{"id":222,"date":"2017-09-30T11:46:04","date_gmt":"2017-09-30T15:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=222"},"modified":"2021-08-18T15:19:18","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T19:19:18","slug":"reformulating-binaries-recursive-time-in-beloved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2017\/09\/30\/reformulating-binaries-recursive-time-in-beloved\/","title":{"rendered":"Reformulating Binaries: Recursive Time in Beloved"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beloved <\/em>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\u2019s perspective, which further suggests that the novel\u2019s treatment of time acts as an allusion to Sethe\u2019s mental state \u2013 her mind reels from past traumas that daily life invokes. But Morrison complicates this binary (embedded in linear time) by writing Sethe\u2019s conscious and continuous resistance to the past\u2019s, or memories\u2019, shaping of her actions in the present moment. \u201cNothing better than to start the day\u2019s serious work of beating back the past,\u201d Sethe reflects (73). As Kristeva argues in \u201cWomen\u2019s Time,\u201d time can exist on linear, circular, and monumental dimensions. Because our society measures time linearly, we would say that Sethe\u2019s traumatic memories occurred \u201cin the past,\u201d in a certain year and month. But they have not: Sethe\u2019s 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\u2019s remembering of her past shapes her present, morphing personality.<\/p>\n

Morrison formally constructs Sethe\u2019s 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\u2019s past, but that also dissolve the boundaries between Sethe\u2019s memory and her reality. For instance, the chapter in which Sethe gives birth to Denver begins, \u201cUpstairs Beloved was dancing…Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music\u201d (74); this is the present moment, featuring grown Denver. By the chapter\u2019s end, Sethe has given birth to Denver and has just decided on the child\u2019s name (\u201cSethe felt herself falling into a sleep\u2026On the lip of it\u2026she thought, \u2018That\u2019s pretty. Denver. Real pretty\u2019\u201d (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<\/em>. Adult Denver and newborn Denver exist simultaneously, as do Sethe\u2019s 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\u2019 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 \u201crememory\u201d of crossing the river to freedom. \u201cFollowed by the two girls\u2026Sethe began to sweat a sweat just like the other one when she woke, mud-caked, on the banks of the Ohio\u201d (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, \u201cAmy was gone. Sethe was alone and weak, but alive, and so was her baby\u201d (90). Here Sethe exhibits vulnerability and easy emotional undoing; the book\u2019s treatment of time aims to convey this internal tussle of Sethe\u2019s through its flashback-flash-forward form.<\/p>\n

So the binary of past and present, flashback and current, memory and reality is not conveniently literal in Beloved<\/em>. I would argue that \u201cpast\u201d does not exist for Sethe, nor does present. Every moment she experiences, whether it is in linear time\u2019s terms \u201chappening now\u201d or \u201chas happened,\u201d is wearing on her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s perspective, which further suggests that the novel\u2019s treatment of time acts as an allusion to Sethe\u2019s mental state \u2013 her mind reels … Continue reading Reformulating Binaries: Recursive Time in Beloved<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145910,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog-posts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3038"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}