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摘 要:《寵儿》是托尼·莫里森问鼎1993年若贝尔文学奖的力作,并于1987年获得普利策奖。该小说在写作风格和结构方面具有显著的后现代主义特征。本文的引言部分介绍了莫里森的个人经历,以及《宠儿》的悲剧故事。主题部分探讨了小说中的三个主要的后现代主义特征:非线性叙事,拼贴和不确定性。通过成功地运用后现代主义写作风格,《宠儿》反映了作者对美国的现实的深刻洞察。
关键词:托尼·莫里森 《宠儿》 后现代主义 非线性叙事 拼贴 不确定性
Abstract:Beloved,as a masterpiece of Toni Morrison, the black American author who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and a Nobel Prize in 1993, has a distinguishing postmodernist trait in its writing style and structure. Introduction in this paper is about Morrison’s own life experience and the story’s tragedy.The essay’s body has discussed three main postmodernist features:the nonlinear narrative,collage and indeterminacy.Morrison’s Beloved makes great use of the postmodernist writing techniques and reaches a keen insight into making American reality alive.
Key Words:Toni Morrison, Beloved, Postmodernism, the nonlinear narrative, collage, indeterminacy
I Introduction
Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain,and moved to Ohio from the South,hoping to raise her children in an environment friendlier to blacks.Racial prejudice was less of a problem there than it would have been in the South.There,the songs,stories,and women’s gossip of her childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work;a great part of Toni Morrison’s struggle has created a literary language to black America that draws strength from the oral art forms of that culture.Consciousness of a distinct African-American history and culture is a part of the intellectual territory,and Morrison may have had her first exposure to the academic approach to the black experience.
With seven extraordinary novels and four major literary awards,including the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and Nobel Prize in 1993 under her belt,Toni Morrison is in the midst of a more than fulfilling career as a contemporary African-American master feminist novelist.Her writing depicts the struggle of black women at various points in American history.Morrison’s prose,laced with soft traces of feminism can proudly compete with the highest praised novel in American literature.
Morrison’s Beloved tells the story of an emancipated woman slave named Sethe who was an escaped slave and mother of four a few years after the Civil War in Kentucky.Her apparent good fortune at successfully escaping to Cincinnati while pregnant and giving birth in flight and finding refuge at her mother-in-law’s spiritually nourishing home vanished 28 days later.The sight of a hat belonged to a cruel white owner who had tracked her down sent her and her four children into a woodshed where Sethe killed them rather than let them suffer the torments of slavery.After killing “BELOVED”,her third child,she was stopped by a friend who had just rushed in as she was swinging the infant by her heels to smash her head.The main action of the story revolves around the return of the murdered child twenty years later,and addressing them such by the children’s ghosts,on purpose of making her mother pay for having taken her life.
Crucially,in Beloved,we learn about the history and legacy of slavery from Sethe’s,Paul D’s,Stamp Paid’s and Baby Suff’s point of view.Sethe’s action of infanticide illuminates the perverse forces of the institution of slavery:under slavery,a mother best expressed her love for her children by murdering them to protect them from the more gradual destruction wrought by slavery.Not only does Morris provide us with a shocking plot,but also the writing style should be of great interest to us.
II Writing Style and Structure
In the 20th century,along with the development of globalization and computer society as well as appearance of the commercialization of knowledge,western critical theories are extremely vigorous.Among Anglo-American New Criticism,Marxist Criticism,Russian Formalism,Feminist Criticism,and Post-colonial Studies etc,Postmodernism is the product of the postmodern society (or the post-industrial society,the information society,the late capitalism),which was gestated in the womb of its modernist mother in the 1930s,tore itself out of it after World War Two and became a cultural specter pacing up and down in the whole field of the Western culture.Toni Morrison was enviably influenced by the social thought of postmodernism,which is embodied in his work Beloved and makes her work full of eternal charming.In the following essay,three main postmodernism features in Beloved are analyzed and shared.
