Fleshly Ghost and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved

FLESHLY GHOSTS AND GHOSTLY FLESH: THE WORD AND THE BODY IN BELOVED David Lawrence University of Pennsylvania In William Faulkner's Light in August, Byron Bunch reflects that no matter how much a person might "talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks . . . it's the dead folks that do him the damage ."1 The damage done by dead folks in Toni Morrison's Beloved points to the central position accorded to memory, the place where these dead folks are kept alive, in this novel of futile forgetting and persistent remembrance. Operating independently of the conscious will, memory is shown to be an active, constitutive force that has the power to construct and circumscribe identity, both individual and collective, in the image of its own contents. Sethe's "rememory," in giving substance to her murdered daughter and to the painful past, casts its spell over the entire community, drawing the members of that community into one person's struggle with the torments of a history that refuses to die. In portraying the capacity of the past to haunt individual and community life in the present, Beloved brings into daylight the "ghosts" that are harbored by memory and that hold their "hosts" in thrall, tyrannically dictating thought, emotion, and action. The stories of the tightly woven network of characters culminate in a ritualistic sacrifice of Beloved, a ceremony that frees the community from this pervasive haunting. The supernatural existence of Beloved, who acts as a scapegoat for the evils of the past, threatens the naturalized set of inherited codes by which the community defines itself. The climactic scene shows how a culture may find it necessary in a moment of crisis to exorcise its own demons in order to reaffirm its identity. Morrison first exposes, however, the workings of the internal mechanisms that have generated the need for exorcism in the first place. A deeply encoded rejection of the body drives the highly pressurized haunting in Beloved. The black community of Cincinnati is caught in a cycle of self-denial, a suffocating repression of fundamental bodily needs and wants. The inability to articulate such embodied experience, to find a text for the desiring body within communal codes, obstructs self-knowledge and does violence to the fabric of community. Woven into the dense texture of the novel, into what Morrison has called the "subliminal, the underground life of a novel,"2 the interaction of language and body underlies the collective con- 190David Lawrence frontation with the ghosts of memory. In her representation of this psychic battle, Morrison fashions word and flesh as intimate allies in the project of constructing a domain in which body and spirit may thrive. The exorcism of Beloved, an embodiment of resurgent desire, opens the way to a rewording of the codes that have enforced the silencing of the body's story, making possible a remembering of the cultural heritage that has haunted the characters so destructively. In the end, the communal body seems ready to articulate a reinvigorated language that, in returning to its roots in the body, empowers its speakers to forge a more open, inclusive community. In a novel that examines the dehumanizing impact of slavery, one might expect that the white man, the monstrous enforcer of slavery 's brutality, would haunt the black community. The haunting occurs , however, within a social structure relatively insulated from the white community and, in its most intense form, springs from the "rememory" of an ex-slave in the form of one victimized by slavery. There is nothing mysteriously threatening about whites; on the contrary , "white folks didn't bear speaking on. Everybody knew."3 Of course, whites "spoke on" their slaves tirelessly, and, in the exploration of political power in the novel, ownership of body and authorship of language are shown to be insidiously linked. Under the regime of white authority, the "blackness" of the slave's body represents for "whitefolks" an animal savagery and moral depravity that, ironically, ends up remaking them in the image of their own fears: Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for sweet...