SOURCE: “Mother’s Milk and Sister’s Blood: Trauma and the Neoslave Narrative,” in Differences, Vol. 8, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 101-26.

In “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery After Freedom—Dessa Rose,” Deborah McDowell poses a question: “Why the compulsion to repeat the massive story of slavery, in the contemporary African-American novel, especially so long after the empirical event itself?” (144). In referring to repetition compulsion, the name given to a psychic and behavioral phenomenon that is seemingly senseless and potentially destructive, McDowell implicitly evokes the theory of trauma. She suggests that retelling manifests an attempt to gain mastery over elusive or defeating histories and their narration. This essay will pursue McDowell’s lead in exploring the connections and disjunctions between trauma and the neoslave narrative, the twentieth-century novel about slavery.¹ In what follows I will examine the term “trauma” in order to argue that it can be useful for focusing a discussion of two texts by African-American women: Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.² I do not wish to suggest that anything as meticulously worked out and worked upon as either of these novels could simply be a manifestation of psychic trauma. In fact, these novels make possible a reading that calls into question such an understanding of psychopathology. If the neoslave narrative marks the undesirable return of an unforgettable past, it also attempts to theorize and control this very phenomenon.

I

The relationship between repetition compulsion and trauma is addressed in one of the most enigmatic of Freud’s texts, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In his search for a beyond, Freud encounters the traumatic neurosis (“a condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters, and other accidents involving a risk to life … the terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind” [12]). The symptoms of traumatic neurosis make Freud uneasy, for the trauma sufferer dreams repeatedly of his accident (“Anyone who accepts it as something self-evident that their dreams should put them back at night into the situation that caused them to fall ill has misunderstood the nature of dreams” [13]). The important point is that these dreams cannot be read as wish-fulfilling texts. If symptoms are compromise formations that yield pleasure, how then to explain the intrusive phenomena of hallucination and nightmare, the “symptoms” of trauma? Is trauma an accident, temporarily suspending the rules that govern the psyche, or is it cause to rethink pleasure and the very possibility that self-destruction and self-interest can be thought apart? Freud develops both of these lines of thinking. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a difficult text to read in a linear fashion because its own move beyond the dominance of the pleasure principle to the death drive is also a circling back. Nevertheless, Freud’s text serves as a point of departure for current work on trauma and the recently acknowledged syndrome, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Recent work on trauma suggests that to write about PTSD is to account for ghosts. The trauma sufferer is “haunt[ed]” or “possess[ed]” by an image or event that she or he has missed as experience; a trauma is violently imposed and is always reimposing itself (Caruth, “Introduction” 2–3). It is because a trauma forces psychic reorganization that it can only happen again. Trauma victims cannot simply remember what they never forgot. And it is at least in part because the trauma cannot be temporally located that it becomes strangely transmissible down through generations. As the skeleton in the closet, the ghost in the attic, the family secret is preserved in its very unutterability. “A trauma,” Cathy Caruth writes, “is never … one's own” (“Unclaimed Experience” 192).³ For example, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, a psychoanalyst who works with the children of Holocaust survivors, writes of a patient who “literally lived in a double reality.” She was both herself, a young painter and a college student, and her Father's past (the life she led was actually more than doubled as she identified both with surviving and with dying in a concentration camp). Grubrich-Simitis points out that in this instance what we think of as “identification” works more like “incorporation”: “Namely, it was characterized both by the totality of immersion in another reality and by involvement of the body” (302–03).⁴

Trauma and repetition compulsion ask one to think about what it means to transmit a culture, to share a story, to pass it on. Repetition constitutes and consolidates identity. But what is the effect, on a culture, of repetitions that are traumatic in character? The traumatic “symptom” (hallucination, flashback, recurring nightmare, compulsively repetitive behavior) has a non-symbolic or literal quality, and, since it is what it is, it resists interpretation or cure. It is as if the thing itself returns as opposed to its representation. Grubrich-Simitis uses the term “concretism” to describe the trauma victim’s experience of the world. She claims that those who have been traumatized have no sense of the figural, that nothing for them has “sign character” (302). Thus both the terms “traumatic symptom” and “traumatic memory” are at best awkward approximations. While it might sound ludicrous to say that someone who suffers from recurring nightmares or invasive and oppressive hallucinations is suffering from senselessness or meaninglessness, this is indeed what trauma reveals.⁵ The most powerful writing on PTSD consistently describes trauma as a force that is not meaningfully experienced: to be traumatized is to be haunted by the literality of events.

The distinction between trauma and repression, a distinction stressed in some of the writing on trauma, is crucial for reading neoslave narratives.⁶ Repression is a response to conflict: that which has been repressed returns symptomatically, in a compromised or distorted form. The traumatic past in Corregidora and Beloved, however, has not been forgotten, nor is it accessible only indirectly. It is strangely concrete, forcefully present, literally there, not past at all. Only by thinking of the history that Corregidora and Beloved depict as traumatic can we begin to give that history some specificity.

PTSD has recently received a great deal of media attention. The typical “balanced” account weights the claims of opposing parties: adults who have just recently remembered that they were abused as children are pitted against groups like the “False Memory Syndrome Foundation” who believe that “fabricated memories” can be implanted or imposed by the power of a psychotherapist’s suggestion.⁷ This by now familiar way of presenting PTSD to a popular audience invokes a simple opposition: memories are either fully rememberable and true, or entirely false. Trauma, in this context, seems to be synonymous with “bad experience.” Therapists who participate in this construction of PTSD claim that patients have bad experiences and “repress” them. Their antagonists counter that individuals have false memories imposed upon them, and this, they warn, can have devastating consequences for the lives of others. Literary critic Frederick Crews, for example, demonizes therapeutic suggestion and psychoanalytic practice itself becomes the original site of horror (“Revenge”). The subject, he insists, is not self-divided, but weak, subject to possession. Force only comes from the outside. But these two apparently conflicting accounts (the accounts of those who seem to affirm and those who would deny the reality of trauma) both insist on the stability and locatability of the event. Psychoanalysis’s discovery of the distortion of memories is thus passed over in favor of a simple causal narrative: terrible events trouble the subject. But neither an event nor an individual psyche, taken separately, can account for trauma. Trauma theory (at its best) refuses the “choice” between self-division and external force and asks us to consider the psychopathology of the historical subject. And there is no knowing in advance that any particular kind of event will be experienced as traumatic.⁸ The difficulty that trauma theory then encounters is that of articulating the specificity of violence against the psyche. This is a difficulty that can be bypassed (“trauma” or “psychoanalysis” can be posited as the answer), but it is not a difficulty that will go away (Laplanche and Pontalis, “Traumatic”).⁹

In her analysis of trauma and history, Caruth is concerned with what contextualization does to trauma, with what happens when it is read and rendered significant. When trauma becomes narrative, the “precision” and “force” of traumatic recall are lost; a comprehensible trauma is traumatic no more (“Introduction” 420). Through literal repetition (“an overwhelming occurrence … remains in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event” [“Introduction” 4]), however, trauma preserves the past that it also renders inaccessible. What is at stake in Caruth’s analysis, then, is not so much the possibility of history as its preservation.¹⁰ If trauma endangers the subject, it would seem to keep “history” safe. “History” as a pre-text, as an event or force that is not yet meaningful, can be valued by survivors precisely in its “affront to understanding” (“Introduction” 420). Survivors often do not want what they suffered to become intelligible. “History” in Caruth’s text, then, is history from the perspective of the traumatized subject.¹¹

Since psychoanalysis has always thought in terms of personal narratives and that which blocks and disrupts them, it should come as no surprise to discover that recent writing on the specificity of trauma concerns itself with a form of narrative: the testimonial. Whereas neurotics need to have their free associations analyzed, trauma sufferers need to have their testimonies witnessed. A witness, unlike an analytic listener, witnesses the reality of the event in the name of justice, and, thus, in the study of psychic trauma the juridical supplements or relocates the psychoanalytic.¹² To testify, however, is always to take the risk of repeating, and indeed both therapy and testimony strive to reproduce the very past that they are designed to enable their subjects to leave behind.¹³ The crucial if unstable difference between retraumatization and cure may be the difference between the unwitnessed and the witnessed repetition: a repetition addressed to and heard by another becomes testimonial.

The concept of testimony has its place both in psychoanalysis and in African-American culture. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates refers to testimony as a key “black rhetorical trope” (52), and Geneva Smitherman writes of “testifyin” as a “concept referring to a ritualized form of black communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the efficacy, truth, and power of some experience in which all blacks have shared” (58). She adds, “To testify is to tell the truth through ‘story’ … the content of testifying, then, is not plain and simple commentary but a dramatic narration and communal reenactment of one's feelings and experiences” (150).¹⁴ Testimony in the form of the slave narrative could be said to have produced many of the tropes that still dominate the African-American literary tradition. Testimony offered during a trial makes available a past that it produces; it produces that which will have been. It is only effective, however, if it seems to describe what “really” happened. As fictional testimonial literature, neoslave narratives both stage a simple return of history and reinscribe it: “Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning” (Corregidora 54). In this sense they do what all testimonies do: they both return to an event and make it happen for the first time. Their status as self-conscious fictions means that they represent, as well as enact, this process. When the novel is a witness to history, it also witnesses its own act of witnessing.

The very structure of trauma—its belatedness—makes testifying possible. When the event is told, it is experienced for the first time and can be placed in a story about history. It is worth recalling here that when Freud searches for a beyond the pleasure principle, he finds that the enigma he has chosen to explore not only resides at the very boundary of psychoanalysis, but also makes itself (un)comfortable in the consulting room every day. While the analyst wants his or her patient to remember rather than repeat, years of experience, Freud claims, have shown that repetition is not only inevitable, but is the very key to therapeutic success. Thus Freud finds his “new and remarkable fact”—there is a beyond the pleasure principle, people do repeat experiences from the past which include no possibility of pleasure—in an old and familiar place (20). A traumatic neurosis and a transference neurosis have much in common. The most intriguing moment in Caruth’s reading of Freud is her account of trauma in all its resistant literality as also already bound up with cure. This precarious interrelationship is established through a reading of trauma as departure: “trauma is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of its site … trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival” (“Introduction” 10).¹⁵

Contradictory as it might sound, then, it is possible to explore the “uses” of trauma, and the patterns of investment in theoretical and literary texts that make the traumatic event their concern. If Beloved and Corregidora could be said to retraumatize the slave narrative, to refuse its linearity, to refuse to move on, what do they thereby accomplish?

II

Corregidora thematizes a concern with the transmission of culture and with the recording and judging of a history of violence: “The important thing is making generations. They can burn the papers but they can't burn conscious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence. And That's what makes the verdict” (22).¹⁶ History, in this articulation, needs to be preserved in the name of justice. While writing belongs to the white father and can easily be used to “forget” history’s inconveniences, Corregidora suggests that the body, specifically the body of the black woman, can constitute a site of resistance. The black woman can reproduce, “make generations” (there is a parthenogenetic fantasy at work here), and pass on stories of her own life and the lives of those before her; Corregidora is a tale about maternal telling. Yet the black Woman's body is the site of resistance even (and only) as it is the site of oppression (parthenogenesis is, of course, impossible): “Procreation. That could also be a slave breeder’s way of thinking” (22). Part of the horror of Corregidora is that these meanings cannot be separated. To bear witness—literally, to bear witness by bearing witnesses—is to resist and to repeat a history of enslavement. In Corregidora the body occupies a doubled position: it both enables testimony and is itself the testifying text. Skin color and facial and bodily features can be read to tell the story of the master’s sexual violence. Corregidora’s protagonist is troubled by the way in which she is compelled to be embodied, to be the history of her own contamination: “Stained with another’s past as well as our own. Their past in my blood. I'm a blood” (45). The question of identity in this novel (“Do you know what you are?” [71]) is a question about the materialization of the past: “What all you got in you?” (72).¹⁷

