American Postmodernism

Several posts have interrogated the placement of the novel Beloved within the framework of postmodernism. At first, I was also curious about the connection between postmodernism and historical fiction. Reading Davis’ article cleared up a few things, including the idea that rewriting history, or “rememory” as she terms it, can alter our view and understanding of history. However, I was still unsure about the reading of Beloved with a postmodern lens. (This has nothing to do with the contention that Morrison does not actually see her work as postmodern. Since postmodernism calls for the figurative “death of the author,” her opinion should not influence our understanding of the novel nor should it discourage us from thinking critically about the novel’s place within the postmodern critical framework.)

In an attempt to understand the connection between Beloved and postmodernism, I searched for any literature on the discussion of “postmodern blackness,” and found a useful article by bell hooks, published in Postmodern Culture in September 1990 (http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html). Hooks argues that racism is actually perpetuated “when blackness is associated solely with a concrete gut level [black] experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory.” Although Hooks is skeptical about a clear relationship between postmodernism and the “black experience,” she is also skeptical of the tendency primarily of black literary scholars to dismiss the probability that there may be a meaningful connection there.

Hooks realizes that the black experience has been left out of the discussion of postmodernism: “Since much of this theory has been constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this work, specifically black women.” In light of this absence of black experience within postmodern works, she finds it strange and ironic that postmodernist discourse has often suggested that discussions of “difference and otherness” are considered legitimate issues in postmodernist thought: “It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge.”

Now that I think about it, even Haraway’s discussion on cyborgs recognizes the necessity for innovative ways of operating and of relating to others in a postmodern world where partial identities are the standard rather than the deviation. In keeping with Haraway’s vision for a definition of feminism that is “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” cyborg theory accounts for and welcomes so-called ‘contradictory standpoints’ from women who are different in class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, nationality, religious beliefs, political party, and physical ability. Hooks seems to agree with this: “Radical postmodernist practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a ‘politics of difference,’ should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black people.”

Hooks concludes her discussion by asserting that “postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the [African American] self and the assertion of agency.” I think this is a useful statement because it compels us to consider the benefits of viewing blackness and the black experience within another critical framework. Such a critique allows us to affirm the existence of multiple black identities, or a varied black experience, thereby challenging archetypes of black identity which represent blackness as one-dimensional in ways that reinforce white supremacy (Hooks).

Hence, I do believe that it is beneficial to discuss works of fiction that are not typically recognized as postmodern (such as Morrison’s Beloved) in a class on postmodernism. Confining our discussions of postmodernism to certain texts that are clearly postmodern defeats the purpose of making new connections and understanding the discourse from varied points of view. For example, if we don’t connect postmodernism to our discussion of Beloved, we may not be able to critically think about the fragmented identities of the characters in the novel as decentered subjects in relation to history, as Davis suggests. We may only be inclined to discuss the novel in light of the generic one-size-fits-all black experience that Hooks is desperately trying to escape.

While we’re all struggling with how Beloved challenges our notions of what counts as “postmodern,” I think it’s helpful (as some of you already have done) to go back and look at some of the various theoretical conceptions of postmodernism we’ve encountered. Hassan and Harvey are good places to begin. Here’s something else I read recently that might be helpful (or perhaps confusing). Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker about Donald Barthelme, an undeniably postmodern writer. But what, Menand asks, is postmodernism again?

Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,”  it is fundamentally ambidextrous.  It can mean, “We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.” Or it can mean “No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.” (Louis Menand, “Saved From Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered,” New Yorker 23 Feb 2009: 68-76)

The funny thing about this division and its anchoring in modernism is that it seems to exclude Toni Morrison. In a sense, she precedes it all. With her emphasis on folklore, mythology, and oral storytelling, she really seems to be pre-modern. (Is that what antipostmodern means?)

Or is being pre-modern actually a kind of postmodernism (in that it is antogonistic to modernism)?

