Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'

Origins

Justine Tally

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134361304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This work expands the scope of Morrison's project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author's specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization's primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of "blackness, " Beloved 's multiple "ghosts" conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.

1 Literary Archaeology

[Truth] is not found in a series of historically verifiable proofs; it lies rather in the experience which [a] book permits us to have.

—Michel Foucault
The Order of Things

Though not an author who gives many indications as to how her texts “should be read,” in 1987 Morrison did publish one crucial essay entitled “The Site of Memory,” which divulges interesting aspects that were very much on her mind at the time of her writing of Beloved. She begins the essay speaking of the slave narratives as the “print origins of black literature,” though she points out that because of textual mediation¹ the interior voices of these former slaves were silenced. Reviews of the slave narratives often signaled the “objectivity” with which they were written, celebrating their avoidance of “inflammatory” discourse that might offend potential readers. Morrison also notes that the mere fact of writing was itself a challenge to the “Age of Enlightenment,” which equated “humanity” with reason and reason with literacy, which the slaves were not supposed to master. “Literacy was a way of assuming and proving the ‘humanity’ that the Constitution denied them” (Morrison 1987b: 189). Significantly, the author also points out that the Age of the Enlightenment was coterminous with the Age of Scientific Racism and that many thinkers and philosophers of the era (e.g., Kant, Hume, Jefferson, etc.) were totally persuaded of the inferiority of peoples of African descent. “Yet no slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement” (Morrison 1987b: 190).

Beloved engages all of these issues: It is a neoslave narrative, written from an extreme subjectivity, scrupulously juxtaposing the power of the written text with that of the spoken word, and examines from within the nature and definition of “humanity.” Morrison sets out to rip off the “veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison 1987b: 190–191) to examine how and why her people managed to survive such brutality in tact. Moreover, having been denied a “written history,” and therefore accused of not having one, slaves depended on nonliterary transmission, a “collective memory” that transcends even the oral tradition (see Chapter 2). Yet in her research for Beloved, Morrison found that the texts available from white writers and the anecdotes, stories, and songs from her own black tradition were wanting in the type of background information that she needed to comprise the story—only the germ of which came from the “true” story of Margaret Garner.² She must rely, then, on “memory” and on her belief that the imagination can provide more “truth” than facts themselves.³

Moving that veil aside requires, therefore, certain things. First of all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and in what I find to be significant. Zora Neale Hurston said, “Like the deadseeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” These “memories within” are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me. (Morrison 1987b: 191–192)

Nevertheless, perhaps the single most important inclusion in this seminal essay is her terminology for this kind of “excavation”: “literary archeology,” which she defines as a “journey to a site to see what remains were left and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply” (Morrison 1987b: 192). This term should immediately alert us to her interest in Michel Foucault, whose third major book published in 1967, titled The Archeology of Knowledge,⁴ examined what he calls epistemes of truth prevalent in given eras (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or the Classical Age, and late nineteenth and twentieth centuries still heavily influenced by the Enlightenment⁵). In C. C. Prado’s explanation,

Archaeology is a critical investigation of disciplinary systems of knowledge with the goal of understanding the discursive practices that produced those systems of knowledge. The archaeologist’s interest, therefore, is in disciplinary discourse,⁶ in expert pronouncements and idioms. [ …] The objective is to unearth, to excavate factors and events, overlooked likenesses, discontinuities and disruptions, anomalies and suppressed items, which yield a new picture of whatever has previously gone unquestioned and has been taken as definitive knowledge and truth with respect to a particular subject matter and more generally of how the world is. Foucault is everywhere concerned with exhuming the hidden, the obscure, the marginal, the accidental, the forgotten, the overlooked, the covered-up, the displaced. His subjects for investigation are whatever is taken as most natural, obvious, evident, undeniable, manifest, prominent, and indisputable. (Prado 1995: 25–26)

These disciplinary discursive practices, these paradigms of “knowledge,” enable individuals and governments to enunciate certain discourses as “true.” From this early stage of Foucault’s work comes his formulation that “truth” is only comprised of power and discourse. Moreover, and equally significant, “knowledge” is conceived as a form of power:

