Course Blog

The book Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution was written by Peter Paret, Beth Irwin Lewis, and Paul Paret. The story was published in Princeton Universities press in 1992. Peter Paret himself was born in Berlin, Germany on April 13^th, 1924.  Peter Paret’s mother was Jewish while the father was not so when the parents divorced Peter eventually immigrated to America in 1937 while Peter Paret’s father stayed in Germany. Peter Paret’s wife was Isabel Harris and their two children were Suzanne Aimeee Paret and Paul Louis Paret. Paret at one point served three years in the United States army from 1943-1946 and he specifically served in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Korea. This first hand perspective on war gave Paret the ability to describe the brutality and a first hand look at how war impacted individuals.“Paret belonged to a generation of World War II veterans who used their experience of the war to better understand military history. Paret’s major interests include the relationship between art of a particular era is related to that era’s ideology and social context, and the interactions among politics, intellectual trends, and war.” (JewAge article)

Additionally, in the book it discusses and brings attention to 317 different posters that were involved in World War 2. With these posters, the United States government wanted its audience to feel compelled to join in the war to fight against the enemy. Through these posters the US government would dehumanize their enemy to help the American people not feel guilty about killing other human beings. By dehumanizing the enemy this allowed more American citizens to become invested in fighting for their government because they knew they were not fighting against another person but they were fighting against something that was not human and was threatening American citizens. Through these posters the United States government gained more civilians to become involved in fighting to defend the US.

Changing subjects, I watched this video on Hitler giving a speech to the German people. In the speech, he tells his Nazi supporters that he needs their help to get the German people on his side. These brief ten minutes clips of some of his speeches provide me with an insight at how well Hitler was able to influence and make people believe in his theory that the German people were superior to other races. Hitler at the beginning of the video makes the Nazi people out to be the victims that went through adversity. He says, “I know, my comrades, that it must have been difficult at times… when you desired change that never came… so again and again the appeal had to be made… to continue the struggle… you mustn’t act yourself, you must obey, you must give in… you must submit to the overwhelming need to obey.” That is the whole idea behind propaganda is to make an individual’s actions justified so that it can “help” make an individual’s country better. When the most powerful man in Germany turned to his people and told them to try and exterminate the Jews as it would be helping them save their country from evil. Many of his followers did what they were told. Additionally, just watching these short clips on Hitler’s speeches made me realize that many of his speeches include uniting the German people together to fight and support their country through the ups and downs. He also wanted all of the German people to help one another despite their social class and work together as a unit. Hitler made the German people believe that their actions were helping their people and as Hitler said, “The most precious possession you have in the world… is your own people.” While Hitler may have been trying to “create” a better Germany he ultimately made millions suffer and the world a more hateful and cruel place, in my opinion.

In addition to those speeches, one of the films that I started watching was called, Triumph Of The Will or also known as Triumph des Willens. This films was produced in 1935 and shows clips of the Nazi group coming together and giving praise to their leader Hitler. To the Nazi group Hitler seemed to be beloved by his followers. The film has an up close personal viewpoint of Nazi leaders giving speeches to the Nazi parties and the speakers included Nazi leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Rudolph Hess, and Julius Streicher. These clips and speeches give me as the audience a personal first hand-look at Nazi propaganda and how the leaders were capable of influencing their followers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=AnpTWKKWQ1o -Hitler Speeches

 

“Peter Paret – Biography.” JewAge, www.jewage.org/wiki/he/Article:Peter_Paret_-_Biography.

 

Everipedia. “Peter Paret.” Wiki | Everipedia, 6 July 2016, everipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paret/.

 

Riefenstahl, Leni, director. TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. N.S.D.A.P. (NAZI PARTY), 1936.

