4—
Love's Labor

Kant, Isis, and Toni Morrison's Sublime

"It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."
(Toni Morrison, Beloved)

Well, we've got a ghost story on our hands all right. But we should wait until there are more than two of us before we start.
(Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting)

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead.
(Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)

In "Unspeakable Things Spoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," written in 1988 shortly after completing her novel Beloved , Toni Morrison demonstrates how issues of race and representation intersect; she ascribes to race the very quality of unrepresentability that we have seen to be the hallmark of the Kantian sublime. According to Morrison, "in spite of its implicit and explicit acknowledgment, 'race' is still a virtually unspeakable thing."^[1] Suggesting that the "presence" of Afro-American literature within the American canon is itself an "unspeakable thing unspoken," she compares the quest for it to a search for "the ghost in the machine":

Another [focus on the study of African-American literature] is the examination and re-interpretation of the American canon, the founding nineteenth-century works, for the "unspeakable things unspoken"; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature. A search, in other words, for the ghost in the machine . (11; my emphasis)

Afro-American literature is present within American literature as a ghost is within a haunted house. And the search for it, for that which is uncannily

both dead and alive, absent and present, is akin to the search for a ghostly presence that, repressed, improperly buried, or ignored, comes back to haunt.^[2] "Are there," Morrison asks, "ghosts in the machine? Active but unsummoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine and can also make it work?" (13). Morrison's use of the word "ghost" raises the question of color—for how do we envision a black ghost?—just as she uses the word "presence" to signify self-contradiction. For the figure of the ghost, which becomes Morrison's metaphor for the "presence" of Afro-American literature within the American literary canon, symbolizes a particular and crucial absence, one that too often remains unheard and unseen.

Morrison invites us to look for this "presence" in contemporary literature that is within or outside the canon, "regardless of its category as mainstream, minority, or what you will," to undertake, in other words, a search for "absences so stressed, so organic, so planned, they call attention to themselves" (11). A ghost represents a very particular kind of "presence," and the pages that follow suggest that the search for "the ghost in the machine"—for "the informing and determining Afro-American presence in traditional American literature" (18)—not only describes Morrison's project in Beloved but may also become a commentary upon precisely those aspects of the sublime that Kant finds it necessary to combat.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) returns to these issues, for in it Morrison argues that "a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence" is the unacknowledged other that shapes, if not produces, American identity.^[3] Here Morrison examines the strategies through which a certain "knowledge" disowns the African-American presence in American culture and literature by insisting that it has no place:

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, unformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our na-

tional literature emanate from a particular "Americanness" that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. (5)

Such "knowledge" also refuses to question matters that Morrison's fiction and criticism persistently interrogate: the nature of the boundary that divides absence from presence, container from contained, or black from white.^[4] And, as we shall see, it is this borderline to which the third Critique attests.

In Playing in the Dark the very strategies of identity formation we have seen at work in Kant and some of his recent critics are shown to exist in the formation of American national and cultural identities. Here Morrison examines the ways in which "Africanism"—"the fetishizing of color, the transference of blackness to the power of illicit sexuality, chaos, madness, impropriety, anarchy, strangeness, and helpless, hapless desire" (80)—as helped to establish white identity. Procedures familiar to us from the third Critique elaborate the construction of black and white identities, for in each case they define identity by what opposes it. Black identity functions as the obverse of American, or white, identity; according to Morrison, "American means white" (47) because it provides the background that allows the foreground to emerge. Indeed, the black figure becomes a convenient receptacle for all that needs to be denied. As Morrison puts it:

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self itself knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny. (52)

The coherence and self-definition of American literature is achieved at the expense of "a distancing Africanism" (8) in which African people come to signify "denotative and connotative blackness" (6). And Morrison likens the darkness of Africanism to a shadow that accompanies and is a companion to whiteness, a presence that "haunts" American literature, but from which it is unable to extricate itself (33).^[5]

The position of African-American literature within American literature is thus akin to that of the sublime within the third Critique . While in Kant the sublime is secondary and marginal, an appendage that frames the "Analytic of the Beautiful" and gives it a border, for Morrison African-American literature is the repressed body of writing that "helped to form

the distinguishing characteristics of a proto-American literature" (38). The Africanist presence that hovers "at the margins of the literary imagination" (5) replicates the place of the sublime with respect to the beautiful: like Kant's sublime that, relegated to the margins, contests the authority and universality of the beautiful, so African-American literature is at once inside and outside the canon, both its border and its frame. If Africanism is "the quite ornamental vacuum" (11) that provides "the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity" (44), its function mirrors that of the Kantian sublime: to contain the fear of boundlessness and primal terror; to give the unnameable a name and thereby defend against it; to aggrandize (or create) identity, but only at the expense of a scapegoated other; and to keep the fear of unrepresentability at bay.

The following pages explore the presence of another sublime, one that does not eradicate alterity but rather seeks to articulate and bear witness to it. Of more than casual interest is an inscription on the temple of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of mourning, that gives Kant an example of the most sublime "thought ever expressed" (185, §49), at the same time that it appears only as a footnote to his text. In the figure of Isis we encounter the combined threat of women and mourning that Plato, and the tradition he inaugurates, genders as feminine, and holds in contempt:

"So then," I said, "we won't allow those whom we claim we care for and who must themselves become good men to imitate women . . . either a young woman or an older one . . . or one who's caught in the grip of misfortune, mourning and wailing. And we'll be far from needing one who's sick or in love or in labor."^[6]

In the third Critique , however, that which Plato kept out of the Republic returns, if only in the margins. This chapter proposes that Isis embodies those aspects of the sublime Kant excludes, and that Beloved enacts the very sublime to which her name attests.

I—

The most important sentence in Kant's Critique of Judgment occurs in a footnote halfway through the "Analytic of the Sublime." Discussing what he calls an "aesthetic idea," that is, "a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought

whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept can be adequate" (182, §49), Kant argues that such ideas are unique. They produce an excess of signification: since "no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it" (182), they "quicken the mind by opening up for it a view into an immense realm of kindred presentations" (183–84). He cites as an example a few lines from a poem by Frederick the Great: "The sun flowed forth, as serenity flows from virtue," and his commentary—that the consciousness of virtue "spreads in the mind a multitude of sublime and calming feelings, and a boundless outlook toward a joyful future" (184–85)—gives rise to this extraordinary footnote: "Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): 'I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil'" (185). The sentence inscribed on Isis' temple functions as an "aesthetic idea" because it gives rise to an impression of limitlessness and occasions "so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept" (183), thereby producing the impression of unrepresentability Kant defines as the sublime. Even more relevant is the complex web of questions and associations that the footnote engenders. Unraveled, the web may open up a space for, and tell us something instructive about, another version of the Kantian sublime.

Why does Kant make such a significant instance of the sublime only an addendum to the main body of the text? How does the footnote's position dramatize Kant's description of the sublime as itself "a mere appendix" (100, §23) to the primary subject of the third Critique , "the Analytic of the Beautiful"? What logic links the sublime both to the question of feminine sexual difference, here personified by the goddess Isis, and to the territory of the belated and excluded, to what arrives and can be symbolized only after the fact? And how does Beloved enact just those aspects of the sublime that, in Kant, appear only in the margins?

I respond to these questions by dwelling in some detail upon what may seem to be only an accessory: the identity of the goddess Isis. Her story is emblematic of the sublime, although perhaps not in the way Kant had in mind, for she names an ethic and aesthetic of attachment that resists the economy of detachment he upholds. And if she presents an exemplary, if quite literally marginal, instance of the sublime, it becomes imperative to know at least something about who she was and what her name implies.

II—

According to Wallis Budge's Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection , the divine couple Isis and Osiris (sister and brother, and also wife and husband) are not native to Egypt; rather their cult is "of purely African origin and existed long before the Dynastic period in Egypt."^[7] Whether or not Budge is correct regarding their homeland, for our purpose what matters is Isis' position as a goddess of burial and mourning and as a protector of the dead. Plutarch, the myth's most influential transmitter (De Iside et Osiride , first century A.D.), relates that she is best known for her role in recovering and burying Osiris' body after Seth, his jealous brother, trapped him in a coffin and threw it into the Nile.^[8] When Isis heard the news of his death she uttered a lament that became the prototype of all Egyptian lamentations for the dead:

Come to thy house, thou who hast no foes. O fair youth, come to thy house, that thou mayest see me. I am thy sister, whom thou invest; thou shalt not part from me. . . . Come to thy sister, come to thy wife, to thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. I am thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far from me. Gods and men have turned their faces toward thee and weep for thee together. . . . I call after thee and weep, so that my cry is heard from heaven, but thou hearest not my voice; yet I am thy sister, whom thou didst love on earth; thou didst love none but me, my brother, my brother.^[9]

There follows the story of her wanderings. Disconsolate, Isis travels up and down the banks of the Nile until she finds the coffin containing Osiris' body and returns it to their son Horns for proper burial. But Seth finds the coffin, tears the body into fourteen pieces, and throws them back into the Nile. Only Isis is able to recover the dismembered body: sailing among the marshes she finds and buries the missing fragments, leaving sepulchers to mark their place. Plutarch tells us that there is only one part of Osiris' body that Isis cannot find: his male member. She therefore makes a replica to take its place and consecrates it as holy. Isis replaces the member that is irretrievably lost with its simulacrum and thereby symbolizes an attachment that resists death. She does not try to resurrect the body or put the scattered pieces back together, but rather memorializes them through the ritual of burial. To know where a beloved body lies is perhaps one condition of its remembrance.^[10]

Not only is Isis learned in the arts of mourning; she is also a mistress of signs and symbols, and what interests me is the complexity of the relation between them. Her name and the legends surrounding it attest to connections between mourning and naming. According to Robert Graves, Isis is named for her ability to mourn Osiris, for "Isis" derives from an onomatopoeic Asian word, Ish-ish , meaning "she who weeps."^[11] But she is also known as the one "who is mighty with words" and "whose words maketh the dead live."^[12] Isidore, archbishop of Seville (ca. 600–636 A.D.), believes that Isis brought the Egyptians their alphabet: "As for the Egyptian alphabet, Queen Isis, daughter of King Inachus, coming from Greece to Egypt brought them [sic ] with her and gave them to the Egyptians."^[13] And Budge relates that among the Egyptians of the Middle and New Empires, Isis was regarded as a great magician, for she knew how to weave spells and possessed knowledge of the secret and hidden names of all the gods. Papyri contain frequent allusions to her magical powers and relate in great detail how Isis gained possession of the secret name of Ra, the sun god, thereby acquiring for herself the power of the gods.^[14] The goddess whose love for her husband-brother is so great that her lamentations do not cease until she finds and buries the fragments of his body also has an intimate relation to language; she who builds monuments to mark the sites of loss also knows how to call the gods by name. We will want to explore the nature of the alliance between the act of mourning and that of storytelling, between the ability to bury the dead and to keep them alive in symbolic form.

