Approaching the Thing of Slavery: A Lacanian Analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

African American literature is often defined through reference to concepts of repetition and revision. African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues it is precisely because black authors read and revise one another, address similar themes and repeat cultural and linguistic codes of a common symbolic geography, can think of them as forming literary traditions (20). It is in context of this literary process of repetition and revision we may first view Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. At its most basic level, Beloved is an imaginative repeating and revising of history of a slave woman named Margaret Garner, historical figure upon whom character Sethe is based. However, what is most compelling about Beloved is its articulation of a conception of role repetition plays in lives of both its African American characters and many of members of its contemporary African American reading audience. If function of repetition is important to psychoanalysis, it is important to extent that, as Jacques Lacan asserts, psychoanalytic thought defines itself in terms of traumas and their (Ethics 10). What Morrison's Beloved points to is precisely persistence of a traumatic past haunts present through a subjective, psychic experience of trauma defies limits of time and space. Morrison's novel presents us with a literary understanding of a past functions as what Lacan calls Real, Real as that which is always in same (70), as excluded Thing is heart of me as something strange to me, prehistoric Other it is impossible to forget, or to remember (71). It is this Real Morrison's protagonist Sethe attempts to circumscribe in her description of Sweet Home as a place from her past is still there, just in her rememory, but out there outside [her] head (36). Speaking of her traumatic enslavement at Sweet Home, Sethe asserts, even though all over--over and done for--it's going to always be there because that place is real (36). Beloved's understanding things just stay founds its articulation of a historical trauma equally haunts residents of 124 and contemporary African Americans (35). The text presents to us a trauma reemerges in moment of our identification with its past location. Speaking of Real place, Sethe proclaims, it's never going away ..., and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there and stand in place where it was, it will happen again (36). Through Sethe's description of a traumatic past is always there waiting, Morrison suggests notion of an African American population continually imperiled, so much physically as psychically, by history of slavery. Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, declares not a house in country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's (5). This past grief is depicted in Beloved as a repetition haunts and claims African Americans because they claim racial past. I read Morrison's Beloved as a textual presentation of race and racial past of slavery as sublimated representatives of Lacanian Real. Where race in particular is claimed by many African Americans as a socially accepted object of attachment, Beloved is a literary attempt to free African Americans from a self-destructive investment in traumatic, racial past frequently grounds their identity as raced subjects. Lacan defines sublimation as a process raises an object ... to dignity of Thing, to level of Real (Ethics 112). His most telling example of a sublimated figure is perhaps the image of crucifixion Christianity has erected in place of all other gods (261). Lacan finds in this sublimated image function of an Ate, divinization of a limit simultaneously draws us toward and keeps us a safe distance from which disqualification of all concepts, which represents void of empty Real (262). …