her name" (B, p. 102). Denver's sense of the beauty of words seems to
be inspired precisely by her ingestion of Beloved (she drinks her blood
along with Sethe's breast milk), who topples symbolic logic, a logic
which has forced the other to bow to the self, the world to kneel to
the word, and the past to submit to future dreams.
In "The Site of Memory," Morrison writes of the Mississippi River,
which was straightened out to make room for homes and farms. When the
River overflows, Morrison suggests, it is not flooding but "remembering
where it used to be."(35) She imagines the act of writing as an effort
to return, like the River, to a place of origin. The origin, the lost
place, is as much a part of history as the documents and facts that
testify to the "here's and now's." Even as she works within the genre
of existing slave autobiographies, which she wants to "fill in and
complement," Morrison wants to hold onto the memory of where she was
before she "straightened out"; working with what is there, she holds
onto the force that has been lost to the order of the symbolic, the
futures that have not been.
NOTES
(1) Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), p. 163. All further
references to this text will be abbreviated B.
(2) Pamela E. Barnett, "Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in
Beloved," PMLA 112.3 (1997): 426.
(3) Jean Wyatt, "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni
Morrison's Beloved," PMLA 108.3 (1993): 484. See also Linda Krumholz,
"The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's
Beloved," African American Review 26.3 (1992): 395-408; Andrew Levy,
"Telling Beloved," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33.1
(1991): 114-23; and Margaret E. Turner, "Power, Language and Gender:
Writing `History' in Beloved and Obasan," Mosaic 25.4 (1992): 81-97.
(4) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New
York: Routledge, 1993), p. 195. All further references to this text
will be abbreviated OTM.
(5)
Douglas Robinson, American Apocalypse; The Image of the End of the Worm
in Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), p.
xi.
(6) Sigmund Freud, "Mourning
and Melancholia," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953-74), p. 243.
(7) Ibid., p. 244
(8) In Lacanian terms the symbolic is very simply "the order of
language." In the following sections of this paper the significance of
the symbolic as the Law of the Father/Master, as a system (the nom and
the non) that positions one in society, will be discussed. See, for
instance, the glossary in Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The
Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1975), p. 168.
(9) Maxine Loron Montgomery, "The Apocalypse in Toni Morrison's Sula,"
Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 127.
(10) Susan Bowers, "Beloved and the New Apocalypse," The Journal of
Ethnic Studies 18.1 (1990): 61.
(11) The slave does redirect her/his libidinal energy to the "free"
north, but, as I will argue later in this paper, this desire is
complicated by the fact that freedom in America is defined against the
black body.
(12) This loss is, of
course, not unique to African-American history. See, for instance,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans.
Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988).
He writes that with Auschwitz, "something new has happened in history
(which can only be a sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the
testimonies which bore the traces of the here's and now's, the
documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the
names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose
conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as
possible" (p. 57).
(13) Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., "Introduction," The Classic Slave Narratives, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Mentor, Penguin, 1987), p. ix.
(14) Marsha Darling, "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation
with Toni Morrison," The Women's Review of Books, March 1988, p. 5.
(15) Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," Out There: Marginalization
and Contemporary Culture, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T.
Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), p. 301.
(16) Newbell Niles Puckett, "Names of American Negro Slaves," Mother
Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of
Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Jackson: Univ. Press of
Mississippi, 1990), p. 158.
(17) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: New American Library,
1978), p. 17.
(18) Lyotard, in The Differend, compares the mass murders at Auschwitz
and the destruction of the records of those murders to an earthquake
that destroys not only lives and buildings but also the instruments
used to measure, directly and indirectly, the seismic force. The
inability to produce accurate records of the destruction does not in
any way dispel the feeling that something has happened. The rules
governing knowledge do not interfere with knowing: "the silence imposed
on knowledge does not impose the silence of forgetting, it imposes a
feeling" (p. 56). Lyotard concludes: "the historian must break with the
monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and
he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not
presentable under the rules of knowledge" (p. 57).
Sustaining the paradox of Beloved as both disremembered and known,
Morrison breaks with the "rules of knowledge" in her account of slavery
and searches not for what has been represented, not the "symbol," but
the unrepresented, the "feelings" that accompany a "picture" ("The Site
of Memory," p. 302). Morrison, in part, was inspired to write Beloved
after reading a newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner, a runaway
slave who killed her children rather than see them return to a life of
slavery. But Morrison is also careful to point out the limitations of
this documentation: "Recording her life as lived [as described in the
research material] would not interest me, and would not make me
available to anything that might be pertinent" ("In the Realm of
Responsibility," p. 5).
(19)
Rebecca Comay, "Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and
the Politics of Memory," Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and
Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press,
1990), p. 32.
(20) Toni Morrison,
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p. 35. All further references to the
text will be abbreviated PD.
(21) Ibid., p. 38.
(22) Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?," Out There, p. 355.
(23) Ibid.
(24) The maternal in Beloved is not the site of original unity,
something which must be killed off in order to express an autonomous
self as Jean Wyatt has argued in "Giving Body to the Word," but, the
undoing of the binary of self and other. "Loss" is thus not located in
some original separation from the mother. See, for instance, Domna C.
Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in
Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K.
Miller. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986): 157-82. She argues, in
her critique of the maternal metaphor, "the problematic of the
unrepresented is not peculiar to the maternal metaphor" (p. 164).
(25) Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni
Morrison (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 86.
(26) Susan Willis, "Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison,"
Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New
York: Methuen, 1984), p. 277.
(27) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the
"Racial" Self(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 25.
(28) Ibid., p. 17.
(29) Olaudah Equiano, "The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano," The
Classic Slave Narratives, p. 3.
(30) Mae G. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-membering the Body
as Historical Text," Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and
Nationality, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 79.
(31) Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison
(Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 155.
(32) The "[y]ou are mine" that is murmured in the section of the novel
which poetically renders the Middle Passage is not the claim of
ownership that mimics the slave owners' claim (as Jean Wyatt suggests
[p. 482]), but the claiming of the other as part of the self.
(33) Gayatri Spivak uses this term in In Other Worlds: Essays in
Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 152.
(34) Ibid, 153.
(35) Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," Out There, p. 305.
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