TY - JOUR
AU - Tally, Justine
AB - Abstract Long before Toni Morrison was extensively recognized as a serious contender in the “Global Market of Intellectuals,” she was obviously reading and absorbing challenging critical work that was considered “provocative and controversial” by the keepers of the US academic community at the time. While no one disputes the influence of Elaine Pagels’ work on Gnosticism at the University of Princeton, particularly its importance for Jazz and Paradise, the second and third novels of the Morrison trilogy, Gnosticism in Beloved has not been so carefully considered. Yet this keen interest in Gnosticism coupled with the author’s systematic study of authors from the mid-19th-century American Renaissance inevitably led her to deal with the fascination of Renaissance authors with Egypt (where the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were rediscovered), its ancient civilization, and its mythology. The extensive analysis of a leading French literary critic of Herman Melville, Prof. Viola Sachs, becomes the inspiration for a startlingly different reading of Morrison’s seminal novel, one that positions this author in a direct dialogue with the premises of Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, also drawing on the importance of Gnosticism for Umberto Eco’s 1980 international best-seller, The Name of the Rose. Such is the fascination with Toni Morrison’s fifth novel that it continues to inspire an ever-widening circle of literary analyses and creative interpretations. Indeed, Jean Wyatt argues that “Beloved (1987) represents a radical shift in Toni Morrison’s literary techniques” and goes on to explore aspects such as its disruptions of syntax and grammar, temporal experimentation that examines the “dislocated time of trauma,” and the psychoanalytical implications of a disturbed mother–daughter relationship (19, 29). I would agree that Beloved indeed marks a dramatic shift in Morrison’s writing, even more dramatically than Wyatt insinuates, yet I would like to factor in influences from the intellectual environment of the 1980s that have significant bearing on the elaboration of this novel and stretch our understanding of literary conversations. After all, “books talk among themselves” (Eco 576). Interestingly, Wyatt mentions Sethe’s one conversation with her mother, but fails to push its implications further than their truncated relationship: Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin. She said, “This is your ma’am. This,” and she pointed. “I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.” . . . “Yes, Ma’am,” I said. “But how will you know me? How will you know me? Mark me, too.” I said. (Beloved 61) The dominance of the word know in this brief interlude is an indication of the focus of the present analysis. Indeed, in a novel of 275 pages, the word know or knowledge is used at least 323 times, a clue to the author’s intense exploration of gnosis and a conversation she sets up with Herman Melville with various asides to Umberto Eco. In 1980, Viola Sachs, a well-known French academic, submitted an article to the American Quarterly, and the editorial committee at the time was much divided as to whether or not it should be published. Professor Emory Elliott’s was the deciding vote in favor, and yet the editors saw it fit to publish it with a caveat: “American Quarterly is pleased to publish this leading example of French work in American Studies. We recognize its provocative and controversial character” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 123). The reading of Beloved that follows most certainly points to Morrison’s engagement with Sachs’ research. The article is entitled “The Gnosis of Hawthorne and Melville: An Interpretation of the Scarlet Letter [1850] and Moby-Dick [1851],” and its central hypothesis is that these books are conceived as a liber mundi, that is, “as being the manifestation of the divine and offering the revelation of the divine Wisdom, whatever its nature may be ” (123). According to Sachs: Reading thus becomes an initiatic quest leading to the revelation of the origins of life, of the Invisible, which is simultaneously the organizing principle or vital center of the volume = liber mundi = manifestation of the author’s cosmic creation. The book contains what the author considers to be the original Word, which has been submerged by the crass materialism of America, the dominance of the White Man and his value system to the detriment and exclusion of those of the Red-Man and the Black Man. The indictment goes beyond America to Christianity, to the institutionalization of one creed, one truth to the exclusion of all others. To the reader who discovers or rediscovers the “lost Word,” the volume becomes “the book of life” identified as in the Book of Revelation with the Tree of Life. (“Gnosis” 123–24) Before continuing, three contextual considerations provide a useful background to Morrison’s fifth novel. First, we are aware of the keen interest that Morrison has always had in writers of the American Renaissance, subsequently manifest in her own innovative critical literary theory. Remember that “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” was published in 1988, only a year after Beloved. Secondly, the notions of origins and the emphasis on the original “Word” are easily recognizable as fundamental to the reading of Beloved particularly, and to the two other novels of her trilogy as well. And third, the 1980s saw a proliferation of interest in both the American fascination with Egypt in the 19th century (cf. the work of John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics [1983], for example) and the work by Elaine Pagels on the Gnostic Gospels published in 1979, not to mention the rise in interest in the theories of Michel Foucault. Also relevant for its “echo” of these themes is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, published in English in 1983, a novel which is also deeply engaged with the difficulties and ways of knowing, the difficulty of discerning the nature of truth or heresy. In his search for the killer in the abbey, William of Baskerville confronts the librarian Jorge: “I say there is someone who knows and wants no one else to know. As the last to know, you could be the next victim. Unless you tell me what you know about that forbidden book, and especially, who in the abbey might know what you know, and perhaps more, about the library” (Eco 478). What I should like to do here is also “provocative and controversial,” with the intention of expanding some of these notions