1. Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 3. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

2. The word "spook," a synonym for "ghost," is also used by whites as a derogatory term for Negroes. Dictionary of American Slang , ed. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, 2d ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 510.

3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

4. While in Playing in the Dark Morrison explores representations of blackness in the white imagination, in a recent essay bell hooks examines the obverse ("Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination," in Cultural Studies , ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler [New York: Routledge, 1992]). She argues that for blacks whiteness is both synonymous with, and a symbol for, terror (which, as Burke tells us, is "the ruling principle of the sublime"). She also emphasizes that terror and whiteness are central to Beloved : "in Morrison's Beloved the memory of terror is so deeply inscribed on the body of Sethe and in her consciousness, and the association of terror with whiteness is so intense, that she kills her young so they will never know the terror" (345).

5. In "On the Backs of Blacks," Time Magazine , special issue "The New Face of America," Fall 1993, Toni Morrison continues to examine the strategies through which racism and "race-talk" create the appearance of unity. Here she maintains that "although U.S. history is awash in labor battles, political fights and property wars among all religious and ethnic groups, their struggles are persistently framed as struggles between recent arrivals and blacks. In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American" (57).

6. Plato, The Republic , trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 74.

7. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911), 1:17.

8. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride , ed. and trans. J. Gwyn Griffiths (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1970), 145-6; chapters 15-16 are devoted to Isis' adventures while she searches for Osiris; chapter 9 mentions the inscription on Isis' temple at Saïs (131). For a description of the myth and cult of Isis and Osiris in relation to Plutarch's text, see Griffiths's commentary, 18-75.

9. James Frazer, The New Golden Bough , ed. Theodore H. Gaster (New York: New American Library, 1964), 388.

10. For a different interpretation of the Isis-Osiris myth, see Jean-Joseph Goux, "The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the 'Exchange of Women,'" trans. Maria Amuchastegui, Caroline Benforado, Amy Hendrix, and Eleanor Kaufman, Differences 4, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 40-75.

11. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 337.

12. Frazer, New Golden Bough , 143-44.

13. Graves, White Goddess , 232.

14. Ra had grown old and Isis wanted to become mistress of the earth and a mighty goddess, which she could do only by discovering the sun god's secret name. She took some of Ra's saliva, moistened dust and fashioned a snake with it, and laid it in his path. The serpent struck Ra as he passed by and the god suffered terribly from the poison. Ra realized that he was near death, but Isis promised to save him if he would reveal his name to her, and when he consented she immediately uttered the incantation that relieved and healed him. See Budge, Osiris , 188.

15. Jacques Derrida's analysis of the notion of the parergon in The Truth in Painting , trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) allowed me to develop this line of thinking. Derrida, however, does not remark the relation Kant establishes between "emotion," parerga , and the sublime. And while Derrida argues that "the whole frame of the analytic of the beautiful functions, with respect to that the content or internal structure of which is to be determined, like a parergon " (71), my point is that the sublime frames, and thus is parergonal to, Kant's "Analytic of the Beautiful."

16. Kant's comments about pure and mixed colors in the third Critique should be read in the context of his 1764 remarks about race in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime , trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). There he declares that: "The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. . . . The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort

of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible in human nature" (110-11).

17. Derrida, The Truth in Painting , 63.

18. Ibid., 39.

19. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 129.

20. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 38.

21. Immanuel Kant, "On a Newly Emerged Noble Tone in Philosophy," Kant , ed. and trans. Gabriele Rabel (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 285. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text. Immanuel Kant, "Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie," in Immanuel Kant's Werke , ed. Ernst Cassirer (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1914), 6:478-96.

22. Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., The Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 2 (1984): 15. Subsequent references to this essay will be in the text.

23. Sarah Kofman, like Derrida, also refers to Isis as "the goddess who murdered Osiris" ("The Economy of Respect: Kant and Respect for Women," Social Research 49, no. 2 [Summer 1982]: 400). Her discussion of Isis' appearance in Kant's "On a Noble Tone" not only repeats Derrida's error regarding Isis' actual role with respect to Osiris but, like Kant, she wants "to make of that phantom whatever [she] likes": according to Kofman, Isis is ''a phallic castrating mother" (400), the "personification of the law" (402).

24. Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers , 130, 172.

25. Barbara Johnson, in a lecture on African-American women's fiction at Harvard University in December 1990, discussed the significance of the missing "three" in the address of the house on Bluestone Road.

26. Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir , ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), 106. Subsequent references to this essay are to this edition and occur in the text.

27. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and 'the jews' , trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 33.

28. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, "A Conversation," The Southern Review 21, nos. 3-4 (1985): 585. Theodore Adorno's view that "some art works have the power to break through the social barrier they reach" has strong affinities with Morrison's emphasis upon the responsibility she feels to the people she writes about. In "A Conversation" she says, "the responsibility that I feel for the woman I'm calling Sethe, and for all of these people, these unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried, people made literate in art . . . I feel this enormous responsibility in exactly the way you describe the ferocity you felt when somebody was tampering with a situation that was gonna hurt" (585). And in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation , ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 344, Morrison's

insistence upon the necessary politicality of her work resonates with Adorno's conviction that art can reach and break through social barriers: "If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn't about the village or community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political." Theodore W. Adorno might well describe Beloved as sublime, for in Aesthetic Theory , ed. Gretal Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), he defines as sublime "works that transcend their aesthetic shape under the pressure of truth content . . . they polarize spirit and material, only to unite them again" (280).

29. A further connection between Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God is suggested by the similarity of the stories of Sethe's and Nanny's escape from slavery. Both are badly whipped before fleeing, and both barely manage to reach a river. Moreover, Sethe is pregnant with Denver and is about to give birth, while Nanny has just delivered Leafy, Janie's mother, a week earlier. See Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial/Harper and Row, 1990), 16-19.

30. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume/New American Library, 1987), 5. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

31. Toni Morrison, "The Pain of Being Black," interview by Bonnie Angelo, Time Magazine , 22 May 1989, 120.

32. Mae G. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved : Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text," in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text , ed. Hortense J. Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991, 83.

33. As Valerie Smith points out ("'Circling the Subject': History and Narrative in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , ed. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah [New York: Amistad Press, 1993]), "by setting the novel during Reconstruction Morrison invokes the inescapability of slavery, for the very name of the period calls to mind the havoc and destruction wrought during the antebellum and war years" (345).

34. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

35. Cathy Caruth, editor's introduction to a special issue ("Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma") of American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 48, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 5.

36. The third revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987), current until May 1994, defined a traumatic event as one "that is outside the range of usual human experiences" (146). The 1994 edition now defines such an event as one in which "the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others" (4th ed., 427).

37. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1920-1922), 18:29, 13.

38. To cite but a few examples, Lyotard's discussion of the sublime in Heidegger and 'the jews' : "There is, however, a sublime feeling . . . this feeling bears witness to the fact that an 'excess' has 'touched' the mind, more than it is able to handle . . . the problematic of the unpresentable as such emerges, a long time ago, with the notion of the sublime" (32, 34); in "Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable": "the task of art remains that of the immanent sublime, that of alluding to an unpresentable which has nothing edifying about it, but which is inscribed in the identity of the transformation of 'realities,'" in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time , trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 128; and in Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event : "With the esthetics of the sublime it can be argued that a kind of progress in human history is possible . . . it is indeed not a progress of the beautiful, of the taste of beauty, but of the responsibility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively presented in the formlessness of such and such a situation which could occur" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 41.

39. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1910), 11:16.

40. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual , 4th ed., 428.

41. Cathy Caruth, "Interview with Robert Jay Lifton," Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma , 160.

42. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," Illuminations , ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 84. Subsequent references are to this edition and occur in the text.

43. The phrase "nobody knows" appears frequently in Morrison's interviews and functions almost as a refrain in Beloved , as if to emphasize that the events about which she writes were (and perhaps still are) unwitnessed, unknown, and unseen. In a scene in which Beloved, Sethe and Denver ice-skate together, Morrison repeats the phrase "nobody saw them falling" (174-75) three times, and then changes the phrase to "nobody saw them fall" (175); Sethe recognizes Beloved as her lost daughter when she hears her humming a song Sethe herself had made up, a song "nobody knows . . . but me and my children" (176); and at the end of the novel, Morrison remarks upon the difficulty, or impossibility, of ''calling" Beloved: "Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name . . . how can they call her if they don't know her name?" (274).

44. Marsha Darling, "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison," The Women's Review of Books 5, no. 6 (March 1988): 5. Subsequent references to this interview will be in the text.

45. Smith, "Circling the Subject," 347.

46. Toni Morrison mentions that Henry Dumas, whose work she greatly admires, was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, but does not say whether or not

Sweet Home's name derives from Dumas' birthplace. See "City Limits, Village Values" in Literature and the Urban Experience : Essays on the City and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 41.

47. Toni Morrison, "Behind the Making of The Black Book ," Black World 23 (February 1974): 89. Subsequent references to this essay will be in the text.

48. Thomas LeClair, "'The Language Must Not Sweat': A Conversation with Toni Morrison," Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , 375.

