Beloved's Re-Vision of Tragedy: A Novel by Toni Morrison

Occasionally, a work of art comes along that forces its audience to reevaluate its understanding of the definitions of genre. A genre so broadly correspondent to human experience and passionately expressive of the deepest of human fears and desires as tragedy has understandably undergone many significant attempts at articulation, definition, and expression. Nietzsche's writings toward a re-definition of tragedy, iconoclastically tearing down centuries of Aristotle's influence, placed our understanding of the tragic vision in a radical new light seemingly more open to contemporary artists. Yet even Nietzsche's mythic vision failed to anticipate the intense psychological, social, philosophical, and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Tragedy is a particularly viable mode for the diversity of contemporary literary expression. One work of art which encounters and alters traditional understandings of the tragic is Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, a drama of terrible beauty and anguished grace in which a runaway slave is forced to decide between two equally damning choices. Toni Morrison's Beloved offers a re-vision of traditional expressions of the tragic impulse, particularly as defined by Aristotle and redefined by Nietzsche, reincorporating the tragic vision as a contemporary artistic mode particularly expressive of the African-American experience.

Tragedy is usually reserved for, or at least associated with, the dramatic genre. Toni Morrison masterfully harnesses the unpredictable power of tragedy into this fictional form, which, by means of multiple voices, perspectives, time sequences, and dialogue, recalls dramatic form. Morrison's familiarity with the conventions of Greek tragedy is beyond doubt. In her 1955 thesis Virginia Woolf's and WilliamFaulkner's Treatment of the Alienated, Morrison wrote of the presence of "elements of Greek tragedy" in Faulkner's novels (Duvall 5). Like Africanism to American literature, these same "elements of Greek tragedy" offer "a dark and abiding presence" in Beloved (Playing 33). The traditional definition of tragedy, forming the basis for Western understanding of drama, regards the genre as "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; . . . in the mode of action . . .; and effecting through pity and fear [what we call] the catharsis of such emotions" (Aristotle 50). Morrison's novel seems not to align itself with this definition so much as with Nietzsche's. In Beloved, "art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up in order to overcome it" (Nietzsche 142). Based loosely on recorded events, the novel is not so much a retelling of history as a re-visioning of history, a view into a mythic world in which past, present, and future collide with terrible force.

On the surface, Beloved appears to replicate many of the conventions of the tragedy, as articulated by Aristotle and re-articulated by Nietzsche. Morrison directs the focus of the novel to a single horrific event: the murder/sacrifice of Beloved. This attention to action is a defining characteristic of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (51). In Greek tragedy, the horrific, climactic action takes place off-stage. Oedipus blinds himself and Clytemnestra murders Agammemnon off-stage. Similarly, Sethe's murder of Beloved occurs beyond the reader's gaze. In the recollection scene leading up to the infanticide, the narrator writes from the perspective of Schoolteacher's white nephews, a technique that distances the reader from the events taking place:

"What she go and do that for? On account of a beating? Hell, he'd been beat a million times and he was white. Once it hurt so bad and made him so mad he'd smashed the well bucket. Another time he took it out on Samson -- a few tossed rocks was all. But no beating ever made him . . . I mean no way he could have . . . What she go and do that for?"

(150)

The ellipses and the memories both reveal a refusal to name the act committed. In the middle of this most horrific scene, the white narrator remembers back to his own beatings and compares his own reaction to his own "similar" treatment. Phillip Novak argues that "by describing the scene . . . from the perspective of those least equipped to empathize or understand, Morrison nonetheless manages to keep the event at a kind of representation distance" (210). At this most intense moment, no one is allowed to cross the barrier of individuality that Sethe maintains to protect herself. No one can imagine, empathize, or feel this moment of personal anguish.

The recognition scene so common to Greek and Shakespearean tragedy plays out in Beloved as the final confrontation between the women of the community and Sethe, the radical impact of the present meeting the past. This scene incorporates both recognition and reversal of fortune, basic to the Aristotle's conception of the tragic plot (56). One fundamental element of Nietzsche's conception of tragedy is the conducive potential of music to emotional evocation. Nietzsche's characterization of Dionysiac music, integral to tragedy, coincide with many critics' and reviewers' comments on Beloved. Many critics have noticed the musicality of Morrison's fiction as a whole and especially in this novel:

"The one who never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer's restaurant did not look away; and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away either. And when the baby's spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked away."

(12)

Such passages possess a flowing rhythm and mournful melody, representative of the musical quality of much art of the African-American tradition. Music, Nietzsche's Dionysiac art, is necessarily complementary to tragedy because of its "heart-shaking power of tone, . . . uniform stream of melody, MacBeth, the plot of Beloved evolves from the consequences of a single precipitating action on the part of the tragic protagonist. And like Othello, Sethe's tragic flaw may be that she is "one who loved not wisely but too well."