1.The Nonlinear Narrative
Postmodernists think,“To the world today,the categories such as determinism,stability,orderliness,equilibrium,gradualism,linear relation,etc.have become less and less effective; on the contrary,the important functions of all kinds of phenomena such as instability,indeterminacy,discontinuity,disorderliness,disruption,sudden change,etc.have been more and more recognized and paid attention to.In this situation,a new concept to look on the world has begun to go into people’s consciousness:it opposes using the single and unchangeable logic,formula,principle and universally applicable law to explain and rule the world,advocates change and innovation,stresses openness and pluralism,acknowledges and tolerate difference”(Welsh 46~47) Hence,in writing of the novel Beloved,Morrison makes bold changes and innovations,deconstructing the linear narrative pattern of the traditional fiction and at the same time reconstructing a postmodernist fictional world by putting forward a nonlinear narrative pattern:combinghistory with apparition,creating multilogue text and adopting new angle of view in narrative.
(1)Combing History with Apparition
Morrison combines history with apparition in her novel Beloved.Concerning theory,history and apparition can not coexist in text,but in Beloved,Morrison puts them together so that mainstream of white culture is challenged.
“Dedicate to 60 million or more” in head page of Beloved clearly tell readers that it’s a book about history,for this number is that of dead blacks during transportation to America by boat.The main plot in Beloved is the truth that a woman black killed her daughter.Meanwhile the fiction also depicts the institution of slavery before the national war,the reconstruction by man and woman slaves after the war and different crimes the white commit to the black.Furthermore,many historical events are mentioned in this fiction,such as Ohio River as the boundary between the slave-own states and slave-free states,activities of the three-K party,etc.All these content shows a historical picture of that dark time,which impresses up on the readers.
Thus Morrison plays the same tune by different voice:there are dialogue between people,and dialogue between the author and the characters; there are subtexts of the author behind the words,and many conscious dialogues parallel under the simultaneous condition,thus intertextuality in different angle of narrative was formed.By showing that dark history,undoubtedly Morris arouses people from that “collective amnesia”.By multilogue text,the traditional history text is deconstructed and reconstructed.
And also every character in this fiction including slave-haunters,the white and even the dead plays a role in telling this story,then the whole event is shown by recollects of different person from different angle and thus forms a whole.Even if the narration by everyone is not complete,they are relevant in order to express the past as precisely as possible.For example:the course of Sethe’s infanticide was told by different person,such as Sethe,school master,and Stamp Pain who hold different views.In fact,this is not just simple repetition,but part of the event,serving as mutual supplement.
To Sethe,she was not willing her children,the best part of her,to experience the same torment she had ever suffered.In fact,Sethe herself never talked about that event except her memory where there was no saw,no chopped throat but purpose and motivation.“She just flew.Collected every bit of life she had made,all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful,and carried,pushed,dragged them through the veil,out,away,over there where no one could hurt them.Over there.Outside this place,where they would be safe.”(Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:163)
Lowever,text of the white almost subverts that of Sethe.In schoolmaster’s narration,Sethe is almost crazy:“Inside,two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hank and an infant by the heels in the other.She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks,missed and tried to connect a second time...” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:149) In his description,Sethe’s behavior is out of control,which can not be judged and understood as a human being.This discount shows obvious racial discrimination,denys human value of the black and also distorts history of them.
If the text represented by schoolmaster,his nephew and judge distorts the fact of infanticide,the narration by Stamp Paid must show something primary,“So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew,snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked,how her hands worked like claws,how she collected them every which way:one on her shoulder,one under her arm,one by the hand,the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shaving now because there wasn’t any wood.” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:157)But it is still short of deeper understanding of the hurt done to black women.Only when Sethe participates in talking her own behavior,the deeper connotation was exposed.
Morrison unscrambles the event of Sethe killed her daughter in multiple angle of view from different layers in order to eliminate the white people’s main discount of black history,supplements the missing discourse of black women and constructs that history more objectively.
2.Collages
The postmodernist fiction is formed with fragments that can never lead to identity.Hassan thinks,“The postmodernist only disconnects; fragments are all he pretends to trust.His ultimate opprobrium is tantalization”——any synthesis whatever,social epistemic,even poetic.Hence his preference for montage,collage,the found or cut-up literary object,for paratactic over hypotactic forms,metonymy over metaphor,and schizophrenia over paranoia.Hence,too,his recourse to paradox,paralogy,parabasis,paracriticism,the openness of brokenness,unjustified margins... The age demands differences,shifting signifiers,and even atoms dissolve into elusive subparticles,a mere mathematical whisper”(Hassan 168~169).
