FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STUDIES Department of Humanities
The Healing Power of the Ghost
In
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
An Analysis Through the Poststructuralist Lens
Eva Yigit
2020
Student thesis, Bachelor’s Degree, 15 HE English English 61-90
Supervisor: Iulian Cananau Examiner: Marko Modiano
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ABSTRACT
This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated.
From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system.
However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques
Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the
Yigit 3 dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically.
Keywords: abject, Beloved, Derrida, deconstruction, écriture féminine, ghost, Kristeva,
Morrison, motherhood, poststructuralism, semiotic order, spectrality, slavery, trauma.
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ...... 2
Table of Contents...... 4
1. Introduction...... 5
2. From Structuralism to Poststructuralism ...... 6
2.1 Intertextuality ...... 8
2.2. Deconstruction ...... 8
2.2.1. Logocentrism, Binary Oppositions, and the Reversal of Hierarchies ...... 9
2.2.2. ‘Under Erasure’, Trace, Différance ...... 10
2.2.3. Aporia ...... 11
3. Key Psychoanalytic Concepts ...... 11
3.1. The Symbolic and the Semiotic ...... 12
3.2. Abjection ...... 13
4. Discussion ...... 13
4.1 Absence ...... 13
4.2. The Reversal of Binary Oppositions ...... 16
4.3. 'Under Erasure'/Sous Rature ...... 18
4.4. Trauma and Spectrality ...... 18
4.5. Who is Beloved? ...... 21
4.6. Polyvocality ...... 23
4.7. The Semiotic Order and the Abject Other ...... 24
4.8. Mother's Milk ...... 31
5. Conclusion ...... 33
Works Cited ...... 35
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1. Introduction
Toni Morrison is much celebrated for her powerful novels concerning the black female experience. Her 1987 novel Beloved, set in the nineteenth century, tells the story of a formerly enslaved mother who is haunted by the ghost of her child whom she killed to protect her from slavery. It was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave pursued by slave hunters who, upon facing capture, kills her two-year-old child rather than returning to the owner’s plantation but is caught before killing her other children and herself (Morrison xvii). The novel contains a variety of issues related to slavery and motherhood. Morrison states in her foreword that she intended the heroine to “represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom” (xvii) and she compares readers’ reading process as well as her own writing process to “pitch[ing] a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts” (xvii). Beloved was awarded the 1988
Pulitzer Prize. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize.
Beloved is a novel that deals with the act of speaking the unspeakable. Although the language in the novel structurally appears simple on the whole, it is multi-voiced, multi-layered, and unusually complex, allowing a broad semantic range that exhibits rich metaphors and symbolism. Morrison’s narration technique overturns the notion of meaning as it challenges conventional semantic relations, and therefore renders the story susceptible to multiple interpretations. The story can be read as an example of several types of literature: as a psychological horror that deals with the mental deterioration of a mother on the verge of psychosis, as a Gothic story that centers around a mother and her daughter’s ghost, as a fictionalization of Margaret Garner’s story, as a sociopolitical critique of American racial history. This essay adopts a poststructuralist approach to
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Toni Morrison’s Beloved and aims to explore the polysemic nature of the character
Beloved.
To understand the multiplicity of meaning in the novel, it is necessary to explore the relationship between text and meaning and discover how meaning is constructed and conveyed. Texts set up a center to stabilize the meaning, and every center naturally has a margin. Deconstruction reveals the subtext, the repressed meaning hidden at the margins. The central meaning could not have been constructed without the subtext. The margins have a determinative as well as a deconstructive force. Simply put, it is the elements of the text that deconstruct the text. Accordingly, this paper intends to point out how the text deconstructs itself, that there is no absolute final meaning. The next section articulates the theoretical background necessary for the objective of this paper.
2. From Structuralism to Poststructuralism
The founder figure of modern linguistics and semiology, Ferdinand de Saussure, explains in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics that language can be considered a system of signs. According to him, a sign (signe) includes a signifier
(signifiant) and a signified (signifié). “Signifier” is the sign’s physical form. “Signified” is its referent, its meaning. The linguistic sign connects a concept and a sound-image, not a thing and a name (Saussure 66). Saussure privileges the spoken sign over the written sign, which is called phonocentrism.
Furthermore, Peter Barry points out three important pronouncements of
Saussure regarding linguistic structures; 1) the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, 2) it is also relational, and 3) according to Saussure, language does not reflect reality; it constitutes reality (Barry 36). Firstly, arbitrariness in this sense means that the signifier has no natural connection with the signified. As an example,
Saussure explains that “the idea of ‘sister’ is not linked by any inner relationship to the
Yigit 7 succession of sounds s-ö-r which serves as its signifier in French” (Saussure 67). Even onomatopoeic words vary between languages, i.e. the sound imitation of the grunt of a pig is ‘oink’ in English and ‘nöff’ in Swedish. Therefore, it can be construed that meaning is a matter of difference. Poststructuralism takes this position a step further and enunciates that, as differences are infinite, it is impossible to arrive at an ultimate signified that is not a signifier in itself, which Jacques Derrida calls a transcendental signified (signifié transcendental), the center of meaning which is absolute and irreducible (“Of Grammatology” 20).
Secondly, the definition of a word always depends on other words; therefore, the connection between a signifier and signified is relational (Barry 36). One can choose paradigmatically among alternatives, i.e. “to sleep”, “to slumber”, “to snooze”, and syntagmatically, for example, “siesta” cannot appear in a predicate position because it is a noun.
Thirdly, the meaning is not already present in the sign as it is assigned to the sign by the human mind. So, structuralism posits that language does not reflect reality; it rather constitutes reality. One can discuss language only by use of language.
Poststructuralist thought postulates that this does not simply suggest that the meaning is in the language, but rather implies that meaning is inherently relativistic as language can no longer provide reliable truth (Barry 52). In that sense, post-structuralism is considered to be the continuation of, but more often, a reaction to structuralism (49).
2.1 Intertextuality
Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality coincides with the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism. Intertextuality refers to the relation between two or more texts in which one text helps shape the other through allusion, reference, quotation, or parody. Kristeva explains the reduced role of the authorial intention of
Yigit 8 meaning as follows: “the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (Kristeva & Moi 37).
