Definición de Microindustria

The timelessness of the Gothic world affects both Seven Gables and Beloved.

Morrison says that Beloved has “no time [. . .] because memory, pre-historic memory, has no time” (1990: 229). Beloved herself, as a ghost, insists that she is in a timeless present: “All of it is now it is now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching” (Beloved: 210).

Marilyn Mobley thinks that the lack of punctuation in the revenant’s monologue suggests the "seamlessness of time, [and] the inextricability of the past and present, of ancestors and their progeny" (1990: 196). When Beloved starts, Sethe, ostracized from the black community, has lived in the timeless haunted house with her daughter Denver, for almost twenty years until Paul D’s arrival: “Sethe’s choice [her crime] has propelled them out of history into a ‘timeless present’” (Jesser: online). Then, for a short period of time, they apparently get rid of their past, since the newcomer exorcises the baby ghost. It seems possible to escape the no-time world of the house. However, Beloved’s reincarnation forces 124’s dwellers to face their troubling memories. Sethe’s

82 For more information, see: Catherine Rainwater (1991). "Worthy Messengers: Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison's Novels”. Texas Studies in Literature 33.1: 96-113.

83 For more information, see: Barbara Hill Rigney (1991). The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

84 Kimberly Davis argues that even though feminist and poststructuralist readings celebrate the nonlinear narrative as a transgression of a linear reading of time and history, they tend to forget that circles are also laden with ominous symbolism, since they recall the circles of iron (and nooses) surrounding the necks of slaves, particularly the “jewelry” Paul D was forced to wear (online).

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recognition of her crawling baby in the revenant and Paul D’s departure finally seem to truncate their desires for a future outside the haunted world of the house.

Sethe stops thinking of having a family with Paul D. She confines herself in the

"timeless present" of her home with her two daughters, in “a space that floats somewhere between an absent past and an absent future. Into this static fictional present a ghostly past perpetually attempts to insert itself” (Pérez-Torres 1998: 130).

Sethe starts to believe that she does not need the outside world. Thus she gets to work late for the first time in sixteen years. She only wishes to be with her daughters.

Kimberly Davis thinks that “although Sethe hopes that her timeless world has put a stop to the cycle in which the past can return to haunt, 124's no-time represents a different kind of vicious circle - with the past, present, and future collapsed into one”

(online).

When Sethe, Denver and Beloved stay by themselves at 124, the haunted house becomes a sort of womb, “a place of ‘no-time’" (Suero-Elliot: online), where they live in a pre-Oedipal state, escaping from “the psychic structures of the dominant socio-symbolic order that cause their pain” (Parker: online). Their voices blend, in their interior “dialogue”: “[. . .] [they] summon the most agonized memories of each of the characters as they journey through their actual and ancestral pasts, as each attempts to claim Beloved as a part of themselves, as each names her ‘mine’” (Koolish 2001:

175). Their “memories and minds” “combine in a mutual song of possession”: “You are mine” (Beloved: 217) (Krumholz 1999: 120). They form a new kind of family outside the patriarchal Western society: “the women put together their histories in an erotics of relational identity outside of heterosexual structures and organizations of desire”

(Carden: online).⁸⁵ In their no-time universe: “Sethe’s, Beloved’s, and Denver’s relative positions in time are lost; their separate histories, their private thoughts, their terrible stories, and their bodies are fused, leaving Denver and Sethe possessed by all the dead and lost, all the Beloveds” (Jesser: online).⁸⁶ For Denver this is a healing test, she fully remembers Sethe’s past and her own: her nightmares with her mother as a murderer and her imaginary reunions with her idealized father. According to Linda Krumholz, “The ritual of possession breaks through her isolation and grants Denver an experience of the past that can lead her into the future” (1999: 120).

85 Teresa N. Washington thinks that “With the male aspect exorcised, Sethe and Denver harness all their power to remember Beloved, and with the latter’s physical-spiritual reality, the three women become a trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Daughter-Divinity similar to the cosmic matriarchal trinity [. . .]”