Thus,in Postmodernists’ opinion,the world is formed with fragments but the sum of fragments cannot form a whole.All the fragments do not gather together round a center or a whole.Therefore,postmodernists do not take seeking orderliness,completeness,whole,all-sidedness and satisfactoriness as their aim but they rather persist in and are satisfied with all kinds of fragmentation,disorderliness,marginality,disjunction,isolation,etc.
(1)Collage in the Sense of Content and Structure
In Beloved,fragments flash unceasingly from the beginning to the end:“124 was spiteful.Full of a baby’s venom.The women in the house knew it and so did the children.For years each put up with the spite in his own way,but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.The grandmother,Baby Suggs,was dead,and the sons,Howard and Buglar,had run away by the time they were thirteen years old as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand printed appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)”“ another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:3)In his narration,the previous sentences still have some connection about the mystery of the house,while the later sentences begin to talk casually about other things,put these irrelevant things of “mirror”,“cake”,“chickpeas”,“soda crackers” together and let their connections alone,which makes a sense of “collage” in the first paragraph,and “as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it ” has reinforced this sense.
In addition,in arrangement of the whole structure,Morris usually adopts simple number “One,Two,Three” to mark each of the three parts,while in every single part there is neither sequence number nor sequence heading except a blank line to show intervals between every chapter which makes Beloved show a structure of big fragment embracing small fragments.
(2)Combining the Diachronic with the Simultaneous
Very few readers will miss the experimental structure of Beloved.Structural form is controlled by the skillful manipulation of narrative time in which she replaces linear progression with a series of moments in which past,present and future all exist together.Its definitions and perceptions are reflected in the narrative structures.Often the movement is circular,and the circles echo the repetitive nature of despair.In other words,it is not a linear tale,told from beginning to end.It is a story encompassing levels of past,from the slave ship to Sweet Home,as well as the present.Sometimes the past is told in flashbacks,sometimes in stories,and sometimes it is plainly told,as if it is happening in the present.When slavery has torn apart one’s heritage,when the past is more real than the present,when the range of a dead baby can literally rock a house,then the traditional novel is no longer an adequate instrument.In a novel that is hypnotic,beautiful,and elusive,Toni Morrison portrays the lives of Sethe,and escaped slave and mother,and those around her.
In essence,Beloved is written in fragments with pieces shattered and leave for the readers to place together.Because of the extraordinary,experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter,what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding.
(3)The Indeterminacy of BELOVED Identity
Ihab Hassan thinks that indeterminacy is the first essential characteristic of postmodernism.It includes all kinds of ambiguities,ruptures and displacements that affect knowledge and society.Indeterminacy has permeated all the thoughts and actions of the people in the postmodern society and formed the most basal situation of the world that people actually face.Sassan gives a specific explanation of indeterminacy.He thinks that indeterminacy is a category consisting of different concepts that help delineate:ambiguity,discontinuity,heterodoxy,pluralism,randomness,revolt,perversion and deformation.Deformation alone unmaking:disintegration,deconstruction,decenterment,displacement,discontinuity,decomposition,detotalization,delegitimation,etc.let alone more technical terms referring to the rhetoric of irony,rupture,and silence.It is just indeterminacy that reveals the spirit and nature of the postmodern times.Through all these signs a vast will moves to unmake and affect the body politic,the body cognitive,the erotic body,and the individual psyche—— the entire realm of discourse in the West (Hassan 92).Only in literature,all of our ideas about writers,readers,reading,writing,texts,schools,critical theories and literature itself are suddenly queried.
Beloved is the most celebrated and controversial of Toni Morrison’s novels.Since the publication of the novel,the identity of BELOVED has confused many readers and critics as well.In the era of postmodernism,the definitive and ultimate meaning of the text does not exist any longer.In this big cultural climate,BELOVED’s identity and thesis naturally appear to be open to multiinterpretation.
She may,as Sethe originally believes,be an ordinary woman who was locked up by a white man and never let out of doors.Her limited linguistic ability,neediness,baby-soft skin,and emotional instability could all be explained by a lifetime spent in captivity.
