Morrison – American Postmodernism

Help.

I found Adams’ article, “The Ends of America,” really helpful in my (still feeble) attempts to form a working definition of postmodernism. She seems very confident in her definition of what we’ve admitted is a slippery category: postmodernism as the “dominant form of avant-garde literary experimentalism during the Cold War, a period marked by the ascendance of transnational corporations, the upheavals of decolonization, fears of nuclear holocaust, and the partitioning of the globe into ideological spheres” (Adams 2). Here, Adams is referring to the sixties through the late eighties (I would say it coincides with the formation and then fall of the USSR). However, stuff like the “upheavals of decolonization, fear of nuclear holocaust, and the portioning of the globe into ideological spheres” is sounding an awful lot like what’s going on today (I asked someone who lived through the Cuban missile crisis why they thought we don’t seem particularly concerned about the prospect of countries like North Korea or Pakistan getting nuclear weapons, and they said they think it’s because our generation has never had that much faith that the world wasn’t going to end, so there didn’t seem a point to panicking. I think they’re right.).

So anyway. If Adams is arguing that postmodernism was a reaction to the “containment culture of Cold War America,” (Adams 1) it would seem that the postmodern “moment” is over, as the particular historical moment that postmodern was a reaction to is more or less over as well. If so, I’d have to say that postmodernism seems to me to be the quickest-passing literary “moment” I’ve ever studied. (Is it possible that literary eras are speeding up? Why do I have to use so many parentheses?) Anyway, Adams argues that books like Tropic of Orange (and I would say also The Magical Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death-there I go again with the goddamn parentheses) are not postmodern per se but post-postmodern, or, in her terms, a reaction to the globalization of American literature. But do we agree that postmodernism has passed as its historical moment has passed?

But moving on, I thought I’d write a bit about my final paper and the issues I’ve been having and hopefully elicit some opinions and comments from other people. I wanted to take the discussion about Beloved and sort of run with it-I’d have to say it felt like the one book on the list that had the most to quibble about whether or not it was postmodern. But now I’m starting to feel like Oedipa, because it seems that each article or book I read just sends me ping-ponging from one position to the other. I’d like to make the argument that Beloved is a uniquely postmodern book. Here, Adams gives her list of what makes a postmodern work postmodern: “dark humor, themes of paranoia, skepticism, and conspiracy, preoccupation with close reading and textuality, and complex formal experimentation…[postmodern works] can be historicized as a response to and reaction against…the containment culture of Cold War America” (Adams 1). Given that Beloved has nary a nuclear reactor or conspiracy theory in sight, and it takes place in a history as yet untouched by the Cold War, is it still a postmodern novel?

Well, Adams goes on to write of Pynchon as the definitive postmodern author, citing his “preoccupation with paranoia and conspiracy, radical skepticism about foundational truth and authority of all kinds, deft mixing of genres, distrust of received historical knowledge, and confrontations with the sublime and apocalyptic” (Adams 3). Leaving out the paranoia and conspiracy part, I think a case could be made that Morrison’s work exhibits the same characteristics

Reconfiguring the Past

Well, it is very late, and I am wondering why it has taken me so long to come up with something to write about concerning Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Perhaps, it has something to do with not actually liking the novel that much. Don’t get me wrong, it is a fine literary achievement, but for some reason it doesn’t “strike a chord” with me (but I will leave my personal taste out of this discussion).

More importantly, I am struggling with the postmodern-ness of the novel (and of Toni Morrison in general). So it is a relief to see that as a class, we seem to be struggling together. I keep trying to find a postmodern entry into this novel but have found little success, and so my last resort is to attempt to situate Beloved with the other postmodern texts we have read up to this point. Obviously, this is no walk in the park either…but I did find one thing that could prove useful, but could also prove worthless.

In Kimberly Chabot Davis’ essay “Postmodern Blackness,” she discusses the interaction between past and present in Morrison’s Beloved:

One way to free oneself from the horrors of the past is to reenact and reconfigure the past in the present, as Sethe does with an icepick at the end of the novel, attacking not her own children this time but the white man Bodwin, whom she perceives as a reincarnation of her slave master Schoolteacher. (251)

Could we not consider this idea (reconfiguring the past in the present) in terms of Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven? I believe a comparison with Le Guin’s novel depends on how one reads the ending of Beloved. As Davis explains, some critics see the ending as a positive resolution; however, Davis “find[s] that the last chapter denies such a simplistic closure. Morrison ends the novel with the word “Beloved,” suggesting that the past is a lasting presence, waiting to be resurrected. […] Although the ending suggests partial healing, the spectre of the past reamins, waiting to resurface” (251).

