'Beloved' and the Problem of Mourning
1998; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoHow can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made keeper of holocaust where all was lost? Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster Making space for transgressive image, outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create context for transformation. bell hooks, Black Looks At heart of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe, at critical moment, is unable to tell her lover, Paul D, story of her dead child. Sethe knew that circle she was making around room, him, subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off--she could never explain.(1) Paul D, at this point, has already seen newspaper article featuring Sethe's picture and story about run-away slave who kills one of her children when owner catches up with her. Desperate, he confronts Sethe, wanting an explanation. But she realizes that it is not question of filling in or countering this official version with her own version: Sethe could recognize only seventy-five printed words (half of which appeared in newspaper clipping), but she knew that words she did not understand hadn't anymore power than she had to (B, p. 161). For Sethe, language cannot contain event. Yet, despite her insistence about failure of language to explain her story, much of critical literature Beloved emphasizes importance of novel in terms of writing or recovering of it. Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that characters in novel are forced by Beloved (the ghost of Sethe's child) to confront traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins process of healing, which she describes as conscious meaning making about what is inherently incomprehensible.(2) And Jean Wyatt, in tempered Lacanian reading of Beloved, argues that the hope at end of novel is that Sethe, having recognized herself as subject, will be able to narrate mother-daughter story and invent language that can encompass desperation of slave mother who killed her daughter.(3) In this paper, I want to challenge these readings of Beloved and suggest some of reasons why novel frustrates storytelling, bearing, what Gayatri Spivak refers to as, the mark of untranslatability.(4) Lost Archives The Europeans who travelled to what they imagined to be and who envisioned America as mankind's last great hope, Western site of millennium, place of freedom and possibility, were, of course, also fleeing religious persecution, social ostracism, and economic hardship in Europe.(5) This transference of libidinal energies from Old to is what Freud understands as normal process of mourning, where loss of one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on is overcome in process of mourning.(6) The process involves an identification of that has been lost and reality-testing that determines that no longer exists. This testing proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that [lost] object and that be incorporated into memory.(7) The process of representing loss, translating it into symbolic language,(8) then allows freed libidinal impulses to be redirected at new object. As several critics have pointed out, New World model is inappropriate in context of African-American history. Maxine Lavon Montgomery describes European experience as involving a gradual decline in social, economic, and moral conditions, major catastrophe, then new beginning--an unreliable model when imposed upon Black American experience.(9) And, as Susan Bowers writes, for African-American (unlike Europeans travelling to America) It]he good life lay not before them, but behind them; yet, every attempt was made to crush their memories of past. …
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