But these traits could also support the theory that is held by most of the characters in the novel,as well as most readers:BELOVED was at the age which the baby would have been lived to,and she bore the name printed on the baby’s tombstone.She first appeared to Sethe soaking wet,as though newly born,and Sethe had the sensation of her water breaking when she saw her.Additionally,BELOVED knew about a pair of earrings Sethe possessed long ago,she hummed a song Sethe made up for her children,she had a long scar under her chin where her death-wound would have been dealt,and her breath smelt like milk.
A third interpretation views BELOVED as a representation of Sethe’s dead mother.In Chapter 22,BELOVED recounted memories that corresponded to those that Sethe’s mother might have had of her passage to America from Africa.BELOVED had a strange manner of speaking and seemed to wear a perpetual smile——traits we are told were shared by Sethe’s mother.By Chapter 26,BELOVED and Sethe had switched places,with BELOVED acting as the mother and Sethe as the child.Their role reversal may simply mark more explicitly what BELOVED’s role had been all along.
On a more general level,BELOVED may also stand for all of the slaves who made the passage across the Atlantic.She may give voice to and embody the collective unconscious of all those oppressed by slavery’s theory and legacy.
BELOVED is presented as an allegorical figure.Whether she is Sethe’s daughter,Sethe’s mother,or a representative of all of slavery’s victims,BELOVED represents the past returned to haunt the present.The characters’ confrontations with BELOVED and,consequently,their pasts,is complex.No matter who BELOVED represents,it needs the readers to interpret and her identity is indeterminate.That is an important feature in postmodernist text,which enforces the theme of this novel.
III Conclusion
In conclusion,Beloved explores the physical,emotional,spiritual devastation
wrought by slavery,a devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom,especially by Sethe’s action of infanticide.In the above essay,three main postmodernist features embodied in this novel have been discussed.By employment of the nonlinear narrative,collage and indeterminacy,Morrison enriches and extends her novel both in time and space from various perspectives so that the theme of the novel is deepened.Though Beloved has been published no more than 20 years before,the recurrence of black history in a special way,especially the creative postmodernist theories,new techniques,new thoughts have proved again that Morrison is a great artist with cultural and literary background together and proved that the postmodernist features have instructive meaning and research value to new development in the world literature as well.
关键词:托尼·莫里森 《宠儿》 后现代主义 非线性叙事 拼贴 不确定性
Abstract:Beloved,as a masterpiece of Toni Morrison, the black American author who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and a Nobel Prize in 1993, has a distinguishing postmodernist trait in its writing style and structure. Introduction in this paper is about Morrison’s own life experience and the story’s tragedy.The essay’s body has discussed three main postmodernist features:the nonlinear narrative,collage and indeterminacy.Morrison’s Beloved makes great use of the postmodernist writing techniques and reaches a keen insight into making American reality alive.
Key Words:Toni Morrison, Beloved, Postmodernism, the nonlinear narrative, collage, indeterminacy
I Introduction
Toni Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain,and moved to Ohio from the South,hoping to raise her children in an environment friendlier to blacks.Racial prejudice was less of a problem there than it would have been in the South.There,the songs,stories,and women’s gossip of her childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work;a great part of Toni Morrison’s struggle has created a literary language to black America that draws strength from the oral art forms of that culture.Consciousness of a distinct African-American history and culture is a part of the intellectual territory,and Morrison may have had her first exposure to the academic approach to the black experience.
With seven extraordinary novels and four major literary awards,including the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and Nobel Prize in 1993 under her belt,Toni Morrison is in the midst of a more than fulfilling career as a contemporary African-American master feminist novelist.Her writing depicts the struggle of black women at various points in American history.Morrison’s prose,laced with soft traces of feminism can proudly compete with the highest praised novel in American literature.
