Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.It was not a story to pass on.
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
To write history means giving dates their physiognomy.
- Walter Benjamin
For philosopher, essayist and critic Walter Benjamin, history is catastrophe. Standing as he does at the dawn of World War II and reflecting back on the devastation of the First World War, Benjamin sees history stretched out before him and knows that it marches forward, goosestepping over the prone bodies of those who could not keep up with its procession, toward a future that can be no more or no less brutal and devastating than the past has already proved to be. What hope there is rests in humanity's ability to remember the experiences of those crushed under this catastrophic progression and to account for them in the narratives of our traditions. The repository of these disremembered experiences, and the one whose task it is to incorporate them into our present, is the storyteller. The storyteller offers the images which can effectively stop the progression of history and creates a conduit through which the "disremembered and unaccounted for" can convey their experience.
The on-going progression of history continually produces new catastrophes and brutalizes new bodies; thus we are in constant need of new storytellers to articulate the experiences of those who would otherwise be buried in the universalizing crush of history. In this, the dusk of the 20th century, to whom has the task of Benjamin's storyteller fallen? One such contemporary storyteller is African-American writer Toni Morrison, who in her novel Beloved brings our present face to face with the image of the smashed bodies of Black slaves, forcing us to re-member and account for their experiences.
Benjamin has identified the catastrophe of history with the loss of communicable experience and hence meaning in human life. The processes initiated in the Enlightenment, perpetuated in the rise of positivistic philosophy, and culminating in the horrors of World War I have stripped humanity of its experiential reality.
It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. . . For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power (Illuminations, 83-84).
What is lost is the art of the storyteller who, in the telling of the stories of a culture, passed on the tradition from one generation to the next and with it the wisdom of experience. This wisdom is nothing less than the knowledge and skill necessary to integrate the experiences contained in tradition into the real lives of the listeners, to make them conscious of history.
The story places us in the presence of the community, for someone "listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship" (100). This is not a dyadic communion between narrator and listener, for in telling the story, the storyteller relinquishes her unique subjectivity to the collective experience, inviting the listener to do the same. "The storyteller takes what he tells from experience -- his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale" (87). The primary tool of the storyteller is memory. "Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation" (98). The company in whose presence the story places us is not just the present community, but also embraces the experiences of those who preceded us. A story is integrated into our experience to the extent that we actively strive to remember that story and the counsel that it contains. It is not necessary that we remember each detail, but that we can comprehend the sweep of the tale enough that we can fit ourselves into the tradition and make the community's experience our own.
This memorial recitation of the communal story is the relating of the history -- the tradition of collective experience -- of the people represented in the story. But this is not history as understood by an Enlightenment-influenced progressive historicism; rather, Benjamin's understanding of history as catastrophe refutes the notion of history as progress. The catastrophe of history lies in the very idea that history is a progression of causal factors and their effects and that it is inevitably progressing toward a better future and a redeemed humanity. This progressive history, which looks ever-forward and sees its past only in terms of its present and future effects, omits mention of past injustices and facilitates the catastrophic devastation of the oppressed. The past no longer matters, except as it validates the present claims of the rulers by reference to the victors. What a positivist historian would perceive as progress, "a chain of events," Benjamin recognizes as "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage..." (257), which compounds the damage of history and leaves the losers and the dead in limbo, where the significance of past events is irrevocably lost to the present and any real change is precluded.
Escape from this positivist-induced devastation of humanity and nature depends upon the oppressed developing a critical consciousness that can break the myth of continuity in history and stop the progression of and to catastrophe (Wolin). Change requires the anger and commitment of the oppressed, which "are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren" (260). But the very weight of this historical procession mitigates against that desired outcome. Thus, the role of the critical historian should be to deliberately intervene in this progressive exposition of history. She must halt this progression whenever and wherever possible, "to brush history against the grain" (257), and in so doing, to shock the listeners into a critical stance vis-à-vis history.
The task of the storyteller and the critical historian, then, is to name and remember the wreckage of history and to make that remembrance relevant to present generations. The storyteller as "history-teller" (95) engages in the act of interpretation, "which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world" (96). The purpose is not to explain the past. Explanation reduces history/story to information, which we can verify or not, but which does not communicate the experience of the past or provoke a change in our perspective. The storyteller's interpretation, on the other hand, directly connects the experiences of past and present. And yet, because the telling of the story, and thus its interpretation, depends on the integration of the listeners' experience as well, even in this interpretation, "the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader" (89). Each new amalgam of story with experience brings a new interpretation, new meaning to the story; no interpretation can stand unscrutinized.
From within that shared communal experience, we are able to interpret and come to terms with the most disturbing of human experiences -- death. In the story we can link our individual experience with the continuity of the tradition and be protected from death in that way. "A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier" (102). Indeed, in the remembering of the traditional story, the lived experiences of the dead are given authority as they become part of the counsel to the living and are integrated into the on-going experience of the community. Integration into the on-going experience of the community opens up avenues of praxis, even for the dead; this authoritative remembering is redemption.
For Benjamin, modern humanity has replaced the story with the information, which severs the links between the reader/listener and communal memory by recasting experience into isolated remembrances of discrete moments and sensations, thus stultifying that experience. Rather than interpreting the depth and breadth of tradition, information explains isolated events, and once explained they are lost to the present. "The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time" (90). This shift from story to information has facilitated and been symptomatic of a fundamental change in the structure of human experience. Once, the communication of experience in the story incorporated into tradition the ultimate shock of death and the multitude of smaller shocks which constitute human life in the world, making it possible to safely assimilate these shocks into our lived experience through remembrance. Now, however, modern urban society bombards us with shock experiences so constantly, and the narrative has been so thoroughly replaced by information, that in order to fend off this barrage of our consciousness, we reduce lived experience to independent remembrances frozen in time, memory traces that lurk at the edges of consciousness, but are only assimilated as pieces of information, which lose their resonance with our present, making that experience difficult to communicate and diminishing the authority of death. Redemption becomes impossible.
Throughout his work, Benjamin is engaging in a materialist reading of experience and tradition and their loss in modernity (Wolin). The change in the structure of experience has been brought about by the advance of capitalism, and perpetuated by its handmaid, positivistic historicism. Just as the process of rationalization isolates human beings from their labor, it also cuts them off from their own experience and from the ability to appropriate the traditions of human experience necessary to meaning-making. Reduced to an automaton by the repetitious and disjointed nature of factory production, the worker on the factory line is disconnected from her own experience; experience itself mirrors the historicist account of the past and becomes a series of dislocated moments strung together into a progressive narrative. Yet because there is no link to an authoritative story, no remembrance of death, the worker, like the historicist, is unable to see that anything has been lost or left unaccounted for.
To accomplish this redemptive task, the storyteller creates images that fuse past and present, images that shock the reader into a critical awareness of what has been left out or rendered complete and now must be reclaimed and redeemed. These dialectical images bring about a "cessation of happening." They are designed to break open the continuum of history, to stop the progression which threatens to overwhelm all true experience of the oppressed classes, "to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it" (255). In the image, past and present collide, and the result is one of ultimate shock for the person encountering the dialectical image. We are shocked into a critical awareness of history and our "weak Messianic power" (254) to redeem what has been left for dead.
The storyteller is the creator of images. These images are dialectical in that they bring together the experience of past generations with the reality of the now, and in so doing, momentarily halt the progress of history. By bringing the voices of the past into communication with the present, the storyteller, opens up the possibility of transmitting the experience of the oppressed, making redemption possible.
It is my claim that Toni Morrison is a contemporary storyteller in the mode Benjamin defines. Her fiction is shaped from the traditions of her people and forms the rungs of the communal ladder of experience which she so freely moves up and down. She shares Benjamin's understanding of history as catastrophe, as a "mimesis of the dead and the smashed" (Tiedemann, 177). And as storyteller, she is able to create the dialectical images that bring those smashed voices into the present and re-members the dead, thus opening up the possibility of redemption for the oppressed.
In Beloved, as in her other writings, Morrison does not tell her own story, but passes on the story of her people, the tales of catastrophe and survival of African-Americans, and especially African-American women, through and beyond the 300 years of slavery in the United States. Like Benjamin's storyteller, Morrison lets go of her own subjectivity, allowing the experiences to speak through her: "Toni Morrison considers herself as a "conduit" for the wisdom of her people. 'I cannot be flattered because it isn't me; the ego isn't involved in the listening, the telling...there is room for everyone...But it's not just mine. I have no ego in that way'" (Russell 45). In Beloved, she draws on the history and collective experience of African-Americans in slavery and the reconstruction period. There are two primary written sources for the novel: slave narratives, the autobiographical and firsthand accounts of slavery which generally mark the earliest written records of African-American literary tradition; and a newspaper clipping that tells the story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave mother who, upon being captured, killed her child rather than allow the baby to be taken back into slavery.
