Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter IV - “Ceremonies of Proper Burial:” Storytelling as Re-Membering

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter IV

“Claiming Ownership of That Freed Self”

Remembering the Unspeakable in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved

“Ceremonies of Proper Burial:” Storytelling as Re-Membering

By creating a symbolic spatial order, Morrison transforms the home of an ex slave into a specific site of memory. Morrison’s haunted house powerfully evokes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s description of the garret in Legree’s house, “a weird and ghostly place” (406). The garret is the place where the cruel master Legree abused and killed a black woman, whose mournful story remains buried within its walls, but is unearthed in the superstitions about the ghostly room. As in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Beloved, a house in Cincinnati becomes a liminal place, a fluid frame for storytelling, situated at the boundary between the visible and the invisible:¹⁷

124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims (3).

The novel begins ex abrupto with a tricky uncomfortable image: the ghost of the baby girl that Sethe killed eighteen years ago disturbs the lives of her mother, her sister, Denver, her two brothers, Howard and Buglar, and her grandmother, Baby Suggs. A psychological topos infused with painful memories, the house is emblematic for any home belonging to former slaves, as suggested by Baby Suggs: “not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (5). Moreover, the house is quite singular, since its special type of “rage” isolates it from the community and places it into a marginal position, which is correlated with the marginal(ized) identities of its inhabitants. The house-tomb epitomizes a threshold over which the others refuse to cross, a world turned upside down, in which the sphere of the living and that of the dead coexist.

Since most of Morrison’s novels can be seen as “ceremonies of proper burial” (Matus 1998, 2), Beloved has the function of unearthing the missing gaps of an African American history that is reconfigured by means of remembrance.¹⁸ The process of storytelling has an anamnetic function, being undertaken both by Sethe and her lover, Paul D. They have the role of catalysts for each other, since they can make each other talk about his or her difficult earlier period. Gradually, they attain the courage and patience to entrust each other with their own painful memories, first more guessed or suggested, then, circularly told from a multiplicity of perspectives that also gather the voices of the other characters in the novel.¹⁹ Therefore, Sethe’s circular movement in space is paralleled by her mental spinning around the unspeakable significance of her story that could not be approached directly.²⁰

The return of the past and its living memory are exquisitely caught by Morrison in the concept of rememory, a combination of memory and remember. Many critics have suggested that Morrison coined the word in order to encompass the reiteration of historical and personal events. As Philip Page specifies, “to remember is also to re-member, that is, to put oneself back together, which is what Sethe’s remembered stories finally accomplish” (1995, 150). Using (re)memory as a means of self-reconstruction, Sethe moves from an imprisoning condition obsessed with her past (infused with traumatizing images) to a state of mental independence (characterized by self-reliance and self-expression).

In the process of rememory, Sethe and Paul D have also the role of mirror-characters for each other. They project images about of how they used to be in the past, counterbalanced by how they are in the present, so that their identities continuously shift. The illiterate Paul D knows how to read Sethe’s past and present face:

The one with iron eyes… a face too still for comfort; irises the same color as her skin, which, in that still face, used to make him think of a mask with mercifully punched-out eyes. Halle’s woman. Pregnant every year including the year she sat by the fire telling him she was going to run… Her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light. They were like two wells into which he had trouble gazing… Now the iron was back, but the face, softened by hair, made him trust her enough to step inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light (9).

As a character-witness, Paul D is the only one in the novel who knows the reality of a plantation in Kentucky ironically named Sweet Home,²¹ and how Sethe used to be there. Reflected in Paul D’s eye, Sethe’s past image and present identity are placed in a mise-en-abyme. When she meets him again after a span of eighteen years, both her physical appearance and her mental state seem to change, to regress toward another younger age. While Paul D stands by her, she experiences a feeling of liberation, of being able to pass to someone else her troublesome burden—the responsibility of her life-story.

In this sense, remembrance may also represent a means of redefining the characters’ identity as autonomous by performing an escape from the unspeakable past. Unlike in the nineteenth century slave narrative in which the quest for freedom is paralleled by a quest for literacy, Morrison’s heroes never learn to write, but use remembrance as a means of achieving psychological freedom. Sethe and Paul D do not master the written language, but the spoken word. The remembrance of their life-story is vital for their own spiritual survival, as well as for the awakening of their people. As in African American oral tradition, Sethe and Paul D pass on their private stories to the readers who play the role of listeners.²² Crossing the haunted threshold of Morrison’s story, the audience sympathizes with the painful experience of the characters, so that “an affective and cognitive connection” is established with the victims of slavery (Bouson 2000, 137).²³

NOTES

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