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

Morrison's own comments appear to support the idea that there are realistic and supernatural ways of reading this character. In an interview with Marsha Darling, Morrison comments that Beloved should be read as both Sethe's dead child and a survivor/ghost of the Middle Passage (247). In a later interview with Angels Carabi, Morrison posits that Beloved could either be "a ghost who has been exorcised or she's a real person pregnant by Paul D." The point is, as Morrison says, that "when you see Beloved toward the end, you don't know" (43; emphasis added). So why does this narrative so often get read as marvelous when the possibility of reading it as fantastic--as balancing between the realistic and the marvelous--exists? As I have already suggested, it may be precisely the narrative structure of the text that causes readers to overlook these ambiguities. While a number of different voices narrate the text, Sethe's and Denver's points of view most often predominate. The reader's role is, as Todorov would say, e ntrusted to the character. Hearing the notes of Beloved's song, Sethe also hears "the click--the settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them" (175), and the narrative voice comments that "things were where they ought to be or poised and ready to glide in" (176). "The click" represents the point at which the reader's and the character's points of view coalesce, and although Morrison provides evidence that should disrupt this alliance, the evidence often is ignored.

It is true, as Maggie Sale argues, that the text as a whole values "the articulation of multiple perspectives" (43) and, as Linda KrumhoLz comments, that Beloved is supposed to act as a trickster figure "who defies narrative closure or categorization" (397). Yet here we may need to make a distinction between what Peter Rabinowitz has called the actual audience and the authorial audience (126). While the authorial audience (the ideal reader) can still see the story through multiple points of view, the actual audience (real readers) may reduce the articulation of multiple perspectives to one (Sethe's or Denver's), thereby limiting the text's flexibility and openness. Furthermore, because both of the book's central characters seem hesitant to raise questions about Beloved's status after she has disappeared, the actual audience also may not raise them. Sethe remains convinced that Beloved was her dead child, her "'best thing'" (272), and when Paul D. asks Denver if she believes Beloved was her sister, Denver res ponds, "'At times. At times I think she was--more'" (266). Beloved is the ghost, and more, but she is not less--the woman from the cabin or an actual survivor of the Middle Passage.

About jazz music, Morrison comments, "You have to make something out of a mistake, and if you do it well enough it will take you to another place where you never would have gone had you not made that error" ("Art" 116). In Beloved, Denver's and Sethe's points of view are so compelling that readers are pulled into them, willy-nilly, wanting, needing to believe what they do. Is this a kind of creative "mistake" that Morrison attempts to revise in her next "performance," that allows her to go to another place in her next narrative? But what basis do I have for calling this an "error"? In a narrative in which it is taken for granted that all the houses are packed to the rafters with some sort of ghost, should it surprise us that many readers finally become convinced that Beloved is a ghost? And what leads me to believe that seeing Beloved as a ghost in any way shuts down the storytelling and retelling possibilities of the narrative as a whole?