Poetica ex Machina
Toni Morrison scholars have had a glorious feeding frenzy dissecting the relationships and historical contexts of Beloved (1987). Still, there’s one element of this ghost story that deserves more scrutiny: the surging, sluicing, wondrous poetry conveying the thoughts of the dead and the living as the novel moves toward its denouement.
Early on, Sethe’s notion of “rememory” lays the groundwork for the interior, increasingly poetic interlude awaiting us. In conversation with her daughter Denver, Sethe says some memories are so powerful that they take on independent existences. Such a memory is a “thought picture” capable of disturbing other people, not just the person whose mind originally contained it. She tells her daughter, “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 there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I died, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”
Here, she is warning Denver never to visit Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where Sethe was enslaved and sexually assaulted by schoolteacher and the nephews. Although she does not say so, it was after she escaped Sweet Home that four armed men on horseback showed up to recapture her. In a deranged attempt to spare her four children from enslavement, she killed her young daughter and sought to kill the other three. Her dead daughter has long haunted 124 Bluestone Road as a “baby ghost” and reappears—once Sethe has a love interest—in the tangible form of a nubile, scratchy voiced young ghost-woman named Beloved.
Denver has long been in the grip of her mother’s rememories. On one occasion, she approaches their home and regards it, “as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were the cautious ones of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but proud).” Through the window, she glimpses Sethe praying and “a white dress knelt down next to her mother [that] had its sleeve around her mother’s waist.” The house is occupied territory where Sethe’s “thought pictures” roam freely.
Leading up to the interior passages late in the book, Sethe’s friend Stamp Paid visits 124, where a full blast of “rememory” awaits him. He hears “a conflagration of hasty voices—loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom. … All he could make out was the word mine.” Coming back later, he glimpses two mysterious figures, apparently Denver and her ghost-sister, Beloved, making no move to answer his knock. Unaccustomed to being ignored, he tells himself that “the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. … Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.”
Yet the jungle they fear is the one they helped create: “And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.” Furthermore, “the secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks’ jungle was hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124.”
Morrison has taken a stock feature of a haunted house—a chorus of ominous, indeterminate voices—and given it new, historically relevant life: “Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.”
In the ensuing pages, the novel enters the soupy, filmy realm of the women’s thoughts, beginning with Sethe’s. In a possessed house, she is nothing if not possessive: “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be.” Sethe’s skewed reasoning reveals her deracinated state of mind. Throughout the five pages of her “unspeakable thoughts,” she returns again and again to her maternal claim on Beloved, the “mines” coming thick and fast. On the prospect of harvesting turnips with her daughter: “We’ll smell them together, Beloved. Beloved. Because you mine and I have to show you these things, and teach you what a mother should.” On preventing Beloved from enduring schoolteacher’s abuse: “Not you, not none of mine, and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. I wouldn’t draw breath without my children.”
Moving on to Denver, we see that her thoughts reveal that she is afraid of her mother, not her capricious, shapeshifting ghost-sister. Bereft of her grandmother, Baby Suggs, and with dwindling hope of ever seeing her father again, Denver has turned to her ghost-sister for solace. She wants to believe her grandmother’s reassuring words: “She said the ghost was after Ma’am and her too for not doing anything to stop it. But it would never hurt me. I just had to watch out for it because it was a greedy ghost and needed a lot of love, which was only natural, considering. And I do. Love her. I do. She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She’s mine, Beloved. She’s mine” (209). Unlike Sethe, Denver is not on the verge of madness. She represents the household’s survival instinct, as seen when she eventually musters the courage to leave her mother’s house of debilitating grief and ask the community for help.
The next interior passage enters Beloved’s mind. Presented in blocks of impressionistic prose poetry, Beloved’s section is very difficult to decipher—perhaps deliberately so. Although it is one thing to invent a dead character, like the protagonist of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, who talks like she is alive and remembers people and events the same way a rational, living person does, it is quite another to create a ghost, as Morrison has done, whose odd, fragmented thoughts feel like those of someone actually dead. The lack of connective tissue in her memories contributes to this effect. We are left to pick out shards of logic and try to fit them into patterns. The challenge begins right away:
I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her
A definitive statement of identity and ownership, the opening sentence is the only one in Beloved’s section that ends in a period. From then on, her thoughts are separated only by white space, as if she is pulling them from an underwater trove of pictures that defy the conventions of exposition, punctuational or otherwise.
