Absence, Loss, and the Space of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

EMILY MILLER BUDICK Absence, Loss, and the Space of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved "~|G t was not a story t? pass on," Morrison writes in the final JLchapter of Beloved; she repeats, "It was not a story to pass on. . . . This is not a story to pass on" (336-38). The wrenching poignancy of the story that precedes the conclusion—condensed in the text's final word: "Beloved"—shows the tremendous importance of remembering in this story, as in other recent African-American fiction and criticism; the novel's endotsement of and almost hypnotic descent into oblivion in its final pages thus can hardly represent simple encapsulation of the novel's wisdom.1 In fact, the final chapter's insistent forgetting is deeply chilling. The almost lyrical, lilting quality of the language, with its repetition of terms like "disremembered" and "unaccounted for" creates a ghostly presence all its own. It is as if, in its vety denial ofthe "breath" and "clamof" of the now-to-be "disremembered" and "unaccounted for" ghost, the novel breathes its very own ghostly clamor (336-38). Is this or is this not, then, a stoty to pass on? And if it is, what and why and, in particular, how are we to remember the past? The way of remembering dramatized through the story is not the way of remembering that the text embodies. This difference between modes of histotical recollection is not unrelated to what is also a major issue in this text: how men and women produce not only the story of the past, but history itself. Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 2, Summer 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 16 10 Emily Miller Budiclc FAMILY, HISTORY, REMEMORY AND DESIRE For most of the novel, Beloved remembers in a particular way. To adopt Sethe's innocent but meaningful term, we might call this the way of "rememory": '"Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay,'" as Sethe explains to Denver: "Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world. . . . Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. . . . Nothing evet [dies]." (44-45) Rememory, as Sethe defines it, is the relocation of the mind's thoughtpictures of the past "out there," in the physical world. It is the concrete and corporeal resurrection of the past in the present, as if time did not exist (226). This definition of rememory (which some critics have understood as a specifically female form of remembering),2 and the dangers of disremembering recorded at the end of the novel make Beloved's function in the story fairly clear. Whether, as most critics have assumed, she is a literal "resurrection" of Sethe's dead daughtet (128), ot whether, as one ctitic has recently suggested, she represents her own and Sethe's fantasies of recovering the lost mother and the lost child, Beloved visually installs the past within the present (House 17-26). She is, in othet words, a particularly vivid and vital—perhaps even maternal—rememory of the past. This past is not simply the ptivate, petsonal histoty of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Insofar as Beloved figures slavery itself, she re-members the history of an entire people. Nor is Beloved the only attempt at rememory which this book depicts . At the beginning of the story, Denver is waiting for the return not only of her sister, but of her fathet as well. "I always knew he was coming," says Denver, "Then Paul D came in here. I heard his voice downstairs, and Ma'am laughing, so I thought it was him, my daddy. . . . But when I got downstairs it was Paul D and he didn't come for me; he wanted my mothet" (255). Denver's mother shares with Denver her Toni Morrisons Beloved119 desire to recover the lost Halle. She...