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Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.
Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”
In December of 2019, just four months after Toni Morrison passed at the age of 88, Alfred A. Knopf published a compendium of short extracts from her novels and essays entitled The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom. Morrison’s extraordinary capacity for resonant and pithy language is of course everywhere on the book’s pages. But as a “gathering of wisdom,” the book falls short. In part, this is because the excerpts feel disembodied without their rich novelistic and persuasive contexts. But it is also because, as we will see here, the project itself is unfaithful to Morrison’s understanding of wisdom as the fruit of an ongoing imaginative collaboration between author and reader.
In her 1992 lecture “The Source of Self-Regard,” Morrison asks her audience to agree that
in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. (Source 307)
In our age of information overload, Morrison rightly argues, it is far too easy to assume that data is knowledge or information wisdom. At the same time, “wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch” (307).
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Morrison goes on to reflect on her process in conceiving her novel Beloved, inspired as it was by slavery narratives, by histories of slavery, and by newspaper accounts of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave who chose to kill her own daughter rather than allow her to fall back into bondage:
What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself up as a substitute. If imagination could be depended upon for that, then there was the possibility of knowledge. Wisdom, of course, I would leave alone, and rely on readers to produce that. (308)
How should we come to terms with this last sentence? From another writer, one might well read this as a rhetorical ploy. Does the claim not to know not typically create the impression that one in fact does know? Given that intellectual humility is itself a marker of wisdom, what better way to appear wise than to deny that one is?
But Morrison’s investment in wisdom is far deeper than any rhetorical ploy. Nothing exemplifies that investment better than the parable she tells on accepting her 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, which begins: “Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise” (Source 102).
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One day, this blind seer is visited by a group of young people “who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance” by asking her whether the bird one of them holds in their hands is living or dead. The blind woman replies that she doesn’t know, but that she does know “it is in [their] hands,” in the sense that the bird is their “responsibility” (103). The wise woman (or is it Morrison herself?) goes on to read the bird as a symbol for language, seeing the bird’s possible death as analogous to a “systematic looting of language [that] can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation” (104). Following an extensive description of the varieties of oppressive official language—be it nationalistic, racist, academic, scientific, legalistic, or “the faux language of mindless media”—the seer quotes from the Gettysburg Address, saying that Lincoln’s words signal
deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns…. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable. (106)
Here, however, the parable takes an unexpected turn. Admitting that there is no bird in their hands, either living or dead, the young people ask, “Is there no speech… no words you can give us that help us break through your dossier of failures” and, more specifically, to “break through the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?” (107). In effect, an exegesis that seemed to be wise, and that surely reflects Morrison’s own view on the generative and humanistic power of “word work,” falls short because it allows the blind seer to retreat “into the singularity of isolation” (106f.). “Why,” her interlocutors ask,
“didn’t you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were?… Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.” (108)
Photo: Encyclopedia Virginia
To illustrate this point, one of the young people tells a brief story of a wagonload of slaves on the far side of the Middle Passage, a story that is as visually and sensually evocative as it is inconclusive in the questions it raises. To this, the old woman responds:
“Finally… I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.” (109)
Wisdom for Morrison, in other words, lies not in any compendium of demonstrably wise pronouncements (fictional or otherwise) but in the experience whereby storyteller and audience together use the life-sustaining power of language to reach toward the ineffable in human experience. There is a bit of false modesty, therefore, in Morrison’s contention that she will leave wisdom alone and rely on her readers to produce it. Rather, wisdom lies in a practice of linguistic imagination around an ineffable core that author and reader, storyteller and listener, engage in lovingly together. Of this principle, I would argue, there is no better instance than Morrison’s masterwork, Beloved.
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In a traditional Bildungsroman, we follow a young protagonist as he or she—but most often, he—travels to a new milieu (such as Parisian high society in Old Goriot) and, thanks to a series of struggles and misadventures, comes to learn its operative rules and codes of conduct in the interest of a future still to be written. Since the function of the novel of formation was to introduce relatively naïve readers to the vicissitudes of an unknown world, its narrative arc moves from relative dispossession to possession—knowing the workings of that world and displaying an associated savoir-faire—for both its protagonist and its readers. Whether the character actually accedes to wisdom in the end is often, as we have seen in the case of Goriot’s Rastignac, an open question.
In a short piece coincident with the publication of her debut collection, Horsepower, poet Joy Priest writes cogently of the ways in which the Black Bildungsroman necessarily breaks with this model:
In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively and must, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from the societal creed of white supremacy. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving in society. Rather than a ‘novel of education’ or a ‘novel of formation,’ the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival, the preservation and survival of the Black child in the world created by the poet, and in the sensibility and memory of the adult speaker.
