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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, \u00a0‘evil and sad, ‘etc.<\/p>\n
\u00a0So, running with that idea, I haphazardly googled “Beloved” and “Morrison” and “Lostness” and wouldn’t you know, something came up. This article:<\/p>\n
Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved’s Epitaph<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n| Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock<\/em>.\u00a0The Arizona Quarterly<\/strong>.\u00a0Tucson:\u00a0Autumn 2005.Vol.\u00a061,\u00a0Iss.\u00a03;\u00a0\u00a0pg.\u00a0129,\u00a025\u00a0pgs<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n | \u00a0<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/em><\/p>\n 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<\/strong><\/em>.”<\/strong><\/p>\n The fact that we start with two epitaphs in Beloved, <\/em>“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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 I’d like to see what shape \u00a0this 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, … Continue reading Lostness, epitaphs, poltergeists, and epigraphs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-10-beloved"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":502,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |