Is Morrison also among the prophets?: "psychoanalytic" strategies in 'Beloved.' (Toni Morrison)

In our efforts to consider the structure of "rememory" in Beloved, we should call to mind what Toni Morrison once said:

Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often extremely hard to seek out both the stimulus and its galaxy and to recognize their value when they arrive. Memory is for me always fresh, in spite of the fact that the object being remembered is done and past. ("Memory" 385)

In Beloved, Morrison takes up the challenge of excavating "buried stimuli" of the slave past by employing psychoanalysis to retrace footprints of journeys "done and past." This paper examines the method Morrison employs to (de)construct historical records about a particular incident that happened in 1855.(1) Struck by the incident but dissatisfied with the amount of information reported, Morrison, like a seer for whom time creates no boundaries, proceeds to give an account of this century-old occurence. She creates a narrative with this incident by exploring the psychic dimensions of American slavery, a dimensio that is often glossed over in the general enumeration of human and material loss. Morrison shoulders the task of reinventing the slave past because the facts of slavery are elided, suppressed, and even forgotten in many recorded accounts. Employing a narrative strategy that offers several possible interpretations of the novel Beloved, Morrison displaces the "comfortable" historical positions we might take on the matter of American slavery.

Morrison's narrative strategy--much like the structure of psychoanalysis--acts as a conditional operative, offering her creative opportunities to deal with the real, the fantastic, and the possible events that make up slave history. Her narrative strategy functions in Beloved as a project in historical mythmaking. Utilizing both Western and African interpretations of the psyche, Morrison succeeds in destabilizing stereotypic "re-memberings" on slavery. She suggests, through the multiple meanings her narrative provokes, that recorded history (which often presents certain information to the exclusion of some other) is a social construction reflecting a particular consciousness, a particular agenda. Indeed, with the lingering shadow of dark memories and the appearance and disappearance of ghosts in Beloved, Morrison states simply: There is more than meets the eye in the construction of history.

Morrison constructs the "interiority" of a slave experience in Beloved by straddling the ontological borders of race. She utilizes her double heritage (African American), her "double consciousness," as Du Bois puts it (45), to rewrite the history of slavery. As both an insider and an outsider to the Western tradition in literature, Morrison ruptures the representations of the literary canon by bringing an African dimension to it. She usurps the canon and forges it to fit her own constructions of a "fictionalized history" or a "historicized fiction," as the case may be.(2)

Yes, Morrison can be counted among the prophets of psychoanalysis. Her application of psychoanalytic material, as a rhetorical strategy, deliberately calls attention to, and lays claim to, the double status of the African American as a split subject. This strategy also arms Morrison with a prophetic voice that heralds on stage a contemplation on what a slave past means for the African American, without bracketing the multiple hermeneutic possibilities such a contemplation provokes. Just as Shoshana Felman uses psychoanalysis in a cultural context--something which is and is not there at the same time, conscious and unconscious, the exemplary description of the trace (11)(3)--so also Morrison uses the principal structure of recovery and displacement in psychoanalysis as a model for understanding Beloved. Consequently, tensions build up across many layers of semiotic representations in the novel. The characters as well as the reader must become part of the dramatis personae of this intra-psychic drama on the "reconstruction" of a slave past.

My aim in this essay is to examine the characters, the reader, and the author herself in the role each plays while seeking to elicit certain meanings through a reconstruction of reactions and responses. I will also highlight Morrison's use of psychoanalytic material to account for the "herstory" of an African past. For where history (as written) has failed to account for the African past, Morrison accords respectable significance to the oral and the psychic representations of history. The oralization of history which gives preeminence to its fictionalized construction(4) will, in my analysis, be explored through the psychic structure/stricture of psychoanalysis that Morrison so cleverly exploits. The singular project of psychoanalysis--to elicit meanings from external reality through the exploration of psychic space--creates a vestibule for the exercise of the imaginary. Thus, in creating a fictional--that is to say, possible--account of history, psychoanalysis provides an environment conducive to both the production and resistance of narratives. Where Western psychoanalysis readily aids the understanding of Beloved, Morrison's text aptly fits into the literary canon, and where the text sometimes resists a Freudian and Lacanian reading, Morrison ruptures the Western canon by producing African alternatives of reading the psyche. I refer to this African alternative of reading as psychoanalysis.

I would make a distinction between this alternative reading and the Freudian institution (and its legacies) the Western world is most familiar with under the name psychoanalysis. Although both are related and often complement each other, the two forms of pysychoanalysis should not be conflated. Freudian psychoanalysis has its foundation in the oedipus complex.(5) African psychoanalysis has its roots in the social and cultural setting of its peoples--in their beliefs in concepts such as nature, the supernatural realm, reincarnation, and retribution. Psychic trauma in the African world usually stems from the immediate historical, social, and political environment, and is responded to in various ways: It can be resisted through the oral transfer of (historical) information, through storytelling, dancing, and exorcism, to name a few examples. Nonetheless, I use the word psychoanalysis in this essay to mean, simply, the operations of the psyche. When either African or Western interpretations of the psyche are assumed in the essay they are so specified. Indeed, African and Western interpretations of the psyche sometimes merge in the novel's rationale, yet this is not evidence of a confused blurring of sites and moments of operation but a confirmation of the usefulness of psychoanalysis as an explanatory theory for the psychic space of possibilities in the fictive realization of history-in-the-making. As Hortense Spillers confirms in Comparative American Identities, it is this fictive space of "corpulative potentials" (6) that orchestrates the possibilities of canonical ruptures, of cutting borders, not as "the seizing of discursive initiative" (8) by a select race, but as "the shifting position of the socionom" (16).

Morrison's copious use of psychoanalysis as a literary device(6) in Beloved serves the author's ultimate purpose of outlining the deliberate indeterminacy of the text's meaning. Traversing the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the spiritual, the conscious and the unconscious, she fully exploits the polyvalent nature of psychoanalysis. She (re)defines psychoanalysis not just as a model for examining the "interiority" of her characters but also for involving the reader in an intimate way. The reader becomes part of the storytelling, unraveling and flowing with the currents of the eccentricities, paradoxes, and collaborations that make up the plot.

