“Beloved” by Toni Morrison (post 16): Sethe’s “rememory” passage implies author’s belief in mediumship and her use of multiple personality in writing process

I have just begun Beloved, the Nobel Prize-winner’s Pulitzer Prize novel. The passage in which Sethe discusses “rememory” is as follows:

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it…Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory…But it’s not…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…outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think of 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.

    “Oh, 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 making it up…But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else…It’s never going away…

    Denver [says], “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.”

    [Sethe says,] “Nothing ever does” (1, pp. 46-47).

Comment

Toni Morrison may be implying that during the writing of this novel, when she would “hear something or see something going on,” she initially thought she was “making it up,” but since it didn’t feel like her own thoughts, she inferred that she was functioning as a medium for the memories of slaves.

When mediums think they are reporting the thoughts and memories of people who are dead, they are actually reporting what their own alternate personalities are showing and telling them, which is an example of the mythopoetic function of alternate personalities.

Search “mythopoetic” to see a past post about the multiple personality of mediums.

1. Toni Morrison. Beloved [1987]. New York, Everyman’s/Knopf, 2006.