The novel is the first-person narration of a blues singer, Ursa Corregidora. Her songs are her not entirely satisfactory alternatives to maternal telling, to testimony based on the logic of reproduction: “I'll sing as you talked it,” she says, “let me give witness the only way I can” (53–54). Ursa is the descendent of a Portuguese slave-breeder who prostituted and raped his slaves. Corregidora is his name. Ursa's jealous husband, Mutt Thomas, comes to the cafe where she is singing; they have a fight and Ursa falls. She is taken to the hospital, and the doctors perform a hysterectomy. Ursa will not be able to make evidence, bear witness by bearing children. Corregidora begins, then, with Ursa's anxiety about the problem of transmissibility, an anxiety aggravated by her inability to extend the tradition of phono-and uterocentrism. But Corregidora is not only concerned with the impossibility of fully transmitting culture; it also confronts the fact that cultural transmission entails the burden of being compelled to repeat the past with one's own life. It is in this sense that Corregidora is a novel about trauma. The trauma sufferer faces a paradox: the past that is her obsession is a past that is not, strictly speaking, hers. Ursa has never been a slave, but neither can she leave enslavement behind her.

Corregidora, then, does not quite fit Bernard W. Bell’s definition of the neoslave narrative. It may be a “residually oral, modern narrative” about slavery, but it does not tell the story of “escape from bondage to freedom” (289). It refuses this story to the extent that it is a traumatized text, a text about trauma. As such, it cannot be so linear, nor can it leave the past behind. There is no question of retrieving a repressed memory and putting it in its place. Jones's Corregidora, like Morrison’s Beloved, pushes at the boundaries of Bell’s definition. Through their preoccupation with traumatic memory, both novels rewrite an old form (the slave narrative) and testify to their own contemporary status (their “neo-ness”).¹⁸ Both take part in the contemporary discourse of memory, trauma, and survival, and in so doing reflect on the problem of what it means to speak from the present moment, to “have” a past.

Ursa is brought up on telling. “They kept to the house, telling me things. My mother would work while my grandmother told me, then she’d come home and tell me. I'd go to school and come back and be told” (101). Moreover, she has great difficulty distinguishing between the “epic” memory of slavery and “personal” memory. A past that she did not witness crowds out her own.¹⁹ The problem seems to be that the Corregidora women do more than remember: they repeat even when forgetting no longer seems a real possibility. Ursa describes her great-grandmother: “It was as if the words were helping her, as if the words, repeated again and again, could be a substitute for memory, were somehow more than the memory” (11). Great Gram’s repetition of words seems to empty them of their referential capacity. To over-remember is perhaps not to remember at all. Great Gram puts something in the place of memory, or, rather, memory becomes memorization and rote recitation. The past in Corregidora is not forgotten, repressed, or acted out symptomatically. It is, in this telling, inaccessible because too ritualistically repeated. Ursa's great-grandmother could be said to be cultivating a traumatic effect, that is to say, using trauma. Instead of meaninglessness being bound into meaning, we have the reverse procedure: through repetition, meaning comes undone. Corregidora suggests that repetition compulsion can be either a sign of trauma or a desired end of its own, a defense against significance.

In Corregidora, maternal telling has the force of literalization, a force which undermines representability. The past is not simply transmissible from generation to generation; it repeats itself. When Ursa visits her mother demanding to be told her mother’s personal story (the story of her relationship with Ursa's father), the mother tells the tale, but she also repeats it, and the repetition has a force that dissolves the boundaries of subjecthood: “Mama kept talking until it wasn't her that was talking but Great Gram. I stared at her because she wasn't Mama now, she was Great Gram talking” (124). Mama was Great Gram. When Mutt tries to comfort Ursa—”don't look like that Ursa … whichever way you look at it, we ain’t them”—she thinks her response: “I didn't answer that, because the way I'd been brought up, it was almost as if I was” (151). And in fact, it is in the context of Ursa's and Mutt’s relationship that this threat of generational repetition is most dangerously evoked. Ursa tells us at the end of the book, “I didn't know how much was me and Mutt and how much was Great Gram and Corregidora” (184). At most, at best, there is the possibility that Ursa and her great grandmother, and Mutt and Corregidora, may not be identical (“I didn't know how much …”).

Writings about trauma suggest that to testify is to find an addressable other, and that this is a form of “cure.” But Ursa is told too soon (“I am Ursa Corregidora … I was made to touch my past at an early age” [77]). By the time she is five, Ursa has heard and reheard the family story. A trauma sufferer, it might be said, always knows too soon. The twist in Corregidora is that it is the address itself that has traumatizing power. It is not the past but scenes of being told that return in a kind of flashback. The novel is repeatedly punctuated by these italicized scenes, which might be said to mark the trauma in the text. They have an antinarrational force in that they stand outside the narrative as narrative, as a chronologically locatable record of events. If repetition compulsion is usually regarded as a symptom of trauma, here the compulsion to repeat is itself traumatizing.

In its concern with the traumatic nature of testimony, Corregidora forges a link between the maternal and the traumatic.²⁰ It is the mother’s testimony that collapses structures of identification and representation. There is no place for absence; Ursa Corregidora cannot lose her mother. Readers of Freud’s analysis of the fort-da game know that the child who can represent his mother’s absence is emblematic of the untraumatized subject, of subjectivity that works. In psychoanalysis, the first experience of losing the mother comes with the “discovery” that the infant and mother together are not complete, that the mother wants something other than the baby. While a premature separation of mother and infant might seem to be constitutive of the truly traumatic, Corregidora poses the problem of the mother who never leaves, the mother whose only desire is for her daughter: Ursa's mother says that she wanted Ursa with her whole body and knew that she was to be a girl before she was born. The one part of Ursa's story that suggests that she will move forward and leave her “epic” past behind is her decision to learn about her father, her mother’s “private memory” (104). The father here, as in many psychoanalytic texts, becomes the name of separation, the very possibility of substitution and of narrativization. It is important to notice, however, that Corregidora does not stage any simple opposition between an oral/maternal order and a phallic/paternal economy, for the oral/maternal with all of its dangers is also associated with an absolute father, the white, epical, Corregidora.²¹