Raymond William, writing on the history of the Western tradition of tragedy, reminds us that "For Nietzsche, the necessary response [to tragedy] is active: an aesthetic of tragic delight in man's inevitable suffering, which the action of tragedy shows us in order to transcend it" (38). The reader experiences the muted affects of the horror of slavery, the terror of the destruction of the mother-child relationship, and the suffering of a woman attacked on all fronts, all through the story of Sethe's life. Tragedy need not resolve itself in the death of the hero. Often, tragedy concludes with "some new distribution of forces, physical or spiritual. . ." (Williams 55). Williams notes that this new distribution is ordinarily portrayed as "a religious affirmation, but in the words or presence of the chorus, which is then the ground of its social continuity" (55). The women of the community offer the chance for reconciliation with and understanding of the past that Sethe can not achieve on her own.

Morrison has created a character in Sethe who embodies all of the qualities Aristotle attributes to the tragic hero (heroine): goodness, appropriate action, likeness to life, and consistency (60). The world into which this tragic heroine is born is a world of mythic proportions, where yesterday's actions provide tomorrow's consequences. Sethe is driven to live by her overwhelming desire to fulfill her own definition of motherhood. Her tragic flaw is her rigid adherence to a definition of motherhood as presence: to be a mother is to have one's children always here and now. Morrison wrote in 1998 that "The driving force of the narrative is not love, or the fulfillment of physical desire. The action is driven by necessity, something that precedes love, follows love, informs love, shapes it, and to which love is subservient. In this case, the necessity was for connection, acknowledgment, a paying-out of homage still due" ("Home" 7). The oppressive burden of her ancestors' history as slaves weighs down on her and she must struggle to justify her infanticide to the judges in the past and in the present. Deborah McDowell argues that Morrison's narrative techniques "deny the reader a 'central' character, but [they] also [deny] the whole notion of character as a static essence, replacing it with the idea of character as process" (105).

The novel negotiates with both the tradition of tragedy and with the traditions of African-American art. Maria Diedrich claims that "Morrison's rigorous movement towards Black oral art forms, which reaches a precarious peak of perfection in . . . Beloved (1987), burdens her novels with a complexity and an experimental quality that renders them intellectually almost inaccessible for 'the village'" for whom Morrison claims to write (99). Such interpretations reveal a lack of understanding not only of "Black oral art forms," but of the Western tradition of tragedy. The feeling of being overwhelmed, of being lost in the confusing but liberating sea of history, is the foundation of tragedy. Tragedy is fundamentally relational. From the soul-wrenching soliloquies of Hamlet to the madness-driven guilt of Raskolnikov, tragedy reaches into the souls of the audience, be they spectators or readers, and connects on a mythic/spiritual level. Through Beloved, Toni Morrison calls for African-Americans to reestablish the link with the painful, but forgotten past. This lesson is "based on her conviction that modern fragmentation and loss of orientation will be conquered once Blacks learn and accept the lesson of the African Diaspora . . ." (Diedrich 100).

Sethe's motherhood, constantly threatened and harshly defended, defines her identity as relational and metaphorically represents the individual African-American's relationship with the past. Metaphor in Morrison's writing often "represents a process for coming to grips with historical transition" (Willis 264). Sethe is a woman who "has submerged herself in history" (Kubitschek 168), a decidedly negative experience for her given the context of the novel. Fiercely opposed to Nietzsche's Apollonian "principium individuationis," Sethe slips in and out of various subjectivities (22). Sethe's relational subjectivity is thematically and symbolically associated with the congruence of African/African-American history. Nietzsche writes of "the mystery doctrine of tragedy" is "that individuation is the root of all evil" (67). Failing to appreciate and incorporate the past into the present will devastate the future. On the other hand, complete submission to the past denies the present. "The other side" provides the spiritual backdrop to the novel, the same level of reality that Nietzsche calls "the maternal womb of being" (97). "The most evident particular consequence, in tragic theory," claims Williams, "is the emphasis on myth as the source of tragic knowledge, and on ritual as a description of communicated action" (42). The mythic world, inhabited by Sethe's mother and the Africans who died along the Middle Passage, constantly threatens to force itself onto the pages of the novel. Glimpses into this world reveal a new form of knowledge, a new language to communicate. Beloved is the bridge between the present and the African-American mythic past.

