A Few Thoughts for Our First Meeting
Dear All Souls Book Group,
Hi and Happy December, Happy Chanukah, and Blessed Advent.
Enclosed are a few thoughts in preparation for our first meeting on Toni Morrison's Beloved, which is coming up this Monday, in the Warner Building, at 7 p.m. We'll have two subsequent meetings about Beloved-- a "conviviality" meeting on Friday, December 17th, at 6 p.m., in the Warner Building--wine, cheese and designer waters included. And the last meeting will be on Monday, December 20th at 7 p.m., regrettably in the Parish (or, as Janet Shaw likes to call it), "Mead" Hall. Terrible acoustics in the Mead Hall, never mind no mead--but I will make sure to have one of those portable microphones at the table, along with baffles to keep the sound low in the room.
I had said I wouldn't write any questions about Beloved. Famous last words. Also, this is my first time typing the questions right here into the Book Group blog, and I have exactly no idea what I'm doing. No idea what these little icons at the top of the box are for.
But. I do know which are the bold and italic icons--and what else ever (ever, ever) does one need? So I'll just type the following question in paragraph form and call it good. Here goes.
How does Sethe remember? How does she remember her past; how does she not remember it? How has she figured her past to herself so that she can live/ survive/ endure?
What I advise you do as you review the book is to look back at the first five chapters--so, that's through to page 75 in the Vintage edition--and ask yourself the above questions. You might have a look in particular at page 7, which is the first long passage about Sethe's memory: it's the one in which she's remarking to herself that of Sweet Home she remembers the sycamores better than she does the children. (7) You might also look at what happens to Sethe once Paul D arrives, and, more important, once he embraces her and makes love to her, "taking responsibility" for her breasts and attending to the "tree" on her back. (20-21) What does the kind of regard Paul D "blessedly" is able to give Sethe make possible for her vis-à-vis her memory? Then, you might have a look at the exchange between Sethe and Denver in which Sethe describes her conception of time. This passage falls in the Vintage edition on p. 43, and it's the first passage in which we see the crucially (I think) important and strange new word, "rememory." I'll just transcribe the passage below. To catch you up as to where we are in the story: Denver has seen Sethe on her knees "praying," a figure in a white dress holding Sethe around her waist. Denver asks Sethe what she has been praying for, and Sethe says she wasn't praying, she was talking.
"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened." (43)
We will spend a good deal of Monday's meeting discussing the above passage. For now I want to invite you to start thinking about Sethe as a kind of designer, if you will, of her own cosmology--her own conception not just of her past, but of "the" past; not just of her lost "beloved," but everyone's. She is engaged, Sethe, in an aesthetic activity--though I'm not sure "aesthetic" is the right word here, in that "aesthetic" may connote pleasure--idiomatically, anyway, it may do that--or it may connote the kind of mental activity we can take up and put down at will. For Sethe I would say this activity is automatic and of dire necessity. "Rememory," that odd word that seems somehow hard to read (?), hard, or slippery, to say (?), a word somehow before the facility for speech (?), or a word uttered between somatic states (?), should signal to us that something singular, something very special, is being described: a single soul's activity in its own articulation, the terms of that articulation Sethe's and Sethe's alone. Those terms are going to change by the end of the novel, and the agents of that change will be Paul D and Beloved. Both will, in a manner of speaking, sit down beside Sethe and put their arm around her waist as she "talks" about time. Entirely original in both instances, entirely idiosyncratic, the love of each will help Sethe experience time, and herself--well, differently. How differently? How will Paul D and Beloved alter the way Sethe tells her story? How will they alter not just the way she tells it, but the story itself?
(Ahhhh, how wonderful. Memory...mammary. Rememory...remammary. Perhaps that's what Paul D does for Sethe when he "takes responsibility" for her breasts--he "remammaries" her.)
It should be remembered that Paul D will also encounter himself anew, and through the love of his lover. Right now I think of Paul D remembering something Sixo said about the Thirty-Mile Woman--this is on p. 321, at the end of the novel. Says Sixo of the Thirty Mile Woman, "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." Later in the passage, Paul D, identifying with Sixo's gratitude, will remark of Sethe: "Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers." (322)
So that's what we'll discuss on Monday: how Sethe conceptualizes her past to herself, and, how Paul D and Beloved help to change or revise that conception.
Inside each and every one of us is the "cosmology" I described above. Inside every one of us are certain pictures from the past, and not other pictures, certain remembered beloved, and not other beloved, arranged into constellations the significance of which--the structural necessity of which--only we understand. This is our private landscape; and if we've had enough help and love along the way, such as the kind given by Paul D to Sethe, and Sethe to Paul D, quite possibly these private landscapes will become private heavens. (This is what is so lamentable about these social-networking web-sites, such as Facebook, through which we "reconnect" with people we haven't given a thought to in twenty years: we re-configure these private landscapes, we adulterate them.) It's through the prism of these cosmologies that we perceive the consented-upon cosmology "outside"--or so, perhaps, is Morrison's proposal. (I'm not sure that it is.) But I want to say one more thing, which is that at issue for Sethe in the work she is doing both to populate and de-populate her private landscape are the memories of a whole race of people. A whole race of people the great number of whom--"Sixty million and more" begins the book--were violently separated from their families, and from their cultural heritage and memory. That is what makes Beloved great. I advise therefore that as you review the book, you try to imagine what it might be like for an African American to read it. What could it be like to come upon those entirely lyrical passages at the end of the novel--the interior monologues of Sethe, Beloved, Denver, and then the fusion of all three--as a reader for whom the memory of slavery is in some way a personal one?
These ideas are not mine--they come from a very good scholarly essay about Beloved I read a couple of days ago, called "A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved." The essay is by Marilyn Sanders Mobley. (The essay is included in an anthology of essays about Toni Morrison's fiction, edited by Harold Bloom, called Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison, 2005.) I'll read a couple of paragraphs from this essay when we meet.
Thanks, and looking forward to seeing you Monday,
Emilie