 

https://www.hs.ias.edu/files/Paret_CV.pdf- (Facts and analysis on Peter Paret)

 

This blog post really revealed to me the obscurity of my thesis topic. I’m enjoying the challenge of finding creative resources. Honestly, I had a hard time with this blog post, because none of the three prompts really directly apply to my thesis subject without some tweaking. The primary texts I will be working with, Beowulf, and a multitude of the Icelandic sagas, have no known author, because they were mainly told orally until written down later by a nameless scribe. I think the best response to these prompts would be to research a little translation theory, since I know nothing about it and I’m working with strictly translations. Beowulf was written in Old English, and the Icelandic sagas were written in ancient Icelandic. Since it’s impossible to close-read the actual texts, I have to look at a few different translations of my chosen passages, because, for example, I cannot analyze something like word choice if I am not actually reading the original words. Zohre Owji describes some problems that translators encounter when translating a text, and strategies that they employ to deal with these issues when they inevitably arise. She cites Mona Baker’s In other words: A Course Book on Translation for support in her arguments. She puts forth a list of constraints, or rules, for translation strategies. They must: apply to a process, involve text-manipulation, be goal-oriented and problem-centered, be applied consciously, and be inter-subjective. There is a careful relationship between the source-language text and the target-language readers. The original text must, in a way, be “decoded” from the original, only to be “recoded” for the reader, in a way that is obviously different, but also the same. Different, because the actual words themselves might be different languages, different iterations of the evolution of the same language, etc., and the same because the translator has the responsibility of not altering the meaning of the words. In order to close read Beowulf, I will be attempting to read some of the Old English version, with help from Peter Baker’s Intro to Old English, published by Wiley-Blackwell, and recommended to me by Professor Skalak, who specializes in medieval studies.  Unfortunately, I do not think it would be reasonable for me to try to decipher the Icelandic.

One of the main differences to keep in mind when dealing with Old vs. contemporary English is that Old English is an inflected language, like contemporary German. But present-day English has only a very few inflections, such as the plural and the possessive of nouns. There was much more variety in Old English. Using Baker’s book and Owji’s article, I will try to “decode” the Old English of Beowulf and “recode” it into contemporary English so that I can understand it, and see what how this added layer to my close reading and study of Beowulf changes my understanding of the text. Maybe I am being overly optimistic about my ability to translate Old English, but it might reveal a change in things like tone, or reveal something hidden in the syntax and form of the epic poem.

Food with the Famous (1979) by Jane Grigson explores the lives of eleven famous English and French artists (writers, painters) in history – Grigson’s mode of selecting the eleven was to “take a number of famous people who liked eating, and give recipes for their favourite dishes” (9). Grigson published this book as an established cookbook writer who performed light scholarship; but she was not a food sociologist. The titles listed in my first edition copy of Food with the Famous suggest that Grigson’s experience lay in writing about enjoying food rather than the history behind it; these titles include Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, The Mushroom Feast (which explores the diversity of the mushroom family), English Food (which remains a “classic” and can be purchased updated with a modern cover on Amazon), Fish Cookery, and Good Things, all of which preceded Food with the Famous. In her introduction Grigson explains that she wrote “cookery articles in the Observer Magazine in 1978,” and that a conversation with a coworker spawned the idea for Food with the Famous (9). This frames Grigson’s career as oriented towards eating in history, but focused mostly on cuisine itself.

Excerpts of Food with the Famous did not appear before the full text was published, but Grigson’s writing in the Observer Magazine and her prolific career during the 1970s established her as a familiar name in English food writing. There appear to be only two editions of the book: the original 1979/80/81 publications, and an updated 1991 edition. This indicates that the book was popular during the 1980s and 1990s, before it could drown in the new millennium’s surge of cooking shows, cookbooks, and stylish diets requiring their own subcategory of cookbook. An Amazon search today generates only used first and second edition copies of Food with the Famous, all with visibly dated dust cover designs. The only book of Grigson’s that I discovered is still regularly read and praised is English Food (1974), which is sold on Amazon today by Penguin (a step up from the relatively unknown Hollen Street Press, who published Food with the Famous). The new edition features journalistic quotes testifying to the revival of English national cuisine that the book promoted. Jane Grigson died in 1990, so the decline in her books’ popularity may be due simply to her absence in emerging food writing.

