BOOKS
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the mere ending of the war is powerless to change. After all, no
retelling can bring back what has been lost or killed. Or can it?
Sethe's murder of her tiny daughter in a desperate attempt to save
the child from slavery at any cost is the center of the many awful
events eddying through
Beloved.
Is the girl who turns up on Sethe's
doorstep, scarred as the dead child would have been, her age had she
lived, truly the murdered daughter come back?
If
so, what can this
mean?
Beloved
is among other things a ghost story. I won't give much
away in pointing out that Morrison is dealing, on multiple levels,
with the return of the repressed. Throughout this courageous novel,
the truth is a deeply equivocal thing. Halle, Sethe's husband, goes
mad when he learns what has been done to his wife; Paul D., scarred
by his years of suffering during and after slavery, thinks of his heart
as a locked tobacco tin whose contents are shrivelled - better to keep
it shut. All the characters in this novel bear physical or psychic scars,
usually both; Morrison is probihg the price of survival. The truth
reopens wounds; the suffering is terrible, but there is no alternative
to knowing.
Beloved
is an extended excursus on the impossibility of
forgetting, but this theme is in fact articulated in all these novels. As
the shadow narrator says on the first page of
Cigarettes,
"I wanted to
understand. I planned someday to write a book about these people. I
wanted the whole story."
Is it a coincidence that several startling correspondences link
the various novels, or are shared thematic strands responsible?
Pascasie, the African woman in
The Voyeur-
knowing yet ignorant, a
bit of Africa encapsulated in a European capital- could be a
character in
The Golden Droplet;
and her liaison with Dodo is
demonically parodied in
Beloved,
where sex between people of dif–
ferent colors and classes is one of a cluster of issues. Along these
lines, the sinister link between power and pleasure, sexually ex–
pressed in sadism, features in
The Voyeur
and more violently in the
unforgettable episode of Morris's death in
Cigarettes,
but is–
again - especially crucial in
Beloved.
Voyeurism is both theme and
metaphor in all four novels, whether Allan tries to look into Eliza–
beth's room or Beloved watches Paul D. through cracks in the floor.
The disoriented, weirdly poetic utterances of a distressed and sick
young woman are among the most memorable moments in two of
these tales; unsolved riddles, family secrets are issues in three out of
four.
Differences in style and texture make the reading of these
