Étudier la littérature en langue étrangère. Perspectives comparatistes.

Aline LEBEL, M1 S1 (2021)

Introduction à Beloved, de Toni Morrison

I. Contexte biographique et social

 Beloved dans l’œuvre de Toni Morrison

 Le contexte culturel, social et politique : Toni Morrison et le Black Arts Movement

II. Présentation de l’œuvre : « the unspeakable unspoken »

 Synopsis
 L’esthétique de l’œuvre et les difficultés de lecture
 Problématisation

III. Une « histoire de fantômes » ? Les ambiguïtés génériques du texte

 Les éléments fantastiques : reprise et subversion des codes de l’horreur

 Le réalisme, ou le surnaturel en question
 Le texte comme tombeau : le retour du refoulé et le travail du deuil

IV. La mémoire et l’oubli

 La mémoire pathologique
 Mémoire et remémoration
 Mémoire et transmission

V. L’individu et la communauté au prisme du modèle tragique

 La structure chorale du texte

 La trajectoire de Sethe, du conflit à la réconciliation
 Communauté des personnages, communauté des lecteurs : les enjeux politiques et éthiques de la catharsis

VI. Faire et défaire l’Histoire

 Une critique de l’historiographie officielle

 Le refus de la distance analytique : la fiction comme immersion dans le passé
 L’Histoire vue par les subalternes

VII. Aux limites du langage et de la représentation

 Le délitement de l’écriture
 Le langage des corps
 Pathos et logos

VIII. Le choix de la polyphonie et de l’ambiguïté : enjeux poétiques et éthiques de l’œuvre ouverte

 Le refus de l’autorité discursive

 La mise à l’épreuve de la structure ascendante du texte, ou la réparation sous caution
 La place du lecteur dans le texte

IX. « This is not a story to pass on » : le roman et le problème du mal

 L’infanticide comme intolérable moral

 La poétique du dilemme
 Peut-on juger ? les limites de l’expérience morale dans la fiction

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Étudier la littérature en langue étrangère. Perspectives comparatistes.
Aline LEBEL, M1 S1 (2021)

1. Le champ culturel afro-américain au XXe siècle et la question de l’engagement

- Années 1920 : Harlem Renaissance. Principaux auteurs : W.E.B. Du Bois (“The Criteria of Negro Art”,
1926), Langston Hughes (“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (“How It
Feels to Be Colored Me”, 1928). Débat entre Hughes et Hurston sur les liens entre art et politique.
- Années 50 : débat entre Richard Wright, partisan d’une littérature politique (cf notamment “Blueprint for
Negro Writing”, 1937), et Ralph Ellison, qui défend une vision moins didactique de l’engagement littéraire
(cf notamment “The World and the Jug”, 1963). Ralph Ellison: “the novel is always a public gesture, though
not necessarily a political one.”
- Années 1960-1970 : émergence du Black Aesthetic/Arts Movement, en parallèle du mouvement pour les
droits civiques et du Black Power. Défend une culture spécifiquement afro-américaine, refusant toute forme
d’assimilationnisme, et affichant un engagement politique clair : opposition à la culture blanche, américaine,
et middle class. Influence majeure sur les auteurs noirs (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, June
Jordan…), et dans les universités (développement des Black Studies).

2. La position de Toni Morrison

- “that’s what an artist is – a politician” (Toni Morrison, Conversations, 4); le but de l’artiste doit être de
dessiller son lecteur : “to bear witness or effect change… take cataracts off people’s eyes…enlighten… and
strengthen.” (Jones et Vinson, 183).
- “the writer should not even attempt to solve social problems, but he should certainly try to clarify them”
(Memory, 389) “first of all, no one should tell any writer what to write, at all, ever… one of the goals of the
whole business of liberation was to make it possible for us not to be silenced, no matter what we said” (E.
Washington, 237). ”If I could understand (my writing), then I assumed two things : (a) that other Black people
could understand it and (b) that white people, if it was any good, would understand it also”” (Bakerman 38)

3. Le concept de “double voicedness”: Repris à M. Bakthine (La Poétique de Dostoïevski) par Henry Louis
Gates Jr. : “in the case of the writer of African descent, her or his text occupy spaces in at least two traditions:
a European or American literary tradition, and one of the several related but distinct black traditions. The
“heritage” of each black text in a Western language is, then, a double heritage” (Criticism in the Jungle, 4)

