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Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
The House a Ghost Built: "Nommo," Allegory, and the Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison's "
Beloved"
Author(s): William R. Handley
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 676-701
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208946
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WILLIAM R. HANDLEY
The House a Ghost Built:Nommo,

Allegory,and the Ethicsof Readingin
ToniMorrison'sBeloved
Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did,
as a person rather than a structure .... that wept, sighed, trembled.
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Hear moreoften things than beings,

the voice of thefire listening,
hear the voice of the water.
Hear in the wind
the bushessobbing,
it is the sigh of our forebears.
Thosewho are deadare nevergone ...

they are in the tree that rustles . . .
they are in the water that sleeps . . .
the deadare not dead.
Thosewho are deadare nevergone,

they are in the breastof the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrandthatflames.
he preceding poem, by the Senegambian poet Birago

Diop, appears in Jahnheinz Jahn's famous study of
neo-African culture, Muntu, published in English in
1961 (108). The poem, like the study itself, demon-
I would like to thank EricSundquist,Dwight McBride,and the anonymousreadersfor

Contemporary for their helpful criticismand suggestions.
Literature
Contemporary LiteratureXXXVI,4 0010-7484/95/0004-676 $1.50

? 1995 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
HANDLEY * 677
strates the predominantly spiritual nature of West African culture's

belief in nommo, the magic power of the word to call things into
being, to give life to things through the unity of word, water, seed,
and blood. Within African philosophy, argues Jahn, muntuis a cate-
gory of existence that includes human beings, both living and dead,
who exercise, like the poet above, the efficacy of the word in bring-
ing all things to life.1 The sacred act of naming is integral to becom-
ing muntu, such that babies who die before they have been given a
name are not even mourned, because they are kintu, that category
of things that only the power of nommocan restore and animate,
make actual and real.2 While Diop's "voice" of the fire and water
and the "sobbing" of the bushes might strike a Western reader as
examples of the pathetic fallacy,these seeming personifications are,
from a West African viewpoint, literal and performative. Similarly,
"the sigh of our forebears" is not simply a tropic analogue to these
sounds in nature: they are unified and made real, in West African
thought, through the power of the poet's magic word, through
nommo.Just as things in nature and human life find a forceful unity
through the word, so do the dead find life in the newly born: this is
the spiritually unified quality of African art and thought that Jahn's
study asserts is markedly different from Western beliefs in the dis-
tance between the name and the named, the living and the dead,
the figural and the real.3
By virtue not only of the literal "ghost" of Sethe's daughter in
Beloved,who is unnamed when she dies and eventually forgotten,
1. Jahn's study invokes a generalized "Africa." In this essay, West African culture is
the source for these "African" concepts even when they are occasionally not referred to
as "West African."
2. "Nommo, which effects conception and then calls forth birth, is not sufficient to
produce a completehuman being, a personality,a muntu. For the new-born child becomes
a muntu only when the father or the 'sorcerer' gives him a name and pronouncesit.
Before this the little body is a kintu, a thing; if it dies, it is not even mourned" (Jahn
125).
3. While Jahn asserts that it is Africans' "perfect right to declare authentic, correct and
true those components of their past which they believe to be so" (17), some African
writers, such as Wole Soyinka, have argued that Jahn's version of African culture is a
Western and romantic one that leaves out many African cultures' particularities. Toni
Morrison herself has asserted the preeminence of nommofor African American writers: "I
sometimes know when the work works, when nommo has effectively summoned, by
reading and listening to those who have entered the text" ("Unspeakable Things" 33).
678 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
but also by virtue of the ethical response Toni Morrison's novel

calls for from its racialized community of readers, Belovedbears
unmistakable marks of African cultural practice ("Nothing" ever
dies, Sethe tells Denver [36]). Yet Morrison's novel is also an
American story whose narrationis both defined and limited by the
historical losses of life, culture, and dignity wrought by slave trad-
ers and slave owners during and after the Middle Passage. What is
in jeopardy of being lost at the end of Belovedis not just the novel's
story or the girl Beloved, but a culture's remembering of its pow-
ers, of nommo'smagic, which is associated in West African thought
with heat and water: "By and by all trace is gone, and what is
forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is
down there. The rest is weather" (275). What is lost, it seems, is
the life of a culture that perceives a sacred unity in all things-in
water, in wind, or in Diop's sobbing bushes and rustling trees.
What is lost to history, however, Morrison's novel seeks to recover
in language fresh and jarring in its ability to call the word back to
life, to create a presence through language that memory has forgot-
ten: "Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have
been and was not, a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-
green bloom to the metal. What made her think her fingernails
could open locks the rain rained on?" (275). Imbued with a
Keatsian richness of sound, Morrison's poetic language also car-
ries another culture's faith in the word's effective force. The an-
swer to Morrison's seemingly rhetorical question might well be
"Africanmemory."
The mourning of an irretrievableAfrican past is not only cultur-
ally at odds with nommo'spower but, for Morrison as an African
American writer, structures her divided narratological relation to
figural or tropological language-to the status of the word as ei-
ther created presence or as the substitution, in the Western theo-
retical conception of language, for the missing thing. Is Morrison's
language unavoidably Western and mournful, and therefore struc-
tured as allegory, or does her privileging of nommothrough the
literalized ghost of Sethe's daughter suggest a recuperation of lan-
guage as presence, the ability of the word to call things into being?
This question is difficult, if not impossible, to answer and demon-
strate either one way or the other, not only because the incommen-
HAN DL E Y * 679
surable cultural gap between Western critical theory and African

