Nothing ever dies

This book is posing many difficulties.  Not necessarily because of quality or content--quite the opposite, really!  First off, I have a confession.  You see, over the weekend, after finishing the allotted pages, I realized I was too into the book to put it down.  I continued being drawn into the book.  For several hours.  Until there was no more book left to be drawn into.  Unfortunately, I have now tangled myself up in two frustrations: longing to talk about it and figuring out what I can talk about.  I cannot get over the intricate beauty of this book.  All I want to do is write about it and work through the details with other people.  Neither of which I can do, because spoiling is considered a bad thing.  Hmph.  Adding to the trouble, I'm having trouble figuring out what I am allowed to discuss.  Time is so convoluted in this book that I can't know what's happened without going back through and rereading what's happened.

Some novels are nice and clear and place everything in chronological order.  But Morrison's not playing nice here.  She's playing hard and thought-provoking, which is fantastic!  Just not for finding passages and figuring out where we are.  It takes so long to look for a quote in this book that I might as well read straight through it again until I find the part I want.  The events in Toni Morrison's world of Beloved don't happen in a chronological order.  These immortal pasts occur in the order they arise.  Instead of asking what's happened in the character's life so far, it's more accurate to ask what has been revealed to the reader so far, which is a complicated question that's sometimes hard to define.  The timing of the memories depend on both the moment they make themselves known to the characters (in order to draw a parallel) and the spot it is absolutely necessary that the reader learns something new.

Time is circular.  Things change when Paul D., a member of her past, enters the picture.  However, a lot has happened to both Sethe and Paul D. since they've last seen each other.  Both characters have pasts that they're suppressing.  Sethe's suppression is upfront and honest; she knows she is cramming it behind her.  Each day, she faces "the serious work of beating down the past" (87).  It's not obvious at first that Paul D. is doing the same thing.  He, too, is beating back the past, but he's more indifferent to the images.  In his quest for manhood, he shoves his scarring past away.  "He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.  Its lid rusted shut" (86).  The primary way we see the emergence of Paul D.'s suppression is through the subtle glimpses of thing we don't yet know about.  Until his past between Sweet Home and Ohio is revealed, there are only little hints that there's a bigger story there.  Paul D's heart has gone so cold, his tobacco tin so rusted shut, that the suppression is almost unconscious.  However, it's interesting that, when their lives are merged, Sethe and Paul D. not only draw the stories out of each other, they illuminate and clarify the vision of the past.

Perhaps a more important question is this: why do the characters feel the need to beat down their pasts?  Paul D. feels the need to defend his manhood.  Originally a Sweet Home man, later treated as an animal, he's had a rough life.  He's been through Hell and survived--but has he loved?  I'm not sure what to think about this point.  Would loving make him more or less of a man?  Does that explain why he starts to break during his time with Sethe?

Sethe, however, has a whole lot she feels she must defend.  She's running away from her Sweet Home horrors along in addition to the murder of her baby that's forever on her conscience.  I am pro-Sethe here, but I'm not entirely sure that the book is.  The whole sense of the novel seems to be that if you confront the past, you can move onward to the future.  When you run away from it, you only get deeper into it.  Her fear of Sweet Home directly leads to the murder of her daughter.  Is this implying that it would have been better for her to face Schoolteacher and subject her children to that life?  I don't see that as the case.  Sethe was right between a rock and a hard place, and she did what she saw best for both her and her children.  But her fear of Sweet Home causes her to hold back the stories, inwardly dwelling on them, making it seem like they're happening over and over again in her head.  "Some things just stay . . . . Places are still there . . . . The picture [of Sweet Home] 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's going to always be there waiting for you" (45).  Early on in the novel, Sethe lectures Denver about why she can never visit Sweet Home.  It's a sign of her past rising up and engulfing her present.  In Sethe's world, because she can't move forward, the past is always there, occurring and repeating on an endless loop.  Beloved is literally the past coming to life.  Sethe feels that she must continue to remain stationary and mourn in order to justify and apologize for what she's done.  She feels indebted to her lost child.  This lingering guilt causes Sethe to continually push back her past.

Unfortunately, you can't have a future without a past.  The only case of a past-less future is a baby.  For babies, there is only a future.  This is one of the big reasons that killing babies is so much more horrendous than killing adults.  Killing a baby is taking away an indefinite future, full of maximum possibilities, because as you age and develop your character, there are less paths to choose to go down.  Sethe sacrifices her future to give her baby one.  This is where it becomes important that Paul D. is there.  He both offers an outside view and offers hope of a new life.  As his past lies side-by-side with Sethe's, they can see how their stories entwine.  Without connecting life stories and sharing pasts, it is impossible to move on to create a future.  A past held back is a volcano waiting to erupt.

This post has gone off in many directions, and I wish it had trailed into many more.  There's so much to talk about, because everything is a reaction.  Many are circular, where one event leads to another, which leads to another, that ends up right back at the start.  Others are catalysts, where something runs into another, setting both off in different directions than expected.  When time is measured in terms of these collisions between the past, present, and future, it makes sense that we see things in the order thoughts collide and are pieced together.  It doesn't lend well to mental organization, though.  If you get nothing more from this, take away the moral of my story: don't read ahead.  The immediate gratification of discovering what happens is nothing compared to the torture of having to suppress the desire to discuss it.