BELOVED & THE EROTICS OF TEMPORAL MUTILATION

Abstract

'Snatched and yanked' the readers begin a journey in Beloved’s extravagant and meandering narrative—a narrative filled with repetitions and returns that mutilate time beyond recognition. This paper aims to map time in Beloved, to understand its narrative insurgence, and feel the foreign terrains it leaves the reader in. I depend on Peter Brooks’ essay “Freud’s Masterplot” to contextualize the patterns of repetitions and returns that mutilate time in the text through a psychoanalytic understanding. Crucial to the psychoanalytic understanding of the narrative is the comprehension of narrative desire, precisely how the death instinct can be at work in the narrative. Given the controversial status of the death instinct in psychoanalysis, I also rely on Matte Blanco’s “The Four Antinomies of The Death Instinct” to elucidate how the death instinct takes root in the narrative and interacts with time. This maimed temporal map of Beloved takes the reader from three-dimensional reality on an ever-deviating spiral downwards to reach the purest, undifferentiated mode of being.