Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter IV - “The Unflinching Gaze:” Denying Monolithic Definitions

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

“The Unflinching Gaze:” Denying Monolithic Definitions

Toni Morrison defines the double function of a narrative in her Nobel Prize Lecture: “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is created” (1993). In her view, texts are both the creations of an author and the creators of a certain audience. They seem to fill an epistemic gap in the reader’s mind, by revealing the unknown side of the black self. The silent images of the black community emerge to the textual surface so that the audience begins to speak, creating a text that, in its turn, reconfigures readers’ racial perspective. Reconstructing black history by means of collective and personal memory, Morrison’s fiction stands for an “interrogation of national identity” (Grewal 1998, xii).

Morrison’s novels—The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), and Love (2003)—respond to “a sense of absence and lack of representation” of the African American identity in fiction (Matus 1998, 37). The auctorial gaze is fixed upon a universe haunted by conflictive interrelations between oppositions: the self versus the other, the individual versus the (black or white) community, and the past versus the present.¹ Morrison experiments artistic freedom by deconstructing such stable concepts as race, gender, or sexuality, whose complexity and shifting multiplicity are skillfully emphasized.²For the author, “the role of literature is that of identifying conflicts, tensions, and problems, by making the reader aware of them, without offering their solution” (Mih�il� 2000, 151).

A palimpsest, Beloved combines the meanings of real and fictional events in order to reconsider the unspeakable truth of black history. The present chapter analyzes how Beloved rewrites the rich nineteenth century literary tradition of black and white authors.³ The chapter starts with the real story that prompted Morrison to write Beloved and with Morrison’s rethinking of the stereotype of “the black savage.” The analysis further discusses two of Morrison’s key intertexts: Frederick Douglass’ three autobiographies (1845, 1855, 1881), and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861). In addition, special attention will be paid to the way in which Harriet Beecher Stowe’s white sentimentalism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) is reconsidered in Beloved. A contemporary author, Morrison writes against that literary tradition that “drops a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison 1987, 109). Her novel offers a counter-history that rips the veil that has fallen previously over unspeakable events, so that slavery and its aftermath are reexamined from the social and psychological perspective of black characters.

Drawing on the deep interconnection between subjectivity and memory, the chapter focuses on the main protagonist in Beloved, Sethe, who acquires a polytropic character by rebelliously disrupting the white rules and affirming her autonomous identity.⁴ Sethe has to assert her independence twice: on the one hand, when she is able to overcome her subordinate condition as a slave and runs away in order to assert her own freedom; on the other hand, when she reenacts the past and frees her guilty conscience from its burden. The novel thus stages a double escape from the unspeakable state of slavery and from the unspeakable memory of the past. Remembrance and mobility become forms of resistance and represent basic means of constructing an autonomous identity that denies monolithic definitions and affirms the inherent difference through a multiplicity of perspectives.

By making us hear Sethe’s voice, Morrison rewrites the African Americans’ story at another level. She unravels the mechanisms of the white text imposed on the blacks in several versions: the newspapers controlled by the whites that manipulate the public opinion, Schoolteacher’s notebook that strives to prove the blacks’ animal-like aspects, ultimately the slave mother’s body, which can be read as a text upon which white power laid its imprint. It is Morrison’s task to make us reread these texts. It is her auctorial gaze that fixes the African Americans’ unknown life-story into the framework of her own masterpiece. In this light, her own words about Faulkner are significant in her case, too: ”He had a gaze that was different. It appeared, at that time, to be similar to a look, even a sort of staring, a refusal to look away approach in his writing that I found admirable” (Morrison 1992, 295).⁵

NOTES

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