The psychoanalytic models Morrison employs offer different strategies for reading the novel Beloved. The basic story is that Sethe runs away from Sweet Home with a full-term pregnancy, having sent her other three children ahead of her. She successfully reaches her mother-in-law's place in Cincinnati, where she reunites with her family, without her husband, in freedom. About a month later, recognizing the hat of her captor coming down the road for them, she quickly gathers her children to kill them in a shed in the yard before anyone else figures out what is going on. Her attempt proves successful with the "crawling-already?" (93) baby girl. From then on, Sethe and her family are haunted by their memories of the murdered child. This is the backdrop against which the story of the present is played out. However, the ambiguity surrounding the facts of the story's present time accounts for the many possible explanations of the past, and because the fictional present is hinged to the past, without the pieces of the present (and supposedly the future), the past remains an unfinished puzzle. What really happens eighteen years after the "crawling-already?" baby is murdered? Is the young woman who enters Sethe's life her daughter come back from the grave? Is Beloved someone else whose identity must be discovered? Does Beloved really exist?

One school of thought assumes that Beloved is Sethe's dead child come to avenge itself on its mother, the child's murderer. The strong history of the baby ghost in the house, coupled with the strange appearance of a young lady, Beloved, makes the characters in the text and the reading public believe that the "crawling-already?" baby has returned in human form.(7) Another school of thought assumes that Beloved is no kin to Sethe. This second reading seeks to defend itself against the more popular reading. The probable story, this latter school believes, is that Beloved is a captive from Africa who escapes from the hands of her sexually-abusive captor, a white man, and she now "mistakes" Sethe for her real mother who committed suicide by jumping into the sea from the slaveship's deck.

This second reading, exemplified by Elizabeth House's interpretation of the story in her essay "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who is not Beloved," contradicts the first reading in many ways. Though House criticizes this first reading and supplies another version of reading Beloved, her reading is no more than another probability because, while she points out evidence to show that Beloved could be other than a ghost, she fails to disprove evidence that supports the earlier reading. By using psychoanalysis where the text warrants, I will illustrate how these rather contradictory readings are not exclusive of each other but complementary. I will also show how this complementarity (knitting together plots, sub-plots, and counter-plots) creates a powerful and affecting work of art.

Signs and Wonders

There is plenty of evidence for the reading public to assume that Beloved is a ghost returned in human form. All the paraphernalia needed for the reader to believe that this is no mere fictive realism of a text are laid out from the very first page: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children" (3). 124 is "suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead" (3-4), and we soon agree with the dying Baby Suggs that "every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road" (3). We are immersed into the spooky world of the novel before we get a chance to rationalize or distance ourselves from its context. As though in the world of magical realism where ghosts and goblins control the human realm, a certain familiarity with the unfamiliar imposes itself on us, compelling our mind to accommodate the world of the text. The hard-to-explain supernatural happenings stand as evidence that, first of all, there is a ghost in the house, and furthermore that the family's unfeigned relationship with this ghost determines their fate and the decisions they make in life. The story clearly suggests that Sethe's boys leave home because of the manifest presence of the baby ghost (272). The women also recognize the presence of the ghost. Sethe and Denver, the two family members remaining after the death of Baby Suggs, learn to live with and to love the ghost. Ostracized from the community since the grisly murder of the baby, and remembering Baby Suggs's statement that" 'not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief'" (5), Sethe, along with Denver, welcomes the ghost into the house.

They live with this state of affairs until Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men, arrives on the scene. Recognizing the presence of a ghost by "a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood," Paul D asks:

"You got company?" ...

"Off and on," said Sethe.

"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?" (8)

Sethe describes this "company" as her "daughter. The one I sent ahead with the boys" (10). With this indelible memory of a ghostly presence in our minds, we are quick to believe that Beloved is the ghost returned.

We also confirm our impressions about this ghostly presence when a shadow joins hands with Sethe and Denver to and from the carnival. Again, when we are introduced to a "fully dressed woman" walking out of water, our now somewhat conditioned minds begin to look at her as, perhaps, another ghostly manifestation. Our minds hasten to make conclusions about her because she seems imbued with a certain kind of inertia, a deathly stillness. Also, we are introduced to her more by her clothing--"a straw hat with a broken brim," "the bit of lace edging her dress" (50)--than by a description of what she looks like. Having to make do with only a description of bits and pieces of her "body," the reader is struck by the deliberate withholding of important details and the highlighting of seemingly unrelated and irrelevant information. For example, we are told that "the rays of the sun struck [Beloved] full on the face, so that when Sethe, Denver and Paul D rounded the curve in the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it, and Here Boy [the dog] nowhere in sight" (51). The uncanniness of this information resides not only in the image of an absent body but in the strong presence of a lack--the lack of a face, and a missing dog. Although "the rays of the sun struck [Beloved] full on the face," and the reader expects a description of the details of that face, the narrative suppresses the presence of the face and rather highlights the absence of the dog. This narrative structure foreshadows a major theme in this novel: the reluctance of the author to draw a line between inside and outside, visible and invisible, image and reality, history and fiction.

Morrison's message here, that what we may be seeing is not there at all and what is open and revealed we may not be seeing, questions the whole idea of truth and certainty. Sethe, Denver, and Paul D see Here Boy, who is nowhere around, but fail to see Beloved's face, which is exposed to the full view of the sun. It is not incidental that, when Sethe moves close enough to see Beloved's face, her "bladder fill[s] to capacity" (51). Sethe's full bladder, which she empties just outside the outhouse, is a metaphor for the link between seeing and telling. Morrison demonstrates that being able to see always produces narratives. It is while Sethe stoops over her own urine that she recalls events of her past, such as her child-hood days with Nan and Denver's birth in a sinking boat. All these memories, of course, are tied to her being able to see Beloved's face. Seeing has to do with reading the past, and how one sees is directly related to the kinds of narratives that are produced. Sethe's link with the past, manifest in her relationship with the ghost, is unmistakably played up in the presence of Beloved.

Consequently, the reader is tempted to tie up Beloved's appearance at 124 with the ghost which has recently been driven away from the house. So many incidents piled up on each other prompt the assumptions the reader makes that Beloved must be a ghost. For instance, the dog Here Boy, having moved out of the house at the presence of the ghost (12), now moves out of the compound at the arrival of Beloved (55). Furthermore, Beloved's seemingly unquenchable thirst (she drinks cup after cup of water) and Sethe's uncontrollable passing of urine at the same time (51) establish irresistible connections between them. Morrison hints at a mother-child relationship between them when she states that "there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now" (51). The idea that Sethe is symbolically giving birth to Beloved also ties up with any immediate interpretation for Beloved's "new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hand" (50).