into a broadening of our interpretation of Morrison’s most famous novel, Beloved. What I specifically want to explore is the “conversation” that Morrison sets up with Melville, with a nod to Eco, based on Sachs’ and others’ investigations, not so much as a palimpsest or guide, but as a response to certain ideological concepts fundamental to Moby-Dick and the relevance of Gnosticism to that ideology. In her detailed book on Melville’s “Counter-Bible,” Sachs journeys into the complicated numerology of Moby-Dick to show that for Melville the invisible is merely the reflection of the visible, often seen as a mirrored inversion: “[L]e diable et Dieu ne forment que les deux faces d’une meme entité” / “The devil and God are none other than the two faces of the same entity” (Contre-Bible 14). And most dramatically, “Aucune Intelligence Suprême, aucun Créatur n’existe; toute vie a son origine dan l’élément feminine – la mer, la mère –, . . . la clef de ce livre fameux par l’absence apparent de femmes . . . ” / “No Supreme Intelligence, no Creator exists; all life is originated in the feminine element – the sea, the mother – . . . the key to this book famous for its apparent absence of the female . . . ” (16).1 This striking absence becomes the central trope in Beloved: in her search for the origins and survival of humankind, Morrison challenges Melville’s ideology, reworks the centrality of the sea and water (crucially linked in images of rebirth and in the devastating Middle Passage), and bases Beloved on the absolute primacy of the feminine. I do not have the expertise to venture into Sachs’ detailed explanations of the Melvillian universe, but certain aspects of her arguments across various publications are indeed pertinent to a reading of Beloved, specifically, for example, the three levels on which Melville’s novel can be read: An apparent visible world, pertaining to matter. An intermediate symbolic level that deals with the mythic world. A labyrinth of symbols, key words, signs to the hidden center of the book, where the revelation of the Spirit occurs (Sachs, “Gnosis” 124). It is the third level to which Sachs dedicates her most in-depth analysis of Moby-Dick: “The internal level evokes the sacred world, marked by wholeness, [where] every detail . . . participates in a meaningful center . . . the primordial Whole, out of which all life stems, and which contains the vital principle” (124). As students of Morrison’s work, we are already very familiar with reading Beloved on the first two levels, though I would add one observation. Calling attention to the underlying circular (or spherical) architecture of Melville’s novel, Sachs points out that the actual center of Moby-Dick, that is, chapter 65, “The Crotch,”2 is both the center of the book and the center of the Whale, and the essence of Melville’s search for the “revelation of the divine,” the principle and origins of life. According to Webster’s Dictionary, “crotch” is both “(1) an angle formed by the parting of two branches or parts” and “(2) the region of the human body between the legs where the legs join the trunk” (“Crotch”). Both these definitions refer to sexuality, fertility, and the omnipresent tree. Moby-Dick is a “labyrinth formed of squares and triangles . . . carried through a spiral movement right to the center of the ‘The Whale = book’, built . . . in the shape of a circle and a sphere” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 126).3 Sachs explains that folding the divided chapters into the middle of the book forms a sphere that places the reader not only in the middle of the book, but also, in fact, in the middle of the whale. In chapter 7 of his critical work Dangerous Freedom, entitled “Circularity in Beloved,” Philip Page writes that the structure of Beloved also emphasizes the circular, or the spiral, which he illustrates in some detail (133–58). In fact, the entire overarching architecture of Beloved is constructed as a circle, opening and closing with one word, Beloved, a point to be emphasized because Morrison herself has affirmed that form is content (Horvitz 157, M. Walter 46, qtd. in Page 140). Moreover, Page signals four specific phrases from the novel to argue that the image of circularity controls the “crucial” scene of Beloved at the end of Part One, in the kitchen at 124 Bluestone: She was spinning. Round and round the room. . . . Once in a while she rubbed her hips as she turned, but the wheel never stopped (Beloved 159). And as she “wheel[s]” (Beloved 160) her confession revolves around the subject, “circling him the way she was circling the subject (Beloved 161) . . . [She] knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off – she could never explain” (Beloved 163). (qtd. in Page 135) In addition to the emphasis on spinning in circles, Sethe is unable to communicate her story to Paul D if the knowledge is not innate. Page also signals the round basket (Beloved 210); the circle around [her] neck which becomes “the iron circle . . . around our neck” (Beloved 211, 212); Sethe’s near strangulation in the Clearing, ghostly fingers making their way around her neck to her “windpipe, making little circles on the way” (Beloved 96). Moreover, he claims that Denver’s circular bower (Beloved 28) is both a safe haven and a retreat from life, an “ambiguous womb image . . . a metaphor, along with her fascination with the story of her birth, for her paralyzing infantilism” (Page 135), though I strongly disagree. While the placement of trees is important, the scenes of Denver in her circular refuge are full of imagery that implies her sexual awakening which, I believe, is tied more closely to the overall meaning in the novel; this, as in Melville’s novel, is the search for the principles and origins of life. In addition, the novel’s lack of straightforward chronology is also built on repetition, a form of circularity. However, and contradicting Page, if all the sections of Beloved are added together (18 + 7 + 3 = 28), the absolute center of the book, around which all other events spiral, is section 14, the arrival of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” the infanticide of Beloved and the copious shedding of blood, both the beginning and end of life, an extreme case of maternal love. This singular focus on the Apocalypse calls to The Name of the Rose even more strongly than to Moby-Dick. While the sinking of the Pequod and the obliteration of the small cosmos it represents is certainly apocalyptic, no less so is the conflagration of the abbey at the end of Eco’s novel, whose structure and guiding force is the Apocalypse as laid out in the Revelation of John. Like Sachs’ pointing to Melville’s ultimate rejection of any spiritual intervention in human life, Susan Bowers writes that while Biblical scholars read the four horsemen of the apocalypse as agents of divine wrath, Morrison’s four horsemen are only emblems of evil. . . . [This] classic apocalyptic image suggests that she does not share with many apocalyptic writers a belief in a moral force at work in history, the invisible presence of a god who will come again to judge sinners and rescue and reward the oppressed. (221) In The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville is almost overcome with despair, not only over losing the treasures housed in the Aedificium in the “divine chastisement” (Eco 533), but because, having followed the clues in the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, he also comes to the same conclusion: “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe” (526). As Adele J. Haft et al. write, “The Apocalypse, seemingly so vital to the unraveling of the crimes [in The Name of the Rose], is revealed in the end to have little or no bearing on their solution” (183). In a novel in which mirrors and reflections are predominant, the final show-down between William and Jorge also reveals that they are but mirrored reflections of each other (182). In his description of the events, Adso writes: I realized, with a shudder, that at this moment these two men, arrayed in a mortal conflict, were admiring each other, as if each had acted only to win the other’s applause . . . nothing compared with the act of seduction going on before my eyes at that moment, which had unfolded over seven days, each of the two interlocutors making, as it were, mysterious appointments with the other, each secretly aspiring to the other’s approbation, each fearing and hating the other. (Eco 506) According to Haft et al., “The Name of the Rose, like a self-conscious Apocalypse, presents apparent oppositions (heresy and orthodoxy, whore and virgin, Devil and God) that on close inspection are seen to be mirror images of one another” (181). The final depiction of Jorge is with the distorted, horrid face of the Antichrist, but the Antichrist himself, as William realizes, “can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer” (Eco 526). As in Melville, the invisible is but the inverse reflection of the visible. Morrison’s extension of the overt reference to the Apocalypse is more subtly manifest in her extensive use of the number seven (see Tally 76–81), a number William refers to as “a superlatively mystical number” (Eco 476), the seven trumpets informing William’s (mis)guided approach to solving the deaths in the monastery. Melville also resorts to both numerology and to geometry to discover another language in which to explore the ultimate mystery of life, give a sign to the Word, and to serve as a “remedy against the loss of the primordial ‘Word’” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 127). His conception of the precious ambergris as the mystic rose is found in the center of the book, in the center of the whale (in the intestines of the sperm whale, literally in its shit, everything “cast away” by Judeo-Christian mythology). “Melville’s rose, recreating through the play of words the process of unfolding, is inseparable from the excrement. This flower comes to symbolize the archetypal form of divine birth” (Sachs, Creation 134). This emphasis is reinforced by the fact that a variety of the term rose appears 12 times in the chapter entitled “ROSE-BUD” (Sachs, Creation 134, note 38). In Beloved, the play on the strong fecal smell of ambergris and its importance (once dried) for perfume is echoed in the profuseness of the dying roses on the road to carnival: “The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses” (Beloved 47), another nod to Eco: “Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus: yesterday’s rose endures in its name; we hold empty names” (Bernard of Cluny, qtd. in Haft et al. 176). Upon their return from Carnival, Sethe, Paul D, and Denver find the mystifying character of Beloved, who has literally been rebirthed from the water, symbolized in Sethe’s “breaking of her waters,” in an archetypal form of divine birth. Yet at the end of the novel Beloved disappears again into the water; all that is left is “[j]ust weather. Certainly, no clamor for a kiss. Beloved” (Beloved 275). Aside from the multiple references, both religious and secular, the “mystic rose” also designates a complete graph in the mathematical field of graph theory (Figure 1), “a simple undirected graph in which every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a unique edge” (“Complete Graph”): Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide The Mystic Rose. In Gnostic writings, graphs also become important symbols for communication. Sachs demonstrates that the structure of Moby-Dick is based on Ishmael and his relationship with the magic square of Jupiter, signaled not only by his use of numbers (the story of Ishmael in the Bible, for example, is found in chapter 16, sum of the magic square of 4), but also by his summarizing Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving “Melancholia” (found in chapter 16 of Moby-Dick): “Number 16 . . . points to the fact that truth is to be found in error, the cosmic error committed by the Demiurge, the Creator of the Gnostics. Melville’s message reads that no primordial Spirit or Light exists, that all life stems from matter” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 137). In “The Gnosis of Hawthorne and Melville,” Sachs writes, “The square represents the terrestrial: by having a magic square underlie the structure of his whole book, that is, his Gospel, the author conveys the message that it is the terrestrial and not the celestial that constitutes the basis of all existence” (136). This preeminence of the “terrestrial” is transposed in Beloved by the symbol of slavery burned onto Sethe’s mother. When the Seal of Jupiter is imposed over the Magic Square of Jupiter, the lines touch all numbers in the square (Beyer, “Planetary”), but the Seal itself becomes the brand by which Sethe’s mother tells her daughter she can identify her (Figure 2). On the one hand, she is literally branded by Western mythology, and on the other, by materiality as this symbol is also the astronomical sign for the planet Earth. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide The square of Jupiter, the Seal of Jupiter, and the brand on Sethe’s mam. Although there are many forms of Gnosticism, hence many variations in the Gnostic mythology, there are recurring “clichés” which are pertinent to all of them (Vansina 21). The three most important are, first, the “Demi-urge,” creator of mankind and a lesser being than God himself, hence responsible for the imperfections and sinfulness of human beings and their separation from the Divine; second, the retelling of the Genesis myth of creation, such that it is the Demiurge who has forbidden humans to eat of the “Tree of Life” (which is also the “Tree of Knowledge”); and third, the serpent, who actually encourages knowledge and is thus more of a reputable figure than an evil one: “the serpent’s action marks the beginning of all gnosis on earth which thus by its very origin is stamped as opposed to the world and its God, and indeed as a form of rebellion” (Jonas 93). The earliest Gnostic sects ascribe the work of creation to seven angels, seven being a “magic” number in cultures around the world, and a key number in Beloved (the sum of the numbers in 124, among a multitude of other references [see Tally 76–84]) as well as in The Name of the Rose. It is also worth noting that the book for which William is searching is found in the finis Africae, repository of all the unorthodox and heretical writings, which Jorge esteems prejudicial for the eyes of other monks. William is most interested in the lost second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, which deals with comedy and the nature and uses of laughter. But the book is bound with three other treatises, and the one just before the Poetica in Greek is written in Syrian and is disdained because, as Jorge argues: “It is an Egyptian work from the third century of our era. Coherent with the work that follows, but less dangerous. No one would lend an ear to the ravings of an African alchemist. He attributes the creation of the world to divine laughter . . .” (Eco 499). However, in this manuscript, God is said to have created the world and laughed seven times, producing seven lower gods “who governed the world” (499–500). While Eco may have touched again on laughter here, the actual structuring of this world is dependent on godlike creations, quite close to the basic Gnostic belief of the creation of the world by seven angels and said to have been written in the third century AD when forms of Gnosticism were widely extended in Northern Africa and the Middle East and undergoing a struggle for legitimacy (“Gnosticism”). (Earlier in the first century AD, Ormus of Alexandria, a master Gnostic, was forming the “Brotherhood of the Rose,” later to be invoked when the Freemason reached the 18th degree—The Rose Croix—and became a Gnostic [Pinkham 252].) Numbers, graphs, and Gnostic references are also crucial for an understanding of Sachs’ interpretation of Melville’s major opus. This critic alleges that “Moby-Dick; or, the Whale . . . [contains a] consciously coded message based on numerology . . . a set of correspondences of words, images, evoked graphical signs and geometrical figures, colors, letters, phonemes, and even punctuation marks, and typographical signs” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 133), impregnated by Pythagorean cosmology and Rosicrucian symbolism (133, note 27).4 Sachs even affirms, first, that the entire architecture of Moby-Dick rests on the magic square of 16, and second, that architecture explores the relation between the square and the circle (Contre-Bible 20, 29). With all this in mind, it is interesting to look in greater detail at the “angels” positioned at the entrance to each section of Beloved. While the first angel, included on the title page, simply seems to be an imaginative graphic drawing reminiscent of the baby who was interred there, the other images are more confounding. I propose a “reading” of these images as representative of the Demiurge, using both Gnostic and Pythagorean geometrical symbols that directly relate to the text.5 The illustrations introducing the first and third sections of the novel are somewhat similar (Figure 3), but while the third looks much closer to the traditional image of death (the skull) forewarning the banishment of Beloved back to the water, the first boasts eyes that seem to give it more character, in a sad sort of way: Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide “Angels” at the beginning of sections I and III in Beloved. These are, in fact, a representation of the monad, which Pythagoras believed “to be god and the good. The monad is origin of the One. The monad is the seed of a tree for which the numbers are to the monad as what the branches of a tree are to the seed of a tree” (Hobgood). The monad, therefore, issues numerous calls to both origins and to the sacred image of the tree, so prevalent in Beloved, though the tree on Sethe’s back, made up of dead welts of skin, is more a tree of death than of life. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are often conceived of as one and the same in that they express the connection between the divine and the profane. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: Two main forms are known and both employ the notion of the world tree as centre. In the one, the tree is the vertical centre binding together heaven and earth; in the other, the tree is the source of life at the horizontal centre of the earth. Adopting biblical terminology, the former may be called the tree of knowledge; the latter, the tree of life. (“World Tree”) However, in Pythagorean theory, all numbers originate in the circle, which by virtue of its reflection gives rise to all others: When a circle is mirrored, two mirrors are created. These two circles side by side build a foundation for all numbers. The overlap of the circles allows each one to share the center of the other. This shaped [sic] created is called the vesica piscis (Latin for “fish’s bladder”). From this shape, a triangle, square, and pentagon can be produced. And the relationship between these figures justifies the existences of further number principles. (Hobgood) Hobgood further notes, “The vesica piscis is a passageway to the journey of spiritual self discovery (Figure 4). The notion of fertility is associated with its vulva shape, and is thus related to the passage of birth”: Figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide The Vesica Piscis. The geometrical figures and lines making up the design of the three “angels” at the beginning of each section in Beloved reflect aspects of Pythagorean theory upon which the Gnostics based much of their mythology. Gnosticism undoubtedly borrowed the idea of the