4. “For Beloved (…) there was almost nothing that I knew that I seemed sure of, nothing I could really use. All
of my books have been different for me, but Beloved was like I’d never written a book before. It was brand
new. (…) I thought, more than I’ve thought about any book, “I cannot do this”. I thought that a lot. And I
stopped for long, long, long periods of time and said, “I know I’ve never read a book like this because who
can write it?” But then I decided that was a very selfish way to think. After all, these people had lived that
life. This book was only a tiny little part of what some of that life had been. If all I had to do was sit in a room
and look at paper and imagine it, then it seemed a little vain and adolescent for me to complain about the
difficulty of that work. I was also pricked by the notion that the institution (l’esclavage), which had been
so organized and had lasted so long, was beyond art. And that depressed me so much that I would just
write some more.” (Denard, 49)

5. Le Black English / AAVE (African American Vernacular English) : sociolecte, variante de l’anglais standard
parlée par la communauté afro-américaine, et caractérisée par un certain nombre de particularités
grammaticales, syntaxiques et phonologiques. Ex : la chute du « s » final à la P3 du singulier ; l’emploi des
formes du singulier du verbe « to be » (is, was, be) pour le pluriel (ex : “But you was there and even if you
too young to memory it, I can tell it to you”, B : 239) ; négation avec des formes en « no » plutôt qu’en « any »
(“I don’t hear nobody”, B, 117) ; la chute du « g » final pour les formes en -ing…

6. Reprise et subversion des codes de l’horreur: l’incipit. “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women
in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873
Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons,
Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old – as soon as merely looking in a
mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that
was it for Howard)”. (B, 3)

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“Introducing a magical character with a narrative voice, Beloved distorts the traditional conception of reality
according to Eurocentric definitions. Moreover, Beloved becomes the medium through which victims of the
Middle Passage gain a literate voice. This functions as a narrative strategy of transgression since it allows for
the voices of the under- or un- represented. In this way Beloved can be understood as a writing back from the
periphery.” (“Magic(al) Realism as Postcolonial Device in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Mehri Razmi et Leyli
Jamali)

7. “A newspaper clipping in The Black Book summarized the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who,
having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than
let them be returned to the owner’s plantation. She became a cause célèbre in the fight against the Fugitive
Slave laws, which mandated the return of escapees to their owners. Her sanity and lack of repentance caught
the attention of Abolitionists as well as newspapers. She was certainly single-minded and, judging by her
comments, she had the intellect, the ferocity, and the willingness to risk everything for what was to her the
necessity of freedom.
The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating but, to a novelist, confining. Too little imaginative space there
for my purposes. So I would invent her thoughts, plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in
essence, but not strictly factual in order to relate her history to contemporary issues about freedom,
responsibility, and women’s “place”. The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame
and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery,
was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not
completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cementery inhabited by highly
vocal ghosts.” (B, XI)

8. « L’inquiétante étrangeté » (unheimlich en allemand, the uncanny en anglais), est un concept freudien : il
désigne la « variété particulière de l’effrayant qui remonte au depuis longtemps connu, depuis longtemps
familier » « ce unheimlich n’est en réalité rien de nouveau ou d’étranger, mais quelque chose qui est pour la
vie psychique familier de tout temps, et qui ne lui est devenu étranger que par le processus du refoulement »
(Freud, L’inquiétante étrangeté, 99). Figures littéraires privilégiées : le double, l’hybride, le fragment et la
métonymie.

9. La mémoire pathologique : “Sethe walked over to a chair, lifted a sheet and stretched it as wide as her arms
would go. Then she folded, refolded and double-folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but
the folding felt too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was remembering
something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her
mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross” (B, 73)

Le concept de « rememory » : cf le dialogue entre Sethe et Denver, p. 44 : “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 here. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, not just in my rememory,
but out there, in the world. (…) 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.”