2.2. Deconstruction
Deconstruction first and foremost questions the basis of meaning and aims to demonstrate the inherent instability of language by revealing the inner contradictions in the text. Derrida points out that deconstruction is not a method that is applied from outside. He stresses that the elements inherent in the text deconstructs the text as his best-known quote encapsulates it: “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte]” (“Of Grammatology” 158).
Furthermore, poststructuralism treats language more like a distortion between reality and the individual. An interlocutor speaks/writes a language, but language, in a way, speaks itself through the interlocutor. On one hand, signification points to interlocutors’ unconscious motivations. On the other hand, a text has its own subconscious. All in all, language generates excess meaning. While some are marginalized, some meanings are centralized as an attempt to establish a coherent discourse, which categorizes meanings in hierarchical binary oppositions; i.e in the civilized/primitive binary, ‘civilized’ is central and privileged. When the privileged binary becomes decentered, opposites bleed into each other. “Either/or” becomes
“both/and”. Hence, the elements of the text deconstruct the text. The structuralist approach identifies binary pairs in order to show the unity of the text. Deconstruction, however, displaces them, so that the seemingly organized and stable system of language proves to be unstable and ambiguous.
Maintaining that language is uncontrollable and unreliable, Derrida argues that the discourse of the writer cannot dominate the system of language. The writer uses it only by letting oneself be governed by the system to a certain degree, so the reading
Yigit 9 must observe in the patterns of the language the relationship between what is intended to be conveyed by the writer and what is unknowingly not intended (“Of
Grammatology” 158). For example, he exposes how Saussure’s central arguments, such as the arbitrariness of the sign and meaning through difference, deconstruct his privileging of the spoken sign.
2.2.1. Logocentrism, Binary Oppositions, and the Reversal of
Hierarchies
Logos/λόγος means “that which is said”; its derivative meanings include divine reason, cosmic force, the rational part of the soul, essence, definition (Bunnin & Yu
402). Logocentrism assumes logos as the ultimate meaning —the transcendental signified— and establishes a system of hierarchical oppositions to maintain the stability of meaning and the validity of reason (Bunnin & Yu 401). To exemplify, ‘evil’ is defined by ‘good’ as ‘not good’ and ‘good’ is privileged per logos; in binary thinking, anything that is the opposite of what logos represents can be categorized as evil, i.e. in
Christian theology, the body is considered a site of sin. Derrida called to attention that, without logos as the center, many such binary oppositions cannot be constructed.
According to him, philosophy should be concerned with the condition of the possibility of logos, rather than viewing logos as the condition of the possibility of truth (Bunnin &
Yu 401). Opposing logocentrism, deconstruction intends to dismantle binaries to show the interplay between them. Nevertheless, attention must be paid not to create new hierarchies when highlighting the marginal. Moreover, deconstruction does not seek merely to destroy the binary but to displace it and situate it differently (Culler 150).
2.2.2. ‘Under Erasure’, Trace, Différance
Madan Sarup points out that understanding Derrida’s ‘under erasure’ (sous
Yigit 10 rature) is crucial for understanding Derrida’s theories. To put the word ‘under erasure’ is to write a word, cross it out, and keep it crossed out so that both the word and its deletion can be seen. The word is crossed out because it is inadequate, yet it is written because it is necessary. Derrida borrows this signification device from Heidegger, who argued that ‘being’ cannot be contained by signification because it transcends signification and, therefore, is the ‘transcendental signified’, and he wrote it in this way: being (Sarup 33). However, Derrida maintains that, since signs depend on difference, the structure of the sign is determined by the ‘trace’ of that which is forever absent, because signs indefinitely lead to one another in a circular way, never meeting an end.
As a result, the sign cannot be said to be a unity that links the origin and the end.
Therefore, “the sign must be studied ‘under erasure’, always inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such” (34). Derrida explains that, in addition to
‘difference’, which implies spatiality, signs depend on ‘deferral’, which implies temporality. Every time a signifier refers to another signifier, it is signified in a new context, which indicates that meaning involves a temporal process. The French verb différer means both "to defer" and "to differ" (‘Différer’). Derrida coins the neologism
‘différance’ to designate the difference and deferral of meaning. Deliberately spelled with an ‘a’, which is an inaudible distinction that requires writing, this term also decenters the traditionally privileged spoken voice (“Positions” 8).
2.2.3. Aporia
‘Aporia’ means an irresolvable contradiction. Norris elucidates that aporia is
“where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean” (Norris 19, original emphasis). By highlighting such contradictions, and forcing an explanation, the text is shown to decenter the very meaning that it intends to establish, thus the system of
Yigit 11 meaning is deconstructed.
3. Key Psychoanalytic Concepts
One of the seminal figures in modern psychoanalytic, linguistic, and post- structuralist feminist criticism, Julia Kristeva, addresses the relationship between language and subjectivity in her work. She criticizes modern linguistics for dissociating language from the speaking subject and emphasizes the importance of ‘the subject who
“means”’ in the theory of language (“Revolution in Poetic Language” 21-23). Kristeva’s theory of language prioritizes the questions of “how language comes to mean (signify),” and “what it is that resists intelligibility and signification” (Kristeva & Moi 90).
Moreover, her work links language to the maternal body and underscores the role of the prelinguistic sensory experiences in language and subject development. It is in these contexts that her work is relevant to the present analysis, considering Morrison’s text is a unique depiction of motherhood in slavery and the act of speaking the unspeakable.
The following sections explain Kristeva’s prominent theories about language and subjectivity.
3.1. The Symbolic and the Semiotic
Kristeva’s theory of language conceptualizes language as a signifying process
(signifiance) rather than a system, and thus emphasizes the continuous transformation.
She elaborates in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) that ‘the symbolic’ and ‘the semiotic’ are two inseparable modalities “within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the dialectic between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved” (24). She adds that no signifying system
“can be either ‘exclusively’ semiotic or ‘exclusively’ symbolic”, that the subject is always both (24). She goes on to explain that the distinction between them is that the
Yigit 12 symbolic is the modality in which a signifier refers to a signified, while the semiotic is an asymbolic modality associated with drives and emotions (26-28). The maternal body is experienced as a dynamic container of sound, rhythm, movement, and bodily drives, which she calls the chora. As a pre-verbal space and a psychosomatic modality, it regulates the relations between the body and the language, between the self and the other (27). Kristeva articulates that the semiotic is a disruptive force in language that can be seen in modern literature and arts, can be heard in patients’ narratives through tonality, rhythms, contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, and silence. It is not only a part of the signifying process but also a component of the identity and construction of the self. (Widawsky 62). For Kristeva, the subject is always in transformation, “subject in process’, due to the interrelationship between signifying modalities (“Revolution in
Poetic Language” ix). In conclusion, ‘the symbolic’ conditions the subject to conform to various structures, whereas ‘the semiotic’ allows drives and emotions to impact the signifying process in ways unique to the subject.
3.2. Abjection
Kristeva’s notion of abject (Powers of Horror, 1980) refers to the social and psychological process that negotiates the borders of the subject by rejecting what is unwanted. The separation from the mother is the first experience of abjection — the subjective horror of transformation. The infant “needs to abject the ‘maternal container’ upon which it has been dependent in order to be weaned from the mother” (Oliver 6).
Kristeva describes the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”
(“Powers of Horror” 4). Physically or psychologically, it is a type of dread that causes the psyche to determine the border of the ego by rejecting the “other”.
Abjection is necessary for the subject’s development. With the help of the
Yigit 13 imaginary father, in order to become autonomous, the infant has to abject the maternal container on which it has been dependent. (Oliver 6). In other words, the abject is what is disallowed in the symbolic, which is therefore rejected by the superego. That which the subject feels upon encountering the abject reminds the subject of the earliest experience of abjecting the maternal entity as well as the non-verbal, chaotic state of the semiotic order (“Powers of Horror” 13). So, the subject is drawn to what Kristeva explains as “the place where meaning collapses” (2). As the repression of the semiotic identification with the mother is the primal repression, the repressed comes up.
Abjection is the subject's only way to stay in the symbolic and not be consumed by the semiotic order.
4. Discussion
4.1 Absence
The first point that draws attention is Morrison’s dedication of Beloved to “Sixty
Million and more”, which alludes to those who died as a result of the Transatlantic slave trade. Daniel Erickson notes that Morrison seems to shift in interviews between the number referring to the Middle Passage in particular, and slavery in general. He adds that this eventually reflects the ultimate uncertainty of the event in historical consciousness (Erickson 227). The epigraph adds a historical subtext that starts to haunt the reader’s mind, and it functions as a discussion starter. Morrison’s second epigraph is a biblical quote from the Book of Romans about the Gentiles: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” (Beloved xiii), which displays the word “beloved” several times and expresses that God will extend his love to non-Jews and the sinful Jews. Arguably, this signifies, on a micro- level, Sethe’s reconciliation with her past, and on a macro-level, a call to blacks and
Yigit 14 whites alike to confront and reconcile with the traumas of the past. With traces from one another, these two epigraphs together reach new meanings at the end of the novel, when
Beloved is referred to as “disremembered and unaccounted for” and “this is not a story to pass on” is repeated several times (274). The epigraphs subtly allude to the
Holocaust, through which Morrison reminds the reader that such tragedies must be remembered and prevented. The meaning transpired through a temporal process and modification by later signifiers.
Beloved signifies, among other things, Sethe’s third child who was killed by
Sethe in order to protect her from slavery. Their house is always referred to as 124
Bluestone to underline this absence of the third child and to signify the unhomeliness of the house by emphasizing that it is just a numbered building, an address. The ghost that haunts 124 Bluestone signifies the persistent memories of the traumas of slavery, the rememories, as Sethe calls them. For Sethe’s psyche, feeling the existence of the ghost is better than the painful emptiness created by the non-existence of the baby. In other words, what haunts her is “absence” and her abject emotions. Whereas 124 Bluestone
Road represents Sethe’s world on a micro-level in which her third child is missing, on a macro level it represents the American history in which “Sixty Million and more” are missing. This absence characterizes the atmosphere that pervades the house and governs its inhabitants. In the absence of documentation, of discussion, the absent presence of the unspeakable contains the political climate regarding black history.
Paul D exorcized the ghost because his presence elevated Sethe’s sorrow. As explained in section 3.3.2, signs indefinitely lead to one another and carry the trace of that which is absent. The sign “ghost” is inhabited by the trace of sadness. This is evident in the wave of grief and immobility that strike Paul D at the door; “a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood” (8), “a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry” (9), “Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had
Yigit 15 soaked him. The red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been
(10). As if the sign is haunted by a series of signifieds, this “wave of grief” that “soaked him” stems from the “pool of red light” that signifies the dead baby that manifests as a ghost. “The sadness that crouched in corners” (20) is one of the seeds of meaning scattered by the author which links the crouching typically repeated by Beloved in her monologue regarding her former experiences (210). Moreover, Sethe’s sorrow is implicated in her address, Bluestone 124, lacking the number three, feeling blue, motionless, speechless; meanings multiply around the aspects of trauma and depression.
Bluestone can also be interpreted as a pair with the baby’s pink tombstone. This pairing blurs the boundaries between life and death, between the living and the dead and it dismantles the binary conception that dead is gone/absent, the living is here/present.
The baby is physically dead but her memory lives on and haunts/visits the house as a raging ghost. Sethe is physically alive but emotionally dead inside and dissociated from her environment.
4.2. The Reversal of Binary Oppositions
In that particular phase of Sethe's life, killing her child meant protection, to let her live meant letting her be destroyed by slavery. Her reality, a black female experience, has been pushed to the margins of historical consciousness or left out completely, and Morrison brings it to the center of attention. As she elaborated in her foreword to Beloved (xvii), Morrison’s heroine unapologetically claims her freedom at the expense of her most beloved. The historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who is a prominent scholar in women’s studies and antebellum South, notes that infanticide and suicide, albeit extreme and rare, were forms of resistance as a statement of ownership of one’s body or children (Fox-Genovese 329). To be in such pain and despair to have no other way out than death is macabre but not illogical. It is the logocentric nature of
Yigit 16 language that entangles itself in an aporia; in the life/death binary, life is privileged, death is the negation of life, thus it is hard to associate death with protection. Sethe deconstructs the conceptual opposition of life versus death and exposes the barbarism of slavery, which consequently, deconstructs the civilized white/savage black binary.
“Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing” (251) implies defiance against the master’s power. Furthermore, the passage below provides insight into the ghastly experience of slavery.
No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in
the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot
girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a
gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs
and threw her daughter out of the wagon. (251)
At the same time, the passage explains the reason why love is a risk for a slave.
“And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper” epitomizes the construction of the racial binary (251).
The dehumanizing atrocities of slavery are one of the focal points of the novel.
The racial binary is firmly signaled by the use of words such as “coloredpeople”,
“whitepeople”, “whitegirl”, “blackman” (8, 47, 48, 186). Spelled as a compound word, these words mark a dichotomy between people according to their skin color. The skin color does not only denote different characteristics of the same kind but constitutes two distinct entities like “lighthouse” and “courthouse”. Morrison’s text privileges the black voice and thus reverses the race binary that centers the white. The characterization of
Amy Denver contributes to the displacement of the black/white binary. She is the one who saves Sethe, who helps her give birth to Denver, after whom Sethe names Denver.
She is a white person who is positioned in contrast with other whites. She is a servant, a runaway, and she is kind and non-judgmental. In addition to Amy’s example, black
Yigit 17 people are not portrayed as absolutely kind. No one in the neighborhood informed Baby
Suggs and Sethe about the schoolteacher’s arrival accompanied by his nephew, a slave catcher, and a sheriff — “the four horsemen” (148). The novel adds multidimensionality to most of its characters and does not perpetuate the black victim/white perpetrator binary. Along with the race binary, the gender binary is also reversed. The black female experience is the central theme of the novel. By not marginalizing Paul D’s story,
Morrison displaces the gender binary and places them side by side. Paul D wants to place his story next to Sethe’s (273).
Furthermore, the fragmented and nonlinear style of narration forces the reader to put pieces together and build the story, which displaces the binary of the writer who puts forward/the reader who receives. Since “meanings cannot be planted in set places,... they can only be randomly scattered or 'disseminated',... so that much of it lands unpredictably” (Barry 51), the reader, in a way, chases them and participates in the endless play of signifiers and signifieds.
4.3. 'Under Erasure'/Sous Rature
The story is set in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, so the black characters are supposed to be free but they are bound to the yoke of racism and suffer under the weight of past trauma. Denver, an eighteen-year-old girl who has never been enslaved, is also impacted by slavery in the form of generational trauma, which is indicated by Denver’s taking “her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister” (152). Restrained by a tragic past, she cannot leave the house alone (205), she is lonely (12) and cries for not having a self (123). Besides, racism still segregates, subordinates, and threatens black people as implied by the carnival segregation (46), references to KKK and their Grand Dragon (66), lynching (180), and the ‘At Yo
Service’ slave boy figurine at Bodwins’ house even though they are abolitionists (255).
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The dominant white/subordinate black binary construction created during slavery carried well over after emancipation, even until today. Morrison, thus, puts the word
“freedom” under erasure/sous rature. Similarly, most of the focal points in the text, such as motherhood, love, family, are sous rature because the meanings of these concepts are contaminated by slavery. Motherhood is reduced to breeding (149), having a family is impossible since enslaved blacks are treated as saleable chattels, and love is fear (164). This reveals the undecidability ingrained in these meanings. Neither slave nor free, neither a mother nor a non-mother, neither loving nor non-loving.
4.4. Trauma and Spectrality
For Derrida, a ghost is an “undecidable”, because it does not conform to either of the polar ends of binary pairs. It is neither present nor absent, or it is both. It is neither alive nor dead, or it is both (Reynolds, “Derrida”). Spectrality also dismantles the past vs. future binary by destabilizing the linearity of the idea of time by forcing past into the present. In other words, the notion of “ghost” is a deconstructive force against the usual understanding of time and place. Wortham describes the Derridean specter in terms of deconstructive context as “a non-present remainder at work in every text, entity, being or ‘presence’ … like the ghost, a sort of non-present being-there”, and adds that différance and trace are such “ghostly ‘remains’” (Wortham 197). Derrida coined the term hauntology (hantologie) as a subversion of ontology. Deprivileging being and presence, hauntology centers “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (Davis 9). The difference between the psychoanalytic phantom theorized by Abraham & Török regarding transgenerational trauma and
Derrida’s deconstructive specter is found in the status of “the unspeakable”, explains
Davis. The former is restricted and should be put into words, the latter resists interpretation. That is to say, the Derridean specter’s unspeakable is “not unspeakable
Yigit 19 because it is taboo, but because it cannot (yet) be articulated in the languages available to us” (Davis 13).
In regards to trauma, the renowned trauma theoretician Cathy Caruth maintains that trauma is more than pathology. She points out that “it is always a story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (“Unclaimed Experience” 4). The flashbacks of a trauma attempt to tell “a history that literally has no place” (“Trauma: Explorations in Memory” 153, original emphasis). For the reason that trauma is unexpected and severe, it is not fully experienced in the past, as a consequence, its representations are not fully understood in the present. In this connection, Caruth underscores the incomprehensibility aspect of trauma, the impossibility of a comprehensible story. Hence, the representation of trauma mimics its incomprehensibility, its unspeakability. Its narration is not only a vehicle of understanding but also the locus of what cannot yet be understood (153–155).
Ghost is an aporetic figure because the dead coming back to life is a semantic impasse. Similarly, trauma has the aporetic quality that it needs to be remembered and forgotten at once, it needs to be spoken —it already cries out— but it is unspeakable. As much as Sethe continues “beating back the past” (73) and “keeping the past at bay”
(42), the past haunts her, rememories keep appearing, like an “apparition”. Her rememories are aporetic in the sense that they carry the trauma that she wants to bury but that she also needs to own.
According to Lacan, a signifier associated with a painful emotion can be repressed but the emotion remains and continues to float around in the unconscious and, through the signifying chains, attaches to another signifier (Bailly 47). As both language and unconscious are often associated with imagery based on liquids, Beloved’s emergence from the water and her liquid-like quality exemplify unconscious emotions.
Multiple meanings “flow” to her and attach to her during the course of the narrative as
Yigit 20 the plot develops and memories unfold in the form of “rememories” — interrupted, suspended, floating, atemporal fragments of persistent memories.
Each of the main characters’ depiction of the ghost reflects their inner worlds.
Denver says that the ghost is “lonely and rebuked” (13), Sethe describes it as sad (8) and mad (13) because she feels guilty for killing her baby. Paul D. thinks that it is evil
(8) because he feels insecure about himself and therefore, he is easily threatened. The ghost represents the projection of their unrepresented, unprocessed emotions. So, the ghost is a component of signification for the unrepresentable.
Sethe, Paul D, and Denver have traumatic pasts, and Beloved’s arrival sparked their healing processes and Denver’s coming-of-age. As mentioned earlier, the fragmented style of writing forces the reader to put the fragments together to construct the story in order to understand it. The reader is forced to be actively involved in this process which parallels the characters’ psychological healing. The characters’ individual processes parallel historical and communal processes.
4.5. Who is Beloved?
Sethe’s dead baby is referred to as “crawling-already? baby” (93, 94, 99, 103,
152). She did not have a name. The epitaph “Beloved” was carved onto her tombstone and was taken from the preacher’s words “dearly beloved” (5). Accordingly, “Beloved” refers to the baby, and everyone present at her funeral. Besides, the name of the girl who arrived from the water is Beloved. Her coming from the water metaphorically represents the arrival from the Middle Passage, or a birth, or a rebirth (Morrison 50).
Since meanings are not static, Beloved’s manifold meanings are scattered throughout the story. When Sethe first meets the young girl Beloved, she feels an uncontrollable need to urinate, which she describes with pre-labor water-break imagery (51). Upon being asked from where she comes, Beloved repeatedly mentions “water” and “the
Yigit 21 bridge” (75, 119). The bridge signifies the liminality between life and death, between the past and present. Arriving from water, she is characterized by fluidity. She has no fixed shape or meaning. She flows with external pressure like a liquid; she is Sethe’s baby, an angry ghost, an incarnated soul, an obnoxious young woman, the collective spirit of the ancestors from the Middle Passage. She tells Denver that she was curled up in a dark and hot place with many people and she waited for a long time on the bridge after she arrived (75). This dark and hot place signifies the womb, or the afterlife, or the
Middle Passage. Her waiting on the bridge signifies the marginalization of the black people. The phrase “men without skin” (210) centralizes the black characteristics. In other words, she is the norm, those pale others are without skin. She insistently demands
Denver not to tell her what to do (76), she claims agency. Her losing a tooth leaves the impression that she is still an infant. She is worried that “[n]ext would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once” (133).
This signifies that Beloved is a traumatized girl who experiences dissociation when triggered by perceived abandonment, or that Beloved is the embodiment of Sethe’s past traumas, and she is vanishing as long as Sethe is supported and not left alone. Just like
Paul D exorcized the baby ghost, Beloved started to dissolve when he and Sethe were together. The significance of union becomes clear at the end of the story when Beloved was exorcized in solidarity with the neighbors (261). At this moment, the meaning is emerging but is still deferred.
While Paul D is talking to Sethe about the torment that he endured at the hands of the schoolteacher, Sethe puts her “soft and reassuring” hands on his knee as a gesture of consolation which stops him from talking. He must “keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (72), and it is “rusted shut” (73). The tobacco tin signifies Paul D’s emotional disposition; rusty — neglected, impaired; locked — unavailable; small — insignificant, immature; metal — rigid,
Yigit 22 lifeless. The tobacco tin is his heart that has lost its ability to love even though he was described as an empathetic person in the beginning: “As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling (6).
Beloved “moved him” (114). She caused him confusion and he gradually moved out of Sethe’s room (66, 116), followed by his sexual encounter with Beloved described with ambiguous terms that can also be interpreted in the psychological sense. Beloved says “I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name” (116). Then, he finds himself repeating “red heart, red heart” and he wakes himself (117). “She moved him” gains new meaning in that she helped him out of his emotive rigidity. In the end,
“he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to” (264), which signifies his ancestors and the Middle Passage.
Moreover, Beloved functions as a catalyst for Denver’s coming-of-age.
Denver’s character develops from a traumatized young girl, lonely but afraid to leave home alone, to a young woman who assumes responsibility and goes out to ask for help.
She observes Sethe and Beloved and comes to terms with the past and its wounds. She is the first emancipated generation. Whereas Beloved as her sister represents the past,
Denver represents the future. She knows and accepts the past and she is not spiteful, she is constructive. She is gradually gaining autonomy.
4.6. Polyvocality
Regarding Morrison’s writing style, various perspectives are woven into a tapestry of multi-voiced and intertextualized discourse. The narrator's voice shifts between the characters, which breaks the continuity of the narration. It shifts to Baby
Suggs, to Paul D, to Stamp Paid, and Denver. The moment the voice shifts to the schoolteacher, Sethe’s former owner, the polar opposite of the black voice, it also brings the harrowing dichotomy between Sethe’s and his experience to the fore while exposing
Yigit 23 a slave owner’s dehumanizing racist thinking that reduces a mother to her reproduction capacity (149). These shifts provide additional dimensions to the black experience.
What is more, Morrison’s intertextualization of songs renders the text more evocative, multi-voiced, and performative; and it bears a resemblance to Baby Suggs’
Clearing ritual. Morrison thereby underlines the essentiality of music in black tradition and exemplifies the empowering aspect of it. Paul D. states that he has never told anyone about his traumatic experiences; he “[s]ang it sometimes, but [he] never told a soul” (71). Singing is portrayed as an outlet in a similar way to Baby Suggs’ use of singing in the Clearing. In this sense, singing is offered as an alternative mode of expression. Furthermore, Morrison does not exclude the white culture; Amy's lullaby is a poem named “Lady Button Eyes” by Eugene Field, a white American poet who lived in the nineteenth century (Field).
Another point to consider regarding narration style is the use of stream-of- consciousness in Sethe’s, Denver’s, and Beloved’s monologues. The stream-of- consciousness style accounts for the thoughts, emotions, and impressions of the narrator as they flow through the narrator’s consciousness. It is in Beloved’s second monologue especially that Sethe, Denver, and Beloved’s voices blend, and it becomes hard for the reader to differentiate the narrator (216). Beloved’s first monologue, in particular, is fragmented, emotive, chaotic (210-213). That is to say, these shifts in point of view, shifts in style, and intertextualized rememories mark the fault-lines in the text that reveal polysemic potential while causing textual disunity.
4.7. The Semiotic Order and the Abject Other
The stream of consciousness narrative presents what a character is thinking and also how the character is thinking. So, the reader follows the thought flow, semiotic flow, and associative connections between thoughts in the monologues. Stamp Paid
Yigit 24
“heard a conflagration of hasty voices—loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom” (172). The reader is informed that the speech was not nonsensical but there was something wrong with the order of words, “[a]ll he could make out was the word mine”. As he approached the door,
“voices became an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work” (172). Several signifieds slip around the signifier as the slipperiness of language enables polysemic connotations. To begin with, Stamp Paid’s failure to identify the language harks back to Sethe’s memory about her mother and her native language that Sethe used to understand as a child but has long since forgotten. The voices signify captive ancestors from the Middle Passage.
Alternatively, Sethe has developed a full-blown psychosis, she engages in a conversation with the hallucinatory voices and Stamp Paid hears this schizophasia, a word-salad, mix of incoherent speech observed in psychosis. Sethe’s traumatic Sweet
Home memories could have been triggered by Paul D’s arrival, as indicated by the following statement: “As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch not forty feet away was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men” (6).
Consequently, her psychological makeup could have been deteriorated by his departure.
She can be gradually regressing into the semiotic while falling into psychosis. As another option, three women can be engaging in expressive speech as a therapeutic outlet for self-expression to process and release repressed post-traumatic emotions. This language is characterized by the maternal semiotic, therefore, it is unintelligible to
Stamp Paid who represents the paternal symbolic at this point.
These monologues present the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199). The emphasis on “beloved” and “mine” in the monologues builds an intertextual relationship with the epilogue’s Bible quote “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” (Beloved xiii). Sethe’s monologue is syntactic
Yigit 25 and displays proper punctuation. Her use of the possessive pronoun “mine” highlights her subjectivity: “She mine” (200). Neither she nor her children belong to the schoolteacher. By saying “I also mean I'm yours" (203), she clarifies that her possessiveness is not the same as the schoolteacher. It is more like a deep symbiotic attachment. Denver’s monologue is also syntactic and displays punctuation. She proclaims her love for her sister and says “She's mine, Beloved. She's mine" (209). The semiotic disposition is most prominently observed in Beloved’s monologue. Her monologue is disrupted and disorderly. It lacks punctuation, displays non-sequiturs and gaps between sentences or phrases. It is more poetic and paratactic. It gives a feeling of tone and rhythm:
her face comes through the water a hot thing her face is mine she is
not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to have my face I
go in (213)
The gaps in the sentences denote “the unspeakable thoughts, unspoken”. The semiotic elements indicate that the symbolic is inadequate to express these experiences.
She taps into the collective unconscious of the black diaspora through the connection with the mother, in a place that can be interpreted as the afterlife, womb, maternal space, semiotic chora, or an overcrowded Middle Passage voyage. She disregards temporality and deconstructs the binary relationship of the past and the non-past;
how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her
there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the
place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing (210)
Beloved’s monologue can be seen as a child language in case Beloved signifies
Sethe’s dead baby’s incarnation. It can be seen as a semi-literate language in case
Beloved signifies an enslaved ancestor from the Middle Passage. It can be seen as a poetic language in case she expresses herself in a language that is rich in semiotic
Yigit 26 elements as a way of discharging emotions.
According to Kristeva, signifying practices that privilege the semiotic can be useful in releasing and articulating drives. Aggressive drives can be discharged harmlessly, and more significantly in this context, conventional or dominant discourses and representations can be changed, as the inclusion of semiotic elements can change the structure of discourse (Oliver 8). Morrison’s text as a whole displays semiotic disposition but it is especially in these monologues that words and phrases flow incessantly like emotions and drives, not restricted by grammar rules or punctuation, which corresponds to Kristeva's notion of the semiotic. The point at which Sethe,
Denver, and Beloved locked themselves in the house is reminiscent of the chora, unrestrained by the symbolic order. “When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds” (199). The voices are “recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid” and
“the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (199). This space functions as the chora, the matrix of the semiotic, the excessive, and transgressive linguistic other that opposes the symbolic in that it permits expressing what is unrepresented in the symbolic. Sethe, Beloved, and Denver communicate their deepest emotions, pronounce their attachments, and finally unite in one voice that denotes unseparatedness as in the mother-child symbiosis of the pre-verbal phase. This is one of the reasons why “unspeakable thoughts” were “unspoken” (199). It implies that they are in a state similar to the pre-Oedipal phase. The other reason is the inadequacy of the symbolic to express the emotions of “the black and angry dead” (198).
Toril Moi points out that the semiotic is “always already caught up in a paradox, an aporia” as is the speaking subject because they at once depend on and subvert the symbolic law (Kristeva & Moi 13). This is what makes the speaking subject a subject- in-process (sujet en procès). Beloved’s second monologue is also exquisitely poetic and
Yigit 27 it displays conventional syntax and punctuation, which suggests a balance between the symbolic and the semiotic. What significantly differs from the previous monologues is the poem uttered by Sethe, Denver, and Beloved together as one voice, suggesting that fragments are fused.
When the women from the neighborhood visit Sethe to help her expel Beloved
(258), they all experience a déjà vu that takes them eighteen years back when “the four horsemen” arrived. This déjà vu indicates that a “repetition with a difference” is taking place, which later becomes clear when Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin for the schoolteacher. The arrival of the white men meant cruelty, tragedy, eighteen years ago.
At that moment, the arrival of the white man means social relationship, Denver’s bildung, development. “The four horsemen” is a biblical allusion to “the four horsemen of the Apocalypse” which symbolize the end of the world in the book of Revelation
(Revelation 6:1–8). Eighteen years ago, the day the schoolteacher came to 124
Bluestone marked the apocalypse for Sethe. This repetition marks a difference, a rebirth.