The fractured time sequence of the novel creates a transhistorical, mythical backdrop to the events unfolding in the novel's present. Baby Suggs' final years are "Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead" (3-4). The importance of remembering is conveyed thematically as well as structurally. The impact of the past on the present is a lived experience for Sethe. The novel offers the hope of balance. Distancing oneself from the past leads to shame, as when Sethe could only remember "the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys" of Sweet Home: "Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that" (6). Paul D's arrival at 124 forces a reconsideration of the past because he is another survivor Sweet Home and its tyrannical lord, Schoolteacher. Denver is troubled by her father's absence in her life. She suffers because "Only those who knew him ("knew him well") could claim his absence for themselves" (13), thus denying her own link to her past and allowing for her growing distance from her mother in the present. McDowell writes that "the story's forward movement in time is deliberately nonsequential and without explicit reference to 'real' time" (111). Upset by Denver's asking him how long he planned to "hang around," Paul D asks Sethe if there is "history to her question" (44), recognizing, like the women of the community, that in order to make a future one must reconcile with one's past.

Sethe's recurring obstacle is her tremendous guilt over her past, a guilt which extends to all of those who survived the Middle Passage and slavery. Missy Kubitschek writes that "one can still drown on the Middle Passage" and that "the pain of acknowledging the historical past and influences on the present may immobilize a heroine rather than energize her" (144), as is the case with Sethe, who allows Beloved to slowly drain her life from her. The past is finally laid to rest when the women of the community, led by Ella, decide to bring Sethe back and banish Beloved. From these women, Morrison's equivalent to the Greek chorus, comes a recognition of the necessary relationship to the past:

"What's fair ain't necessarily right."

"You can't just up and kill your children."

"No, and the children can't just up and kill the mama."

(256)

As the women watch and wait and Edward Bodwin approaches 124, the confrontation scene takes on the air of a ritual. Praying and chanting, the women remember the past: "In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like" (259). As Sethe takes the ice pick in her hand and lunges for Mr. Bodwin, she finally understands, even in her maddened state, the course of action she needs to take to secure a future in the community. Instead of murdering her child in an effort to save her, as she did eighteen years before, she now sacrifices herself to the threat of a white man taking away her "best thing" (262). Michael Hogan argues that "Beloved's subsequent departure . . . signals that Sethe's choice -- attempting this time to attack the white man, the threat against her family -- was the right one. In attacking the white man, Sethe offers herself -- rather than her child -- for sacrifice. It is a decision that conveys Sethe's selflessness, rather than her pride, to the thirty women watching and allows Sethe to re-enter the community" (176). Paul D tries to reinforce this sense of goodness and worth in Sethe, to make her aware of her own value as an individual, as a woman who has made a life of freedom for herself and her surviving children, that she is her own "best thing" (273). But after Beloved's flight, she still can not fully formulate an identity not based on her relations to others. She answers Paul D's valuation with the question "Me? Me?" (273).

Morrison's re-vision of tragedy radically concretizes Nietzsche's understanding of the genre. Where the German philosopher defined tragedy as "a concrete manifestation of Dionysiac conditions, music made visible, an ecstatic dream world" (89). Morrison, in contrast, refuses to allow the power and passion to remain in the mythic realm. Her novel dares to bring the nearly unbearable weight of centuries of pain and isolation to the world in material terms, and offers a vision of hope to the survivors of tragedy. "Tragedy is qualitative," writes Geoffrey Brereton (11). How more poignant a story than the awful choice a mother must make between allowing her children to live in slavery or die in freedom? Throughout the novel, a subtle feeling constantly threatens to undermine the comfortable resolution of Sethe's predicament. The novel offers no solutions to the psychological, physical, and social trauma of slavery; it allows the reader to develop her own conclusions, to create her own visions for the future. Through Sethe's experiences, we see the potential to overcome the scars of human existence. Sethe's life is a reality that can not be ignored; the novel "is not a story to pass on" (275).

Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by James Hutton. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982.

Brereton, Geoffrey. Principles of Tragedy: A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life andLiterature. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1968.

Diedrich, Maria. "'When You Kill the Ancestor You Kill Yourself': Africa and the Modern Black Identity in Toni Morrison's Novels." Minority Literatures in North American: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Wolfgang Karner and Hartmut Lutz. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1990. pp. 97-114.

Duvall, John N. "Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulkernian Influence." Unflinching Gaze: Morrisonand Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Ed. by Carol A Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. pp. 3-16.

Hogan, Michael. "Built on the Ashes: The Fall of the House of Sutpen and the Rise of the House of Sethe." Unflinching Gaze: Morrisonand Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Ed. by Carol A Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. pp. 167- 180.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

McDowell, Deborah E. "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: The Penguin Group, 1987.

----- Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

------ "Home." The House That Race Built. Ed. by Wahneema Lubrano. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. pp. 3-12.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.

Novak, Phillip. "Signifying Silences: Morrison's Soundings in the Faulknerian Void." Unflinching Gaze: Morrisonand Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Ed. by Carol A Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. pp. 199-216.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Willis, Susan. "Eruptions of funk: historicizing Toni Morrison." Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. pp. 263-283.