It seemed to me that Beloved was, maybe not at its core, but definitely somewhere near it, a story of lost. Not loss, but lost…lostness if you will. Lostness in the sense of being neither here nor there – a figurative (or, what the hell, a legit supernatural) limbo. Being stuck/lost between slavery and freedom, youth and age, being someone’s daughter and someone’s mother, life and death,  ‘evil and sad, ‘etc.

 So, running with that idea, I haphazardly googled “Beloved” and “Morrison” and “Lostness” and wouldn’t you know, something came up. This article:

Does contain the word “lostness” and does deal with it in a sense, but what I found most interesting was Weinstock’s discussion of the epitaph – language, really, by the living, in the language of the living, for the dead who cannot read it. He writes:

One can begin to approach the dilemmas posed by the idea of reading epitaphs by observing that to read something as an epitaph, as written on a gravestone, is, first of all, to make the relationship between language and death explicit-epitaphs are always curious types of dead letters that mediate the relationship between the living and the dead.

He relates the epitaph to the theme of “lostness” or limbo as he continues,” The epitaph marks a site of memory, a powerful zone of contact between the living and the dead. It performs the complicated function of calling to mind the departed as departed, that is, of foregrounding the present absence of the beloved. To read the epitaph is to remember its referent, to conjure the dead, while at the same time to be struck by the ephemerality of living. The materiality, the weightiness, the persistence of words literally etched in stone contrast with the fleetingness and fragility of life.”

The fact that we start with two epitaphs in Beloved, “sixty million and more” and the more literal epitaph “Beloved” immediately places the reader in a world of inbetweens. Morrison herself takes part in the act; the epi(gr)taph “sixty million and more” will be forever “etched” in every edition of her novel, reviving/conjuring those who died in slavery, while their actual physical lives were probably relatively brief.

Anyway, the seemingly conflicting ideas of the epitaph and the poltergeist are particularly interesting to me – the epitaph essentially ends a physical life as soon as the chisel lifts, while simultaneously (ideally) perpetuating the memorial/spiritual/emotional life of the departed; conversely the poltergeist attempts to perpetuate the physical being while altering/subverting/perverting the memory/emotion/spirit of the departed.  I’d like to see what shape  this discussion takes – the conventions of the epitaph…what is a haunting? (something very present in the text, an inability, unwillingness to move on.) Is a haunting, or is this haunting, simply an emotional/social construction? Is it meant to be entirely literal? It is memory? Is it the desire to remain within the limbo/ “lostness”? If so, why? Out of comfort? Fear? Evil? Sadness?

Like many of the posts before me, I feel uncomfortable calling this text postmodern, especially since Morrison calls herself antipostmodern.  (What does antipostmodern mean anyway?  Against the idea of postmodernism?  Against the tenets associated with the term?  Or is she saying that she is anything other than postmodern?  All would be interesting avenues of exploration.) Regardless,there is one part of this novel that struck my postmodern chord: the rewriting/ retelling of history in the novel.  

This idea reminded me of Hassan’s discontinuity of history in”POSTmodernISM.” According to the essay,  “We reinvent continually the past…Or individually, each man dreams his ancestors to remake himself” (6).  Clearly, this reinvention of history is a major part of Beloved not only with events happening out of order and the revision of the history through the mouth of a freed slave, but– more interesting yet– the reader sees several retelling of stories that happen to the characters in the novel.  A prime example is the narrative of Denver’s birth told (in part) to us by Sethe (31).  A more expanded version of Denver’s birth is told from Denver herself as she recounts it to Beloved.  “Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it” (78).  This collaborative second-hand retelling of history based on Sethe’s story to them struck me as just the type of discontinuity of history that links Morrison to Hassan.  

Davis devotes quite a bit of her essay to Morrison’s rewriting, “rememory” as Sethe calls it, of history  though “origins, cycles, and reconstructing agency” (244).  While I don’t want to rehash her analysis of the novel, I did want to add on to her idea.  

