670 The American Century: Literature since 1945relating to more than three hundred years of African-American history. And it
concerned a fugitive slave called Margaret Garner who killed her daughter, then
tried to kill her other children and herself rather than be returned to slavery.
Morrison took this as the nucleus, the germ of her story about Sethe Suggs, who
killed her own young daughter, Beloved, when faced with the same threat. Circling
backwards and forwards in time, before and after the Civil War, the novel discloses
how Sethe and other characters – especially her daughter Denver and her lover
Paul D – struggle with a past that cannot but must be remembered, that cannot yet
must be named. In other words, it pivots around the central contradiction in
African-American, and for that matter American, history: living with impossible
memories. There is the need to remember and tell and the desire to forget; there are
memories here with an inexhaustible, monstrous power to erupt and overwhelm
the mind that must somewhere be commemorated yet laid aside if life is to continue.
It is a contradiction caught in a phrase repeated in the concluding section of the
narrative: “it was not a story to pass on” (where “pass on” could mean either
“pass over” or “pass on to others”). It is one caught, too, in the scandalous nature of
the act, the killing that haunts Sethe. In that sense, the mother–daughter relationship
that Morrison characteristically focuses on here is at once a denial of the institution
of slavery and a measure of its power.
Beloved is an extraordinary mix of narrative genres. It has elements of realism, the
Gothic, and African-American folklore. It is a slave narrative that internalizes slavery
and its consequences. It is a historical novel that insists on history as story, active
rehearsal and reinvention of the past. It weaves its way between the vernacular and a
charged lyricism, the material and the magical, as it emphasizes the centrality of the
black, and in particular black female, experience. It also forces the reader to
collaborate with the author, narrator, and characters in the construction of meaning:
the energetic refiguring of a past that is seen as a necessary precondition of the
present – determining (and so to be resurrected) yet different (and so to be laid to
rest). This involvement of the reader in the exhumation of a secret that is also the
narrative’s secret – the unspeakable heart of the story that remains intimated rather
than spoken – is the main grounds for the emotional intensity of Beloved. This is a
novel that reorients history, American history in particular, to the lived experience
of black people. It is also a passionate novel, that sets up a vital, unbreakable circuit
between historical events and emotional consequences, and then connects up that
circuit to any one, black or white, or whatever, who reads it. We the readers are
caught as the main characters of Beloved are in the “look,” the gaze that seeks to
reduce the black subject to the position of otherness. We share with these characters
the rigors of the disciplined body – the denial of the ownership of one’s own flesh.
We also participate in the strenuous, successful effort to resist all this: the right to
one’s own body and consciousness, the responsibility for them in the past, present,
and future. Above all, we share in the project of naming. “Did a whiteman saying
make it so?” Paul D asks himself at one point. The immediate answer turns out to be
“yes”; the ultimate answer is “no.” The novel and its characters turn out, after all, to
offer another form of “saying,” a more authentic way of seeing and telling theGGray_c05.indd 670ray_c 05 .indd 670 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM