Magical Realism

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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 Haruki Murakami novels, you know they’re littered with talking cats and raining fish, and yet you can trace the exact locations he describes in his novels, and listen to all of the Beatles songs that are mentioned.)

And Beloved is very similar. The depictions of food are clear, and the method that Paul D used to get to the North is probably based on actual things used on the Underground Railroad. And Morrison depicts slavery in a completely unflinching way; like Sethe, she never looks away. The story is about a very real element of American history, and yet it’s a story that is fundamentally based on the ideas that ghosts exist.

The contrast between real and unreal, and how they work together, is what makes Beloved, along with the other novels, extremely convincing. This contrast confuses on purpose, and illuminates things about reality. The supernatural and hyperbolic conveys an emotional reality better than “actual reality”.

I’ve been confused about whether Beloved the character is actually “real”, but does it matter? Does it matter whether or not there actually is a ghost? The ghost captures the reality of Sethe’s emotions, her actually being haunted by the past. What better way to depict the mixing of past and present than with ghosts?

Also, the story line in Beloved (and all of the other mentioned novels) is not linear. I love the use of “rememory”; revisiting memories with new details each time. It’s a much better depiction of actual human consciousness. Beloved is so convincing because it captures the messiness of the human conscious experience.

Do you guys also find Beloved really convincing? Anyone else have trouble thinking about literally anything else after reading it? I’m trying to find the critical points of some function or something but I can’t because I’m still hung up on every page of this novel.

Comments

  1. SolomiaNovember 15, 2018 at 6:41 PM

    Awesome post! I love magical realism as a genre, I think it’s interesting how easy it is for us to suspend our disbelief in one small yet significant way in order for the novel to work. I think the whole switching viewpoints with a lot of free indirect discourse is an element of this magical realism – rarely in a novel do you get the perspective of so many characters all intertwining to create one narrative – and it gives the novel a not-perfectly-realistic spin. These aspects are to me just a testament to how good a writer Morrison is – reading this book I understand why she received a Nobel Prize in literature.

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  2. OliviaNovember 16, 2018 at 11:34 PM

    This is a really great post-- it pinpoints exactly what about this book's integration of supernatural and, like you said, hyper-realistic elements makes it so compelling. I also love the way you addressed Beloved as a ghost, and how it's just the perfect representation of the past still haunting the present. For the record, I don't really see a possibility where Beloved isn't actually real, I feel like it's just a thing we as readers have to deal with. Really good post!

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  3. isabella solisNovember 17, 2018 at 7:46 PM

    Now that we know that Beloved is at the very least a physical being that people outside of the family can see, I think it's interesting how we could have gone with the story without knowing that fact. I think the realest thing in the novel is the pain that the inter-generational trauma of slavery has caused the characters of the novel. Nobody in the novel hasn't been hurt in some way by slavery, and Beloved is a physical expression of that pain. Basically, the more unreal elements of the novel serve as ways of talking about the deep and intense pain that its characters feel.

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  4. SarahNovember 17, 2018 at 9:03 PM

    I think magical realism is a good classification for this novel. I'm still a bit perplexed by how completely realistic and naturalistic the novel is written, while still harboring supernatural elements inside. Great post!

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  5. UnknownNovember 20, 2018 at 1:53 PM

    I agree. I think the combination of historical events and the supernatural work very well together. The supernatural makes the looking back into the past, the haunting past, very fluid and allows the novel to progress very well. I also feel like whether or not Beloved is real or not is not very important because it is the role that she plays in the family and presence that is important. Great post :)

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  6. Ayat JaberNovember 23, 2018 at 5:01 PM

    This is such a good post! I like how you made the point that sometimes magical realism can make things more realistic and clear than realism itself. Beloved embodies that very much.

    ReplyDelete

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