The American Century: Literature since 1945 671personal and historical past. That is why the last word of Beloved is, precisely,
“Beloved,” because the whole aim of the story, and its protagonist, has been to name
the unnameable. That way, we know by now, African-Americans and all Americans
can come to terms with a past that should be told, that will not be told (the paradox
is irresolvable) – and then, perhaps, be able to continue.
After Beloved, Morrison published two books that, with it, form part of a loosely
connected trilogy, Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). Morrison has said that the three
novels are about “various kinds of love” – the love of a mother for her child, romantic
love, and “the love of God and love for fellow human beings.” The three might
equally be described as charting the history of African-Americans. Jazz, set in
Harlem in 1926, was inspired by Morrison reading in a book she was editing,
The Harlem Book of the Dead, about a young woman who, as she lay dying, refused
to identify her lover as the person who had shot her. What distinguishes the novel
more than its plot, however, is Morrison’s innovative way of telling it. Imitating the
improvisational techniques of jazz music, she presents us with a narrative that
constantly revisits events and a narrator who frankly confesses her fallibility. “I have
been careless and stupid,” the narrator declares at one point, “and it infuriates me to
discover (again) how unreliable I am.” History is consequently presented as a process
of constant telling and retelling, with the openings for chance, the impromptu, and
mistakes that implies. And, at the end, the responsibility for that process is passed on
to us, the readers. “Make me, remake me,” the narrator tells us. “You are free to do it
and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”
Paradise is set in 1976. However, in describing the intimate contact between two
communities, one a black township and the other a refuge for women, it circles as far
back as 1755. It also supplies another example of Morrison’s characteristic strategy
of giving voice to the silence while initiating its own forms of silence. That is, it
brings those traditionally exiled to the margins, for reasons of race, gender, or both,
to the center of the stage; it allows them to name themselves and narrate their history.
But it quietly intimates its own lack of authority, the blanks and absences detectable
in its own account, and the responsibility that this imposes on the reader.
In Beloved, for example, the reader never knows who the young girl is who returns
to Sethe during the course of the story. Is she the ghost of the 2-year-old daughter
Sethe killed twenty years earlier? Does she recall Sethe’s nameless mother, since
some of her dreams and narrations seem to recall the horrors of the Middle Passage?
Is she a myriad figure, a composite of all the women ever dragged into slavery? Or is
she a very singular young woman who has been driven mad by her enslavement?
We cannot know for sure; all we can do is allow these possibilities to feed into our
own retelling of an intolerable, impossible past, our own project of naming the
unnameable. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain what happens at the end of
Paradise. The pivotal act of this novel is the shooting, and apparent killing, of the
women at the refuge by nine men from the township. Paradise closes, however, with
the “marvelous” disappearance of the bodies of the women and the reappearance,
then, of four of them. One of the several, unresolved puzzles of this story is, therefore,
what they return as – ghosts or human beings who somehow survived the attack.GGray_c05.indd 671ray_c 05 .indd 671 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM