Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (23 page)

All speakers and writers and listeners and readers negotiate this unbridgeable gulf between words and things every day of their lives. And we all know the numbing feeling that words won't do, or that our words don't get across, or that others' words seem hollow and distant, just sounds. I routinely urge my students to pay real attention to the books I ask them to read, in order that otherwise "dead letters" might come to life. I recall again that moment in O'Neill's play,
Long Day's Journey into Night,
when Mary tells her son Edmund that he may have heard the story of his father going to work at the age of ten some ten thousand times, but that he has never
understood
it; likewise, I acknowledge, in my

family a similar story about my father going to work existed—six was the age given—and I too heard it thousands of times; but did I ever understand?
How do words become real?

These incessant feats of translation constitute the most basic facts of our lives as lingual creatures. (And who can seriously believe that we succeed as often as we fail, in this arena?) But Kafka's machine writes a script that doesn't need deciphering: at the sixth hour the prisoner reads it in his flesh. Kafka is exploding some of the oldest metaphors of civilization: surface and depth. We all know that
deep
is a complimentary term, meaning "profound," whereas
surface
or
superficial
connotes "trivial," "unimportant." We speak blithely of "deep feelings" and we criticize efforts that do not even "scratch the surface." But when a blade approaches your skin, "scratching the surface" matters. We respect human skin as a surface that one is not supposed to penetrate, however much we may like "deep feelings."

Perhaps the pivotal notion in Kafka's story is a word that is not pronounced:
open.
Consider how positive a valence it has: open-minded, open your heart, be open to experience, even open-ended. Now literal-ize it: the only open end the body knows is an orifice or a wound. Anuses are open-ended. Kafka's writing machine
opens
the body, writes
in
the flesh. And it is monstrous.

And yet. . . Kafka's machine is doing what every writer, at some (doubtless unspeakable) level has dreamed of: creating a language that penetrates, creating a language that actually enters the body of your listener or reader. At some censored level, perhaps we all dream of such potency. In this story we see just how ghastly it can be, when language physically enters the body, when those closed contours so crucial for our integrity and safety are finally opened.

Kafka's penal saga is rough going. Philosophically, it stands as one of the most troubling and provocative stories I know, a story that dares to reveal just how invasive, even sadistic, our quiet terms such as
knowledge
and
communication
might really be. This is because it centralizes the human body. What is utterly missing from Kafka's scheme is
love,
love

understood as an embrace of the body, love understood as tenderness and nurturance of the flesh. Could one imagine a work of literature that owned up to the body's authority and vulnerability, its wounds and its pains, but did so in a spirit of love?

TONI MORRISON'S
BELOVED:
THE BODY BELOVED

Toni Morrison's magnificent novel about the legacy of slavery in post-Civil War America,
Beloved,
is unmatched in its tribute to the body as site of our most precious transactions and as target of systematic violence. The evil of slavery has been verbalized and theorized in coundess ways in moral discourse, but Morrison is out to write this story somatically. Here the natural preacher Baby Suggs delivers her plaint of pieced-apart bodies and dismembered flesh:

"Here," she said, "in mis here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick 'em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off, and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face, 'cause they don't love that either.
You
got to love it,
you
! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leav-ins instead. No, they don't love your mouth.
You
got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I'm telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So

love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize." (88-89)

This moving inventory of the body's sanctity and integrity assaulted by slavery is a prodigious feat of translation, transforming social system into somatic reality, worth more (in my view) than tomes of pious sentiment or ethical pronouncement. An old mind/body dichotomy, with us since Antiquity and preeminent in Western religious thought since St. Paul—and invariably privileging mind/soul as superior to body/flesh— is overturned here, so that we are struck by the body's centrality, its always/already site as the place where love and war, pain and pleasure, humanity and brutality, do their bidding.

Slavery is the system that, like a brutal sculptor, remakes the black body: collars are there to redesign your posture, bits can be put into your mouth to endow you with a permanent smile, parts can be redistributed, so that what is hanging in the trees has "Paul A's shirt on but not his head or his feet." In slavery a man is forced to discover the "dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis and his future" (226).

How could you best illuminate slavery, make people see its horror? Morrison has taken a chapter of American history, a chapter that—far from being over—is still playing, in terms of African-American notions of agency, and she has been able to see it as a story of the body.
Agency
or
ownership,
as I have often said, is exactly what none of us has, who live in bodies. But the culture of slavery goes well beyond this generic problem, and reconceives these notions in horrible but familiar ways: the black person's body is owned by the white master. The body is a collection of limbs and organs in someone else's possession. In such a world,

the black subject is reduced to being a series of parts and appendages. Wholeness and ownership go out of the picture entirely.