To reinforce her claims, Davis turns to Hutcheon who I think can be used also to consider The Lathe of Heaven:

the past is not something to be escaped, avoided, or controlled. . . the past is something with which we must come to terms and such a confrontation involves an acknowledgment of limitation as well as power. (251)

So to try to pull this shaky argument together: Sethe’s icepick maneuver is comparable to the chaotic ending of Dr. Haber’s effective dream in The Lathe of Heaven. These resolutions are not perfect. Instead, the endings demonstrate an “acknowledgment of limitation”: Sethe cannot erase the past by stabbing someone with an icepick, and Dr. Haber cannot alter the wrongs of the past by changing the world’s present condition (Note: his attempt to do so results in chaos. Had it not been for George reaching the “off” switch, the world would have been staring into the eye of an apocalyptic disaster.)

Alternatively, both novels demonstrate the failing attempts to reconfigure the past through the present: Beloved in terms of a personal, familial past and The Lathe Heaven in terms of a broader world history.

Well what exactly does all of this tell me? By placing Beloved alongside a postmodern text, can a claim of postmodernism be made for Morrison’s novel? I’m not sure. As was stated in Davis’s essay, Beloved‘s ending can be read several different ways. If we read the ending as a positive resolution, then I can see the case being made against a postmodernist reading. Either way, a comparison between the two novels certainly raises questions about the reconfiguration of the past through the present, and whether or not this can be achieved.

Re-creating Reality

Although the narrative was much easier to follow reading it for the second time, I remain very confused about exactly what Beloved herself is. The text from Beloved’s own point of view exacerbated rather than cleared up my confusion, as, apart from the interesting form that Davis comments on, I could not understand the content, or the point. Davis mentions that Beloved’s sections reference the slave narratives of the middle passage, and I didn’t catch that at all when I read it, but now I see the references. If there are references, does Beloved then become the spirit of African American history? Is she the mythical “presence” that Morrison is quoted as saying African Americans possess?

Even the other characters in the novel seem confused about what she is. Once another character identifies her as probably a girl that had escaped being imprisoned by a whiteman. When she vanishes from the porch, some characters see her as fat, some as thin, and later a boy reports seeing a woman with fish for hair in the woods. Morrison herself says she blended Beloved from the murdered historical child and a woman in a photograph murdered by a jealous lover.

With all these different interpretations of her, it’s no wonder Beloved has trouble keeping herself together. Beloved mentions trying to keep herself intact, each part of herself, as if the integrity of her form was a function of her concentration, and if she let herself drift for a moment, she would all fall apart. This vulnerability to self-fragmentation is seen in Sethe as well, and it reminded me of the conscious re-creating of one’s reality the travelers in the hallways of House of Leaves had to do. Beloved’s own narrative is also fragmented, and she seems to see Sethe’s face as both the face she lost on the middle passage and her own face.

What is this ambiguity accomplishing? What is Morrison communicating that she felt Beloved would be the best medium for? And why do Davis (and apparently I) care so much about Morrison’s intent? I am fond of the imagery of Davis’s “wheel,” ever changing and adapting and never repeating – perhaps these are also the characteristics of the water from which Beloved came. Beloved herself is always changing, her form varying both over time and with the viewer. Yet in the end, no one can remember her and she seems to diminish in form to a kind of nature spirit, hiding in the forest. What does this development signify? Davis mentioned a theory that Sethe’s proactive reeactment of the past broke the hold of the past (in the form of Beloved) on her, making Beloved vanish and allowing Sethe to come to terms with her past in a way that still allowed her to live in the present.

In the normal ideal of a sane person in our society, the sane person clearly separates memory and imagination and the present, and also remembers all important events in their life. The characters in this novel clearly do not always fit that ideal, and even at the end when Sethe has been “liberated” from the past, she and others can not really remember Beloved, even though she played such a large role in their lives. Does this leave them functioning but insane? Does this ending shed some light on the way we construct our societal ideal of a functioning productive member of society?

Beloved- Morrison’s Definition of “Freedom” as Postmodern

I’d like to start off by saying that I find Beloved entirely mesmerizing, and this week when I was listening to NPR on the way to work, I was reminded that Patrick Henry gave his speech to the Virginia Convention two hundred and thirty-four years ago this week (March 23, 1775)– I just realized I originally posted this with a miscalculation. If you’ll recall, the last few lines of his speech seem awfully ironic, considering the practice of slavery by the colonists themselves:

Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

That said, one of the most moving motifs for me as I read Beloved was the characters’ discussion of what freedom meant for them. Toward the beginning of the story, Baby Suggs discusses how she gives up loving her children because “men and woman were moved around like checkers” (27). The narrator explains, “What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers because the pieces included her children,” and then goes on, saying that after her third child was taken from her, “That child she could not love and the rest she would not. ‘God take what He would,’ she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing” (28).

