Let's face it: Toni Morrison's Beloved can no other than be re-read.

Let's face it: Toni Morrison's Beloved can no other than be re-read. But the challenges pos by means of this novel ought not to be confused with the sheer "fascination of what's difficult" that Yeats complains has "dried the sap public of [his] veins." To the contrary, the difficulties of Beloved should risk our sap flowing. In her 1989 Michigan Quarterly Review article "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" Morrison describes the opening of Beloved as "immediately incomprehensible" and "excessively demanding." She goe onward to explain that, for reasons as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but artistic and political, in the first pages of the volume she wishes her reader to experience "compelling confusion without comfort or succor from the 'author,' with and nothing else imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey" (32) Likewise with her endings--interviewed in 1983 Morrison had this to say about the "deliberate ambiguity" with which she completions Tar Baby and Song of Solomon: I want to shift the ending away from the notion of a novel as "Tell me what I ne to know" and "What is the solution to the problem?" I want to shift the emphasis away from our ne for a kind of clos door. I want the door make open because I want the reader to think about it. I want him [or her] to take an responsibility for the ending.

Later in the same interview, after noting by what means blues and jazz leave the listener "always a little famishing ... so you hear it again and again and again," Morrison concludes: I think language can do the same thing. And I want to think a machination can be shaped that way. I don't think it has to be that little pyramid--you know, that little denouement, resolution, end--that we were taught in grammar educate It's just a different building that is sort of spiral and exhibit at the beginning, and spread at the end. (Bonetti)

In other words, from start to finish, Morrison's fiction demands that her readers adopt modern strategies of comprehension and interpretation. We shouldn't be surprised, then, if readers who persist in expecting the author to "tell me what I ne to know" fail to survive the journey.

With regard to my hold first reading of Beloved, all I can say about Morrison's novelistic schemes is that they worked. In fact, as I initially read Beloved, Morrison abundantly accomplished all three of the goals specified above. First, I was plung into "compelling confusion," an exhilarating mixture of awe, admiration, frustration, and determination. next to the first at no point--least of all at the novel's end--did I be impressed that Morrison was handing me all I destitutioned to know or offering me easy solutions to the novel's problems; to the contrary, Beloved's "door" looked to me wide open. Third, and perhaps most numerous important, I found myself spiraling back into the novel, hearing it again and again, rereading it solely to find it a thesis transformed.

This essay reckons the story of that rereading: to what degree the second time around, I grasped certain perplexing facts about the identities of the character Beloved, and by what mode Morrison's tortured crafting of Beloved's identities can teach us a great deal not just about departed spirits or ancestors, but also about us, the novel's living and breathing readers.

The question "Who the hell is Beloved?" must haunt each reader of the novel, just as it incites the characters Sethe, Denver, and Paul D Of course Morrison, like any mystery writer, wants us to bewilderment and to try to figure it abroad But the challenge of decoding and interpreting this spirit is peremptory since the section in which Beloved encode her supernatural autobiography (210-13) is another of those "excessively demanding" and "incomprehensible" passages to which Morrison assigns in "Unspeakable Words Unspoken." If, however, we unravel Beloved's identities, then we will better understand Morrison's vision of the ties between what she calls "the incredible spirit world" and "the incredible political world" ("Unspeakable" 32)

The sole relatively sure thing about Beloved is her bodily identity. Early onward we recognize the body that "walk[s] public of the water" (50) as the twenty-one-year-old reincarnation of the little girl massacreed at age one by her mother, Sethe: Her forehead still bears the scratches from Sethe's fingernails and her throat the scar from the handsaw. Sethe herself is finally convinced according to Beloved's knowledge of the little three-note strain which, Sethe observes," 'nobody knows but me and my children'" (176)(1) moreover the spirit that inhabits Beloved's material substance is more than that child's spirit more than Paul D, Sethe, or Denver always bargain for.

Although Denver in her final conversation with Paul D reveals that "'at time'" she thinks Beloved "'[i]s--more'" (266) than her sister, I can find no earlier evidence that Sethe or Denver forever understand Beloved to be anything other, spiritually, than what she appear to bes to be bodily: their daughter and sister recured from the dead. The questions they ask her, their studys about her, Sethe's lengthy explanations and justifications--these all insinuate that they see Beloved as the identifiable, individual spirit they have been expecting. Unfortunately, they're mistaken.