"From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

Abstract

In final chapter of Beloved, narrator repeats, was not a story to pass on. Nonetheless, like ghost in novel that haunts 124 Bluestone Road, that draws life out of Sethe, story is beloved. The dearly beloved, those buried, burned, thrown overboard, who cannot or should not be forgotten, create this story that must be known and told. In telling, Morrison not only rememories experience of slavery, but she also ties her work to production of critical theory as she deconstructs Enlightenment notion of to make room for what bell hooks calls a radical black subjectivity. Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical challenge to Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language, history, and identity. Then, in open space remaining, she reconstructs knowledges, histories, and identities, all of which allow for inclusion of African American subject and African American experience. However, this is no easy task. The Western intellectual tradition works against establishment of alternatively legitimate modes of knowledge. It is not only a white intellectual tradition that has required black experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens. African American intellectuals have similarly tried to gain social advancement through mastery of white language and knowledge. Influenced by his Enlightenment world view, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in Talented Tenth that of life and its wider meaning has been point of Negro's deepest ignorance (Writings 852), thus underestimating capacity of everyday people to 'know' about life, argues Comel West (58), (1) and embracing instead Modernist tradition of power/knowledge. Enlightenment thought constructed a white, heterosexual, patriarchal hegemony that marginalized those outside fixed center. Similarly, Du Bois's social philosophy for betterment of his race depended implicitly upon Modernist vie w of and language, which necessitated presence of a rational, coherent subject. It was upon shoulders of this enlightened, exceptional man that Du Bois placed burden to save race, for he was far more likely to act on behalf of common good than were uneducated masses. However, within bounds of Enlightenment thought, neither Du Bois nor any other member of a socially marginalized group (2) could cast himself as a thinking subject because he was necessarily constituted as Other. Enlightenment tradition alienated African Americans from knowledge and all its rewards--history, identity, language. This exclusion from American culture has formed an unrelenting attack on black humanity, producing condition of black culture--that of black invisibility and namelessness (West 80). For many marginalized groups in America, historical status of is precisely that of never having existed, because members have lacked power imperative to conceive of oneself as a centered, whole entity (Harper 11). Because Du Bois's agenda for social improvement proved incompatible with philosophy under which it was conceived, African American intellectuals have been compelled to find theoretical alternatives which would allow for creation of presence and voice through which to articulate their experience and history. The subversion of monarchical rule of Enlightenment thought which discredits alternatives, multiplicitous representations, or varying knowledges appears essential for African American intellectuals who would empower themselves to create a radical black subjectivity and identity outside of hegemonic prescriptions. Henry Louis Gates defines this opposition to hegemony as the most fundamental right that any tradition possesses.. . to define itself... [and] its very own presuppositions. If African Americanists fail to accomplish this task, we shall remain indentured servants to white masters. …