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

Beyond helping understand textual instability, Todorov's theory is also useful in assessing the reason that the text's unstable elements sometimes become unified by the novel's end. [5] According to Todorov's definition, Beloved is an almost perfect fantastic narrative. However, some of its rhetorical strategies cause it to seem more marvelous than fantastic. More specifically, its narration so closely entangles the characters' points of view with the point of view of the reader that, by the end of the text, it is difficult to separate the two, and many readers are likely to agree with Sethe and Denver that Beloved is the returned ghost of Sethe's deceased, crawling-already? baby. Of course, the text does present several alternative and more realistic explanations for Beloved's presence that often get overlooked. [6] For example, embedded into the text is the possibility that Beloved is an actual survivor of the Middle Passage and/or a woman held hostage in a cabin by a white man who used her for sexual purp oses. Consider, for instance, the textual moment when Denver asks Beloved about the world "over there," and Beloved responds:" 'I'm small in that place. I'm like this here.' She raised her lead off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up[ldots] 'Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in[ldots] A lot of people is down here. Some is dead'" (75). This passage, which seems to start as a description of the afterlife (" 'I'm small in that dace'") quickly metamorphosizes into something else ("'No room to move in[ldots] Some is dead'"). Finally, we are left unsure whether Beloved is describing death, the Middle Passage, or both--the interpretations collapse into each other.

The importation of slaves to the United States was banned in 1807, yet historical research suggests that violations were prevalent well into the 1850s and 1860s (House 25). Therefore, one possible "realistic" explanation for Beloved's presence in the novel (although, of course, this explanation also functions on the supernatural level) is that she is an actual survivor of the Middle Passage, and Morrison includes details that support such a reading. For example, Beloved's voice is described as having a cadence not like" Denver's and Sethe's (60), possibility indicating an African accent. Her forehead is marked with fine lines that Sethe interprets as "fingernail prints" (202) from when she held the child, but that could also be African tribal marks of identification (or scarification). Furthermore, in her inner monologue (210-13), Beloved describes a number of details congruent with the Middle Passage: crouching in the hold of a ship next to dying bodies (210), bodies thrown overboard (211), starvation and d ehydration (210), sexual abuse (212), and finally the loss of a woman who looks like her own mother (211). If we read Beloved as an actual survivor of the Middle Passage who mistakes Sethe for her long lost mother, then statements like "I don't have nobody" (65) and her accusation that Sethe "never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away from her" (242) have a certain logic, a certain realism. Throughout the novel, what seems to be commentary on the afterlife could just as plausibly be the vivid recollections of an experience of extreme horror branded onto the consciousness of a real survivor. [7]