PROPHYLACTICS
AND BRAINS: BELOVED IN THE CYBERNETIC AGE OF
AIDS
By:
Stockton, Kathryn Bond, Studies in the Novel
Contents:
One: The Dead
Two: Living Dead
Three: Disappearing the
Living Dead
Four: C2D, or Virtually
Beloved
Interlude:
Underlinks
Five: Skinflicks
Six:
Selfish Memes
Seven: Tamed Richness
NOTES
We lean along their edges in the act of contemplation, for
they reside, with strange intermittance, behind our eyes, in the boat
of the brain. We wonder how they breathe, how air reaches them at the
length of such an intimate remove.
Imagine, the dead are a cybernetic problem: a material
problem alive in the virtual world of ideas--their storage and
transfer.
Claims to surprise us by the actual surround us. Scientific
"thrillers," fertile in their forms of the factual, invoke
the living dead, claiming what is virtual is actually viral, the viral
more than virtual.[1]
"'Memes [ideas; memories; basic units of cultural
transmission] should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my
mind you literally parasitize my brain . . . in just the way that a
virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell'"
(Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene).
"Viruses are ambiguously alive . . . They carry on their
existence in the borderlands between life and nonlife . . . Virus
particles that lie around . . . may seem dead, but the particles are
waiting for someone to come along . . . [Then] ["a motive without
a mind"] the virus switches on and begins to replicate"
(Richard Preston, The Hot Zone).
"Is there a way to control HIV's replication without
having to kill it?" (Rolling Stone).
Distill Beloved's climax down to this: A
pregnant teen is "disappeared" by a group of mothers, who
search for "the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of
words."[2] Stranger yet, this teen is made to disappear, even
though, years before, she died as a child (when murdered by her
mother) and, therefore, all throughout the story, has been close to
death ("C2D," as some contemporary teens might put it).
Reading a context puts a needle to a narrative, opening a
vein of investigation (we commonly say) that often has designs from
the start. It may be a motive without a mind, a reading that is trying
to get itself thought. One that wishes a novel would think it.
To this end, I open Beloved onto surface
surroundings to read it as it is virtually never read--as a novel born
in 1987, eight years old (in 1995) in the cybernetic age of AIDS.
Untimely deaths and dangerous transmissions are broad surroundings I
have in mind. AIDS, specifically, would appear on the list of black
American worries. But so would other versions of early demise that
coincide with Beloved's double death: infant mortality
(now often due to AIDS) and teen homicide (murders of and by
teens).[3] Media reports on early death in black American communities
now routinely yoke together AIDS, teen homicide, and infant
mortality--even as they slide into a dirge on pregnant teens, as if
reproduction is being seen in the guise of transmission, the
replication of early death. State propositions against "promoting
gay lifestyles" suggest a kindred worry over queer propagations,
even if they take, especially if they take, the form of ideas--as if
queer children could now be copied from the idea of them. It's
official: sliding the face of early death under disputes over making
"copies."
Why should we not conceive a defense against these slides,
pricking Morrison's narrative into a sliding reply?:
It is the dead we must learn how to face as we copy them into a
virtual future, one that travels alive in our minds. This reply will
seem obscure, until I can produce it by reading through Beloved's
back door of time, which makes us come around to the front. For Morrison's
fantasy of a history, by which she conjures slavery's past, foretells
a future that we are presently alive to read. I wonder, does her
reading of the 1980's wish the history of slavery would think it?
Writing out of her fictive interval (Beloved's 1873), Morrison
makes herself a prophet of the future ills of 1987, making a teenage
infant--pregnant, disappearing--her book's most infectious idea. I
will even fantasize that she foresees two comers to the field of
replication, both of which build a net to hold Beloved
in 1995. I am thinking of the frenzy over cloning and the endless
articles now appearing on the world of cyberspace.
The outcry over cloning human embryos is directly attached to
the very idea of reproduction as replication. It is called
"aberrant" by detractors--"a line . . . crossed,"
"a taboo broken," even "a modern form of
slavery."[4] Many people apparently are horrified by these newly
imaginable prospects. For example, being able to replace a dead child
with its exact genetic equivalent, starting it over by raising its
copy from an embryo, which becomes a child--again. Perfect tissue
donors, flawlessly compatible, could be thawed and raised should need
arise. And for less urgent reasons, couples who set aside clone
embryos of a particular child "could give birth to the same child
every few years" at different intervals. In that sense, says
Time, "an exact template for what a child could become in 10 or
20 years could be before them in the form of an older
sibling."[5]
Never mind how this last remark ignores the whole question of
learning, which might produce remarkably different children. Rather,
understand this as a chance to see yourself in a virtual future--a
future you could never possess for yourself as anything other than an
idea, since your interval from your clone-sibling would always assure
that you would live in different worlds at the same age. Contrary to
the logic of Time, you could just as easily grow up watching the death
of your future possibilities, just as a woman who gave birth to her
own twin, by incubating her own clone embryo, could never truly relive
her past. Her ungraspable past would become her baby twin's
unfulfillable future, a future always C2D, or, when she got there,
simply dead. Right now the future of such futures is on
ice--literally, as it happens. Time conveys this actuality in
suspense: "there are already 10,000 frozen embryos floating
around in liquid nitrogen baths... in a kind of icy limbo."[6]
Since it is more confabulation than flesh, cybernetic advance
would seem a more benign domain of transmissions and copies. Companies
are scrambling to simplify the task of "cruising the Information
Highway," making intellectual promiscuity more efficient and,
intriguingly, more anonymous, where "the user" (an
interesting term in itself) is always intended to be a cruiser. No
wonder one such system, we are told, "is called Lycos, after the
Lycosidae spider, known for pursuing its prey relentlessly."[7]
The goal, in the words of AT&T, is to enable users to find
"where information is buried" without having to learn
"where it comes from [or] how it got there."[8]
The breakthrough began in 1993 with the creation of the Net's
subnet-work called, spiderously, the World Wide Web, famous for its
"hyperlinking." Hyperlinks are key words--"Beloved"
could be one--that appear in bold type. When clicked upon, they
transmit their users to further discussion of that keyword on other
Web pages, which may be stored in other computers thousands of miles
away. Sounds safe for such rampant transmissions. In fact, Business
Week, which explained hyperlinking techniques to its readers, did not
appear to notice the irony of their choice of a keyword example:
"antigen" (a substance which, when introduced into the body,
stimulates the production of an antibody).
And yet, fears of invasion are growing. Body condoms are
quickly finding their equivalents in sophisticated cyberprophylactics,
meant to protect against viral floodings of information and the pranks
of cyberpunks roaming the Net.[9] "The technology is in the hands
of the children," 60 Minutes recently complained, citing kids and
teens as the masterminds of cyberinvasions and giving us, as their
sole example, a black, streetwise, gold-toothed hacker with an
infectious grin. The upshot? "No one is immune," says one
article; "the potential for invasion of privacy [is]
severe"; "[they] can get in and [they] can be you."[10]
Hackers, for their own part, lend a viral edge to these
fears. But--and let me lean on this point, since it matches key
divisions in Beloved--hackers often celebrate their
viral powers, their ability to invade the control of information. In
this way they heighten generational divides between themselves and
their seemingly cyberphobic elders who fear their invasions. Some see
their stealth and vital tactics as corrective to official discourse on
AIDS, the environment, psychedelics, sexuality, and spiritual life on
this planet. Some writers praising and participating in groups like
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP, founded in 1987) and the
Campaign for Smart Drugs (a response to the '87 release of AIDS drug
AZT) have appropriated Richard Dawkins' theory of "memes,"
or what he warns is the parasitic, vital nature of ideas (more on this
later). Making celebrations out of his warnings, they press hard on
his viral metaphorics while stressing that they're actually not
metaphorical.
Take the example of Generation X writers R.U. Sirius of Mondo
2000 and Douglas Rushkoff of Media Virus!. Both urge activist youth
(and their elders) to inject their own "agendas into the
datastream in the form of ideological code."[11] They deem
Generation X the first American generation "fully engaged in a
symbiotic relationship with media" (MV, p. 31), due to what they
say is their unprecedented ability to "feed back" and
"change what's on the screen" (MV, p. 30) (also their
tendency to view the datasphere as their natural environment--"as
complex, far-reaching and self-sustaining as nature herself" MV,
p. 29). In his characteristic rush of optimism, arguing for the
"power of virology to effect social change" (what he calls
"evolutionary" change), Rushkoff cheerfully distinguishes a
media virus (such as those engineered by ACT UP) from the public
relations ploys of a company such as Burroughs-Wellcome (maker and
promoter of AZT) by stating that a virus makes an issue not
"simple and emotional [but] dauntingly complex"; "a
virus will always make the system it is attacking appear as confusing
and unresolvable as it really is" (MV, p. 36).[12] Santa Cruz
hacker, Bill Me Tuesday, goes so far as to fashion "a healing
medical model" when he suggests that "viruses can act like a
logic analyzer . . . [and] serve as a means of creating a
self-repairing system" (MV, p. 248). A similar point was made in
a recent Newsweek article on the unacknowledged benefits of computer
viruses: "a few scientists [for example, Fred Cohen in his
forthcoming book It's Alive] have begun to argue that [computer]
viruses are actually living organisms, capable someday of evolving
into autonomous Net-runners that will retrieve information for their
owners."[13]
With sadder tones, Beloved itself forges a
model of data retrieval, one derived from older forms. We could tag it
"viral gothic." For the novel's ghost, ambiguously alive,
retrieves information, not just on the slave experience the reader and
author never had (though this is one fantastic effect, produced
precisely through a fantasy), but on the virtual, viral life of dead
bodies in our brains. "Beloved" is a version
of autonomous retrieval: a viral hyperlink: a keyword with a life of
its own. At first it appears as a name on a tombstone and thus as a
site of buried information. This is a rather resistant site, since the
name "Beloved" seems generically to cover
for a body, occluding on the face of it "where it came from or
how it got there." And yet, soon enough, "Beloved"
becomes an idea on a romp, clicking on the living to get itself
"inside." More than that. Sethe's single beloved
seems to stand for the nameless dead, or perhaps for the "60
million and more" invoked in Morrison's
dedication. "Beloved," that is to say, is a
miniaturization and a compression (in the form of code) of a series of
futures chain-linked in death. To encounter "Beloved"
in this book is to find oneself carried away to hyperlinked files that
exist as their failure to appear in our future. This is slavery in a
way that we have often failed to apprehend it: bondage to a future of
virtual remains.
Three assertions float this claim: 1) Beloved
is an embodied idea. 2) Beloved is an embodied
interval. 3) Beloved makes her mother ill with
interval when she enters her as an idea. When dead, Beloved
is a virtual child kept alive in a watery limbo (she refers to
"the water in the place where we crouched," to the sea, to a
bridge over water where she waited; she speaks of coming out of blue
water). When she returns as a teenage infant (no small trick), she
seems to come back as a clone of herself: the idea of herself embodied
at a different interval from herself. In fact, she is an interval. She
is now the interval between her death and her mother's current life,
as if she's been marking time while dead. Killed before the age of
two, she returns, eighteen years past her murder at the hands of her
mother, as a nineteen-year-old babywoman.[14] I'll argue that she
makes her mother ill with interval. I'll suggest that, according to
the book's depictions, Sethe becomes memory-positive, probably at Beloved's
death, but recognizably (as if she's testing positive) at Beloved's
return. By the end of the book, Sethe's gone into symptoms, which is
why the women want to unload or dispel (delete?) Beloved
from the house.
Interlaced with interval is a sense of latency, the feeling
that something suspended pursues.[15] Recall that "latency"
or "interval" forms a distinguishing feature of the medical
category HIV positive. HIV disease is not only the infection of a body
with the virus that is thought to cause AIDS. It is also medically
conceived as the interval between infection and the onset of symptoms.
For this reason, HIV, in the absence of symptoms, can be a strange
state of limbo in which you are ill only with the idea of death,
making you nostalgic for yourself before you begin to decline. You
find you fall ill with nostalgia for a future.
This is the tunnel Sethe enters when her daughter makes her
ill with interval: Sethe increasingly starts going back by a series of
hyperlinks on her web, activating keywords that open files on shame,
beauty, fascination, and a future of virtual remains.
On our way to understanding how Beloved
scouts the need for a mental prophylactics, a barrier against
pursuant, invasive, vital memory, we need to grasp a different kind of
prophylactic fiction, one that may haunt Beloved's
dedication ("60 million and more"). "Hypolinks"
(to coin a term) can be laid down under this reading. They will take
you, not via hyperlinks over to files that are certifiably linked to Beloved,
but under to a resonance. The hypolink, or underlink, is in fact an
old technology, the staple of readers's peculations on the question of
literary echoes or shadowy influence. Cynthia Ozick's holocaust
fiction (in this case, The Shawl) offers Beloved such
reverberations, ones of the youthful dead alive in a drama of waste.
In the brevity of an interlude, consider the contrast between Beloved
and the stories I believe stand as Beloved's most
unspoken influence. Is it telling that they divide over depictions of
prophylactics and how one makes safe exchange with the dead? Are there
any hints found here about the different injunctions to remember in
holocaust memorials and blacks' uneven invocations of slavery?
Morrison may have been held by The Shawl,
arrested, if she read it, by Ozick's stories published apart in The
New Yorker as "The Shawl" and "Rosa," in 1980 and
1983 (Beloved was begun in 1982). The first story
renders an infant's death as she's "splashed" against an
electric fence. A baby curled between sore breasts, each nipple, we
learn, "a dead volcano": there's not enough milk (a central
fear in Morrison's novel).[16] The child (Beloved's
age, as it happens, not yet two) milks a shawl, "flooding"
its linen "threads with wetness" (S, p. 5). Wandering into
the roll call arena, seeking her shawl, Magda, in an image that will
resonate with Beloved dribbling spit into Sethe's
face, "was spilling a long viscous rope of clamor--'Maaaa'"
(S, p. 8). Though, unlike Sethe, hardly the cause of her daughter's
death, Rosa, the mother, is bound to, even wound around,
quiescence--this in the face of a rope of clamor, which Rosa is going
to swallow in the form of a fluids exchange. Even the Nazi's helmet,
which "the light tapped . . . and sparkled . . . into a
goblet" (S, p. 9), portends Rosa's swallow. The story ends:
She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if
she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda's body they would shoot, and
if she let the wolf's screech ascending now through the ladder of her
skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda's shawl and
filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until
she was swallowing up the wolf's screech and tasting the cinnamon and
almond depth of Magda's saliva; and Rosa drank Magda's shawl until it
dried. (S, p. 10)
The syntax here coils the noose of its repetitions around the
phrase of a singular end ("they would shoot"). In the mouth
of such constrictions, Rosa chooses her own barrier. She even creates
a prophylactic (of the barrier type) more concerned with holding
something in than with keeping something out, a prophylactic against
mourning escaping from the body. Stranger still, this barrier protects
by means of exchange, turning the knot of syntactical copies
("stuffed it in and stuffed it in") into the declarative
opening of a swallow (where one less obvious definition of
"swallow" can be "the opening in a block or pulley
through which the rope runs").[17] In fact, in the form of
reversed milking, the daughter by means of the "flooded"
shawl feeds her mother her own saliva (her "viscous rope"?),
materializing as fluid remains. As hypolink to Morrison's
outhouse scene in Beloved, this passage supplies a
range of echoes for the novel as a whole, underlinking Sethe's
decisive murder to Rosa's acquiescence, Sethe's gorging (along with Beloved's
desperate gulping) to Rosa's stuffing and her drinking.
This ingestion insures that Rosa, the eponymous character of
the second story, after an interval of thirty-five years, holds to
herself both mourning and Magda as trusted companions, against the
threat of strangers--now embodied not by Nazis but by the researcher
Dr. Tree. Pursued by his "university letters"
("strangers scratch at my life; they pursue, they break down the
bloodstream's sentries" [S, pp. 39-40]), Rosa, once again unlike
Sethe, pursues her dead daughter, entreating the dead to come to life.
She even switches on at will "the great light of Warsaw"
("she wanted to live inside her eyes" [S, p. 21]). In Ozick,
links to the dead are electric (the telephone rings: "how quickly
a dead thing can come to life!" [S, p. 62]). The dead do not
carry the toxic dangers we meet in Beloved; nor are
they intervals; rather, they live and die on the "wires"
that ferry voices over intervals of time, suspending, releasing
narrative flow as they ring, then fade.
What Rosa clings to between visitations, strangely enough, is
the drama of waste; "a newspaper item" (S, p. 18) (as Sethe
will be), she had "murdered her store with her own hands"
(S, p. 46), this "cave of junk" (S, p. 46) smashed with a
metal scrap "from the gutter" (S, p. 26).[18] She highlights
loss by sketching, as she switches on aristocratic Warsaw, the quality
of what got wasted. Against this remembered ruin of wealth and her
parents' intellectual largesse, Rosa's mundane survival unfolds amidst
such crises as missing a pair of her underpants. Metonymically linked
to Magda--they're called "lost bloomers" (S, p. 33)--the
underwear holds to the mother's body, as did the shawl, a private
conduit to her loss. Their "stains in the crotch" (S, p.
34)--Magda, the narrative seems to imply, was the product of a Nazi
rape figure a set of intimate remains, which only if they surface for
the eyes of others serve as shame. In Ozick, so different from what we
find in Morrison, the effort is to guard against this
surfacing--because it threatens to be an escaping--rather than to
guard against an entering.
Beloved reverses this direction of Ozick's
depicted protections, turning Rosa's prophylactic barriers against
escaping memories into barriers blocking entry. In mid-eighties
fashion, Morrison toys with surface protections. She
even sets our sights on skin, offering figuration of a surface sheath.
More complexly, the narrative imagines Sethe's focus-on-her-surface as
a form of brain protection, establishing Morrison's
own version of Freud's hardwired prophylactics, what he called the
brain's "protective shields." This is to defend, in the case
of Beloved, against some logic alive and loose in
Sethe's brain. And so, at the start, just three pages in, following a
pointed count of the children lost to Sethe and her mother-in-law
(Baby Suggs, eight, Sethe, three), we find this first long passage on
memory:
[Sethe] worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was
safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying
across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and
rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her
mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as
the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor
was there the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark
from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as
she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump
water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off .
. . Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and
stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy
lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home
rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was
not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it
rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty . . . Boys hanging
from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed
her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys.
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. (B,
p. 6)
This beginning is an expose of the workings of the mind,
making them a topic for narrative discussion, even speculation. But it
does more. It offers a structural clue as to how other scenes may take
place: how a keyword (in this case "remember," or later
"a plash of water," etc.) opens a trap door in the plot,
suspending (or slowing) narrative time as we fall through the
hyperlink into scenes in characters' brains, which we are unprepared
to receive.[19] There, we become captive to their cameras, riding the
blind curve of images they would keep from rolling out.
In this scene, Beloved's obsession with
safety is immediately made precarious by a brain typified as
"devious," as if Sethe's brain has a mind of its own. The
image of chamomile-sap-on-skin-that-needs-to-be-washed would seem to
indicate something insistently stuck to a surface, the body's surface
sheath. It would seem to stick in opposition to the contents of her
mind that here are absent. But look closely. This image, or intent, or
sensation of sap-on-skin-that-needs-to-be-washed is already in her
mind, her surface in her brain. It's just that "nothing
else" is. Lurking but "lifeless" is a picture--a
strange nursing scene of men coming to nurse her. Its ambiguous
status-"lifeless" but not forever dead?--is conveyed by
comparison: "as lifeless as" skin the brain can't feel,
since its communicating nerves are dead. Another specific sensation--a
scent--is positively not there, implying that on other occasions it
must be a frequent visitor, since her brain, or maybe just the
narrative, has caught it not at home. No, nothing is there, we are
told, "just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward
water." Again, a sensation is in the brain, though it's rendered
as if it is worn on the skin. Remarkably, then, as narratively
ordered, the danger images (nursing and ink) are narratively sheathed,
wrapped round before and aft, by skinflickerings (sap on legs, breeze
on face) imagined as a form of brain protection. These brain
contents--skinflicks, I'll call them--keep the brain's internal camera
focused out, tracking skin, as a way to protect against the (here)
obscure but possibly pornographic contents of the nursing picture and
the scent of ink.
"Then something." Not the willed flipping of a
switch as one finds in Ozick. Rather, links accidentally tripped--a
plash of water, the sight of shoes, a dog drinking--that when they
enter Sethe's brain, through ear or eye, mysteriously open an inside
file. In fact, she's its prey in a brain competition she is always
poised to lose. For with an evident agency of its own--"it rolled
itself out before her"--its insistence, as we saw in Ozick,
linguistically captured by word copies ("rolling, rolling,
rolling")--it selects beautiful trees, rather than the boys
lynched upon the limbs, as the point of her remembrance. Shame, it
appears, is a brain fascination one cannot control or perhaps
understand. For "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."
Sethe's skinflicks and their breach recall the side of Freud
now taboo. Hardwire Freud; the speculative Freud of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle; a Freud closer to the spirit of Beloved
than the Freud of "Mourning and Melancholia." For even
though Freud was fixated on invasions of the mind from within, his
detailed address to "protective shields" concerns "floodings"
from the external world, how the mind does or does not get
"flooded with large amounts of stimulus."[20] In part,
Freud's focus is available brain space, especially space for
consciousness; for if every excitation were retained as something
conscious, the mind would quickly reach its limit for "receiving
fresh excitations" (BPP, p. 27). Borrowing upon Helmholz and
Fechner's physical energy theories, Freud declares: "protection
against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living
organism than reception of stimuli" (BPP, p. 30).
