Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative Form [PP: 120-125] Sayed Mohammad Anoosheh Hossein Jahantigh Department of English Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages Yazd University, Iran

ABSTRACT faces a great challenge in representing the . In contemporary narrative form, the novel, Beloved, portrays the devastating effects of forced transnational migration. She confronts conventional silences surrounding the aspect of by presenting displaced Africans on their way to America. Her text defines both black literature of the late twentieth century and troubles the status quo as an experiment in aesthetic expression which demonstrates the legacy of trauma fabricated in American culture. She stylizes her narrative form of language for particular effect by using direct references and subtle allusions to the aspect of slavery. Drawing on the coded discourse of oral history and as fashion of writerly texts, Morrison takes her readers as participants in the construction of cultural memory. The present article takes up the formalistic and cultural approach to critique the aesthetic means by which Morrison’s verbal style signifies the content of her story, Beloved, which results in a new genre as African- that establishes itself in the late twentieth and the present century world literature. Keywords: Toni Morrison, Beloved, Stylistic Narrative, African-American Literature, Slavery ARTICLE The paper received on: 21/11/2016 Reviewed on: 25/12/2016 Accepted after revisions on: 31/12/2016 INFO Suggested citation: Anoosheh, S. M. & Jahantigh, H. (2016). Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative Form. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. 4(4), 120-125. Retrieved from www.eltsjournal.org

1. Introduction supposedly unrepresentable subject matter In narrating the story of Beloved, (Hughes, 1962). Morrison writes not only Toni Morrison portrays the devastating against traditional subject matter restriction effect of slave trade in contemporary but also against the conventional limit of narrative form through direct references and her respective media’s language by using subtle allusions. She draws on the coded words and images despite living in a white- discourse of oral history and slave dominated society. Her critiques identify narratives as she fashions writerly texts, formation while in bondage by cycling drawing in her readers as participants in the through an obsessive litany of sound and construction of cultural memory. She image fragments. Many researchers have constructs the bilderverbot tradition, an scrutinized the interaction of history, injunction against depiction of sacred or memory and fiction, melancholy and Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative… Anoosheh, Sayed Mohammad & Jahantigh, Hossein.

trauma, women’s loss and female Morrison represents the theme of subjectivity in their works but none has separation of family members from each dealt with the canonical text of Beloved, other and from their African homeland deemed as a touchstone of African- through the device of the ghost story in the American literature. This article is Beloved. This is the first time that she puts concerned with Morrison’s approach into words the experiences of a slave articulated in words and images in order to mother who expresses: “I would rather see dismantle and reveal the verbal my children killed than have them given up signification which portrays the Atlantic to the slaveholder’s power; death is better slave trade from Black perspective. The than slavery” (Morrison, 1987, 62). The interface between American literature as an bitter experiences she goes through include: institution and that of celebrated artist as a childbirth, nursing, the desires of preverbal social activist reveals the problem of infant and the sufferings of Africans who defining and promoting transnational Black died on slave ships. She uses subject matters literature. In this regard, she avoids which were normally excluded from reductive debates on ethnicity and identity western cultural narratives. politics by characterizing and thus giving Through the narration of the ghost voice to the traditionally silenced Africans of an infant, Beloved, who has been killed on their way to America. by her mother to save her from slavery, 2. Discussion Morrison articulates a new mode of Toni Morrison’s subject in Beloved expression against the traditional subject is that of separation, loss, and renewal matter restriction and conventional limits of afforded by memory. She draws on media and language. Beloved, the dead documents of the Atlantic slave trade and infant, returns in the body of a nineteen- slave narrative, grounding her stylized year-old who is able to express infantile fiction in historical fact. She carries the feelings otherwise unarticulated in normal legacy on Black Arts Movement started in life: “Her desire to regain the maternal early 1970s with her groundbreaking novel closeness of a nursing baby powers a and more recent works demonstrating an dialogue that fuses pronoun positions and ongoing commitment to bring Black abolishes punctuation, undoing all the experience into the mainstream American marks of separation that usually stabilize literature. She selects and combines details language” (Wyatt, 427). with rhetorical emphasis which signify, in a Morrison’s slave narrative shows a realist mode, with a traditional reverence collective identity of Beloved as an African for history as a verifiable fact. As a matter American who died on the of fact, she tends to invoke and dismantle of Atlantic slave trade. Regarding the simple binaries such as victim/victimizer, narration of the story, Wyatt (1993) mother/daughter, black/white by stream of describes the conditions on the slave ships consciousness episodes which signify in a “in fragmented images without connective subversive non-standard way. By the use of syntax or punctuation, capturing the loss of dialectic tensions based on these demarcation and differentiation of those dichotomies and deconstructing them, she caught in an “oceanic” space between increases the possibilities of rhetorical style cultural identities, between Africa and an of language. unknown destination” (Wyatt, 73).

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International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies ISSN:2308-5460 Volume: 04 Issue: 04 October-December, 2016

Morrison selects and combines According to Raynaud, the whole verbal signification with emphasis on process of making history with the tools of coherence to show the Atlantic slave trade master (reading/writing) is reflected in the form black perspective. The rhetorical character of the schoolteacher who images signify realistic mode regarding represents scientific racism (46). Sethe traditional reverence for historical fact. She makes the ink with which the schoolteacher tends to invoke and dismantle simple and his nephew define on paper her “animal binaries as victim/victimizer, characteristics;” the ink, a tool for mother/daughter and black/white. Sethe, communication produced by her hands, is Beloved’s mother, insists on her physical turned against her. Irritated, she asks Mrs. presence and a firm relationship to her Garner for the definition of children. She is willing to accept the “characteristics” and “features,” vainly to separation and substitution of her child to exert control over the very words that have avoid the further suffering from slavery. defined her body in a notebook (Morrison, Here, she will not apply any kind of 1987, 194-5). The terror Sethe feels in signifiers to represent her nursing baby so seeing herself defined and divided: human as to tell the secret of her infant’s murder. characteristics on the left, animal ones on According to Rose (1982) “the novel’s the right (193) is reflected in her statement discourse tends to resist the substitution of that the Whites can “dirty you so bad you the very law of metaphoric operation” (38). forgot who you were” (251). She murders By creating dialectic tension, Morrison Beloved not to let anyone on this earth to deconstructs the dichotomy to increase “list her daughter’s characteristics on the rhetorical possibilities in language. animal side of paper” (Ibid). Morrison fashions a new In the world of slavery, binary representation of slave narrative that once oppositions are at work to make the slave was neglected in the history of black slavery distinct from the master. Numerous which has now become the central concern references in the novel recall the journey, of American literature. The strategy of her especially the literal and symbolic division narrative rhetorically implicates the of slavery and freedom. In the Beloved, involvement of readers who may take stand Morrison mentions the idea of Whites about against the issues she poses. She depicts the Blacks: “Whatever the manners, under power of discourse in destroying African- every dark skin was a jungle. Swift American slaves’ sense of selfhood. The unnavigable waters, swinging screaming major characters of the novel are born into baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready slavery and experience “the imposed for their white blood (197). Lawrence objectivity of its commodifying ideology” (1998) commenting on the expression (Elliot, 2000: 181). Hence, power is remarks “This belief […] abstracts the maintained not only through physical human corporeality of the slave into a sign violence, but also by recourse to other for the other in the discourse of the "instruments of subjugation particularly dominant ideology” (89). The writer language and discourse" (Palsa, 2000: 234). parallels the structural tension that signifies In exposing slavery’s machinations, the resistance to the existing situation. This Morrison pays particular attention to is done by careful balance and unbalance on “ethnographic and historical scholarship” the linguistic level which troubles the deep (Abdullatif, 1999: 55). waters of cultural values and norms. Cite this article as: Anoosheh, S. M. & Jahantigh, H. (2016). Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative Form. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. 4(4), 120-125. Retrieved from www.eltsjournal.org Page | 122

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative… Anoosheh, Sayed Mohammad & Jahantigh, Hossein.

Lawrence is of the opinion that Negros companions look at it as a sign of madness. internalized such views of slaveholders by By depicting the distance between a white’s mentioning “further, such invasive superficial interpretation of an event from signifying upon the black body generate a its complex reality, Morrison “begins to self-fulfilling prophecy, as blacks find blur the dichotomous representations which themselves unable to assert an identity in enlightenment thought so easily outside the expectation imposed upon them categorized truth and falsehood, good and (90). The author confirms this in the evil, history and myth” (Fuston-White, continuation: “The more colored people 2002: 464). spent their strength trying to convince them Morrison’s aim of narrating the how gentle they were, how clever and story of Sethe’s infanticide is to disclose loving, how human, the more they used “the multiplicity of truth, all of which merit themselves up to persuade whites of legitimation” (Ibid). The role of community something Negros believed could not be in Sethe’s killing her daughter is not questioned, the deeper and more tangled the negligible. However, identity is formed in jungle grew inside” (198). the context of community in this novel. According to Fuston-White (2002), According to Anzaldua the border culture is Morrison’s work is a strong challenge to emerged by “the life-blood of two worlds modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, meaning to form a third …. a border culture language, history and identity (461). She is (qtd. in Elliot, 2000, 188). The community self-conscious and metadiscursive as a Sethe lives in is similar to “borderland”. postmodern writer, though she questions The blacks live in a borderland between the scope of the postmodern moment as an their own culture and the white historical event and the conventions of its slaveholders’ culture. The free black style as aesthetic. Fuston-White’s assertion community in this story “has no fixed, signifies that Morrison in Beloved institutionalized, organized, moral and deconstructs the foundations that have social codes of behavior and thought. Its marginalized and essentialized African- vulnerable existence is compounded by Americans. However, Morrison’s method unrelenting white hatred and disrespect of narrating the story of slavery is (Elliot, 2000, 188). The white community innovative and she attempts to depict the has internalized social and moral codes and “disremembered and uncounted for” those does not provide any support to Sethe. Such “sixty million and more” who died as codes remind us of inherited codes of past captives in Middle Passage (Morrison, slavery which finds its manifestation in 1987, 274). Fuston-White further adds that Sethe’s killing of her child. She rationalizes Morrison’s aims are to revive “the and justifies her act by telling “that anybody collective cultural memory” a brutalized white could take your whole self for and dehumanized history that has been anything that came to mind. Not just work, erased from the minds as in Fisher’s term, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you “hegemonic whitewashing” (2002: 463). so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore Such prejudice is evident in Beloved when (Morrison, 1987: 251)”. we come across the reaction of white Morrison has an astonishing power observer to Seethe’s infanticide. Here, the of storytelling through which she represents readers come to know that Sethe did it out history and connection of families that had of agency, while schoolteacher and his been lost in slavery. Sethe and her mother’s International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies ISSN:2308-5460 Volume: 04 Issue: 04 October-December, 2016 Page | 123