Monad producing the Dyad, and of an evil demiurge producing our wicked world. The nose in the first graphic is made up of an inverted and incomplete triangle: the triad. This reference to the number three is not only religious in nature; three is repeated often and strategically in the novel itself. There are three major sections (as opposed to chapters), three calls to the protagonist in the last and shortest section and, most importantly, three major characters: The triad represents the number three. It is the first born and the eldest number. The equilateral triangle serves as its geometric representation and is the first shape to emerge from the vesica piscis. . . . The triad signifies prudence, wisdom, piety, friendship, peace, and harmony. The triangle represents balance and is a polygon of stability and strength. (Hobgood) But in this first angel, this triangle is missing its base, indicating a destabilization of the relationship. In the first section of the novel, the harmonious unity of three is constantly challenged and changing: Sethe, Denver, and the baby ghost; Sethe, Denver and Paul D, whose shadows hold hands as they return from the carnival; Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, after Beloved moves Paul D from the house and then Stamp Paid shows him the newspaper clipping of the “Misery.” Only in the final illustration at the beginning of the third section is the triangle tentatively reestablished with the possibility of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Perhaps more complicated is the graphic design at the beginning of Section II, in which Beloved herself takes prominence (Figure 5). Slightly elongating the head of this angel in this image emphasizes the repetition of the vesica piscis without distorting the rest of the graph: Figure 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Illustration at the beginning of Section II. Other geometric symbols constituting the graph also add to the enigma of understanding the main character. Firstly, the eyes are “empty” here, but the nose is represented with a straight line: the dyad. The dyad involves the principles of “twoness” or “otherness.” Greek philosophers referred to the dyad as “audacity” because of the boldness of separation from the one, and “anguish” because there is still a sense of tension created by a desire to return to oneness, a central tenet of Gnosticism. Gnostics believed that the dyad divides and unites, repels and attracts, separates and returns. According to Hobgood, “Pythagoras held that one of the first principles, the monad, is god and the good, which is the origin of the One, and is itself intelligence; but the undefined dyad is a deity and the evil, surrounding which is the mass of matter” (Aet. 1. 7; Dox. 302). The dyad is the door between the One and the Many. Secondly, the spiral, here framing the face, according to Sachs, represents the dynamism of life (Contre-Bible 83). In terms of spirituality, the spiral symbol can represent the path leading from outer consciousness (materialism, external awareness, ego, outward perception) to the inner soul (enlightenment, unseen essence, nirvana, cosmic awareness). Movements between the inner (intuitive, intangible) world and the outer (matter, manifested) world are mapped by the spiraling of archetypal rings.. . . Moreover, in terms of rebirth or growth, the spiral symbol can represent the consciousness of nature beginning from the core or center and thus expanding outwardly. This is the way of all things, as recognized by most mystics. (“Spirals”) In the fourth place, the mouth is formed by a rectangle: “Squares and rectangles are stable. They’re familiar and trusted shapes and suggest honesty. They have right angles and represent order, mathematics, rationality, and formality. They are seen as earthbound” (Bradley).6 Because the number four is associated with material things—the physical elements, the directions (North, South, East, West), and the seasons of the world—both squares and crosses are often used as symbols of the material world itself. Squares, however, are quite possibly even more associated with materiality than crosses because of their visual solidness. Lastly, the two circles with “flowers” are misleading. They actually form a hexagram, also known as the Seal of Solomon: The legend of the Seal of Solomon was developed primarily by medieval Arabic writers, who related that the ring was engraved by God and was given to the king directly from heaven. The ring was made from brass and iron, and the two parts were used to seal written commands to good and evil spirits, respectively. The formation of the hexagram is with two inverse triangles (Figure 6). The orientation of a triangle can be important to its meaning. Point-up triangles can also represent ascension toward the spiritual world, while the point-down triangle can represent a descent into the physical world (Beyer, “Geometric”). Figure 6 Open in new tabDownload slide The Hexagram. Taken as a whole, then, this graphic illustration either reinforces the confusion as to Beloved’s identity, or calls to her representation as a Gnostic force, trapped on earth (in Gnostic texts signified by the “dwelling” or the “house” [Jonas 55]): “The sojourn ‘in the world’ is called ‘dwelling’, the world itself a ‘dwelling’ or ‘house’ . . . . When Life settles in the world, the temporary belonging thus established may lead to its becoming ‘a son of the house’ and make necessary the reminder, ‘Thou wert not from here . . .’” (Jonas 55). It is noteworthy that Sethe regards the house at 124 “as a person rather than a structure: A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits” (29). This idea of confinement is also alluded to in the “garments” that Sethe makes for Beloved, and the young woman’s yearning to be reunited with the light or spirit.7 This latter idea is referred to as “the gathering” or the “recollecting” of the fragments, reinforced, on the one hand, by the rememorying of Sethe and the gatherings called by Baby Suggs in the Clearing (Beloved 88), and, on the other, by the disappearing of Beloved in the Cold House, or her acute sense of fragmentation, beginning with losing a tooth (133–34).8 Hans Jonas writes, If portions of the Light of the first Life have been separated from it and mixed in with the darkness, then an original unity has been split up and given over to plurality: the splinters are the sparks dispersed throughout the creation. . . . Consequently, salvation involved a process of gathering in, of re-collection of what has been so dispersed, and salvation aims at the