Versions of History: The Problems of Representation in Beloved

Morrison mentions in the forward to Beloved that “to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (XIX). What an interesting and strange thing to say!—especially for a novel brimming with powerful language. What could Morrison have possibly meant, and how could language—the very medium through which narrative is transmitted in a novel—be put aside? I believe Morrison means something very specific with her usage of “language” here: in order construct her ideal reader, traditional, more obvious forms of representation have to “get out of the way” and be replaced by intentional strategies like nonlinearity, the use of multiple perspectives, and repetition. Her ideal reader will be one who becomes immersed in the experience of enslavement without over-intellectualizing, one who lets the narrative itself do the work of representation and interpretation. The paradox of narrative is that it must necessarily be incomplete compared to the ideas or history it tried to represent; yet one of the only, and perhaps best, ways to represent history is through narrative. An historical occurrence such as American slavery is an event so complex and so tragic that it nearly defies accurate, productive representation. With Beloved, Morrison was acutely aware of these issues, and we as readers get the impression that the form Beloved takes as the narrative we read is the best form of representation: that which communicates experience through fiction, instead of a sense of factual history.

We see Morrison scuffle with the problem of representation most explicitly with the multiple points of view when revealing Sethe’s secret that she murdered her daughter. The order of perspectives narrated to readers is important in considering Morrison’s strategy: it flows and resolves from Schoolteacher, to Stamp Paid, to Sethe herself. These perspectives are set in a hierarchy of degrees of closeness to the experience of slavery, and perhaps Morrison isn’t concerned with truth or factual accuracy—seeing as we get the most slanted perspectives first, and even Sethe’s is biased into obfuscation—but rendering the “how” circumstances surrounding the facts of slavery. The revealed experience of the characters in the novel is more important than narrating any kind of historical fact. Morrison wants to argue, using Beloved, that effective use of narrative begets experience, and experience begets understanding. In Stamp Paid’s version of the story, Paul D repeats the refrain of “That ain’t her mouth, ” referring to how Sethe’s drawn image doesn’t accurately depict how she really looks. This is related to the problem of representation—depending on the perspective, representation is hardly ever 100% accurate and effective. What’s missing in the overarching narrative of slavery, then, is the real mouth that speaks real experience, where “real” doesn’t necessarily mean truthful or factual.

In class, we considered several meanings for the repetition of “This is/It was not a story to pass on” at the end of Beloved. The tension between the alteration of This is/It was made me think that stories of this kind exist in and confront both the past and present, and instead of suggesting that these kinds of stories shouldn’t be transmitted but buried away like so many of the memories in the narrative, it actually suggests the impossibility of them “passing on” into death. The phrasing does not identify an agent that enacts the transmission; the story is doing the action. So maybe, at the end of everything, Morrison wants to argue that stories of this kind have a tendency of perpetuating themselves and, like Beloved herself, sometimes unbury themselves.