Critical Commentary

The article that I read was, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited,” by Cynthia Dobbs. This essay talks about Beloved and many of the ways that Morrison uses language to emphasize a characters personality and ways of using the language to let us know where the character is in time—past or present. The article summarized many different parts of the book and gave us more information to further understand it. The part that I found most interesting was the part in the article where it summarizes why Sethe uses different words and what they mean.

Dobbs states in the beginning of the article that “Toni Morrison’s Beloved presents the psychological and aesthetic difficulties, as well as the cultural and political importance, of narrating the stories and histories of slave bodies in pain. In doing so, the novel discloses and attacks one of the fundamental assumptions of slavery and, to some degree, of present-day racism…” She then continues to tell us that the novel is filled with the idea of modernism and the ways that she does a “great violence” by “breaking the back of words”. Here we are introduced to our favorite word—rememory.

“I used to think it was my rememory.” Dobbs tears this word apart giving us a better understanding of what it really means. “The prefix suggests the idea of memory as always already re-created: the memory is never a stable, singular calling up of the past, but rather a partially invented, subjectively selective narrative of the past.” With this being said, this is where Morrison brings the modernist meaning of memory being of Sethe’s wanting to, or desire to remember what has happened in the past. With using this word it was said that her memories are dangerous and a timeless space. The example given in the article from our book goes as follows:

"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."

When I think of how Sethe is talking to Denver this reminds me of when Sethe decided to kill Beloved. Her ‘rememory’ of that will never die. Going off of nothing ever dies, this is where the haunting of Beloved comes in at 124. This is also explained in the article by which Sethe is still in a denial mode that nothing ever changes because she is stuck in her ‘rememory’, her own memory at which nothing can be changed.

I would have to agree with Dobbs points on this because Sethe never seems to see what is really happening when she knows who Beloved really is. She wants everything to go back to the way it was, which can’t happen because she is dead. While Sethe is dreaming of this Beloved is busy trying to see herself in Sethe’s body. We got to read a couple of pages of what was happening there on pages 254 and 255. As the novel continues they “thin” and as the novel comes to an end we see that the chain they have created has to be broken and they become their “own best thing”.

I believe that the article is a great tool to have an explanation to certain pieces of the text. Dobbs does a great job of showing and telling us about what Sethe and other character’s language means as a whole and the modernist twist that Morrison put on some of the characters. I found this article to be an easy flowing article filled with a lot of great information.