Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter IV

1.     In this direction, Barbara Hill Rigney writes about “the double-voiced discourse which is Morrison’s text,” as well as its “controlled disorder” and its “serious anarchy” (1991, 4).

2.     Aoi Mori draws our attention to Morrison’s deconstruction of binary stereotypes: “Aiming at subverting a racial hierarchy and validating African American culture, she challenges a dualistic Western Civilization which has mutilated and debased the African Americans physically and psychologically: right or wrong, black or white, the oppressors or the oppressed. African Americans have been subject to the harmful dichotomizing by race which has strongly restricted their behaviors and social and political participation. In slavery, the status of slaves was determined by the race of mothers, either a legitimate white or a conquered black, with no acknowledgement of degrees of racial identity between these polarities... That is, the lives of slaves were determined by a strict racial dualism from the very beginning; and they could never subvert or qualify the imposed racial status ” (1999, 21).

3.     Beloved draws on an oral tradition, too. The novel contains accordingly motifs from the African American folk tradition, with which Morrison has been familiar since an early age, when she grew up in Lorain, Ohio, in the middle of a black community that indulged in telling supernatural stories. In the black folk tradition, there are significant ghost stories which might have influenced Morrison in creating Beloved, the ghost character. Trudier Harris draws our attention to a tale, “Daid Aaron,” which comes from the Gullah people. Focused upon the theme of revenge, the story tells how a dead husband refuses to go to the other world and allow his wife to have other suitors: “The widow finally gets rid of Aaron when he requests that her fiddler suitor provide dance music. Aaron dances gleefully and madly, faster and faster, until he comes apart, literally bone by bone” (Harris 1991, 156). The story of Aaron should therefore be linked with Morrison’s novel in the sense in which the dead members of the family return to inhabit the consciousness of the living. As Morrison’s text is inhabited by a ghost that feeds upon the main character’s memory, so the reader’s mind gets haunted by Morrison’s ghost-like text that makes reference to an intricate cultural memory. At a symbolic level, the ghost represents the embodiment of the oppressed memory that emerges at the textual surface as a memento, a reminder of the slave condition in the past. At a literal level, “the ghost in Beloved is not represented as a shadowy figure, a creature of legend or dreams, but rather as a character who drinks water, has sexual urges, and even has a need for mothering” (Rice 1999, 101).

4.     By comparing Toni Morrison’s and Maxine Hong Kingston’s work, Pin-chia Feng discusses the relation between the process of remembrance and the construction of identity: “The continual resurgence of the past leads the protagonist, the reader, and the author to a linguistic meeting place in which dialogic exchanges between different layers of history take place and vital ‘information’ is passed on” (1998, 24).

5.     See also Unflinching Gaze. Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, edited by Carol A. Kolmerten.

6.     For an account of Margaret Garner as the historical model used by Morrison to write Beloved, see the essay by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “‘Margaret Garner’: A Cincinnati Story.” The Massachusetts Review 32 (Fall 1991): 417-440.

7.     In the eighteenth century, Thomas Jefferson argued that blacks were inferior to the white population, though he concluded that this hypothesis should be verified: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to whites both in body and mind” (1784/1944, 455).

8.     In Beloved, Schoolteacher is one of the harshest promoters of slavery. His notebook, in which he takes notes about the slaves’ physical features and behavior, shows his aim to document the black’s inferiority.

9.     Stamp Paid is a controversial image: he is the one that helped Sethe, but he is also the one that unconsciously made the community hate Baby Suggs’ family, by bringing the blackberries and thus starting the party, the huge celebration that would attract the envy of the community.

10. In Beloved, as in most of Morrison’s novels, the heroes are seen in connection mainly with the African American community, and not so much with the white people’s society. For the community depicted by Morrison, it is the recognition or despise of the others that gives to any person a social and moral status. As a runaway slave and a criminal, Sethe’s status is ambivalent. This is why, from an ethical point of view, Sethe is seen by the others as a prodigal character, one whose act of killing her own child is unaccountable. However, from an epistemological point of view, Sethe demonstrates the truthfulness of her motherly love, when she takes the risk of claiming her children as her own.