The short two-page chapter on 133 and 134 appeared to be a beautiful metaphor of this very revision of history that Davis speaks of in Beloved.  In this chapter, Beloved reaches into her mouth and pulls out a “back tooth” (133).  She ponders this action and thinks that “her arm, her hand, a toe” would be the next to fall off (133).  This pulling / falling apart of Beloved seems to be a nice extension into thinking about history.  At any moment the details of events in the past could suddenly be lost.  What then?   Beloved appears to share these fears by saying that she has two dreams: “exploding, and being swallowed” (133).   The threat of losing the past could very well meet the same fate.  The interesting part to me was Denver’s response to this tooth loss episode.  

“Must be a wisdom,” said Denver.  “Don’t it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you cry?”

“What?”

“If it hurts, why don’t you cry?”

“And she did.  Siting there holding a small white tooth in the palm of her smooth smooth hand” (133-4).  So Beloved cries after the suggestion has been made that it might hurt and she should cry.  If this is an extension of the retelling of history, Morrison would be positing the idea that a mere seed of suggestion can alter and shape not only our reactions to events, but the very events themselves.  A terribly postmodern idea.

I share some of the same uncertainty that others have expressed in previous posts regarding classifying Morrison’s work as “postmodern”. When I read the novel, I wasn’t actively trying to place it into a category. It was not until after I finished reading the novel that I started to think about it through a “postmodern lens”. I’m having the same difficulty that others are having. I found Alana’s comment about the narrative interesting. Alana suggests that “the narrative isn’t particularly fragmented (at least in the sense of point of view)”. I agree that Morrison’s narrative was not ground-breaking or earth-shattering, but as I read I was continually struck by her skill at flawlessly weaving in and out of the perspectives of the various characters. Some chapters contained multiple perspectives, weaving from the voice of an unknown narrator into the memories of various characters. While I guess this isn’t fragmented in the sense of The Female Man and some of the other works that we have read, I do feel that it is distinct.

After considering my own thoughts on how and why the novel is (or isn’t) postmodern, I was struck with the question of how many books are “postmodern” due to the time period in which they were written yet lack some of the key characteristics of postmodern works. This question made me think about how and why we classify texts, but I realize this pondering doesn’t get us anywhere with our discussion of Beloved as a postmodern work.

Aside from the narrative, and my ponderings on classifying works as postmodern, I was struck by several things while reading the novel. The motif of space comes up throughout the novel. Sethe feels that she can’t take any more memories, thinking, “I am still full of [the memories], God damn it, I can’t go back and add more” (83). Beloved talks about the lack of space on the other side, telling Denver there was “nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in” (88). Along with the idea of space is the selfishness of each character. Denver wants Sethe to herself and doesn’t want to share her with Paul D. or Beloved. But she also wants Beloved for herself and views it as her mission to care for and protect Beloved. Paul D. wants Sethe for himself and is jealous of their new boarder, Beloved. And Beloved wants Sethe for herself. This idea of space and selfishness is connected to Sara’s post about characters trying to establish ownership. It seems that Denver tries to establish ownership the most. Not only does she desire to “own” Sethe and Beloved, but she also seeks ownership over the past. She resents the fact that “her father’s absence was not hers” (15), and she “hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself” (74).

Of all the characters, Sethe’s desires seem unclear. She is obviously obsessed with the past and it seems that Beloved is the embodiment of what Sethe calls her “rememory”. It is interesting that Sethe believed that she could forget her past because Beloved was there and seemed to understand when, in actuality, Beloved’s presence made Sethe remember even more. At one point Sethe even says that “her mind was busy with the things she could forget” (227). We are told that “to Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay” (51), and “her brain was not interested in the future” (83). Because of the deep hurt of her past, she had “no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.” Despite her desire to “[beat] back the past” (85), the past seems to be Sethe’s obsession.

On the other hand, while he remembers the past, Paul D looks to the future. He takes Sethe and Denver to the carnival in hopes of a fresh start, and when he comes back to Sethe in the end, he tells her, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (322).