Morrison’s Beloved tells the story of an emancipated woman slave named Sethe who was an escaped slave and mother of four a few years after the Civil War in Kentucky.Her apparent good fortune at successfully escaping to Cincinnati while pregnant and giving birth in flight and finding refuge at her mother-in-law’s spiritually nourishing home vanished 28 days later.The sight of a hat belonged to a cruel white owner who had tracked her down sent her and her four children into a woodshed where Sethe killed them rather than let them suffer the torments of slavery.After killing “BELOVED”,her third child,she was stopped by a friend who had just rushed in as she was swinging the infant by her heels to smash her head.The main action of the story revolves around the return of the murdered child twenty years later,and addressing them such by the children’s ghosts,on purpose of making her mother pay for having taken her life.
Crucially,in Beloved,we learn about the history and legacy of slavery from Sethe’s,Paul D’s,Stamp Paid’s and Baby Suff’s point of view.Sethe’s action of infanticide illuminates the perverse forces of the institution of slavery:under slavery,a mother best expressed her love for her children by murdering them to protect them from the more gradual destruction wrought by slavery.Not only does Morris provide us with a shocking plot,but also the writing style should be of great interest to us.
II Writing Style and Structure
In the 20th century,along with the development of globalization and computer society as well as appearance of the commercialization of knowledge,western critical theories are extremely vigorous.Among Anglo-American New Criticism,Marxist Criticism,Russian Formalism,Feminist Criticism,and Post-colonial Studies etc,Postmodernism is the product of the postmodern society (or the post-industrial society,the information society,the late capitalism),which was gestated in the womb of its modernist mother in the 1930s,tore itself out of it after World War Two and became a cultural specter pacing up and down in the whole field of the Western culture.Toni Morrison was enviably influenced by the social thought of postmodernism,which is embodied in his work Beloved and makes her work full of eternal charming.In the following essay,three main postmodernism features in Beloved are analyzed and shared.
1.The Nonlinear Narrative
Postmodernists think,“To the world today,the categories such as determinism,stability,orderliness,equilibrium,gradualism,linear relation,etc.have become less and less effective; on the contrary,the important functions of all kinds of phenomena such as instability,indeterminacy,discontinuity,disorderliness,disruption,sudden change,etc.have been more and more recognized and paid attention to.In this situation,a new concept to look on the world has begun to go into people’s consciousness:it opposes using the single and unchangeable logic,formula,principle and universally applicable law to explain and rule the world,advocates change and innovation,stresses openness and pluralism,acknowledges and tolerate difference”(Welsh 46~47) Hence,in writing of the novel Beloved,Morrison makes bold changes and innovations,deconstructing the linear narrative pattern of the traditional fiction and at the same time reconstructing a postmodernist fictional world by putting forward a nonlinear narrative pattern:combinghistory with apparition,creating multilogue text and adopting new angle of view in narrative.
(1)Combing History with Apparition
Morrison combines history with apparition in her novel Beloved.Concerning theory,history and apparition can not coexist in text,but in Beloved,Morrison puts them together so that mainstream of white culture is challenged.
“Dedicate to 60 million or more” in head page of Beloved clearly tell readers that it’s a book about history,for this number is that of dead blacks during transportation to America by boat.The main plot in Beloved is the truth that a woman black killed her daughter.Meanwhile the fiction also depicts the institution of slavery before the national war,the reconstruction by man and woman slaves after the war and different crimes the white commit to the black.Furthermore,many historical events are mentioned in this fiction,such as Ohio River as the boundary between the slave-own states and slave-free states,activities of the three-K party,etc.All these content shows a historical picture of that dark time,which impresses up on the readers.
Thus Morrison plays the same tune by different voice:there are dialogue between people,and dialogue between the author and the characters; there are subtexts of the author behind the words,and many conscious dialogues parallel under the simultaneous condition,thus intertextuality in different angle of narrative was formed.By showing that dark history,undoubtedly Morris arouses people from that “collective amnesia”.By multilogue text,the traditional history text is deconstructed and reconstructed.
And also every character in this fiction including slave-haunters,the white and even the dead plays a role in telling this story,then the whole event is shown by recollects of different person from different angle and thus forms a whole.Even if the narration by everyone is not complete,they are relevant in order to express the past as precisely as possible.For example:the course of Sethe’s infanticide was told by different person,such as Sethe,school master,and Stamp Pain who hold different views.In fact,this is not just simple repetition,but part of the event,serving as mutual supplement.