The claims of Enlightenment thought to be based on an equitable and just rationality with universal validity are in fact sustained, at a profound level, by processes which involve the exclusion and repression of forms of thought that are inaccessible to reason, for example madness. [ …nowledge is not a form of pure speculation belonging to an abstract and disinterested realm of enquiry; rather it is at once a product of power relations and also instrumental in sustaining these relations. (McNay 1994: 27; italics added)

In “The Site of Memory” Morrison also specifically notes that the Age of Reason gave rise to the most insidious form of knowledge imposed by a culture that presumed humanity to be based on literacy, which entitled itself to subjugate other peoples based on the “scientific knowledge” that deemed them intellectually insufficient. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes,

[A]fter René Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were “reasonable,” and hence “men,” if—and only if—they demonstrated mastery of “the arts and sciences,” the eighteenth century’s formula for writing. So, while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation on man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been “discovering” since the Renaissance. (Gates 1986b: 8)

Yet in Beloved, Morrison intentionally appropriates the terms of the debate as set out by philosophers of the Enlightenment, effectively challenging the definition of “humanity” as literacy, rationality, and Christianity (see McBride 2001). Sethe is neither literate nor “rational” in her response to schoolteacher; nor is she Christian in that rather than praying to a Christian God, she “communes” with the spirit of Baby Suggs, herself a preacher of the godliness of physicality rather than of spirituality. Her value as a human being does not spring from the terms of the masters, and her agency is determined by the deeply human concerns of a mother for her children, even though she has displaced her “self.”⁷

In his account of Madness and Civilization (originally published as Histoire de la Folie in 1961), Foucault studies the silencing and progressive physical isolation of a sector of the population that does not participate in the “discourse of reason,” all in the name of expertise. However, it is more than just a curiosity that Foucault never examines the implications of the rise of the African slave trade at the same time, especially considering that it was also during the “enlightened” century (1721–1820) that 60 percent of all African slaves were shipped to the New World. A full 87 percent of all slaves taken to British North America arrived there between 1701 and 1810 (see Daniels 1990: Chapter 3).

The omission is particularly interesting because Eric Williams in his seminal study of Capitalism & Slavery (1944) had postulated that the socioeconomic circumstances that gave rise to slavery, facilitating the Industrial Revolution in Britain, were the same root cause of its abolition, not the purported “high-minded” rhetoric of the abolitionists. The arguments and data he uses give rise to theses that are certainly “Foucauldian” in nature. Even contemporary critics such as Sharon Holland, among others, marvel at the abysmal absence of philosophical thought on the implications of the Middle Passage. Indeed, Foucault’s reference to the isolation of madness in the medieval metaphor of the “Ship of Fools”⁸ makes this omission all the more puzzling, as the transposition of madness from its ability for truth-telling to its disparagement as irrational discourse is one of the philosopher’s arguments in favor of an abrupt change of episteme from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. In fact, for furthering Foucault’s arguments, it would seemingly not be much of a stretch from the metaphorical use of insane people sent away on a ship in order to criticize the church, to the silencing and brutal treatment of Africans on a slaver.

It is very possible, however, that Morrison has picked up on Foucault’s symbolic use of The Ship of Fools in her text. In Beloved, most accounts of the “display of abundance” that sparked the envy of the neighbors reference Jesus and the Sermon on the mount (“Loaves and fishes were His powers—they did not belong to an ex-slave who had probably never carried one hundred pounds to the scale, or picked okra with a baby on her back”[Beloved: 137].) However, the painting The Ship of Fools (1490–1500) by Hieronymous Bosch contains imagery that might well have inspired the specific scene of the feast offered by Baby Suggs, with its symbolism of eroticism and gluttony. Instead of the cherries in the painting (eroticism), Stamp Paid has gathered seasonal wild blackberries, and the two hens [that] became five turkeys serve as the large roast fowl (gluttony):

Now to take two buckets of blackberries and make ten, maybe twelve, pies; to have turkey enough for the whole town pretty near, new peas in September, fresh cream but no cow, ice and sugar, batter bread, bread pudding, raised bread, shortbread—it made them mad. (Beloved: 137)

Possibly, it is for these offenses that Baby Suggs pleads for forgiveness on the day after the feast, now painfully aware of the community’s condemnation.

There is no doubt that Morrison’s novel is a conscientious endeavor to address and redress the silence that has surrounded the Middle Passage and recover its horror for the national (and international) scene.

Moreover, given this author’s oftstated interest in questions of “truth,” it is hardly surprising that she would be attracted to the ideas of Foucault, who asserted that the value of truth poses “one of the fundamental problems of western philosophy” (Foucault, qtd. in Prado 1995: 146). If truth is a function of discursive acts determined by power schemes and the relationship of what passes for knowledge with power is interactive (power produces knowledge, which produces more power, etc.), then giving an interior voice to the victims of slavery is clearly a Foucauldian challenge to the reigning “truth” about the intelligence of Africans.⁹

However, Morrison’s neoslave narrative might be more appropriately examined as a “counter-slave narrative” in that it fundamentally challenges the notion that writing has anything to do with “humanity” at all. The “scientific” knowledge encrypted in the written text was in the service of the masters, and its effects on the enslaved Africans were devastating in their consequences. Writing is philosophically challenged in Beloved in a profound way, as is the rise of “experts and expertise,” which imposed a social hierarchy based on knowledge.

The urge toward the systematization of all human knowledge (by which we characterize the Enlightenment) led to the relegation of black people to a lower place in the great chain of being, an ancient construct that arranged all of creation of a vertical scale from plants, insects, and animals through man to the angels and God himself. (Gates 1986b: 8)

Although the story of Margaret Garner certainly seems to have sparked Morrison’s interest in using slavery as a backdrop for exploring the nature of sacrifice (“A woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself.”¹⁰), it is fascinating to note just how closely Sethe’s fictional story runs to a case of parricide in nineteenth century France in 1835, edited by Foucault in Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur, mon frére¹¹ in 1973. Foucault relates the notorious court case as a struggle between the discourses of the lawyers, who argued that Rivière was sane and a criminal and, therefore, should be condemned to death for murder, and the psychiatrists, eager to establish themselves as authorities in their newly conceived profession, who, without examining the defendant, sent reports arguing that he was mad and therefore not responsible for his actions. In the words of Phillipe Riot,

The elaboration of the picture of Rivière, in each of these two accounts, does not work towards reconstituting history; it defines a grid that operates to select from the facts reported by Rivière and by those who testified; it institutes an encoding that allows the facts to be interpreted. (qtd. in Cooper 1981: 73)

But Pierre Rivière had written his own account of the murder while he awaited trial in which he explained that he wished to free his father from “the tyranny of a domineering wife; his siblings took their mother’s side, so they had to be killed too” (Cooper 1981: 75). In fact, he wrote of various plans of action to accomplish his objective, fully understanding his actions and his fate:

And then there was the final plan: kill, give himself up, write about it, die. Save for the 29 days of flight, it conformed to the actual course of events. In other words, he knew that by killing his mother, he was sacrificing himself for the sake of his father. That particular bit of discursive practice seemed not to have gained any visibility at his trial. Indeed, it was assumed by the lawyers and the doctors that the words of a peasant could not possibly hold any integral meaning: peasants were, by definition, mute. Their only acts were their deeds, which the savants [experts], with competence and confidence, alone were capable of interpreting. (Ibid: 75)

After twenty-eight days of rest, community, and peace, reunited with her children and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs,¹² the posse, including schoolteacher and one of his nephews, come looking for Sethe and her children to take them back to Sweet Home in Kentucky. In a passionate refusal to allow her children to be enslaved once more, Sethe tries to kill them, only succeeding with her “crawling-already? baby,” whom we will only know as “Beloved.” Sethe, still nursing Denver, is taken to jail. In the “real life” case of Margaret Garner, representatives of the law wanted to hang Garner for her crimes, both for murder and for the destruction of private property, but abolitionists made much of the infanticide, alleging that this result is what slavery did to people, caused them to commit “unnatural acts,” thereby appropriating her case for their own ends. Even the “sympathetic” Bodwin recalls the heady days when his life was animated by the fight for abolition, a cause he fondly remembers as giving sense and purpose to his life: “Nothing since was as stimulating as the old days of letters, petitions, meetings, debates, recruitment, quarrels, rescue and downright sedition” (Beloved: 260).

Pierre Rivière’s memoir was ignored for over 40 years after he was hanged. Cooper writes that “[t]he very silence in which his memoir was buried is also mute testimony to the power of his discourse to upset the smooth processes of control being put in place by medico-legal practice” (1981: 78). Margaret Garner, like Rivière, was a pawn of different discourses, none of them her own; her story was effectively silenced by the competing di...