Next week, we'll begin talking about Toni Morrison's seminal 1988 novel, Beloved. Beloved is a book rich with Cincinnati history. It fictionalizes the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner into a magisterial narrative about love, human rights, and our ability to truly "own" the lives we lead. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Garner. She was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky during the 1850s and escaped from her masters with her young children by night from Covington across the Ohio River into the Union enclave of Cincinnati. When slave-catchers reached the home where she and her children were hiding, Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. An America already at odds over the issue of slavery was captivated by the story of Garner and her subsequent trial, which posed fundamental questions about liberty, personhood, and the law. When Junot Diaz was asked by Newsweek to name the 5 books of fiction that were most important to him, he placed Beloved at the top of the list, saying that "[y]ou can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past."
(l) Thomas Saterwaite Noble, "The Modern Medea" (1867)--painting based on Margaret Garner
Toni Morrison based Beloved loosely on the Garner narrative. She also wrote the libretto for an opera on the subject of the runaway slave's life, entitled Margaret Garner. Beloved and Margaret Garner are just two examples of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works, to Paradise and the recently-released A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I’m intrigued by the use of the term “rememory” in Beloved. In one sense, this word seems to describe the dominant narrative technique of the novel, a recursive style that repeatedly revisits traumatic events. Beloved presents a narrative that is preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions. Boundaries show themselves everywhere: between slavery and freedom, black and white, male and female, child and adult, dead and alive. The cost of crossing these boundaries is great and rememoring similarly comes at a dear price. This term seems to be very closely associated with memories that cause great pain to recall, but that also prove to be extraordinarily formative for the individuals. Because of both of these properties, such memories are repressed whenever possible and crossing the boundary between the conscious and the nearly forgotten involves, to some degree, reliving the trauma of the experience. I read the first-person sections that recall such painful memories for Sethe, Denver, and Beloved as linked to this idea of rememory as much they are to the characters’ identities. If this is the case, then it makes sense to express these sections in the narratively more intimate first-person. These sections that are supposed to reveal the truth regarding past events seem only to reveal the subjective but formative impact that these same events had on each character. This idea also seems linked to the way that the novel deals with the community’s memory of Beloved after she’s been banished. Their memory of her seems to be actively repressed. She will not be remembered because her story will not be repeated (which is ironic given that the novel is repeating it). This ending puzzled me. I have trouble buying that this tactic will succeed given the fact that, in many ways, the novel is about half-forgotten traumas reasserting themselves in the lives of the characters. I’m sure there are alternative readings of the novel’s ending, and I’d love to hear them.
ReplyDeleteIn Beloved, Toni Morrison does not go easy on her reader. And why should she? Her purpose – of crafting a work of art that attempts to broadcast the recursive horrors of slavery in a way that no history textbook ever could – requires the author to drop her reader directly into the haunted world of 124 Bluestone Road and trust the reader to learn the rules of that world as quickly as possible. Me, I’m basically a realist. So even though I was told almost immediately about “the outrageous behavior of that place […] overturned slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air […] the ghost that tried them so”(4), I wasn’t sure if I should read this information literally or figuratively, and as I was busy trying to sort out the characters and their connections, it took me more pages than I’d like to admit to realize we were talking about a real live ghost here. Anyway, after I tuned into Morrison’s wavelength, to what my man James Pihakis aptly calls “the dominant narrative technique of the novel, a recursive style that repeatedly revisits traumatic events,” I started to get a stronger sense of the book’s purpose, and Morrison’s choice to write according to the tenets of what I suppose we would call magical realism. It could be argued that Sethe’s story (and of course that of the real-life Margaret Garner) is even more harrowing than a traditional slave narrative in that Sethe’s escaping to the North does not result in freedom. She is followed by “the four horsemen” who cause her to murder her baby – an act I first thought of as unimaginable, but eventually came to see as her only real choice in the face of a future of slavery for her children. Slavery is not contained to the South; it chases Sethe. The past is a thing of power. It has agency; it brings Beloved back from the grave; it reaches out and repeatedly tears at Sethe and Denver, who at points seem to be the ones giving the past such power because in doing so they can be reunited with the family member they lost. In a world where slavery happened, where white men committed unbelievable atrocities against fellow human beings without remorse, it seems just as believable to fathom the ghost of a girl returning to life to haunt the mother who killed her in order to save her.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to this novel, I am interested in a different type of history that it seems to invoke and reimagine: literary history. Morrison is clearly writing in the tradition and style of Faulkner, particularly with regard to the obsession with narrating and re-narrating the past, a recurring motif in Faulkner's writing but also in postmodern historical fiction in general.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Morrison seems to be re-writing that history. Something as simple as the shift to the female point-of-view revises the Faulknerian tones of the novel (it doesn't disavow them, but merely points the lens in a different direction).
Thus, in this novel, it seems that history is being doubly re-written and doubly re-vised: Morrison is rewriting literary history, particularly with regard to Faulkner, who in turn was obsesses with retelling and re-narrating history. In the end, we have a sense of history and "rememory" that is based completely on perspective and retelling, not on objective fact (postmodern indeed). That is, the telling is what significant, not what "really" happened, which is manifested in both Beloved and Denver's obsession with hearing Sethe retell her past.
Toward the end of the novel, Beloved starts to gain weight and take the shape of a pregnant woman as Sethe gets thinner and thinner. This touching symbolism reveals how a person's past 'demons' wear away at their body and their spirit until there is nothing left of them. Sethe is saved by the community of women through an act of agape love. She is forgiven by her daughter and her lover. She is literally 'freed' from slavery and the ghosts of her past, but it took an act of love from her community in order for that to occur. There is a lot of power in this story.
ReplyDeleteGo blog(gers), go!
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