“The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well–to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other–the things neither had word-shapes for–well, it would come in time: where they led him off to sucking iron; the perfect death of her crawling-already? baby” (116).
For both Sethe and Paul D, remembering the past is painful. However, as Sethe comes to realize, by sharing memories with Paul D, her past becomes his own (above) and this somehow renders the “intolerable” tolerable.
Telling stories of her past to Beloved gives Sethe a similar rejuvenating energy, but for the opposite reasons, “…as she began telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events, or her thirst for hearing it–in any case it was an unexpected pleasure” (69). Sethe’s words shouldn’t be taken at absolute face value here, since she’s been enchanted by Beloved (not a topic I have space to get into), but her assertion that she enjoys telling stories to Beloved because of her distance doesn’t seem to be thrown into question by this fact.
Beloved, likely being the incarnation of Sethe’s self-murdered crawling-already? girl, represents some aspect of the tantalizing allure and strange permanence (43) of history (adequately supporting this fairly fundamental claim would take up a lot of space, so I’m going to assume it’s pretty much a given). Morrison has constructed a binary with the relationships Between Sethe and her past through two different figures from that past. The reading of the entire text hinges on this duality: Paul D’s affair with Beloved (and so Sethe’s and his own history); Denver’s reliance on and strange attraction to Beloved (and the things unknown to and responsible for her being); and the very way in which storytelling morphs to and from subject and form throughout the novel.
In telling stories to both Beloved and Paul D, Sethe is able to cope with her past through its expression, but as I wrote above, this end seems to be achieve by opposite means with her two listeners — Paul D is a figure from her past who already knows her and continues to know her better, bit by bit, with the telling, while Beloved is the murdered daughter who simultaneously haunts her and remains totally oblivious who she is. Proximity and distance.
The two disparate experiences of Sethe’s past function in different ways, but they seem to enable each other to have an effect. Paul D came to 124, bringing Sethe’s past to her present, then beat away the baby’s ghost (22), leading it to return as Beloved. Sethe then went from telling her stories to beloved (more candidly than she had with Denver), to taking a further leap and sharing them with someone who actually knows them intimately.
Paul D is her history — they share a past. At the point of the first quote I selected, they know everything about each other other than that traumas that make their pasts painful in the first place, “where they led him off to sucking iron; the perfect death of her crawling-already? baby.” Beloved is the source of Sethe’s pain. Now that Paul D has rendered it unable to haunt her as a spirit, it has descended on her to haunt her with the truth of its existence — the truth that it exists for everyone.