Morrison alludes further to the Bible and expands the intertextual relationship with it. The allusion to the Gospel of John (Morrison 259) has been noted by several critics such as Krumholz, Parker, and Bröck. The beginning of John’s Gospel itself alludes to Genesis from the Old Testament (Menken 88). The Book of Genesis begins as follows: “In the beginning God created heaven, and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made” (The Douay-
Rheims Bible, Genesis 1:1–3). The Gospel of John begins as follows: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The
Koine Greek version of John’s Gospel begins with “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος” (SBLG, John
1:1) which translates into “in the beginning was the lógos”. “Logos” has been translated
Yigit 28 to English as the “Word” with a capitalized initial. Logos derives from the Ancient
Greek root λέγω (légho—I say). So, God says and the universe comes into being. By contrast, Morrison writes: “In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (Morison 259). And she continues, “For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words” (261).
Morrison artfully defies the logocentric discourse of the Western patriarchal tradition and calls attention to “the raw material of signification” as Madan Sarup describes Kristevan notion of the semiotic (Sarup 124). Besides, this intricate use of intertextuality signals that Beloved could be expelled by voice, by music, by an occasion similar to Baby Suggs’ Clearing ritual, by an alternative mode of signification that subverts phallogocentrism, a counter-discourse. Hence, a new signified slides under
Beloved; the pain, the oppression caused by the white supremacist ideology as Baby
Suggs once articulated harshly, “‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’… ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks’” (89). The pain can be chased away with the help of fellowship and the oppression can be overcome with solidarity. By the same token, Emma Parker resembles those noises to the kind of cacophony considered to be a symptom of hysteria in Breuer’s and Freud’s early work of psychoanalysis. Drawing on Diane Hunter’s analysis on Anna O., née Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer's first hysterical patient, Parker argues that “for both Anna O. and the chanting women in Beloved, the disruption of the symbolic through the disorganization of speech and linguistic discord is a way of rejecting patriarchal authority and prescribed cultural identity” (Parker 11).
Finally, Beloved’s pregnancy, the reference to Baby Suggs’ Clearing ritual and the baptism signify Sethe’s rebirth (261). There are traces of Paul D and Baby Suggs in
Yigit 29 her rebirth. Once the rememories are set free, Sethe is set free. She is not possessed by the past anymore, she possesses her own.
Beloved’s ambiguity and her intrusion into Sethe’s life bear comparison to the ambiguity and persistence of traumatic flashbacks. Sethe seems to be possessed by her trauma that is metaphorized by Beloved. And Beloved grows. She grows bigger because she is pregnant, she grows up because she is united with her mother and sister.
Nevertheless, she also grows exhausting and consumes Sethe like her traumatic rememories (240–243). “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became” (250), which illustrates that she engulfs Sethe’s subjectivity like traumatic memories gnaw at her psyche. Contrastingly, Beloved remedies Paul D’s heart, although their intimacy is a violation of moral borders (117, 127). This view of Beloved epitomizes the Kristevan abject; that which trespasses the border and disturbs the order. She represents the horrors of the Middle Passage, the repressed trauma of black cultural history. She embodies the marginalized other. She is the furious ghost of the past exorcized by the community — remedied by unity. Abjection is one of the pivotal processes of the subject in development. Sethe has to abject her traumatic memories.
As mentioned earlier, Kristeva associates chora with rhythm, tones, and kinesis.
“The kinetic functional stage of the semiotic precedes the establishment of the sign”, she states in Revolution in Poetic Language (27). Drawing on this association, Joshua
Hall argues that chora, as the locus of the semiotic, is kindred to dance, especially, dance as an embodied process (Hall 52). Likewise, Dianne Elise “propose[s] dance as paradigmatic of the semiotic and choreography as exemplifying a symbolic communication that retains its bodily, affective force. Dance gives shape to affective expression through embodied motion, e-motion”, she adds (Elise 36). By the same token, Baby Suggs’ Clearing ritual is characterized by the semiotic. Her sermons are meant to heal past traumas through togetherness allowing the semiotic to emerge, for
Yigit 30 example, in singing and dancing. She says “‘Let your mothers hear you laugh’… ‘Let your wives and your children see you dance’... ‘For the living and the dead. Just cry’”
(87-88). Her sermons function as a way of discharging the semiotic into the symbolic, in other words, signifying what resists conventional signification in an alternative model. This also clears the abject. Her congregation constitutes of former slaves who are haunted by past traumas. The Clearing drives out the abject/the ghost. The exorcism of Beloved in the end reminds Sethe of Baby Suggs’ Clearing in which Baby calls to recognize the beauty of nature, the beauty in themselves (88). After Beloved’s disappearance, after abjection, Sethe recognized her best thing, her self (273), through which Morrison highlights Baby Suggs’ wisdom.
To elaborate, Sethe’s repressed traumas, unrepresented in the symbolic, return in the form of a revenant. Because the repressed other, unsymbolized in the symbolic, returns “in a phobic, obsessional, psychotic guise” (“Powers of Horror” 11). Sethe’s isolation at home with her daughters serves as a semiotic process “where meaning collapses” (2), which is similar to the abjection of the maternal entity so that they can actualize separation and gain subjectivity. In infant development, the entry into language enables the infant to tolerate loss and separation and situate the m/other as an object, so the symbolic is linked to mourning. The final exorcism represents Sethe’s mourning in solidarity with her neighbors. Abjection involves the destruction and construction of boundaries at the same time. Sethe experiences “repetition with a difference” by returning to an earlier trauma of having and losing her daughter, and this time she transforms this destructive experience into a constructive one, the construction of her subjectivity, “her own best thing”. This is a micro-level interpretation. On a macro-level, Beloved represents the black peripherality. She tests the borders of the dominant discourse by violating the borders of the dominant discourse as she represents the history of slavery told by former slaves' rememories in contrast with history written
Yigit 31 mainly by white men. She has been “waiting on the bridge” (65, 75, 119, 212) as a revenant, neither alive nor dead. In other words, she has been marginalized as a racial- historical abject, neither completely forgotten nor willingly remembered, neither one of us nor the other, neither inner nor the outer.
4.8. Mother's Milk
Toward the end, when Paul D comes back, Sethe tells him: “I made the ink, Paul
D. He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made the ink” (271). As she is in the process of forming her subjectivity, she recognizes her condition of being an object in the dominant discourse, her objecthood in the binary of the white who writes as the subject/the black who is written as the object. This is also symbolized in the scar on her back. She was punished by the schoolteacher for speaking out about the rape (16–17).
Her punishment, the silencing of the black voice was written on her back by way of scars left by whipping. Moreover, the bit placed in Sethe’s mother’s mouth (203) and
Paul D’s mouth (70) is also a symbol of the silencing of the black voice. By realizing that she made the ink, that she has the determining force, Sethe deconstructs the active/passive dichotomy of the racial binary. Her stolen milk and her making of the ink call to mind Hélène Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine, female writing, to which
Cixous refers as “writing in white ink”, “mother’s milk” in her groundbreaking 1976 essay “the Laugh of the Medusa”. The Semiotic mode of signification carries the trace of the pre-Oedipal stage in which the infant and the mother are not yet separated. In the monologues of the women of 124, their voices mixed with one another, with their ancestors, mothers; in a sense, they wrote in mother’s milk. Sethe was silenced and her milk was stolen, but she is a mother and she is the one who makes the milk, and therefore she refers to her breasts as “[e]xhausted breasts” (272).
“This is not a story to pass on” is repeated several times (274–275). This
Yigit 32 sentence implies the impossibility of properly conveying the horrors of slavery, and that it should not be repeated. However, Morrison’s repetition of the phrase causes aporia.
John Caputo postulates that “the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is just what impels deconstruction” and he underlines Derrida’s simple explanation of deconstruction as an “experience of the impossible” (Caputo 32). By repeating the sentence, Morrison centers the unspeakability aspect of the story. In order for it not to be passed on, it has to be passed on. In order for it not to be repeated, happen again, it has to be repeated, told; but it is impossible to tell properly because the symbolic is inadequate.
The text demonstrates not only the fact that signifieds are in a perpetual state of flux but also that the necessary signifier is absent; “Beloved (……)”. Beloved was the only word inscribed on the baby’s tombstone (5) and “[e]verybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for…”
(Morrison 274). Morrison indicates that there is no word to describe slavery and motherhood in slavery.
5. Conclusion
In the final analysis, the language in the text manifests the inadequacy of the symbolic to explain, express, describe the impacts of the traumatic experiences of slavery. It highlights the semiotic and creates an écriture féminine by centering the woman’s body as the locus of signification. Morrison’s eloquently powerful language is open for multiple interpretations and demonstrates that signs always have peripheral meanings that generate parallel discourses, subtexts. Meaning is mutable, fleeting, and flowing, permeated by the ghost/inhabited by the trace/unsettled by the absent presence of another meaning. In the foreword to Beloved she says: “To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (Morrison xix). As trauma
Yigit 33 carries an aporetic force that resists language, Morrison’s text privileges emotions, the semiotic, the body, the pathos, the feminine, the black voice over logic, the symbolic, the mind, the logos, the masculine, the white voice. She centers cultural traditions such as singing and dancing that are exoticized and marginalized by the logocentric Western discourse dependent on the mind/body, reason/feeling binaries. Her demonstration of the body as the locus of signification, wisdom, and healing deconstructs such binaries.
The dance sociologist Helen Thomas brings attention to the semiotic chora, which is
“pushed to the margins of the logocentric, phallocentric symbolic order”. She adds: “It is from this space of endless possibilities, which cannot be contained by the rational structure of language, that there is the potential to disrupt, challenge, break out of or destabilise the dominant symbolic order” (Thomas 169). Quoting Cixous’ words “Write yourself. Your body must be heard”, she asserts that change is possible through “a feminine ‘writing of the body’”, and she identifies dance as a part of the signifying process that “can challenge the patriarchal order... freeing the repressed feminine located in the body to assert different meanings and values” (174). Morrison weaves together body and mind in Beloved, encapsulates this expressiveness of the body, and centers it by privileging singing, dancing, and écriture féminine, and thus deconstructs phallogocentrism.
Furthermore, Morrison’s text demonstrates how that which is absent or peripheral has a determining force in the meaning through the African American vernacular oral tradition “signifyin(g)”, which was theorized by Henry Louis Gates in his 1988 book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary
Criticism. It involves speaking indirectly about something usually in a provocative way.
She signifies on history, genocide, that is, she makes the reader think of them without using the words Middle Passage or Holocaust. She signifies on the poststructuralist feminism, she signifies on the Bible and the transcendental signified. She makes the
Yigit 34 reader gather the clues without providing a direct reference. Even though what she is referring to is absent or only peripherally involved, it produces subtexts that haunt the reader’s mind. Meaning is marked by what is left out of the text and every revelation leads to a new revelation. Her text allows absence to speak louder than presence and achieves major revisions. Sethe experiences repetition of trauma with a healing difference, the novel repeats history with black centralization, the language signifies with semiotic centralization.
In closing, this essay aimed to investigate the polysemic nature of Beloved and argued that the text is open for re-interpretations as Morrison’s use of language is cleverly fluid. The dynamics inherent in the text deconstructs the text. Such dynamics can be typically found in logocentrically structured binary pairs, aporias, contradictions, shifts. Moreover, Morrison’s text disseminates meaning by defying meaning rather than pointing to specific meanings. It also gives voice to the unspeakable parts of the black cultural memory through multiple rememories in the novel. Beloved signifies Sethe’s third child, her ghost, a young girl, Sethe’s past, Denver’s generational trauma, their ancestors, Paul D’s trauma and healing, The Middle Passage, the black history, the subjugation of black people; she signifies that which resists the symbolic, that which eludes signification, the abject, both on an individual level and social level. She is polymorphous and polysemous. The text can be read as a re-enactment of Margaret
Garner’s story, it can be read as a supernatural Gothic story, it can be read as a psychological horror, it can be read as sociopolitical commentary. Meaning is always yet to arrive —or return— and thus the text is forever subject to the forces of différance generating ephemeral meanings that refer to new meanings. In the end, all signifieds are beloved, that is, transformed through love and forgiveness.
Yigit 35
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