"magic" forbids any kind of agreement, but because by the end of
the novel, the girl Beloved is neither mourned nor remembered.
"It was not a story to pass on. So they forgot her" (275)-not a
story that can be passed on orally in the African tradition, not a
story we can afford to ignore, not simply a story that is passed on
to us, nor a memory that will die. Beloved's literalness does not
simply dissolve into figural substitution, into storytelling, but van-
ishes except for a few chillingly literal traces: "Sometimes the pho-
tograph of a close friend or relative-looked at too long-shifts,
and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there.
They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things
will never be the same if they do" (275). The girl Beloved thus
inhabits both West African and American cultural spaces; she is at
once found and then lost, visible and then invisible, tangibly alive
and then a part of language, emblematic of both African survival
and American loss. Belovedis not a conventional ghost story even
though it centers on a ghost; it challenges Western criticalassump-
tions about the nature and function of personification and allegory
as narrative modes by demonstrating the ways in which language-
as-loss is not only a culturally relative concept but produced by
history-specifically, for African American culture, the history of
slavery. Yet as it enacts the necessity and near impossibility of re-
covering not just African memory but African presence after the
Middle Passage and slavery, the novel is also challenged by those
Western critical assumptions from which it cannot completely dis-
sociate itself. Morrison's response to those challenges is a critique
of slavery's erasure of memory, but at the same time a critique of a
Western ideology of writing and reading that itself constructs an
allegory of reading that serves that erasure. Morrison's own theo-
retical work demonstrates what her novel bears out-that norma-
tive theory and reading practice cannot properly unlock African
American literature when it is marked as heavily as is Belovedby
African culture. My goal in this essay is not so much to allow the
reader to hear those sounds the novel wants us to hear-only the
act of reading can do that-as to draw attention to this novel's
cultural and historical crossing-over from Africa to America, from
the past to the present, as well as to draw attention to what that
project hopes to perform both for its contemporary readers and for
the memory of "Sixty Million and more."4
The first and last word of Morrison's novel, "Beloved" is its title
(Beloved), an epitaph ("Beloved"), and the name of a girl without a
proper name (Beloved). Each of these three senses of the word re-
sists absolute placement: this is "a novel," we are told, but is it an
imaginative reconstruction of history, a performance of the African
concept of nommo, or a fictional account of something that can never
"truly" be known, perhaps something more like an allegory? Is "Be-
loved" as an epitaph sufficient, deficient, or does it exceed some-
thing unspeakable? Is the girl called Beloved Sethe's reincarnated
daughter, a survivor of the Middle Passage, as Elizabeth House has
argued, or, as Denver suggests, "more" (266)? The difficulty of plac-
ing Beloved, of accounting for her as a presence and as an absence,
and of understanding what the word means, is symptomatic of the
difficulty of reading Morrison's novel. When the reader arrives at
the novel's end and reads "Beloved" displaced from any context on
the page, detached and ghostly, the questions remain: who is Be-
loved now that she has been "disremembered" by everyone in the
novel, and why is this "not a story to pass on" (274)?
The name of Beloved, which follows Morrison's penultimate
line, "Certainly no clamor for a kiss," asserts itself as the swinging
door that both occludes the African past and marks an entry into it.
The name both marks and preserves against loss; it inaugurates this
present narrative and serves as a stop against total absence, as an
enabling limit for an African American cultural memory, precisely
because "Beloved" is insufficient as a name but sufficient as a call:
Everbody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her
name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost be-
4. Throughout this essay, I mean to emphasize the reading experience itself, which is
irreducible and performative. I should, however, distinguish the reader from the literary
critic, who is both reader and writer. When a critic tries to interpret allegory in Beloved,as I
try to do, he does so at his peril, for whereas Morrison wants her readers to experience
otherness, interpretation, like allegory, wants to see sameness in place of difference.
Whereas Morrison wants us to read gaps as gaps, interpretation seeks to fill the gap in
allegory. I have tried to avoid this reductive tendency by opening up both the gap in the
structure of understanding that we cannot understand and, implicitly, the critical gap
formed by my cultural position as a white reader.
H A N D LEY 681
cause no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they
call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is
not claimed.
(274)
Because Sethe killed her daughter to prevent her being taken as a

slave-and hence named as one-"Beloved" is a call that resists
slavery's name and that asks for a response. "Everybody" must an-
swer this call and assume what Morrison calls "response-ability" for
the unnamable and unspeakable loss to slavery. The name "Be-
loved" is a perfect encapsulation of slavery's intrusion into the sa-
cred West African process of naming. Incantatory, it is also inscribed
by its limitations: Sethe could not afford more than those letters to
be inscribed on the gravestone, suggesting that Beloved's name can-
not be purchased precisely because it is sacred.
Beloved's epitaph thus represents both preservation and loss,
pricelessness and purchase, the sacred name and the deficient
word. One could say that these oppositions, which do not consti-
tute a simply binary relation throughout the novel, demonstrate the
combative struggle between slavery and storytelling, the name of
property and the proper name-the struggle, essentially, between
an African American writer and the American history of loss she
must represent but wants to forget for the sake of remembering a
more distant African past and its inheritance of life. Central to un-
derstanding the role of vocal expressiveness within the African
American community are nommo and slavery, both of which are in-
scribed in the word "Beloved" and in the novel Beloved, so at odds
that they threaten to pull it apart. The last word of the novel fights
against erasure in order to stand as a testament to the regenerative
power of the word as much as it stands in for an absence, "in mem-
ory of."
Although we may be creatures of language for whom, as Walter
Benjamin writes, "meaning is encountered ... as the reason for
mournfulness" (209), Beloved does not merely bear out a linguistic
predicament. Like Morrison's epitaph, language and meaning also
constantly remind us of "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199),
of historical ruptures around which our language, our stories and
myths, structure figurations and fictions that perform an impossi-
ble and yet necessary task of mourning and reincarnation. Put an-
other way, while allegory is mournful and mourning is allegorical, it
is not an allegory to say so: the African American linguistic predica-
ment has, in fact, historical and traumatic causes that are "unread-
able" by the language built upon them.
Within the Western understanding of the "prison house" of lan-
guage, the word both reveals and veils the lost object that is the
reason for its impulse to represent. But since we understand only
within language, we cannot fully understand the very processes of
understanding or of mourning-under/stand itself implies the seem-
ing inevitability of this divide. In other words, we cannot read the
act of reading itself because we cannot close the gap that the tem-
poral and representational nature of narrative and language opens
up without abandoning language and narrative themselves. Paul
de Man argues that an ethical imperative is involved in this linguis-
tic predicament in which we necessarily assume responsibility for
our own blindness inherent in any reading; this is what he means
when he writes in "Allegory (Julie)" that "Allegories are always
ethical" (206). De Man's theory of reading is universalist; he claims
this as a necessary condition of all speech. But to what extent is
allegory the result of history, rather than the irretrievability of his-
tory a result of the allegorical structure of all linguistic representa-
tion? To reverse Benjamin's argument, perhaps mourning can also
be encountered as the reason for meaning; in other words, histori-
cal loss can be encountered as the grounding for our structures of
representation.
In contrast to Western philosophical views of allegory and repre-
sentation, the West African view of the word, of nommo, is more
functional and performative, suggesting a coming-into-being, a cre-
ative presenting, rather than a mournful re-presenting of some-
thing lost. Jahn writes:
"There is nothing that there is not; whatever we have a name for, that is";
so speaks the wisdom of the Yorubapriests. The proverb signifies that the
naming, the enunciation produces what it names. Naming is an incanta-
tion, a creative act. What we cannot conceive of is unreal; it does not exist.
But every human thought, once expressed, becomes reality. For the word
holds the course of things in train and changes and transforms them. And
HAN DLEY ? 683
since the word has this power, every word is an effective word, every
word is binding.
(133)
When Morrison writes about "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken,"

she is clearly in disagreement with the Yorubapriests: the unspeak-
able, for Morrison, has a reality,a historicalplace, even if we cannot
mark it.5 Nevertheless, the last word of the novel, "Beloved," like
the novel itself, is in part an incantation, a performance of nommo,
the force that makes words living things, not so much recuperative
of loss but rather regenerative. "The incantation," writes Jahn of
West African poetry, "is at the same time transformation"of a reality
the poet listens to that is "taking place outside the skull, but the
listening to an imperative which the poet both projects and makes
happen" (137-38). Expression is thus not imprisoned by language
in African thought. In Morrison's novel, the word is pulled almost
in separate directions; neither simply incantatorynor simply impris-
oned, Belovedreflects its own historical crossing-over in Morrison's
desire to revive lost African traditions and to recover an African
American past. Her project also acknowledges the historical rup-
ture that makes of this difficult, ethically necessary attempt an alle-
gory of its own mourning through the text's repetition of retrieval
and loss. We are left with vanishing, physical traces: "Down by the
stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go.
They are so familiar.Should a child, an adult place his feet in them,
they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though
nobody ever walked there. By and by all trace is gone" (275). But
what the community of former slaves forgets, Morrison's novel re-
produces. Her disconsolate ending, with its mournfully Western
account of nature-"The rest is weather. Not the breath of the
disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves"-is at
odds with her own written account in its effective production of an
African presence. These cross-cultural differences are manifested
5. The Yoruba culture is very much "over there," one should note, in that rarely did
whites successfully take as slaves members of the Yoruba tribes (Blassingame 5). The
metaphysical unity between what exists and what is spoken is thus aligned with an
origin-the Yoruba people-with which the African American present is discontinuous.
for Morrison in cross-temporal and cross-continental transactions:a

novel that so deeply mourns the past in a Western sense is also a
novel that seeks to create a future in the African sense, a novel both
of hope and of mourning, of nommoand of allegory. Where alle-
gory's narrativepast foretellsa future, nommo'spower seeks to create
one.
Allegory and mourning share a common structure in that both
are founded upon loss, employ metaphor as substitution, and are
stretched metonymically across a temporal field. In its etymologi-
cal origin, Joel Fineman observes, "allegory" derives from the di-
rect translation from the Greek of "other"and "to speak" (46). Its
very existence assumes temporality, a past: "It is as though alle-
gory were precisely that mode that makes up for the distance, or
heals the gap, between the present and a disappearing past,
which, without interpretation, would be otherwise irretrievable
and foreclosed" (29). But whosehistory, one needs to ask-the his-
tory of American slavery, the personal experience of which Sethe
and Paul D would sooner forget, or the history of an African past,
much of it lost with the death of Baby Suggs, which they can
barely remember? Morrison's allegorization of Beloved privileges
the recuperation of the latter. Allegory is a hierarchizing mode in
which "the structure of metaphor" is imposed "onto the sequence
of metonymy, not the other way around" (Fineman 32). The power
of Beloved'sstructure lies in its metaphorical grounding: Beloved is
not an American slave; she is an African survivor. The loss of Be-
loved and of African memory is recuperated by her resurrection
through the power of nommo;Beloved's cultural memory is pre-
served in the text we read, even though Beloved vanishes. Like
the power that the novel's allegorical structure grants her, Beloved
wants to dominate. Her vanishing is coextensive, in the final
pages, with our assumption of responsibility for an accounting of
her and with the emergence of community. The power of nommo,
Morrison suggests, asserts its preeminence for the African Ameri-
can writer not in its originary African form, but rather in its ability
to set the terms for the allegoricalstructure of recuperation, histori-
cal understanding, and communal survival necessitated by slav-
ery. While that structure cannot house nommoas a literal presence,
the structure is nevertheless indebted to nommofor a community's
HAN D LEY 685
self-understanding. For Toni Morrison, the African American art-