But Morrison, like many other Black women authors, also draws heavily on the folklore and oral traditions of her culture, including the call and response patterns of African songs and African-American preaching (Mobley). Her attention to this latter technique in Beloved prompts her to tell the story through a layering of the different characters' voices, experiences and histories, over all, as Trudier Harris claims, giving her narrative the feeling of being "saturated" with the oral folklore traditions.
There are certain forms, conditions, and ideas...so thoroughly enmeshed in the African-American psyche and culture that they are instinctively, intuitively recognizable when they appear in literary form; their appearance evokes in readers a "depth" and "quality" of experience....An individual can be so "immersed" "in the totality of the Black Experience" that he or she cannot readily draw the line between literary creation, communal psyche, and racial history as far as these saturated concepts are concerned.I would suggest that Toni Morrison approximates such a saturation in her use of traditional folkloristic forms and in her creation of other forms that resemble the original ones so closely that we often cannot tell where her imagination leaves off and communal history begins....
...By using multiple voices of creation in the novel...Morrison illustrates how characters can be the subject as well as the transmitter/author of tales about themselves. Morrison also suggests here, as earlier, that a communal storytelling session is in process, one in which the reader is as intimately involved as are the characters and the author. By breaking down the barriers between fiction and folkloristic process, Morrison again makes clear how saturated the folk materials are within her texts (10, 13).
This saturation allows Morrison to transmit the experience of her tradition in the novel, and invites her readers to join in the process of constructing the communal story. In addition, the use of multiple character's voices to tell the story helps her to achieve the texture that Benjamin laments is missing from the craft of storytelling, "that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings" (Illuminations, 93).
What is the story of Beloved that is told in this dense layering of voices? Morrison is a "history-teller," who, like Benjamin, understands the history of her people as catastrophe. As the characters reluctantly peel away these thin, transparent layers of their stories -- seven of Baby Suggs' children lost to the auctioneer's block; her last son, Halle, butter smeared on his face, driven mad by watching the slave owner suck the milk from wife Sethe's breast; Sethe's back permanently scarred in the dense shape of a chokecherry tree; Paul D enduring the humiliation of the iron bit in his mouth -- -what is revealed is the pile of human wreckage wrought by slavery. And even with Emancipation, the horror continues:
...Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. (180)
It is a narrative so punctuated by death and brutality that when we reach the horrendous centerpiece, Sethe's brutal murder of her beloved two year-old daughter, we can almost believe, as she almost believes, that the finality of death is infinitely preferable to the horror of an enslaved life. The reader is left fixated on the carnage, mouth agape, unable to find words to describe what they see, and yet longing "to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed" (Illuminations, 257).
Morrison's understanding of history is, also like Benjamin's, a materialist one. The Black slave, like the European worker, suffered from the shocks of the capitalist system of production, although in a more direct and profound way. Just as the worker on the factory line lost her ability to connect with her own experience, the shocks of slavery: "were everyday reminders to slaves that the masters possessed their very minds and memories -- had indeed erased if not destroyed their histories -- even as they owned their bodies" (Harris 330). Morrison's almost surrealistic ghost story is, in fact, a materialistic rendering of the catastrophe of African-American history. The past, its memory, is out there still, real enough to capture the living in its grip: "Even if the whole farm -- every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there -- you who never was there -- if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting" (36).
So traumatic is this history that the characters themselves try everything in their power to avert their eyes, to deny its reality. At every turn, their experience of themselves as whole and worthy human beings was contradicted by the oppressive system of slavery, until they are unable to assimilate the shock of it into their consciousness. Yet the "rememories" remain as memory traces, evoked by the sight of a tree, a smell, a word or gesture, sneaking up on the characters, unavoidable, until Sethe laments: "Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new...how sweet that would have been" (70). But she, like the others, is left only with forgetting, removing herself as far as possible from the lived experience of slavery, with "the serious work of beating back the past" (73).
But Morrison as "history-teller" is conscious of her "weak Messianic power" to remember and redeem the past, while Morrison as storyteller is the creator of images, dialectical images, that can break the continuity of white history which threatens to bury slave history, leaving the survivors with a choice between forgetting and madness. Into this sea of repressed "rememory" comes the dialectical image of Beloved, murdered at her mother's hand. Not content to remain a mere memory trace, frozen in history forever as "the crawling-already baby" of two, she arrives in corporeal form as a young woman of 20, and disrupts the lives of Sethe, Denver and Paul D just as the pleasure of their reunion threatens to override once and for all the horror of their past. Despite her beautiful form and gentle manner, Beloved is by no means a benign ghost. She forces Paul D out of the house and little by little she traps Sethe in that "no-time waiting for her," where "I don't have to rememory or say a thing because you know it" (191). Convinced that with her daughter back, the pain and guilt of the past can be erased from memory, Sethe hovers closer to the madness that is a total forgetting of the catastrophe of history.
As dialectical image, Beloved is the image "in which the Then (das Gewesene) and the Now (das Jetzt) come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill" (Benjamin, "N," 49). As flesh and blood woman, the ghost Beloved is wholly in the Now time of the story. Yet she embodies and brings with her the Then, the collective memory, and the collective rage, of the slaves forced from their ancestral homes, piled in ship holds for the Middle Passage, brutalized by the system of slavery. As Beloved the ghost, the dialectical image, brings time in the story to a halt, daughter and mother begin to merge, past and present become conflated, and even Morrison's writing loses its structure as descriptions of the present meld with memories of the Middle Passage:
I am Beloved and she is mine... I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing 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 some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink we have none ...we are all trying to leave our bodies behind the man on my face has done it it is hard to make yourself die forever you sleep short and then return...(210).
In Beloved, not only are the memories, the voices of the dead and disremembered, brought into the present, but so is the collective anger of those denied their experiences. "For someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation. Yet it is this very inability to experience that lies at the heart of rage" (Illuminations, 184).
Sethe and Denver are ill prepared for the onslaught of history, for ever since Sethe's act of violence, they have been separated from their community, ostracized and distant. Yet without the community they lack a context that allows them to integrate the experience of the past into their present. A story without listeners remains in the realm of the incommunicable. So great is Denver's isolation from the traditional Black community, so unsure is she about her ability to communicate what is happening in the house, that when she is finally forced to go for help, she is almost unable to complete her mission. She hears her grandmother's voice list the family litany of troubles to convince her that neither fearing the past, nor ignoring it, is the answer:
"You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don't remember nothing about how I come to walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps? My Jesus my."But you said there was no defense.
"There ain't."
Then what do I do?
"Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on" (244).
Saving her mother is not a matter of leaving the past behind, but it requires that she take strength from the very catastrophes that give authority to the experience of her family. Remembering history so that it can be communicated as lived experience is the source of courage and redemption.
And what of us, the 20th century readers of this historic tale? Morrison's ghost is also dialectical image for us as much as for her characters. Morrison's book confronts us with our own histories -- of enduring the horrors of slavery or of smashing the bodies and souls of slaves -- imploring us not to forget and let the voices drown like the bodies thrown from the ships in the Middle Passage. The images in Beloved shock us into a critical stance toward our own history. "Thus, just as the slave narratives were a form of narrative intervention designed to disrupt the system of slavery, Beloved can be read as a narrative of intervention that disrupts the cultural notion that the untold story of the black slave mother is, in the words of the novel, 'the past something to leave behind'" (Mobley, 358).
Not long after my first reading of Beloved I had a dream. My father and I are shopping in a bookstore in Berkeley. As we are browsing the books, the ghost of Beloved arrives, not in corporeal form as she does for Sethe and Denver, but ethereally. She is angry, and locks the doors and windows, preventing our escape from the store. Before she will let us leave, we must recite from Beloved, read aloud her story, in particular her monologue where she describes the collective experience of her people aboard the ships of the Middle Passage. I remove the book, a large leather bound and tooled version, from the shelf and give a quick run through, but cannot find the passage she wants to hear. She becomes angrier and agitated, begins zipping around the room just above our heads, knocking things from shelves and hurling books and other objects around the room. I begin to go through the book, page by page, scanning as quickly as I can while ducking from her projectiles and trying to calm her and explain that I am trying my best. But my best is not good enough, because when I reach the end of the book, I still have not found the passage. It is gone. It has been written out of her story.
Those of us who would, with Benjamin and Morrison, resist the progression of history that threatens to bury the "disremembered and unaccounted for" beneath the wreckage must not allow those experiences to be written out of history. Instead we must listen to the stories, make them our tradition and experience, even when they are not. "For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (Illuminations, 255). And where the forgetting is total, madness ensues.
By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.Beloved (Morrison, 275).
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. (Illuminations, 255)
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