(online).

86 Linda Koolish says that in this chapter “differentiated characters merge historically, spiritually, and psychologically” (2001: 184).

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The ultimate metaphor for the timeless-present the three women live in after Beloved’s recognition is the scene where they are skating, alien to the universe that surrounds them. Holland and Awkward see how in this episode the females’ “worlds [are] arrested and stationary for the moment” (53). They emphasize the symbolism of the place where they meet: “[. . .] the suspension [. . .] stressed by the frozen creek, a space as liminal as that which Sethe, Beloved, and Denver occupy. As a tributary of the river, the creek serves as a symbolic extension of their complex relationships”

(53).⁸⁷ However, Morrison shows us how the characters must escape from the “idyllic”

no-time at 124 to have a chance for a future.

The timelessness at 124 coincides with Sethe’s idea about time and place. She says:

I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. [. . .]. 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 [. . .]. The picture 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 [. . .]. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. (Beloved: 35-36)

As Sharon P. Holland and Michael Awkward write, in Sethe’s theory of spatial-temporal permanence, “They [places] leave a permanent record of their existence on the physical plane; they exist not only in imaginative activities such as memory and, on another discursive level, (re)memory’s formulation as history but also as a tangible presence” (50). Sethe believes that "nothing ever dies" and that the past will always haunt you. We live in a recurring cycle from which we cannot escape. As Kimberly Davis says, her concept of a timeless present reminds us of Jameson’s complaints about the postmodernist flattening of time. He believes that, in postmodern society, time has become a perpetual present, depriving us of history. However, Davis argues that Morrison’s concept of history is not flat, but rather spreads out to contain the cultural memories of ancestors (online). Karla Holloway points out that

Because slavery effectively placed black women outside of a historical universe governed by a traditional (Western) consideration of time, the aspect of their being—the quality and nature of their “state” of being—becomes a more appropriate measure of their reality. In historian Joan Kelly’s essays, the exclusion

87 According to Sally Keenan, “this scene suggests the absolute identification of the three, not split into subject or object, gazer or gazed upon, an idealized moment of absolute unity, as fragile as the ice they skate upon” (130). Bonnet insists that the relationship between the three females at this point is insane:

they have cut off from any contact with other human beings, as shown in the circularity of the ring they form on the ice, and the regression to the pre-Oedipal stage is signaled by the next scene in which Sethe heats milk for the girls. The skating scene is also associated with death, as we can see in the grey, death-like color of the women’s skin, which has “turned pewter in the cold and dying light” (online).

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of women throughout “historical time” is discussed in terms that clarify how the activities of civilization were determined by and exclusive to males. In defining a

“feminist historiography” (a deconstruction of male-centered formulations of historical periods), Kelly focuses on the ways in which history is “rewritten and periodized” according to issues that affect women (6). In black women’s writings, this deperiodization is more fully articulated because of the propensity of this literature to strategically place a detemporalized universe into the centers of their texts. Not surprisingly, black women have experienced the universe that Kelly’s essays on women’s history theoretically discuss. (68)

Holloway adds that for Morrison, myth means “a metaphorical abandonment of time,” to be “freed from the dominance of history” (74).

As Justine Tally argues, Western thought understands time as classified into

“past, present, and future”, as completely separated from one another. “Present” is not really relevant while both the “past” and the “future” seem to be much more significant.

However, the suspension of disbelief that allows us to understand the figure of Beloved as Sethe’s murdered daughter helps us move beyond the limitations of a Western dichotomy of life and death and onto an African continuum:

The African world view [. . .] does not conceptualize reality as a strict dichotomy, but rather perceives life and experience on a continuum. The past is very much a part of us, of who we understand ourselves to be. In this view what we know as

‘life’ is only one stage or stage of human existence; we lie somewhere on the continuum together with our ancestors and our descendants, and communication from or with them is not only viable, it is an established ‘fact of life.’ (38)

Mae Henderson believes that “Sethe’s actions [. . .] show that the present is bound to the past and the past to the future, and it is precisely the (re)configuration of the past that enables her to refigure the future” (99).