ist's language is freed from being a prison only because an African
presence has been there. Though the truth of such a claim is virtu-
ally impossible to know, the history of slavery nevertheless sug-
gests that the structure of allegory and mourning is neither univer-
sal nor inevitable as a human and linguistic predicament.
Morrison suggests how a community's allegoricalunderstanding
of itself is produced by historical rupture in her epigraph from
Paul's letter to the Romans: "Iwill call themmy people,whichwerenot
my people;and her beloved,which was not beloved."The epigraph is
richly suggestive from an African American viewpoint: the fact that
the substitutable "they" can be read as black Africans or even white
Americans suggests that to be "AfricanAmerican"has always been
to assume an allegorical identity-in a quite different sense from
being allegorically "white." Most importantly, Morrison wants to
grant to the dead a living and beloved status-denied them by
white slave owners-as a form of communal identification and recu-
peration: she will call the girl "Beloved" because she was neither
loved nor mourned. But to call her by another name is in an impor-
tant sense to speak for her, and such a voicing assumes a burden of
responsibility. When one speaks for another, presumes to tell her or
his story, one is engaged in a fictional act that is unavoidably ethical
precisely because of the otherness that structures both ethical rela-
tions and the relationship between narrationand history. The dou-
ble misrecognition or misreading between Sethe and Beloved oc-
curs in a structure-Sethe's home-that houses the allegory of our
own reading: "124"addresses this double specularity, or this dou-
bling relationship, in that the numbers each double the one preced-
ing. The pictographically specular address is addressed to the
reader, an allegory of whose activity is mirroredin the processes of
Sethe's mourning, in her attempts to account for Beloved. Allegory
is mournful because it presumes the loss of a unity like that of the
Western symbol, a unity in which there is no distance between sign
and meaning, a unity that is arguably always forever lost in an alle-
gorical world. Mourning is allegorical in that it attempts to recuper-
ate that lost unity through substitution. Morrison's novel tries to
reclaimlost Africanlives and AfricanAmericanhistory, and it substi-
tutes for that lost life "over there" an allegorical presence forever
past but whose face, once seen, leaves traces even though it is
"disremembered."
From a Western point of view, loss initiates all structuralization,
including the structure of language. JoelFineman argues that "there
is buried in the structurality of any structure the ghostly origin of
that structure, because the origin will be structurallydetermined as
a ghost, a palpably absent origin, by virtue of the very structurality
it fathers" (44). Conceiving it as a metaphorical structure imposed
onto a metonymic, temporal chain, we can understand how alle-
gory both mourns and desires. Fineman writes, "Distanced at the
beginning from its source, allegory will set out on an increasingly
futile search for a signifier with which to recuperate the fracture of
and at its source, and with each successive signifier the fractureand
the search began again: a structure of continual yearning, the in-
satiable desire of allegory" (45). In this light, we can understand
Beloved's insatiable desire for Sethe (particularlyin that Beloved
retains the cultural memory of a Middle Passage survivor) as a de-
sire not just for the originary mother but for lost African origins.
Sethe learns early on "the profound satisfaction Beloved got from
storytelling" (58); Beloved's ghost allows Sethe to tell stories too
close to home, apparently for the first time. But storytelling, signifi-
cantly, "became a way to feed her" (58). By growing pregnant and
starving her mother, the source of her life, Beloved exemplifies the
futility of her search for an absolute recuperationof origins. Beloved
may be an allegory of her own loss, but the girl herself becomes
forcefully literal and cannot incorporatethe necessity of temporality
and meaning in accommodating her loss: "All of it is now it is
always now" (210). Time literally stands still in 124; as a structure,
124 threatens to collapse in its explusion of others, like Paul D,
whom it cannot house because they threaten an absolute unity with
Beloved's origin. The ghost of any structure must in fact be buried,
in Fineman's terms, for that structure to subsist. When Beloved is
made increasingly literal, she threatens the temporal structure, like
124 itself, that already exists and that allows life meaningfully to
continue.
The figure of Beloved is Morrison's attempt to bring to presence
a lost child, to fill the incalculable metaphysical space inaugurated
by the historical facts of loss during the Middle Passage and slav-
HAN D L EY 687
ery. But as the section that serves as Beloved's narratedautobiogra-

phy shows us, her story is constituted as much by loss as by pres-
ence, much as silent rests are constitutive of music. To know her,
and to know this historical loss, is to know that we can't know her
or the historical loss she embodies. Schoolteacher's deceptive, self-
blinding report, in contrast, lacks this knowledge of its own limits
and thus lacks responsibility: "see what happened when you
overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of-the
trouble it was, and the loss. The whole lot was lost now" (150). But
while the reader is made aware of limits, there are also things in
Beloved's memory heard by and known only to the reader, unre-
ported elsewhere in the text to other characters-the fragments of
the Middle Passage, for example. Only the reader hears the frag-
ments of this history; only the reader can choose to respond to it in
the "sweaty fight" of writing and reading, as Morrison describes
it, "for, meaning and response-ability" (Playing xi). As a ghost,
Beloved can be read in part as an allegory of the difficulty of Morri-
son's task as a writer of this history, as well as of our tasks as
readers of this novel and the history it figures. Who is she? What
are we to do with her? These ethical questions emerge from the
structure of allegory, from the gap between what is narrated and
the loss that initiates that narration and its central, elusive figure.
To take Morrison's last two pages at face value is an unnerving
experience because, as readers, we wonder what we have then
been doing while reading the novel, if in the end "no one is looking
for her." Morrison's description of the ex-slaves' cultural "disre-
membering" heightens the ethical tasks that she has assumed in
writing this novel in the 1980s and that we have assumed in reading
it. As BarbaraChristian has observed, "memory when it does exist
in nineteenth-century African-Americannovels about slavery goes
back but one generation, to one's mother, but certainly not much
further back than that. Slave-owners were aware of the power of
memory, for they disrupted generational lines of slaves in such a
way that many slaves did not knoweven their own parents or chil-
dren" (333). The problem of a white audience, for those ex-slaves
who did record their memories, necessitated certain omissions, in
addition to those "events too horrible and too dangerous for them
to recall" (329). Morrison's initial impulse for writing Belovedcame
from being intrigued by nineteenth-century slaves' comments

