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Ghostly Matters: Chapter 4

September 24, 2013

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Lauren Shoemaker

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Dr. Lothian

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 ENGL 985

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 24 September 2013

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Chapter 4:  not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there

7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 “This chapter is about the lingering inheritance of racial slavery, the unfinished project of Reconstruction, and the compulsions and forces that all of us inevitably experience in the face of slavery’s having even once existed in our nation” (139).

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9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Gordon describes this haunting through Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, because she sees it as a work that contributes greatly to the understanding of haunting as a sociological experience:  “This ghost, Beloved, forces a reckoning:  she makes those who have contact with her, who love and need her, confront an event in their past that loiters in the present.  But Beloved, the ghost, is haunted too, and therein lies the challenge Morrison poses” (139).

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11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Margaret Garner

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  • “the slave mother who killed her child rather than see her taken back to slavery” à “two moments of traumatic violence and injury:  a slave mother’s killing of her child and slavery…one seemingly individual and private—a mother kills her child—and the other systemic and public—Slavery.” (141)  Gordon quotes Morrison as saying that the story is not about Slavery with a capital “S,” but instead “is about haunting and about the crucial way in which it mediates between institution and person, creating the possibility of making a life, of becoming something else, in the present and for the future” (142).  This is opposed to the linear narrative conception of history (like Benjamin’s rosary beads).
  • Her story is given through Levi Coffin, the white abolitionist.  Slave narratives, while they had the function “to move an audience to comprehend, empathize, and seek salvation for the slave,” they also became a commodity at the service of the sponsor, the white abolitionist. 
  • Beloved is not a slave narrative.  Gordon suggests that Morrison revises the slave narrative by rejecting “literacy as the supreme measure of humanity” and she “refuses the task of having to prove the slave’s (and by implication her descendants’) humanity” (147).  “[Beloved] remembers some of what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest” (146).  Sethe runs when she learns how she is being read and written by schoolteacher, not when she learns to read and write:  “Here…literacy literally measures humanity, savagely, as only a culture schooled in racial science could dream up” (148).

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14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 This reminded me of our conversation about barbarism in Benjamin.  Literacy is used by Morrison in a barbaric way to measure humanity, yet neither Morrison nor Gordon can escape the realm of literacy to claim its illegitimacy in defining humanity/civilization.  How do you denounce it while you can’t escape it?

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  • This is not a story to pass on.  “There are no apologies for passing on a story that was not to be passed on” (149).  Gordon argues that not only was the system of slavery denounced, but so too was the need to keep refuting that slavery created the condition of subjection so totally that their humanity vanished.  Morrison and Robinson declare it indisputable that slavery could not negate their being.  Morrison’s novel “will not only retell the story of Margaret Garner, but will also imagine the life world of those with no names we remember, with no ‘visible reason’ for being in the archive” (150).  She doesn’t speak for her characters; they are given complex personhood.

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18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Gordon calls Beloved a “decentered structure of storytelling that deploys the sounds and rhythms of call and response” (150).  How does giving names and faces to a story like Margaret Garner’s accomplish both a collective and an individual rewrite of the slave narrative?

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20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 The Ghost Represents the Unspeakable

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  • “…Beloved also problematizes the retrieval of lost or missing subjects by transforming those who do not speak into what is unspeakable, so that in that marvelous power of negative dialectics it can be conjured, imagined, worked out…the ghost gesticulates, signals, and sometimes mimics the unspeakable as it shines for both the remembered and the forgotten.” (150).
  • The Story of a Hat à Levi Coffin’s story is authorized through his reputation and genealogy.  His anti-slavery principles, he claims, are given as an inheritance.  “Yet Coffin does not notice that it is precisely his genealogy, a lineage of conquest and property ownership, that gifts him the possibility of a reputation—to act in behalf of the ones whose lives need rectification and who seemingly cannot act on their own.” (153) Margaret Garner’s story appears just before a trivial story about Coffin’s refusal to remove his hat at the request of a marshal.  The hat story is testament to not only his reputation as an abolitionist but also to his right to claim his property, his hat.
  • Margaret Garner could not be convicted for murder because as a slave woman, she was property, not a person:  “the law disallows her even the subjectivity of a criminal” (160).  “The Story of a Hat can only be read as Coffin’s assertion of the right to claim one’s property even against the state of the law.  And yet the story intends to counter such an assertion over Margaret Garner’s body and counter the legitimacy of owning people as if they were property.  Coffin unwittingly images the fantasy and power of ownership of property and story as the hat becomes the trope that reads the failure of Margaret Garner’s claim to self-possession and her own story.” (160)
  • The hat in Beloved:  Sethe’s mistaken recognition of the hat is an insightful mistake for Gordon.  Mr. Bodwin, who comes to help Denver get to a job, is mistaken for schoolteacher.  Gordon reads this hat as evidence of the haunting of Reconstruction.  Sethe knows that abolition is not emancipation (162).

