The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Martha J. Cutter

Beloved as a Fantastic Novel

Todorov defines the fantastic as a literary genre that makes uncertainty on the part of its readers the very core of its rhetorical and thematic strategies. More specifically, the reader must hesitate between two narrative explanations for unusual events: Either they can be explained by realistic reasons (for example, a character believes s/he saw a ghost, but it turned out to be a chair covered by a white sheet), or they can be explained by marvelous ones (for example, a character believes s/he saw a ghost, and it actually does turn out to be a ghost). When a reader hesitates between marvelous and realistic causes for unusual events, s/he is in the realm of the fantastic (25). Of course, it is difficult for a text to maintain this hesitation throughout its narration, butt Todorov does say that some texts are able to accomplish this, forcing a reread to reread the text in a metatextual way (90).

For my purposes, it is also crucial to consider what Todorov has to say about the way the fantastic as a genre first swallows up, and then ejects, the reader's point of view. Since the fantastic is based essentially on a hesitation of the reader--a reader who identifies with the chief character-there is often a confluence between the main character's and the reader's points of view: "The reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character" (33). However, although the fantastic begins in an integration of the reader's and the character's perspectives, it does not necessarily end that way. The character cannot, after all, normally exit the world of the text, but the reader can, and once s/he does, the reader may begin searching for the way the effect of the fantastic was produced. Thus, according to Todorov, in a second reading the identification between character and reader "is no longer possible," and so this second reading "inevitably becomes a meta-reading" (90). At the end of a fantastic text the conflu ence between reader's and character's points of view self-destructs, forcing the reader to read metatextually, searching for the mechanisms whereby this identification was created and the ambiguous world of the fantastic was maintained. Although Todorov calls his work on the fantastic "structural," I am suggesting it has numerous features congruent with a post-structuralist and post-modem theory of textuality, in which a text is never closed, but can be read over and over again.

Although Beloved also exhibits a number of other features congruent with Todorov's definition of the fantastic, I do not mean to argue that Morrison conceptualized her novel with Todorov's ideas in mind. [3] Rather, I am suggesting that Todorov's approach helps us to comprehend how certain formal and textual features of narration are interwoven with an oral African American aesthetic agenda to create a work that is, in both its lexical and aural features, infinite, plural, and open. [4] In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Morrison states that African American literature should not be judged "solely in terms of its referents to Eurocentric criteria" (22). But Morrison also argues that "finding or imposing Western influences in/on Afro-American literature has value" when a work is not appreciated only because it meets such criteria (23). Employing Todorov's approach to understand Beloved is not to cripple the novel or infantalize it, but rather more fully to appreciate the multiple ways it undermines the totaliz ing impulses of narrative and of readers.