restoration of the original unity. (59) Perhaps the most dominant motifs in Beloved are precisely “re-member/rememory.” Sharon Jessee, rightly I think, and basing her analysis on Jonas’ work, points out the Gnostic “transformative experience based on a ‘Call’ which can change one’s relationship to the illusory and gross material environment of life on earth” (132). Yet I do not think she explores the discrepancy underlying her comparison. While Baby Suggs certainly “calls” to gather her dispossessed people together, it is not to the spirit that she does so, but rather to the specific parts of human flesh. According to Jonas, the Caller is sent by “the Great Life and invested with authority ‘to remind’ people of their origins” (77), but Baby Suggs tells her congregation that the only grace they will have is the grace they can imagine. In her eloquent sermonizing in which she specifically enumerates the organs of the body, critics note that she ends by celebrating the heart (Beloved 89; e.g. Alexandru; Krumholz; Marks; O’Reilly; Wyatt). But as Martin Bernal explains, in Egyptian mythology, the heart is not the organ housing love, but rather knowledge, the underlying Greek meaning of Gnosticism (140–41). While the crucial importance of water as a symbol and metaphor in the novel is apparent, yet another instance of the “mirror” that reflects the invisible within the visible, one of its standard meanings is rebirth and transformation.9 However, it was only rereading Philip Page that I noted the significance of rebirth through water for Paul D. Arguing again for circularity in the architecture of the novel, Page alleges as well that “form and content are synchronous”: [The] exposure of the double-edged nature of circularity is especially significant in its treatment of the theme of rebirth. . . . [J]ourneys across water . . . thereby become symbols for birth. Beloved: reincarnation in terms of crossing a body of water in a ship . . . Sethe’s escape to the North requires two similar voyages: the birth of Denver in the waters . . . and Sethe and Denver’s perilous crossing of the Ohio. Paul D undergoes a similar journey of rebirth through water . . . [when the members of his] chain gang miraculously escape from the trench in Alfred, Georgia. (Page 144) Dennis Childs also argues that “Morrison’s radically circular time-space structure represents a narrative unburial of the undead vestiges of America’s prison/slavery past” (293). He points out that the need for moving convicts around to work on the chain gangs led to the production of “the portable chain gang cage or ‘moving prison’, many of which were built in Georgia and distributed throughout the southern states” (285), a form of imprisonment similar to the cages dug into the earth in Beloved. This would clarify Morrison’s choice of Georgia, but where is Alfred? Not on any map I could find. However, I confess to having missed Morrison’s clue. Just before the novel delves into the circumstances of Paul D’s imprisonment and escape from these underground cages, his memory is dominated by two things: 1) “Mister,” the rooster who seemed to look at him so cockily and so knowingly (“How could a rooster know about Alfred, Georgia?” [Beloved 41; emphasis mine]) and 2) the image of Sethe before she ran, and “[h]er tenderness about his neck jewelry – its tree wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet in the air” (i.e. serpents; Beloved 243). So at a moment during intense rain, when “[a]ll Georgia seemed to be sliding, melting away” (Beloved 111), the inmates communicate through the “best hand-forged chain in Georgia” (107), through extralinguistic sensory perception, to make their escape, a moment of rebirth. However, no Alfred, Georgia, on the map, but an artifact called “Alfred’s Jewel” leads us to a surprising reinforcement of Gnosticism. Alfred’s Jewel, apparently given by King Alfred to accompany his gift of Pope Gregory’s Pastoralis to the clergy in England at the time, is composed of four fascinatingly pertinent parts.10 First, on the front is “the image of a man . . ., which when it is compared to another jewel, the Fuller Broach, is identified as the sense of sight” (“Alfred”). A key principle of early Christian Gnosticism is that “seeing the kingdom where ‘men do not see’ is the only way to realize it” (Jessee 138). Secondly, around the broach in gold is an inscription: “aelfredmec heht gewyrcan,” meaning “Alfred ordered me to be made.” Compare this with Melville’s “God: Done this day by my hand” (Moby-Dick 292), which, according to Sachs, relays the author’s message that there is no life other than matter (Game 80). Here, either “God” is made by man, or by the author’s writing, “God” is done with (i.e. the concept of God is abandoned). Thirdly, on the back of Alfred’s Jewel, engraved in gold, is the “Tree of Life” (or “Knowledge”). And fourthly, although the information available speculates that the open-ended bottom piece, apparently meant to hold a pointer for following a text, is most likely an animal or even “dragonesque” (“British”), it actually looks much more like a serpent with its mouth open. Even though Gregory preached nonheretical Christian faith, he did spend time as papal ambassador to the Emperor’s court in Constantinople. So it is interesting that on first evaluation the jewel Alfred had made for the English clergy very much signals the mythology of the Gnostics: the importance of sight/seeing the unknown or invisible, the presence of the tree of life and/or knowledge (mostly considered as one and the same); and the serpent, which in Gnostic tradition is celebrated as the bearer of knowledge. In Beloved, Denver is closely associated with acute sight (103, 121); the serpents are found not only in Paul D’s “neck jewelry” (243) but in the imagery Sethe conjures up while lying in the underbrush fearing attack by a white boy (32); and the “tree of death,” on Sethe’s back: “her back skin had been dead for years” (18). John Irwin reminds us that the word book comes from the old English bec, which meant “birch tree,” possibly because its bark was originally used for writing (32–33). Sethe has been inscribed and subjugated by the “Word.” Knowledge has been violently imposed upon her. In their mythology, the Gnostics also reached for meaning behind the visible. But for Melville, the invisible was only a mirror reflection of the visible11; hence his emphasis on mirrors, water (the ocean), and the forms or reflections in the sky. But according to Sachs, his ultimate goal was to reach a primal language used before Babel, and he recurred to extensive