Food with the Famous was published by an already popular author – English Food, evidently Grigson’s most lastingly influential book, was published five years before it, so Grigson’s name would have leapt out to customers. The book popularizes the history of food through famous cultural figures, all of whom are English or French, thus reinforcing the emphasis on nationality that characterizes Grigson’s work. Food with the Famous takes an unusual form: Grigson introduces her work and the book’s format in her introduction, then includes a section for each author, listing them chronologically, she explains. Each author section begins with a two or three page description of their life and relation to food, favorite dishes, and materials Grigson used to investigate their life through food. What follows are on average eight recipes, excerpted from diaries or family cookbooks but which Grigson modernized for the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century cook. She combines anthology, scholarship, biography, and recipes to form a book that maps English food. As a marketing strategy, this gives readers many reasons to buy the book: as a cookbook, a piece of academic work, or an exploration of the lives of figures famous and popular in England.

 

Grigson, Jane. Food with the Famous. Hollen Street Press, 1979.

For this blog post, I chose to focus on a text that came out of one of the scholarly articles that I originally referred to on my reading list. That article was “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory” (2014) by Joshua Pederson, which uses trauma theory and psychoanalytic theory as a lens to understand how literature aids in the healing process of people who experience remarkable trauma in their lives. Pederson refers to Cathy Caruth many times in his argument, citing her as “an important first-wave trauma theorist” (Pederson 334) who contributes to the understanding of trauma theory and how trauma, as it is described, shapes history. Because of his references to her, I decided to look into her own texts, which proved to be relevant to my own interest with trauma theory.

For this post, I will be focusing on Caruth’s book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), which, in essence, discusses the confusing experiences of trauma, the disparities in explaining trauma from the victim’s perspective, and the consequences of trauma – as it has become more relevant in society – that make it hard to document history based on straightforward experience and reference. Trauma essentially clouds history for those who experience it, causing a biased and sometimes inaccurate portrayal of history.

This book, published in 1996 – not long after her first book, titled Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) – is considered one of the first critiques of trauma as it was used in historical references, and Caruth was seen as a trauma theorist who helped to develop the language that surrounded this idea. Her work introduced fairly new ideas in the trauma theory field, which have still stayed relevant today. Her ideas from this book have been cited and referred to in numerous publications, anywhere from peer-reviewed articles and journals to books where chapters are dedicated to her theories – playing to her prestige and the importance and influence that her theories had on trauma theory as a whole. On the same note, Cambridge University hosted a colloquium surrounding her work in 2011, dedicated to discussing and applying her theories to modern day events. Jean Wyatt, another published author, explains that trauma theory “is dominated by the theoretical framework that she [Caruth] introduced” (Wyatt 31).

Caruth’s theories clearly had a lot of clout over the way trauma theory was viewed, and her work is still referred to today in regards to a plethora of historical events. Her theories have been applied to many historical events/groups of people who have experienced trauma – anything from WWII/Holocaust and Japanese internment survivors to Trinidad slaves and the “War on Terror” prisoners of war. Her theories are applicable to all of these traumatic events and the people who experienced these wide-ranging traumas, showing how well thought-out and important her works stand to be.

The main focal point, and perhaps trigger, for my emerging project was Yoko Ogawa’s book The Diving Pool, and the elements of the grotesque that she expertly incorporates into it. As the book is written by a female author, and tells three stories from the perspective of female protagonists, I thought that a feminist lens would be an appropriate way to approach this. Yet, I also do not want to ignore the fact that what mostly caught my attention in these three novellas was their intricate attention to the human body, and specifically the female body and the connection of the grotesque to them. By incorporating this unpleasant and repulsive element, Ogawa adds another side to the feminist lens. Is she trying to lend a look at how society perceives women’s’ bodies? Is she trying to draw our attention to the women’s function in reproduction (as one of the novellas centers on the pregnancy of the protagonist’s sister)?