11. In Greek, pathos means “sufferance,” and nomos means “law.”

12. See Morrison’s preface in Playing in the Dark, and her comments on Marie Cardinal’s The Words to Say It.

13. Missy Dehn Kubitschek comments upon Morrison’s choice of 1880s to set her novel. She draws a comparison between the 1880s and the late 1980s, when the novel was published. Kubitschek specifies: “Writing about the problems of the present in terms of the past has the advantage of not making the audience immediately defensive” (1998, 132). The critic points out that both the 1880s and the 1980s were times of change. In the 1880s, “the African American community faced many serious problems—worsening poverty, weakening family and neighborhood structures for raising children, and stereotypes to justify political neglect. Like the 1880s, the 1980s followed a period of drastic change for the African Americans. As the 1860s witnessed emancipation, so the 1960s saw the culmination of the civil rights movement. As the black community of the 1870s lost leaders like Baby Suggs, so did the black community of the 1960s lose the leadership of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.” (132-33).

14. As Krista Walter notes, “just as Brent learns that in order to protect herself she must negotiate and imitate the cunning ‘texts’ of her master, Jacobs finds that she must use the language of the sentimental romance (and the identities it engenders) in order to convince her readers to take action against slavery and its supporting social institutions” (1994, 4).

15. Both Linda and Sethe are assisted by female characters, which offer them protection and shelter.

16. One could ask here again the recurrent questions: Is Linda’s voluntary exile from the others and Sethe’s act committed in cold blood an imprisoning experience or a redeeming act? Certainly, for both characters, “indiscipline makes it possible to resist, to remove [themselves] from the actions of the Master/Other” (Jewsiewicki 2002, 595).

17. Irina Chirica convincingly argues that Sethe’s home actually stands for her conscience that is haunted by the memory of past events: “Sethe cannot escape from her house, as she cannot escape the memory of the past which totally fills her tortured mind” (1998, 200).

18. See also Mae Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text.”

19. “I do not remember these things/—they remember me”—both heroes seem to say (Frame 1986, 297). As Janet Frame’s seemingly paradoxical line suggests, a sort of reciprocity is present in the process of memory, which always implies a double process.

20. Sethe’s perception of time as cyclical should be related with Mircea Eliade’s comments upon the perception of time in traditional societies. Eliade specifies that there is a great difference between the individual who belongs to a traditional society and the individual who is part of a modern society. If the first has a circular conception of time, thinking of time in a cyclical way, the latter has a linear idea of time, seeing time as progress. The traditional person abolishes the chronology of history by endowing a certain event with a special repetitive significance, whereas the modern person places the historical event in a chronological order, history being the development of the Universal Spirit in its Hegelian understanding (1991, 108).

21. Many critics have noticed the ironical discrepancy between the meaning of the place, Sweet Home, and its cruelly dull reality. Sweet Home is a place that functions “as a critique of a system covered with the ‘begonias’ of the domestic ideal but built on the ‘rough logs’ of slavery” (Askeland 1999, 165).

22. Commenting upon the way in which Morrison links her narrative craft with music, in particular with jazz, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin suggest that her intention is to emphasize “the participatory aspect of that type of music that complements her conception of art as pictorial vision… The jazz musician starts from a well-known popular tune in order to imprint upon it his distinctive style in a more forceful way than if it has been his own creation” (1994, 152-3).

23. Brooks Bouson notes that by “exposing the shame and degradation suffered by the slaves, and because shame is a contagious affect, Beloved, like Morrison’s other novels, risks generating shame conflicts in readers” (2000, 136).

24. It is Paul D who reluctantly notices that she needs no man at all, that she has succeeded in escaping with no man’s help—revealing Sethe as a feminist character.

