"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

While Henderson's analysis is often insightful, I find her view to be one-sided, because she ignores the novel's postmodernist suspicion of coherent and logical historical narratives that attempt to smooth over the disorder of lived experience. I disagree with her suggestion that this novel creates coherence out of the lives dismembered by slavery. She writes: "If dismemberment deconstitutes the whole . . . then re-memory functions to re-collect, re-assemble, and organize into a meaningful sequential whole through... the process of narrativization" (71). Henderson uses words like "cohesive" to describe Sethe's narrative, an adjective that seems inappropriate for a novel that rejects closure and facile narrative solutions. In opposition to Henderson, Emily Miller Budick cogently argues that gaps left by a tragic past are not easily filled or smoothed over in this work: "recovering the missing [child] . . . reconstituting in the present what was lost in the past, will not, this book insists, restore order and logic to lives that have been interrupted by such loss" (131).

I would argue along with Budick that Morrison's novel does not aim to fill in all the gaps of the historical past; the result of her literary archeology is not a complete skeleton, but a partial one, with pieces deliberately missing or omitted. Because the reconstruction is not total, the reader is engaged in the process of imagining history herself. Although Morrison's historical project is to unveil the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (Beloved 199), many things nevertheless remain inaudible or buried in the novel, and these gaps can be read as characteristically postmodern.(8) When Paul D confronts Sethe with the newspaper clipping about the murder of her child, Sethe is unable to give voice to the unspoken: "she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask" (163). Of course, she continues to try to pin it down throughout the rest of the novel, but rather than a complete and seamless product, the process of putting some of her memory into words is stressed here.

Rather than the "meaningful sequential whole" that Henderson finds, I see a text with many holes and gaps, a testament to the incoherence of "life lived," especially the life of a freed slave.(9) For example, the novel begins with Howard and Bugler, but we never learn their fate, or that of their father Hale. Who was the girl whose red ribbon Stamp Paid finds attached to a raft? This novel never forgets or underestimates the difficulty of representing the lives of the disremembered and unaccounted for, "the people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons" (181). The Middle Passage, in which "sixty million and more" slaves died, is another significant gap that looms on the horizon, and can only be obliquely alluded to in the novel's epigraph, in Sethe's buried memories of her mother's story, and in Beloved's postmodern fragmented narrative that blends the historical past and present. Beloved's disjointed narrative, composed of phrases with no punctuation, calls attention to the visual spaces on the page, a metaphor for the gaps in the storytelling. In Beloved's narrative, "it is always now" (210), and Morrison combines imagined scenes of life on the slave ships with details from Beloved and Sethe's stories: