How is language a force both liberating and destructive?
How does memory function in individual and communal life?
How do human beings choose to define and decipher freedom? Is the African American choice to define and decipher freedom different? Why or why not?
“If you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.” -Carl Jung
Carl Jung “Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.” Carl Jung (from "New Paths in Psychology," in Collected Papers on Analytic Psychology; London, 1916)
The Unconscious
Unconsciousness reveals itself through symbolic form – Collective unconscious would be Dante’s Hell
Personal conscious –contains the personal ghosts
ARCHETYPES
The Shadow – dwarf who guards unconscious. Primitive. Amoral
Anima (little girl – feminine soul)
Animus male soul. All of us are born bisexual and gender is learned.
Wise Old Man – collective unconscious
*Collective unconscious – contains all the world’s ghosts.
**
Psychic inheritance.
Jung felt if we could recapture mythologies, we could heal our mental illnesses.
Reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.
immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.
He states, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the **archetypes**, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic content.” Personified as Wise Old Man.
Beloved
Sethe’s memory is a collective unconscious. It intertwines throughout the narrative.
Beloved is Satan frozen in hell.
Can the multitude of stories be separated?
How is memory fragmented? (Gatsby, too)
Chapter 3-5 notes/questions
Chapter 3/4 (34-59).
“Denver’s secrets were sweet.” (Structure of simple sentence)
“Hidden by post oaks, five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other to form a round, empty room… its walls … of murmuring leaves” (34).
What is suggested by the word hidden?
How does this space give Denver ownership?
Compare the emerald room to 124.
“First a playroom (where silence was softer) then a refuge (from her brothers’ fright), soon the place became the point” (35).
Point of? What does point suggest?
Can silence be softer? How does this relate to the novel thus far?
“Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure…. (someone dependent but proud)” (35).
“(even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peopled by the living activity of the dead)”
Wow wow wow – what is Morrison doing here?
Universally what is she making alive?
Denver’s vision of her mother in prayer with a ghost by her side, “the tender embrace of the dress sleeve that made Denver remember the details of her birth” (35).
Again, how is Morrison manipulating and turning language inside out? How does she make death become living?
How are ghosts treated in this novel? The house, Baby Sugg’s remark about the haunting of every Negro’s grief (collective unconscious) the “white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s waist” (35).
Nice phrase quote: “to get to the part of the story she liked best, she had to start way back” (36).
Why must Denver “start way back?”
How does Sethe’s inability to remember “of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? Or was it Louisiana?)” speak to communal memory (37)?
How about the explanation of the antelope and its connection to Jung’s theory?
Discuss the between that exists between Sethe’s mother being pointed out (“singularity enough in that world of cooing women, each of whom was called Ma’am”(37). How is Morrison playing with memory here?
The Jaws? (38). “like jaws inside”
Examine the passage about time and rememory (43-44). “‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies….’ ‘Nothing ever does’” (44).
Why would the questions schootteacher asked and the notebook tear Sixo up for all time? (44).
“temptation to trust and remember”
Does it take trust to remember? Why does Morrison combine the two?
Paul D does not heal but breaks apart 124 : “a loud male voice” “broke up the place”
Difference between Paul D – can’t stay in one place, can’t live with a woman for more than a few months (49) and Sethe – she stays (prison, 124).
“The box had done what Sweet Home had not” (49).
Sethe makes past present for Paul D, too: …he could not account for the pleasure in his surprise at seeing Halle’s wife alive….The closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock” (49).
Connect Sethe’s meditation on time and the past not dying with the end of Ch. 3.
How does the carnival function in Ch. 4?
Why does Morrison concentrate of the shadow image of three people holding hands as they went to and from the carnival (56, 59)? Who are the three people? Why does Denver trail on the way to the carnival and lead on the way back?
CH 5 (60-67) “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water” (60). A loaded image – how so?
TREES Beloved comes out of water and leans on a mulberry tree…. “A giant temple of boxwood” – How do the boxwood trees function? Beloved sis on stump in front of 124.
Beloved has “new skin” what other hints does Morrison drop about this being the baby? “Three vertical scratches on her forehead” “her feet were like her hands, soft and new”
Trees. Water. Count how many references on pages 60 and 61.