To Sethe,she was not willing her children,the best part of her,to experience the same torment she had ever suffered.In fact,Sethe herself never talked about that event except her memory where there was no saw,no chopped throat but purpose and motivation.“She just flew.Collected every bit of life she had made,all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful,and carried,pushed,dragged them through the veil,out,away,over there where no one could hurt them.Over there.Outside this place,where they would be safe.”(Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:163)
Lowever,text of the white almost subverts that of Sethe.In schoolmaster’s narration,Sethe is almost crazy:“Inside,two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hank and an infant by the heels in the other.She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks,missed and tried to connect a second time...” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:149) In his description,Sethe’s behavior is out of control,which can not be judged and understood as a human being.This discount shows obvious racial discrimination,denys human value of the black and also distorts history of them.
If the text represented by schoolmaster,his nephew and judge distorts the fact of infanticide,the narration by Stamp Paid must show something primary,“So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew,snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked,how her hands worked like claws,how she collected them every which way:one on her shoulder,one under her arm,one by the hand,the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shaving now because there wasn’t any wood.” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:157)But it is still short of deeper understanding of the hurt done to black women.Only when Sethe participates in talking her own behavior,the deeper connotation was exposed.
Morrison unscrambles the event of Sethe killed her daughter in multiple angle of view from different layers in order to eliminate the white people’s main discount of black history,supplements the missing discourse of black women and constructs that history more objectively.
2.Collages
The postmodernist fiction is formed with fragments that can never lead to identity.Hassan thinks,“The postmodernist only disconnects; fragments are all he pretends to trust.His ultimate opprobrium is tantalization”——any synthesis whatever,social epistemic,even poetic.Hence his preference for montage,collage,the found or cut-up literary object,for paratactic over hypotactic forms,metonymy over metaphor,and schizophrenia over paranoia.Hence,too,his recourse to paradox,paralogy,parabasis,paracriticism,the openness of brokenness,unjustified margins... The age demands differences,shifting signifiers,and even atoms dissolve into elusive subparticles,a mere mathematical whisper”(Hassan 168~169).
Thus,in Postmodernists’ opinion,the world is formed with fragments but the sum of fragments cannot form a whole.All the fragments do not gather together round a center or a whole.Therefore,postmodernists do not take seeking orderliness,completeness,whole,all-sidedness and satisfactoriness as their aim but they rather persist in and are satisfied with all kinds of fragmentation,disorderliness,marginality,disjunction,isolation,etc.
(1)Collage in the Sense of Content and Structure
In Beloved,fragments flash unceasingly from the beginning to the end:“124 was spiteful.Full of a baby’s venom.The women in the house knew it and so did the children.For years each put up with the spite in his own way,but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.The grandmother,Baby Suggs,was dead,and the sons,Howard and Buglar,had run away by the time they were thirteen years old as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand printed appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)”“ another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill” (Beloved,Toni Morrison,2000:3)In his narration,the previous sentences still have some connection about the mystery of the house,while the later sentences begin to talk casually about other things,put these irrelevant things of “mirror”,“cake”,“chickpeas”,“soda crackers” together and let their connections alone,which makes a sense of “collage” in the first paragraph,and “as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it ” has reinforced this sense.
In addition,in arrangement of the whole structure,Morris usually adopts simple number “One,Two,Three” to mark each of the three parts,while in every single part there is neither sequence number nor sequence heading except a blank line to show intervals between every chapter which makes Beloved show a structure of big fragment embracing small fragments.
(2)Combining the Diachronic with the Simultaneous
Very few readers will miss the experimental structure of Beloved.Structural form is controlled by the skillful manipulation of narrative time in which she replaces linear progression with a series of moments in which past,present and future all exist together.Its definitions and perceptions are reflected in the narrative structures.Often the movement is circular,and the circles echo the repetitive nature of despair.In other words,it is not a linear tale,told from beginning to end.It is a story encompassing levels of past,from the slave ship to Sweet Home,as well as the present.Sometimes the past is told in flashbacks,sometimes in stories,and sometimes it is plainly told,as if it is happening in the present.When slavery has torn apart one’s heritage,when the past is more real than the present,when the range of a dead baby can literally rock a house,then the traditional novel is no longer an adequate instrument.In a novel that is hypnotic,beautiful,and elusive,Toni Morrison portrays the lives of Sethe,and escaped slave and mother,and those around her.