An African Fable: The Devil Child

A very popular African tale(8) bears close similarity to the suspicion the reader holds about Beloved's too-flawless appearance: Once upon a time there was a very beautiful young girl who was being wooed by many suitors. She was widely known for rejecting all her suitors on the grounds that they were not good-looking enough for her. Suitors came from far and wide but could not meet her expectations. A demon in a far-off country heard of her beauty and reputation for refusing eligible bachelors. He decided to try his chance. But first, he stopped at several locations on the way to borrow the most beautiful body parts he could find. Eventually, fitted out to "kill," he arrived in the girl's village riding gallantly on a beautiful horse. Seeing the most handsome man of her dreams, she decided to marry him and insisted, against her parents' wishes, to follow this total stranger to his own country. On their way, he had to return the parts he had borrowed. Realizing her husband's deceit, she was, of course, most alarmed to find that the man of her dreams was nothing but an ugly demon. What she thought she had was certainly not "there" at all.

The manifestation of Beloved as a ghost returned in the flesh follows much the same pattern as the demon of the African story. In an African tale, a demon may sometimes have the same characteristics as a ghost. For example, they are often presented as speaking the same way--through their nose. As a concept, the term demon is sometimes interchangeable with the term ghost. Even Beloved, believed to be a ghost, is sometimes called the "devil-child" by Ella's troop of praying women (261).

In thinking about this African tale, one immediately calls to mind Beloved's new skin, new shoes, and expensive clothing. The text suggests that she might not only have borrowed (actually, she claims to have taken) the things she has on, she might have borrowed her body as well. With "her soft new feet ... barely capable of their job" (53), with her head supported in "the palm of her hand as though it was too heavy for a neck alone" (56), as if she was just learning to use unused-to corporeal material, the puzzle she holds for the reader is as great as that bothering Paul D:

"Something funny 'bout that gal," Paul D said, mostly to himself.

"Funny how?"

"Acts sick, sounds sick, but she don't look sick. Good skin, bright eyes and strong as a bull."

"She's not strong. She can hardly walk without holding on to something."

"That's what I mean. Can't walk, but I seen her pick up the rocker with one hand." (56)

The reader is also fascinated by Beloved's own preoccupation with her "borrowed" body. Indifferently pulling out a back tooth from her mouth, Beloved thinks:

This is it. Next would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once.... It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. (133)

Beloved's breathtaking appearance at 124 is equaled by her vanishing act at the end of the novel. No one knows for sure what happens to her. Like Ella and the women in the story who witness her "disappearance," the reader may easily assume that, as a ghost, she goes the way she came--into thin air. Like the devil-child that she is, she "erupts into her separate parts" (274), leaving nothing "but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather" (275).

Specular Constructions

As a ghost, or the devil-child, as Ella chooses to call her, Beloved's appearance and relationship to each person in the text are particularly distinct. The embodied ghost whose detachable body eventually "erupts into her separate parts" plays a significant role in the black community, especially in the lives of the residents of 124. For instance, Paul D's role as lover to Beloved strikes us with horror because we have, by now, accepted that she is a ghost. His suspicion and dislike of Beloved and her unparalleled hatred of him translate into a sexually explosive scene in the novel. In this seduction scene, in which she lures him into the cold house to possess him, they interlock in a sexually-potent power play. It would seem that having driven the disembodied ghost out of the house with "a table and a loud male voice" (37), Paul D should be able to confront an embodied spirit who is bent on using her sexual powers over him:

"I want you to touch me in the inside part."

"Go back in that house and get to bed."

"You have to touch me in the inside part. And you have to call me my name." ...

"No."

"Please call it. I'll go if you call it."

"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. (117)

If we keep in mind that the restored-to-life phantom of a baby ghost, though a grown-up girl when she appears in human form, is, nevertheless, a baby in her mind and in her mental development (she cannot even tie her shoe laces [65]), we may better appreciate their sexual encounter. Her mental development accounts for her rather possessive behavior and her tendency to be selfish. But given this limited development, one might wonder how she possesses the knowledge to take her mother's lover.

Freud's theory of infantile sexuality is perhaps a way to explain the rather unusual relationship among her, Sethe, and Paul D. One can argue that, as a "crawling-already?" baby who has not quite entered the symbolic order, which could help her differentiate between herself and her mother--in other words, her identity is still confused with her mother's--she desires her mother as a symbol of identification with her. Thus, her mother's desire becomes her own. That is to say that her sexual encounter with Paul D is not done through any perverse sexual knowledge but through a childish desire to be the center of her mother's love. This explanation is perhaps justified by the fact that, as soon as she gets what she wants--that is, to drive Paul D away from her mother--she stops "visiting" him. It also seems evident from the text that Beloved learns her sexual plan against Paul D when she watches the turtles making love beside the stream. The same action of hoisting up her skirt and dropping it while she watches the turtles in the stream at the back of the house is repeated when she seduces Paul D. Indeed, she "turned her head over her shoulder the way the turtles had" (116); this gives the impression that she has just learned how to do such a thing. The "animality" of the act, and the manner in which she does it, demonstrates some kind of innocence.(9)

Paul D's painful past, which he had locked up in a rusted tobacco tin of a heart, is unlocked by this contact between the living and the dead. Touching Beloved "in the inside part" is equivalent to keeping in touch with his own past, opening up himself enough so as to confront the past and negotiate the future. When Paul D thinks back on all he suffered in his attempts to escape from Schoolteacher's brutal empire--Sweet Home--he has to admit to himself that there is no forgetting the past. The memory Paul D has to live with, a memory in which Schoolteacher plays a significant role--Sixo burnt alive, Halle insane, Paul A sold, and himself with a bit in his mouth--confirms this past. Through Beloved, Paul D is able to reappraise the past and to survey possible opportunities for the future. His cry for a red heart during his sexual encounter with Beloved partially restores his manhood.