Morrison's genius is to understand the itemized, pieced-apart body as a tragedy that goes beyond flesh. The former slaves at the core of this novel are arguably the poorest, most despoiled creatures in all of Western narrative, more reduced even than Kafka's beetle or Barker's shell-shocked soldiers or O'Connor's displaced Guizac, because they have been systematically deprived of all reach, extension, and connection. Slavery annihilates the family, separates spouses from each other, parents from children, siblings from one another. You are only your physical body, and even that is someone else's property. Not only is there no family, but there is no past, no future either. Morrison has taken the true measure of slavery, has grasped how much inner wreckage, annihilation, and outright
erasure
it entails. Baby Suggs had eight children, and every one of them was taken away: "Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil" (5). She claims she cannot remember: "My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember" (5).

It is not just the children who have been stolen, erased. It is the entire past that is cashiered. Not by any executive order, but because the past that belonged to these former slaves was simply so awful, so lethal, that it had to be jettisoned, had to be blanked, if living was to be possible. The only parallel that I can muster for this would be the mind-set of those who survived the Nazi Concentration Camps; they too found themselves at war with memory, found themselves carrying inside them a record that would kill them, if they dealt with it. Morrison's characters in
Beloved
appear virtually amnesiac, sometimes bordering on autistic, as they hunker down and work at not dying. Paul D, survivor of torture, now lover of Sethe (also a survivor of torture), comes into this story as a man who "had shut down a generous portion of his head" (41), but when he and Sethe are intimate, Morrison chooses a starding image to evoke what this self-inflicted violence and censorship entails: in his

chest, instead of the "red heart" that used to be, there is buried a tobacco tin, "its lid rusted shut." It is a grisly but powerful metaphor: the vital life-giving organ at the center of the human being has been transmogrified, altered into something rusty, metallic, and utterly closed.

The novel's elemental project is no less than to reverse this arterial blockage, to restore full circulation to its maimed characters. When Amy Denver, the white girl, saved the life of the escaping slave, Sethe, by helping to deliver her premature child, she massaged also the black girl's monstrously swollen feet, making Sethe cry "salt tears," telling Sethe, "It's gonna hurt, now . . . Anything dead coming back to life hurts" (35).
Anything dead coming back to life hurts.
I have repeatedly invoked the notion of
flow
as central to the life of art, characterizing its connection to us, its depiction of humans as linked and joined, but no novel illustrates the reality of "flow" more richly than Morrison's. It is as if the Emersonian model of Oversoul, of a bloodstream that connects living creatures, were moved out of polite nineteenth-century rhetoric and shown to be the life-saving, corporeal principle it is. Yes, Amy Denver saves Sethe's life, the baby Denver's life, but the larger job is to bring the "red heart" back to life, to restore wholeness to the human soul.

And so the horrors of the past—the stuff that had to stay buried, shut in a tobacco tin or kept in oblivion—are confronted. And it hurts, because anything dead coming back to life hurts. Particularly if the dead themselves come back to life. Particularly if the dead are of your own doing.

Morrison's plot replays the Medea story of a crazed mother who killed her child. Sethe had escaped to freedom, but the slave-hunters found her, one month later, and were about to bring her and her children back to the plantation. To prevent this, Sethe acted. Here is how Morrison writes it:

Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little

hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything it was No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Outside this place where they would be safe. (163)

That was how it looked and felt to Sethe. To the outside world, it looked different: she cut off the head of her little girl, and almost did the same to her baby. For Sethe, it was a matter of saving her children, putting them "over there where no one could hurt them"; for us, this is murder, death. A memory like this is a good reason for amnesia. What could full circulation achieve here?

The book shows us. Years later, Sethe and Paul D—living together, carefully staying on the surface of things—are returning home from a fair, and see a strange girlish figure waiting for them. She says her name is Beloved. And gradually, magically, incredibly, the pieces start to fall into place. This child is possessed of intimate memories that seem unmistakably to relate back to Sethe, to the slavery days, to the impossible incident with the handsaw. And we are obliged to reconsider everything we ever thought possible about reality. Can the dead return? Can this be the murdered child? And if so, was she murdered? Or saved? The book begins with much talk about a baby ghost that haunts Sethe's house, and we recall Baby Suggs's lost children, her comment that each one of them is "worrying somebody's house into evil." Do the dead actually live "on the other side," perhaps as virulent ghosts, in order to come back in the flesh?

Beloved's return makes whole the fissured family; Denver recovers a sister, Sethe a daughter, and Beloved a mother. Beloved is the restored blood flow, the reassembling of all the severed parts, all the mutilations inflicted by slavery. This is borne out even in relation to Paul D, whom

she
moves,
whom she comes to at night, imploring: "I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name" (116). Paul D resists, begs her to leave, promises to call her by name if she'll leave:

"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall that he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part, he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again. (117)