To discuss Corregidora in terms of trauma is not to suggest that the workings of trauma can totally account for the text. The past repeats itself in the novel not only because it is traumatic, but also because forms of power endure. In other words, a traumatized Ursa might confuse Mutt and Corregidora, but Mutt is abusive all on his own. Corregidora is also not wholly a text about trauma in that it also is a story of conflict, a story of the fraught relationship between desire and survival. Ursa has to wonder to what extent the Corregidora narrative is a kind of tribute to a horror so stunning that it has a peculiar appeal: “How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love?” (131). The scandal of Corregidora is its staging of the possibility that an enslaved woman might desire her enslaver. The novel skirts the edges of trauma theory here, in puzzling over the mystery of pleasure in unpleasure. To say that Corregidora is a blues novel, an exquisite rendering of suffering, is one way of naming this precarious distinction between the impasses of trauma and the conflict that generates texts.

III

In Morrison’s novel a ghost-woman, Beloved, returns almost two decades later, to be with her mother, Sethe, who killed her to save her. Sethe, an escaped slave, chose death over enslavement for her children, that being the only choice: “I took and put my babies where they’d ” (164). Sethe knows about the presence of the past even before her daughter returns in the flesh, even before she recognizes the daughter that she once killed. Sethe warns her other daughter, Denver:

Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But It's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, It's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around there outside my head. … Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think It's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.

(36)

Sethe seems to offer Denver an account of the experience of traumatization. The event or image imposes itself. It is extra-subjective. It has a thing-like quality (not “she remembered” but “there it was again” [4]). History as trauma belongs to no one, yet it is also shared: one can walk quite easily into someone else’s past. Trauma confuses the relationship between inside and outside, the psyche and the social, the present and the past (or the “personal” and the “epic,” in Gayl Jones's terms). The overly immediate character of the traumatic event leaves the sufferer strangely uncertain (“And you think It's you thinking it up … But no”).

Sethe and Denver lead a suspended life in a haunted house in Ohio in the years following the Civil War. Sethe avoids the “inside,” her inside, and Denver, the “outside”; she never leaves the yard. A baby ghost is their only company. Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, worn out by white people (“‘They don't know when to stop’” [104]), has died. Buglar and Howard, Sethe’s sons, scared of their mother and her haunting child, have run off, and Halle, Sethe’s husband, seems never to have successfully escaped “Sweet Home,” the ironically named Kentucky plantation. The narrative begins when Paul D, another ex-slave from Sweet Home, arrives at Sethe’s address: 124 Bluestone Road. If Paul D walks out of the past, he nevertheless represents the possibility of a future, of a story that can go on. He threatens to nurture Sethe, thereby disrupting a prolonged stasis, the very persistence of the past in the present that characterizes gothicized domestic space.²² Denver is deeply hurt when her mother looks away and chats girlishly with this “stranger,” and the baby ghost is enraged. Beloved is the past that returns in the flesh to challenge Paul D’s claim and Sethe’s new aspirations (“[to] trust things and remember things” [18]).²³

Beloved allegorizes, then, contending forces in Sethe’s life, the relationship between narrative possibility (Paul D) and the trauma that disrupts and resists (Beloved). The traumatic return, the novel suggests, is simultaneous with the beginning of the possibility of narrative or testimony. If Sethe experiences her past as traumatic, so does the reader. Sometimes the past returns, becomes present in the text, when nobody is telling it or thinking it, or when it exceeds their telling or thinking. In a Faulkneresque scene, Denver “tells” Beloved (Beloved feeds on sugar and stories about Sethe), and the past becomes animated.

Now, watching Beloved’s alert and hungry face, how she took in every word, asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it. … So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps that her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved.

(77–78)

The scene takes on the character of flashback as it modulates into direct quotation (78).

Since it is Beloved who returns to represent a traumatic resistance to narrative, the temptation is to locate the novel’s traumatic center at the site of the infanticide. Yet it is not this scene, or at least not the actual killing, that returns to haunt Sethe. The only vivid description of Beloved’s death is filtered through the perspective of the white men: Schoolteacher, his nephew, the slave catcher, the sheriff. In this description, Sethe’s deed is both outrageously overrationalized, made “sense” of as “testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred” (151), and depicted as the white man's trauma (the nephew, in particular, is overwhelmed and cannot bring himself to name Sethe’s deed [150]). These modes of representation remind us that the experience is not Sethe’s; it is too close, too immediate to be hers. They also work to undermine any “gothic” pleasure the reader might derive from shocking revelation. The novel makes it all the more difficult to look by suggesting here that to look would be to identify with Schoolteacher, the slave catcher, and the sheriff.

It is difficult to say whether this moment is overtold (it is approached more than once), undertold (by the time the white men arrive it is too late), or never adequately and justly narrated (what would it mean to narrate such an event adequately and justly?). The point is not that the infanticide is not traumatic, only that trauma in Beloved cannot be looked for and located in a single place. For if the infanticide does not return to haunt in the form of a flashback, it does seem to have bypassed her consciousness in its very immediacy: “if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple” (163). After the baby’s death Sethe’s life is numbed and colorless (“It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it” [39]). Paul D is dizzied listening to Sethe tell her story. While he thinks, at first, that this is because she is being evasive, just “circling the subject,” he realizes soon enough that she is “too near,” unbearably close to Paul D and to the events themselves (161). Paul D refuses, at this point, to witness Sethe’s testimony.

