Lecture 8: Memory and DesireEnglish 140

UC Santa BarbaraSummer 2012

16 August 2012

Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Margaret Garner: A Modern Medea (1867)

Notes on Identity

“Of that place where she [Sethe] was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother.” (37; ch. 3)

“She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it [the past] was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries.” (69; ch. 6)

“words whispered in the keeping room had kept her going. Helped her endure the chastising ghost; refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar and kept them whole in the world because in her dreams she saw only their parts in trees.” (101; ch. 9)

“Beloved, inserting a thumb in her mouth along with the forefinger, pulled out a back tooth. There was hardly any blood, but Denver said, ‘Ooooh, didn’t that hurt you?’

“Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is it. Next it would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of those mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces.” (159; ch. 14)

[Denver:] “What did you come back for?”Beloved smiled. “To see her face.” (88; ch. 8)

“‘But this ain’t her mouth,’ Paul D said. ‘This ain’t it at all.” (184; ch. 17)

“Now she [Denver] is crying because she has no self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this. She can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing. She grabs the hair at her temples to get enough to uproot it and halt the melting for a while. Teeth clamped shut, Denver brakes her sobs. She doesn’t move to open the door because there is no world out there.” (145; ch. 12)

Naming and Nomenclature

Beloved, to Paul D: “And you have to call me my name.” (137; ch. 11)

“Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know?” (146; ch. 12)

“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him [Sixo] anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined.” (225; ch. 19)

Slavery“Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?” (259; ch. 24)

“anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she [Sethe] and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.” (295-6; ch. 26)

“But suddenly she [Baby Suggs] saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, ‘These hands belong to me. These my hands.” (166; ch. 15)

Freedom

“After Delaware and before that Alfred, Georgia, where he [Paul D.] slept underground and crawled into sunlight for the sole purpose of breaking rock, walking off when he got ready was the only way he could convince himself that he would no longer have to sleep, pee, eat or swing a sledge hammer in chains.” (49; ch. 3)

“A woman, a child, a brother – a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now, that was freedom.” (191; ch. 18)

“Sethe had had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of unslaved life. […] Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.” (111; ch. 9)

Love and desireDesire itself is movementNot in itself desirable;Love is itself unmoving,Only the cause and end of movement,Timeless, and undesiringExcept in the aspect of timeCaught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.................................................Quick now, here now, always– Ridiculous the waste sad timeStretching before and after.

– T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” p. 122 (lines 161-8, 173-5)

Absence

“They [Sethe and Paul D] were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers. Once the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby – a son, deeply mourned because he was the one who had bought her out of there. Then it was her mother’s absent husband. Now it was this hazelnut stranger’s absent friend. Only those who knew him (‘knew him well’) could claim his absence for themselves.” (15; ch. 1)

“Rememory”

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm — every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there — you who never was there — if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over — over and done with — it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.” (43-44; ch. 3)

She [Baby Suggs] did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. (103; ch. 9)

Media credits

Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner: A Modern Medea is out of copyright because it was completed in the 19th century. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Satterwhite_Noble_Margaret_Garner.jpg