about their deliberate omissions (329). When we contextualize this
text, then, the last pages read as a rendering of those past omissions
that this novel clearly seeks to recover, those periods in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century that Morrisonhas characterized
as being "X'dout by upwardly mobile African-Americansof the for-
ties and fifties" (Christian327). And we see in Morrisonas a contem-
porary writer and ourselves as contemporary readers the ethical
task at hand to make a community with the past through narration,
figuration, and naming, even if the community of Morrison's char-
acters cannot house Beloved's presence because she is too close to
home.
When we talk about "what to do" with a novel or "what to make
of it," we are talking in part about the ethics of reading, of account-
ing for another or others whom we cannot know but who are never-
theless represented for us in language. Language, especially the
practice of storytelling, is like a ghost effect: we sense the presence
of something absent in the way in which words stand in for a lost or
missing object. Words can never be sufficient to their task of repre-
sentation or substitution, even though they are necessary; in some
sense they always "lie,"even as they are used to tell the truth. Morri-
son's epitaph at the beginning of the novel, "SixtyMillionandmore,"
suggests a loss of such magnitude that no sufficient accounting can
be made of it: these spectral italics cannot literally represent the
dead, give a reality to the Middle Passage, or reincarnateits victims.
And yet this novel makes the necessary attempt to mourn that loss
precisely by heightening our awareness of how the act of represen-
tation, in giving a name and a figure to the absent other, is both
urgent and fraught with difficulty. By her awareness of this neces-
sary impossibility, or this impossible necessity, and by her attempt
to inscribe an allegory of its difficulty in her text, Morrison makes
the reader aware of how the acts of writing and reading inevitably
involve an ethical imperative, made all the more imperative when
what is narrated is unspeakable. Morrison's text assumes, as we
learn in the last pages, a responsibility for its own unavoidable dis-
tortions and ghosts called up in any attempt to understand figura-
tively and imaginatively the historical ruptures of the Middle Pas-
sage and of slavery that we can never know, that we can neither
HAN D LEY 689
remember nor forget. For Morrison's characters who lived that his-
tory, of course, remembering is most painful: "every mention of
[Sethe's] past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and
Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable"
(58).
Morrison's epitaph before a novel that is in one sense an epitaph
suggests how Beloved can be read in part as an allegory about the
allegorizing process of narrating the past. If we read the evidence of
Elizabeth House's argument that Beloved is a literal survivor of the
Middle Passage, then Morrison's haunting epitaph suggests an alle-
gorical reading of Beloved as embodying a longer African history,
and of the ruptures in Sethe's family as a repetition of the rupture
from Africa. The relationship between Sethe and Beloved consti-
tutes for House a double misrecognition, but a misrecognition that
"gets right" the very unreadability both of reading and of our read-
ing of this history. 6 In misrecognizing each other, in not telling "the
6. House's reading of Beloved as a literal survivor of the Middle Passage both enables
and clouds our ability to read this specular text. Her convincing evidence that Beloved
contains the traces of historical experience beyond simply that of Sethe's daughter points
to that cultural "beyond" which this novel so urgently wants us to hear. At the same time,
however, House's insistence that Beloved is not a ghost strips Beloved and the novel
itself of the incantatory power of nommoand of the continuity suggested by African be-
liefs in reincarnation. House's reading unwittingly makes Sethe blind to the allegory of
her own reading and suggests that, in misrecognizing Beloved, Sethe is like a reader who
cannot hear the otherness beyond speech. I would argue that Sethe's misrecognition is
also, importantly, a recognition, a hearing and an incantation, an act of mourning but
also an act of resurrection, much as this novel seeks to resuscitate things not merely lost
but "over there," just beyond speech.
In a British television interview, Morrison made the observation while discussing Be-
loved that in some African beliefs the dead are often reborn in children who retain their
memories and visions, which would work at odds with House's argument that Beloved,
the girl herself, never really died. But the text itself works against House's argument.
House asserts in a bracketed comment, without support, that Beloved runs away when
Sethe runs toward the man whom she thinks is schoolteacher (24). But the passage in
Beloved(262) in which House slips in this bracketed assertion offers no statement at all
about Beloved's movements; instead, it ends with the man "looking at her," presumably,
one would assume, because she is still standing there. Moreover, the next section begins
with one explanation for Beloved's absence: "Disappeared, some say, exploded right
before their eyes" (263). Later, Morrison writes, "One point of agreement is: first they
saw it and then they didn't" (267). Clearly, House's argument depends ultimately on
explaining the magic of Beloved's appearance and the magic of her disappearance; with
regard to these matters, her argument becomes forced.
Sethe's literally turning her back on a literalized Beloved and the community's
truth"of the other, they nevertheless enact the necessity and appro-
priateness of mourning, of allowing something present to stand in
or substitute for something lost and absent, which is also to struc-
ture an allegory, as Morrison's epigraph from Paul's letter to the
Romans suggests. House reads the epigraph, in contrast, as a sug-
gestion merely that the story is an instance of mistaken identity,
such that identity is a matter of either/or ratherthan of both/and; the
latter is true of allegory, especially of the Christiantheory of allegory
exemplified in Paul's letter. In the Revised Standard Version of the
New Testament, the metaphoric nature of naming is emphasized by
quotation marks: "Those who were not my people I will call 'my
people,' and her who was not beloved I will call 'my beloved.'"
In proposing a way of reading Beloved,I do not want to separate
the ethics of that reading from its African, any more than from its
Western, component-from the imperatives of either nommoor al-
legory. Morrison takes seriously the ethics of writing and reading,
of representation and understanding. At the end of her article "Un-
speakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature," she writes, "as far as the future is con-
cerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the
line" (34). Although we come to an understanding of the ethical
nature of our task by confronting the ghosts of others in the past
for whom we write and read "in memory of," the practical effects
of these ethics are for the future, as is echoed in Paul D's statement
to Sethe that "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.
We need some kind of tomorrow" (273). Nommoplays a crucial role
in the ethics of reading for Morrison; as she suggests, its in-
cantatory powers summon not only ghosts but also readers. The
dialogue between West African ways of understanding and an
American readership is aided and not impaired by the novel's cul-
tural position within a Western tradition filled with the very read-
"disremembering" of her can also be read as an "aborted interiorization," in contrast to

the faithful interiorization of the other by prosopopeia, in which the other is at once living
and dead. Derrida describes this aborted interiorization as "a respect for the other as
other, a sort of tender rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other
alone, outside, over there, in his death, outside of us" (35). For Morrison, this respect for
Beloved as other allows her characters to become a community. "Imagining is not merely
looking or looking at," Morrison has written; "nor is it taking oneself intact into the other.
It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming"(Playing 4).
HAN D LEY 691
ers Morrison wants to summon. Trying to face a history of geno-

cide and slavery, and situated in part within a Western literary
tradition, Morrison's project acknowledges the impossibility of its
task in granting a sufficient living figure to the myriad dead. But
the necessity of this task is not without its effective force also
within that very tradition, a force made present ethically to the
reader in the act of reading Morrison's specular allegory.
Those ethics are inseparable from personification, just as our re-
sponse to Morrison's novel is inseparable from Beloved. In discuss-
ing the ethics of narrating and reading "Bartlebythe Scrivener,"J.
Hillis Millerobserves how Melville's narratorcannot avoid a respon-
sibility for his response to the enigmatic Bartleby. Even the most
passive action "is a response to Bartlebyand a taking of responsibil-
ity toward him, even for him. Try as he may, the narrator cannot
escape that responsibility-but then he cannot fulfill it either" (Ver-
sions 142). For Miller, Melville's story "is not so much the story of
Bartleby as it is the story of the narrator'sethical relation, or failure
of ethical relation, to Bartleby."By not telling the complete story of
Bartleby,the narratorcannot determine his ethical responsibility to-
ward him and act on it. "Storytelling and ethics are," in Miller's
view, "inextricablyrelated." Ethics depends on storytelling, just as
storytelling depends on personification: if I cannot name and give a
figure to or represent an other, I cannot tell his or her story; if I
cannot know someone's story, I cannot determine my ethical rela-
tion to that person. Narration, according to Miller, "is the attempt to
respond to the metaphysical injunction in the compulsion to biogra-
phy and autobiography. This is the obligation to bring people into
the space of immediate presence where they may be seen and
known" (143-44).
Within Western literature, personification-the granting of a
voice to the absent, inanimate, or dead-is presupposed for there
to be storytelling. The figure of personification is also known as
prosopopeia, which Paul de Man defines as "the fiction of an apos-
trophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the
possibility of the latter's reply and confers upon it the power of
speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is
manifest in the etymology of the trope's name, prosoponpoien, to
confer a mask or a face (prosopon).Prosopopeia is the trope of autobi-
ography, by which one's name... is made as intelligible and

