Beloved by Toni Morrison
Reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami made me think of ghost stories. Several of Murakami’s characters move back and forth between the mundane world and a spiritual world. Sometimes Murakami’s spiritual world might be a land of the dead, or a land of memory, or a displacement in time. Sometimes a character moves completely from one world to the other; sometimes they straddle both. Thinking of ghost stories I pulled Beloved off my bookshelf, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, which I hadn’t yet read.
The baby called Beloved is the literal ghost in this ghost story: a baby ghost who haunts the home where she was killed and the mother who killed her. But the mother and every other character in the book are also haunted by the ghosts of their past lives. They haunt themselves, caught between real and remembered worlds in a maelstrom of endlessly swirling trauma that makes the past a constant presence.
Beloved is a ghost story in which the ghost are the characters’ past lives in slavery. The story is difficult to read, not for the prose, but for the constant telling and remembering of experiences of degradation, pain, heartbreak, and violence endured by the characters. At times the horror approaches a degree that almost slips into melodrama. The horror is only heightened by the characters’ matter-of-fact acknowledgement of it. Every character has their equally extreme story to tell. (When trauma is this widespread I wonder whether the common experience helps individuals cope successfully rather than be paralyzed by PTSD?) And yet the suffering, and the story, is also relieved, occasionally, by incidents of tenderness, bravery, and resistance.
The story takes place in two main times and locations. One setting is a farm in Kentucky about 10 years prior to the Civil War where Sethe, Beloved’s mother, is enslaved. The second setting is a home in Cincinnati, about 10 years after the civil war, where Sethe lives after escaping with her four children. Between the two times, soon after arriving in Cincinnati, comes the incident at the center of the story. Sethe is tracked down by slave catchers. Rather than allow herself and her children to be taken into slavery, Sethe attempts to kill her children and herself. She succeeds in killing one child, the older of her two girl babies.
Sethe’s trial and sentencing is barely mentioned in the book. We vaguely learn that she spent a short time in custody before being released. (The true story of Margaret Garner that inspired Morrison’s book is more complicated. Margaret was returned to the temporary custody of the slave owner while the court decided whether the Federal Fugitive Slave Law or state murder charges took precedent. They decided on murder but when state officials went to Kentucky looking for Margaret the slave owner kept her hidden by moving her from place to place. Margaret was never brought to trial. She died of typhoid a few years later, still enslaved).
The story is not told linearly. From one paragraph to the next characters slip from narrating a current incident to remembering a past incident. Incidents are hinted at long before they are recounted plainly. Some memories are never fully revealed. Because of the circular structure of the story-telling there’s a frustrating sense of feeling we know the whole story with still a third of the book yet to be read. Beyond that point minor stories at the margins are added but the central story stops progressing. I still enjoyed reading to the end but ceased expecting a resolution. Perhaps no resolution is appropriate for a story so morally complicated.
Morrison’s writing is elegant, experimental in places, but never obscure. It reminded me of Faulkner, in that the character’s speak and think in simple language amidst a novel that exists in a highly elevated literary space. Morrison is also compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as is Murakami, in their use of the supernatural to reveal the emotional power behind events. Henry James’ ghost story, The Turn of the Screw is another example.
Morrison received the Pulitzer prize for Beloved. She received the Nobel prize for literature in 1993.