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Beloved is not obviously a Bildungsroman inasmuch as most of its central characters remain stuck in a traumatic past—the experience of slavery and its aftereffects—whose traces resurface endlessly throughout the novel. From the outset, Sethe thinks of the future as “a matter of keeping the past at bay” and of her role as Denver’s mother as one of “keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her” (51). After Sethe learns of her husband Halle’s having witnessed (and had his spirit broken by) her being sexually assaulted by two white boys, we read: “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (83). Indeed, the central act around which Beloved turns—Sethe’s cutting the throat of her eldest daughter to keep her from falling into slavery—is a desperate assertion of her motherly freedom of choice in a system that denies self-determination and a sense of personal futurity at every turn. Over the course of the novel, Sethe, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and her love interest Paul D all see their worlds contracting rather than expanding, under pressure of the lesson that Baby Suggs “had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople” (122).
Although Sethe’s daughter Denver has been largely isolated as a child, thanks to a curse that attaches to 124 Bluestone Road following Sethe’s killing of Denver’s sister, she is portrayed as never having enjoyed the luxury of naïveté, having taken “her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister” (179; cf. 242). When we as readers are finally introduced to the infanticide, we read of four white men riding into 124 to recapture Sethe and her children, bearing that “righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit” (185). In repeatedly speaking of Sethe’s newborn as “crawling already,” Morrison implicitly signals her assent to Priest’s contention that Black children are denied the chance to “come of age naively.”
And yet, unlike the novel’s other major characters, Denver does undergo an entry into the adult world beyond 124 reminiscent of the traditional Bildungsroman, in ways that readings of Beloved that focus on the mother/daughter dynamic between Sethe and Beloved or the “romance” between Sethe and Paul D frequently miss. Toward the novel’s end, as Sethe and Beloved seem to merge into one another, to the point that “it was difficult for Denver to tell who was who,” Denver reaches out to her one-time teacher, Lady Jones, in search of work. This results in her engaging a community of Black women who warmly recall Baby Suggs’ preaching days and send food to 124, in her meeting a man of interest, and in inaugurating “her life in the world as a woman” (285, 292). Denver’s quest for work ironically triggers Sethe’s crazed attack on the family’s white patron, Edward Bodwin, but the novel concludes with Denver having “a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve” (297).
Photo: Denver, in Beloved, dir. Jonathan Demme
Less evident at the novel’s end but no less important in the overall economy of Beloved, Denver comes to exemplify the power of a certain collaborative storytelling. Having once only been interested in the story of Sethe’s escape insofar as it explained her own name, Denver now relishes that radicality of narrative that, in the words of the blind seer’s interlocutors, creates “us at the very moment [a story] is being created”:
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it—through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother…. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. (91f.)
Before she follows the well-worn path of entrance into adult selfhood, in other words, Denver has already come to exemplify a narrative generosity essential to Morrison’s understanding of wisdom. This is not the generosity of the traditional Bildungsroman, which helps the reader take possession of a largely unknown world in the interest of a promising (if yet indeterminate) futurity, for both protagonist and reader. Rather, Morrison’s generosity is grounded in a certain readerly dispossession, in ways that mimic the trauma victim’s failed desire to keep the past at bay.
Trauma, and aggressivity in general, have long been linked to the fantasy of bodies in pieces. Morrison’s novel inscribes itself squarely in this tradition, using as its jumping off point “the Misery,” Sethe’s taking of a handsaw to her older daughter’s neck to keep her “safe” from slavery—itself a desperate repetition of a threat haunting the enslaved (192). Beloved in particular is consistently thematized as prone to dismemberment. Early on, in a rare passage adopting her point of view, we read of Beloved pulling out a wisdom tooth:
Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is it. Next would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of these mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. (157)
Photo: Regardt van der Meulen
Morrison returns to this thematic at novel’s end when Beloved, “[d]isremembered and unaccounted for… erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow it all away” (323).
The earlier passage’s insistence that Beloved is most threatened by dismemberment when she is alone jibes with the novel’s insistence that it is loving dialogue with the other that makes the victim of trauma whole. Just prior to Beloved’s erupting into pieces, Paul D recalls Sixto’s description of the woman he secretly trudged 30 miles to see back at Sweet Home: “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order” (321).
Yet it would be a mistake to take this gathering power as the novel’s last word on bodies in pieces. Morrison’s brilliant play on the concepts of dismemberment and forgetting in the portmanteau word “disremembered” clearly echoes her concept of rememory. “It was in Beloved,” she wrote,
that all of these matters coalesced for me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory vs. memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering, as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. (Source 324)
Photo: Biennial of Sydney
On the one hand, Morrison points here to the role that authorial imagination plays in the practice of what she elsewhere calls a “kind of literary archaeology”—the practice of using the shards of the past to reconstruct and illuminate the inner life of those who left few traces (Source 239). On the other hand, she leaves room for the necessity of “disremembering”—forgetting as disassembling—as an essential “device of the narrative.”