MALE/FEMALE PERSPECTIVE Paul D delineates between “a young coloredwoman drifting was drifting from ruin” – “All their men … had been picked off one by one by one”(62-63).
Why does Morrison combine the color and the person into one word? (whitegirl coloredwoman).
“The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it” (63). Consider divide created by "or."
“The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew” (63).
Reclaim language
Collective consciousness
Reclaim power.
Communal suffering
End of chapter considerations Sethe’s subconscious knows it is Beloved before her conscious does. (her bladder fills; she drops her shoes (62); thinks of headstone (63).
Essential Questions
“If you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.” -Carl Jung
Carl Jung
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.” Carl Jung (from "New Paths in Psychology," in Collected Papers on Analytic Psychology; London, 1916)
The Unconscious
Personal conscious –contains the personal ghosts
ARCHETYPES
*Collective unconscious – contains all the world’s ghosts.
**
He states, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the **archetypes**, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic content.” Personified as Wise Old Man.
Beloved
Chapter 3-5 notes/questions
Chapter 3/4 (34-59).
“Denver’s secrets were sweet.” (Structure of simple sentence)
“Hidden by post oaks, five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other to form a round, empty room… its walls … of murmuring leaves” (34).
“First a playroom (where silence was softer) then a refuge (from her brothers’ fright), soon the place became the point” (35).
“Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure…. (someone dependent but proud)” (35).
“(even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peopled by the living activity of the dead)”
Denver’s vision of her mother in prayer with a ghost by her side, “the tender embrace of the dress sleeve that made Denver remember the details of her birth” (35).
- Again, how is Morrison manipulating and turning language inside out? How does she make death become living?
- How are ghosts treated in this novel? The house, Baby Sugg’s remark about the haunting of every Negro’s grief (collective unconscious) the “white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s waist” (35).
Nice phrase quote: “to get to the part of the story she liked best, she had to start way back” (36).How does Sethe’s inability to remember “of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? Or was it Louisiana?)” speak to communal memory (37)?
How about the explanation of the antelope and its connection to Jung’s theory?
Discuss the between that exists between Sethe’s mother being pointed out (“singularity enough in that world of cooing women, each of whom was called Ma’am”(37). How is Morrison playing with memory here?
The Jaws? (38). “like jaws inside”
Examine the passage about time and rememory (43-44).
“‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies….’ ‘Nothing ever does’” (44).
Why would the questions schootteacher asked and the notebook tear Sixo up for all time? (44).
“temptation to trust and remember”
Paul D does not heal but breaks apart 124 : “a loud male voice” “broke up the place”
Difference between Paul D – can’t stay in one place, can’t live with a woman for more than a few months (49) and Sethe – she stays (prison, 124).
“The box had done what Sweet Home had not” (49).
Sethe makes past present for Paul D, too: …he could not account for the pleasure in his surprise at seeing Halle’s wife alive….The closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock” (49).
Connect Sethe’s meditation on time and the past not dying with the end of Ch. 3.
How does the carnival function in Ch. 4?
Why does Morrison concentrate of the shadow image of three people holding hands as they went to and from the carnival (56, 59)? Who are the three people? Why does Denver trail on the way to the carnival and lead on the way back?
CH 5 (60-67)
“A fully dressed woman walked out of the water” (60).
A loaded image – how so?
TREES
Beloved comes out of water and leans on a mulberry tree….
“A giant temple of boxwood” – How do the boxwood trees function?
Beloved sis on stump in front of 124.
Beloved has “new skin” what other hints does Morrison drop about this being the baby?
“Three vertical scratches on her forehead” “her feet were like her hands, soft and new”
Trees. Water. Count how many references on pages 60 and 61.
MALE/FEMALE PERSPECTIVE
Paul D delineates between “a young coloredwoman drifting was drifting from ruin” – “All their men … had been picked off one by one by one”(62-63).
Why does Morrison combine the color and the person into one word? (whitegirl coloredwoman).
“The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it” (63).
Consider divide created by "or."
“The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew” (63).
End of chapter considerations
Sethe’s subconscious knows it is Beloved before her conscious does. (her bladder fills; she drops her shoes (62); thinks of headstone (63).
When does Denver know Beloved is Beloved?