If, as Kant would have it. Isis' inscription gives rise to thoughts of the ineffable, her story, of which he was apparently unaware, attests to a capacity for limitless attachment even in the face of traumatic loss. As trauma does, the sublime occasions a crisis of representation such that what is lost can never be found whole or in one place. It is recoverable only as a series of disconnected fragments—a search for the pieces of a dismembered or, in Morrison's words, "disremembered" body. Isis' quest for Osiris' body stages the scene of writing as a search for what language witnesses but cannot say.

Isis mourns and buries Osiris, but no one mourns for her. Her inscription lies unnoticed in a note at the bottom of Kant's page, just as the sublime it epitomizes is buried within the third Critique . And what returns as the signifier of something missing also appears in belated form: as a footnote, in the case of Isis, and as "a mere appendix" in that of the

sublime. Isis' position within the third Critique —appearing in the margins, as a footnote or afterthought—is a metaphor for not only the sublime's relation to the beautiful, but for the third Critique 's relation to its two predecessors. As we shall see, it marks an abyss that even Kant cannot bridge.

For Kant the aesthetic is the third term that will resolve the breach between nature and freedom, or theoretical understanding and practical reason, that was set up by the first two Critiques . Nature appears on the basis of the Critique of Pure Reason as a world of phenomena strictly subject to our forms of intuition (in space and time) and to our categories of understanding (including cause and effect). But the moral world that is the subject of the Critique of Practical Reason is one that presupposes the freedom of the rational agent. The architectonic goal of the Critique of Judgment is to exhibit the possibility that we do in some sense live in one world where freedom can be actual within the natural. If there is a ground for our aesthetic judgments, in which we suppose that the experienced world is constituted as if freedom were expressing itself in what we perceive as natural beauty, then we have some justification for thinking (if not knowing) that the realms of freedom and nature are compatible. Kant's aim in the third Critique is to provide an absolute foundation for judgments of taste, to supply the a priori principle through which aesthetic judgments can claim universal validity. If aesthetic judgments rest on a ground that is independent of experience, they not only become the objects of a necessary "liking" but also provide a missing link, supply "the concept that mediates between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom" (36). Charged with bridging "the great gulf [Kluft ] that separates the supersensible from appearances" (35), aesthetic judgments have a specifically reparative function: their task is to make it possible "to throw a bridge from one domain to another" (36).

But, not surprisingly, the bridge doesn't quite work. Just as the third Critique supplements the lack opened by the first two Critiques , so the "Analytic of the Sublime" supplements the strangely inadequate theory of the beautiful, which cannot explain the complex form of "negative pleasure," or mixture of pain and pleasure, that distinguishes the sublime. Isis' footnote, then, testifies to something excluded from the "Analytic of the Sublime." Kant relegates Isis to a footnote and in doing so he shows what must be barred from the Critique of Judgment : an ethics and aesthetics of attachment rather than detachment. This exclusion operates in the same way that the sublime frames and supplements the "Analytic of the Beau-

tiful," displacing the emotions from the realm of beauty; the third Critique itself attempts to repair the breach between the two preceding it. Yet every attempt to bridge the gap produces more gaps to be bridged, just as the attempt to excise what has been repressed only gives rise to more of it. (We will return to bridges in connection with Beloved ).

If, in the sublime, borders disappear and the subject is overwhelmed by a magnitude she can neither control nor represent, the notion of parerga (ornaments or frames) haunts discussion of the sublime and even foreshadows its appearance.^[15]Parerga are said to distinguish those elements that are internal to the work of art; their use for Kant is to lend credence to the view that only an object's formal properties may contribute to judgments of taste. His definition of parerga —"what does not belong to the whole presentation of the object as an intrinsic constituent, but [is] only an extrinsic addition, does indeed increase our taste's liking, and yet it does so only by its form, as in the case of picture frames, or drapery on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings" (72, §14)—occurs just before he mentions the sublime for the first time, and "emotion [Ruhrung ]" is the intermediary term that links them. Immediately after his remark about parerga Kant describes emotion as "a momentary inhibition of the vital force followed by a stronger outpouring of it," adding that it "does not belong to beauty at all" (72).

Kant's definitions of emotion and the sublime are almost interchangeable. In the first section of the "Analytic of the Sublime" he describes the sublime as a pleasure that is "produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger" and remarks, "hence it [the sublime] is an emotion" (98, §23). Emotion and the sublime are alike in that both entail a rapid alternation between extremes of feeling, a moment of inhibition that leads to an intense outburst of the "vital force," and neither allows detachment. Like pent-up water rushing from a dam, this "outflow" bursts boundaries; it cannot be bordered. But if we have begun to account for the connection between emotion and sublimity, we have yet to explain how they are related to the parergon .

To respond to this question it is necessary to look a bit more closely at paragraph 14, in which Kant enumerates the conditions that allow "pure [rein ] judgments of taste," that is, those judgments whose "uniformity [is] undisturbed and uninterrupted by any alien sensation [fremdartige Empfindung ]." (Sensations of color, for example, can be regarded as beautiful

only insofar as they are "pure"; "mixed colors do not enjoy this privilege, precisely because, since they are not simple, we lack a standard for judging whether we should call them pure or impure" [71].)^[16] Since "sensation [Empfindung ]" has nothing to do with determining "a pure judgment of taste" (72), qualities such as "charm [Reiz ]" and "emotion" do not belong in the beautiful. In order to produce "a pure judgment of taste," Kant is required to show that materiality is irrelevant to the aesthetic experience described in the "Analytic of the Beautiful." Because nothing will be allowed to disturb the purely formal beauty of the work of art, Kant feels the necessity to excise emotion, and with it, the sublime. Kant mentions the sublime in the last sentence of the "Analytic of the Beautiful," asserting that it has no place in the beautiful and requires its own standard of judgment: "But sublimity (with which the feeling of emotion is connected [verbunden ]) requires a different standard of judging from the one that taste uses as a basis. Hence a pure judgment of taste has as its determining basis neither charm nor emotion, in other words, no sensation which is [merely] the matter of an aesthetic judgment" (72). My point is not that the sublime is an emotion, but that Kant describes them in the same terms. The qualities that define emotion also define the sublime and both need to be ejected not only from our aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, but from the "Analytic of the Beautiful" itself. Both involve an experience of attachment that threatens aesthetic judgments and with them the working of Kant's aesthetic. The "Analytic of the Sublime" thus contains everything the "Analytic of the Beautiful" cannot admit and must reject. Whatever has no place in the beautiful—emotion, charm, and the sublime itself—must be relegated to the margins and treated in an aftermath that Kant describes as "a mere appendix" to the main body of the work.

If a judgment of taste is "pure only insofar as no merely empirical liking is mingled in with the basis that determines it" (69), we must distinguish the "pure" from the "empirical," divide the thing itself from what is merely extrinsic to it, and discern what in the art work is foreign or impure. Aesthetic judgment presumes a knowledge of the difference between inside and outside, form and matter, that Kant takes for granted. But, as Derrida so astutely observes in The Truth in Painting , it requires a distinction between container and contained, extrinsic and intrinsic, or emotion and detachment, that the notion of parerga calls into question.^[17] Because a parergon is both inside and outside the work of art it belongs to the work by not belonging to it, and is thus neither intrinsic nor extrinsic to that

which it seems to adorn. By disclosing the presence of the outside within the inside, the parergon undermines the possibility of universally valid judgments of taste, which depend upon keeping the difference between them intact. It thereby cancels the success of Kant's aesthetic project.

Kant's Isis, whose inscription provides an example of the most sublime thought ever expressed, also provides a perfect example of a parergon . Placed in the margins, the footnote defines the main body of the text by marking its difference from it. The note, however, is not simply adjacent to and outside the text proper, for it is also part of and intrinsic to it. The footnote seems to be both subordinate to the text, a mere supplement to it, and also a necessary supplement. Its position at the bottom of the page suggests the former, but the fact that it deals with what Kant thinks is probably the most sublime thought ever expressed suggests the latter. Like Morrison's view of the Africanist presence within American culture, the parergon , which supposedly happens after the fact, is the "alien sensation" (71, §14) that enhances, if not produces, the identity of that to which it is subordinate. And the footnote's subject matter also exemplifies its parergonal status. The inscription (but isn't an inscription itself a parergon ?) that adorns Isis' temple attests to a veil no mortal can lift—and veils, like footnotes, are supposedly extrinsic, an accessory or ornament to the body they are said merely to cover. What, however, is the basis for deciding where, or if the veil ends and the body inside it begins? For the veil is not merely extrinsic to the goddess but is an integral and nondetachable part of her representation, and rather than illustrate the difference between inside and outside, primary and secondary, or disinterest and emotion, it occupies the very point at which the differences between them dissolve.

What is true of the parergon is also the case for the sublime: both name that moment within Kant's system at which the distinctions that are essential to judgments of taste break down. And the parergon , whose position marks it as adjacent to or outside the work of art, is also a metaphor for the sublime that, as a "mere appendix to the beautiful," functions as a supplement. Wherever they appear we find the attempt to fill in for something missing, a gulf that cannot be bridged, a place where aesthetic judgments threaten to collapse. The parergon reveals at the level of structure what emotion and the sublime reveal at the level of affect and theme: the complexity of the connection between the two terms of any opposition, be they form and content, intrinsic and extrinsic, or "pure" and "alien." Just as the parergon demonstrates the impossibility of discerning where the

"inside" begins and the "outside" ends, so the sublime, like emotion, demonstrates the inextricability of borders. Hence it testifies to what Isis' story affirms: the impossibility of detachment, and to what Morrison in Beloved calls "the join."

Two very different responses to loss are at issue here. A vocabulary of emotion and attachment, of bondage and boundarylessness, attends that of the sublime; the beautiful brings with it a wish for disinterest, independence, and autonomy. The beautiful conveys a notion of mourning as detachability, of losses effaced and covered up. The sublime, on the other hand, is the place where boundaries come apart and boundarylessness is at issue. It is the "ghost in the machine" that disturbs Kant's aesthetic—or anaesthetic—project, for the sublime not only usurps the priority of the beautiful but exposes the fragility of its claim to totality and disinterestedness. If for Kant aesthetic judgment requires an absolute lack of interest in the existence of the work of art (taste, he tells us, "is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest " (53, §5) and if, as Derrida reminds us, a "disinterested attitude is the essence of aesthetic experience," the sublime marks the failure of any judgment of taste based upon an aesthetic of detachment.^[18]

And it indicates a crucial absence. As "the concretization of a missing presence, the sign of what is there by not being there," the sublime is like a ghost in that it marks what has been excluded from the main body of the work and returns in an attempt to make up for its loss.^[19] Jacques Lacan reminds us of the commonly held belief that ghosts appear "when someone's departure from this life has not been accompanied by the rites that it calls for."^[20] They come back to keep us in touch with a history we can neither remember nor forget, with a past that refuses to die. And can be laid to rest only when the labor of mourning begins to transmit the silence they signify into speech. If the sublime appears to mark a trauma that exceeds language, it simultaneously impels and disables symbolization, and its effect is that we can never relinquish the attempt to find words for some of the unspeakable things that remain unspoken.

III—

Kant loves Isis for her unavail ability. She is the totality of all that was, is, and will be: no one can lift her veil and that is what makes her sublime. Isis appears (veiled) a second time in Kant's writing. In "On a Newly

Emerged Noble Tone in Philosophy" (1796), a polemic against romantic philosophers of feeling, he describes the veiled goddess as "the inner moral law in its inviolable majesty," and while Kant says that both he and the romantics (or "mystagogues") must "bend our knees" before her, he is suspicious of their claims to immediacy and of the danger that representation in images will displace philosophical principles.^[21] It might appear that these two manifestations of Isis present her under very different aspects, or with more than one veil. In the note to the Critique she becomes "Mother Nature" and stands for the ultimate truth of things, while in the later essay she personifies the moral law. If Kant were an ultimately dualistic philosopher we might wonder how she could play both roles. Yet as the Critique of Judgment makes clear, he wants to bridge the apparent gap between cognitive and moral domains. Isis can figure as an aesthetic idea for the truth of nature, for the moral law, or finally, for the very tentative connection between them that Kant wants to effect.

Derrida's parodic response to Kant's essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy" (1983) shows in part how Isis functions there. For although in The Truth in Painting Derrida never comments upon Isis' appearance in the third Critique —an extremely interesting omission given her parergonal position within the text and the centrality of this concept to Derrida's reading of it—in "An Apocalyptic Tone" he remarks in some detail upon "the intrigue of a certain veil of Isis."^[22] Derrida understands Isis exclusively as a "matter of the veil and of castration" (15) and even appears to link murder, castration, and femininity: he calls Isis "the universal principle of femininity and murderess of Osiris" (19). "Faced with Isis," he says, "I am going to expose myself to taking (and tying) up again with the threads of this intrigue and with the treatment of castration" (15).^[23] Faced with Isis, Derrida looks the other way.

In Kant's "On a Newly Emerged Tone," as in Derrida's "Apocalyptic Tone," Isis has neither existence nor interest apart from her veil. This veil plays a surprisingly large role in Kant's flirtation with Isis, given that he explicitly includes "drapery on statues" under the category of parerga (72, §14). In the case of Isis Kant would seem to insist, contrary to his more explicit aesthetics, that the parergon or frame cannot be eliminated from the figure or work. Indeed, Kant's criticism of the romantic philosopher of his day, whom he calls the "philosopher of intuition" (284) or "philosopher of vision" (285), is elaborated in terms of the latter's rapport with the veiled goddess. "The term 'Philosophy,'" Kant tells us, has "lost its

first meaning as a 'Scientific Wisdom of Life'" and "now implies the revelation of a mystery" (283). The "Philosopher by Inspiration" (283) refuses mediation and seeks direct contact with what the true philosophers—"those 'schoolmen' who proceed slowly and cautiously through criticism to knowledge" (284)—know to avoid. Believing himself in immediate and intuitive relation with the mystery, the romanticist tries to attain an intimate rapport with the goddess without the aid of conscientious, diligent labor. In the futile attempt to see directly into the unseeable, he hopes "to come so near to the goddess Wisdom that [he] can hear the rustling [Rauschen ] of her garment" (285). For although "the Platonic sentimentalist . . . 'cannot remove the veil of Isis, [he tries] to make it so thin [so dunne ] that one can divine the goddess beneath it' [unter ihm ]. How thin? Presumably still dense enough to make of that phantom [Gespenst ] whatever one likes" (285; emphasis mine).

The true philosopher, however, should place the law above and beyond personification, even that represented by the veiled goddess; recognize the difference between the moral law and the mystery of vision and contact; and realize that, as Derrida says, "the moral law never gives itself to be seen or touched" (13). Kant concludes: "the veiled goddess before whom both of us bend our knees is the inner moral law in its inviolable majesty. What we ought to do remains the same. Only: to reduce the moral law to logical conceptions is the philosophical procedure, to personify it in a veiled Isis is an aesthetic representation" (285). But Kant himself comes close to deviating from properly "philosophical procedure" through recourse to what he says distinguishes the "philosopher of intuition" from the "schoolmen": he personifies the sublime moral law (which may itself be the veiled truth of nature) as a veiled goddess.

Isis and her inscription are sublime because they manifest a certain reserve and distance: because she is past, present, and future, no one can lift her veil, that is, directly apprehend the totality she represents. Kant's Isis is impenetrable, and therein lies her power. She is herself the enigma she exhibits and she ensures the place of the unknowable by placing a frame around it, thereby giving its supposed inaccessibility limit and definition. But, as we have seen, Isis' veil raises the same questions that haunt the parergon and the sublime: is there a "real" ghost behind the veil or sheet that adorns it? Is the ghost identical with the veil that seems to conceal it; does anything lie beneath the veil? And what if Isis, exemplar

of the sublime, were indeed a ghost? Would the anonymous spectator really be able "to make of that phantom whatever one likes?" Kant and Derrida both assure us that it is dangerous, if not in fact a serious error, to get near enough to find out, that we should keep a proper distance and leave the veil intact.

Like Kant's notion of Isis, ghosts are (as Marjorie Garber reminds us) "often veiled, sheeted, and shadowy in form . . . a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss," and they appear in the place where they have not been acknowledged or admitted. Ghosts "always come back, but they are always already belated when they come—it is only when they return, re-venant , that they are ghosts, and carry the authority of their own belatedness."^[24] For example, in the numbers of a certain address: 124 Bluestone Road, the house in which Beloved takes place and for which, as for the third Critique , we sense a third term it cannot possess.^[25] For the number three simultaneously names what the house on Bluestone Road does not contain and signifies the return of that which renders detachment impossible. It also announces that, since there are definitely a lot more than two of us now, the ghost story can begin. Again.

IV—

Written while Beloved was nearing completion, Morrison's "Site of Memory" has something very different to tell us about the subject of veils, one that has nothing to do with notions of lack and castration or the question of veiled or unveiled truth. It is concerned not with the unspeakably good, but with the unutterably inhuman: The "veil" to which Morrison refers calls attention to those aspects of the slaves' experiences that their writing could not address. Morrison points out that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives do not describe the most unspeakable aspects of their history. And it is striking that the need to appear disinterested and objective, that is, to conform to a Kantian aesthetic, informs that omission. Morrison explains:

American slaves' autobiographical narratives were frequently scorned as "biased," "inflammatory," and "improbable." These attacks are particularly difficult to understand in view of the fact that it was extremely important for the writers to appear as objective as possible—not to offend the reader by being too angry, or by showing too much outrage, or by calling the reader names. As recently as 1966, Paul Edwards, who

edited and abridged Equiano's story, praises the narrative for its refusal to be "inflammatory."^[26]

Although the slaves' narratives had ample reason to maintain Kantian aesthetic standards, their motivation had perhaps more to do with survival than with the desire to adhere to established criteria of taste. Because black writers "knew that their readers were the people who could make a difference in terminating slavery," a great deal depended on "using their own lives to expose the horrors of slavery" (107), on doing so in a way that, as Edwards writes of Equiano, "puts no emotional pressure on the reader other than that which the situation itself contains" (106). And Morrison cites an 1836 review of Charles Bell's Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave that celebrates the narrative precisely for its objectivity: "We rejoice in the book the more, because it is not a partisan work . . . it broaches no theory in regard to [slavery], nor proposes any mode or time of emancipation" (106). Morrison emphasizes that slaves in their writing perforce not only demonstrated their ability to reason but also described their experiences while maintaining the very standards of taste Kant advocates in the third Critique . Even while they wrote of events that erode the possibility of trust in human reason and judgment, good taste required them to uphold it.

