Original Sources:
Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited. Cythia Dobbs, African American Review, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998) 563-578
This article spends a lot of time defining, and redefining (using Morrison among others) what is Modernism. Using T.S. Eliot as a kind of father for Modernism, Dobbs makes a perimeter of modernism which includes: personal madness, cultural madness, physical identity, and metaphysical identity. Throughout the article we see modernism as a kind of denial of the suspicious other world (for slaves this is the white bourgeois) where as the later modernism of Pound and Eliot is defined by radical self identification through recent wars. The idea of casting the body and the mind against the alternative world, in a harmonial self is the driving citation in Beloved. We see this with Paul D and his chain gang in their unfied rescue of language, their poetry of speaking without words. We also see this in Baby Suggs’ clearing sermon. Where he communication is half her own, half the crowds. And is also half done in rhetoric, half in non verbals, music and body. There are recurring ideas about pain. Pain in the body, outside the body, and leaving the body. Sethe’s tree certainly stands out in this article as a fulcrum for transforming the violence of remembrance, into something much kinder. This like many other examples must go through a certain sifting of real vs. corporeal dialogue with itself, its creator.
Is Morrison Also Among the Prophets?: “Psychoanalitic” strategies in Beloved. Lyunolu Osagie. African American Review. Volume 28, Number 3 (1994).
Lyunolu deals a lot with the intrerior and exterior of experience and past. Taking time to examine what has happened, versus what has occured. The happened is the event inside or affecting someone. The occured is the objective realm of history. Again this idea is pitted against the self and the wicked. Whether this wicked is the community at large, or a version of the self that attacks…the self. We get a good glimpse of this in Beloved on page 55 when Beloved is wildly drinking water while Sethe pees at the same rate. Lyunolu points to this as the symbolic birthing of Sethe’s own child, the breaking of her water. In the end, this is her giving birth to her painful self. We see Beloved as an oppositional other to all the other characters. Like we talked about in class, the projecting screen, or as Lewis calls it “a condition” and as Lyunolu calls “the other” quoting Morrison’s own term as well, “just weather” (437). The thought I take from this is section, as well as an overall regard for the journal in the frame of modernism is Beloved as an account of inner weather. Told curiously from the inside, and the outside.
Part II: Secondary Sources
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conciousness. Cambridge: Harvard, 1993.
Gilroy plays around with Modernism vs. Black modernism in an attempt to help each describe one another. A true modern paradox. Beloved is both the internal struggle of the self, and the internal struggle of the masses as they bought quarrel with their worlds internally.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The making and unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford, 1985.
This journal examines how the language of Beloved is broken down just as the characters are. For Morrison to represent the horrific scenes and emotions properly, such a toll must also be taken out on the written words themselves. A great deal of this article is pits the narrative against the text as they assist and qualify eachother. Very modern.
Common Names
Eliot
Pound
Whitman
Freud
Faulkner
Questions Asked/Answered
How does the body affect the mind, and other?
How does the story affect the prose?
How do the community and the self interact, both outside and inside the body?
How is modernity defined?
WHat are the real/corporeal ramifications of self evaluation, communal evaluation?
Common Passages
Baby Suggs in the clearing
Paul D with his chain gang
Paul D coming to the house
Paul D banishing Beloved
The opening of the novel
Sethe and her Chokecherry tree
The community at large
Beloved’s several broken narratives
