ALTERNATE TEMPORALITIES

In killing her toddler daughter Sethe has successfully removed her at last from this system: "...no one nobody on this earth would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper...

the Fugitive Slave Act, or kill the children The scene in the shed like the scene in the barn is repeated at several junctures in the novel· But unlike the scene in the barn the infanticide scene is first narrated from the perspectives of other characters that witnessed it - Schoolteacher Stamp Paid But in Sethe’s own version ‘‘the truth was simple... She just flew... carried 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·..over there where no one could hurt them” (1988, p. 163) In her act of infanticide she has asserted precisely what the system of slavery refused every African - a refusal emblematized by Sethe’s violation - the bonds of family rooted in mother bonds

In this sense then we can say that Morrison introduces a conception of ‘‘the ethical act’’ But it differs considerably from Zizek’s version, if we understand Zizek to be championing what is fundamentally an individual assertion of freedom In Sethe’s ‘‘ethical act,’’ far from a decimation of the subject what we see is a claim placed on her child on her role as mother as the person with the sole sovereign right to determine her child’s future - or lack thereof In this grim act act of last resort, she performatively constitutes her maternal bond Rather than leaving the realm of the symbolic of language and subjectification Sethe’s act perhaps could be read as initiating a new symbolic order bearing marks both of the horrifying privation of choice she faces and her insistence on her maternal position even where the inscriptions of law and language have refused it¹⁰

Sethe’s murder of her child is bound in Morrison’s novelistic discourse to an historical and social universe against which it is an act of resistance That moment out of time in which Sethe kills her child is truly one wherein the ethical and political intersect in Morrison’s telling If for Sethe ‘‘carrying pushing dragging’’ her child ‘‘beyond the veil’’ is the ultimate in maternal love a love that has no anchor or representation within her material world it is also a thoroughgoing indictment of the veil itself by which we can understand both the social and legal institution of slavery and the symbolic support for the constitution of those subjects who uphold it

Yet, of course readers of the novel cannot forget that it does not end there with a child’s murder in a shed If Totem and Taboo was for Freud the primal scene of psychoanalysis articulating the temporality of the subject in which the traumatic murder of the primal father was destined to be repeated again and again inaugurating ‘‘the temporality of the subject,’’ the reading I have been proposing of Beloved might cause us to inquire of psychoanalysis: What subject? Beloved tells the story of an alternate temporality and another subject; Morrison’s moves are deliberately away from any deployment of history as a positivist context for event imagined in literature She tells a story of a specter Beloved who is at times a baby then a young woman at once that baby girl grows up and a voice from the unrecorded sufferings of the Middle Passage Sethe speaks to her surviving daughter of what she terms ‘‘rememory:”

‘‘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.. even if I don’t think of 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” (Morrison 1988a,b, p.

And she reminds her daughter that rememory is not restricted to individual subjects: ‘‘Where I was before I came here that place is teak.. 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 was never there - and stand in the place where it was it will happen again: it will be there for you waiting for you’’ (1988 p 36) In Morrison’s account there is no simple forgetting no ready oblivion; there is the weight of memory that has been left out of the dominant historical record But she is charting here the birth of a subjectivity which cannot quite align itself in the terms of murder and guilt offered by the key texts of the psychoanalytic canon If the symbolic father and his primal double haunt the Freudian subject, Morrison imagines an African-American subject whose specters invoke ancestors and kinship bonds only acknowledged negatively as what was refused destroyed forgotten

Morrison is tracing the painstaking emergence of a subjectivity which not only must constitute itself outside the law but also must resolve in some way an irreducibly and historically particular crushing relation to it We could then say that the politico-ethical mode of subjectivation outlined by Freud in his story of the primal horde is what is rejected But this would only be partially true; it is the underside of that story that Morrison’s story exposes - not only the violence that it occults in order to institute the subject of guilt, but also the violence that it produces in the process of sustaining itself Toward the end of Beloved, the narrator’s voice repeats ‘‘this is not a story to pass on.” In similarity to but also in distinction from Freud’s myth we might understand that dictum as carrying two senses: it is not a story to hand down to further generations and at the same time it is not a story that can be left to forgetting