use of numerology and geometric form. “The hieroglyphics (hiero = sacred, gluphicos, gluphe = carving) engraved upon the body of the whale and of Queequeg constitute the sacred signs of the author/Creator” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 126). Morrison’s insistent call to the numbers 7 and 28 (see Tally 71–84) contrasts with Melville’s emphasis on 16, 17, and 99, and the Magic Square of 4. And while Melville’s use of numbers was based on numbers associated with the letters of Hebrew and Greek, for example, Morrison relies on the table based on English. While Melville’s quest was for a primal language, we know from the end of Beloved that her quest is for the primal sound. Sound succeeds where Baby Suggs fails—the Word has been taken from her. Even so, both authors clearly call to the “Black Land” of Egypt and the mythology of Thoth, Osiris, and Set, whom Melville calls Typhoon. I have argued in Origins that the number 28 was associated with Thoth, god of language, inventor of the alphabet among other things (Lockyer 174), and therefore closely related with Morrison’s challenge in Beloved to the power of the Word and to Foucauldian theory (see Tally 1–28). Melville, however, relates the number 28 with Osiris, who is also closely associated with the moon: Thus, the number of the chapter [of Moby-Dick] bearing his name is 28, suggesting the 28 days of the lunar cycle. The words lunacy, lunatic used to describe him evoke the moon (L. luna); 29 – the number of the chapter “Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb,” brings to mind the leap year linked to the lunar cycle. The numbers can also be interpreted in terms of the myth of Osiris; according to Plutarch, Osiris reigned 28 years and was killed when the moon was waning. His body, divided into 14 parts, was pieced together by his sister Isis. The 14th part = phallus was missing. The references to Ahab occur in chapter 41 (~ 14) “Moby-Dick,” an indication that the phallus is keyed up in Moby-Dick . . . Ahab pronounces his great monologue in chapter 37 (~ 73) entitled “Sunset”, showing thereby his relation with the moon. (Sachs, Game 57, note 22) In my own work on numerology—obviously in English—I discovered that the numerical calculations of even the names of the places and the characters in Beloved were of special significance with an emphasis on the numbers 7 and 28 (Tally 71–84). Moreover, Morrison changed the date of the historical events in the book (1856) to 1855: 18 + 5 + 5 = 28. Even the pages of the three different sections all add up to 28 as well.12 Changing the focus of this analysis of the significance of 28 from Thoth to Osiris perhaps takes us closer to Morrison’s consideration of Melville’s masterpiece: “Melville’s gnosis denies the existence of anything else than matter in constant movement . . . [and] refuses to accept his leviathanic origins; it is he who pits himself against Moby-Dick, the primordial mother principle = the Leviathan = Rahab” (Sachs, “Gnosis” 139). Melville moves to return to the Egyptian sources through the equation of Ahab with Osiris: “Behind Leviathan loomed the Egyptian god Set, or, to use the name given him by the Greek mythographers and generally used by Western mythographers until the late nineteenth century, Typhon. The struggle between Osiris and Typhon forms a basic part of the conception of Ahab’s struggle with Moby-Dick (Franklin 71). H. Bruce Franklin goes on to emphasize the three main symbols of Osiris—the hawk, the coffin, and the phallus: “The hawk, the most common symbol of Osiris, is nailed as an emblem to the mast of the sinking Pequod” (74); the coffin is crucial not only for the hieroglyphs inscribed on it but for its mission of rescuing Ishmael; the recurrence of the phallus in Moby-Dick points to Melville’s obsession with a masculine-oriented universe and with early phallic fertility rituals. Franklin follows Maurice in asserting that “the greater part of the Egyptian zodiac apparently alludes to the contests of these two mythological personages for the empire of the skies” (qtd. in Franklin 71; see also Lockyer). Ahab’s descents into his cabin under the deck “are periodic, are related to natural fertility and astronomical events and are infernal” (Franklin 83). This seems quite clear, but Melville seemingly fails to see this “struggle” in terms of the “wholeness” that he is searching for. In spite of his quest for the recovery of ancient phallic rituals and the mythological wisdom of the Red and the Black Man, Seth (Typhon) is portrayed as an evil to be overcome. In Ahab’s struggle, in which he “lay like dead for three days and nights,” Ahab becomes “literally an Osiris. . . . Just as Moby-Dick embodies Typhon, Ahab embodies Osiris” (Franklin 81). The Egyptian Seth in the 19th and 20th centuries was converted into a negative force (god of chaos, darkness, destruction), losing his function as one half of the whole necessary for fertility and reproduction. Hence, the early hieroglyphs portray Seth as full partner of Horus, the sun. Moreover, Stubbs’s references to the “thigh” (in the Dendera zodiac, “the thigh of Seth”) pierced by an arrow (of Sagittarius) is clearly a reference to the rituals of fertility that dominate early religious mythology.13 To downgrade Seth is to disturb the balance of the natural cycle. Morrison’s very strong call to Seth, via the name of her protagonist (in honor of the love Ma’am felt for her father) is a corrective to Melvillian mythology. The “whole” must be sought in the earliest rituals, the cycle of life and death, day and night, summer and winter. Those gods and goddesses that have come down to us via multiple modifications and reinterpretations are examples of the forms of Gnosis in which these two opposite aspects come to ever more complete coincidence [coincidentia oppositorum]. Osiris is indeed a god of fertility, but without Seth, the story is incomplete, for it is Seth who chops him up into 14 pieces, to be later recollected by Isis (all but the penis) to produce Horus. Just like the germination of the seeds in the ground that must go into the earth in order to flower and reproduce, so Osiris must be ritually murdered in order to regenerate the earth (Figure 7). Horus and Seth are equal partners in this enterprise. Figure 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Osiris and the germination of the grain. In the Gnostic religion, “dispersal and gathering [are] ontological categories of total reality . . .” (Jonas 61), and the seed must be planted before it can flower and be dispersed to renew the cycle. E.A. Wallis Budge states