On the whole, Beloved's return in the flesh is therapeutic. In the case of Sethe, her assumed mother who has been literally ostracized from the community not only because she has murdered her own child, but because she is too proud, Beloved will become the link that will bring her into the community again. Stricken with guilt for having killed her daughter and looking for a way to make up for it, Sethe welcomes the "resurrection" of Beloved. In this way, she revises the past. Beloved becomes a symbol that banishes Sethe's pathogenic link with her murdered child. With Beloved's disappearance at the end of the novel, one is wont to believe that 124 experiences relief. Paul D returns and Denver receives good advice to try life out. Although Beloved's presence will continue to haunt the neighborhood in a very effervescent sense, it is best (in Morrison's advice to the characters/readers) to "disremember" her and to avoid her as "unaccounted" (274) for. It is best to pass on--to the present.

Moreover, an exorcism of the past will leave Sethe room for self-realization. Without the incapacitating presence of the past about her, she can now begin to be herself and not live for a ghost. As Paul D tells her, "'You your best thing'" (273). Sethe understands that a real claim to freedom must begin with the mind, and until she is able to deal with the past not as a burden which must be beaten back by all means but as a factor which constitutes the present, she will continue to be haunted and will not enjoy total freedom. Consequently, before she can have her peace, there is a need to examine the past and correct it where possible. Beloved's appearance is a concrete way to resolve this psychic trauma.

I am not suggesting that Beloved's resurrection is an easy therapeutic course that brings the past to the foreground and that her disappearance completely exorcises the past. Indeed, the past cannot be forgotten. This is the lesson Baby Suggs learns when her "faith, love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived" (89) in Cincinnati. Although "Baby Suggs, holy" (87), has a therapeutic treatment for her black community that helps to counteract the spite white people have for it, her therapy can only do that much--help her people. In her call for them to lay everything down, sword and shield, and her command for them to love themselves, she discovers that one needs these weapons as a defense against love, too much love. For sanity's sake and for the defense of one's life, one cannot lay down everything; for instance, one cannot lay down one's guard, which Baby Suggs does when she indulges in an excess of love at the safe arrival of her daughter-in-law and her children. In other words, therapy is fine if it leaves room for a serum of dead bodies, antibodies if you will, in the mind of the living, in order to protect the living from the dead and from all that will threaten their well-being in the real world. The healing process must of necessity include the past.

Indeed, Sethe's relationship to the ghost-child is wholly dominated by the past. Judith Thurman points out that the impossibility of erasing the past is due to the fatal relationships which slavery produces. In fact, these relationships--master-slave, motherchild, etc.--are "what we experience as most sinister, claustrophobic, and uncanny in the novel, and [they are] what drive home the meaning of slavery" (179). Thurman points out that it is these relationships, and not the idea of the novel as a ghost story, in her opinion a "deceptive and sensational tag" (178), that make the novel so uncanny.

No matter our reaction to Thurman's point, we can agree with her that the novel is uncanny. Freud has described the uncanny (unheimlich) as "something which is secretly familiar [heimlich--heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it" (245). Indeed, Freud admits in his parapsychological explanations of the uncanny that it is a very delicate ground because what we may see as uncanny under one circumstance may not be in another. For example, fairy tales, though they are peopled by ghosts, spirits, and otherworldly presences, are not uncanny in any way because they are instantly regarded as belonging to the world of the impossible, as make-believe--which means that the rules of normalcy do not apply. However, certain fictional texts, if handled carefully, can produce the uncanny because the possibility of their happening, or having happened in fact (247), haunts the present, under what Freud would call repetition compulsion.(10)

Beloved falls into this latter category, because it presents in a very realistic manner a fictional account that is historically true. Morrison's novel is based on a true account of an event of 1855: A slave woman named Margaret Garner, when chased by her owner to Cincinnati where she had escaped to her mother-in-law's, tried to kill her four children. Without remorse, she had preferred death for them to slavery (Clemons 74). The reader's experience of the uncanny in Beloved rests mainly in the realistic (historical) setting which characterizes Morrison's novels. The landscape of normalcy upon which the extraterrestrial is accounted for encourages the reader to read with a certain trepidation and expectation of terrifying havoc common to all such ghostly manifestations. To summarize Freud's "The Uncanny" crudely, one can say that the flow of adrenaline carries with it the often repressed, sometimes blunted, "primordial" beliefs which our "finer" social sensibilities have discarded. To conclude, we can say that the first interpretation of Beloved lies mainly in the reader's capacity to accept the characters' identification of Beloved as a ghost returned, a perception strengthened, perhaps, by our varied cultural experiences and belief in ghosts.

Truth Constructions

The second reading tries to prove that Beloved is not Sethe's daughter but is indeed a strange woman who walks into Sethe's compound bearing a name (not really hers) similar to the one word Sethe could afford to have engraved on the headstone of her murdered baby--"Beloved." In her essay mentioned above, Elizabeth House strives to show that Beloved is not the Beloved we think she is. According to the story House reconstructs, Beloved is carried on a slaveship headed for America from Africa with her mother. Since she was so young during the voyage, Beloved cannot construct her story accurately. House writes:

From Beloved's disjointed thoughts, her stream-of-consciousness rememberings set down in these chapters [Book Two, Sections Four and Five], a story can be pieced together that describes how white slave traders, "men without skin," captured the girl and her mother as the older woman picked flowers in Africa. In her narrative, Beloved explains that she and her mother, along with many other Africans, were then put aboard an abysmally crowded slave ship, given little food and water, and in these inhuman conditions, many blacks died. To escape this living hell, Beloved's mother leaped into the ocean, and, thus, in the girl's eyes, her mother willingly deserted her. (18)

Surprised that major reviewers of Morrison's text simply assume that Beloved is Sethe's dead daughter come to take revenge, House cites many examples to show why this cannot be. Indeed, her argument, as much as it sometimes remains speculative, is largely convincing, and puts to rest many incoherent and knotty questions as to the puzzling appearance and identity of Beloved.

My interpretation of this second possible reading on the following pages is triggered by House's own reading of Beloved.(11) It is necessary to lay out this second reading not so much to argue whether Beloved is or is not a ghost as it is to portray that this supposedly contrary reading is another deliberate move of Morrison's. From the numerous images the author employs to provoke this second interpretation, we can posit that her strategy insists on the indeterminacy of the text's meaning.

