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...

Their Eyes Were Watching God certainly showcases Zora Neale Hurston’s training as an anthropologist. She used the idea of cultural relativism, the knowledge that aspects of a culture can only truly be understood relative to that culture itself. The whole idea emerged as a reaction to very Eurocentric anthropological practices. Huston shows us this in the novel by letting the black characters speak from themselves, unlike Bigger in Native Son . She has the readers understand black American culture as it exists without having to constantly describe it in the context of white society, which is different than the social protest novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In this way, I see cultural relativism seems as a good idea, particularly if the author/anthropologist is to some degree an insider of the community/culture. I think it’s possible to allow cultures to speak for themselves, but this novel can still end up being “minstrel-y”. Not because of the novel, but because of the rea...

I was brainstorming for my essay last week and just sort of poking around in the book to find what I wanted to write about. And so I ended up back in the factory hospital episode and rereading it. And all of a sudden I noticed a whole bunch of things I hadn’t picked up on before. First, I decided to look up who Buckeye the Rabbit and Brer Rabbit were. Their names are mentioned when the doctor is asking the narrator various questions about his identity, and after asking about his name, identity, and mother, he asks about this seemingly random character from the narrator’s childhood. So who are they? Basically, they’re the same character, more commonly known as Brer Rabbit. Buckeye the Rabbit is another name, but it definitely has some significance if you read the narrator’s internal monologue in page 242 (I haven’t really tried to unpack what he means about Buckeye being what you call him when you’re younger, Brer when you’re older - if you have some thoughts/an explanation let me kno...

Reading the dialogue between any of the characters in Invisible Man as they discuss Brotherhood ideology is an adventure into a bizarre rabbit hole. I keep trying to read into it as with any other aspect of the novel, but the words feel empty. It’s difficult to figure out what their ideology is. You can look deeper and deeper and then all you end up finding is rhetoric. Here’s a good line to illustrate this: “The people are fully aroused; if we fail to lead them into action, they will become passive, or they will become cynical. Thus it is necessary that we strike immediately and strike hard!” (pg. 363). Throughout other parts of the novel, you get a slight sense of their views on race perhaps, but other than that we have no idea what the Brotherhood beliefs. What do they mean when they say “action”? What does that look like? What does “striking hard” mean? What are they trying to do at all? This reminds me of the narrator’s speeches, where as readers we question whether he’s sayi...

My dad always said, or perhaps joked - the line with Serbs is thin - that the capital “I” in English is a testament to the vanity of the British. He’s not wrong in that English is probably one of the only languages which capitalizes exclusively this pronoun, although realistically I’d assume that there’s a niche linguistic explanation. Nonetheless, it’d be boring to merely assume this. You have to find some symbolism in everything, or maybe that’s just a side effect of reading Invisible Man. Admittedly, I’ve poked fun at people who try to extrapolate meaning from things like punctuation and capitalization. But the poem that Sarah presented, “I Have a Dream” by Pat Parker, made me remember my father’s remark. I realized that the capitalization was not an accident. While my father always referred to the “vanity of the British”, what was meant under the surface was a history of colonialism and the exploitation of others for the sake of profit; the capitalists of capitalists. For him, and ...