memorable as a face" ("Autobiography" 75-76). This might suffice
as a description of Beloved's reincarnation, were it not for her literal-
ness and then disappearance. For Beloved, "Uncomprehending
everything except that Sethe was the woman who took her face
away" (252), the name in another's mouth speaks of her own deface-
ment even as it returns it to her. Denver calls to her:
". . . Beloved?"
Beloved focuses her eyes. "Over there. Her face."
Denver looks where Beloved's eyes go; there is nothing but darkness
there.
"Whose face? Who is it?"
"Me. It's me."
(124)
To remember Beloved is to grant her a face, to make her face memo-

rable. She is remembered through the faces of those who loved her
and especially through the face of her mother. In Sethe's lyric sec-
tion beginning "I am Beloved and she is mine," Sethe asks Be-
loved, "You never forget me?" to which Beloved replies, "Your
face is mine" (215). These are, of course, faces we do not see but
that we incorporate through language. Our reading of Beloved
(the girl) both restores and disfigures the absent other we neither
see nor forget.
In his essay "Autobiography as De-Facement," de Man is con-
cerned with "the giving and taking away of faces, with face and
deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration" (76). The dominant fig-
ure of autobiography is this "voice-from-beyond-the-grave" (77).
De Man reads Wordsworth's Essays upon Epitaphs, in which Words-
worth writes that representing the deceased "'as speaking from his
own tomb-stone'" is a "'tender fiction,' a 'shadowy interposition
[which] harmoniously unites the two worlds of the living and the
dead.'" The Western tradition is of course not monolithic; in the
word "fiction" we hear how what was once somewhat pejorative
has become the object of interest in literary theory, the place of liv-
ing ethical activity. Wordsworth denounces the purely fictional
trope, preferring "'that in which survivors speak in their own per-
sons,' " and yet the figure Wordsworth counsels against, as de Man
HANDLEY ? 693
points out, is the main figure he uses in his essay. The language of
personification is the language of metaphor and of tropes, de Man
argues, the very language of cognition "that makes the unknown
accessible to the mind and to the senses." This language "is indeed
like the body, which is like its garments, the veil of the soul as the
garment is the sheltering veil of the body" (80).
Just as the body is not the thing itself or the soul in Western
thought, so is language a veil, not the thing itself. De Man con-
cludes:
To the extent that language is figure (or metaphor, or prosopopeia) it is

indeed not the thing itself but the representation, the picture of the thing
and, as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are mute. Language, as trope, is
always privative. . . . As soon as we understand the rhetorical function
of prosopopeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also
understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the
sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding.
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and the restora-
tion of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the
name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores.
(80-81)
For de Man, to understand our own processes of reading and cogni-

tion is to understand how language deprives us of the thing which it
helps us to understand, to understand how we cannot know it. De
Man's interest, as his title suggests, is precisely in how autobiogra-
phy is a de-facement, since he is reading a romantic rhetoric that
wants to deny the inevitability of that de-facement. Morrison, on
the other hand, is reading an African American history filled with
de-facement by slavery, and so she might reverse the symmetry of
de Man's equation and say, "the restoration of mortality by autobi-
ography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) restores to the
precise extent that it deprives and disfigures." The African Ameri-
can linguistic predicament, for Morrison, is a displaced "name" for
death. In other words, Morrison does not deny the inevitable distor-
tions of representation, of figurative language, but wants rather to
affirm-both within the Western tradition of personification in
storytelling and within the West African tradition, fragmented but
not exterminated by the Middle Passage and a history of slavery-
the power of nommo,the restorative and transformative power of

the word.
Even though storytelling stands as an allegory of its own limits,
and even though slavery relied on its own stories, storytelling in
the Western sense works at cross-purposes with slavery by figuring
the bodies and voices that slavery denied. Writing as an African
American and an academic in the 1980s, Morrison does not deny
the impossibility of being completely "true" to the dead, but she
does affirm with an added ethical urgency, given the magnitude of
slavery's violence, the necessity to "get it right," to restore even
while such restoration is an allegory of our inability to read "un-
speakable thoughts, unspoken." Language is all the more privative
when it attempts to represent the absence of sixty million and
more. To do battle with that history of privation inscribed in West-
ern language and modes of cognition, Morrison relies on the regen-
erative sound of words, on language as productive force rather
than as prison house.
In the same article in which she writes of nommo'ssummoning
power, Morrison reads the allegorical nature of Herman Melville's
white whale, followed by readings of the first sentences of her
novels. What happens when we read Morrison's novel is further
illuminated if we read her reading, particularlyher reading of the
first sentence of Beloved.These readings suggest how the Western
structures of allegory, the same structures of mourning and of the
Western conception of meaning, inform her writing practice. "Writ-
ing is, after all, an act of language, its practice," she writes. "But
first of all it is an effort of the will to discover" (20). Morrison's
focus on language and on the will to discover, as opposed to
nommo'swill to create a reality through performance, here sug-
gests a Western-influenced view of language as an active effect of
absence, as an attempt to recover or discover things that exist
apart from language.
Morrison suggests a reading of the white whale as an allegory of
white ideology's blindness to itself as ideology, observing Melville's
shift from the whale as commerce to the whale as metaphor. She
places as much emphasis on the adjective as on the noun in "the
white whale" and argues "the possibility that Melville's 'truth' was
his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became
HANDLEY * 695
ideology" (15). "Truth"is put in quotation marks because what Mel-

ville has glimpsed is precisely white ideology's inability to see itself
as an allegorical structure of understanding that lies about its own
fictionality, that cannot recover the human integrity lost to slavery.
Morrison suggests how this blindness of white ideology to itself is
structured like mourning: Ahab "is not a man mourning his lost leg
or a scar on his face"; rather, "if the white whale is the ideology of
race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and fam-
ily and society and his own place as a human in the world. The
trauma of racism is, for the racistand the victim, the severe fragmen-
tation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symp-
tom) of psychosis-strangely of no interest to psychiatry" (15-16).
From this interpretive stance, Ahab is in a mournful pursuit of that
which cost him his sight, of the allegory of his own blindness, and
the whale is a melancholic, in the strictly psychoanalytic sense of
one who unconsciously mourns. Blind to its conceptual vision of
itself precisely as a mode of understanding, the whale of whiteness
as ideology blinds those who invented it. The pursuit is so frenzied
because, paradoxically, Ahab cannot face that which has de-faced
him.
Morrison points out how this allegorization of loss is all an elabo-
rate invention, not simply a natural condition of meaning. Racism
causes loss, psychosis, melancholia, and this looming, blindingly
white metaphor of the whale; it forms the structure of allegory and
mourning as Melville understood it. Melville's task was to read the
unreadability of his reading of white ideology, "to say something
unsayable," as Morrison describes Melville's task in his chapter
"The Whiteness of the Whale"-a task of "do-or-die significance."
"'I almost despair,' he writes, 'of putting it in a comprehensive
form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things ap-
palled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet in
some dim, random way, explain myself I must, elseall thesechapters
mightbenaught'" (17). Melville's task is as necessary as it is impossi-
ble, like Morrison's task of giving a voice to the dead once
traumatized by slavery's violence. Morrison acknowledges the im-
possibility of this most necessary and urgent of the writer's ethical
tasks: "after informing the reader of his 'hope to light upon some
chance clue to conduct us to the hidden course we seek,' he tries to
9
696 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
nail it. ... His struggle to do so is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we.
But in nonfigurativelanguage, he identifies the imaginative tools
needed to solve the problem: 'subtlety appeals to subtlety, and with-
out imagination no man can follow another into these halls'" (17;
emphasis added). There is in fact a figure here: we are entering
halls, in a house or in some structure. Our imagination can help us
see how the ideology that blinds us is in fact a construction, and the
way we discern this structure is precisely with the figures that our
imagination supplies us to inhabit these halls, in order for us to see
the limits or walls that surround those figures. This "invention,"
Morrison elucidates in discussing Melville, "was indeed formed in
fright" (18).
For Morrison this "'unspeakable'" meaning of Moby-Dick"has
remained the 'hidden course,' the 'truth in the Face of False-
hood.' . . . The chapters I have made reference to," she writes, "are
only a fraction of the instances where the text surrenders such in-
sights, and points a helpful finger toward the ways in which the
ghost drives the machine" (18). Beloved figures in part as such a
ghost-not, clearly, the ghost of white ideology, but the ghost that
drives the machine of memory and recuperation. Beloved's ghost is
an allegory of the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" that fill the
house of 124 and that we cannot hear, those unreadable structures
of understanding that help us to face the enormity of slavery even
as slavery blinds us, ultimately, to the ghosts that it produced.
Morrison reads not only the unreadability of allegory but its his-
torical invention in order to suggest an "over there" where such
structures of figuration were not necessitated by slavery. By struc-
turing her novel like an allegory and privileging nommoas the
grounding, inaugural term, Morrison deconstructs the idea that
reading's impossibility is universal and inevitable and betrays its
historical roots for African Americans, the ruptures that necessitate
Sethe's reading and misreading of the ghost who is both her daugh-
ter and not her daughter. As far as the effect on her readers is con-
cerned, however, Morrison can at best summon them to hear the
ghost in the machine that is the cause of their historically racialized
blindness, as well as their insight. Acknowledging their variously
racialized limits, Morrison's readers encounter insights into the eth-
ics of their own activity in accounting for an absence that they can
HAN D LEY 697
neither know nor forget but know that they have heard. It is this
recognition of otherness, as I have suggested, that is involved in
responsible reading.
In her reading of the first line of Beloved, Morrison demonstrates
an allegory of our disorientation in reading the sounds of 124. Her
observations suggest the allegory of our own reading and how
that allegory, rather than bearing out merely a linguistic predica-
ment, also calls up a historical reality that produced that predica-
ment:
Whatever the risks of confronting the reader with what must be immedi-
ately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative authoritative sentence,
the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined to take. Because the in
mediasres opening that I am so committed to is here excessively demand-
ing. It is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The
reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely for-
eign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might
be possible between the reader and the novel's population. Snatched just
as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another,
without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no
entrance-a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house
into which this snatching-this kidnapping-propels one, changes from
spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may
have changed.
(32)
Reading Beloved, Morrison suggests, we enact a linguistic crossing-

over that structurally repeats the cultural rupture effected by slav-
ery. While reading a narrative is always a complex encounter with
alterity, Morrison wants to emphasize how this foreign experience
has, within the African American perspective, a historical ana-
logue, and so she reverses that rupture by bringing the reader into
a literary landscape filled with traces of the African slave's experi-
ence. African Americans, Morrison argues, "are not, in fact,
'other.' We are choices" (9). And so Morrison chooses to emphasize
the otherness of "American" in "African American" and to show
her American readers what is on the other side of this novel set in
Ohio. Morrison wants "the compelling confusion of being there as
they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from
the 'author,' with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity
available for the journey." All there is, she suggests, "is just a little
music, each other and the urgency of what is at stake. Which is all
they had. For that work, the work of language is to get out of the
way" (33).
In West African culture, speech and music are part of the same
expressive pattern.7 Within this tradition, music is a manifestation
of nommo;it produces and commands rather than substitutes for the
thing it expresses, much as the Western symbol, in contrast to alle-
gory, wants to express an essence that is not divided from that
which it signifies. When Morrison suggests that the work of lan-
guage is "to get out of the way," she is clearly speaking outside the
modern Western tradition that views language as inevitably and
unavoidably in the way of our understanding, even as it is our given
means of comprehension. When she speaks of the shared experi-
ence between the reader and the novel's population, as well as the
absence of a guiding author, she describes the functional and com-
munal aspect of African art, in which the Western division between
speaker and audience is not present, much as the Greek chorus,
antiquated in the West, sings its lines and unites the audience and
the actors in a communal performance of a culture's understanding
of itself. The sound of her novel, Morrison writes, "must be an inner
ear sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a
musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than
music can" (31-32).
Referring to her novel's first word, "124," Morrison observes that
"there is something about numerals that makes them spoken,
heard, in this context, because one expects words to read in a book,
not numbers to say, or hear" (31). Within nsibidi, an Efik writing
system, pictograms are mediatory signs with a mantric power and
pulsation that indicate a realm beyond ordinary discourse (Asante
60). "124" may be interpreted as a pictorial, specular allegory of
such a pictogram's mediatory effect in the way in which, as I have
noted, each number mediates for the next, doubles into it, much as
Sethe and Beloved, and the histories that make up their experiences
as Africans and Americans, reflexively figure each other. It is also,
of course, the sign of property and of a black woman's right to own
7. See Sidran 1-29.
HANDLEY * 699
that property, in contrast to white ownership of black bodies. Al-