Beloved says in her reminiscence of her mother:

I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket ... she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way (210)

In this first set of rememberings, we are given the image of a peaceful setting in which Beloved watches her mother pick flowers. But this settig is disturbed by "clouds" which are "in the way." As House points out, Beloved later describes the clouds as "clouds of gunsmoke" (214). This phrase helps us to imagine that perhaps her mother is hiding in the grass ("she opens the grass"), or falls down, as House suggests, when she hears gunfire. Unable to protect her mother and overwhelmed by the smoke herself, she is captured, along with her mother, by white slave traders, "men without skin." Her memories of the gruesome experience she encounters on the slaveship remain vivid; they are "pictures" in her mind. Beloved recalls that there are many other people on the slaveship and that they are all tightly packed into the ship. Having to crouch on the long trip across the Atlantic, it seems to her that "there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too." They are all so tightly packed in the hold of the ship that those who wish to die do not have enough room to do it in. In the inhuman conditions in the hold of the ship, those who eat the miserable food they are offered (for example, the bread is moldy, "sea-colored") vomit it up; "some who eat nasty themselves." The white overseers also bring them their urine and try to force the captives to drink, but they refuse (210-11).

After a protracted period of starvation and unhealthy conditions, a lot of people succeed in dying; in fact, there are so many that they form a "little hill of dead people." Beloved and her mother witness this scene because they are on the deck. We know this from Beloved's recollection that "we are not crouching now we are standing ... the sun closes my eyes" (211). Probably realizing that the death toll is too high under the prevailing health conditions, the white slave traders bring the people who are still alive on deck to get some fresh air. Apparently, Beloved's mother's decision to throw herself overboard is prompted by the harrowing experience of watching dead captives unceremoniously pushed overboard with poles by the white overseers. Preferring death to slavery, she jumps into the sea, leaving Beloved behind:

the woman with my face is in the sea ... they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in (212)

By stressing that the white men do not push her mother into the sea but that she "willingly" jumps in, Beloved tells us plainly that her mother commits suicide.

The indelible imprint of this traumatic experience follows her to the shores of America. While the other slaves are sold into slavery, she is left in the keeping of one white man, probably the ship master. This white man not only sexually abuses her (212), but also uses her as a prostitute: Beloved "said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her.... Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light" (241).

How she escapes from this setting we can only speculate about. But the most likely interpretation is the clue which Morrison gives about "the bridge," the one thing Beloved seems to have clearly remembered, probably because it is the latest happening in the long line of events in her life. The evidence we can elicit from the text lies in the conversation she has with Denver:

"Tell me, how did you get here?"

"I wait; then I got on the bridge. I stay there in the dark, in the daytime, in the dark, in the daytime. It was a long time."

"All this time you were on a bridge?"

"No. After. When I got out." (75)

Beloved always makes reference to "the bridge," while Denver, thinking it is just some bridge over a river, says "a bridge." Beloved is probably trying to say that, after she left the deplorable conditions in the slaveship's hold, as "mistress" to her master, she had access to the bridge where she sat night and day reminiscing about her mother. It seems possible that she has stayed on this ship all her life and has been used to service other men on board. On one of her lonely rendezvous on the bridge, during the day time when she is nothing but a bitch of whom all the white men are ashamed, the thought occurs to her to escape from the ship by following the example of her mother--jumping overboard. This seems to have been the case if we consider what she says to Paul D when he asks her how she found the house: "'She told me. When I was at the bridge, she told me'" (65). The "she" refers to the mother she lost overboard. The obvious nostalgia suggested by her statement "she took my face away there is no one to want me to say me my name" (212) probably directs her to jump from the bridge into the water where she thinks she can find her mother. What she sees when she looks in the water, though, is her own reflection.

The details of how she gets from the bridge of the ship over, we might suppose, a large body of water to the stream at the back of Sethe's house is elided from her narration. But we do know that, when she swims out of the water and sees Sethe coming down the road toward her, she is deluded into thinking that Sethe is her mother: "Sethe's is the face that left me" (213). The delusion she now suffers demonstrates the intensity of the trauma she is experiencing, a trauma caused by the stunted family relationships which slavery has forced on her. Lacking mother love and not even remembering her own name (212), she goes by the name which "ghosts without skin" call her in the dark--Beloved.

Once we are able to construct the sketchy account of her life, we are then able to make sense of the conversations she has with Denver and Sethe from time to time. Denver strongly believes in ghosts, and the pointed questions she sometimes asks Beloved are meant to clarify and confirm her perception of things. So, although Beloved actually answers her questions, they have two different frames of reference in mind. For example, once, when "Beloved let her head fall back on the edge of the bed .... Denver saw the tip of the thing she always saw in its entirety when Beloved undressed to sleep. "Looking straight at it she whispers," 'Why you call yourself Beloved?'" (74-75). Denver thinks that the mark on Beloved's neck which she is looking at is the gash left from the wound that killed her sister.

However, the mark on Beloved's neck, from the point of view of the second reading being pursued here, is the mark left from her experience on the slaveship where they were held captive with "the iron circle," a metal collar which was "around our neck" (212). Consequently, Beloved responds to Denver's question about her name in this manner: "'In the dark my name is Beloved.'" Beloved is referring to the night-time rendezvous men had with her (241), but Denver thinks that "dark" refers to the grave where her dead sister is. Thinking that her sister, whom she thinks Beloved is, is finally confessing that she is a ghost, she asks Beloved if she was cold because Denver believes that her dead sister should have been cold in a wintry grave.

Morrison intertwines Beloved's and Denver's stories to create a narrative that transcends either of their solitary meanings. Morrison knows that meaning is not for itself and in itself but in spite of itself. Her agenda here tells us that meaning is always a construction, most often a production of our social environment. Colored by our varied perspectives about life, meaning is open to a body of interpretations, sometimes conflated, sometimes distinctive.

A seemingly eerie incident that takes place in the dark, cold house ties up neatly with this idea that meaning is not a construct with a singular end but is the product of semiotic layering. The conflated and yet distinctive meanings evident in the stories Denver and Beloved share are indicative of the questions surrounding the representation of meaning:

"Look," [Beloved] points to the sunlit cracks.

"What? I don't see nothing." Denver follows the pointing finger.

Beloved drops her hand. "I'm like this."

Denver watches as Beloved bends over, curls up and rocks. Her eyes go to no place; her moaning is so small Denver can hardly hear it.

