Lars Eckstein analyzes the role of musicality and memory in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved,' highlighting its deep connections to African-American musical traditions. He argues that the novel serves as a 'jazz-text,' utilizing musical principles to convey complex themes of memory and trauma while also engaging with historical narratives like that of fugitive slave Margaret Garner. Morrison's narrative emphasizes imagination over documented history, critiquing the limitations of written testimonies and promoting a dialogue rooted in oral and musical expressions.

1. z Musical Memory in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Re-Membering the Black Atlantic
On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory by
Lars Eckstein

2. z
Mnemonic Design of Beloved
 "… one crucial aspect of Morrison’s poetic scope has not been
sufficiently considered: namely, the “aural” musicality of Beloved.
While Jazz (1992), her next novel, as well as her third novel
Song of Solomon (1977) … have been associated with musical
forms of expression, this has generally not been the case with
Beloved" (Eckstein 177).
Presenter’s note: Eckstein argues that mnemonic design of Beloved is rooted in a dialogue with a
decidedly African-American musical tradition. The novel is a perfect example of a jazz-text, as both
its story and narrative discourse are largely musical in scope.

3. z
The Poetics of Memory: The Art of
Musicalization
 The musical memory lie at the of heart o the novel with regard
both to thematization and to dramatizations of African-American
musical traditions from their beginnings in work songs, spirituals
and blues all the way to modern styles of jazz (Eckstein).
Presenter’s note: Eckstein examines to what extent mnemonic design of music is embedded in the character’s
“rememories.”

4. z
Intertextuality
 The novel’s relation to documents testifying to the historical case of the
fugitive slave Margaret Garner.
 She and her husband Simon Garner, Jr and their four children, Simon’s
parents and nine other slaves fled north across the frozen Ohio river on a
horse sledge.
Presenter’s note: But, before discussing Music, we need to investigate
memory in the text a little more, which in the end will bring us why music is
the most important mnemonic desing int he novel. Morrison’s reference to
Margaret Garner is clearly marked and it features the framework in the
narrative. That follows from a number of newspaper reports, from
abolitionist tracts, and from a number of biographical and autobiographical
accounts.

5. z
Imagination
 "if I had known all there was to know about her I never would have written it. It
would have been finished, there would have been no place for me there."*
Presenter’s note: Morriosn says: “I did a lot of research about everything else in the book – Cincinnati,
about the abolitionists, about the Underground Railroad – but I refused to find out anything else about
Margaret Garner. With that quotation, we see her emphasis is on imagination in the novel’s fictional design.
But, why does she emphasizes on imagination? Because Morrison clearly distrusts the written documents of
slavery. Such documents may either be sentimental, such as the writings of white abolitionists or they are
openly racist. In both cases, however, they are inevitably structured and manipulated by power relations of
white interests.
 *Morrison, in Elissa Schappell, “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction,” 123–24

6. z
White Interest
 "It would have to be something out of the ordinary – something
white people would find interesting, truly different, worth a few
minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps (Morrison 156)“
Presenter’s note: This much is reflected in the narrative itself when Stamp Paid hands to Paul D a
newspaper clipping which shows an image of Sethe and her youngest daughter in prison. Implications can
be brought further by saying that the authority of white testimony in the quest of truth is undermined in this
passage.

7. z
Heteronomous Discourse
 "while you can’t really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, but you can
certainly debate it. There’s a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, [...] and
the job of recovery is ours."*
Presenter’s note: That implies Morrison’s public dismissal of the selective, sensationalist,
and heteronomous discourse in which written testimonies seem to be rooted.
 *Morrison in Christina Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” 224–25.

8. z
A slave Narrative?
 "I wouldn’t read them for information because I knew that they have been authenticated by white patrons, that they
couldn’t say everything they wanted to say because they couldn’t alienate their audience; they had to be quiet about
certain things."*
Presenter’s note: This is also the case when it comes to black autobiographies which she sees as being suffocated in
the pragmatic censorship, either by the writers themselves or at hands of their editors.
 *Morrison, in Elissa Schappell, “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction,” 103.

9. z
Sound of the Silenced
 “the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in and complement
slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix.”*
Presenter’s note: Again, Morrison admits that she writes writing back to the tradition of the slave narrative;
however, rather than evoking what is present in the older narratives, she tries to uncover what had been
silenced.
 *Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” 302 and 305.

10. z
Nonreferential Text
 "Literary references can also supply a comfort I don’t want the reader to have because I
want him to respond on the same plane as an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to
subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in
the company of his own solitary imagination.
Presenter’s note: Beloved bears a relationship to a number of other texts which may have served as an inspirational foil for
Morrison. Yet it is hardly possible to consider them as intentional references within the novel. Eckstein refers to some interviews in
which we learn the reasons why she avoids literary references in her novels .The first reason is to call her readers to have in work
in the construction of meaning by leaving gaps to be filled by them; the second is to create a pure Black aesthetic by not only
ignoring but also rejecting previous texts.
 *Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation and Writing,” 387.

11. z
Music is omnipresent in Beloved
 "I am not like James Joyce, I am not like Thomas Hardy, I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense.
[…] I know that my effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in
music.”
Presenter’s note: Therefore, Morrison is careful to point out that mnemonic structure in Beloved is to be pursued in the dialogue
with oral traditions and musical manifestations of African-American culture. Almost all of the characters in the novel are associated
with it at one stage or the other. Sethe’s memories of her childhood are framed in the context of song and dance at Sweet Home.
We also see it from Halle’s tunes to Sixo’s song at his execution. Denver sings at school; Paul D sings the blues; Baby Suggs
sings with the community, And, the community eventually sings for Denver and Sethe.
 *Morrison in Nelly McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Taylor–Guthrie, 152.

12. z
African Musical Traditions
 "Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat
now. She believed that must be why she knew so little before Sweet
Home except singing and dancing and how crowded it was. What
Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it
in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never
come back" (Morrison 62).
Presenter’s note: This passage is significant because it points to the continuity of
musical expression in the history of African enslavement. African languages was
forbidden and punished on plantations; so, African dialects did not make it into the
second generation, unlike African musical traditions. The loss of language as opposed
to the survival of music and dance is made clear this passage.

13. z
African Music and Past
 “Well, at least I don’t have to take another step.” A dying thought if ever
there was one, and she waited for the little antelope to protest, and why she
thought of an antelope Sethe could not imagine because she had never
seen one. She guessed it must have been an invention held on to from
before Sweet Home, when she was very young. Of that place where she
was born (Carolina maybe? Or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only
song and dance. Not even her own mother […]. Oh but when they sang.
And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope"
(Morrison 30).
Presenter’s note: The continuity of musical expression is underlined with this quotation in which
Sethe not only consciously remembers the African music and dances of her childhood but
associates them with the movements of her unborn child. This is how Morrison establishes an
unbroken connection of past, present and future which are rooted in music, from Sethe’s African
ancestors to Denver who embodies the hope for a better future.

14. z
Subversive Music
 “This one will never be suitable.” The song must have
convinced him" ( Morrison 226).
Presenter’s note: The subversive employment of music, in this quotation, is manifested in the radical
objection to the discourse of colonial exploitation. Sixo’s song has such an alienating and confusing impact
on School teacher and his men that they are convinced that Sixo can no longer be valuable commodity on
the plantation. Thus, Sixo eventually triumphs over slavery.

15. z
Subversive Music
 “I don’t know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it
sometimes, but I never told a soul” (Morrison 71).
Presenter’s note: For Paul D, Sethe or Baby Suggs, the refusal of the colonizer’s language
would imply silence; they must instead transform the English language in such a way that it
can render their personal experiences and enable autonomous expressions. Again, music is
of fundamental importance here. The embedding English language in the rhythms, repetitive
figures and inherited patterns of blues, jazz and spirituals uncovers an expressive potential
that would be denied in mere narrative speech. The memory of personal suffering can be
often seen in the characters’ musical expressions.

16. z
Jazz Text
 "Beloved is such a jazz-text. It not only denotes a variety of
musical forms and styles that have gone into the making of
modern jazz; more than that, the novel is organized according to
what Richter calls “jazz-aesthetic principles (Eckstein 211).”
Presenter’s note: After the solo excursions of the three women at124, the narrative moves on to a passage which
eventually unites all three voices and their characteristics in a polyphonic, collective chorus. There we see how her
text meets of a truly musical quality

17. z
Jazz Text
 "In order to engage and immerse the reader, language must
therefore step out from the page, “get out of the way” – by
blending into music. Verbal speech, in Beloved, discursively
invokes the arrangement, the expressive qualities, and
performative spontaneity of jazz" (Eckstein 223).

18. z
Conclusion
 "There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course there’s a
necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a
manner in which memory is not destructive."*
Presenter’s note: It is in this context that the musicalization of the mnemonic design comes into its own. The placement of the
novel in the domain of African-American music is the key to overcome the speechlessness of trauma and to engage in
constructive dialogue with painful chapters of the past
 Morrison, in Marsha Darling “In the Realm of Responsibility: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” 247–48.

19. z
Conclusion
 “That music is no longer exclusively ours, another form has to take its place, and it seems to
me that the novel is needed […] now in a way that it was not needed before.”*
Presenter’s note: This statement is essential to an understanding of the ideological scope of Morrison’s mnemonic
choices. It indicates her decision to preserve and remember the traditions of African-American music in the medium of
narrative fiction. It also explains her denial of any intertextual impact of Western written traditions on her art.
 *Toni Morrison, in Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews, ed. Mari Evans (London: Pluto, 1983): 340.

20. z
Works Cited
 Eckstein, Lars. Re-membering the Black Atlantic : on the poetics and politics of literary
memory. Amsterdam New York: Rodopi, 2006.
 House, E. B. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved is Not Beloved." Studies in American
Fiction, vol. 18 no. 1, 1990, pp. 17-26. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/saf.1990.0016
 Keenan, Sally. “‘Four Hundred Years of Silence’: Myth, History and Motherhood in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved,” in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed. Jonathan White
(Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993): 45–81; quoted from Toni Morrison, “Beloved”, ed.
Carl Plasa (Cambridge: Icon, 1998): 131.
 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Distributed by Random
House, Inc, 1987. Print.