though it is simply an address for a house, in our immediate confu-
sion as to its significance, it is an address to our own disorientation
within the prison house of language that is the Western inheritance.
It suggests, in its specular and nonverbal qualities, something be-
yond our conventional systems of reference and calls into question
the grounds and limits of those systems.
To read Morrison's novel is not simply to read an allegory of our
difficulty in reading this novel, for it also performatively allows us
to hear things just beyond speech, to hear something "over there,"
both the richness of the ancestral spiritual world so crucial to an
understanding of West African culture and the sounds of that cul-
ture before the Middle Passage. We read that traces of these sounds,
of nommo's music, are heard when the community of women at the
novel's end approaches 124 in order to pull Sethe back into history
and save her from a futile cohabitation with loss. Sethe and Beloved
hear "music" from the "singing women" and walk to the doorway.
In the women's voices Sethe hears the cultural memory, the force of
nommo, that has not died with Baby Suggs:
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat
and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.
Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a
wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off
chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in
its wash.
(261)
Voices without words, voices that break the back of words, have the
power magically to shape nature, to revive the living, to expel
ghosts and call the living to a new life.8 That "right combination" of
8. That the wave of sound is powerful enough to "knock the pods off chestnut trees"
suggests allusively that nommo's power has been summoned to rescue Beloved from a
form of slavery to her past, just as her mother had sought tragically to rescue her from
slavery by taking her life: "chestnuts" was the name given to runaway slaves, as Jahn
points out: "whoever got to a [chestnut] tree at the edge of the plantation could climb up
and get away" (144). The spiritual unity of nommo'spower is also seen in the combination
of trees, backs, words, and water, which are unified throughout the novel's imagery but
are also unified in West African art and thought. A Yoruba concept similar to nommois
sounds just beyond the reader's hearing is produced because a com-

munity has, in fact, not forgotten its past and its powers but instead
learned how to live with them. And yet it is only through words
with unbroken backs that Morrison pulls off the magical effect, and
it is only a present, historical community of readers who can answer
it.9 It is in our failure to hear that which we read the women have
heard that the ethical nature of our task is made apparent to us.
Responsibility enters into reading at that point when we cannot
gain access to the sounds just beyond our understanding. In Beloved
our responsibility is made apparent to us when we are made aware
of the difficulty of accounting for Beloved, at that moment when the
text reveals its "inability to read itself, to benefit from its own wis-
dom," as J. Hillis Miller elucidates de Man (Ethics45). This apparent
inability of the novel to read itself is what Morrison's last pages
suggest: "It was not a story to pass on" (275), the novel twice tells
us. And yet it has been passed on, and not merely through repeti-
tion: "it"becomes "this," something that can be pointed to, pointed
out, even grasped, by us, as the past tense of "was" moves into our
present: "Thisis not a story to pass on" (275;emphasis added). Be-
lovedends at a point when there seems an unaccountable gulf be-
tween what has occurred before the singing and what has occurred
afterward. The reader becomes responsible for this failure to read
the gap between the living and the dead; there is no recourse to
anything outside the reading experience, to anything-history,
Truth-that transcends language. What remains are consequences
in the personal, social, and political worlds, worlds inseparable
from words that bring them to life. In particularwhat remains is the
ethically necessary and free compulsion of an African American
community to create itself. Ratherthan remind her readers of things
they cannot recover, Morrison's ghost, along with the words the
that of lshe, "the power-to-make-things-happen," of which "some trees are . . thought
to be avatars," and which is present in the color red, "'supreme presence of color'"
(Thompson 5, 6). That Baby Suggs likes to ponder the color pink, that Beloved appears as
a red light, that Sethe "one day . . . saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone
chips" (39), and that there is a tree made of scars on Sethe's back are all allusive of dshe.
9. "African poetry," writes Jahn, "old and new, poetry and prose, is determined by
responsibility. Poetry does not describe, but arranges series of images which alter reality
in the direction of the future, which create, produce, invoke, and bring about the future"
(149).
HANDLEY * 701
ghost has structured, calls a racialized readership to hear things it

does not know and an African American community to discover
what it may become.
HarvardUniversity
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Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German TragicDrama. Trans. John Osborne.
London: Verso, 1977.
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum
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The House a Ghost Built:Nommo,

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Hear moreoften things than beings,

Thosewho are deadare nevergone ...

Thosewho are deadare nevergone,

he preceding poem, by the Senegambian poet Birago

I would like to thank EricSundquist,Dwight McBride,and the anonymousreadersfor

Contemporary LiteratureXXXVI,4 0010-7484/95/0004-676 $1.50

strates the predominantly spiritual nature of West African culture's

but also by virtue of the ethical response Toni Morrison's novel

surable cultural gap between Western critical theory and African

Because Sethe killed her daughter to prevent her being taken as a

When Morrison writes about "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken,"

for Morrison in cross-temporal and cross-continental transactions:a

self-understanding. For Toni Morrison, the African American art-

ery. But as the section that serves as Beloved's narratedautobiogra-

from being intrigued by nineteenth-century slaves' comments

"disremembering" of her can also be read as an "aborted interiorization," in contrast to

ers Morrison wants to summon. Trying to face a history of geno-

ography, by which one's name... is made as intelligible and

To remember Beloved is to grant her a face, to make her face memo-

To the extent that language is figure (or metaphor, or prosopopeia) it is

For de Man, to understand our own processes of reading and cogni-

the power of nommo,the restorative and transformative power of

ideology" (15). "Truth"is put in quotation marks because what Mel-

Reading Beloved, Morrison suggests, we enact a linguistic crossing-

7. See Sidran 1-29.

that property, in contrast to white ownership of black bodies. Al-

sounds just beyond the reader's hearing is produced because a com-

ghost has structured, calls a racialized readership to hear things it

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