Although the slaves wrote thoughtfully and in great detail about their enslavement, Morrison hears the silence that lies at the heart of their narratives. The "monstrous features" of slavery, the most traumatic aspects of their experiences, went unwritten and unsaid. As in Kant, emotion needed to be excised, or in this case, kept under wraps. For Morrison, the narratives exhibit a profound reticence, a need to draw a veil over "proceedings too terrible to relate":

Whatever the level of eloquence or the form, popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of their experience. . . . Over and over, the writers pull the narratives up short with a phrase such as, "But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate." In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they "forgot" many other things. There was a careful selection of the instances that they would record and a careful rendering of those that they chose to describe. Lydia Maria Child identified the problem in her introduction to "Linda Brent's" tale of sexual abuse: "I am well aware that many will accuse me of in-

decorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled ; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I am willing to take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil drawn [aside]."

But most importantly—at least for me—there was no mention of their interior life. (109—10; my emphasis)

A veil had to be drawn over tales of monstrous, often overtly sexual abuse, as if survival depended upon keeping a veil, however fragile, between what could and could not be said. Thus what Morrison finds missing from the narratives is any trace of the slaves' "interior life." The monstrous and the evil need to be spoken, somehow, but they cannot be approached directly, any more than Kant's Isis can become present without an intermediary. The sublime re-emerges in this context through the metaphor of the veil, but here it is a border that overflows, exceeds, and refuses to stay within bounds. Like a sepulcher, it marks the place of traumas that can be symbolized only after the fact. For what remains veiled in one era comes back, as a ghost, to haunt us in another.

Morrison's sublime is not, like Kant's and Derrida's as well, conditioned and maintained by reserve, distance, or the need to keep the veil intact but refers instead to the other Isis, to the goddess of mourning that Kant's Isis veils. Here, in Lyotard's phrase, writing devotes itself "to marking on its body the 'presence' of that which has not left a mark."^[27] Morrison is also willing to find the traces and testify to the loss of a beloved body, however mutilated. "For me," she says, "a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman . . . my job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate'" (110). Ripping aside the veil does not reinstate the difference between "interior" and "exterior," but rather shows their interrelation, for what is "within," "the unwritten interior life of these people," cannot be separated from what is "without," those collective memories Morrison calls "the subsoil of my work" (111). In this case, the work of unveiling discloses the intensity of the connection that binds them. Like Lydia Maria Child, Morrison assumes the responsibility for encountering and trying to find words for "proceedings too terrible to relate." And it is this act of witnessing—in which language undertakes the work of mourning that an earlier epoch

had left undone and begins, in Morrison's words, to "properly [and] artistically" bury the "unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried"—to which Beloved attests.^[28]

V—

So the beginning of this was a woman who had not been able to come back from burying the dead. Unlike Hurston's protagonist Janie Woods, who at the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God has just returned from burying her husband, at the beginning of Beloved Sethe Suggs has not yet laid to rest her infant daughter.^[29] Her body lies beneath a headstone on which the word "Beloved" is engraved—because Sethe had no money she paid with her body for the headstone; the engraver said "You got ten minutes I'll do it for free" (one word was all he had time for)—and the grave is still open.^[30] If to leave unburied is, as Morrison suggests, to be buried "unceremoniously," without the proper rituals and observances, in Beloved writing becomes a funeral rite in which Morrison performs the labor of mourning that Isis enacts.

"Sixty Million / and more." A written number, with words below it that attest to that number's incalculability, appears on Beloved 's dedication page. Morrison begins by confronting the reader with a phrase that signifies excess: the number of slaves who died as a result of the Middle Passage. Beloved is dedicated to "more," to an unquantifiable surplus, a number that cannot be known. Asked in an interview in Time magazine if the number sixty million had been "proved historically," Morrison emphasizes the historian's uncertainty regarding the exact figure:

Some historians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were travel accounts of people who were in the Congo—that's a wide river—saying "we could not get the boat through the river, it was choked with bodies." That's like a logjam. A lot of people died. Half of them died in those ships. . . . I thought this has got to be the least read of all the books I'd written because it is about something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean it's national amnesia.^[31]

As Mae G. Henderson points out, Morrison's "accomplishment in this novel is precisely not to allow for the continuation of a 'national amnesia' regarding this chapter in America's history."^[32] Dedicated to the unnamed

dead, the phrase "sixty million / and more" presents itself as an epitaph on a nonexistent tombstone, commemorating the incalculability of black suffering and loss. At the heart of the novel lies a project familiar to us from discussions of the sublime: the process of translating and figuring events that exceed our frame of reference, and the need to attest to emotions that can be experienced only after the fact of their occurrence. Morrison's "and more" both denotes the impossibility of knowing just how many died as a result of slavery and refers to the surplus of "dead negroes' grief" (5) that, in part, is the subject of the novel. At issue is an aesthetics of the incalculable.

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom" (1). Beloved begins with a sentence that is not one. As Morrison observes in "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," the novel's second sentence "is a phrase that properly, grammatically belongs as a dependent clause with the first" (32). The novel commences by insisting upon a disconnection between phrases that should be joined. Putting a period in the place of a comma, Morrison activates a gap that she refuses to fill. Rather than mark a point of entry that would secure the differences between the work's lobby and its main body, the house and those it contains, Morrison's opening sentences are meant to confront "the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible" (32). The sentences do to the reader what the house does to those who seek to inhabit it: just as the narrative frame is meant to be "incomprehensible," so Sethe and Denver live in a house that, disrupted by "a baby's venom," is full of an incomprehensible presence it cannot contain. In each case the frame does not secure differences but rather calls into question the mere possibility of containment.

In her commentary upon Beloved 's first sentences in "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Morrison compares the house into which the reader is propelled to the body of a slave ship. We are meant to confront something that lies beyond our comprehension: the suffering of those who were "thrown into an environment completely foreign":

The reader is snatched, yanked . . . and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel's population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance—a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching—this kidnapping—propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the

sounds of the body of the ship itself may have changed. . . . Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the "author," with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey. (32–33)

Morrison's wager is on the possibility of a "shared experience" between the reader and the "novel's population," the recently freed slaves who live in and around 124. But if, like Kant, she links the experience of pain to a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure, unlike Kant she ensures the reader's emotional involvement in what she reads. Rather than maintain distance from personal or political trauma, the novel from the outset insists upon our proximity to it. While we are "preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world," Morrison supplies us with "a controlled diet of the incredible political world" (32), thereby calling attention to the intricacy of their connection. Rather than detach ourselves from a chapter of our history so horrendous as to be "unspeakable," Morrison insists that we encounter it. But how? The question Beloved addresses is the same as that which motivates the discourse of the sublime: how do we symbolize events that are defined by their very unrepresentability?

VI—

It is fundamental that the novel is set in Cincinnati in 1873 and takes place after the Civil War, during the period of its alleged reconstruction.^[33] It is not by chance that the story of what took place in "the interior life" of the slaves can be told only in its aftermath, nor is it by chance that a novel that treats events that, as Morrison says, "no one wants to remember" could begin to be written only more than one hundred years after their occurrence. Certain stories can be remembered only after the fact. As Dori Laub remarks of Holocaust testimonies: "these testimonials—even if they were engendered during the event—become receivable only today . . . it is only now, belatedly , that the event begins to be historically grasped and seen." Traumatic events create what Laub describes as an "historical gap" in the collective witness.^[34] And Cathy Caruth points out, "in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, [so] that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness": thus at the beginning of Beloved its

protagonists, years after their escape from slavery, are still numb from its effects.^[35] They are haunted by an excess of the past that can be neither forgotten nor clearly articulated in memory. There is no way for them to tell the "story" of events that not only have been omitted from history but that, owing to their traumatic nature, may be too terrible to be told; and what is crucial to the novel's narrative structure and plot is the way that it deals with that which lies beyond the threshold of representability.

The phenomenon of what is currently known as "post-traumatic stress disorder" was first studied after World War I.^[36] Faced with the onset of "war neuroses" in returning soldiers, in 1920 Freud defined trauma as "excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield," and remarked upon the compulsive reliving of the traumatic experience in the form of a memory that returns, often in the form of repetitive nightmares or flashbacks, against the victim's will:

[People] think the fact that the traumatic experience is forcing itself upon the patient is a proof of the strength of the experience: the patient is, one might say, fixated to his trauma. . . . I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neuroses are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking about it.^[37]

As in Lyotard's famous remarks about the sublime, trauma also attests to the fact that something unpresentable exists.^[38] At the beginning of the novel, 124 is consumed by a history that it cannot contain. The house is "so full of strong feeling" and "spite" that "there was no room for any other thing or body" (39), and Sethe's main concern—that of "keeping the past at bay" and protecting Denver "from the past that was still waiting for her" (42)—gives weight to Freud's conviction that the chief activity of trauma victims lies in "not thinking about it." The novel commences by linking "the unspeakable" to a past of such immeasurable horror that it cannot pass away: "every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable" (58).

If the sublime refers to a magnitude that leaks out of any container that would "keep it at bay," so in Beloved the past shatters narrative and characterological frames; it bursts into the present and plunges protagonist

and reader backwards, preventing a straightforward, chronological sequence of events. Unwanted memories of "unspeakable" events surge involuntarily into Sethe's consciousness. Living in a house constantly disrupted by the presence of the past, Sethe is also haunted by what she calls "rememory": spontaneous re-experience of occurrences so traumatic she can neither forget nor escape their effects. "Past errors" take "possession of the present" (256), and what returns like a ghost is history itself. Sethe tells Denver:

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. . . . It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. (35–36)

The past is permanently inscribed in the present and it appears suddenly, in unexpected times and places. Denver replies: "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies." And Sethe answers: "Nothing ever does" (36). Like Kant's sublime, in which an encounter with sheer magnitude shatters ordinary perceptions of space and time, the traumatic event also disrupts temporal boundaries. Because the past is always present, there is no future: the novel's protagonists are possessed by a past so catastrophic they can neither articulate its effects nor forget its scars. In this case, what cannot be remembered or forgotten is the history of a specific people, the untold tale of a tribe.