10. La scène de reconnaissance : “‘I made that song up’, said Sethe. ‘I made it up and sang it to my children.
Nobody knows that song but me and my children.’ Beloved turned to look at Sethe. ‘I know it,’ she said.”
(206-7)
Images de la dévoration / de la fusion / de la possession : Sethe comparée à “a rag doll”, “locked into a love
that wore everybody out”; “The best chair, the biggest piece, the prettiest plate, the brightest ribbon for her

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Aline LEBEL, M1 S1 (2021)

hair, and the more she took, the more Sethe began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered, been
through, for her children, waving away flies in grape arbors, crawling on her knees to a lean-on.” (284)
La fusion des identités atteint son paroxysme dans la deuxième partie : “I am Beloved and she is mine. I see
her take flowers away from leaves she put them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the
basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are
pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to
be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing” (B, 248)

11. Walter Benjamin et l’appauvrissement de l’expérience « (Autrefois) on savait aussi exactement ce qu’était
l’expérience : les personnes plus âgées l’avaient toujours transmise aux plus jeunes. Concise, parée de
l’autorité de l’âge, prenant la forme de proverbes : redondante dans son babil, énoncée sous la forme
d’histoires ; parfois récits provenant de pays lointains, racontés auprès de la cheminée aux enfants et aux
petits-enfants – où tout cela a-t-il disparu ? Qui peut encore, aujourd’hui, rencontrer des gens capables de
raconter quelque chose avec rectitude ? Où entend-on encore, aujourd’hui, de la bouche de ceux qui meurent,
des paroles si durables qu’elles cheminent de génération en génération, à la manière d’un cycle ? Qui trouve
encore, aujourd’hui, secours dans l’évocation d’un proverbe ? » « une chose est claire : le cours de
l’expérience a chuté, et ce dans une génération qui fit en 1914-1918 l’une des expériences les plus effroyables
de l’histoire universelle » (Expérience et pauvreté, 1933, p. 366)
Refus de la transmission et peur de la répétition : “All the time, I’m afraid the thing that happened that
made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know
who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. I need to know
what that thing might be, but I don’t want to. Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house, outside this
yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard,
so it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me too.” (B, 242)

12. Le style indirect libre : fusion de la voix du narrateur et des personnages. Ex. : l’exploration de l’intériorité
de Paul D : “For years Paul D believed schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men.
And it was that that made them run off. Now, plagued by the contents of this tobacco tin, he wondered how
much difference there really was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them
men – but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?
That was the wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D that those two were men whether
Garner said so or not. It troubled him that, concerning his own manhood, he could not satisfy himself on that
point. Oh, he did many things, but was that Garner’s gift or his own will? What would he have been anyway
– before Sweet Home- without Garner? In Sixo’s country, or his mother’s? Or, God help him, on the boat?
Did a whiteman saying it make it so?” (B, 260)

Le modèle du « call and response » dans le texte : système d’improvisation collective caractéristique de la
culture orale afro-américaine. Décrit comme composé de “spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interactions
between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker’s statements (“calls”) are punctuated by expressions
(“responses”) from the listener” (“Language that bears witness. The Black English Oral Tradition in the Works
of Toni Morrison”, Yvonne Atkison in The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison. Speaking the Unspeakable, p. 22)

13. Le rapport à la communauté : du confit à la réconciliation. La scène d’enterrement de Baby Suggs “The
setting-up was held in the yard because nobody besides himself (Stamp Paid) would enter 124 – an injury
Sethe answered with another by refusing to attend the service Reverend Pike presided over. She went instead
to the gravesite, whose silence she competed with as she stood there not joining in the hymns the others sang
with all their hearts. That insult spawned another by the mourners: back in the yard of 124, they ate the
food they brought and did not touch Sethe’s, who did not touch theirs and forbade Denver to. So Baby Suggs,
holy, having devoted her freed life to harmony, was buried amid a regular dance of pride, fear,
condemnation and spite” (B, 202)
Le rituel collectif de l’exorcisme: “Instantly the kneelers and the standers joined her. They stopped praying
and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound,
and they all knew what that sound sounded like.” (B, 305)

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14. Réparation, rédemption, renaissance : “‘Sethe’, he says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.
We need some kind of tomorrow.’
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’
His holding fingers are holding hers.
‘Me? Me?’” (B, 322)

“This healing process has particular applications for African-American readers, but this does not deny the
importance this process may have for non-African-American readers, since we must all reckon with our
historical positions regarding race, class and gender.” (“The Ghost of Slavery : Historical Recovery in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved”, L. Krumholz)