Over the course of four pages, Beloved recalls experiences that could not have happened in her brief life on Earth. At times, she appears to be channeling atavistic memories of enslaved people who died during the Middle Passage. Sethe’s concept of “rememory” applies: even the dead, or especially the dead, bump up against traumatic “pictures” untethered from the minds that originally formed them. We can infer from Beloved’s fragmented recollections, laced with wonder and longing, that she knows more than she can tell. But she does try. Like a very young child, she views her mother’s face as an extension of her own identity. Near the end of her section, she thinks:
I see her face which is mine it is the face that she was going to smile at me in the place where we crouched now she is going to her face comes through the water a hot thing her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to have my face I go in the grass opens she opens it I am in the water and she is coming there is no round basket no iron circle around her neck she goes up where the diamonds are I follow her we are in the diamonds which are her earrings now my face is coming I have to have it I am looking for the join I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join she whispers to me she whispers I reach for her
Beloved’s repetition of certain words, especially “face” and “join,” is notable. She wants to fuse her identity with Sethe’s and return to an infantile state. At times, she seems to be recalling memories of her life as a young child before she was killed; at other times, she appears to be remembering dreams or imagining what it would be like to still be in her mother’s womb.
In their respective poetry passages, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved all have a ghostly quality to them. The frightening blur of sound that Stamp Paid hears outside 124 does not come from any one person, alive or dead. Adding to the ghostly effect, the thoughts of all three are in conversation in the fourth and final passage. It begins with a long paragraph in which we again enter Beloved’s mind. This time, Beloved fills in a few blanks: “Sethe is the face I found and lost in the water under the bridge. When I went in, I saw her face coming to me and it was my face too. I wanted to join. I tried to join, but she went up into the pieces of light at the top of the water. I lost her again, but I found the house she whispered to me and there she was, smiling at last.”
Her thoughts are more lucid now, but her liminal, ghost-consciousness can go only so far in explicating her story. In the remaining pages of this passage, she and Sethe and Denver address each other in lines of dialogue that form stanzas of free verse, as this excerpt illustrates:
You rememory me?
Yes. I remember you.
You never forgot me.
Your face is mine.
Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now.
Mother and daughter speak in their own encoded language and understand each other well. Sethe is all repentance and reassurance while Beloved is intent on closing the distance between her mother and herself. When Beloved takes an unusual grammatical leap and asks, “Will we smile at me?” Sethe replies with her own question: “Can’t you see I’m smiling?” Individuation is not an option for these two, a point that becomes clearer in the next stanza when Denver’s and Beloved’s thoughts communicate with each other.
Later in this communal section, Beloved, Sethe, and Denver form a chorus of three voices. In the following excerpt, we don’t know who’s speaking, but I’ve made my guesses in parentheses:
You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? (Beloved, based on the odd syntax)
I will never leave you again (Sethe, desperate to be a good mother)
You will never leave me again (Beloved, confirming what Sethe has said)
You went in the water (Beloved and/or Sethe, recalling the loss when Sethe killed Beloved)
I drank your blood (Denver, who nursed at her mother’s bloodied breast after Sethe killed the baby Beloved)
I brought your milk (Sethe, flashing back to her escape to freedom and her desire to feed the baby Beloved)
It’s worth noting the elemental nature of the last four lines; water, blood, and milk invoke the flowing essence of life and substance.
In the concluding lines of this passage, things remain ambiguous:
I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine
These untethered, echoing, literary possessive thoughts emanate from the possessed house where Sethe, Denver, and Beloved circle around each other. Beloved is the controlling—one might say, very controlling—metaphor of the novel bearing her name, but she would not exist without Sethe’s belief in her. The stream-of-consciousness passages and free verse poetry conjure Sethe’s horrific longing and guilt (and her profound desire to bond herself forever to the child she killed) in ways that mere prose could not. The interlude also shows us just how alone and lonely Denver is, as she tries to navigate a liminal space where dire circumstances render her invisible, as if she were the ghost. And Beloved! What of this nubile, pathetically vulnerable monster-ghost girl kissing the dark air with her unknowableness? When she vanishes at the end of the book, she is no longer “mine”—she is ours to ponder as we wish.
Though hard to sort out, the stream-of-consciousness passages and free verse in Beloved are worth our close attention. Without this interlude, we would not feel the full depth of Sethe’s monomaniacal grief, nor would we know how close she is to losing her mind. We wouldn’t know how afraid Denver has been for her entire life and how hard she has tried to do right by her grandmother, Baby Suggs, who loved her and cared for her in ways that her tormented and preoccupied mother could not. Finally, we would have no inkling of how Beloved’s mind operates—the mind, that is, of the novel itself. Beloved is, in effect, the poetica ex machina: the ghost-poetry of loss and mystery that invites us to make peace, as best we can, with the endlessness of certain kinds of pain.