Then when Seth and Paul D are talking about what Sethe did to her children, she tells him, “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon– there wasn’t nobody int he world I couldn’t love if I wanted to” (190-1). Paul D doesn’t respond aloud, but the narrator explains that he understands what Sethe means: “So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to ownl lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salmanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother–a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what [Sethe] meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose–not to need permission for desire– well now, that was freedom” (191).”

The reason I felt so moved by these particular passages is because Morrison very successfully recovers a part of history that all of the American literary movements before postmodernism just gloss over:

What is freedom, not just for certain privileged Americans, but for those who have actually been enslaved and silenced?

Freedom, according to these excerpts from Beloved, means not having to ask anyone if it is okay to love one’s own children. The most natural and uncontrollable love, the love of a parent for his/her child, had to be controlled in order for people in our American history to survive.

Now, before I start to sound like I am on an Oprah show, I want to say that I think this conversation is relevant to whether Morrison’s novel ought to be considered Postmodern or not. I have to agree with Alana that there seems to be something inherently wrong with suggesting that Morrison is a postmodern writer, even when she claims she is not; it seems to be adding salt to the wound that she is writing about in her books. Then again, her book does challenge history. Davis points out the metaphor of the newspapers (which have been considered to contain evidence of “what really happened” in history) in the woodshed where Sethe killed her child and where Paul D sleeps with Beloved, and Davis suggests, “This metaphor allows Morrison simultaneously to point out the gap between representation and reality and to suggest that we can only know the past through discourse. She seems to concur with the poststructuralist view that reality is a function of discourse, yet does not let this point pacify her into accepting the representations that already exist-the voyeuristic news accounts and the constrained slave narratives” (248).

In effect, Morrison’s message about freedom, as Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D all explain, meaning being allowed to love your own children–that is a postmodern element in this text. I suppose that’s as far as I would like to go–I feel uncomfortable classifying Morrison into a category she does not embrace herself–but I will say that there are various postmodern themes and motifs in Beloved, particularly that of the ultimate freedom to love. Unfortunately, it is that very freedom to love which leads to the terrible haunting that occurs in this story, particularly for Sethe– because Sethe finally allows herself to love her children, she tries to kill them and succeeds in killing the one who is quite overtly named Beloved.

As for Patrick Henry, I think perhaps he would understand Sethe’s choice given the last line of his rather ironic speech, only I am fairly certain that he and most of his fellow colonists were unable to see past their own feelings of “slavery” to see the reality of the slavery which they themselves perpetuated and deemed acceptable.

Ghosts and Postmodernism

With this book, I feel like I have more questions than answers. But, who knows, maybe I can still offer some insight through my line of questioning. I agree with the previous post that Morrison’s “Beloved” seems out of character compared to the other “postmodern” novels we’ve read. I think the fact that the book gives us an altered, unexpected view on a certain historical period is the main reason for labeling it postmodern. However, there is a connection I made with this text and another postmodern text. Like the character Beloved in Morrison’s text, Don DeLillo also uses a ghostly figure to focus his novella “The Body Artist.” When I first read DeLillo’s book I was puzzled by the ghost. I didn’t see how it fit with the postmodern agenda, or why he found the ghost to be a productive tool to convey his message. With Morrison, the ghost makes more sense. Ghosts are often linked with history because they can exist outside of time. Also, the concept of “haunting” works well as a link for the guilty conscience. Okay, so maybe it works for Morrison, but I still don’t quite understand the link between ghosts and postmodernism.

On the first day of class, someone said “All I know about postmodernism is that it doesn’t work with religion.” It seems like most of the postmodern books we’ve read are working against any kind of ontology. So why use ghosts? Don’t ghosts represent a higher power, someone in control of things we don’t understand? Can we separate ghosts from the idea of religion? Morrison does not attempt to separate ghosts from religion, but DeLillo does. DeLillo’s seperation struck me as somewhat jarring, where Morrison’s connection seems more natural. Morrison calls attention to the link between religion and ghostsby deliberately making Baby Suggs a preacher. When Sethe visits the holy ground where Suggs used to preach, she finds herself choked by Beloved’s ghost.

What I wonder about is the way this all plays out. Baby Suggs status as a gifted preacher seems to make the other town folk jealous. Somewhere in the text (I could not find the exact page) a character posits the idea that the town folk fail to warn Sethe about the police because of their jealousy of Baby Suggs ability to talk to god. After that, Baby Suggs stops preaching and appears to stop believing in a god. By the end of the story, both god and Beloved’s ghost have disappeared as if they were never really there. The way these events play out makes me think that Morrison wants ontological views to be seen as a negative force within the text. Religion and the idea of the afterlife only cause problems in the book, never solutions.

Characters and Satirical Experiment

Like a couple people mentioned before, the J-characters in this novel seem to represent different aspects of the female psyche: Jeanine seems to play the role of want-to-be submissive housewife, Janet portrays a rational and scientific mind, Jael represents a violent rebel and would-be conqueror, and Joanna seems to be the contemplative observer. As the writer and a character in the novel, I think that Joanna’s sensibilities present her as the most fully human character in the novel; that is, she seems the most realistic, and while she does not always appear as an agent of action she seems aware of and has more access to other perspectives and possibilities (perhaps I’m attributing too much of Joanna, the writer and creator of the world and everything in it, to Joanna the character). All of the major characters, including Joanna, seem to be extremes: overly submissive, overly rational, overly aggressive, overly meditative. Their extremes make them more into archetypes than characters, inorganic representations rather than organic people.

These archetypes of female possibility, the fragmented structure of the novel, the intense interest in feminine and masculine identity, and the meta-fictional aspects of the novel draw attention to the work as an artificial construction. Science fiction does not always draw attention to itself as artificial; most times in sci-fi, we give ourselves over to willing suspension of disbelief and simply accept that the mechanics of the world are different. This novel draws does not disguise the fact that Russ is using the sci-fi genre as a platform for experimenting and investigating gender identity. I think that Anastasia and Alyssa are correct in reading the novel as a satire or parody since these forms of writing usually depend on generalizations. How can Russ not be poking fun at gender constructions when she lists in quick succession the names of women whose identities are imbedded right in the name? (“…Clarissa, who will commit suicide…” I think is a reference to the title character of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, a modern writer and feminist (34).)

Anastasia and Alyssa’s comments remind me of the Toni Morrsion book Playing in the Dark, which I read an excerpt from recently in my theory class. One of the things that Morrison insists upon is that she recognizes that African American voices are marginalized in literary scholarship, but she does not want to trade a white Euro-centric perspective for a strictly African or African American perspective. Both white and black need to be acknowledged to understand one another, just as female and male are needed to understand one another (Janet Evanson might disagree with me, but in our world of two sexes, two genders, both must be incorporated in the whole of humanity). I think that Russ comes to a similar conclusion at the end of Female Man when Jael’s crusade to overthrow male domination comes across as extreme and just trading misogyny for misandry. While much of post-modern literature is inconclusive (I don’t think that Joanna formally allies herself with Jael and her war plans) I think we are right to question the anti-male domination view at the end.

The Color of Battleships

The Color of Battleships: Racial Identity in The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven confronts the “problem” of racial identity and the implications of, what Toni Morrison terms, the “deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity for establishing difference” (Morrison 39). Le Guin uses two methods of exploration. First she intentionally racializes her characters, calling into question the role of racial appearance on perceived identity. Le Guin offers focused descriptions of George Orr from the perspective of both Dr. Haber and Heather Lelache. Haber describes George Orr as having “Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, twenty-eight to thirty-two. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional” (Le Guin 7). Heather Lelache, the “Black Widow” (42), finds him “A born victim. Hair like a little girl’s, brown and fine, little blond beard soft white skin like a fish’s belly; meek, mild, stuttering” (42). In both instances, Le Guin marries the physical/racial with the psychological/emotional. This marriage leaves the reader to ask: how much does race have to do with who we are and how we are perceived? How much does race have to do with identity?

To answer this question, Le Guin proposes a universe that “undoes” this racial construction. Dr. Haber suggests that there should be “no more color problems. No more questions of race” (129). Consequently, human beings become gray, “the color of battleships” (130). With memories of both worlds, Orr struggles to integrate his ideas of a racial identity with a non-racial world. He notes, “That’s why she [Heather]’s not there… She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born” (130). Orr feels that race is essential to Heather’s identity or his perception of her identity. Resigned to this new world without Heather, George encounters the arrest of a short man for the crime of cancer. Instead of racial persecution, disease is “other.” By doing so, Le Guin emphasizes the metaphorical implications of race as a “way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic then biological ‘race’ ever was” (Morrison 63). To demonstrate this point, disease and race become interchangeable. Just as one can produce a racial identity, so can one produce one based on a particular illness or good health. These identities are not inherently evil; rather, suffering comes from the appropriation and misuse of these identities to create difference.

Le Guin depicts racial identity as something that gives human beings shade and dimension. To further emphasize this point, Orr compares the racialized Heather to the gray one: “His wife had been a gray person, a far gentler person than this one… This Heather carried a big black handbag with a brass snap, and probably a half pint of brandy inside; she came on hard. He wife had been unaggressive and, though courageous, timid in manner. This was not his wife, but a fiercer woman, vivid and difficult” (182). Like Morrison, Le Guin finds race as an asset rather than a detriment. Racial diversity allows for a “deeper, richer, more complex life than the sanitized one commonly presented to us” (Morrison 66).

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1992.