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23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 How can an object like a hat signal whole histories of power relations?  When do we know if we’ve stumbled upon the presence of a ghost in a text?

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  • “[M]uch that distinguishes Morrison’s story from Coffin’s can be found in their respective hat stories:  Coffin trying to hold on to it, obsessed with its property rather than its spirit, and Morrison conjuring up the complicated nexus that is the thing behind it, offering reconciliation and a future without propertied domination.” (164)  The ghost may flicker by in the form of a hat that needs to be seized and read, or it may “seize you first.”
  • Haunting is felt socially in Beloved, not privately.  “[S]ocial relations are not ours for the owning” (166).  Denver did not experience Sweet Home, but the memory is there for her, waiting.  Sethe explains rememory to her, and says that it’s possible to bump up against others’ memories.
  • Confronting the trauma of the Middle Passage must be accomplished to appease the ghost.  “This trauma links the origin of Slavery with a capital S to the origin of modern American freedom, to the paradigmatic and value-laden operations of the capitalist market” (169).

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27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 In order to function in a capitalist system today, what ghosts do you need to deny or repress?  Whose memories do we risk “bumping into” in Indiana?

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29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 The Ghost’s Desires

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  • Beloved takes place in 1873, during Reconstruction.  The reconstruction occurring is both political in economic and geographic terms, explained at length by Gordon, but also personal.  “…[N]o one in the novel (or, we can surely say, in real life) gained freedom from the pure fact of the Emancipation Proclamation…’freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another’” (172).
  • Gordon argues that Morrison shifts the burden away from the Civil War as the decisive moment to the Reconstruction where ordinary people attempt to remake their lives in a “Reconstruction that turned out to be expansionist, militaristic, and subjugating” (172).
  • Beloved’s arrival and her whole story are not readily available:  “The whole story is always a working fiction that satisfies the need to deliver what cannot possibly be available” (174).  Beloved haunts Sethe, but acts like a screen for the memory of the child she killed.
  • Beloved herself is hauntedà she can’t speak about her own past and that which is waiting for her.

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32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 How are we as readers of Beloved able to see the ghost, Beloved, as being haunted but the characters within the novel are not?  What does it mean for a ghost to be haunted within their own haunting?

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  • The purpose of the engraving of the slave ship is “to create an impression of the violence of the slave trade so that we—who were not on the ship—can apprehend its essence” (177).  The invisibility and the insignificance of the men, women, and children is such a violence that the engraving cannot admit to it in the representation itself.  “Real representations are fictions too” through exclusion (178).
  • Haunting is essential because it tells us that something is missing.  Then we are able to begin to look for “gestures anywhere, in the archive or in the imaginary zone” (178).
  • The needs of the dead are inseparable from the needs of the living:  “the ghost is nothing without you” (179).
  • Beloved gets more and more destructive, and Denver is the one to recognize that it must be dispatched.  Denver’s leaving the yard puts the events in motion that bring Mr. Bodwin to 124, which causes Beloved to leave when Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher and all of the women in the community are present to keep Sethe and the others safe.  The ghost had to go because “To remain haunted is to remain partial to the dead or the deadly and not to the living” (182).

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36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 What does a ghost have to offer us?  Do we have anything to give in return?  When we remain “partial to the living,” have we moved on from the ghost (and what it requires of us) or do we just have to start ignoring it and hope it bothers someone else?

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  • The collective exorcism of Beloved is evidence that haunting cannot be traced to an individual loss or trauma.
  • The last time the reader sees Beloved she is pregnant.  Gordon suggests that all ghosts are pregnant with “unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding” (183).  They are a
    call for something to be done.
  • As schoolteacher was writing a book about Sethe in the ink she made, Gordon identifies that she is writing a book about her too.  She points out that most teachers would not want to identify themselves with schoolteacher.

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40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 This comparison aligns her with the abolitionists sponsoring slave narratives.  Is there a difference between her project and theirs?  How is someone a “friend of the oppressed?” 

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  • Efforts in critical scholarship have been organized around the question of being accountable for those who have not counted.  The desire for inclusion, according to Gordon, is a “treacherous mistake.”  It fixes subjugated people in place and holds them back from moving on, and haunting always gets the better of it.  Haunting shows the problem with the logic of the American dream of clean slates (187).
  • “The relationship between accountability and accounting that slavery establishes means that those who do not count are those whose worth is literally measured by their price” (188).  Morrison wants us to recognize our place in this story, even if we don’t want to be there.  The slave narrative was not able to speak this inheritance of slavery that places us within this history where we do not want to be, but Morrison’s novel is able to speak it (190).

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Source: https://985archive.queergeektheory.org/ghostly-matters-chapter-4/