If, as Freud said, hysterics "suffer from reminiscences," trauma victims suffer from flashbacks.^[39] The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder differ from those of neurosis in that they do not involve repression or distortion. Rather, against the wishes of those it possesses, the trauma reappears in all its literality. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , traumatic events are "persistently re-experienced" in the form of "recurrent distressing dreams of the event," as "recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event," and/or as "feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring."^[40] Laub points out that trauma survivors live "with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and

is current in every respect" (69). Like the symptom of a trauma, Sethe's "rememory" is always present. In the following scene, perceptions of the present trigger flashbacks from the past:

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. . . . 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 splash 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 in that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. (6)

We will return to the question of hell's aesthetic status. For the moment, it is important to explore the effects of trauma upon symbolic processes. Like the sublime, which is defined by its capacity to overwhelm the subject and entails an experience for which there is no adequate form of presentation, trauma produces, in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase, "an impairment in the symbolization process itself."^[41]

After the First World War, Freud began to study war's psychological consequences. Responding to the same event and the failure of narrative that emerged from it, Walter Benjamin's "Storyteller" describes its impact upon speech. He observes that men returned from battle unable to speak about their experiences: "with the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable by the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?"^[42] Some experiences instill silence, not speech, and the legacy of traumatic events is to render problematic the possibility of their narration. Laub points out that "massive trauma precludes its registration; the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction" (57), and emphasizes that the psychic numbing that accompanies trauma is actually required to survive the experience. Trauma has the capacity to obliterate its own witness, for survival depends, at least in part, upon absenting oneself from the event even as one experiences it. The representation of trauma thus raises at the level of history the issue raised in aesthetics by the sublime: that of symbolizing

an event whose magnitude impedes its very symbolization. The traumatic events to which Beloved bears witness are defined by the fact that they require a particular kind of narration that will find a way to metabolize the repression of a terrible event. Sethe can no more simply "tell her story" than Morrison can represent the largely "unspeakable and unspoken" events of slavery. But how can we tell not only a story "no one wants to remember," but one that "nobody thinks about" and "nobody knows"?^[43]

The problem at the heart of the novel is knowing how to read the traces of a people whose death left no trace, who, "disremembered and unaccounted for" (274), left no story to be told. In an interview entitled "In The Realm of Responsibility," Morrison uses the phrase "nobody knows" while referring to the silence that surrounds the Middle Passage:

Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people. The people who arrived—there is lore about them. But nothing survives about . . . that.^[44]

Like Benjamin, she emphasizes that "nothing survives" simply because survival depends upon not telling about, or dwelling upon, this event:

I suspect the reason [that nothing survives] is that it was not possible to survive on certain levels and dwell on it. People who did dwell on it, it probably killed them, and the people who did not dwell on it probably went forward. I think Afro-Americans in rushing away from slavery, which was important to do—it meant rushing out of bondage into freedom—also rushed away from the slaves because it was painful to dwell there, and they may have abandoned some responsibilities in so doing. It was a double-edged sword, if you understand me. There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course there's a necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing the book, in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember. (5)

The story of the slaves who died in the Middle Passage is inaccessible not only because the event left no survivors, but because the experience of trauma entails a crisis in representation: as in the sublime, we encounter that which imperils, or impedes, speech. In assuming the responsibility for making it possible to remember a history "nobody thinks about,"

Morrison cannot simply tell the story of events that are available but forgotten, but rather must reconstruct, or invent, events that are accessible only as an omission and a gap. It is not a matter of simply substituting memory for forgetfulness or putting speech in the place of silence, for what has been "forgotten" was never fully present to begin with. The challenge at stake in Beloved , then, is not to recover a repressed or forgotten past, but rather to represent an absence, reconstruct a past that had no witnesses, and read the traces of a history that in fact may be unreadable.

Trauma may impede storytelling yet nonetheless impel it. On Sethe's back the anesthetized becomes the site of an aesthetic that has nothing whatever to do with the beautiful. If, according to the O.E.D. , the aesthetic pertains not only to interpretive activities but also (as in the Greek Aisthesis ) to "things perceptible by the senses," in Beloved the realm of the aesthetic cannot be perceived: it is figured by "a clump of scars" (18) that mutely bear witness to an unspeakable past. Sethe's "back skin had been dead for years" (18), a result of the savage beating she endured under slavery, and like Sethe herself at the beginning of the novel, it is incapable of feeling. In this case the unspeakable, that which cannot be told, is encoded in the scars on Sethe's back, which bears the traces, or marks left behind, of a history that announces its own unreadability. Here scars, a moment of the past made permanent, are inscriptions that take the place of stories, images of an illegible writing that nonetheless calls for interpretation. As Valerie Smith observes, "their symbolic power is evident in the number of times that others attempt to read them."^[45]

Just as Isis symbolizes "the inner moral law in its inviolable majesty" ("On a Noble Tone," 285), the marks on Sethe's back signify both the law's capacity to harm and the immorality of aesthetic or political judgments based solely upon perceptions of "the beautiful." That hell might be beautiful, a "pretty place" just like the ironically named Sweet Home, means that beauty cannot, as Kant would have it, be the symbol of "the morally good" (228, §59).^[46] The scars on her body attest to the inextricability of political and aesthetic domains, for they function both as the permanent reminder of Sethe's legal status as a slave, the visible sign that she was once a white man's property, and as an aesthetic site that calls for symbolic reconstruction by her friends and family.

That which consciousness cannot register is inscribed upon Sethe's body. This inscription, bearing the traces of an event that challenges and disrupts the powers of memory, calls for an aesthetics that no longer centers on the experience of the beautiful. Any approach that would deal with the horror and meaning of these marks would imply a critique of the beautiful and the aesthetic ideologies that flow from it. As Morrison says, "the concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it."^[47] In "Behind the Making of The Black Book ," Morrison criticizes the slogan Black Is Beautiful as an example of "instant and reactionary myth-making" (88) and remarks upon the political and ethical consequences of the reification of beauty:

I remember a white man saying to me that the killing of so many Vietnamese was "of course wrong, but worse was the fact that they are so beautiful." I don't know if there is a white mind; if there is—this is it. Too bad such beautiful people had to die. A mere question of aesthetics! . . . Physical beauty has nothing to do with our past, present or future. Its absence or presence was only important to them, the white people who used it for anything they wanted—but it never stopped them from annihilating anybody. (88–89)

Reading the marks on Sethe's back offers an alternative version of the aesthetic, one that refuses beauty as a criterion for judgment. For the scars, a sign of gratuitous brutality, also function as an aesthetic site in that they become the focus of interpretation and reconfiguration by three successive readers: a white girl, a black man, and a black woman.

If writing takes root in a wound, who will be able to read it? The novel proposes several scenes of reading the traces that remain from an unrepresentable past. Here reading is a means of refiguring history and allows the reader to interpret marks that are, strictly speaking, unreadable. Whereas the intention of her masters was to create a lasting sign of ownership, the scars on Sethe's back function as an aesthetic space for Amy, Paul D, and Baby Suggs, each of whom reads it in a different way. The aesthetic activity of reading calls the master's meaning into question by turning the significance of the event against the intentions of those who imposed it. Sethe's owners wished to leave her back a bloody mess as a reminder of her powerlessness and their power, yet her readers are able to find aesthetic form in the marks they leave and thus to rewrite the master's "text."

In the eyes of Amy, the white girl who helps Sethe escape, ministers to her wounds, and helps to deliver her daughter Denver, the whipped and bloody back is "a chokecherry tree":

See, here's the trunk—it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. (79)

Amy's reading of Sethe's wounds shows the connection between healing and interpretation. Envisioning the cluster of marks as a tree in full bloom provides a way of symbolizing the unspeakable. If the primal scene of trauma is itself unrepresentable, reading its traces creates the possibility of an alternative reality; turning the marks on Sethe's back from a bloody mess that reflects the white man's cruelty admits the possibility of change and makes it possible to survive the past. Aestheticizing wounds that have nothing whatever to do with beauty serves a political end: because Amy can find the outline of a tree in bloom in the wounds Sethe bears, the master's meaning need not be dominant. Amy's reading alludes to the unpresentable and in doing so transforms it.

Baby Suggs and Paul D offer alternative interpretations. For Baby Suggs, who cares for Sethe while the wounds are still open, Sethe's "flowering back" is a pattern of "roses of blood" (93), as if the signs of her brutal treatment can be endured and made communicable only by endowing them with an aesthetic form. For Paul D the marks are also open to interpretation: before he and Sethe make love for the first time he rubs "his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches. . . . And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, 'Aw, Lord, girl'" (17). (The next day, however, he feels different: "the 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" [21], and it will take the rest of the novel for him to change his mind.) In these scenes of reading, an aesthetic (perhaps we should call it a poetics of the unspeakable) comes into play that has nothing to do with disinterested pleasure. The reading that must be done here is one that is constantly brought back to the reality of trauma and loss. Interpretation

opens up a passage to the unsymbolizable; by refiguring Sethe's scars it provides access to powerful affects that otherwise would be unknowable. In Beloved the function of the aesthetic of reading is to de-anesthetize the terrible inscriptions and bring dead feelings back to life. Morrison's poetics, while not eradicating trauma, nonetheless bears witness to its horrifying and ineluctable facticity.

If trauma can turn people into ghosts, perhaps only a ghost story has the capacity to symbolize trauma. In Beloved the ghost that returns, first as a spirit that haunts the house at 124 and then as a young woman who appears to be Sethe's murdered, nameless daughter, is also a survivor of the Middle Passage, a representative of "the people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood" (181). She speaks "a traumatized language" that combines the experience of death with that of the Middle Passage. In "In the Realm of Responsibility," Morrison describes "the levels on which I wanted Beloved to function":

She is a spirit on the one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead. And she must function like that in the text. She is also another kind of dead which is not spiritual but flesh, which is, a survivor from a true, factual slave ship. She speaks the language, a traumatized language, of her own experience, which blends beautifully in her questions and answers, her preoccupations, with the desires of Denver and Sethe. So that when they say "What was it like over there?" they may mean—they do mean—"What was it like being dead?" She tells them what it was like being where she was on that ship as a child. Both things are possible. And there's evidence in the text so that both things could be approached, because the language of both experiences—death and the Middle Passage—is the same. (5)

Morrison makes the dead return as an ambiguous presence who, both ghost and flesh, has a name that is not a name. And she gives Beloved a voice—broken, incoherent, fractured—that testifies to what it cannot tell.

