In Kimberly Chabot Davis’s article “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History,” Henderson claims that the novel “asserts the importance of a ‘mediation between remembering (possession) and forgetting (exorcism)'” (Henderson qtd. in Davis 251). More simply put, Beloved questions the power dynamic between outside forces and the individual’s free will. Though this is not a new question in literature or philosophy, Davis uses this as a springboard for a postmodern reading. She (over)promotes the slipperiness of the text in an effort, I believe, to jump ahead to other (potential) postmodern elements. In the process, she ignores or diminishes the importance of key moments in the text that contradict her perspective.
At first glance, Beloved appears to inhabit the gray space between determinism and existentialism (innovative for a modern text that includes slave narratives). Morrison points to the (at times meager) freedoms that exist within confines without occluding the fact that there are indeed confines. Her protagonist Sethe rejects the traditional either/or logic favoring the unconventional either/or/neither/both or (to borrow a phrase from Eugene Eoyang) “four-cornered logic.” The introduction of this four-cornered logic allows the reader to develop double vision, a perspective which Davis capitalizes on to develop a “blended” postmodern resolution allowing for both and neither determinism and free will. Davis notes “Sethe has limited power to revise or erase the past” (Davis 251). “Limited power” implies that there is indeed an element of free will (existentialism) though it is not without boundaries (determinism). This argument encourages the “slipperiness” or “untidiness” of a postmodern reading.
Though I agree that Beloved is neither overtly deterministic nor overtly existentialist, I find less ambiguity in the text. Morrison notes, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (Morrison 95). This statement implies both agency and responsibility. While Sethe made a difficult decision, it was a choice for her to make. Moreover, it becomes something she takes ownership of (one could say literally). Though Davis make a point when she notes that the text does not offer obvious directives: “memory also has its costs, resulting often in the reopening-rather than the healing-of old psychic wounds” (Davis 250). Davis (perhaps inadvertently) demonstrates something important about the process. The cost of memory implies something gained from payment. In that case, the “something” seems to be Sethe herself. She goes from “…sadness at the center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home… [the] fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like” (140) to beginning to accept that she is her own “best thing” (273) at the conclusion of the text. If the self is created through one’s actions, this progression is important. Without choice and action, there can be no self-as there was at the beginning of Sethe’s journey. A self may only be formed though choice and action. Lastly, if the reader agrees to that gain, Sethe’s situation is not futile. The text becomes less slippery, less untidy, and potentially less postmodern.