Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

Now that we’ve finished Beloved, it’s time to revisit my first post about Denver being the primary narrator. Having finished it, the novel obviously isn’t from her perspective, as it’s (mostly) written in third person and captures the perspectives and intimate stories of Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and even Beloved. Beloved is a beautifully complicated novel, and includes numerous intertwined narratives. Each character’s perspective tells a different story, but together they weave together into a stunning depiction of slavery; its horrors, the human experience, and the endurance of family, love, and culture in spite of it. One of these narratives is Denver’s, and her’s is extremely compelling to me. Her story is one about coming-of-age, and how a child has to reconcile with the past of their parents, how to care for them but also how to live their life. Her birth story is repeated multiple times as one of the big, important events because her birth is symbolic. She i...

Toni Morrison has asked us to believe in ghosts, and we do. Our reality and the reality of a novel are not synonymous; that would make fiction boring. The novel is set in our world, and yet employs supernatural elements. And so if we put a genre label on Beloved , magical realism fits well. Magical realism is perhaps one of the most convincing genres. What defines it, I would say beyond the standard definition, is that there is a hyper realistic setting with supernatural elements. I mean “hyper realistic” in the sense that magical realism often depicts very real events and is regularly littered with actual cultural references or well-researched historical elements. (For example, the thing about the banana plantations One Hundred Years of Solitude was based in reality, and yet the descriptions are hyperbolic. In Slaughterhouse Five , the firebombing of Dresden was real, but it’s full of Billy Pilgrim’s bizarre experiences with aliens and getting “unstuck in time”. If you’ve read any Ha...

I have an idea about the story in Beloved , but as we’re still really early in the novel it’s just a prediction. I’ll try and come back to the idea later on: What if this story is from the perspective of Denver? The novel is told in third person, obviously, so it’s not from her directly. But here’s the thing: the story is told in a way that there is a present-tense narrative, that is being intermittently interrupted by memories of the traumatic past. But those aren’t all separate memories - they’re the same memories, just cycled back to in more detail. So as you progress through the present-day narrative, the pieces of the story are filled in so that by the end, you have the full picture. This reminds me of what a child’s relationship is with their parent. You grow up with your parents, and progress through your life as they are also progressing through theirs. But they had things in their life before you. So as you grow up and they grow older, you hear their stories and as you get old...