In essence,Beloved is written in fragments with pieces shattered and leave for the readers to place together.Because of the extraordinary,experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter,what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding.
(3)The Indeterminacy of BELOVED Identity
Ihab Hassan thinks that indeterminacy is the first essential characteristic of postmodernism.It includes all kinds of ambiguities,ruptures and displacements that affect knowledge and society.Indeterminacy has permeated all the thoughts and actions of the people in the postmodern society and formed the most basal situation of the world that people actually face.Sassan gives a specific explanation of indeterminacy.He thinks that indeterminacy is a category consisting of different concepts that help delineate:ambiguity,discontinuity,heterodoxy,pluralism,randomness,revolt,perversion and deformation.Deformation alone unmaking:disintegration,deconstruction,decenterment,displacement,discontinuity,decomposition,detotalization,delegitimation,etc.let alone more technical terms referring to the rhetoric of irony,rupture,and silence.It is just indeterminacy that reveals the spirit and nature of the postmodern times.Through all these signs a vast will moves to unmake and affect the body politic,the body cognitive,the erotic body,and the individual psyche—— the entire realm of discourse in the West (Hassan 92).Only in literature,all of our ideas about writers,readers,reading,writing,texts,schools,critical theories and literature itself are suddenly queried.
Beloved is the most celebrated and controversial of Toni Morrison’s novels.Since the publication of the novel,the identity of BELOVED has confused many readers and critics as well.In the era of postmodernism,the definitive and ultimate meaning of the text does not exist any longer.In this big cultural climate,BELOVED’s identity and thesis naturally appear to be open to multiinterpretation.
She may,as Sethe originally believes,be an ordinary woman who was locked up by a white man and never let out of doors.Her limited linguistic ability,neediness,baby-soft skin,and emotional instability could all be explained by a lifetime spent in captivity.
But these traits could also support the theory that is held by most of the characters in the novel,as well as most readers:BELOVED was at the age which the baby would have been lived to,and she bore the name printed on the baby’s tombstone.She first appeared to Sethe soaking wet,as though newly born,and Sethe had the sensation of her water breaking when she saw her.Additionally,BELOVED knew about a pair of earrings Sethe possessed long ago,she hummed a song Sethe made up for her children,she had a long scar under her chin where her death-wound would have been dealt,and her breath smelt like milk.
A third interpretation views BELOVED as a representation of Sethe’s dead mother.In Chapter 22,BELOVED recounted memories that corresponded to those that Sethe’s mother might have had of her passage to America from Africa.BELOVED had a strange manner of speaking and seemed to wear a perpetual smile——traits we are told were shared by Sethe’s mother.By Chapter 26,BELOVED and Sethe had switched places,with BELOVED acting as the mother and Sethe as the child.Their role reversal may simply mark more explicitly what BELOVED’s role had been all along.
On a more general level,BELOVED may also stand for all of the slaves who made the passage across the Atlantic.She may give voice to and embody the collective unconscious of all those oppressed by slavery’s theory and legacy.
BELOVED is presented as an allegorical figure.Whether she is Sethe’s daughter,Sethe’s mother,or a representative of all of slavery’s victims,BELOVED represents the past returned to haunt the present.The characters’ confrontations with BELOVED and,consequently,their pasts,is complex.No matter who BELOVED represents,it needs the readers to interpret and her identity is indeterminate.That is an important feature in postmodernist text,which enforces the theme of this novel.
III Conclusion
In conclusion,Beloved explores the physical,emotional,spiritual devastation
wrought by slavery,a devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom,especially by Sethe’s action of infanticide.In the above essay,three main postmodernist features embodied in this novel have been discussed.By employment of the nonlinear narrative,collage and indeterminacy,Morrison enriches and extends her novel both in time and space from various perspectives so that the theme of the novel is deepened.Though Beloved has been published no more than 20 years before,the recurrence of black history in a special way,especially the creative postmodernist theories,new techniques,new thoughts have proved again that Morrison is a great artist with cultural and literary background together and proved that the postmodernist features have instructive meaning and research value to new development in the world literature as well.