No wonder his disquisition on reception--how the brain
develops from the skin--becomes enveloped by his talk of
protection--how the skin protects the brain. Embryology, Freud
explains, "actually shows" that "the central nervous
system originates from the ectoderm . . . and may have inherited some
of its essential properties" (BPP, p. 29). Making speculations on
evolution, Freud suggests the brain's grey matter was originally a
highly receptive skin that "in highly developed organisms . . .
has long been withdrawn into the depths of the interior of the body,
though portions of it [in the form of sense organs] have been left
behind on the surface immediately beneath the general shield against
stimuli" (BPP, p. 31). This "general shield" (in human
beings, skin) allows the energy of the external world to pass into the
organism's next layers "with only a fragment of their original
intensity" (BPP, p. 30). In his example of primitive living
vesicles, Freud imagines this layer as dead: "[This] outermost
surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter . . . and
thenceforward functions as a special envelope . . . resistant to
stimuli." "By its death," Freud concludes, "the
outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate" (BPP,
p. 30).
Intriguingly, Morrison endows Sethe with a
back full of nerve-dead skin, courtesy of a severe whipping that
opened Sethe's back and closed it with a scar in the discernible shape
of a tree. Time and again, we find that Morrison plays
with depictions of surface protections, often at the level of bodily
envelope, only to dramatize the dangerously permeable borders between
the brain and its visitors. Freud himself believed that the mind had
no shield towards the inside. The organism's solution? Projection
(Freud's own theory of skinflicks). "[T]here is a tendency to
treat [excitations] as though they were acting, not from the inside,
but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield
against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against
them." "This is the origin of projection," says Freud (BPP,
p. 33).
Beloved is full of projective display: brain
excitations projected out to the body's perimeters so as to shield
one's interior against them (or what comes in lieu of them). One case
in point keeps us tracking dead skin. Consider the milk on Sethe's
mind and the tree on her back. An early scene between Paul D and Sethe
shows the reader the network of hypertextual links between
"tree" and "milk." At first, these links seem
posed oppositionally: surface protection versus liquidity; a
tree-on-the-skin that can't be felt versus the milk taken in by
ingestion (whether the milk has been stolen or given). Even Paul D and
Sethe are split (genderwise?) by dichotomous focus, his on the tree,
hers on the milk. Twice he asks, "what tree on your back?"
(B, p. 15), only to retreat from Sethe's advancing meditation on milk
("I had milk for my baby girl * Nobody was going to nurse her
like me," Sethe says amidst her reverie [B, p. 16]). When at last
Paul is shown to interject, the narrative makes its careful weave
between the sites of "milk" and "tree":
"We was talking 'bout a tree, Sethe."
"After I left you, those boys came in there and took my
milk . . . Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em . . .
Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my
back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still."
"They used cowhide on you?"
"And they took my milk."
"They beat you and you was pregnant?"
"And they took my milk!" (B, pp. 16-17)
What was lost to Sethe as milk makes its appearance to others
as "tree." Indeed, the tree (Saussure's famous example for
signifier), like signification in general, signs a loss and a
compensation: the taking of Sethe's milk causes "tree,"
itself an opening onto virtual life, the life of the sign ("it
grows there still").
Further, when we learn the tree on Sethe's back is a
"chokecherry tree" in Amy's estimation ("Could have
cherries," Sethe muses [B, p. 16]), we can web the tree to the
"cherry gum" cited earlier in relation to the making of ink.
"Tree" and "milk" open onto files for the danger
images previously cited: the scene of nursing and the scent of ink. Beloved,
too, has its Dr. Tree who pursues in writing, for what can't be felt
as written on the back, on Sethe's buckled skin, on her brain's
"protective shield" ("I've never seen [the tree] and
never will," [B, p. 16]), can still be ingested--just as her
house has no back door, sending its visitors around to the front.
Hints of this dangerous ingestion emerge, even in this early
scene. Paul D, his hands under Sethe's breasts, "his cheek . . .
pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree" (B, p. 17),
"touchling] every ridge and leaf of [Sethe's tree] with his
mouth" (B, p. 18), is the first to make her tree beloved.
Yet, within the short space of two pages, Paul D has revised his
reading:
[T]he wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a
gold miner pawing through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of
scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing
like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could
trust and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did . . .
[with one] he called Brother . . . that was a tree . . . the
"tree" lying next to him didn't compare. (B, pp. 21-22)
In spite of its blooming, what grows on the tree, as the plot
through backwards advance unfolds, is the signified
"sawing": sawing one's beloved-as-tree.[21]
"Milk" is hypertextually tied to this relation in Beloved's
famous scene of a sawing followed by a milking, since after Sethe has
slashed Beloved's neck with a saw, she nurses Denver,
"aiming a bloody nipple into the baby's mouth" (B, p. 152).
Another nursing blooming with loss into virtual life. (A ghost is
born.) In fact, the "lost bloomers" of Beloved
are not a pair of underpants, as they are in Ozick. They're
"doomed roses" planted by a
"sawyer"--"something to take the sin out of slicing
trees for a living" (B, p. 47). The "stench" of these
dying blooms pervades in the scene that precedes Beloved's
return, before she comes back to sit on "a stump" with
"new skin, lineless and smooth" (B, p. 50).[22]
Beloved may be the ultimate skinflick. A brain
content, a clear excitation, projected outside. For one of the chief
complications of Beloved is trying to understand where
Beloved is depicted as returning from. Should we
imagine that she's a projection of Sethe's mind and thus her mother's
mental defense against an invasion from within? Are we to think she's
been living as lost behind Sethe's eyes as a word or idea or future
that desperately wants itself thought? Whatever we surmise, some
evident breach of a shield surrounds Beloved's
appearing--a fluids exchange that matches Ozick's in its strangeness
and makes a dangerous pact with a body foreign, and known.
A fully dressed woman walked out of the water . . .
Everything hurt but her lungs most of all. Sopping wet and breathing
shallow she spent those hours trying to negotiate the weight of her
eyelids . . . "Look," said Denver, "What is that?"
And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment
she got close enough to see the face, Sethe's bladder filled to
capacity. She said, "Oh, excuse me," and ran around to the
back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the
eight-year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an
emergency that unmanageable. She never made the outhouse. Right in
front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided
was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she
thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much
water Amy said, "Hold on, Lu. You going to sink us you keep that
up." But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking
womb and there was no stopping now . . . [She was] squatting in front
of her . . . privy making a mudhole too deep to be
witnessed without shame. Just about the time she started wondering if
the carnival would accept another freak, it stopped. She tidied
herself and ran around to the porch. No one was there. All three were
inside--Paul D and Denver standing before the stranger, watching her
drink cup after cup of water. (B, pp. 50-51)
In what could serve as a rumination on Rosa's swallow and her
drama of waste, Beloved's mother/daughter reunion
takes its place as an outhouse scene.[23] Only Morrison
would imagine the filling of a mother's mind with her dead daughter's
face as the filling of a mother's bladder to capacity. Such a foreign
conception cunningly delays before delivering (first through a clue,
the single word "voided," next by means of extended simile,
"more like flooding") its recognition that birthing is
voiding. And yet this thought has been brooding in Beloved
since its inception on the novel's third page: "knees wide open
as any grave" (B, p. 5). It's a sexual image at the start. Sethe
is trading her body for the tombstone, Beloved's home
page. But it also imagines a quick path to death, with no middle
passage to burial from birth. Here in this later scene of a voiding,
the lingering of the legacy of infant mortality takes its shape as a
fluids exchange, where the cause and effect of transmission make a
temporal smear.