"You all right? Beloved?"

Beloved focuses her eyes. "Over there. Her face."

Denver looks where Beloved's eyes go; there is nothing but darkness there.

"Whose face? Who is it?"

"Me. It's me."

She is smiling again. (124)

Beloved is reliving her experiences on the slaveship. Her rocking movements simulate the storms at sea she still remembers: "storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men" (211). What activates this memory is not so much the darkness they are sitting in as the "sunlit cracks" which remind her of the little shafts of sunlight that used to come into the hold of the slaveship. Her stream-of-consciousness rememberings in the second half of the book illuminate the meaning of the above conversation: "at night I cannot see the dead man on my face daylight comes through the cracks and I can see his locked eyes" (210; emphasis added).

With her mind on the past, Beloved invites Denver to take a look at the face of her mother whom she, Beloved, pictures, with her mind's eye, at one corner of the room. She uses the pronoun "Me. It's me" because she has always identified her mother with herself. We can imagine that Denver thinks Beloved is at last admitting that she is the ghost sister she believes Beloved to be. When Denver looks, she sees nothing because there is nothing to see beyond "the sunlit cracks" Beloved is pointing at. Ironically, seeing nothing feeds her preconceived idea that there is a ghost lurking around in the dark, invisible to her own eye because she is only mortal. With that notion, she asks Beloved to name the face she "sees" in the dark room. Beloved's response, "Me. It's me," can only translate Denver's suspicion into fact.

My interpretation of the second reading here, as much as it seems to prove Beloved's identity, does not in fact do so. As another reading with speculative assumptions, it has many gaps and unanswered questions. Thus, this interpretation adds to the enigma of who Beloved is not, rather than who she is. Our attempts at defining Beloved are always superseded by our knowledge of what she might not be or, more precisely, what else she may be.

Indeed, House rightly describes Beloved's identity as ambiguous (22), but her singular denial of Beloved as a ghost limits her reading since this denial suffocates the varied perceptions of Beloved which Morrison seems to insist on. This second interpretation suggests only one such probable answer to the riddle of Beloved's identity. The first reading is just as legitimate. Each reading ultimately has its purpose. On the one hand, the first reading presents not only the ghosts of history which haunt our present realities but also presents Morrison's rhetorical strategy--psychoanalytic models--which enables the reader to comprehend the implication of other possible readings. In other words, because our imaginative potential is at its highest when we encounter, or imagine that we encounter, ghosts, our capacity to produce and accept multiple meanings applicable to a given situation also operates at its fullest. The second reading, on the other hand, gives Beloved a voice (she controls her own narrative) which the disembodied presence of a ghost cannot quite muster. Moreover, Beloved's narrative delineates incidents that remain unaccounted for in many historical records. Both readings, however, constitute an intra-psychic experience that clearly spells out the psychosomatic traumas of a history of slavery.

The Writerly Text

But how is the reader to handle a narrative emplotment that begs to be comprehended on contradictory levels at the same time? The rhetorical sleight-of-hand which Morrison uses to seduce the reader into believing the first interpretation, accepting the second, and contemplating other possible readings involves the reader in an intimate engagement with the text. Apparently, Morrison has left a lot of the interpretation within the control of the reader because the stories about Beloved's identity, her appearance, and her leave-taking are actually left to the reader's imagination. Morrison trusts either the reader enough or her craft better to believe that the reader will take up the threads where she leaves them hanging and with the results that she expects.(12)

The multiple readings of Beloved echo the elusive nature of psychoanalysis and its tendency to recover itself constantly; this tendency makes psychoanalysis an uncanny representation of literature. Its capacity to be "lost, displaced or misplaced," as Felman puts it,(13) gives it a presence that is "never simply there, at our disposal to apply. It is something that we necessarily keep losing and have to keep working at to find again.... psychoanalysis always has to be recovered" (11). To this end, the psychoanalytic device which Morrison adopts works very well in Beloved. It is in the context of the psychoanalytic that the reader is able to appreciate the contrary yet complementary readings discussed above. The reader can invoke psychoanalytic explanations for hard-to-define incidents, and at the same time dismiss them where some other explanation seems apparent.

In the latter instance, psychoanalysis always seems out of place and irrelevant. For example, it is easy to explain away Beloved's seduction of Paul D as something she is well-practiced in if we assume, with the second school of thought, that she might have been, as Stamp Paid suspects, the "girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone'" (235). In addition, her own confession of carnal knowledge--she admits that men call her Beloved in the dark and bitch during the day (241)--stands as evidence of her sexual ploy. Yet the sexual context itself, so seductively laden with innocence, like the turtles she imitates, quickly recovers the psychoanalytic relevance of the theory of infantile sexuality as an explanation. The reader's arrival at one meaning can easily be tempered by the arrival at an opposing interpretation. This present/absent face of events is intrinsic to the structure of psychoanalysis.

The puzzle over Beloved's "new" body is another example of the ambiguity of meaning which psychoanalysis can provoke. In the first reading, the newness of her body stands as evidence of the literal "return of the repressed"--the baby ghost. In the second reading, it seems evident that her flawless skin, her newness, results from her confinement by a white man; she is therefore not exposed to the types of hardship (though confinement is just as hard) the black community generally knows.

From these two interpretations, we can see that the irreconcilably dialogic reading, the "misplacedness" of meaning, registers tension in the text. This tension is achieved, in a truly Faulknerian sense,(14) through the rhetorical obscurity of Morrison's writing style. Part of the plot structure is the impossibility of putting the whole picture together. Morrison leaves the gaps open, inviting a speculative reading of possibilities. Obviously, the reader is given the task of filling in the gaps, but the more the reader fills in the gaps, the more conscious s/he becomes that other possible explanations may exist.(15)

If the reader does arrive at a conclusion at all, it is not so much (not with confidence, at any rate) about who Beloved is, or is not, as it is about the elusiveness of the text. This elusiveness is enhanced by the characters' difficulty in distinguishing between their inner minds and the outer world. The blurring of inside/outside binds the characters together. They cannot separate the past from the present. Denver, for instance, defines the present by the past, and her resolute belief in Beloved's identity as her ghost sister is dependent on this factor.