49. Le Clair, "The Language Must Not Sweat," 375.

50. More than one critic has remarked that Beloved retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Marilyn Sanders Mobley suggests that Sethe's "pain and mourning over her murdered child recall Demeter's pain in losing Persephone to the underworld." See Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991), 174. For Marianne Hirsch, Sethe's story revives "the powerful mythic figure of Demeter . . . like the story of Demeter and Persephone, it is about a temporary, perhaps a cyclical, reunion between the mother and the daughter she lost" (8). "Maternity and Rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," Representations of Motherhood , ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 97. I thank Marianne Hirsch for graciously allowing me to read her essay in typescript.

Classicists remind us that in many cases the myths of ancient Egypt stand behind those of Greece; some propose that the Demeter-Persephone legend itself is based upon the worship of Isis. J. Gwyn Griffiths, the editor and translator of Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride , points out that in the Greek tradition, "Demeter was the counterpoint of Isis." See Griffiths's edition of Plutarch, cited above, p. 43. And according to Joseph Fontenrose, the story of Isis' wanderings and visit to Byblos "is remarkably parallel to the tale of Demeter's wanderings in search of Persephone and visit to Eleusis." See Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 178.

51. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved ," 78.

52. Many of Morrison's critics agree that Beloved symbolizes the presence of the past. Marilyn Sanders Mobley points out that "when Paul D arrives at Sethe's home on 124 Bluestone, Denver seeks to frighten this unwanted guest away by telling him they have a 'lonely and rebuked' ghost on the premises. The obsolete meaning of rebuked—repressed—not only suggests that the ghost represents repressed memory, but that, as with anything that is repressed, it eventually resurfaces or returns in one form or another." See "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved ," in Toni Morrison ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), 195. For Mae Henderson, "memory is materialized in Beloved's reappearance . . . her 'rebirth' represents . . . the uncanny return of the dead to haunt the living, the return of the past to shadow the present," "Toni Morrison's Beloved ," 72-73. According to Marianne Hirsch, Beloved "is memory itself. She is the story of slavery, the memory of slaves come back to confront the community whose future, until that

point, had been to 'keep the past at bay,'" "Maternity and Rememory," cited above, 105. And Valerie Smith observes that "as a ghost made flesh, she is literally the story of the past embodied. Sethe and Denver and Paul D therefore encounter not only the story of her sorrow and theirs; indeed, they encounter its incarnation," "Circling the Subject," 350.

53. Claudia Tate, "Toni Morrison," Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983), 125.

54. Susan Bowers, " Beloved and the New Apocalypse," The Journal of Ethnic Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 64.

55. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1913-1914), 13:65.

56. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1914-1916), 14:243. Subsequent references to this essay are to this edition and occur in the text.

57. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety , included in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1925-1926), 20:172.

58. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 79.

59. In this regard, see Celeste Marguerite Schenck's provocative essay on women's elegies and the masculine elegiac tradition in "Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5 (Spring 1986): 13-26. Here Schenck observes that elegy is "a resolutely patriarchal genre" (13), and argues that because men and women have different styles of mourning, their poetic expressions of loss also differ. Unlike the male elegist, who emphasizes his independence from the poetic master whose death he mourns (and celebrates), the female elegist affirms her refusal to mourn, her unwillingness to render up the dead. Whereas the masculine elegy is "a ritual hymn of poetic conservation during the course of which a new poet presents himself as heir to the tradition" (13), marking "a rite of separation that culminates in ascension to stature" (15), Schenck shows that female elegists construct poems based upon "attachment and recovery, rather than a severing of ties'' (19). I would argue that in Beloved Morrison transposes the concerns of elegy into a narrative domain. See also Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1-37; and Celeste Marguerite Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 1-18.

60. For discussions of the role of memory in Beloved , see Gayle Greene, "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory," Signs 16, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 290-321; and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, "'Rememory': Primal Scenes and Construction in Toni Morrison's Novels," Contemporary Literature 31, no. 3 (1990): 300-323.

61. Barbara Hernstein Smith, "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," in On Narrative , ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 228.

62. Smith, "Circling the Subject," 351.

63. In Eric L. Santner's formulation ( Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990]), "mourning without solidarity is the beginning of madness" (26). Santner articulates a theory of mourning whiIch is able to find "in the harrowing labor of mourning . . . a source of empowerment" (11) and relates this new "rhetoric of mourning" to the project of postmodern theoretical discourses.

64. Bowers, " Beloved and the New Apocalypse," 68.

65. In "Circling the Subject," 351, Smith quotes an unpublished essay by Gwen Bergner.

66. Nellie McKay, "An Interview with Toni Morrison," Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present , 411.

67. Ibid.