If the infanticide is not the trauma, neither is Sethe the traumatized subject. Beloved is about a traumatized, gothicized, culture (“Not a house in this country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” [5]). Moreover, the story of slavery in general, insofar as it is a story of captivity, torture, and sexual violence, is also a traumatized, gothic narrative. And yet one can make the opposing case: in its very testimonial character (all testimonial requires a referential effect), the story of slavery in African-American literature explodes the concept of gothicism, of violence as fantasy. I would like to argue that much of Beloved’s power comes from its dual status as literary gothic text and as testimonial to history. The close and uncomfortable relationship between the conventional elements and the story that exceeds convention restores the horror to what could have been the merely sensational.²⁴

If there is an “original” trauma in Beloved, an event that renders history gothic, it is the trauma of Middle Passage, which establishes a pattern of separation and desertion. Beloved’s words make it more than apparent that this event or series of events cannot be left in the past: “All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead” (210). Beloved is both Sethe’s child and the representative of “Sixty Million and more.” Beloved tells Denver: “In the dark my name is Beloved” (75). The dark of the womb? the tomb? the ship’s belly? Beloved’s speech is overdetermined, always marked by her personal past as well as by the past of a culture.

It has been suggested that the recognition of PTSD allows clinicians to take more seriously the traumatic character of events experienced by adults. Not all that has an impact on the psyche must or can be traced back to early childhood. This is one of the ways in which thinking about trauma disorients psychoanalysis, asking that psychoanalytic inquiry relocate itself. But in the case of Beloved, trying to separate out an account of trauma from an account of the mother-child dyad proves difficult, and for good reason. Beloved is about its conflation of “maternal” and “historical” thematics. Denver, we are told repeatedly, drinks her sister’s blood along with her mother’s milk (a stunned Sethe, having killed Beloved, goes on to nurse her youngest baby). This unhealthy mixture, mother’s milk and sister’s blood, is an emblem of Beloved’s doubled relationship to the discourse of trauma. The infant’s experience is the trauma of Middle Passage and vice versa. Beloved does not haunt Sethe because Sethe killed her—the infanticide is not traumatic in this sense—but because she left her, deserted her repeatedly: the infanticide is one more desertion. If Sethe is the mother who killed her daughter to protect her from being re-enslaved, she is also the mother separated from the child in Middle Passage, and the one who left Beloved behind—or actually sent her on ahead—when she ran from Sweet Home (if Ursa's mother never leaves, Beloved is the perpetually abandoned child). Beloved retells the story of how mother and child lose one another, but in this particular instance, and in the culture of slavery more generally, the loss in both premature and the product of external force rather than conflict.²⁵

The unspeakable secret in Beloved, what Sethe can never say, is that her own mother deserted her. When Sethe was a small child her mother was hanged, but Sethe has never known why. What was her mother doing when she was caught: “Running, you think? No. Not that. Because she was my ma’am and nobody’s ma’am would run off and leave her daughter, would she? Would she, now?” (203). With her question Sethe simultaneously posits and negates this tale of desertion. What Sethe cannot say—my mother deserted me—Beloved returns to say incessantly. Beloved depends on Sethe for survival. She craves bodily intimacy and no degree of separation is tolerable; desire and identification are one: “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” (210). But Beloved is not just a novel about an infant’s need for mirroring, her oral economy, her intense ambivalence, her fantasies and fears about bodily integrity, or her experience of narcissistic woundedness (although it is also all of these things). These fears and fantasies are those of a (pre)subject in crisis, the crisis of (de)formation. While it sounds too simple to say that Beloved is governed by a regressive dynamic, it does seem fair to say that it is a novel about a crisis of subjectivity, a crisis inseparable from the traumatic legacy of slave culture. The infant’s experience of the precariousness of self-image (Beloved’s twin fears are that she will be eaten or that her body will explode [133]) resonates with the slave’s experience of a fragmented body, a body that belongs to someone else (141,226). Barbara Matheison has suggested that the novel’s dramatization of pre-Oedipal dynamics provides the metaphorical vehicle for its depiction of the experience of slavery. Morrison herself would seem to reverse the emphasis. In an interview with Marsha Darling in The women's Review of Books, she claims that slavery presented “an ideal situation” for discussing the intricacies of the mother-child relationship (Darling 6). Clearly neither assertion wholly accounts for the novel’s pattern of figuration. Beloved is a difficult text precisely in the way that it conflates those traumas that are not “outside the range” of human experience, the traumas of subject formation (what Freud would find in his consulting room every day), and the violence of particular histories.²⁶ If the novel of disrupted domesticity can often be read as an allegory of political anxiety, Beloved troubles the family at its roots. In other words, it implicitly suggests that family harmony is never possible. The gothicized domestic space is not just symptomatic of cultural conflict.²⁷

The conflation of maternal and historical thematics in Beloved combines two forms of resistance to representation: the resistance of the pre-Oedipal pre-subject, who exists prior to the dividing and identity-securing structures of language (“Why did you leave me who am you?” [216]), and the resistance of the traumatized subject, for whom the already expressive possibilities of language are (temporarily) overwhelmed. Although Sethe wants to share her story with Paul D, it may be impossible; there are horrors that “neither ha[s] word-shapes for” (99). Morrison renders the unrepresentable gothic by renaming it the unspeakable. After hearing of Sethe’s deed, Paul D leaves 124 and Sethe shuts herself in alone with her daughters:

Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have known better. Did know better. Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be.

(182–83)

When Stamp Paid, an ex-slave who has helped many others to gain their freedom, approaches Sethe’s home, he hears sounds that he cannot make sense of: “something was wrong with the order of the words and he could not describe or cipher it to save his life” (172). He hears what he cannot possibly hear: “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (199). In his unsuccessful attempts to cross the threshold, Stamp Paid encounters both pre-Oedipal mumblings, sounds that are not yet dialogue, sounds of a woman alone or of a woman and child together, and the constant “roar” of unbearable suffering. Jean Wyatt’s powerful reading of Morrison’s text offers an account of these two kinds of unspeakability: “Outcast both as victim of slavery whose death is unspeakable and as preverbal infant who has not made her way into the symbolic order, Beloved remains outside language and therefore outside narrative memory” (484).