Finally, Denver is concerned with the present. We’re told that Denver “had her own set of questions which had nothing to do with the past. The present alone interested Denver” (141). Denver is lonely and feels that she is out of place. She is unaccepted in her society, and she realizes that she is not a part of the past that Paul D and Sethe share. She is also fearful of losing Beloved and her mother, just like she has lost everyone else. So, for Denver, life is about maintaining what she has. It is interesting that she seems to be okay in the end. While we are left with hope for Sethe and Paul D, it seems that Denver is the only one we can be sure of having a hopeful future.

I really enjoyed reading Beloved and was most intrigued by these views of past, present, and future. I do look forward to our class discussions of the various themes and motifs in the text, as well as its classification as “postmodern.” There’s too much to say about this novel for just one post!

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.

I, like the posts underneath me, had trouble locating the “postmodernism” in this text. In fact, when glancing over the reading list for this course before the start of the semester, I remember seeing Beloved on there and, although I hadn’t read it, I knew enough to be confused as per how it was postmodern. I thought this would be cleared up when reading it, however, but for a few points, I can’t see how this book is the same as say, House of Leaves or The Crying of Lot 49. I went back to the Harvey article from a few weeks ago to review that list he gave insofar as differences between postmodernism and modernism to see what I could dig up or to help with my understanding of establishing this book as indeed postmodern. 

I kind of found a few things that maybe the class can consider. For instance, he lists “Interpretation” under modernism and then “against interpretation or misreading” under postmodernism. So, of course this is clearly evident in a book like House of Leaves which is “against interpretation” because it interprets itself. But how might we think of this in relation to Beloved? I was thinking, possibly, that Beloved herself might fall under the “against interpretation/misreading” due to the fact that this unexplainable phenomena occurs as possible resurrection but there are also existing sources in the book that might propel the interpretation elsewhere… does this make sense? For instance, it is easy to “misread” or misinterpret” Beloved because she can be many things–a ghost, a resurrected being of her dead daughter (thus, the flesh form of the ghost), or the actual daughter (as made a possibility by I think Stamp Paid when he mentions to Paul at the church that there was a girl who had been held captive for the last eighteen years and had just escaped from her tormentor a few weeks before… or something). So, because the way the book handles Beloved, we might see what Harvey distinguished as the one of the difference between modern and postmodern… maybe… or it could simply be something open to a lot of interpretation and not really against interpretation…

Hmmm, on that same note, he mentions “paranoia” under modernism and “schizophrenia” under postmodernism. I was looking at the end of the book, in particular, relating to schizophrenia or the joining of the women. This might be too literal of a stretch here (or maybe just a stretch, literal or otherwise), but there is a certain schizophrenia in the characters–perhaps Harvey was writing more about the writing of a postmodern text as being schizophrenic rather than the content therein as schizophrenic (as opposed to paranoia), but I thought I’d throw that out there for the class.

I’m not sure if Harvey helped or hurt me in my understanding. I looked at Davis too, of course, since she talks about this, but she left me with more questions than answers (which is why I went back to Harvey). For instance, Davis even states that she is suspicious of reading Morrison’s fiction through the lens of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or “white” academic theory… (243) but later states that we should be wary of calling postmodernism a “white phenomenon” (244). She links the lives of black people with postmodernism by way of a complex historical relationship between black protest and liberal academic discourse but doesn’t really say how, specifically. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand the connection–what difference, for instance, does color make when it comes to academic discourse? I mean, I get the part where Davis talks about Morrison “deconstructing and reconstructing” history so as to “tap the well of the African-American presence,” and I know we talked about this on the first day of class–about postmodernism rewriting history–but I honestly don’t see how this book, Beloved, does this. So, it’s not that I don’t understand what Davis is saying, I just don’t understand it in relation to the text… you know what I mean? Sure, Morrison is “filling a gap,” or writing about people that mainstream historians have neglected to write about, but for that matter, so did Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States. There, he wrote about the marginalized voices and people who, also, “mainstream historians” have neglected in textbooks. So, is Zinn’s book “postmodern?”

I think that’s it… if someone can explain to me how the retelling of marginalized history in Zinn’s book is not postmodern but the retelling of marginalized history in Beloved is postmodern, that might help in my confusion….

I really really enjoyed this book; I just feel like I’m missing something when trying to read it through a postmodern lens. Oh, I wanted to talk about the tree/back too… if someone else can write on that, that would be awesome–in the very beginning of the book, I thought “postmodern” at the mention of this tree sprouting out of her back but can’t explain why and now am not sure what the point of that was (metaphor?)…

Oh, and geez, this post is getting long… but what did everyone think about Davis and her connection with the newspapers in the book as example of the gap between representation and reality? Did anyone pick up on this and think of Simulations? And might this lead us to a better lens through which to see this text as postmodern? Or, was this example as much a stretch as my Beloved as “against interpretation” reasoning?

For some reason I’m feeling extra nitpicky about this article.

First of all, if one were looking for a book that broke the pattern of what we’ve read so far, I’d have to say Beloved would be it. The narrative isn’t particularly fragmented (at least in the sense of point of view) and it doesn’t have any of the aesthetic experimentation of other postmodern works. There’s also a conspicuous lack of disaffected youth, sex, encounterrs with technology, deliberate attempt to shock, and navel-gazing. But then I’ll admit that I’ve never really thought of Morrison as a postmodern writer.

Of course, this goes back to our discussion at the beginning of class about what, exactly, defines postmodernism-aesthetics? or era? Aside from what she has to say about Morrison’s writing, Davis has some interesting arguments to make about postmodernism’s interaction with history. Davis starts out with Jameson, Baudrillard, and Fukuyama’s argument about postmodernism’s disbelief in teleological narratives (but I think if you’re going to be disagreeing with the above, you’d better pack your lunch and plan to stay awhile).

Davis argues that the basis for excluding Morrison from the postmodernist canon is the interaction with history in her work, but that this exclusion isn’t defensible. I would agree that postmodernism has a queasy relationship with history-I think this is perhaps what gives postmodernism it’s “depthlessness”-but at the same time, escaping history is nearly impossible (and the tendency for literature to become “dated,” as we mentioned in connection with The Female Man, is perhaps the basis for postmodernism’s failure to untangle itself from history). So is it possible for a writer to engage with history and still be postmodern? Well, maybe not-after all, Davis herself writes: “postmodern theories need to be modified to accomodate texts like Beloved with an overt agenda of political protest” (Davis 257).

But I’m not sure I agree with her. After all, Morrison calls herself an “antipostmodernist” and it seems disingenuous to argue that she is in fact a postmodernist, especially if doing so would require stretching postmodernist theory (not to say that the argument couldn’t be made). BUT STILL.

Aside from that, Davis makes a few other arguments that kind of bother me. Davis writes: “A rigid demarcation between postmodern texts and African American texts merely perpetuates a false dichotomy of academic theory and social protest, ignoring that they emerged in response to a similar set of lived conditions” (Davis 244). First of all, I think it’s harder to define “African American texts” as a category than merely declaring it texts written by African-American authors. But that aside, earlier Davis claimed to share Barbara Christian’s reservations about “the increasingly popular move to read Morrison’s fiction through the lens of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or “white” academic theory” (Davis 243). I don’t think that looking at Morrison as a postmodernist author “underestimates the crucial importance of Toni Morrison’s black cultural heritage,” to use Davis’ own words, but at the same time, I don’t find a mutual exclusivity between feminist and African American texts and postmodernism. Davis goes on to write: “feminist and African American critics have often dismissed postmodernism’s philosophical questioning of foundationalism and essentialism as being incompatible with their sociopolitical criticism,” but I would argue that Russ’ work fits elegantly into both categories (Davis 244). Rather, I feel that squashing a writer like Morrison into so narrow a box is a greater loss.

So finally-is Beloved a postmodern work or not?