Toni Morrison's Novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved - Book Report/Review Example

Discuss the interrrelationship of trauma, memory and narrative in Toni Morrison's novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. The ideas of trauma, memory and narrative are intimately linked throughout Toni Morrison's work. All of Morrison's novels to date deal with the trauma associated with being a black (usually female) American. The novels span around one hundred and fifty years of American history, and the traumas of black Americans range from physical abuses such as injury, rape and murder, to the psychological damage inflicted on black citizens by their exclusion from white society, and their desire for cultural and personal identity and a sense of belonging. On another level, Morrison's novels attempt to provide the very kind of identity the loss of which they bemoan: through her work, Morrison is trying to continue in literary form the oral tradition of tale-telling and narrative songs which she feels modern black Americans have lost - she said in an interview, there has to be a mode to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization. I am not explaining anything to anybody. My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. (Leclair 1981). Hence, Morrison's novels explore these ideas in two ways: firstly, they deal with personalised memories of traumas experienced by black Americans, explored using fragmentary narrative which in fact mirrors the psychological reality of trauma; secondly, they involve the reader in an act of collective memory, and so attempt to create a unified sense of black American culture and history. Psychological trauma is omnipresent in Morrison's novels, and The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved are no exceptions. In The Bluest Eye, the primary trauma is that of Pecola: she cannot come to terms with her ugliness as defined by the white stereotype of beauty. On the face of it, there are other events in the book that are more shocking - Cholly's rape of Pecola, Mr. Yacobowski the shopkeeper refusing to touch her, the white men's abuse of the adolescent Cholly, to name but a few - however, the true tragedy of the novel stems from Pecola's inability to find her place in a society that defines her as an ugly outsider. In Beloved, we discover a similar trauma at the novel's core: Sethe's (and Beloved's and Denver's) tragedy stems from her inability to fulfil her role as a mother in a society that treats her instead as a breeder. Whilst in the course of the novel Morrison mentions countless horrific events - notably the factual account of the post-emancipation lynchings (Morrison 1987, p. 180) - those with the most psychological impact relate to Sethe's motherhood: the stealing of her milk, Schoolteacher's attempt to take her children back into slavery after she escapes, and, most horrifically, her murder of her own daughter. Equally, in Song of Solomon, Milkman's trauma stems from his struggle to find his place as a black male in a society that forces him either to sell his soul (as his father has done) or to become an outlaw and a murderer (like Robert Smith). As Brooks Bouson (2000, p. 7) quotes, the psychological phenomenon of trauma occurs when actual experiences are so overwhelming that they 'cannot be integrated into existing frameworks' so they are 'dissociated, later to return intrusively as fragmented sensory or motoric experiences' (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991, p. 447). The narrative structure of the three Toni Morrison novels being discussed reflects this account of the psychology of trauma: in each, the viewpoint of the narrative changes, and traumatic events are mentioned in passing and glimpsed through repetitions in their fragmentary structures. In The Bluest Eye, the recollections of Claudia MacTeer are interspersed with passages in the style of a first-grade primer, the kind of book which would have instigated Pecola's feelings of being ugly and excluded. The passage is stated three times in full at the beginning of the book: first in quotation style, then without punctuation, finally without spaces between the words. This shows the internalisation of the primer's message by Pecola: it stops being a book designed to help children learn to read, and instead becomes a barrier excluding her from society. Throughout the novel, unpunctuated, unspaced, capitalised passages from the primer are contrasted with Pecola's own situation (for example, 'HEREISTHEHOUSE [] ITISVERYPRETTY' followed by a description of the 'abandoned store' in which Pecola lives (Morrison 1970, p. 24)) - this serves to emphasise the personal trauma to Pecola caused by the idea of the "perfect" family created by the primer. In Beloved, the narrative is temporally fragmented, and presented as a series of the characters' memories. Therefore, traumatic events recur throughout the novel: at first they are glimpsed or alluded to, later they are elaborated on, and finally they are shown in full. For example, Sethe's murder of the 'crawling-already' child (who becomes Beloved) is first mentioned on page 13, when Denver says obliquely, '[m]y sister [] she died in this house'; the murder is mentioned again on pages 149-50 and 157; however, it is not until pages 163-4, significantly occurring just before the end of part one, that we see a full picture of what happened, when Sethe says to Paul D: 'I took and put my babies where they'd be safe' (Morrison 1987, p. 164). Though the narrative of Song of Solomon is more linear, fragments of traumatic events are also glimpsed here: 'he [Macon Dead] believed that the sight of her mouth on the dead man's fingers would be the thing he would remember always' (Morrison 1977, p. 46). Thus, it can be seen that Morrison's fragmentary, multi-perspective narrative techniques in these three books mirror the psychological effect of trauma. The effect on their lives of the traumatic events experienced by Morrison's characters is explored in these novels by examining their memories. Memories of horrific events spring up at unwanted times, and this is mirrored in the narrative style Morrison employs, as described above. The idea of memory is most fully explored in Beloved: Sethe describes her personal concept of "rememory": I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go [] Some things just stay [] Places, places are still there [] out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. (Morrison 1987, pp. 35-6) This idea prepares us for the arrival of Beloved, who can be seen as the physical manifestation, or "rememory", of Sethe's and Denver's memories of the murdered child. Later, at the end of the novel, Beloved is described as having been 