Reformulating Binaries: Recursive Time in Beloved

Beloved presents a binary between flashback and the present moment, thus creating a recursive, revisiting, almost swirling sphere of time in the novel. This perception of time is almost exclusively expressed through Sethe’s perspective, which further suggests that the novel’s treatment of time acts as an allusion to Sethe’s mental state – her mind reels from past traumas that daily life invokes. But Morrison complicates this binary (embedded in linear time) by writing Sethe’s conscious and continuous resistance to the past’s, or memories’, shaping of her actions in the present moment. “Nothing better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past,” Sethe reflects (73). As Kristeva argues in “Women’s Time,” time can exist on linear, circular, and monumental dimensions. Because our society measures time linearly, we would say that Sethe’s traumatic memories occurred “in the past,” in a certain year and month. But they have not: Sethe’s memories are present for her and bleed into her conversations with Beloved, Denver, and Paul D; she is never free of their infliction on the decisions she makes or reactions she exhibits. These memories reoccur every time Sethe remembers: though they do not physically occur when she remembers them, they elicit fresh trauma that Sethe had not developed until she mentally relived them. Sethe’s remembering of her past shapes her present, morphing personality.

Morrison formally constructs Sethe’s involuntary urge to remember. Morrison writes the novel in fragments that provide the reader with background plot necessary to understand the sometimes cryptic prose that refers to Sethe’s past, but that also dissolve the boundaries between Sethe’s memory and her reality. For instance, the chapter in which Sethe gives birth to Denver begins, “Upstairs Beloved was dancing…Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music” (74); this is the present moment, featuring grown Denver. By the chapter’s end, Sethe has given birth to Denver and has just decided on the child’s name (“Sethe felt herself falling into a sleep…On the lip of it…she thought, ‘That’s pretty. Denver. Real pretty’” (85)). The reader has already seen this name for seventy pages, a familiarity Morrison relies on to suggest that past moments and the present overlap in Beloved. Adult Denver and newborn Denver exist simultaneously, as do Sethe’s living and disappeared sons, and Baby Suggs as commander of 124 and as a physically minor figure in the house yet a monumental one in the residents’ imaginations. This collapsing of the past and present is displayed again when Sethe, Denver, and Beloved walk into the woods and the physical experience of being surrounded by nature plunges Sethe into a “rememory” of crossing the river to freedom. “Followed by the two girls…Sethe began to sweat a sweat just like the other one when she woke, mud-caked, on the banks of the Ohio” (90). Again, by the end of this sentence the reader is in a different year from where we were when the sentence began. Morrison follows this sentence with, “Amy was gone. Sethe was alone and weak, but alive, and so was her baby” (90). Here Sethe exhibits vulnerability and easy emotional undoing; the book’s treatment of time aims to convey this internal tussle of Sethe’s through its flashback-flash-forward form.

So the binary of past and present, flashback and current, memory and reality is not conveniently literal in Beloved. I would argue that “past” does not exist for Sethe, nor does present. Every moment she experiences, whether it is in linear time’s terms “happening now” or “has happened,” is wearing on her.