25. An abyss separates the world of the whites from that of the blacks, each of them being inescapably caught in their own condition. As Franz Fanon underlines in Black Skin, White Masks, a sort of “dual narcissism” appears: “the white is sealed in his whiteness,” “the black is sealed in his blackness” (1967, 11). Only seldom bridges of humanity are built between races. Such an example appears when Amy helps Sethe; another example appears when Mrs. Garner gives Sethe a pair of earrings as a wedding gift.

26. Baby Suggs’ name is symbolical. She refuses to be called “Jenny” because Jenny Whitlow is the name given to her on the sale ticket. In her discussion with Mr. Garner, the slaveholder, who keeps calling her “Jenny,” she explains to him why she is called “Baby Suggs:” “Suggs” is the name of her husband and “Baby” is the name by whom he used to call her. It is interesting how Baby Suggs refuses to accept the name and identity imposed by the white man and strives to keep a name inherited from her black husband.

27. In Harper’s Iola Leroy, the prayer meeting also takes place in the woods. The preacher, Uncle Daniel, is an illiterate black man, just as Baby Suggs. Harper insists that the secret character of these meetings has the role of evading the masters’ surveillance: “Although the slaves were denied unrestricted travel, and the holding of meetings without the surveillance of a white man, yet they contrived to meet by stealth and hold gatherings where they could mingle their prayers and tears, and lay plans for escaping to the Union army. Outwitting the vigilance of the patrollers and home guards, they established these meetings miles apart, extending into several States” (Harper 1893, 13).

28. Baby Suggs’ message can be put into relation with L. E. Lowman’s suggestion in The Negro Revolt: “By listening and frequently responding to the pure poetry of the Negro preacher, the Negro masses got a sense of history and moral philosophy… Even those of us who couldn’t read came to think of history as a moving, changing thing; we were never allowed to doubt that man as a created thing had purpose and that we, to be sure, were a part of that purpose” (1962, 47).

29. In many of her novels, Morrison depicts the black community in an ambivalent way, making it responsible for the characters’ fall or redemption. For instance, in The Bluest Eye, “the gaze that condemns the Breedloves belongs as much to the white people as to the African Americans who refuse to recognize their status as human beings” (Crišu 2001, 68).

30. The same idea appears in most of Morrison’s novels: the individual should be seen in relationship with the community. For instance, in Sula, the community’s venom infects the individual’s life and produces sufferance and even death.

31. Sethe’s case can be symbolically linked with another emblematic figure: Sojourner Truth. Truth’s biography, like that of Sethe, is shaped by images of loss. Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I A Woman” reveals striking images of motherhood as a deprived condition: “I have born thirteen children and seen most all sold into slavery and when I cried out a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me” (in hooks 1981, 169). There is an important interconnection between Sojourner Truth and Sethe, as both of them are able not only to survive a tragic event, but also to reconstruct their self-image as powerful mothers with a free consciousness.

32. Lori Askeland comments on Stowe’s mitigation of Cassy’s maternal force, even after escaping slavery: “When Cassy is united with and enabled to ‘sink into the bosom of the family,’ Eliza’s ‘steady, consistent piety’ must transform even the strong maternal force that Cassy redeveloped in the attic with Emmeline into the ‘gentle, trusting’ love of a grandmother. Her maternal love might still be judged too powerful or ‘too thick,’ as Paul D put it to Sethe in Beloved” (1999, 164).

33. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison specifies that “the fully realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand,” and its aim is to “keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a diet of the incredible political world” (32).

34. Jill Matus observes that “the narrative in itself, at least in the first half of the novel, conveys the nature of the traumatic past through its discontinuity and fragmentation. The narrative texture is built up of memories that disrupt linear time and blur the boundaries between past and present experience” (1998, 111).

35. Beloved appears as both a projection of Sethe’s guilty conscience and a projection of the black mothers that were forcefully separated from their daughters. Beloved consequently stands for a whole genealogy of daughters that yearn to be reunited with their lost mothers. As in Harper’s Iola Leroy, the daughter comes back to search for her lost mother. Moreover, as in Brown’s Clotel, it is the mother who also searches for her daughter.