I proceeded to find a tentative answer to this question by consulting Freud’s The Uncanny. Freud begins his analysis of the Uncanny as something that “evokes fear and dread,” or discomfort in the beholder (p.123). He claims that the uncanny is experienced through aesthetic, and therefore is a kind of aesthetic disorder. As these things that are considered uncanny are the opposite of beautiful, they are categorized as grotesque, which perhaps Ogawa is trying to hang over the women in her novellas to make a point about how society perceives the female body. The need for the female to be more thoroughly covered in public, lest she show too much and reveal herself to the public eye could be a contributing factor for this display in Ogawa’s book.

To further the point that Ogawa is reaching for a feminist lens, or that her novellas could be interpreted in such a way, one could mention Freud’s comment on the basis of the term, “uncanny.” According to Freud, “one may presume that there exists a specific affective nucleus, which justifies the use of a special conceptual term,” (p.123). This special term Freud refers to is the “uncanny,” but what struck me with this sentence was the use of the word nucleus to represent the uncanny. We know that this nucleus is “affective” in creating the effects of fear and discomfort in the ones that witness the aesthetic deformity, which for now we will assume is the female body. Next, the use of the word “nucleus” right after affective suggests that this aesthetic disorder is, in fact, at a cellular level, in other words, a genetic defect. Men and women each have different cells (chromosomes) that make an individual genetically male or female. If Freud states that this disorder of the uncanny lies at a cellular level that is affective, this could be applied to the fact that the female body is considered grotesque simply because of an affective difference in genetics. Not only is this difference effective, it is also “specific”, as if it needs to be just right and very calculated.

Another element of the uncanny is also the fear of castration, and as Freud states, “ losing a precious organ,” suggesting that the male sex organ is what creates power and normality as opposed to females who don’t posses one. The anxiety and fear associated with the castration complex falls parallel to the fact that the uncanny also evokes feelings of fear and anxiety. Freud claims “one finds it understandable that so precious an organ such as the eye should be guarded by a commensurate anxiety. Indeed, One can go further and claim that no deeper mystery and no other significance lie behind the fear of castration,” (p. 140). In other words, the fear of losing the male sex organ denotes a male as male. Without this symbol of masculinity, the man has no identity and subsequently no power. Women do no posses this organ and therefore start off with no power, or less power than men. As said before, the basis for the uncanny lies in the cellular differences of men and woman, which then leads to physical difference in appearance; the aesthetic disorder.

Not only have common patterns in the physical writing been apparent, but common themes in Tony Morrison’s book, Beloved, have also made themselves known. In broad retrospect, common themes that have been recurring in this text have been ones such as the warping of time, and it’s fluidity in the text. There is also the matter of pain, whether it is physical pain, or the mental pain of remembering the past.

All of these aspects become apparent in the section I have chosen for this post in Beloved on page 113. The theme of warped and fluid time is represented in a way that creates a sense for the reader that there is no linear path that the book follows. Characters can die or leave the scene, but they will always come back and keep circling around like vultures waiting for the opportune time to strike. On page 113, the third person narrator takes on the persona of Sethe as she remembers Baby Suggs, deceased at this point, as she sits in the Clearing that Baby used to frequent. Although Baby Suggs is dead, and we know this through Sethe’s “rememory” of her, she somehow creates a physical presence as she is seemingly “touching the back of [Sethe’s] neck,” with fingers that are “gathering strength,” (p.113).

The idea and physical manifestation of Baby Suggs also speaks to the point of pain, not just the manipulation of time to bring characters back from the dead. It is Sethe’s pain and longing to have Baby Suggs back that calls her into a sort of physical form that is able to knead the back of her neck. Not only does the pain of loss bring Baby Suggs back into being, but she also brings with her anguish, or a pain of her own to inflict upon Sethe. As if the pain of loss cannot go unaccompanied by physical pain. As the fingers push “harder, harder… Sethe was actually more surprised than frightened to find she was being strangled,” (p.113). The fact that Sethe is “surprised” rather than “frightened” is what was striking about this sentence. The pressure of Baby Suggs’ presence at first brings her peace that soon turns into pain and surprise.