Lest we give in to an over-hasty gothicization, Wyatt also argues that Morrison is not only concerned with the unspeakable or the unrepresentable but also with the unspoken or the just plain under-represented. In other words, the task of Beloved is also to “break … the silence,” to use Wyatt’s phrase, to represent what has been “le[ft] out” of “Western cultural narratives” (476, 474). What one ought to question, however, is the conflation of these terms: not the conflation of the “maternal” (the trauma of subject formation) and the “historical” (the trauma of slavery) as unrepresentable or unspeakable, but the conflation of the concept of the unrepresentable and the concept of the underrepresented, the conflation of a linguistic and a political problematic. This is not to suggest that the linguistic is apolitical (not to suggest that there is nothing at stake in what is constituted as an outside), nor that the political is not also a question of language, but to insist that there is a difference between what has not yet been said and what is constitutively excluded from the possibility of saying. To conflate the problematic of the unrepresentable or unspeakable with that of the underrepresented or not-yet-spoken is to restage, reperform, what Beloved itself does.²⁸ As a neoslave narrative, Beloved is both the text that has been excluded from the canon—the story that now demands its place, a place for the stories of slaves, and for the literariness of the black tradition—and the story of its own impossibility: how can there be a story of trauma? (“This is not a story to pass on” [275]).²⁹ In her conversation with Darling, Morrison claims that “the purpose of making [Beloved] real is making history possible, making memory real—somebody walks in the door and sits down at the table, so you have to think about it, whatever they may be” (5–6). This is the enabling fantasy of Morrison’s text: the unrepresentable can be approached as if it were only a problem of not yet being represented. In this depiction, the forceful and literal return of the past is domesticated and used. If Beloved is about the literalization, personification and reanimation of the past, it not only shows repetition compulsion at work, but is also a fantasy realized, a wish fulfilled.³⁰

This fantasy, of course, is also the fantasy of successful testimonial, and Beloved certainly moves in the direction of restoring the possibility of witnessing to the world it depicts. Paul D returns and promises to hear Sethe’s story (“He wants to put his story next to hers” [273]), and at the end of the novel the women of the community acknowledge Sethe’s trouble and banish Beloved (the ghost becomes ghost-like once again, her status uncertain, “Could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance” [263]). But by this point Sethe and Beloved have exchanged positions: Beloved is large and pregnant, and Sethe is wasted, small, and child-like, literally eaten away by Beloved’s insatiable demand. Morrison’s novel is about history as trauma insofar as it is about what happens when your past wants you. Indeed, it is only in its moments of willful optimism (the sentimental ending with Sethe and Paul D is, after all, “much much happier than what really happened”) that the precariousness of testimony itself seems to disappear.³¹Beloved stresses the importance of extra-familial community. With its depiction of testimonies that do not and cannot succeed (Sethe can testify, at first, neither to the unwilling Paul D nor to either of her too close daughters), Beloved, like Corregidora, allows for no easy cure.³²

And this should not be surprising. Testimony inevitably troubles the opposition between a pure repetition of the past (trauma) and representation through narrative. Because it must reproduce the past it purports to represent, it always risks retraumatizing both victim and witness. As a testimony to the difficulty of testifying or witnessing, Beloved allegorizes the conflict between a political imperative to preserve history (to preserve it against the distortions of representation) and the political imperative to represent (to give voice to what has been kept silent). In 1986, Morrison spoke about nineteenth-century slave narratives and their relationship to her then current project, the writing of Beloved. Morrison claimed that these narratives had been underread—not read for their literariness—and that the writers themselves were limited, by literary and social convention, in what they could say. She expressed a desire to reveal the “interior life” of slaves and to “rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (“The Site of Memory” 110). But if Beloved addresses itself to these problems, problems of inadequate representation, it also thematizes other resistances to representation: what most needs to be said in the novel defies narrative form. Instead it is said through the unlocatability of trauma, the conflation of the maternal and the historical, and the ambivalence of an ending that repudiates Beloved (“Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.” [275]) even as it conjures her once more. While Beloved, like Corregidora, repeats the story of slavery, then, it also asserts that it is only through an account of traumatic repetition that the story of slavery ever gets told.

Notes

1. Bernard W. Bell coins the term “neoslave narrative” in The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition. According to Bell neoslave narratives are “residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom” (289).

2. Much of the criticism, particularly of Beloved, already centers on questions of memory, history, and event, but it either appeals to the language of repression, which does not adequately or accurately account for the quality of the past in Morrison’s text, as I will show, or it uses “trauma” in an underspecified sense in which it seems to mean no more than “bad event.” See Ferguson; Henderson; Horvitz; Mathieson; and Mobley. It is of course difficult to reconcile the pleasure produced by literature with the fact that trauma, strictly speaking, excludes such enjoyment: unpleasurable repetition is trauma’s “symptom,” or rather since unpleasurable repetition signifies trauma, the logic of symptom must be reinterrogated.

3. See also Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. The rhetoric of ghostliness or gothicism in Caruth’s account recalls Nicolas Abraham’s concept of “the phantom” In “Notes on the Phantom.” Abraham claims that children act out their parents’ past secrets, secrets to which they would seem to have no access: “The phantom remains beyond the reach of traditional analysis. It will only vanish once we recognize its radically heterogeneous nature with respect to the subject—to whom it at no time bears any direct reference. In no way can the subject relate to it as his own repressed experience, not even as an experience by incorporation. The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other” (79).

4. The deconstruction of an opposition between Identification and incorporation (between being like and literally being) has been central to more recent accounts of subjectivity, accounts in which “trauma” is either not an issue or in which the “trauma” is the trauma of subject formation. See Borch-Jacobsen (“Identification brings the desiring subject into being, and not the other way around” [47]) and Butler.

5. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud is concerned with a force that violates the protective shield of consciousness and must be bound into meaning. For Walter Benjamin, it is specifically the modern subject who must constantly “parry the shocks” that threaten to violate this protective shield. Benjamin historicizes a line of thought already present in Freud’s text: to speak of trauma or shock is not merely to consider pathology but to rethink the category of experience. See “On Some Motifs” 165.

