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Toni Morrison's Beloved and Louise Erdrich's Tracks.1

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Toni Morrison's Beloved and Louise Erdrich's Tracks.1 SECRET HISTORIES: TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED AND LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS.1 Lesley Marx. The debate concerning the relationship between history and postmodernism has been given special impetus by Fredric Jameson's argument that the postmodern is inextricably tied to late capitalist consumer culture and that its artefacts work at the level of surfaces, pastiche or the schizophrenic fracturing of time so that all happens in the present. As a consequence, the only access to history that the postmodern can offer is through consumer images of the past. Writing of Doctorow's Ragtime, Jameson brings his critique to a poignant and pessimistic climax: This historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only "represent" our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes "pop history"). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject but rather that of some degraded collective "objective spirit": it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history which was once itself a present; rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls. If there is any realism left here, it is a "realism" that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.2 More optimistic is John Barth's essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," in which he takes his cue from what is commonly known as "magical realism.” He praises the work of Marques and Calvino who "keep one foot in fantasy, one in objective reality."3 Marques is especially to be praised for being a "master of the storyteller's art."4 A Hundred Years of Solitude is a "synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization and caricature, humour and terror."5 The fragmentation, the aphasia and the amnesia of the postmodern may then, in this view, be redeemed by a return to the “narrative past,”6 to storytelling in its primitive and folkloric sense, to what Walter Ong would call the "human lifeworld."7 It is a Kierkegaardian return, 1 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; London: Picador, 1988); Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988; New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 25. 3 John Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” in The Post-Modern Reader, edited by Charles Jencks (London: Academy Editions, 1992), 179. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1982). however, a repetition where "consciousness is raised to the second power," the past received back doubly.8 Barth's discussion of the replenishment enabled by this heightened consciousness might perhaps be a tentative consolation to that great cataloguist of the postmodern, Ihab Hassan, who calls, with some anguish, for the need to "remythify the imagination ... and bring back the reign of wonder into our lives.”9 Of course this plea for a return to myth is a problematic one for politics and history. One recalls Barthes' analysis of myth as frozen language. But there is also Nietzsche's warning of what happens to the mythless, the rootless, the unspiritual man. This second reading of myth asserts its ancient power to revitalize our connectedness to each other, to the social and the natural world, and to a broader conception of the movement of time in a way that is surely profoundly political. I would like to argue that Morrison and Erdrich have written works that achieve the same kind of synthesis for which Barth praises Marques. In so doing, they also resurrect, or rememory, as Morrison would have it, histories that have been repressed, destroyed, denied by hegemonic narratives. Central to the process of rememory is the tangible, material power of that resurrection: bodies come back to life, bodies come to life, material nature is animated by spirit, the trees talk. Metamorphosis is central to these narratives of rediscovery. The notion of transformation is double•faced, of course: carnivalesque and grotesque in both their Bakhtinian and their Brueghelian modes. The energy and laughter of metamorphosis are countered by the dissolution and terror as one form is dismembered for another to take its place. The pain of transition, of liminality is acutely felt in both books—the transition between psychic, physical, political and historical states. Morrison, an African-American woman writer, a hyphenated consciousness, takes as her subject the "sixty million and more" (epigraph) who died in slavery. Beloved is not only Sethe's murdered daughter, but the resurrection of slave history. The intense physicality of this embrace of the past is prefigured in the very naming of Beloved. Sethe sells her body over the grave of her child to pay for the name on the tombstone, one of the words spoken at the funeral, "beloved." So the name is created out of sex and death. The "crawling-already?" baby who never had a name is given a second birth into the word memorialized on the stone, born out of her mother's body. In the cyclic nature of ghosts and hauntings, the word will return as flesh. This is also an image of what Morrison is doing. Her word embodies history as a meditation on the torment and the power of the woman's body. But there is dualism inherent in the image of the woman as flesh and as word. Beloved's resurrection of the middle passage, in her stream-of-consciousness monologue, is a passage of separation and death. In broken syntax and the imagery of nightmare, the collapsing of forms, of consciousness, of individual being, 8 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, translated by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 156. 9 Ihab Hassan, “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective,” in Jencks, 204. 2 Beloved's incantation brings to birth the movement of Africans across the Atlantic, a past made eternally present: All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked…. (210) The passage climaxes in Beloved's merging with her mother, both a joyous return to the mother•daughter dyad and a terrible vision of cannibalism. Beloved's ambiguity as both haunting and embrace is finely captured: ... she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me ... Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the place I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing (213) History, then, is something suspended in the womb, but the womb as gothic space of claustrophobic enclosure, the dead sea of the middle passage, out of which you are born a slave. The "hot thing" becomes both the inferno of the slave ship and the mutual devouring of mother and daughter in a grotesque compensation for the rupture of family caused by the slave market. Possession and dispossession feed off each other. At one level, the answering monologues of Sethe and Denver argue for orality and motherhood, both signifying presence, fullness, the plenitude of the voice and the maternal body. Moreover, the mother has two mouths, one that gives birth figuratively to words and stories; one that gives birth literally to life. Irigaray's "two lips" speak together to generate a world, an extension of the body, not a separation from the body. Nevertheless, when Sethe gives her body in order to write a word on the tombstone, she also gives birth to death and separation. Writing and giving birth are both connected to divorce, the written word separated from the living tongue, the body, the voice. For Kristeva, birth, too, is a moment of abjection, rupture, splitting. Morrison's novel seeks a way back to what Kristeva calls ''WORD FLESH.”10 In the beginning was the word, sheathed in the body of the mother. But it is a quest that must not succumb to mutual devouring, circling back into the hungry past of conception under the sign of death. The central path back to this integration is through the telling of stories. Beloved's orality, her constant desire for things to eat is tied to her hunger for stories, to have herself told and brought into being as more than a name, as part of a narrative, a fiction of concord, as Kermode might put it. Denver shares in this awareness of the 10 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 235. 3 importance of having a story to make oneself feel real. She is jealous over stories that do not include her. To be excluded from a story is like being murdered. When Denver tells Beloved the story of her own birth, she resurrects the sensual fullness through the presence of her ghostly sister, the past reincarnated: "Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked" (78). But the centrepiece, the revelation of Sethe's murder of her child, is a travesty of storytelling.
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