'disremembered' (Morrison 1987, p. 275) - this introduces a further idea with relation to memory: that memories of events and people can be suppressed. In fact, it would seem that this is a very important idea for Morrison's characters, traumatised as they are by the past: for Sethe in Beloved, 'the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay' (Morrison 1987, p. 73); in Song of Solomon Macon Dead tells how 'Mama liked it. Liked the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past' (Morrison 1977, p. 54); finally, Guitar seems to summarise the attitude of Morrison's characters towards the past: '[d]on't carry it inside - don't give it to nobody else' (Morrison 1977, pp. 87-8). Hence memories are seen as presences in the lives of the characters, to be focused on or ignored as they see fit: it is in this manner that Morrison's characters internalise the traumas that they have experienced - by shutting them out and attempting to ignore them. However, this is clearly unsuccessful - 'if you want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth' Macon says (Morrison 1977, p. 70) - and in this sense Morrison's books serve as a very personal document of the central characters' struggle with the trauma of their past. In each book the traumatic experience haunts the characters, recurring in the narrative throughout; again this is most obvious in Beloved, where the haunting is literal as well as metaphorical. However, also in The Bluest Eye it can be seen that the repeating fragments of the first-grade primer haunt Pecola. A consistent theme of these haunting memories is their lack of punctuation - both the fragments of first-grade primer and the four chapters central to Beloved (pp. 200-17) are ungrammatical and (in some places) unpunctuated - this shows the internalisation of the traumatic events by the characters. Thus, memory and trauma are closely linked in Morrison's novels, since the narrative style emphasises the personal experience of dealing with the memory of traumatic events. As well as the highly personal experience of Morrison's characters which I have detailed above, the novels also act as a collective memory. The critic Peter Ramadanovic writes, 'Beloved helps its contemporary audience work through the trauma of the past' (Ramadanovic 2001, p. 99) and I feel that this is true of all three novels being discussed. To go back to the concept of "rememory", each novel can be seen as itself a "rememory". In Beloved Ella says to Stamp Paid, 'you know as well as I do that people who die bad don't stay in the ground' (Morrison 1987, p. 188) - this is clearly an allusion to the supernatural; however, I feel it also has a more subtle meaning: that the memory of horrific incidents cannot be "disremembered", and that they will continue to be "rememoried" long after they have occurred. By this reading, then, in writing the novel Morrison acts so as to force her readers to remember happenings that cannot and should not be forgotten. This is most noticeable in the section in Beloved written in Beloved's voice (pp.210-213) during which Beloved seems to tap into the collective memory of atrocities committed on the slave ships; through this, Morrison makes these atrocities become our memories, too. Therefore, the novel as a whole can be seen as an act of memory: it is a literary manifestation of a past situation which cannot be "disremembered". The same is true of the struggles of Pecola and Milkman to find their place in their society in The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. Each story is both particular and personal, but also a general description of black American experience during the period in which it is set. This idea is strengthened by the stylistic attributes of Morrison's writing: there is strong reference throughout her work to the black oral tradition. In Song of Solomon, there are many references to blues music, which is typically black and originated from slave songs. The "sugarman" song is omnipresent and serves as a foil to the struggles of the men in the book to fulfill the duties of manhood. Similarly, the style and content of Beloved is reminiscent of (though much more complex than) the slave narratives written by slaves and documenting their experiences, such as that of Frederick Douglass (Douglass XXXX). So, Morrison allies herself to the black narrative tradition by incorporating elements of it in her work. In this way I believe she attempts to create in her novels a communal black American history that is shared by all. In conclusion, I believe that Morrison's exploration of trauma in her novels is developed through the memories of her characters. The personal experience of trauma is conveyed by the focus of her novels on these painful memories, and their recurrence throughout each book in spite of the characters' best efforts demonstrates the potency of their past agonies, and gives the novels a powerful sense of pathos. It is Morrison's individual narrative style, which is allied to post-modernist and magic realist movements but also apart from them, that allow her to explore her characters' memories and traumas on such a personal level. However, there is also, in my opinion, a further level to Morrison's work: whilst the traumas and memories she describes are certainly personal, I feel she also means them to be collective - that we, the readers, should also experience the trauma of the past, and that it should become our past as well (which, after all, it is, even if we may not have directly experienced the things she describes). In the afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison writes that she hopes its opening ('quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941' (Morrison 1977, p. 3)) 'provides the stroke that announces something more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled, an unspeakable thing spoke at last' (Morrison 1977). In these three novels, I believe Morrison sets out to speak the unspeakable in order to fill the void she sees in communal black American culture. References Bouson, J. B. 2000, Quiet as it's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, State University of New York Press, Albany. Douglass, F. 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, OUP, Oxford (1999). LeClair, T. 1981, "The language must not sweat", in New Republic, 21 March 1981. Morrison, T. 1970, The Bluest Eye, Vintage, London. Morrison, T. 1977, Song of Solomon, Chatto and Windus, London. Morrison, T. 1987, Beloved, Vintage, London. Ramadanovic, P. 2001, Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity, Lexington Books, Maryland. Van der Kolk, B. and van der Hart, O. 1991, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma" in American Imago, 48.4. Read More