6. Caruth sets up an opposition (trauma vs. repression) but also reads how the term “repression” divides. See, in particular, her reading of Moses and Monotheism and her use of the term “inherent latency” (“Unclaimed Experience” [187]). See also van der Kolk and van der Hart; and Leys.

7. See, for example, “Childhood Trauma.” See also Crews, “The Unknown Freud,” “The Revenge of the Repressed,” and “The Revenge of the Repressed: Part II.”

8. Not all slave narratives, or neoslave narratives, are necessarily testimonies to trauma. Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child, for example, is strikingly similar to Beloved both thematically and structurally: Cary spins her fictional tale of the after-effects of enslavement, and of a mother forcefully separated from her young child, out of a kernel of historical truth. Yet, unlike Beloved Cary’s novel is not a consideration or enactment of the workings of trauma. For example, when Cary writes of Mercer Gray’s scars she is more interested in problematizing the abolitionists’ eagerness to read the slave’s body. Cary thus takes on, in quite a different way, the risks of testimony (167). See note 9.

9. The analogy to the physiological (trauma means wound) remains precarious and is always in danger of collapse. Corregidora and Beloved call attention to this precariousness in their depiction of the scar not only as a record of the violence done to the body but also as a metaphor for the violence suffered by the psyche. Scars signify deadness, loss or lack of feeling. In Beloved Sethe’s scars are on her back where she cannot see them, signifying the presence of an unreadable yet persistently present past. The dead flesh of the scar must be read to become meaningful; Sethe’s back is read and re-read (Beloved 17–18). In Corregidora the scar becomes the testimony: “‘that scar That's left to bear witness. We got to keep it as visible as our blood’” (Corregidora 72). The reading of scars, I want to suggest, is a compelling figure for the process of de-traumatizing, or making trauma mean. Sherley Ann William’s Dessa Rose is another neoslave narrative that includes a scene of scar reading.

10. While Benjamin’s thought is not easily assimilable to much of the recent work on trauma, he is another thinker who suggests that history needs to be thought of as that which disrupts or prevents narrative. See “Theses.”

11. See also Felman and Laub; and van der Kolk and van der Hart. Leys begins to articulate a critique of “the redemptive authority of history” and of “the modern recovery movement” (652, 653).

12. Laplanche and Pontalis assert that analysis is predicated on the “absolute suspension of all reality judgements … as the unconscious … knows no such judgements” (“Fantasy” 7). But they also acknowledge the difficulty of absolutely dismissing a reality/fantasy distinction (see their discussion of the fantasy and reality of adoption, also in “Fantasy” 20n). Felman and Laub explore the relationship between trauma, testimony, and witnessing. Both Felman and Laub and Grubrich-Simitis talk about how trauma pushes at the boundaries of normal analytic procedure: “In psychoanalytic work with survivors … historical reality has to be reconstructed and reaffirmed before any other work can start” (Felman and Laub 69).

13. When the argument is made that the victim of sexual abuse experiences a trial as a second rape, this may not only be because the judicial system adopts a masculinized point of view, but also because a testimony to trauma can also be a traumatized testimony. As “Andrea” says in Andrea Dworkin’s feminist testimonial novel, Mercy: “There's no what happened next” (160).

14. The recent work of African-American legal scholar Patricia J. Williams makes use of the testimonial form.

15. The above also draws on Caruth’s talk “Traumatic Departures.” For another interpretation of trauma as departure see Christopher Bollas. Bollas describes the case of a battered woman and ponders the enigma of her repeated return to the abusive relationship. He suggests that she may be staging a return to “[her] own relational origin” (205). She is thus returning not so much to the violence, as to its cessation. She returns time and again to the elusive care that the end of conflict repeatedly promises. Abuse is seductive because it stops (203–05).

16. Corregidore means, in Portuguese, “judicial magistrate.” Melvin Dixon suggests that “by changing the gender designation, Jones makes Ursa Corregidora a female judge charged by the women in her family to ‘correct’ (from the Portuguese verb corrigir) the historical invisibility they have suffered” (239).

17. See also Williams, “On Being the Object of Property” in Alchemy. Williams tells the story of her departure for law school. Her mother tries to reassure her of her worthiness by telling her that the law is “in [her] blood.” Williams’s great-great-grand-mother Sophie was purchased and impregnated by a white lawyer named Austin Miller (216).

18. While Jones and Morrison revise the slave narrative, this revision works in part to reveal what is already there. One can read, for example, what is non-linear in Harriet Jacobs’s story: Jacobs does not want her freedom to be purchased by a white woman. Purchased freedom is, in a sense, no freedom. Despite Jacobs’s desires, however, this is what happens (199–200).

19. In an interview, Jones says, “in the Corregidora story I was concerned with getting across a sense of an intimate history, particularly a personal history, and to contrast it with the broad, impersonal telling of the Corregidora story. Thus one reason for Ursa telling her story and her mother’s story is to contrast them with the ‘epic’ almost impersonal history of Corregidora” (‘Interview’ 92). Jones also claims, however, that she did not initially include the personal (Corregidora was all “epic”). She added a hundred pages when her editor, Toni Morrison, asked the question: what about Ursa's past? Notably, critics of the blues suggest that this musical genre conjoins shared and intimate history. See Carby 750.

20. For example, psychoanalyst André Green writes of the paradoxes of maternal love and specifically of what he calls “normal maternal madness” (“It is when this ‘madness’ does not appear that we have reason to suspect that the matter is disturbing” [245]). The father in this narrative represents the “cure” (“He is, so to speak, the guarantee of the transformation of this madness, and of its evolution towards inevitable separation” [247]). Green argues that the father is mad “elsewhere—in the world, in social life, in his preoccupation with power.” In this rendering, social reality—or being the father—is one long and elaborate attempt at disengaging oneself from the “delicious[ness]” of passivity (247).

21. See Kristeva. She gives an account of the imaginary father, which also complicates any simple separating out of maternal and paternal orders.