The trauma impelled by this indifference of an inside/outside psychic state in the novel also defines the relationship between Beloved and Sethe; each reads her own historicity into the life of the other. By her attempts to "join" with Sethe when she sees her own reflection in the water, Beloved identifies with Sethe, claiming that Sethe's face is her face:

Sethe's is the face that left me ... her smiling face is the place for me ... she is my face smiling at me ... now we can join (213) Sethe also sees her life as unlivable without Beloved. As she says to Beloved, "... when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours. I wouldn't draw breath without my children" (203).

This reluctance to distinguish between self and other, inside and outside, hints at Morrison's deliberate attempt to give her plot an "ambivalent" and "indeterminate" status. The contradictions inherent in the two possible readings elaborated above illustrate that the real meaning of Morrison's project resides not in the readings but in spite of them. The ambivalence and indeterminacy evident in Morrison's conflation of two distinct stories characterize the person of Beloved, the riddle of the text. As "a condition," to use Phil Lewis's term,(16) Beloved resists definition by being the measure by which Morrison encourages us to read difference in the text. Difference is the distinctive mark of "otherness." Lewis asserts that in the articulation of "otherness" heterogeneity rather than homogeneity results. He points out that difference is introduced "precisely [by] what cannot be made manageable and intelligible, what cannot be measured by a reality principle or verification procedure, what cannot be pinned down by homogeneous interpretation ... but rather by factoring heterogeneity into the text" (15).

Morrison does in fact celebrate "otherness," difference in interpretation, by the elusive, "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't" stylistic device prevalent in her novel. Characters in the novel theorize about what they know, or think they know, about Beloved. The reader also goes through the text "stranded" with an untotalizable, difficult-to-clarify, identification of Beloved--one character that remains impossible to track down, describe (we never really know what her features are like), or project into for too long. She remains the enigma of the "other," "a condition," to use Lewis's term, and to use Morrison's term, "just weather."

Communal Neurosis 

It may be pertinent at this point to end with a note on the place of communal neurosis in the novel. By now it is obvious that it is not only Sethe and Beloved who qualify for a place in the asylum. If black people were to be allowed into the white people's madhouse in Cincinnati, without an exception, the whole black community would easily be admitted. Each of them has something to repress, or even confess, about the past (which is also the present), because they are virtually forced to live with their agonies--physical as well as psychical scars.

The white community as well suffers from a strain of madness unique to the "peculiar institution"--slavery. Sweet Home, the seemingly ideal slaveowner's place, is the ultimate statement about the white man's madness. Naming and un-naming is the numbers game being run in this territory. In this madhouse of a plantation, all the variables of lunacy and folly can be plugged anywhere between the extremes of Mr. Garner, who calls his slaves men, and Schoolteacher, who insists on calling them boys.

Perhaps what is more interesting is the manner in which we as readers shift from one end of the divide to the other, trying to sort out our own perceptions of the story. Our definition of reading as the masterability of meaning is redefined by Morrison's project as the unmasterability of the unconscious. In witnessing the novel's intra-psychic drama, we come away recognizing the limits of our capacity to configure truth. Thus, any (meta)commentary we make cannot be a privileged mode of truth. The interpretation of the historical event of 1855 in Cincinnati is left to posterity to determine. Morrison has of course taken up the challenge, not only by rewriting and redefining the event, but also by encouraging us to read various meanings into it.

Nonetheless, to dismiss the reader's endeavors at arriving at an interpretation of the novel Beloved (the quest for narrative control) is as disabling as fetishizing the character Beloved into a pure "other."(17) Being an overdetermined character, Beloved's multiple inscriptions call for a semantic layering of interpretations. Certainly, no one interpretation would do; but all possible readings can work together to give a rather persuasive picture of the past. However, there is no final point at which the story of slavery can be captured, as is evidenced in the no-real-address of Sethe's house, 124. Keeping in mind that, when the significant events of Sethe's life happened in this house, "it didn't have a number ..., because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far," one can understand why, when it can be identified as "the gray and white house on Bluestone Road" (3), the house, and all it contains, exceeds interpretation by constantly doubling itself: 1 ... 2 ... 4 ...

Apparently, the text of slavery continues to resist conclusive interpretations: If the white man who knew the slaveship's navigational routes could not tell the number of slaves that would survive the journey; if most of the captives who went through the pain and sufferings of rebellion in the Middle Passage did not have a language to tell it in, or simply did not live to tell the story; if those who defied the horrors of captivity in a strange land--a captivity layered by an inevitable neurosis--forgot their past "like a bad dream" (274), then, certainly, the author/reader's limit in space and time gives way to a "collective hallucination."(18)

Consequently, like the role played by the demon who was able to seduce a beautiful village girl in the African fable narrated earlier, Beloved, the devil-child, seduces us with metonymic bits of her life-story. The black community in the novel can all identify with bits and pieces of Beloved's life. In fact, through Beloved's own life, we are given a retrospective look at events in other people's lives in the community--for example, Stamp Paid's and Ella's. It is as if Beloved has compressed into herself borrowed pieces of everyone else's life. Her story is the story of a whole community, a small narrative that overflows into a larger narrative.

Evidently, the story of slavery, even when it pertains to the individual's story, cannot wholly be captured on paper. Like Sethe, who resists captivity, the trope of slavery also resists closed interpretations. The gaps and transitional stages, then, which remain unexplained in Beloved's life maintain their enigmatic status by remaining just that--never fully captured ... never fully defined.

Notes

(1.)In 1855, a slave woman had run away to Cincinnati, where she attempted to kill her four children when chased by her owner. this incident inspired Morrison's writing of the novel Beloved.

(2.)Henderson refers to Morrison's task in Beloved as "the act of historicizing fiction" (72). Comparing a historian to a fiction writer and vice versa, Henderson cites R. G. Collinwood who, in The Idea of History (London: Oxford UP, 1946, 245-46), argues that the historian like the novelist uses "'the constructive imagination' to create a 'coherent and continuous picture' consistent with the available historical data" (84).

(3.)Felman's reading of Lacan has greatly shaped and provoked my reading of Morrison's Beloved. In Felman's reading of Freud and Lacan, she sees psychoanalysis as something which needs to be read and re-read, since one meaning often covers over another. For instance, in Freud's treatment of his patients, the "real" story is often hidden under other stories.