clearly that “Osiris is closely connected with the germination of wheat; the grain which is put into the ground is the dead Osiris, and the grain which has germinated is the Osiris who has once again renewed his life” (130). Indeed the title of Sachs’s article, “The Profane and the Sacred: an Initiation to the American Romance,” seems to be a direct reference to the concept of coincidentia oppositorum, which Mircea Eliade describes as a “very old symbolism” that was “universally widespread and well attested in primitive stages of culture” (qtd. in Valk 35). Eliade cites Nicholas of Cusa, who was the first to elaborate on the concept of “the union of contraries and the mystery of the totality the coincidentia oppositorum” (Valk 35). “The sacred is necessary to make sense of the natural” (40), yet without the material there is no sacred. Indeed, the first two precepts of Eliade’s world view are first, “the opposition between the sacred and the profane as the basis of religion, and [second,] symbolism as the primary means of religious expression” (31).14 Yet, according to Eliade, “archaic humankind did not make a separation between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’” (33, note 12). Indeed, the idea that “[s]acred reality contradicts profane reality: eternal and temporal, being and non-being, absolute and relative” (33) certainly seems to undergird the philosophical structure of Beloved, and supports Melville’s belief that the invisible was only the reflection of the visible. In Sachs’s words, “It is in this sense that the apposition of the profane and the sacred offers a key to the understanding of mythical American writers” (Sachs, “Profane” 73), and while she is referring in her work specifically to Melville and Hawthorne, this observation and her insistence that “they are deeply attracted to Gnosticism” (Sachs, “Profane” 74) are equally appropriate to our understanding of Morrison’s novel. Morrison’s Beloved then becomes a corrective for Ahab’s futile struggle. Sachs alleges that his quest is disoriented: in relying on the phallic rituals that dominate Moby-Dick, Ahab misses the feminine principle that governs the whale, Rahab, the Leviathan that lodges the Mystic Rose at its center. Morrison’s novel counters the highly masculine text of Moby-Dick with the absolute centrality of the feminine in Beloved. The narrative repeatedly emphasizes certain pertinent tropes: the lengths to which a mother will go to “protect” her daughter from slavery, all in the name of love; the origins of human life in the amniotic fluid/water initially symbolized in Sethe’s “breaking of her waters” coincidental with Beloved’s appearance at 124; the sexual awakening of both Sethe and later Denver together with Beloved’s sexual demands on Paul D, Amy’s assistance at the birth of Denver on the wrong side of the Ohio, or even Ella’s and Mam’s refusal to nurture the offspring of violent rape by white men. Through all of these instances and more the novel foregrounds the absolute priority of the feminine for the origins of life and its continuance through procreation. Ahab’s obsession with the masculine through Melville’s repetition of phallic imagery in Moby-Dick ultimately blinds him to his own origins into which the great white whale will submerge him. Ishmael ultimately survives, floating on the water atop the hieroglyphically inscribed coffin of Queequeg. Morrison’s novel is tentatively more optimistic, reuniting not only Paul D and Sethe, but restoring a sense of self to Sethe through her faltering understanding of Paul D’s admonishment: “You your best thing, Sethe. You are” (273). With the banishment of Beloved from the house at 124, Morrison closes her story with an uneasy truce between the profane and the sacred. After all, “sexual union is one of the oldest metaphors used to express coincidentia oppositorum” (Sachs, “Profane” 77). 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Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Endnotes 1 My translations. 2 The middle of 135 chapters plus the Epilogue = 65. 3 For a detailed analysis and explanation, see Sachs, The Game of Creation and La Contre-Bible de Melville. 4 Needless to say, Eco also employs a huge range of semiotics in his novel, beginning on the first page of the First Day with the geometrical structure of the Aedificium (23–24). See also his description of the abbot’s apartments (475–76). 5 The interpretations of geometrical figures that Eco employs in The Name of the Rose are imbibed with Biblical meanings. I am aware that my choices for interpreting Morrison’s signs are much more esoteric but also more aligned with Gnosticism and Pythagorean mathematics. 6 “Squares and rectangles suggest conformity, peacefulness, solidity, security, and equality. Their familiarity and stability, along with their commonness can seem boring” (Bradley). 7 “[T]ent” and “garment” denote the body as a passing earthly form encasing the soul (Jonas 56). 8 “Gathered” being the Gnostic metaphor for “restoration of the original unity” (Jonas 59). 9 As for example, “The face that is mine” that Beloved sees reflected in the water, in which “mine” may be her reclamation of her lost mother (the face that belongs to her) or literally the reflection of her own face (Beloved 214). 10 The jewel was once attached to a rod, probably of wood, at its base. After decades of scholarly discussion, it is now “generally accepted” that the jewel’s function was to be the handle for a pointer stick for following words when reading a book. It is described as “an exceptional and unusual example of Anglo-Saxon jewellery” (“Alfred”). 11 Note also the importance of mirrors in crucial scenes of The Name of the Rose. 12 It was remarkable that for about the first 20 years of publication, Beloved was always reissued with the same paging as the original. Clearly these numbers were important to the author. 13 “Thigh” was a reference to genitalia in ancient biblical times (see Sarna 170–71). 14 The other two precepts are “(3) prehistory as the fundamental, decisive epoc in the history of religions; and (4) homo religiosus as the allegedly ideal form of humanity” (Valk 31). © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - The Gnosis of Toni Morrison: Morrison’s Conversation with Herman Melville, with a Nod to Umberto Eco
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cww/vpaa011
DA - 2019-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-gnosis-of-toni-morrison-morrison-s-conversation-with-herman-s07Z0DbdrF
SP - 357
EP - 376
VL - 13
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -