In “Postmodern Blackness,” Davis explains memory as a hybrid version of history and time. She describes the cyclical occurrence of memory in Beloved, characters’ lack of control over changing the past, and the visually fragmented narrative that calls attention to lapses in memory. I like her reading of the text, regardless of whether Beloved is classified as postmodern. I also think many other factors are at work in Beloved, including internal conflict caused by lack of ownership, especially over oneself.
Most of the conflict arising throughout the novel seems to be directly connected to slavery or the aftermath of slavery. Unlike her relatives, who had been warned not to love their children as their own, Sethe becomes strongly attached to hers after leaving Sweet Home, so much so that she’d rather murder them than give them up. By the end she withdraws completely from the outside world because she feels that nothing outside her house belongs to her. Paul D also faces this dilemma, not only trying to hate beautiful things in the world because he feels they’re not for him, but also moving from room to room in Sethe’s house, ultimately relocating to the church.
Denver feels a sense of ownership over Beloved in the beginning, and Beloved, who at first has possession of the house she haunts, later takes possession of Sethe and her sanity. I wonder if the characters in Beloved exhibit tendencies toward claiming what’s theirs because they don’t really know what is theirs. Many have been forced to think that they don’t even own themselves, or that they aren’t even human.
Paul D, for example, remembers overhearing his dollar worth, and the pain and humiliation of wearing a bit. Sethe is compared to an animal several times – Paul D tells her she has four feet; the students classify her human and animal features; and later, in her horrifying stolen milk memory, a scene of both sexual assault and degradation, she is treated like an abused barnyard animal.
The process of using people as commodities or animals turns their lives into disjointed fragments. The haunted house is more human than those living inside. People are displaced. Nobody lives with their whole family, nobody knows quite where they came from, or the accuracy of the history described to them. No one is whole or in the right spot. Many of the characters don’t even know their real names. When Sethe, Beloved, and Denver finally experience a sense of unity at the end: “Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; you are me,” (255) it quickly dissolves to a breaking away from reality. Denver gets excluded from Sethe and Beloved, and Sethe and Beloved exclude themselves from the outside world entirely, spiraling into an ownership and retribution battle which affects their health and sanity.
I think the fragmented narrative literally represents the lack of wholeness many of the characters experience. At the end, Sethe lies under a quilt, appropriately, and wonders if Paul D will bathe her in sections. There is this feeling of helping one another become whole at the end, as he looks at Sethe’s split back and thinks of what Sixo said about the Thirty Mile Woman: “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order” (321).