This simple schema seems to be a recurring theme in Sethe’s life. When she escaped Sweet Home, she was only consumed by the relief and peace she found in the house with Baby Suggs, but despite this, the past came creeping up not far behind and inflicted its pain on Sethe. It was a pain that was inescapable and triggered by the smallest of instances and impossible to predict. The next stage was the surprise and not fear. She was surprised by the schoolteacher and his entourage and resorted to killing her children, but she was not frightened. It is similar with this instance with Baby Suggs’ ghost supposedly strangling her, that she is used to the cycle and almost expects pain to be right around the bend.

Her surprise leads Sethe to go “tumbling forward from her seat on the rock, she clawed at the hands that were not there,” (113). The word tumbling echoes the rapid changes in Sethe’s life, and the fact that none of these are her own decision. It is only when she does make the decision to escape that she has the time to stop and remember all the terrible things done to her, and the ability for her to let the pain in. The word clawed also speaks to pain, as the word itself evokes this sensation, and also desperation. “Clawed” paired with the remainder of the sentence, “at the hands that were not there,” creates a sense of pain for things that are ghost-like, no longer there, and therefore in the past. Sethe suffers from pain from her past, present and future because of the pain she endured as a slave.

Toni Morrison’s novels consistently raise critical moral questions via their intricate plots, complex character development, and the use of narrative devices such as flashback and/or limited perspectives. Beloved, in particular, deals with the moral binary of good versus evil, or otherwise ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ by complicating the way readers consider the extent of the role of ‘evil’ and also what may be deemed as ‘good.’ The main force of evil in the novel is the institution of slavery, and Beloved actively works to unpack the intricacies of this ‘evil’ by considering how it shapes the way we understand ‘goodness’ relative to its oppositionary force.

Beloved responds to the personal and interpersonal traumas created by the institution of slavery by highlighting how these traumas manifest in the characters’ lives, and drawing specific attention to relevant historic detail. On the most basic, fundamental level, one might reduce such a novel to an anti-slavery text with the main argument that “slavery is bad”; this kind of text typically sets up a binary that suggests slave-owners are guilty while enslaved people are innocent. But Morrison does not give this to us straight—in fact, she hardly gives us the opportunity to even think we’re off the hook so easily.

The book is loaded with examples of slavery and racism’s pervasiveness. For example, the detailing of Paul D’s horrific experience with the iron bit exposes the cruel, torturous elements of slavery: “He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him—about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back,” (71). Decades later, Paul D continues to face the repercussions of having had the iron bit forced upon him. There is no ambiguity here; the iron bit is a clear, representative symbol of the evil of slavery.

Sethe’s description in the above quote reveals another binary that Beloved addresses within the institution of slavery—“the place before Sweet Home” versus Sweet Home itself. The novel hardly describes the place before Sweet Home except for in passing—in brief memories of traumas that the characters experienced. Yet, by grounding most of the novel’s story in Sweet Home, Morrison further complicates and criticizes the notion of a more “benevolent” form of slavery. Sethe’s understanding of Sweet Home is informed by her past experience: “The Garners, it seemed to her, ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching what they wanted known. And he didn’t stud his boys. Never brought them to her cabin with directions to ‘lay down with her,’” (140). The ‘goodness’ of Sweet Home—here indicated not by a moral judgment but merely by the word ‘special’—is defined by Garners’ treatment of her being better than her previous situation i.e. not being subjected to sexual abuse or extensive degrading. Other points in the narrative storyline continue to challenge the notion of a ‘good’ kind of slavery, as when Sister Brodwin says: “We don’t hold with slavery, even Garner’s kind,” (145).