International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies ISSN:2308-5460 Volume: 04 Issue: 04 October-December, 2016 discontinued relationship is made alive references highlight the exophoric through the act of storytelling “as she began references. Young Sethe and her mother telling Denver and Beloved about her articulate few words between each other but earrings, she found herself wanting to, the message of connection and identity is so liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance strong that signifies an eternal effect. The from the events, or her thirst for hearing it- image of Sethe’s mother nurturing breast to in any case it was unexpected pleasure” show the branded scars and small Sethe (Morrison, 1987: 58). Sethe’s speech-act is seeking a pile of corpses for her mother’s an attempt to express her thoughts and body draws the readers’ consciousness into feelings clearly in words that bond between the meaning-making process of the novel. her and her mother in an infrequent Ignoring the reductive binaries of negative encountered the facts of her loss which against positive or good against evil, serves to conjure up the memories of the Morrison applies her stylistic shifts to show past in present. the similarity and difference between black Morrison’s great contribution to the and white, victim and victimizer, death and fabric of American literature is a rendition victory. The focus of her attention in the of nearly lost to the novel is to draw the readers to a realization consciousness of people of the world. She of the text which in the process of reading attempts to give voice to those who died in …. can make an ethical development of it to the Middle Passage which in Fuston- react potentially to the world at large. White’s term were “so easily erased from 3. Conclusion the cultural text” (465). She shatters the The great mystery of the novel accepted social custom of silence Beloved lies in the rational connection surrounding the Atlantic slave trade lifting between the mother and the lost child. As a up hypothesis of human repression under mother, Sethe learns her history through colonizers by giving an instance of a game retelling the story told to her. The mother of language and logic such as the beating of figure takes a contradictory position in the Sixo by the schoolteacher and highlighting discourse. The speaking subject forms her that no more “the definition belongs to the sense of identity by poeticized linguistic definers-not the defined” (Morrison, 1987, process. The identity of mother owned by 190). self-definition makes Morrison form a new By presenting Sixo in the game of narrative in which it signifies the language and logic, and other instances in subjectivity that illuminates the political the story, Morrison signifies stylistic structure of social domination. She treats consideration of language and authentic the historical fact of slavery and establishes mode of African oral tradition in which the depth of a mother’s and breaks the history is passed on to the readers orally. link of family relationship in the context of The basic structure of slavery is transcended Middle Passage. Applying semiotic to create a superstructure of resistance and openness of meaning in her often revival that naturalizes the institution as ambiguous expressions, she addresses the cultural practice. issues of the ever-evolving human identity Through the use of gestures, signs, particularly fabricated in US culture. exophoric references, characters’ language References in Morrison’s story becomes mysterious Abdullatif, H.(1999). "Toni Morrison: through time and space. Endophoric Rethinking the past in a postcolonial Cite this article as: Anoosheh, S. M. & Jahantigh, H. (2016). Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative Form. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. 4(4), 120-125. Retrieved from www.eltsjournal.org Page | 124

Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative… Anoosheh, Sayed Mohammad & Jahantigh, Hossein.

context" (1999). Dissertations and Middleton, D.L. (2000).Toni Morrison's Master's Theses (Campus Access). fiction: Contemporary criticism. New Paper AAI9955093. York : Garland. http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertat Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: ions/AAI9955093. Knopf, 1987. Elliot, M.J.S. (2000). Post-Colonial Experience Hughes, L. (1962). "The Negro Artist and in a Domestic Context: Commodified Racial Mountain". Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/p Beloved. oets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm. MELUs.Vol.25,No.3/4.Revising Booker, M. K. (1996). A Practical Introduction Traditions Double Issue. PP. 181-202. to literary Theory and Criticism. New Fuston-white, J. (2002). From the seen to the York: University of Alkansas. Told: the Construction of subjectivity Rose, J. ed. (1982), Feminine Sexuality: in Toni Morrison's Beloved. African- Jacques Lacan and the Ecole American Review. 36.3. PP.461-473. Freudienne. New York: Norton, pp. 27- Palsa C. (2000), Toni Morrison Beloved: A 57. Readers Guide to Essential Criticism. Wyatt, J. (1993), Giving Body to the Word: The New York: pal grave Macmillan. Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's PP.231-246. Beloved, PMLA 108, 3: pp: 474.

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