15. Discours scientifique et déshumanisation ; “Schoolteacher made his pupils sit and learn books for a spell every
afternoon. If it was nice enough weather, they’d sit on the side porch. All three of em. He’d talk and they’d
write. Or he would read and they would write down what he said. I never told nobody this. (…) But I couldn’t
help listening to what I heard that day. He was talking to his pupils and I heard him say, ‘Which one are you
doing ?’ And one of the boys said, ‘Sethe’. That’s when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took
a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one
hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to
turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, ‘No, no. That’s not the way.
I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to
line them up’” (B, 227-8)
“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers – not the
defined” (B, 225)
“‘I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t make the ink.’” (B, 320)

16. Le refus de la distance : cf. l’analyse de l’incipit de Beloved proposée par TM dans Unspeakable Things
Unspoken. “Whatever the risks of confronting the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible
in that simple, declarative authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined to take.
Because the in medias res opening that I am so committed to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and
should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment
completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible
between the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another,
from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance – a
gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching – this kidnapping – propels
one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed”
(30)

17. Sur le concept de « subalterne » : voir Gramsci (Les Cahiers de prison, not. 1 et 3) ainsi que Gayatri Spivak
(Les subalternes peuvent-elles parler ?)
“When I began, there was just one thing I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on
the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society – a black female and a child” (Toni Morrison,
Conversations, 102)
“(…) it is no longer acceptable merely to imagine us and image for us. We have always been imagining
ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s “aspects of nature”, nor Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subjects of
our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the
experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, “other” We are choices.”
(Unspeakable Things Unspoken, p. 9)

18. Le délitement de l’écriture: “How can I say things that are pictures” (B, 248)
“I am standing in the rain falling the others are taken I am not taken I am falling like the rain is I watch
him eat inside I am crouching to keep from falling with the rain I am going to be in pieces he hurts where
I sleep he puts his fingers there I drop the food and break into pieces she took my face away” (B, 251)

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Aline LEBEL, M1 S1 (2021)

19. Le langage des corps. Le sermon de Baby Suggs: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.
They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back.
Yonder they flack it. And O my people they do not love your hands.” (B, 103)
La rencontre avec Amy : “Amy spoke at last in her dreamwalker’s voice.
‘It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk – it’s red and split wild open, full of sap, and this
here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these
ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What
God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this. Mr Buddy
had a right evil hand too. Whip you for looking at him straight. Sure would. I looked right at him one time
and he hauled off and threw the poker at me. Guess he knew what I was a-thinking. ” (B, 93)
“Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” (B, 20)
“And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the
decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl”.
And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which
Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew what that the responsibility
for her breats, at last, was in somebody’s else hands ” (B, 21)

20. La fonction poétique du langage et le modèle du jazz : “I don’t want them (the novels) to be unsatisfaying,
and some people do find it wholly unsatisfying, but I think that’s the habit, the literary habit, of having certain
kinds of endings. Although we don’t expect a poem to end that way, you know, or even music doesn’t end
that way, certain kinds of music. There’s always something tasty in your mouth when you hear blues, there’s
always something left over with jazz, because it’s on edge, and you’re never satisfied, you’re always a little
hungry” (Toni Morrison, citée par Cheryll Hall “‘Literary Habit’ : Oral Traditions and Jazz in Beloved”, 89)
“the tiny shock of recognition we receive with each recurrent motif is akin to the pleasure we derive from
identifying familiar phrases in complex jazz performance” (Hall)
Les phénomènes de répétition dans la partie II : “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine” (Sethe, 236); “Beloved
is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk” (Denver, 242); “I am Beloved and she
is mine” x 2 (Beloved, 248 et 253).
Le chant de purification : “For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and
simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the
sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was
a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe
and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.” (B, 308)