In Ozick's stories, Rosa's swallowing makes her safe at
Magda's murder, though she becomes mad in the eyes of others when she
murders her store. ("You're like those people," Stella tells
her, "who worshiped a piece of the True Cross [a beloved
tree], a splinter from some old outhouse . . . You'll kiss, you'll pee
tears" [S, pp. 31-32].) In Morrison, too, a
fluids exchange initiates the losing of a mother's mind, conveying a
foreign body to her brain. Notice the reversal of mother/daughter
positions, such as we saw in Ozick. Sethe remembers herself as a baby
in the care of a child who is pointing out a mother. This reversal may
play its part in carrying Sethe to a danger image. For the endless
voiding reminds her of flooding a boat with a birth, anchoring
floating to the cruel joke of sinking by swamping a container (the
boat) with her waters. This is a womb breaking from birth. It's as if
Sethe's body, like her brain, finds its fascination against her will
with what it holds in store, birthing the drama of waste--a
display--in front of her privy, against her helpless sense of shame.
So voiding is birthing is "flooding," "no
stopping." The worry throughout Beloved is over
stopping flowing in and out of bodies, in and out of brains. (We think
of Freud's worries.) And yet when flow is stopped, and all might seem
safely at an end, the strange cause--or is it the effect?--of Sethe's
voiding is already inside, drinking cup after cup of water. The scene
we thought was focused on getting something out is taking something
in, for while Sethe's gone around to the back, Beloved
has entered from the front. Has Sethe's voiding caused Beloved's
thirst? Or has Beloved's thirst--her quest to be
inside--filled Sethe's bladder to capacity? We're not told but we do
learn this: Beloved is infected with the cholera (Paul
D says, "All that water. Sure sign" [B, p. 53]). One of her
major symptoms is incontinence? Symptoms aside, Sethe herself is
memory-positive, infected with the idea of a birthing that led to a
voiding.
The spate of Beloved's viral depictions is
yet to come. I say "viral" for the sake of my reading. But
this is no stretch. It plausibly accommodates scenes of decline from Beloved's
entry in the passage above to Sethe's hosting of lethal
relations--what I will suggest is a mother's autoimmune relation to
(the idea of) her dead daughter. The series of odd negotiations to
emerge by Beloved's end has an uncannier double still,
as we shall see: the letters written to AIDS by its sufferers, found
in the best-selling self-help guide, Immune Power.
But first, it is time to explore why Beloved's
viral agendas lack the giddy optimistic stance of the hacker activists
who are making manifestos? Take, for example, Jody Radzik, as cited by
viral proponent Douglas Rushkoff:
Radzik first became aware of the power of viruses in the
third grade: "I wanted to be a microbiologist, and I became aware
of the T4 bacteriophage ("a DNA virus") . . . They use T4 to
intentionally infect bacteria--to tag them or even to do gene splicing
for them. I was fascinated by that." Jody developed a viral
identity . . . and began in the most grassroots meme pool he could
find in his Oakland neighborhood: graffiti . . . [which] became a
conduit for Radzik's technological and vital memes: "One day it
just occurred to me to call my posse CIP for Cultural Insurgent Phages
and to make one of my tags 'virus.' My name became 'Saint Virus'
because it was a total juxtaposition of something that sounds good
with something that sounds bad. I wanted to show that I was a virus,
but that I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want to do whatever I
can to help evolution along . . . [We would be] cultural terrorists
who would go around infecting inadequate social complexes with little
pieces of information that would then deconstruct that social
phenomenon... Everywhere I had a tag, I had a little physic listening
post. By having a network of tags in my own geographical area, I sort
of drew energy from them." (MV, pp. 297-98)
For Rushkoff's Radzik, viral fascination and the microbio-logical-turned-urban-guerilla
game of "tag" find their credible roots in childhood. In
Radzik's own implicit "evolution," his T4 devotion makes
"viral identity" the only identity worthy of mention for
"saints" who are packing "memes" ("little
pieces of information"). Copying now is transpersonal growth
("I sort of drew energy from them"), a way of plumping the
self who feeds back. In fact, the anti-establishment slant to Radzik's
vaguely specified point of "terrorist" attack
("inadequate social complexes," "that social
phenomenon") contributes to his "success" as a budding
self-growth industry. Rushkoff reports:
By becoming a "somebody" in the graffiti world,
Radzik developed the ability to market himself as an expert on youth
culture. He was scooped up by sportswear designers at companies like
Stussy and Gotcha, where he chose to make T-shirts the new canvas for
his viral tags and chaos ideology . . . [First "to put a fractal
on a T-shirt"] . . . he was hoping to use all of [his] memes to
empower the individuals in youth culture to feed back their own
impulses to the culture at large and accept their roles as active
promoters of vital iteration . . . Jody used his virus logo overtly
and put copies of his T4 hieroglyph on his business cards and fax
cover sheet. (MV, pp. 299-300)
It must be noticed that Beloved-as-memory
shares something crucial with Rushkoff's portrait of Jody-as-virus.
She, like he, is an icon of protest against restraints. Against the
restraints of "inadequate social complexes," to put it
mildly; and to put it more forcefully, in Beloved's
case, against the restraints of state-sponsored forced labor and a
kind of censorship of the soul that leads to self-censorship (Sethe
holding her past at bay, Paul D locking his heart in a tin). This is
the suppression Baby Suggs, not just Beloved, tries to
fight against, as Baby urges her congregation "to feed back their
own impulses," at least to one another, in defiance of"the
culture at large." But the fervor of her preaching, protected by
the opening of the Clearing, is defeated by invasion. (Several times
she repeats the line "I'm saying [the whitefolks] came in my
yard" [B, p. 179].[26]) Here is what Morrison has
to engage that Rushkoff, Radzik, and their fellow enthusiasts have to
downplay for the sake of their empowerment: Invasion is the other side
of restraint. Slavery is invasion as well as restraint. Invasion by
the idea of an interval. For Sethe, it's the interval between Beloved's
death and Sethe's current life in 1873; for the reader, it's the
interval between that complex known as "slavery" and life
past the point of 1987. This is an interval very much alive, but, only
rarely, vitally spoken. Claims of unspeakable things to the contrary,
this spokenness--of invasion by the idea of an interval--is what Beloved
spreads and sells.
Of course, invasion--invasive ideas--should be recognized by
hacker activists elite as potentially oppressive, not just liberating.
This idea underlies renowned zoologist Richard Dawkins' idea of ideas,
or what he calls "memes"; an idea of ideas so intriguing
that hacker activists pepper their writings with mention of
"memes" and ground their views with Dawkins's theory of
viral transfer. A meme, we learn, is "a complex idea" that
1) forms a memorable unit; and 2) replicates itself, reliably, with
fecundity. Memes, for example, can range from "tunes,
catch-phrases . . . clothes fashions," to inventions, academic
ideas, and symphonies.[27] In Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene (1976),
a bestseller in 13 languages, he coins "meme" to sound like
"gene" and to reference the Greek root of imitation, "mimeme";
it is meant to call up "memory" and "meme," the
French word for "self" or "same".[28] Daniel
Dennett, a cognitive philosopher, has given even wider play to
"memes" in his most recent book, Consciousness Explained
(1991). These academic best-selling theorists offer what they claim
are stranger-than- fiction actualities with regard to cultural
evolution, for what interests both men is how cultural transmission is
analogous to genetic transmission. Dawkins:
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by
leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a
process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation . . .
"[M]emes should be regarded as living structures . . . When you
plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain . .
. [T]he meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually
realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the
nervous systems of individual men the world over." (SG, p. 192)
When Dennett summarizes Dawkins' views in 1991, AIDS-related
memes emerge in Dennett's discourse. Now memes "leap
promiscuously," prove "unquarantinable," are sometimes
"pernicious invaders" that prove as deadly and as "hard
to eradicate," he says, as "the AIDS virus, for
instance."[29] Dennett, even more than Dawkins, stresses the
debasement of the mind by memes that "distract us, burden our
memories, derange our judgment" (CE, p. 204). In a passage that
even Dennett seems to mean as comical, he playfully magnifies this
point:
I don't know about you, but I'm not initially attracted by
the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of
other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of
themselves in an informational Diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind
of its importance as both author and critic. Who's in charge,
according to this vision--we or our memes? (CE, p. 202)
This is a different outhouse scene, where we become the
mudholes made by birthings taking place in our brains.
Understand, in Dawkins' view memes do not spread because they
are good for human populations; they spread because they are good at
replicating. Dennett adds: "Memes, like genes, are potentially
immortal, but, like genes, they depend on the existence of a
continuous chain of physical vehicles" (CE, p. 205). Books and
even monuments can disappear with time, but thousands or millions of
copies of a single meme or meme-complex will account for a meme's
"penetrance," its "infective power." And yet,
aside from promiscuous travel, a meme's fate depends upon the nature
of the vehicles that carry the meme into its future. Dennett specifies
each meme's ultimate destination as the very kind of place from which
it spreads: "The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human
mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes
restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for
memes" (CE, p. 207). We should not forget that memes are
dependent. Like attention-seeking infants, they seek the mind's
nurture (its "nest," its "haven" [CE, pp.
206-07]). But they also change the structure of a brain to make of the
mind their own "habitat." In what he calls his
"Pandemonium model" (CE, p. 241), alluding to Milton,
Dennett explains "what words do with us": They are on the
alert, he says, to get "incorporated," "ingested,"
but "when we let [them] in" they "tend to take over,
creating us out of the raw materials they find in our brains"
(CE, p. 417).
Clearly, this is not the heady rush of control one discovers
in Rushkoff, Radzik, Sirius, or especially Timothy Leary. Hardly
optimistic in any grand sense--hence they are tagged "sociobiological"--Dawkins
and Dennett sport a view of insurrection, which, nonetheless, has
paved the way for hacker appropriation of memespeak as rebellion. (As
of July 1995, Dawkins has just appeared on the cover of Wired
magazine, touted as a "bad-boy evolutionist."[30]) Not so
much packing memes as equipping the mind in its defensive fight
against them, Dawkins ends his book "on a note of qualified
hope" (SG, p. 200): "We have the power to defy ["our
creators":] the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the
selfish memes of our indoctrination . . . We, alone on earth, can
rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators" (SG, pp.
200-01).[31] This is Milton's Satan via Blake and Shelley--the
Romantic view of rebellion's allure. From this Promethean ledge,
hacker optimists leap past the issue of memes in our minds, invading
our brains, to focus on one's manufacture of memes that allows for
"attack" and luxurious habitation.
By contrast, the wary tone one finds in Dawkins and Dennett
crosses Beloved's concern with invasion at just the
right angle. Indeed, for all of its crude explanation, memetheory runs
with a point importantly implicit in Saussure, in his stress on
"the physiological transmission of the sound-image" out of
someone's brain into someone else's ear.[32] The point is this: a
sign, in order to be a sign to you, must get inside your body.
Actually, it must enter your body through an orifice. In Beloved,
it enters the body through the gullet. Ingestion becomes the site of a
struggle where the daughter restructures her mother's brain. In this
sense, we find that Sethe's voiding in the outhouse scene was truly a
prelude to a thirsting--and a gorging. Not only does Beloved
gulp water at the start (due to her infection), she soon develops a
ravenous tooth, "as though sweet things were what she was born
for"--"honey as well as the wax it came in, sugar sandwiches
. . . sludgy molasses gone hard . . . any type of dessert" (B, p.
55) ("Paul D said it made him sick to his stomach"). Towards
Sethe, she turns an epistemic hunger, making sight the servant of
ingestion: "Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's
eyes" (B, p. 57). Sethe, in response, learns that telling her
memories "became a way to feed [Beloved]"
(B, p. 58). In fact, it is one of the novel's most interesting tricks
that the body we take to be memory cannot perform the act of
recollection (due to the cholera fever, Sethe thinks). Like the
headless bride in the legend Paul D mentions, Beloved,
her head nearly sawed off by Sethe, would likely depend on reaching
the haven of a human mind. For just like a meme, though she evokes the
clear language of purpose, she clearly has no mind of her own. Hungry
for memory, thirsting to hear, Beloved makes Sethe
memory inges-tive, as if Sethe eats in accordance with an appetite
foreign to her own.
One particular memory fest appears in the guise of a
force-feeding. Paul D has just told Sethe that Halle--Sethe's
husband--saw the boys hold her down and take her milk (Halle watched
from the loft in the barn).[33] In terms of narrative technique, it's
a highly stylized scene. Eleven times in two pages the phrase "he
saw" (a replicative meme) is repeated in see-saw conversation.
("He saw?"; "He saw"; "whatever he saw go on
in that barn . . . broke him like a twig"; "He saw them boys
do that to me and let them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He
saw?"; "I never knew he saw" [B, pp. 68-69].) The
phrase is actually making a slit in the reader's mind that will later
allow linked saws to seep in (the sawyer and his doomed roses;
Sawyer's restaurant, where Sethe works; Beloved's
sawed neck; Paul D's fright that Sethe "talked about safety with
a handsaw" [B, p. 164]). In this context, interval is thematized
as the structure of a latent trauma. Structurally even, the meme's
repetition is stalling for time, making a short interval between
itself ("he saw") and something Sethe will see of Halle as
she eats a new memory. For unbeknownst to Sethe, there's more for her
to learn:
"You may as well know it all. Last time I saw him he was
sitting by the churn. He had butter all over his face." Nothing
happened, and she was grateful for that. Usually she could see the
picture right away of what she heard. But she could not picture what
Paul D said. Nothing came to mind. (B, p. 69)
When it hits, Sethe's recognition sinks with a vengeance,
since the opening of her mind is displayed as the unwilled opening of
an orifice:
She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her
rebellious brain. . . Like a greedy child it snatched up everything.
Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold
another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one
sucking on my breast the other holding me down . . . Add my husband to
it, watching, above me in the loft . . . But my greedy brain says, Oh
thanks, I'd love more--so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there
is no stopping. There is also my husband squatting by the churn
smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because
the milk they took is on his mind. And as far as he is concerned, the
world may as well know it. (B, p. 70)
As if restructured, Sethe's brain resembles Beloved:
"like a greedy child it snatched up everything." Here is an
eating-disorder equivalent to Sethe's bladder filling to capacity,
again with "no stopping." But something more than the
brain's involuntary binging intrigues me. Notice how Halle projects
the contents of his mind to his face, wearing them as visible waste
for the world to see. He smears the butter "because the milk they
took is on his mind"; and this action, Sethe imagines, is Halle's
way of stopping his brain ("what a relief to stop it right
there"). As for Sethe, "her brain was not interested in the
future" (B, p. 70). "Loaded with the past and hungry for
more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next
day."
Sethe's gorging in and of this interval appears to be a
skewing, a reprise in minor key, of a feast from her short 28-day
period of maternal hedonism between her escape from Sweet Home and her
killing of Beloved. That period (the length of a
woman's menstrual cycle) was characterized by what Sethe can only
remember as "a kind of selfishness" (B, p. 162). ("I
birthed them and I got them out . . . It felt good . . . I was big . .
. and wide" [B, p. 162]). In celebration of such width, she and
Baby Suggs threw a feast for 90 people, "who ate so well, and
laughed so much, it made them angry" (B, p. 136). This was deemed
a "reckless generosity" (B, p. 137) (a nice phrase for
maternal indulgence) which "offended . . . by excess" (B, p.
138). Meanness was the result of this feast--the kind of meanness that
falls in a slant across nearly all of the book's relations. No one
warned Sethe a white man was coming to take her back, along with her
children; the result of which was Beloved's death at
the hands of Sethe.
In a thought to linger on, Morrison makes a
maternal hedonism the innocent cause of untimely death and dangerous
transmissions. Yet, when it all comes back in memory, that is to say
when Beloved comes back, the innocence and generosity
of the feasting--along with Sethe's width ("I was big . . . and
wide")--becomes the gorging of a hedonistic memory--the gorging
of Beloved (herself a selfish meme) that grows fat on
Sethe's stories and sends Sethe into symptoms. By the end, sickness is
a solitude of two who are locked inside their house. Of course, it is
cunning that Morrison makes us wonder--as many readers
do--if Beloved is pregnant with Paul D's child.[34]
Cunning, I say, since there is a more compelling explanation: Beloved
is "pregnant" from "eating" her mother. What can
this mean? And how does it bring us, finally, to symptoms?
In the novel's last third, Sethe and Beloved
(with Denver more as witness than participant) are trying to reinhabit
Sethe's hedonistic interval, her charmed 28 days between her escape
and her murder.[35]
The thirty-eight dollars of life savings went to feed
themselves with fancy food and decorate themselves with ribbon and
dress goods, which Sethe cut and sewed like they were going somewhere
in a hurry. Bright clothes--with blue stripes and sassy prints. (B, p.
240)
Sethe played all the harder with Beloved, who
never got enough of anything: lullabies, new stitches, the bottom of
the cake bowl, the top of the milk . . . It was as though her mother
had lost her mind. (B, p. 240)
Feasting, festival, and play all emerge here, but illness
finally overtakes this interval. (Like the magical 28 days, it lasts
"a whole month" [B, p. 240]). At first, the two are
interchangeable: "they changed beds and exchanged clothes. Walked
arm in arm and smiled all the time . . . It was difficult for Denver
to tell who was who"(B, pp. 240-41). Then, Beloved
becomes the mother, Sethe the teething child, with eyes "fever
bright":
Then it seemed to Denver the thing was done: Beloved
bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child . . .
The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became; the
brighter Beloved's eyes, the more those eyes that used
never to look away became slits of sleeplessness. Sethe no longer
combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the chair
licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved
ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it . . .
her belly protruding like a winning watermelon . . . [T]he older woman
yielded up [her life].[36] (B, p. 250; emphasis mine)
Here the legacy of infant mortality, in the context of
slavery, emerges as a form of what AIDS watchers know as autoimmunity,
where the body mistakes "invader" for "self" and
thus lets it in. Consider this explanation given in Discover magazine:
Some researchers suspect that the virus . . . trick[s] [the
immune system] into an assault on itself . . . causing T cells to
commit suicide . . . Think about it: to the body, a key part of the
AIDS virus looks like--of all things--the 'self' badge on a crucial
subset of its own cells.[37]
In current cybernetic lingo, the virus is a cyberpunk:
"I can get in and I can be you." Rolling Stone adds to this
picture: "Like any virus, the sole mission of HIV is to reproduce
. . . [The virus] twists its genes into the [T-helper's] genes, then,
with the host as its commandeered factory, goes about all the work it
takes to make new viral packages."[38] Sethe is such a
commandeered factory, offering Beloved ("her
belly protruding") a site from which to grow and spread.
In Beloved, the pertinent confusion turns out
to be meme for meme, memory for self, so that Sethe wastes at the
hands of a memory--a physical structure in her brain--that wears her
self-badge. (In fact, Beloved is the age Sethe was
when she birthed Denver and killed Beloved.) But to
grasp just how odd understanding of the body's invasion can be,
consider how it becomes narrativized in attempts at self-help:
elaborate efforts that shed some light on Sethe's communicative
attempts with her daughter ("the more [Beloved]
took, the more Sethe began to talk, explain . . . listing again and
again her reasons" [B, p. 242]). In a Harper's essay,
"Making Kitsch from AIDS," we learn of patients writing
letters to their virus, anthropomorphizing it as a loved one, a pen
pal with whom one corresponds.
In the self-help treatment guide Immune Power, Dr. Jon D.
Kaiser even advises his clients to open up a regular correspondence
with their virus. The patient, playing the role of the disease, writes
back like a pen pal or a well-bred guest to thank its
"hosts" "for sharing your feelings with me"
"[that I] have overstayed [my] welcome," adding that "I
appreciate your thoughts and I am not offended by the bluntness of
your attitude toward me."[39]
The patient pretends to swap self for invader, attempting to
embody a kinder, gentler virus who will find the patient's good
wishes, and manners, infectious--a reading that truly wants itself
thought. Kaiser even proffers that if letters to the virus indicate
"the way you truly feel about yourself' (IP, p. 103) ("since
it is within you" [IP, p. 104]), letters from the virus reflect
one's "beliefs" about "what . . . will happen"
(IP, p. 104)--as if HIV, channelled by oneself, is a set of beliefs
about the future. What Kaiser sees for the future of AIDS is
"viral dormancy," by means of which patients continue to
carry HIV while they "revert back to [an] original asymptomatic
status" (IP, p. 7). As support for his views, Kaiser cites
Harvard's William Haseltine: "HIV can lie dormant indefinitely,
inextricable from the cell but hidden from the victim's immune
system" (IP, p. 3).[40]
Some form of hiding, though one that is both uneasy and
sad--accompanied by a communal forgetting--attends Beloved's
disappearance and Sethe's apparent "rever[sion] back to [an]
original asymptomatic status."[41] True, it may seem like Beloved
is ousted, evacuated, exorcised, disappeared at the end of the book,
but the last two pages of Beloved suggest a restless
dormancy: "There is a loneliness that can be rocked . . . It's an
inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that
roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own" (B,
p. 274). The all or nothing, in/out, yes/no model we think the book is
backing--has Beloved disappeared or not? are the dead
in or out? are you infected, yes or no?--is really a more pressing
issue of intensity, threshold, and extent (like measurements that are
rendered in T-cells), or, in the case of ideas, memic insistence and
width. (How wide is my idea of the dead?) In fact, Dennett and other
brain theorists suggest that intensity of memic insistence determines
what memes win brain competitions, in which the brain's parallel
processors offer different candidates for consciousness.[42]
This is simply to say, the question I thought Beloved
was asking all along--how can we have a mental prophylactics that
protects against invasions from the dead?--is not the most urgent
query I am left with. Beloved leaves me to ponder how
memic intensity is tamed, so that it can be carried, by the mind's
crowded vehicle, into the space of a virtual future.
