Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph

JEFFREY ANDREW WEINSTOCK Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph You haven't really read something until you've read it as an epitaph, said a friend of a friend of mine to whom I told this title. Tell them that. Cynthia Chase (EiHT1ELL them that." The last reported words from an anonyJL mous "friend of a friend." Taken by itself, the command raises ambiguity to its highest level—the imperative for someone to tell something to others. Read contextually, the implied "you" of the imperative "Tell" is Cynthia Chase. The "them" is the audience at the 1993 New York University conference "Deconstruction is/in America" listening to Chase's "Reading Epitaphs" presentation. The "that" is "You haven't really read something until you've read it as an epitaph." Yet the "that" of Chase's related comment raises even more questions: what is an epitaph ? How does one read it? How and why does this reading differ from normal reading—or rather, how does reading something as an epitaph constitute reading in its essence such that texts read otherwise aren't "really read"? And how can something that is not an epitaph be read as an epitaph? One can begin to approach the dilemmas posed by the idea ofreading 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. Reading something as an epitaph forces one to consider the strange materiality of language, the way in which the sign can persist in the absence of both its producer and addressee. The epitaph marks a site of Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 61 o I30 Jeffery Andrew Weinstock 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. However, can one ever really "read" an epitaph? Ifthe epitaph functions to refer beyond itself, to call to mind the departed, then to read the text of the epitaph as text, divorced from its referential function, is not to read it as epitaph. To read an epitaph as a poem, for instance, to celebrate the beauty of its composition rather than to reflect on the absence of the deceased, is not to read it as an epitaph. Contrarily, to read the epitaph as epitaph, as that which commemorates the deceased and insistently gestures towards the present absence of its referent, is not to read the epitaph as text. The question of reading the epitaph therefore introduces an ethical dimension to reading. Is it ethical to consider an epitaph as "literature" and to perform the same critical analyses and manipulations one might apply to, say, a "normal" poem? Can an epitaph be aestheticized and still be an epitaph? The reverse of this question also applies, especially in light of my epigraph: can one consider the "normal" poem as epitaphl At bottom here is the vexed question of the relationship of language to that which exists outside language. If, as Hegel suggests, the word is the death of the thing, then is not every word, in some sense, an epitaph? The imperative to read as epitaph suggests that somehow reading is connected to absence, that to read is always to recognize or undergo an experience of loss. In order to approach the subject of spectrality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and its relation to language and to the possibility of justice for the living and the dead, one must start with the complex mediation performed by the epitaph, because, from start to finish, Beloved is a story about an epitaph, the name...