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

Discuss the interrelationship between trauma, memory and narrative in Toni Morrison's novels Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon. Throughout Toni Morrison's Beloved, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, trauma1, memory2 and narrative3 are interwoven to produce common strands on non-linear meaning and inter-textual cross-referencing. Trauma, in each of the novels, triggers a kind of narrative propulsion towards a new level of meaning, often serving as a catalyst, sign post or predicate to a moment of revelation, resolution or rebirth. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola's introduction to the narrative was preceded by her father's act of arson upon the family home, in Song of Solomon a traumatic childhood haunts the present, and in Beloved, each appearance of the title's namesake - whether in her interned, ghostly or 'reincarnated' form - is accompanied by a traumatic event. Song of Solomon begins with a symbolic scene involving a man who attempts to fly and plunges to his death. This tragedy is immediately followed - or seems to even trigger - a new birth. Morrison uses trauma as a kind of narrative signpost for change - whether positive or negative, real or imagined. Trauma also acts as a point of juncture between perceived frailty and the onset of dissolution - as seen in the rape of Pecola that leads to her mental deterioration: "[Pecola beat] the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach - could not even see - but which filled the valleys of the mind." (p. 204) It is a fragmentation mirrored throughout each of the novels - cleverly in Morrison's use of an idyllic storybook extract at the onset of The Bluest Eye. The extract itself is re-written a number of times, each time deteriorating and becoming less structured - more chaotic. It is a textual reflection of the theme of recurring memories, pasts revived and traumas relived that colours much of Morrison's work. The process of re-telling also evokes the strong cultural heritage of African-American oral histories - wherby story-telling - from one generation to the next - was a way of sharing wisdom and establishing narrative bridges between the past, the present and the future. According to Rody (2000, pp. 93-94): "'Rememory' functions in Morrison's 'history' as a trope for the problem of reimagining one's heritage. The (Bluest Eye's) entire poetics of memory, all of Sethe and Paul D's troubles with remembering can be seen to figure the problem not of Morrison's own memory, of course, but of her imagination as it encounters her people's past. The characters who do not want to or can not remember their stories reverse the desire of the writer who wants to know and tell a communal history. She must work to 'rememory' these ancestors who wish they could forget." Kubitschek (1998, p. 72) observes a similar need throughout Song of Solomon to reconstruct the past as a pathway to self-understanding and personal growth: "Much of Part Two consists of Milkman's attempts to recognize and follow clues, to create a coherent history of the gold's travels. To succeed, he must develop previously latent parts of his character and change his shallow values." Many of Morrison's characters react differently to the traumatic occurances within their stories - some run, some descend into madness, some prevail - but the common thread is change and - subsequently - a change in narrative direction and/or pace. Trauma is also linked to narrative and memory through the use of structures, landscapes and signposts in the natural realm. The house at Beloved's 124 Bluestone Road is imbibed with the personalities of its inhabitants. It is personified beyond the realm of a mere physical structure - invisibly inscribed with memories, traumas, a common sense of identity and a life force of its own: "the house itself was pitching." (p. 18), "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." (p. 3) This same link between abode and identity comes to the foreground in The Bluest Eye, with the Breedloves salvaging scraps of a lacklustre breed of domestic bliss from within the walls of their dilapidated residence: "They slipped in and out of the box of peeling gray, making no stir in the neighborhood, no sound in the labor force, and no wave in the mayor's office. Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other." (p. 34). In Beloved, Sethe's staunch refusal to flee 124 is indicative of her resolve not to run from the past: "'I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running - from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me It cost too much.'" (p. 15). Abodes in all of the novels, as they are personalised and transposed upon the experiences of their inhabitants, act as thematic foundations for core narrative developments - and - acting as both the sites of trauma and the structural conserves of familial memory - they wed these three elements - trauma, memory and narrative - into a common discursive fabric. As well as man-made structures - natural objects are also symbolic calling cards that stir memory, direct narrative and often act as a poignant juxtaposition against traumatic experiences. In The Bluest Eye - flowers recur as thematic signposts along the eloquent winding road of Morrison's prose. At the start of the novel, Claudia recounts the rape of her best friend - connecting it to the failure of her marigolds to bloom. Towards the novel's end, however, this sense of loss converts to a kind of insight accompanied by resignation, as she observes - in an indirect allusion to the sad fate of Pecola that: "this soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers." (p. 206) Dandelions, throughout The Bluest Eye are representative of Pecola's own perception of her unattractiveness - in accordance to the predominant categorisations of society - the same simplistic categorisations that brand the pretty dandelions as ugly weeds. Pecola's inner landscape finds reflection in the external, tangible landscape around her - and the two become united by the shared trauma of displacement and otherness. Later, however, she takes on the opinions of the majority, turning against her own beliefs in the quest for a greater sense of belonging with the crowd:: "Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.' Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth." (p. 50). The fallibility of memory, combined with its persistence, underpins much of the tension across the three works. Remembered things, through the process of being remembered, experience a kind of rebirth or immortality. Conversely, as shown in Baby Sugg's remarks during Chapter 1 of Beloved, things that are not remembered can seem as though they never existed at all: "My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that Eight children and that's all I remember.'" (p. 5) This idea is expanded further a few chapters on by Sethe: "'The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there - you who never was there - if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over - over and done with - it's going to always be there waiting for you.'' (p. 36) One of the most traumatic scenes across all three novels is the rape of Pecola by her father - an event which depends upon the distortion of memory as its catalyst. The intrusion of the past into the present occurs when Cholly sees his wife in his young daughter, and the events that follow set in motion Pecola's tragic narrative journey up until the story's end. While Pecola is a victim in The Bluest Eye, Paula Gallant Eckard (2002, p.35) observes that many of Morrison's female protagonists tend to break away from conventional, stereotypical narrative structures - tapping into primal female energies that utilise both memory and trauma as sources of awareness and power: "Intimately connected with the earth, the all-powerful Great Mother was associated with birth, transformation, death, and rebirth. The mothers in Morrison's fiction mirror the Great Mother's propensities for life and death, for procreation and destruction. Her maternal figures are complex, often possessing negative qualities that disturb and confound the reader. They have the potential to be loving, nurturing, judgmental, punishing, and even murderous. They are not romanticized or glorified in any traditional sense. They are flesh-and-blood, sexual women who erupt with passion, incite fear and terror, inspire adoration, and provoke sorrow. Collectively, they represent the Great Mother in all of her incarnations." On an intertextual level The Bluest Eye expresses its own take on the actual enforced slavery of the characters in Beloved. With the intrusion of western culture, in the form of white beauty ideals and film star glamour, the novel's protagonists are entrapped by a kind of mental slavery - where the prevalent ideals of the society around them superimpose themselves upon the consciousness of the community's 'colouredfolk'. This facilitates the trauma of self-loathing that follows on from the realisation that such goals are unattainable and that the espoused ideal is something the 'colouredfolk' can never achieve. Throughout the narrative of the book itself, the intertextual referencing of Hollywood starlets and the obvious grasp they had on the minds of both Pauline and Pecola, exists as a kind of textual invasion, representing the way that repression has played itself out on many levels throughout the course of history. In particular, where it interacts with ideas of objectification and ideals of feminine beauty, repression has had a strong inter- generational impact upon the spiritual connectedness and sense of unity shared between mothers and daughters. Rody (2000, p. 98) expands on the way this is played out in Beloved - circling the central theme of loss - particularly in relation to lost history, memory and identity: "this history-as-daughter's-rememory is pervaded with grief for lost mothers: Beloved's aching desire for Sethe; Sethe's mourning for Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law almost as present in memory after her death as is her ghostly granddaughter; and Sethe's loss of her own mother, remembered in excruciating fragments: a hat in the rice fields, a scar under her breast (p. 61). This multiple mourning for mothers inscribes in our literature the tragic experience of African-American children and women under slavery, systematically denied mothers and denied the mother-right by the pitiless traffic in human labor and by enforced wet-nursing. Her mother sent to the fields, Sethe was suckled by the plantation nurse: 'The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you . . .' (p. 200). Echoing through this 'history' is a cry for mother's milk, fusing a mass- scale historical deprivation with that of the thirsting self, the daughter deprived of her 'disremembered' matrilineage." In conclusion, narrative structure and direction are strongly dependent upon the motivating force of trauma for its drama and momentum throughout each of the novels, while the recurring theme of memory is given intensity and clarity as a link between different levels of textual expression. Footnotes 1Definitions of trauma: A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption. From: http://dictionary.reference.com; sourced on December 24, 2005. 2Definitions of memory: The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection: spent the afternoon lost in memory. All that a person can remember: It hasn't happened in my memory. Something remembered: pleasant childhood memories. The fact of being remembered; remembrance: dedicated to their parents' memory. The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of persons: within the memory of humankind. From: http://dictionary.reference.com; sourced on December 24, 2005. 3Definitions of narrative: A narrated account; a story. The art, technique, or process of narrating. From: http://dictionary.reference.com; sourced on December 24, 2005. References/Bibliography Angelo, Bonnie. 1989, "The Pain of Being Black." Time, May 22, pp. 120-122. 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Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. 1998, Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Lerner, Gerda, (ed.). 1973, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. Vintage, New York. Liscio, Lorraine. 1992, "Beloved's Narrative: Writing Mother's Milk", Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 11, pp. 31-46. McDowell, Deborah E. & Rampersad, Arnold. 1989, Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Selected Papers from the English Institute, New Series 13. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Morrison, Toni. 1987, Beloved, Plume-NAL, New York. Morrison, Toni. 1970, The Bluest Eye: A Novel, Holt, New York. Morrison, Toni. 1997, Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison. McKay, Nellie Y. & Earle, Kathryn (eds), The Modern Language Association of America, New York. Morrison, Toni. 1997, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, Peterson, Nancy J (ed), The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Rigney, Barbara Hill. 1991, The Voices of Toni Morrison, Ohio State University Press, Columbus. Rody, Caroline. 2000. ''Toni Morrison's Beloved: History, "Rememory," and a "Clamor for a Kiss"', Understanding Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author, Whitson Publishing, Troy, New York, pp. 84-109. Read More