VII—

While some wounds impel interpretation, storytelling begins with an act of mourning. Benjamin chooses the story of the Egyptian King Psammenitus, related in Herodotus' Histories , to illustrate "the nature of true story-telling" (90), and it is perhaps not by chance that the story describes

the conditions in which a vanquished king begins to mourn. Beaten by the Persian King Cambyses and forced to watch the Persian triumphal procession, Psammenitus sees his daughter pass by as a slave and his son about to be executed. In the midst of other Egyptians lamenting the spectacle, Psammenitus is unmoved. "But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning" (90). Herodotus does not explain why Psammenitus begins to mourn only when he sees his servant, nor does Benjamin explain why he chooses a story of mourning to illustrate the idea of a story's immortality. Instead, he compares the story of Psammenitus to a seed that, enclosed within a pyramid, remains fruitful and alive: "it resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative powers to this day" (90). Unlike "information," which "does not survive the moment in which it was new," a true story "preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time" (90).

The seed, like the story, may live forever. And if the seed attains immortality through its entombment, the story's power also results from its proximity to death. "Death," according to Benjamin, "is at the very source of the story" (90): it sanctions "everything that the story teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death" (94). For Benjamin, the pyramid is to the seed as Herodotus' Histories is to the story of King Psammenitus: the book is a monument that preserves the story's life and ensures its transmission. The pyramid encloses the seed in the same way that a story encases those about whom it tells, for a pyramid, monument to death, is also the site where life is retained. A story, then, may function as the linguistic counterpart of a pyramid or tombstone: both ensure that someone, although dead, also remains alive. In both cases an intimate connection to death is the condition for longevity.

In Beloved , as in the myth of Isis, the act of mourning parallels that of storytelling. Sethe cannot begin to let go of the past until she is able to tell stories about it, and Beloved's return allows that process to begin. As a silent figure from another time and place, neither wholly alive nor wholly dead, Beloved provokes in others both the desire to tell and the need to enact what they cannot recall. She is the medium through which, in Shoshana Felman's phrase, "what is not available in words, what is denied, what cannot and what will not be remembered or articulated,

nonetheless gets realized" (267). Her ability to listen helps create the possibility of narrative. And her presence at 124 enables Sethe to move from the position of the one about whom stories are told to the active position of speaker and storyteller.

Marks give rise to stories and to trauma, although in different ways. In a community of slaves, however, they may also function as the only available symbols of identity. In Beloved marks substitute for names and sometimes supply the sole means of recognizing blood kin. In response to Beloved's questions, Sethe suddenly remembers her mother and the circumstances in which she learned how to recognize her: she remembers the brand, "a circle and cross burnt right in the skin" (61), that signifies her mother's position as a slave. And the first story she tells is of how her mother transformed the mark on her body into a name that allowed Sethe to know her. Pointing to the brand, her mother says: "I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can't tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark" (61). Behind one scar are the traces of another. In Beloved's presence, Sethe begins to tell her daughters about the marks that have made her who she is. She remembers another story, told to her by Nan after her mother's death. In a language Sethe had forgotten she ever knew, Nan tells her how she received her name:

She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe." (62)

Nan's narrative links the act of naming to that of marking, as if to tell, or name, were to imprint one's intentions upon the body of another. "Telling," in this context, implies the power to name rather than be named, the ability to give meaning to scars rather than merely bear them.

Sethe's name, Nan says, is "the name of the black man," and in an interview Morrison explains what bearing such a name implies: "If you come from Africa, your name is gone. It is particularly problematic because it is not just your name but your family, your tribe. When you die, how can you connect with your ancestors if you have lost your

name?"^[48] If one consequence of coming from Africa is that "your name is gone," the name "Sethe" carries with it a specific legacy, for instead of signifying identity and familial relation it points to the loss of connection and the destruction of family ties. Receiving "the name of the black man" is to bear a name that signifies absence and loss. Continuing her discussion of the problem of having, or writing about, an African name, Morrison remarks that in Song of Solomon she used "biblical names to show the impact of the Bible on the lives of black people, their awe and respect for it coupled with their ability to distort it for their own purposes," and also "used some pre-Christian names to give the sense of a mixture of cosmologies."^[49] It appears that she has employed this technique in choosing Sethe's name as well, for Sethe signifies the novel's relation to a variety of religious and mythic subtexts.^[50] Mae Henderson points out that Sethe "recalls the Old Testament Hebrew name of 'Seth,' meaning 'granted' or 'appointed' . . . (Eve named her third born Seth, saying 'God has granted me another child in the place of Abel.') In this instance, it would seem that Sethe signifies the child whose life was spared or 'granted' by her mother, who did not keep the offspring of the white men who forced themselves upon her."^[51] In addition, Sethe recalls the Greek river Lethe , which signifies forgetfulness and rhymes with "death." Perhaps most importantly, however, the name links Sethe's story to that of Isis, for Seth is also the name of Osiris' brother and murderer. But if Sethe's name resembles that of Osiris' ancient enemy, what she does re-enacts Isis' role and function: like Isis, Sethe laments the dead's passing and lays them to rest. Whereas Kant, even while citing Isis' inscription, remains fixated on her veil and Derrida fears her as a murderess, Morrison performs the rites for which Isis was renowned: celebrating and burying a beloved body.

Beloved's return is the condition for that process to begin. While at the beginning of the novel the white man makes the marks that Amy, Baby Suggs, and Paul D may read but not write, Beloved's presence allows the protagonists to shift position and begin to speak, signifying the transition from reading the marks the other has made to telling the tale of that by which they have been marked. For Sethe, answering Beloved's questions about the past is "an unexpected pleasure" (58); telling her stories becomes "a way to feed her" (58). Beloved is the absent third that is missing from 124, and her insatiable hunger for stories prompts Sethe's and Denver's speech and Paul D's memory. Her presence makes it possible for Sethe

to tell the story of being black, a woman, and a mother under slavery; for Denver to reconstruct the story of her birth; and for Paul D to retrieve the feelings he had kept locked in "the tobacco tin lodged in his chest" (113), the place where a real heart used to be. Through their relation to Beloved, the past Sethe and Paul D have tried to "beat back" returns. As Paul D tells Stamp Paid, "She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember" (234).

VIII—

Beloved enacts the sublime. Appearing in the margins and signifying the presence of the marginal, she also signifies that which is missing or absent and which, like Kant's citation of Isis' inscription, is placed in the margins but nonetheless returns. Just as Kant relegates the sublime to a subordinate position from which it nonetheless escapes, so Beloved betokens the excessiveness of a history that cannot be presented as such. If the novel is about the possibility of addressing the magnitude of a horror that defies representation, Beloved is the figure through which the reader, like the protagonists, may encounter that horror. And if trauma raises in history the same issues that the sublime raises in aesthetics—the experience of an event whose magnitude exceeds representation—Beloved is the figure that attests to that which cannot be figured. Symbolizing the precise opposite of her name, she marks a surplus that exceeds speech but nonetheless impels it.

As both a figure for the border and a borderline figure, Beloved systematically disrupts temporal, spatial, and physical boundaries. Through her Morrison sets up and calls into question a series of oppositions: between life and death, past and present, individual and collective. When she was simply a ghost Beloved haunted 124 and kept its boundaries in constant upheaval; as an incarnate ghost she is quite literally the past embodied and she continues to displace the boundaries of those who reside within 124.^[52] Because of Beloved, for example, Paul D first moves into the margins and finally leaves the house; at the same time she draws Sethe and Denver into ever-deepening intimacy. Bringing back to life a past that cannot be kept separate from the present, she conflates what ordinarily would be distinct temporal domains. At once the materialization of Sethe's personal history and a symbol for the institution of slavery, Beloved dramatizes the fragility of the line that divides the realms of past

and present; indeed she is a liminal figure who always stands on, and is a figure for, the border.

To tell (or invent) such a "story" involves the presentation of absence, and Beloved is the symbol of absence around which meaning and memory can coalesce. Through her the characters are able to enter into a relationship with loss, for she allows access to a past that is, strictly speaking, irretrievable. At the level of character, Beloved enacts those qualities Morrison finds essential with respect to style: "My language," she told an interviewer, "has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it."^[53] As the signifier of absence, Beloved allows both characters and reader a point of entry to that which has been absent in our history.

What is lost must be re-found before it can be relinquished. Sethe's relation to Beloved replicates Isis' relation to Osiris: the body cannot be mourned, nor can the story of its loss be told, until its fragments have been found. For Isis, whose words "maketh the dead live" and whose inscription epitomizes Kant's sublime, also performs the work of mourning: she discovers the members of Osiris' body, builds sepulchers to mark the place of their burial, and finds the words in which to lament his loss. Recovering the fragments of a beloved body, or in this case the fragments of a dispersed and ruptured past, shows the connection between the ritual of mourning and the art of storytelling, for each is a way of keeping the dead alive in memory. Burial performs at the level of ritual what storytelling enacts at the level of language; neither seeks to replace or recapture what has been lost but is rather a process of commemorating and symbolizing our attachment to it. Here memory bears witness to an irrecoverable past, and burying the dead "with proper and artistic ceremony" is a matter of burying their remains wherever they are found, resisting the wish to make of the pieces a unified whole or to bring the dead back to life. As Isis finds Osiris' dismembered body, so Beloved 's protagonists encounter a repressed and disconnected history.