36. Commenting upon the complex significance of the name “Beloved,” many critics have underlined how Morrison rethinks the Biblical tradition. Monica Bottez subtly observes the allusions to both the Old and the New Testament: “The epigraph of the novel is from the Romans (9: 25). St. Paul is explaining why God has chosen the Gentiles over the Jews, but curiously he is quoting Hosea. Of Hosea’s three children, representative of the Israelites temporarily rejected because of their betrayal, one is called ‘not beloved.’ After a period of punishment, God reclaims the lost people, symbolically renaming the children, as related in Romans” (Bottez 1997, 227). Moreover, Gurleen Grewal argues that the word “beloved” can be an allusion to another temporal moment in the Bible, the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (6: 3) becomes in the novel: “I am Beloved and she is mine” (1998, 210). Grewal also points to the fact that the novel makes allusions to other episodes in the Bible, for example “The Witness of the Spirit,” in The First Letter of John: “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ, not by water only but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth” (5: 6). Thus, Grewal shows that a transparent comparison can be established between Christ’s resurrection and walking on the water and Beloved’s appearance and walking out of the water.

37. See the novel’s dedication: “Sixty Million/and more.”

38. Morrison points to the similarity between the Middle Passage and death: “[Beloved] tells them what it was like being where she was on the ship as a child. Both things are possible, and there is evidence in the text that both things could be approached, because the language of both experiences, death and the Middle Passage—is the same” (Morrison with Marsha Darling, “In the Realm of Responsibility.” Women’s Review of Books 5, 6 (1988): 5).

39. Beloved’s appearance triggers in the novel the “trickster aesthetic,” which is described by Jeanne Rosier Smith as an aesthetic that “challenges an ethnocentric as well as a phallocentric tradition” (1997, 11). In the presence of this symbolic character, the past can be seen as a multi-voiced flexible entity to be re-lived and re-created through the agency of the others, i. e. Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, and the community. Smith’s “trickster aesthetic” draws on Bakhtin’s conception of the novel as a “dialogized heteroglossia” which incorporates diverse and sometimes contradictory points of view, thus undermining the monolithic supremacy of a unitary language.

40. The novel is so designed that the readers enter a “watertime” condition, in which the limitations of normality are trespassed by “a confluence of time and space in which all normal boundaries are suspended” (Morey 2000, 248). Ann-Janine Morey demonstrates that “watertime” stands for a new type of feminine knowledge that appears in women’s fiction, in which spatial and temporal borders become fluid. Morey analyzes Morrison’s and Atwood’s novels as illustrative for this type of fiction which resists a rigid categorization and proposes a cultural flexibility that threatens not only the strict schemes of the religious traditional Weltanschauung, as Morey specifies, but also the frame of the ethical order. For both Morrison and Atwood, “watertime” is a condition that brings in the “irrepressible fluidity of the inbreaking past” (Morey 2000, 248), a concept that Morrison designates by her own coined word, “rememory,” and Atwood by the metaphor of “surfacing.”

41. Claudine Raynaud correlates Beloved’s burning with Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which lies beyond the re-presentable: “Abjection resurfaces in the very ambivalence, in the impossibility of a definite referent, of that recalled burning (searing?) which points to consummation, to death by fire, or to sexuality” (1999, 78).

42. Denise Heinze notes about the importance of communities in Morrison’s text: “Morrison’s fictional communities, simultaneous expressions of structure and communitas, provide unique insight into the conflicting value systems of America” (1993, 107).

Discussing this scene, Terry Otten explains: “In attacking him, Sethe achieves an exorcism; in saving Beloved by offering herself, she at last frees herself from the demonic presence that will not release her from the past. Once Sethe acts to save Beloved, retestifying to her love, the ghost disappears” (1989, 94).