Eighth lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 8: Memory and Desire
English 140
UC Santa Barbara
Summer 2012
16 August 2012
Thomas Satterwhite Noble, Margaret Garner: A Modern Medea (1867)

2. Notes on Identity
“Of that place where she [Sethe] was born (Carolina
maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only
song and dance. Not even her own mother.” (37; ch.
3)
“She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so
that it [the past] was unspeakable; to Denver’s
inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling
incomplete reveries.” (69; ch. 6)
“words whispered in the keeping room had kept her
going. Helped her endure the chastising ghost;
refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar
and kept them whole in the world because in her
dreams she saw only their parts in trees.” (101; ch. 9)

3. “Beloved, inserting a thumb in her mouth along
with the forefinger, pulled out a back tooth. There
was hardly any blood, but Denver said, ‘Ooooh,
didn’t that hurt you?’
“Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is
it. Next it would be her arm, her hand, a toe.
Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time,
maybe all at once. Or on one of those mornings
before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would
fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her
neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by
herself. Among the things she could not remember
was when she first knew that she could wake up
any day and find herself in pieces.” (159; ch. 14)

4. [Denver:] “What did you come back for?”
Beloved smiled. “To see her face.” (88; ch. 8)
“‘But this ain’t her mouth,’ Paul D said. ‘This ain’t it
at all.” (184; ch. 17)
“Now she [Denver] is crying because she has no
self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this.
She can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving
into nothing. She grabs the hair at her temples to
get enough to uproot it and halt the melting for a
while. Teeth clamped shut, Denver brakes her
sobs. She doesn’t move to open the door
because there is no world out there.” (145; ch. 12)

5. Naming and Nomenclature
Beloved, to Paul D: “And you have to call me
my name.” (137; ch. 11)
“Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming
done by a whiteman who was supposed to
know?” (146; ch. 12)
“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him [Sixo]
anyway to show him that definitions belonged
to the definers – not the defined.” (225; ch. 19)

6. Slavery
“Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his
life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain’t that slavery
or what is it?” (259; ch. 24)
“anybody white could take your whole self for anything
that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but
dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself
anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were
and couldn’t think it up. And though she [Sethe] and
others lived through and got over it, she could never
let it happen to her own.” (295-6; ch. 26)
“But suddenly she [Baby Suggs] saw her hands and
thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling,
‘These hands belong to me. These my hands.” (166; ch.
15)

7. Freedom
“After Delaware and before that Alfred, Georgia,
where he [Paul D.] slept underground and crawled
into sunlight for the sole purpose of breaking rock,
walking off when he got ready was the only way he
could convince himself that he would no longer
have to sleep, pee, eat or swing a sledge hammer
in chains.” (49; ch. 3)
“A woman, a child, a brother – a big love like that
would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He
knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place
where you could love anything you chose – not to
need permission for desire – well now, that was
freedom.” (191; ch. 18)

8. “Sethe had had twenty-eight days — the travel
of one whole moon — of unslaved life. […] Days
of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company:
knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes,
their views, habits; where they had been and
what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along
with her own, which made it better. One taught
her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her
how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what
to do with the day.” (111; ch. 9)

9. Love and desire
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
................................................
Quick now, here now, always–
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
– T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” p. 122 (lines 161-8, 173-5)

10. Absence
“They [Sethe and Paul D] were a twosome,
saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way
that made it clear both belonged to them and
not to her. That her own father’s absence was
not hers. Once the absence had belonged to
Grandma Baby – a son, deeply mourned
because he was the one who had bought her
out of there. Then it was her mother’s absent
husband. Now it was this hazelnut stranger’s
absent friend. Only those who knew him (‘knew
him well’) could claim his absence for
themselves.” (15; ch. 1)

11. “Rememory”
“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.”
“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.

12. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be
walking down the road and you hear something or
see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s
you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s
when you bump into a rememory that belongs to
somebody else. Where I was before I came here,
that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the
whole farm — every tree and grass blade of it dies.
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; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So,
Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because
even though it’s all over — over and done with —
it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s
how come I had to get all my children out. No matter
what.” (43-44; ch. 3)

13. She [Baby Suggs] did not tell them to clean
up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did
not tell them they were the blessed of the earth,
its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could
have was the grace they could imagine. That if
they could not see it, they would not have it.
(103; ch. 9)

14. Media credits
Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner:
A Modern Medea is out of copyright because it
th
was completed in the 19 century. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Satter
white_Noble_Margaret_Garner.jpg