Locating the interior of African-American history: rememory, storytelling and the interior of history.

Abstract

How does Morrison propose we get into the interior of African-American history and its people? The desire for interiority echoes a modernist concern with wanting to get to the psychologically interior and the unconscious state that is repressed from visibility to expose a more authentic state of being for an individual or a society. It is therefore no surprise that Morrison suggests that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory” as she writes in a period of modernism in America (“The Site of Memory” 76). And in Beloved, I suggest that the relationship between imagination and memory is played out by the active and reconstitutive act of story-telling as exemplified by the figure of Beloved herself. Although we clearly see Morrison’s privilege of the imagination as an argument for it being an effective vehicle through which truth and an interior narrative can be attained, I argue that we read Morrison’s use of the imagination with distance to see how the result of imagination – of getting at an interior – has a crippling and non-liberating effect on an individual while still attaining a reconstitution of self. To demonstrate this, I will be examining Morrison’s novel Beloved’s expansive use of storytelling and narrative as an inherently violent rather than therapeutic process through which the characters in her work have no choice but be subjected to. Also, I will seek to explore the following questions: If remembering, reconstituting, writing and re-telling a history is a violent act, is there redemption in the linguistic attempt to express? Does Morrison’s work create something new that can help to redeem and reconstitute African-American identity, experience and history?