While Sweet Home might be considered “good” relative to the place before it, it is also specifically Sethe’s trauma associated with Schoolteacher that drives her to kill her own daughter. Sethe is the novel’s “heroine” and thus we are made to empathize with her, but yet, this does not mean that she is free from moral judgment based on her actions. Morrison complicates the binary which suggests Sethe’s “goodness” by depicting a complex character who is deeply impacted by the role of the ‘evil’ (slavery) in her life: a character who cannot be easily dismissed as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ specifically because we understand the wider moral injustice of slavery when we consider the moral injustice of her act as a mother.

Beloved calls for a complex understanding of morality, rather than considering it something that could be so easily clear-cut. Both sides of judgment—both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are informed by the contexts in which that very moral judgment is made.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Plume: 1988.

*Trigger Warning*- This post contains  close-readings of violent scenes that involve sex and physical abuse.

Throughout Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a consistent thread appears that depicts the dehumanization of slaves at the hands of those with privileged identities. Within the text, Morrison uses animalistic language to describe different scenes in which Sethe and other slaves are being beaten, coerced into sexual acts, and controlled by someone of privilege.

One of the first moments in which Morrison uses language related to animals to describe a scene of abuse and powerlessness occurs when Sethe partakes in a  sexual act with the engraver in order to have the name “Beloved” written on her daughter’s head stone. The narrator describes the scene once saying, “she thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new,” (pg. 5). This graphic scene was extremely disturbing for me to read, indicating it was a passage worth noting. Here, a key aspect of the scene is the nature of the son and the engraver who both contribute to the dehumanization of Sethe. By describing the son as, “looking on,” Morrison creates a sense of spectatorship, as if Sethe was an interesting object to gaze upon. Furthermore, the engraver is said contain an amount of “anger” and an “appetite.” This image immediately evoked a dynamic of predator and prey, as the words “anger” and “appetite” indicate a sort of animalistic, instinctual need for satiation. The juxtaposition of the engraver’s “old” face yet “new” appetite emphasizes the instinctual nature of his need for sexual gratification. It’s as if despite his age, the act of asserting himself upon Sethe ignites feelings of youth and power. Lastly, the word “rutting” in this context contains significant meaning. I decided to look up the definition of this word and its connotations. I found that “rutting” has another meaning and often refers to the sexual acts of farm animals, mainly deer. This term is repeated later in this section as the narrator says, “Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver’s son was not enough,” (pg. 5). The repetition of this word refers to the way in which the engraver and his son treat Sethe as non-human. Instead, she is an object with little importance to them, similar to an animal. This can be connected back to Mulvey when thinking about the object of the gaze and the performer of the action.

Another instance in which animalistic language is used to describe a scene of abuse when Sethe recalls slaves being forced into wearing bits generally used on farm animals. The narrator ays, “She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye,” (pg. 84). This instance is one more of many examples in which Morrison uses animalistic language to emphasize the dehumanization of slaves. The terms “wildness” and the picture of one’s lips being “yanked back” evoke images of a horse being tamed. Generally, this is called “breaking” a horse and often involves using a bit to tame the wild creature. The practice is based upon removing the independence and power of the horse in order to serve its master. The same practice is being used here on people as means of control. Ultimately, Morrison seems to be using both this scene and that which Sethe is at Beloved’s gravestone to depict the way in which African Americans were treated as though they were animals. The language here is not only rooted in referenced to animals, but also to the body and the lack of power. Both of these scenes depict an act being committed against the will of the recipient. The language is centered upon the body and contains notions of forced penetration, whether the mouth or other areas of the body. This constant referral to animals throughout the text furthers the central theme which is the deep-rooted pain that is a result of years of torture and abuse. It highlights the lack of agency had amongst slaves and the cruel practices held by their owners who often performed violent acts centered upon penetration and disfiguration of the body.