21. La polyhonie romanesque. Def de Mikhail Bakthine : « Dostoïevski est le créateur du roman polyphonique.
Il a élaboré un genre romanesque fondamentalement nouveau. (…) On voit apparaître dans ses œuvres des
héros dont la voix est, dans sa structure, identique à celle que nous trouvons normalement chez les auteurs.
Le mot (= le discours) du héros sur lui-même et sur le monde est aussi valable et entièrement signifiant que
l'est généralement le mot (= le discours) de l'auteur ; il n'est pas aliéné par l'image objectivée du héros, comme
formant l'une de ses caractéristiques, mais ne sert pas non plus de porte-voix à la philosophie de l'auteur. Il
possède une indépendance exceptionnelle dans la structure de l'œuvre, résonne en quelque sorte à côté du mot
(= discours) de l'auteur, se combinant avec lui, ainsi qu'avec les voix tout aussi indépendantes et signifiantes
des autres personnages, sur un mode tout à fait original » (Poétique de Dostoïevski, p. 33)
L’infanticide de Sethe – la diversité des jugements et des points de vue :
- les neveux de schoolteacher (incompréhension, sidération) : “His uncle hard warned him against this kind
of confusion, but the warning didn’t seem to be taking. What she go and do that for? On account of a beating?”
(B, 176-177)
- Paul D. (condamnation morale, indignation): “‘What you did was wrong, Sethe.’ ‘I should have gone on
back there? Taken my babies back there?’ ‘There could have been a way. Some other way.’ ‘What way?’
‘You got two feet, Sethe, not four,’ he said, and right then a forest sprang between them; trackless and quiet.”
(B, 194)

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- le rejet des membres de la communauté : “I ain’t got no friends take a handsaw to their own children.” (Ella,
B, 221)
- Baby Suggs (horreur, empathie) : “I told Baby Suggs that and she got down on her knees to beg God’s
pardon for me” (B, 179) “they came in her yard and she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice”
(B, 212)

Le refus de l’autorité morale – l’éthique de Baby Suggs : “Talk was low and to the point - for Baby Suggs,
holy, didn’t approve of extra. ‘Everything depends on knowing how much’, she said, and ‘Good is knowing
when to stop.’; “she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to
those who could use it.” (B, 102)

22. La remise en cause de la structure ascendante du roman : l’épilogue en « hyperbate » : “Down by the
stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult
place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked
there. By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what
it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in
the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved.” (B, 325)

23. La construction dialogique du récit. cf les scènes de discussion entre Denver / Sethe et Beloved / Sethe : “It
became a way to feed her. Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect sweet things had on
Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much
as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She
and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short
replies or rambling incomplete reveries. Even with Paul D, who had shared some of it and to whom she could
talk with at least a mesure of calm, the hurt was always there – like a tender place in the corner of her mouth
that the bit left. But, as she began telling about her earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perhaps it
was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it – in any way it was an unexpected
pleasure.” (B, 69)

24. Le dilemme: “Yet she knew Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning – that Beloved
might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant -what it took to drag the teeth of that
saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would
stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump
and sweet with life -Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that -
far worse- whas what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D
tremble. That 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 and others lived through and got over it, she could
never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right,
but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing - the part of her that was clean. No undreamable
dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul
A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a
gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out
of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter” (B, 295-6)

25. Une réécriture du mythe de Job : cf la mort de Baby Suggs – “I know Grandma Baby would have liked the
party and the people who came to it, because she got low not seeing anybody or going anywhere – just grieving
and thinking about colors and how she made a mistake. That what she thought about what the heart and the
body could do was wrong. The whitepeople came anyway. In her yard. She had done everything right and
they came in her yard anyway. And she didn’t know what to think. All she had left was her heart and they
busted it so even the War couldn’t rouse her.” (B, 247)

7
Étudier la littérature en langue étrangère. Perspectives comparatistes.
Aline LEBEL, M1 S1 (2021)

“(Baby Suggs) announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten
years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople: ‘They don’t know when to stop.’, she
said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever” (B, 123)

Une éthique du regard : « the unflinching gaze ». cf la description de Sethe. “The one who never looked
away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer’s restaurant did not look
away; and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away either. And when the baby’s spirit picked
up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye, so
hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked away” (B, 14)

La sagesse du roman : “my mode of writing is sublimely didactic”; “there has to be a mode to do what the
music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that
existed underneath the white civilization. I think this accounts for the address of my books. I am not
explaining anything to anybody. My works bear witness and suggest who the outlaws were, who survived
under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it.
All that is in the fabric of the story in order to do what music used to do” (Toni Morrison, citée par Marc C.
Conner in The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison, p. XXIV)