Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison - ed

Beloved's ending matches the desire to forget the horror of slavery with the impossibility of doing so. When it insists, "This is not a story to pass on," it puns on the opposing tendencies: this is not a story to tell future generations; and this is not a story likely to die. As Morrison's novel negotiates between the two poles of forgetting and remembering, it leaves us with ghostly traces of the haunting: the ghost of a ghost. The narrator claims that finally the air is clear of the haunt: "The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves.... Just weather" (175). Morrison's language, however, so thoroughly associates the ghost's breath with the weather (both through implied metaphor and through metonymy) that traces of slavery enter the very air we must breathe.

As Melville places the American Captain on a slave ship and joins him in brotherhood with a Spanish captain clad in faded old clothing, he imbues an American identity, supposedly new and innocent, with the long past of imperialism and slavery. Chesnutt and Morrison each bear that past into his or her present historical moment, rightly treating the witnessing of American slavery as ongoing, unfinished business. The task remains unfinished in part because, as Beloved suggests, its losses cannot be fully recouped. The task remains unfinished also because American understandings of freedom remain problematic. Traces of slavery haunt the freedoms we espouse in part because a Western rational discourse conceives of freedom as a mode of domination. The scientized definition of freedom as the conquest of nature easily has accommodated the subjugation of other peoples in the Americas. In the fiction of Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison, gothic representations of slavery foreground the violent domination hidden within idealized images of "America," and American "progress." Gothic hauntings reveal the ways that such domination entangles American identity with racism and American freedom with slavery.

Notes

(1.) See James H. Kavanagh's "That Hive of Subtlety: `Benito Cereno' and the Liberal Hero" for an important related interpretation of the fleeting meanings that disrupt rational order of ideology.

(2.) My reading of the absent presence of the mute is indebted to Haegert's discussion of mutinous voices that speak through silence in "Benito Cereno" (35-36).

(3.) In "Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and the Literate," John Edgar Wideman discusses Chesnutt's split position as an African American, educated in a Western literary tradition, who also absorbed African American folk culture of the rural South (60).

(4.) See Harvey's discussion of the capitalist use of homogenized space in the United States after the Civil War (257-59).

(5.) In Figures in Black, Gates discusses African traditions of the sacred whose terms defy Western rational concepts of time and space (168).

(6.) The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion defines witnessng as "personal testimony," which "may express itself in a confession, preaching, prayer, teaching or martyrdom" (3765). For discussions of witnessing as it produces meaning out of suffering, see Caruth's "Interview with Robert J. Lifton," 160-61.