"Only when the survivor knows he is being heard will he stop to hear—and listen to himself" (71). Laub's account of the role hearing plays in analytic work with Holocaust survivors describes Beloved's function with respect to Denver, Paul D, and Sethe. If, as Amy tells Sethe, pain is "good for you. More it hurts more better it is. Can't nothing heal without pain, you know" (78), Beloved enacts that precept: she brings the protagonists into intimate relation with their pain and one another. Susan Bowers points out that "contemporary research in treatment for

post-traumatic stress syndrome indicates that the most crucial part of healing is the unavoidable confrontation with the original trauma and feeling the pain again," and Beloved's return allows that process to begin.^[54] For each of the residents of 124, responding to Beloved addresses his or her most intense anguish. Sethe wants to forget having her breast milk stolen and her back beaten to a bloody pulp, murdering her infant daughter to keep her from being enslaved. Paul D wants to forget witnessing the abuse of his fellow slaves at Sweet Home, wearing a bit in his mouth, and working in a chain gang. Denver so desperately wants to forget the rumors she has heard about her younger sister's death that she loses her hearing and leaves school rather than confront suspicious schoolmates. The characters' relationship to Beloved, who symbolizes what in history remains unseen, is the condition for a collective work of mourning to begin.

Beloved both performs the work of mourning and revises Freud's theory of it. As early as Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud emphasized that "mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivor's memories and hopes from the dead."^[55] In his influential essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) he continues to stress that mourning entails the ego's progressive detachment from its "lost objects."^[56] As distinct from the "pathological condition" of melancholia, in which the ego establishes "an identification . . . with the abandoned object" (249) and which, Freud says, "behaves like an open wound" (253), mourning accomplishes the "detachment of the libido"; once it "is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again" (245). For Freud the work of mourning and that of regaining autonomy are one and the same; he defines "normal" mourning as that state in which the ego is able "to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished" (255). As late as 1926, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety Freud continues to insist that successful mourning is a matter of dissolving the ties that bind:

Mourning occurs under the influence of reality-testing; for the latter function demands categorically from the bereaved person that he should separate himself from the object, since it no longer exists. Mourning is entrusted with the task of carrying out this retreat from the object in all those situations in which it was the recipient of a high degree of cathexis. That this separation should be painful fits in with what we have just said, in view of the high and unsatisfiable cathexis of longing which is concentrated on the object by the bereaved person during the

reproduction of the situations in which he must undo the ties that bind him to it.^[57]

Published ten years after Freud's essay on mourning and also written in the aftermath of World War I, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) portrays a moment in which Mrs. Ramsay, anxious about her children's late return from an afternoon exploring the edge of the cliffs, is unable to believe that they may come to any serious harm: "after all," she reasons, "holocaust on such a scale was not probable. They could not all be drowned."^[58] Woolf's ironic comment (for, unlike her protagonist, she knew full well the likelihood of holocaust) is intensified by Morrison's insistence that catastrophes of such improbable scale do indeed occur and thereby makes explicit a question Freud never entertains: how do we mourn a loss whose magnitude renders it unspeakable? Freud assumes that all losses can be mourned. He does not envision the idea of losses so immense that they may exceed our ability to mourn or represent them. And although he might acknowledge that in mourning we transfer the love previously felt for the dead to the living, his exclusive emphasis upon the process of detachment precludes awareness of what Beloved affirms: that mourning consists in sustaining, rather than severing, our continuing love for the dead. The novel not only calls into question Freud's belief that the ego's detachment from its beloved objects is the hallmark of successful mourning but demands a very different account of mourning, one that depends upon affirming and symbolizing our connection to the past.^[59]

IX—

The sublime attests to this: there is something that cannot be presented. There are also losses that cannot be mourned by a process of separation and detachment such as Freud describes. Just as Isis memorializes Osiris' body by arranging sepulchers to mark the sites of his burial, so Beloved functions as a monument that marks the place of what has passed away. Here mourning does not transcend loss but rather imparts a stronger sense of it. If Kant would ban attachment in the name of an economy of disinterestedness and if the sublime continually refers to attachments and emotions that his aesthetic defends against, the act of mourning—here understood as bearing witness to bonds that time cannot destroy—affirms those aspects of the sublime that Kant will not admit.

In Beloved mourning becomes possible only when the protagonists are able to symbolize and acknowledge their connection to the past and to one another.^[60] Here writing offers a strategy for prolonging attachment, a means of deferring radical separation until the dead have been embraced, if not restored. In the three successive monologues that occur near the end of the novel and present the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199) of the women of 124, Morrison does not so much speak the unspeakable as push language into border zones that welcome what cannot, but must, be said. At issue in each monologue is the task of articulating, at whatever cost, the extremity and depth of attachment; in each Sethe, Denver, and finally Beloved are able to put their love into language. Each section moves a little farther from narrative, becoming more like music, emphasizing tone and rhythm rather than meaning. In these most poetic sections of the text, mourning becomes synonymous with love's articulation, asserting an intimacy with the dead that proclaims its existence in the here and now, preserving the characters' relatedness to one another in a continuous present in which time's ability to erode connections is denied. Like Isis' songs for her dead brother-lover, loss expresses itself as pure lamentation. Mourning does not "detach the survivors' memories and hopes from the dead," as Freud would have it, but rather underscores the durability of their attachment. In these passages Beloved's return has allowed each character to speak her love and her loss, at first separately and then, at the end, as one. The first is Sethe's, the second is Denver's, the third is Beloved's. A final passage fuses all three.

"Beloved, she my daughter. She mine" (200). In Sethe's monologue, words function as caress and as lament. Sethe begins by explaining that she can speak to Beloved without explanation: "She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing" (200). Beloved already knows everything Sethe thinks and feels: there is no need for narrative. Her presence makes it safe for Sethe to remember. In relation to the daughter who is an intimate part, if not the embodiment of her past, Sethe can relive memories that have had to be hidden: "But you was there and even if you too young to memory it, I can tell it to you" (202). And so she tells Beloved about her longing for her own mother, the rape of her breast milk, the escape from Sweet Home, and finally, about her act of murder. Until her reunion with Beloved, "my mind was homeless . . . I couldn't lay down nowhere in peace, back then. Now I can. I can sleep

like the drowned, have mercy. She come back to me, my daughter, and she is mine" (204). A slave owns nothing, including her body; Sethe's use of the possessive pronoun thus proclaims that she is no longer a slave. Knowing what it means to be property, to exist "without the milk that belongs to you" (200), makes Sethe's insistence that Beloved is "mine" all the more poignant. But Sethe does not conceive of her relationship to Beloved as a form of ownership, for if Beloved belongs to Sethe, Sethe also belongs to Beloved: "when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours" (203).

Denver's monologue expresses her fear of Sethe, for she believes that her mother might kill her, as she did Beloved, and her longing for her father. While Sethe remembers being motherless, Denver, also orphaned, cherishes the details about her father she's garnered from her grandmother, Baby Suggs. She describes her daddy as "an angel man," hopes that Beloved has "come to help me wait for my daddy" (208), and plans to protect Beloved from Sethe "till my daddy gets here to help me watch out for Ma'am and anything come in the yard" (207). Most of all, however, this section expresses Denver's love for Beloved, whose blood she swallowed "right along with my mother's milk" (205) and who has been her secret companion since she was little. Like Sethe, Denver affirms the depth and intensity of their connection: "And I do. Love her. I do. She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She's mine, Beloved. She's mine" (209).

"I am Beloved and she is mine" (210). This monologue is not narrative—as Barbara Hernstein Smith says, narrative consists of "someone telling someone else that something happened"—for the speaker has no clearly defined, separate identity and cannot be described as "someone."^[61] From the first phrase, this section emphasizes the degree to which "she" does not exist apart from her fusion with Sethe: "I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing" (210). Sethe, however, is both Beloved's real-life mother and the mother of a child at sea on a slave ship, suggesting the extent to which Beloved's subjectivity, bound up with her ancestors and to a diffuse, unrepresentable history, is not one. Her voice speaks for a people, across space and time: it is a composite, both personal and collective, joining the tale of a survivor of the Middle Passage with that of the preconscious "consciousness" of a murdered child.

Beloved's chapter contains no punctuation. Paratactic rather than syntactic, it is both ruptured and connected, employing spaces between linguistic units rather than grammatical signs to indicate the relations between words. It is written entirely in the present tense because for Beloved there is neither past nor future: she exists in a perpetual present in which "it is always now" (210). And, as Valerie Smith points out, "only the first person pronoun and the first letter in each paragraph are capitalized."^[62] These pages do not narrate a discrete event or series of events but rather mark the point at which narration becomes impossible. The account to which Beloved refers—crouching in the slave ship with a dead man on top of her; wanting to die, but not dying; watching her mother "go into the sea" rather than continue to live as a slave; waiting on a bridge for her mother's face "to come through the water" (213)—blends the real and the fantastic and insists upon the omnipresence of the unsayable.

The account chronicles the sensory impressions of a child trapped in the hold of a slave ship while emphasizing that Beloved is both the survivor of the Middle Passage and Sethe's real-life daughter. Because crouching inside the slave ship is also being coiled within her mother's womb, waiting to die and waiting to be born converge. This section expresses the child's loss and abandonment when "the woman whose face she wants" drowns herself "they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in the little hill is gone she was going to smile at me she was going to a hot thing" (212). Beloved's mother has done to herself what Sethe will eventually do to Beloved: kill herself rather than be enslaved. Beloved waits "on the bridge because she is under it" (212) and eventually goes into the water in the hope of finding her mother: "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" (213). There is no longer a difference between "I," "me," "she," and "her"; the last "paragraph" conflates Beloved's consciousness with that of the abandoned baby. She comes out of the water to find her way to the house she had heard the other whisper about and, seeing Sethe's face, recognizes it as her "own": "Sethe's is the face that left me . . . she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing" (213). Beloved's monologue ends by celebrating her joy in a union that has been endlessly deferred.