The phrase "tamed richness" is Roland Barthes',
from his essay "Myth Today," in which he laments myth's
taming operations on the richness of objects, words, and pictures. At
first view, myth seems intriguing but benign, as Barthes hangs his
first explanation on a tree:
A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by
Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is
decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with
literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of
social usage which is added to pure matter.[43]
From this example of mythified matter, the tree-as-matter
dressed up in myth ("decorated, adapted"), Barthes proceeds
to give examples of words and pictures that get dressed, too,
stressing, as he goes, "a social usage" that is not only
additive ("added to . . . matter") but also
"parasitical." That is to say, Barthes begins to emphasize
how the form of myth feeds off of the "meaning[s]" offered
by objects, words, or pictures, "emptying" them of their
"own values" so that they might "receive" mythical
ones.
In another example, which, like the tree, is resonant for Beloved,
Barthes writes this:
And here is now another example: I am at the barber's, and a
copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the cover, a young Negro in a
French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on
a fold of the tricolour. All this is the meaning of the picture. But,
whether naively or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that
France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour
discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no
better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the
zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (MT, p.
116)
Formed by a sum of individual signs, a myth, says Barthes,
signifies something beyond the immediate meaning drained by myth for
its own nourishment, a meaning, as in the case of the picture, "I
grasp . . . through my eyes," "a sensory reality," with
a "richness," "a history," "its own
value" (MT, pp. 117-18). In this case, then, the myth of French
imperiality empties the picture's meaning of whatever history and
value it may have apart from myth, on "its own" ("it
belongs," he says, "to a history . . . of the Negro"
[MT, p. 117]). Moreover, myth drains the meaning of the picture so as
to "fill" it with French imperiality. Or, as Barthes puts
it: "one must put the biography of the Negro in
parentheses," "put it at a distance," "if one
wants to . . . prepare [the picture] to receive its signified"
(MT, p. 118). As the result of such a "parasitical" action,
"the meaning of the picture" "becomes impoverished,
history evaporates, only the letter remains" (MT, p. 117).
Taking just this much from Barthes' familiar views, we may
grasp a signal aspect of Beloved, which, to this
point, I have been producing as a tale of parasitical relations.
Realize, we have not yet broached the possibility that Beloved's
parasitical invasion could be seen as a struggle against the greater,
and greatly parasitical, force of myth. To put it succinctly: Beloved
is a tale of a tamed richness returning to protest the force of its
reduction. On the surface of it, this view does not surprise. It
squares so neatly with what we know of Morrison's
intentions, since in American myths of slavery (historical ones, as
much as any others) the meaning of the slave has been emptied,
distanced, in order to prepare it to receive a signified. (Morrison,
by contrast, would restore the slave to richness.[44]) So, no
surprise. And yet, on further view, what does jolt is the realization
that Morrison makes the myth-making persons of Beloved
not just figures like Schoolteacher but, in some ways more
dramatically, the black community--the "mothers" (and later,
other folk) who tame Beloved's meaning--rich,
historical, full, even pregnant--into decorations lacking memic
intensity (which "[made] it easy for the chewing laughter to
swallow her all away" [B, p. 274]). For "after they made up
their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on
the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her . . . [T]hey realized
they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to
believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she
hadn't said anything at all" (B, p. 274).
But, of course, Beloved did speak. Even as a
structural oddity, a resistance to the narrative flow: Beloved's
narration, five pages long. There we encounter Beloved
awash on the sea of the dead in a time that threatens to be only now:
All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time
when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am
always crouching the man on my face is dead his face is not mine his
mouth smells sweet but his eyes are locked. (B, p. 210)
Passages such as these hyperlink us to where we cannot
follow. Carefully crafted to tease us with meaning so rich in its own
values and history that it's opaque (the basket, the bridge, the men
without skin, even "a hot thing"), Beloved's
narration evokes the memory of a slave ship sunk (at least in Beloved)
to any operation other than myth. More to the point, Beloved,
we learn, has come back to Sethe in search of her face, her own
self-badge:
my face is coming I have to have it . . . she knows I want to
join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face
has left me I see me swim away a hot thing I see the bottoms of my
feet I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join. (B, p.
213)
These lines tender a sympathetic view, a meme's-eye view, of
memic insistence. Beloved is left insistently to
follow the trail to where she can be thought, however incompletely.
She lies among the dead; but whatever face may be saved for the dead
is gained through those who eat them in memory, taking the name (and
meanings attached to it) inside the body so that it may lie (sometimes
dormant, sometimes active) behind living eyes in the boat of the
brain. Importantly, Beloved's narration appears, not
towards the book's beginning where it might have functioned as an
origins tale, an explanation of where Beloved is
returning from. Rather, it appears at the end of Part Two, just before
Sethe starts to decline. This placement reminds us to read the
marauding Beloved as a victim of a prior swallowing,
just as the outhouse scene prepared us to understand her gulping as a
symptom of a prior voiding. As much as Sethe is menaced by meaning, as
if she's taking a sensory dose of it (through her eyes, ears, mouth),
she is also by the end complicit in a dormancy, one achieved by myth
and by those who are its aids. In fact, Barthes' version of the living
dead inadvertently provides a canny reading of Beloved's final pages:
"One believes that the meaning [here the meaning of Beloved]
is going to die, but it is a death with reprieve; the meaning loses
its value, but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will
draw its nourishment" (MT, p. 118).
It would be nice to end with a set of neat relations:
American myths of slavery as a way to defend against slavery's virtual
remains; Morrison's myth of tamed richness as a way to
defend against American myths. But something would still be hidden by
this frame: the fact that Morrison, who slips the face
of early death back into view, tames richness, too--however much she
might wish for a myth that restores but does not simultaneously
reduce. Working from the historical record, Morrison
makes a story such as Margaret Garner's (the kernel of her novel), and
even the specific signs of Beloved, plumped to
bursting with lyric effort, "recede a great deal," in the
words of Barthes, "in order to make room" (MT, p. 118) for
her own myth. Her myth of tamed richness.[45] Or, as Barthes elsewhere
states the matter: "The meaning [once again, the meaning of Beloved]
is always there to present the form [of myth]; the form is always
there to outdistance the meaning . . . they are never at the same
place" (MT, p. 123). What Beloved represents, and
quite allegorically, is a question, I suggest, structured into the
text, even from its name, goading the reader, at every turn, into an
act of outdistancing individual meanings. In Beloved
especially, meaning and myth are "never at the same place,"
a sense only heightened by historical interval (between the slave dead
and the future ill of 1987) and by the intangible boundary that
separates dead Beloved from living Sethe, giving Beloved
a virtual life.
And now we must raise a final issue, so crucial to Beloved's
multiple tamings, by raising it first to Roland Barthes, who, in the
example of the meaning of the picture of the Negro soldier, slides
among "the meaning of the picture," "the pictu |