(4.)As Henderson mentions, both Hayden White, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1979), and Paul Ricoeur, in The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1984) and Time and Narrative (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), have supplied sufficient evidence to prove that written history itself is constructed through a fictionalized narrative "emplotment" (for White) or "configuration" (for Ricoeur). In other words, both history and fiction are characterized by the same narrative structure. Drawing on both authors, Henderson says of Beloved: "Narrativization enables Sethe [and Morrison] to construct a meaningful life-story from a cluster of images, to transform separate and disparate events into a whole and coherent story" (72).

(5.)As Fanon argues, it is the cultural imposition of the white man on the black man (and not the oedipus complex) that is ultimately responsible for the "psychopathology" (141) of the black man: "A normal negro child ... will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world" (143).

(6.)By "psychoanalysis as a literary device," I refer to the structure of psychoanalysis, its capacity to be present and absent at the same time (see Felman). This present/absent strategy aids Morrison in creating a very complex narrative.

(7.)According to the information given by Elizabeth House, most early reviews of Morrison's Beloved in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Times Literary Supplement of 1987, for example, assumed that Beloved is Sethe's murdered baby come back. A few other reviews left the identity of Beloved under doubtful speculation (17).

(8.)This African tale is a very popular one told along the West Coast of Africa. It is a night-time story told orally to children in Freetown, Sierra-Leone, where I learned it as a child. My purpose for recounting this tale in relation to Morrison's Beloved is to show an alternative way of reading the psyche that may, perhaps, provide a possible logic for the characters' assumption that Beloved is a ghost. For another version of this African tale, see Tutuola 18-24.

(9.)Although this may seem like a paradoxical reading of Freud's theory of sexuality, which sets out to prove the sexuality of children (and seems to strip away the innocence associated with little children's knowledge of sexuality), I believe that Freud ends up proving that human sexuality is not something to be regarded as socially incriminating but as natural, innate, and inevitable. For readings on infantile sexuality, see Vol. 3 of Freud's Collected Papers, ed. Alix and James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1959), 296-303, 473-547.

(10.)Repetition compulsion "endeavors to make the psychic trauma real--to live through once more a repetition of it" (Fordor and Gaynor 157). The repetition-compulsion principle is an important aspect of Freud's theory as a whole. It features significantly not only in the subject of the uncanny but in the issue of infantile sexuality, in the treatment of neurosis, and in the pleasure principle. Lacan has also identified repetition as one of the major concepts of psychoanalysis. The repetition concept is, of course, not new to African psychotherapy, in which psychic trauma is relived and relieved through such channels as dramatic enactments and oral rituals (for example, speaking to dead ancestors).

(11.)All evidence suggested by House in my reading will be indicated; however, the evidence I provide here consists of my own suggestions.

(12.)I disagree with Thurman's point of view that "one of the ironies of the novel is, in fact, that its author hovers possessively around her own symbols and intentions, and so determines too much for the reader" (177); I believe that part of Morrison's aim is to construct a narrative that is openended enough to provoke other interpretations. Sale's analysis of "call-and-response patterns" as Morrison's celebration of a "multiplicity of voices" is more in line with my argument (42).

(13.)The issue Felman takes up in Lacan, on the status of psychoanalysis, is succinctly stated in Lacan's essay "Of the Subject Of Certainty": "Appearance/disappearance takes place between two points, the initial and the terminal of this logical time--between the instant of seeing, when something of the intuition itself is always elided, not to say lost, and that elusive moment when the apprehension of the unconscious is not, in fact, concluded, when it is always a question of an 'absorption' fraught with false trails ..." (32).

(14.)I have in mind Faulkner's style of writing in texts such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!; it is more the enigma of the reading experience than the final assertion of any definite meaning of the text that appeals to the reader and seems to constitute, in large part, the aim of the author. Peter Brooks sees Faulkner's works as "offer[ing] multiple constructions of events that never are verifiable, that can be tested only by the force of conviction they produce for listeners and readers" (158).

(15.)For instance, Deborah Horvitz's interpretation of Beloved as both Sethe's ghost-child and Sethe's African mother is convincing and quite unique. Her interpretation bolsters my point about the possibilities of meanings identifiable with Beloved. As Hortvitz herself confirms in her essay, "Beloved operates so complexly that as soon as one layer of understanding is reached, another, equally as richly textured, emerges to be unravelled" (157).

(16.)Lewis defines the other in relation to the same as "ambivalent" and "indeterminate." He also describes the other as "a condition" (14).

(17.)Mohanty argues that the perception of the other as a pure state frees the ex-colonial from adequately relating to his former subjects (19). He argues that, if we are to relate to the "otherness" (Mohanty's term) of the other with something more than incoherence, or worse, condescension, then negotiations must begin with our commonalities--those "shared terms, ideas and spaces" (13). Obviously, the landscape of slavery is a shared space containing both black and white, captive and captor.

(18.)One interesting essay on the issue of "collective hallucination," or communal neurosis, is Nicolas Abraham's "Notes on the Phantom." "It is a fact that the 'phantom,' whatever its form," Abraham asserts, "is nothing but an invention of the living.... What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others" (75).

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas. "Notes on the Phantom: A complement to Freud's Metapsychology." Meltzer 75-80.

Brooks, Peter. "The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism." Meltzer 145-59.

Clemons, Walter. "A Gravestone of Memories." Newsweek 28 Sept. 1987: 74.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks. 1903. New York: NAL, 1969.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. London: Pluto, 1986.

Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

Fordor, N., and F. Gaynor. Freud: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Westport: Greenwood, 1950.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1953-74. 17:219-52.

Henderson, Mae. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text." Spillers 62-86.

Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 17.2 (1989): 157-67.

House, Elizabeth. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved who is not Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 18.1 (1990): 17-26.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1981.

Lewis, Philip. "Post-structuralist Condition." Diacritics 12 (Spring 1982): 2-24.

Meltzer, Francoise, ed. The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Mohanty, Satya. "Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism." Yale Journal of Criticism 2.2 (1989): 1-31.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

--. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thought 59 (1984): 385-90.

Sale, Maggie. "Call-and-Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved." African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.

Spillers, Hortense, ed. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. New York: routledge, 1991.

Thurman, Judith. "A House Divided." New Yorker 2 Nov. 1987: 175-80.

Tutuola, Amos. The Palmwine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.