In more traditional novels, we as readers grant the novelist the power to pursue seemingly unrelated story lines and characters with the assurance that, over the course of the novel, the links between these characters and story lines will become progressively clearer. Or to paraphrase Sixto, we expect the traditional novelist—Dickens was a master of this—to eventually gather up all the story’s pieces and put them into some semblance of a right order.
Photos: Harper, Penguin Classics, Knopf, Scribner, Penguin Classics, Oxford
For Morrison’s purposes, however, there are three related flaws to this logic.
First, the traumatic events at the core of Beloved are themselves ineffable. Morrison figures their unspeakable nature both through stable images, such as that rusted “tobacco tin” that Paul D finds buried in his chest in place of a heart, and through the imagistic pointillism of Beloved’s recollections: “She said… [t]hat dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (284; cf. 248-252).
Second, where traditional plotting calls for progression, the traumatic plot demands repetition. Beloved’s appearance in the flesh after Paul D banishes the ghost haunting 124 is the most central instance of repetition in Beloved, consonant with Stamp Paid’s belief that “the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead” (234). But there is repetition, and vicious circularity too, in the way the trauma of slavery reinfects those who inflict it: “It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread…. Until it invaded the whites who had made it” (234).
Photo: Twelve Years a Slave, dir. Steve McQueen
Third, and most important for my argument here, the traditional logic of plot is, for Morrison, not especially generous or wise. Because the events around which Beloved turns cannot be directly and fully captured in language and cannot adequately be worked through by the novel’s characters, they give rise to a form of plotting based on repetition that involves the reader, generously, in an active process of progressive revelation and realization.
Still more so than Arrow of God and Half of a Yellow Sun, Beloved is a radically perspectival novel, heavily reliant on what narrative theory calls the internal focalization of a wide array of characters. Over its course, we are privy to the internal reflections of its principals (Sethe, Beloved, Denver, Paul D, Baby Suggs), of ancillary members of the Black community (Stamp Paid, Lady Jones, Ella), and even of several white characters (schoolteacher, Edward Bodwin, the sheriff). Given all of these characters’ impartial knowledge of the novel’s central events—such as Sethe’s escape from Sweet Home, the fate of her husband Halle, Paul D’s wanderings after Sweet Home, and Baby Suggs’ retreat into “colors”—perspectivism and a predilection for storytelling allow Morrison progressively to unfold our understanding of these events, adding new layers of detail with every retelling. Early on, to cite a small but important example, Denver notices the tip of a scar on Beloved when she undresses, but it is only much later that Sethe sees that “little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy-coo place under her chin” as seeming confirmation that Beloved is her eldest daughter reincarnate (282).
This example takes us to the fundamental inconclusiveness with which any reading of Beloved must come to terms. Is Beloved, as Sethe and Denver come to believe, their daughter and sister returned to life? Is she rather, as Stamp Paid speculates and much of Beloved’s internal monologue seems to confirm, “a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone” (277)? Or does she symbolize more generally, as the image of Beloved’s emerging from water with fish for hair suggests, the traumatic violence and loss that all enslaved women experienced in the Middle Passage? The point, as many have rightly noted, is that we cannot decide. The only truly stable reading of Beloved, in my view, is that she embodies what a formerly enslaved mother like Sethe might take to be
her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. No unbreakable 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. (296)
In a strong analysis of Morrison’s novel, critic Irmtraud Huber reads the fundamental indeterminacy around Beloved’s nature as emblematic of the text’s ethical dimension, arguing (after Emmanuel Levinas) that “ethical narratives neither provide closure nor make it possible to forget. They do not heal; they hurt” (377). My reading is different in focus, but very much complementary.
In her 2004 Forward to Beloved, Morrison says this of her decision to thrust the reader straight into the world of 124 Bluestone Road, with no “foyer” or “introduction”:
I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense. (xviii)
Few modern readers will have directly experienced forms of dispossession or dislocation commensurate with the experience of Beloved’s principal characters, robbed as they so often were of their husbands, wives, and children, of their bodily integrity, their labor, their right to self-determination, and often their lives.
Photo: Sethe in Beloved, dir. Jonathan Demme
Morrison’s gambit was to mimic this sense of radical dispossession by abandoning the traditional, mostly linear plot for a form of plotting that is both repetitive and radically perspectival as it circles around a series of largely ineffable traumatic experiences—all in the interest of creating “a shared experience with the book’s population.” In other words, her aim was to use not just her narrative content, but also the very form of the narrative itself, to convey to her reader, not what slavery “looked like, but what it felt like and what it meant, personally” (Source312). In Beloved, as in so many of our texts, formal complexity and indeterminacy of meaning serve as catalysts to readerly wisdom.
I began this post by arguing that wisdom for Morrison lies in the process of imaginary production that author and reader, storyteller and listener, engage in together around the ineffable core of traumatic experiences. Empathy and a sense of community are thus not only markers of wisdom; they are essential components in the production of wisdom in and through narrative. Or as the blind seer’s interlocutors so aptly put it: “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created” (Source 108).