The African view of time establishes a strong fluidity and interconnection between the past, present and the future. According to Holloway,

The structures within African and African-American novels consistently defy the collected eventualities of time “past, present, and future” and in consequence a consideration of aspect may be a more appropriate form through which to consider the chronicle of events in the story. Temporal time represents a narrow specific moment of occurrence. The relatively limited idea of time as being either in the past, the present, or the future is inadequate for a text like Beloved, where the pattern of events crisscrosses through these dimensions and enlarges the spaces that they suggest. This novel immediately makes it clear that a traditional (Western) valuation of time is not definitive of the experience it (re)members, instead it is an intrusion on a universe that has existed seemingly without its mediation. Weeks, months, and years become irrelevant to the spite of 124 [. . .]. Living itself is suspended in this story because of the simultaneous presence of the past. (73)⁸⁸

Kimberly Davis suggests that Morrison seems to reject a “modernist diachronic view of history” in order to explore the idea of a more synchronic, spatial experience of

88 Morgan Dalphinis discusses how aspect is a better descriptor of those basic cultural concepts traditionally measured by a “(past/present/future) time-base yardstick” (qtd. in Holloway: 77). Aspect would describe action in terms of its duration without a consideration of its place in time. For more information, see: Morgan Dalphinis (1985). Caribbean and African Languages: Social History, Language, Literature and Education. London: Karia Press. (rpt. Paul & Co. Pub Consortium, 2006).

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time. Morrison’s spatial sense of time is not just what critics have called a postmodern form of temporality, but the way African Americans must confront time, since they are denied a future and they are haunted by their past. They are "boxed in" by time: “she [Sethe] cannot construct an ordered timeline of her life, so she attempts her experiment of living only in the present” (online). Beloved's reincarnation corroborates the fact that the boundaries between past and present are not clearly differentiated.

After the initial joy of recognizing her dead daughter, the revenant’s recriminations begin and Sethe cannot stop apologizing. Nothing can mend the irreparable damage done to Beloved or the deep guilt that her mother feels. Sethe gives up. She quits her job, while she seems to be on the verge of insanity: “broken down, finally, from trying to take care of and make up for” (Beloved: 243). The females at 124 are locked in a love that exhausts them and leads them to the edge of madness and violence. Their roles change and Sethe is the child punished by the insatiable reincarnation of the past, Beloved, who devours her: “Beloved becomes for Sethe a manifestation of history—a living and usurping power, one that controls and subsumes her, one for which she does not have a contesting language” (Pérez-Torres 1999: 190).

Sethe is impotent and completely enslaved to her daughter’s despotic rule. However,

“to cling to the past even to the annihilation of the present and the suspension of the future can only lead to the obliteration of the self. Sethe must come to terms with a past she tries hard to ‘disremember,’ a process instigated by the arrival of Paul D and Beloved, respectively, but she must learn to accept the past without being consumed by it” (Tally: 39).

In Seven Gables, Clifford and Hepzibah are confined in the no-time Gothic world of the Pyncheon house, which symbolizes the inner life of the psyche: they have withdrawn from the world and, consequently, from life. Clifford’s body and mind are practically destroyed by thirty years of imprisonment and he can only be another ghost in the static universe of his forebears’ abode. His sister Hepzibah is also a ghostly prisoner of time who does not want to confront the dynamic society outside her dwelling. She is unable to earn a livelihood with the cent-shop, since she cannot renew her bonds with humankind. Eventually she must retreat to the dismal house. Neither Clifford nor Hepzibah can escape from their timeless existence inside the old house. In their failed attempt to attend church or in their flight they realize that they do not belong to the contemporary world, but to the Gothic abode of their ancestors. The Judge, as the true symbol of the past and the Pyncheons’ guilt, is also doomed to be forever a part of the timeless world of the Pyncheons’ haunted house and become a new member of his dead forefathers’ parade.

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