At the level of style the monologues also move toward merger, for each is less differentiated than the one preceding it. In the fourth and final section, for example, the voices become a chorus in which the characters, speaking in union, declare their love for one another. Written without quotation marks or paragraphs, this section looks like a poem: its eight stanzas are composed of single lines and the concluding verses contain no punctuation. Here consolation depends upon an affirmation of attachment and the fusion of individual identities. The monologue begins with Beloved's proclamation that when Sethe "smiles at me . . . it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine" (214). It ends only when the three voices have become indistinguishable:

Beloved
You are my sister
You are my daughter
You are my face; you are me
I have found you again; you have come back to me
You are my Beloved
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine

You forgot to smile
I loved you
You hurt me
You came back to me
You left me

I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine (216–17)

Only when their voices merge can the characters begin to separate from the past and from each other; only when the past's legacy has been acknowledged can the process of letting go of it begin. Thus is the work of mourning accomplished.^[63]

But although their merger is necessary, the novel does not end with unequivocal celebration. The union eloquently celebrated in these passages leads toward a symbiosis so intense that Sethe and Beloved become "locked in a love that wore everybody out" (243). Obsessed with Beloved,

Sethe excludes Denver, stops going to work, and starves herself so Beloved will have enough to eat. Denver realizes that Sethe will die unless she does something: "Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world and go ask somebody for help" (243). Knowing that "nobody was going to help her unless she told it—told all of it" (253), she confides in Janie, the Bodwins' maid. Once again, an act of "telling" allows the possibility of repair. When Janie spreads the word that "Sethe's dead daughter, the one whose throat she cut, had come back to fix her" (255), the community reverses its former antagonism and comes to Sethe's aid. They organize an exorcism and arrive at 124 to free Sethe.

The last part of the novel is structured around a series of reversals, repetitions of earlier scenes that lead to a different outcome. While earlier the community had failed to warn Sethe of the slave captor's approach and thus were indirectly responsible for Beloved's murder, now their generosity prevents Sethe from re-enacting what seems to be the same event. Holding Beloved's hand, Sethe stands at the door to greet the women who assemble outside 124, and when their voices join together to build "the sound that broke the back of words," Sethe trembles "like the baptized in its wash" (261).

In this instance, hearing is a metaphor for rebirth. When Mr. Bodwin drives into the yard to pick up Denver, Sethe, thinking he is Schoolteacher coming for her children, runs at him with an ice pick. This time, the community intervenes. Led by Denver, the first to realize what Sethe intends, the women make "a hill of black people" (262) and wrestle Sethe to the ground. In the process Beloved disappears. She is never seen again.

The community's intervention is not a sufficient exorcism of the past. In the novel's final scene, Paul D returns to 124 and "his coming is the reverse route of his going" (263). Finding Sethe lying on her mother's bed, lamenting the loss of her "best thing" (272), his love brings her back to life. He wants to rub her feet (as Amy did when Sethe gave birth to Denver), to "put his story next to hers" (273). Once again, language symbolizes attachment, for the proximity of one story to another is the most appropriate figure for their intimacy. Perhaps the protagonists can now begin to possess the past, rather than be possessed by it.

X—

"I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil." Morrison neither raises nor lowers the veil but instead attests to the

uncanny border between memory and forgetfulness. The veil, like a bridge, connects the familiar to whatever lies beyond, and the novel makes visible both the struggle to remember and the necessity to forget. Lifting the veil drawn over "proceedings too terrible to relate" also means keeping it in place: at the novel's conclusion the community forgets Beloved "like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep" (275). Every trace of her is "disremembered and unaccounted for." All that remains is "weather," and the novel ends by celebrating and lamenting her passing:

They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing she said. . . . By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. (274–75)

If, having learned to remember, Sethe, Paul D, and Denver can now begin to forget, the reader has been placed in relation to a hitherto unwitnessed history and comes to bear the burden of a "rememory" she has not directly experienced. The story remains in the present tense.

The last two pages state "It was not a story to pass on" twice; in a third version the phrase becomes, "This is not a story to pass on" (274–75). The injunction, which reflects the community's response to Beloved's passing, functions as a chorus that, as Valerie Smith points out, emphasizes "the unspeakability of the subject" and points to "the novel itself, naming the difficulties that attend the project of writing a novel about slavery" (350). The ambiguity of the phrase "to pass on"—meaning both "it was not a story to let die" and "it was not a story to keep alive"—suggests the complexities of transmitting an account that reflects, and indeed comments upon, its own incommunicability. Because "to pass on" means both to transmit and to forget, the novel concludes by "passing on" the very story it proclaims ought not to be transmitted. The phrase's multiple meanings also attest to the untellability of the story that has just been told, for the attempt "to pass on" this story is to occupy the shifting boundary between what can and cannot be said. Morrison's project has been to tell something

that resists transmission but must be told, and hearing it links the reader to the untellable. If the community, having confronted the horror of its personal and collective history, has earned the right to forget the past and claim the future, the reader has not. The shift from "It" to "This" and the change in tense from "was" to "is" in the last version of the sentence reflects the shift in responsibility from the community, whose survival depends upon letting go of the past and must now put the story in the past tense, to the reader, who is enjoined not to let the story die. Morrison has refused to pass on "the national amnesia" regarding the subject of slavery in American consciousness. The burden of remembering now depends on us: this is not a story for us to pass on.

Asked about Beloved's past, Paul D says that all she ever said was "something about stealing her clothes and living on a bridge" (235). Beloved tells Paul D she came to 124 because "when I was at the bridge, she told me" (65), and her monologue reveals that she waits "on the bridge because she is under it" (212). The girl who lived on a bridge waiting for a face in the water functions both as a bridge within the novel and as a figure for the novel itself. As the novel's protagonist, Beloved's symbolic function of otherness connects the characters to repressed aspects of the self and to a traumatic past: she is the missing link that fills the gap in 124 and, as Bowers points out, enables "passage to knowledge of the other side that otherwise would be impossible."^[64]

But a bridge is also a transitional space between realms that otherwise would remain incommensurable, a place in between where we can go either way, changing direction at any time. Like a bridge, Beloved marks the distance between aesthetic and political domains even as it reveals the profound link between them. Like a bridge, it demonstrates the connection between different dimensions even as it attests to what remains unbridgeable, to events "too terrible to relate." Just as reading the scars on Sethe's back signified a brutal political reality at the same time that it changed the meaning of those marks by giving them aesthetic pattern and shape, so Beloved demonstrates fiction's capacity to change the meaning of the master's text. Shoshana Felman remarks that "the question for contemporary testimonial narrative is, then, how can it bridge , speak over the collapse of bridges, and yet, narrate at the same time the process and event of the collapse" (199), and Beloved may be seen as an exemplary response to this challenge. Just as the character Beloved bridges the distance between the past and present, the dead and the living, between stories that can and

cannot be told, so the novel creates links between self and other, connecting the reader to buried aspects of the past and unacknowledged chapters of our history as well as to the unpresentable dimension of language that lies within language itself. The novel testifies to its own unspeakability and, if it does not alter the past, it transforms our perception of it, thereby holding out the promise of change in the collective future we create.

If Isis, whose inscription for Kant exemplifies the sublime, is equally important as a goddess of mourning, Beloved enacts a work of mourning like that of Isis. Just as Isis buries the fragments of Osiris' body and keeps his memory alive in language, so Morrison bequeaths a "proper and artistic burial" to the "dismembered and unaccounted for," the sixty million and more to whom the novel is dedicated. And if burial's purpose is both to reaffirm our bond with the dead and ritually to mark the place where a beloved body lies, Beloved functions as a hitherto absent burial ground, a monument occupying the site of an unmarked grave. Like an inscription on a headstone, the novel commemorates and memorializes the life and death of those who were not, but should have been, loved. At the end of the novel, the narrator suggests that we can only "call," or enter into a relationship with, that which we can also name: "how can they call her if they don't know her name?" (274). By endowing the word "beloved" with multiple significance, Morrison allows access to that which previously was unnamed. As Gwen Bergner points out, "the word 'beloved' names not only the girl baby's return; in the funeral service the word addresses the mourners of the dead," and the novel passes on that name to the reader, who comes to occupy the position of the one who is addressed.^[65] The word accrues significance as the novel progresses: what was at first a title becomes a single word on a headstone of a murdered infant, then the name given to the returned ghost of that same child, and finally an injunction.

But the inscription on the headstone that gives Beloved its title and initiates its plot also alludes to its epigraph:

I will call them my people,
Which were not my people;
And her beloved;
Which was not beloved.

This quotation from Romans 9:25, which repeats with little difference a passage from the Old Testament book of Hosea, refers to the Apostle Paul's

discussion of the Gentiles, who, hitherto ridiculed and despised, have become acceptable. The epigraph prefigures what the novel will perform: reclaiming a lost tribe and calling them by name, it asks us to do what Beloved asks of Paul D: "You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name" (117). In this case, the name is both the text's title and last word, a word that, when divided, functions as an imperative, affirming that what was once reviled must now be loved .

At the end of an interview, Morrison describes the qualities she consistently discovers in African-American writing. Comparing the satisfaction and closure classical music gives rise to with the "hunger and disturbance that never ends" produced by jazz, Morrison likens "what black writers do" to black music:

Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you. Spirituals agitate you. No matter what they are saying about how it is all going to be. There is something else there that you want from the music. I want my books to be like that—because I want the feeling of something held in reserve and the sense that there is more—that you can't have it all right now.^[66]

Morrison's fidelity to the edge, to writing on and about it, keeps us on edge too. Emphasizing its own refusal of closure, the end of Beloved exemplifies the qualities Morrison finds in jazz:

Take Lena [Horne] or Aretha [Franklin]—they don't give you all, they only give you enough for now. Or the musicians. One always has the feeling, whether it is true or not, they may be absolutely parched, but one has the feeling that there's some more. They have the ability to make you want it, and remember the want. That is a part of what I want to put into my books. They will never fully satisfy—never fully.^[67]

Summoning the traces of the dead, of that which, unburied, comes back to haunt, Beloved ends by insisting not only that we "remember the want," but also that we must never forget.