22. The house on 124 Bluestone Road is the novel’s main character. In addition to this haunting of domestic space, Beloved is a gothic novel in that it involves intergenerational transmission, features scandalous sexuality and bodily mutilations, and makes use of the trope of unspeakable horror.

23. Perhaps Beloved is Morrison’s most aesthetically compelling work to date because its theme, the literal or material return of the past, echoes Morrison’s style, the intimacy and corporeality of her figuration: secrets are sweet, sleep has a lip, disapproval a scent (28, 85, 138).

24. James Baldwin suggests that the temporality of trauma is also the temporality of gothicized African-American experience. “This horror … has so welded past and present that it is virtually impossible and certainly meaningless to speak of it as occurring, as it were, in time” (xii).

25. While there are several psychoanalytic stories of the crisis, or triumph, of infant-mother separation, Beloved could be said to reveal the necessarily fantastic component of most of these tales. In Lacan’s mirror stage the child that “loses” or “overcomes” the mother and sees himself as whole and independent actually props himself upon her (his self-recognition is a scene of misrecognition—he fantasizes both that he has lost his mother and that he is independent and whole). See also Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who suggest that a “real” loss of the mother would constitute a trauma and impede language acquisition. A loss, then, as necessary as it is for subject constitution, is only bearable (i.e. non-traumatic) when it is not a real loss.

26. The phrase “outside the range” comes from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM-III-R) definition of the traumatic event (“the person has experienced an event that is outside the range of human experience” [qtd. in Brown 120]). Laura S. Brown considers this wording in her feminist critique of the DSM’s definition. She argues that politics determine what counts as traumatic. Brown describes a case in which an adult incest survivor was told that she could not possibly be traumatized since incest is fairly common, and in order to have suffered a trauma one must have suffered from something that is “outside the range of human experience.” Brown’s point is that the category “human,” while seeming to represent all, excludes people from non-dominant groups.

27. Anticipating the conflation that characterizes Beloved, Morrison’s Sula juxtaposes “too thick” mother love (is the maternal the position where excess and insufficiency inevitably meet?) and trauma, specifically war trauma. Shadrack the World War I veteran is “permanently astonished”: “He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both” (7, 14).

28. Much of the criticism on Beloved celebrates the text as it retells its story as a story of cure. See Duvall, Horvitz, Mathieson, Rushdy, and Wyatt. (Rushdy’s article is already a polemical response to Stanley Crouch, who argues that “Beloved means to prove that Afro-Americans are the result of a cruel determinism” [42]). For Wyatt, this cure, which she names “the maternal symbolic,” is not just Sethe’s cure, or a cultural cure, but a cure for language itself. The process of signification needs healing, and Beloved does the work. Sethe may revert to materiality and refuse the process of exchange and substitution, but the world that she rejects, the world that according to Wyatt psychoanalysis describes, is a world in which materiality and the maternal must be entirely surrendered. Beloved, Wyatt argues, ultimately offers a middle way. It is not so much that these therapeutic or celebratory readings are wrong (the text provides plenty of support for such readings), but that it seems worth scrutinizing their investment in such a healing project. In successfully doing the work of reading Beloved as a progressive narrative, as a narrative that progresses, the criticism itself becomes, or is able to present itself as, a powerful antidote to the culture’s ills and trauma’s resistance to narrativization.

29. Morrison also addresses the question of unspeakability in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” In this essay Morrison’s concern would seem to be primarily with the political, that is, with the problem of forms of “willful oblivion,” with “certain absences … so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them” (11). Even here, “unspeakability” takes on a variety of meanings. It also means, for example, that which can only be cited. Morrison writes, “Thus, in spite of its implicit and explicit acknowledgment, ‘race’ is still a virtually unspeakable thing, as can be seen in the apologies, notes of ‘special use’ and circumscribed definition that accompany it—not least of which is my own deference in surrounding it with quotation marks” (3).

30. Morrison has spoken of “a necessity for remembering the horror,” but, she adds, “of course There's a necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested. … my story, my invention, is much, much happier than what really happened” (Darling 5). By opposing her version to “what really happened,” Morrison exposes the willfulness of her project, its investment in the very possibility of fictional language (a power that she also acknowledges in her epigraph: “‘I will call them my people/which were not my people;/and her beloved,/which was not beloved’ Romans [9:25]”). Similarly, Beloved both preserves and rewrites the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who did kill one of her children to prevent her from being re-enslaved. In the historical account, Margaret Garner is re-enslaved, but she falls or jumps with her baby from the boat taking her further south. The end of Garner’s story, such as it is, is reinscribed in Beloved, but not as the end of Sethe’s tale. Instead Morrison conflates Garner’s story with the shared, unlocatable account of Middle Passage. For Beloved, Sethe is the mother lost in an attempt to “escape” from a slave ship: “She was about to smile at me when the men without skin came and took us up into the sunlight with the dead and then shoved them into the sea. Sethe went into the sea. … When I went in, I saw her face coming to me and it was my face too” (214). Despite Morrison’s avowed investment in the possibility of cure, the manageability of history, this treatment of the Garner material displays a traumatic resistance to narrative. For the Margaret Garner story see Coffin; Darling; Lerner; Morrison and Naylor; “The Cincinnati Slaves”; and “A Visit.”

31. Morrison says of her relationship to sentimentality, “I want a residue of emotion in my fiction, and this means verging upon sentimentality, or being willing to let it happen and then draw back from it. Also, stories seem so old-fashioned now. But narrative remains the best way to learn anything, whether history or theology, so I continue with narrative form” (Leclair 372).

32. Although Corregidora is not governed by the same intensity of infantile affect that predominates in Beloved, in both novels there is a specifically mother-child violence associated with the force of repetition. Between mothers and daughters, it seems, the future has no chance. It is as if relationships within the family, the gothicized domestic space, are always in danger of becoming pre-objectival (particularly if they are relationships between women), and the pre-object cannot bear witness.

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