"Postmodern blackness": Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and the end of history - novel by Black female author

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by Kimberly Chabot Davis

Despite the indeterminacies of her fiction, Toni Morrison's Beloved can be read as an overt and passionate quest to fill a gap neglected by historians, to record the everyday lives of the "disremembered and unaccounted for" (274). Rejecting the artificial distinction between fiction and history, Morrison considers artists to be the "truest of historians" ("Behind the Making" 88). In "Site of Memory," Toni Morrison explicitly describes the project of writing Beloved as one of fictional reconstruction or "literary archeology" (112), of imagining the inner life of the slave woman Margaret Garner, her source for Sethe. While working on The Black Book (1974), a collection of cultural documents recording African American "history-as-life-lived," Morrison discovered a newspaper clipping about Garner, a runaway slave who had murdered her children at the moment of capture. Like Denver's efforts to reconstruct the past through storytelling, Morrison's narrative has succeeded in "giving blood to the scraps . . . and a heartbeat" to what had been merely an historical curio (Beloved 78). The desire to uncover the historical reality of the African American past fuels Morrison's fictional project of literary archeology: "you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply" ("Site" 112). Working to fill in the gaps left by the constrained slave narrative genre, she attempts "to rip the veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate'" in order "to yield up a kind of a truth" (110, 112).

Although this last phrase suggests that Morrison pursues authenticity in her historical renderings, I will argue that she accepts the poststructuralist critique of the idea of a single totalizing Truth or History. While she sees herself as a creative historian who reconstructs, Morrison also works to deconstruct master narratives of "official history" in Beloved. Mae Henderson describes the novel as a counternarrative to the "master('s) narrative" (79), one example of which is the newspaper account of Margaret Garner's deed, a document that reappears in the novel as a harsh official alternative to Sethe's emotional interpretation of events. In this novel, the appearance of the newspaper clipping is one of the few intrusions of the dominant culture's process of historical documentation. Morrison drops only a few references to historically recognizable "encyclopedia" events of the period; for example, the Fugitive Slave Bill, the historical fact that provokes Sethe's infanticide, is mentioned only in parentheses (171). Even more striking is her rendering of the Civil War, the apocalypse of American national history, as a minor, inconsequential event in the lives of these former slaves. As Denver lovingly remembers the gift of Christmas cologne she received as a child, she mentions casually and offhandedly that she received it during "one of the war years" (28). Paul D's haunting memory of the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, outweighs the significance of his participation in the war, of which we learn only in the last few pages of the book. The private realities of persecution and daily survival matter more to Sethe and Paul D than any dates or public documents worthy of note in a history textbook. Paul D recognizes that prejudice and racism certainly did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation or the surrender of the Confederate Army: "The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it" (52). Marilyn Sanders Mobley suggests that the fragments of recognizable history in Beloved "punctuate the text and . . . disrupt the text of the mind which is both historical and ahistorical at the same time" (196).(5) While I agree that these historical facts appear as interruptions, I would argue that the minds of Sethe and Paul D are never "ahistorical." Rather, Morrison attempts to redefine history as an amalgamation of local narratives, as a jumble of personal as well as publicly recorded triumphs and tragedies.