 

 

Toni Morrison’s Beloved features a transformation of consciousness through the power of slave song, in which songs become a companion of a slave narrative that must be laid to rest. This is the case for Paul D, who once took refuge in the music from his chain gang suffering.“The songs he knew from georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding”, in that the songs are tightly-knit with the components and actions of his chain-gang (Morrison, 48). The spiritual songs themselves act as a metaphorical material of slavery, in which songs are buried inside Paul D’s heart much like nails become buried into the tracks. The songs, like the nails, become immeasurable. His history as a chain-gang member is infused in his head via both the sensory details of his labor and the lyrical tune of the chain-gang music that accompanied it. The spiritual songs and the labor both have a rhythm as the “pounding” of the flat-head nails acts as a meter. This description of songs as an element of the hammering nails  prefaces Paul D’s description of chain-gang slavery that connects singing slaves songs to painful memories that Paul D wishes to reject.

Though no man in the chain-gang can directly intervene with their suffering, Morrison depicts singing as an acts of power and defiance. Between shouting “Hiii” to their guards, paul D details two-step dance the chain gang juxtaposing the “music” of the iron (Morrison, 127). The wording creates a cruel irony of the free-expressive nature of dance and music juxtaposes the limitations of the bindings. “They sang it out and beat it up”, as they chain dance over fields and trails, “garbling the words so they could not be understood” (Morrison 128). Morrison makes “it” ambiguously count as both song and nail. The whole provides a glimpse of how songs required encryption from their oppressors. While their bodies and dignity were robbed from them, spiritual songs became a treasured source of pride. If these slurred songs could be hidden from guards and masters, it gave hope. Songs held promise and power as a ethereal possession that could be shared.

“They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs.” (Morrison, 108)

While songs about women are typically about old lovers, it is possible they refer to mothers and family. The children they had been recalls innocence while the stories of taming invoke power. While they could not be heard by guards, they could talk about their owners uncensored. The “shamelessness of life” refers positively to living carefree, while remembering graveyards and sisters long gone celebrates past lives. Each item of the list may be entirely unqiue, but are bound by the fact that they express the men’s inner feelings.  These songs represent the values that motivate beyond mere survival, but into prideful memory that remembers better times before daily labor. The uplifting power of spiritual songs comes from their ability to draw on fond memories during hardship. They want to remember peaceful domestic life. But Paul D lives in the peaceful domestic life. Now these songs do not inspire hope but instead memories of the chain-gang. This kind of uplifting power shines now due to the oppressive atmosphere of the chain-gang, due to the fact that they are the only way to survive the suffering.

But for Paul D, these spiritual songs have no use while out of bondage besides reminding him of his past. Sethe’s home represents a new beginning for Paul D, which is much like the life that the spiritual songs sought to find. “But they didn’t fit, these songs. They were too loud, had too much power for the little house chores he was engaged in…” (Morrison, 48”) The songs themselves “didn’t fit” as though the songs had a physical presence that dwarfed 124, and would make the “little house” burst. Paul D himself could emotionally burst if he sang the songs with feeling. The songs were “loud”, not in volume, but in meaning and power. To equate the depth of emotions felt in the chain-gang under duress to the chores of his . The songs no longer had the power to let Paul D remember times before slave labor, but instead have the power to never lose his past. While other characters such as Baby Suggs can reimagine their past narrative into new narrative like the sermons in the clearing, Paul D refuses to acknowledge his old songs. Paul D models how to handle an emotionally powerful past through constructive reimagining, but by exorcising the songs like a ghost.

While writing this post, I was struggling to make clear sense of the layered symbolism in Beloved. It occurred to me that the slavery experience of one character like Paul D not only vastly differed from others, but had it’s own set of complicating factors such as songs. The emphasis the book places on power juxtaposed to song made me curious about exploring it further. I’ve learned that spiritual songs become further complicated in the moment and in retrospect from Paul D. As a motif, song may be more subtle than death and ghosts, but the memory of song haunts and terrifies Paul D much like a ghost does.

“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.