Enacting literature: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Beloved grapples with the grand magnitude of history and the intimate legacy historical events leave on people’s lives. 

The novel has in its sight the radical cruelty of slavery and racism as it unfolds, recedes and swallows casualties following the American Civil War. 

Yet this story is placed in the tight frames of a home, a family in crisis and the personal ache of grief. 

Dr Clara Tuite, from the University of Melbourne, says this superb historical novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.

“If there’s one thing that makes Beloved great – laying my cards on the table – it is the way this novel enacts literature as a form of life. It doesn’t just represent life. It enacts it.”

Beloved is about a slave, Sethe, who escaped from slavery in 1856, running away with her children in tow, arriving to settle in Ohio. 

When threatened with being recaptured and sent back to the plantation that enslaved her, Sethe kills her two-year-old daughter to save her from the prospect of a life with no freedom.

This is the moral heart and question of the novel. The problem from which all other strands and stories bleed out.

In terrible, inhumane situations, how do ethical standards change? What, in other circumstances is cruel and callous, could in fact be kindness?

Morrison’s ethical questions resound through contemporary American race relations, and arcs back through all histories of inequalities.

“Beloved is an exemplary model of fiction as a form of public participation,” says Dr Tuite. “A revelation of the enormous political and social agency literature can have in shaping conversations about the past.

“It has had a profound impact on the national conversation in contemporary America, about the unhealed wounds of slavery, the unfinished business of emancipation and the ongoing effects of institutional racism.”

Dr Tuite suggests that via Beloved Morrison questions and challenges what we count as history.

The book’s dedication reads: “Sixty million and more”. This homage, though not in the novel itself, breathes throughout the work. It leaves sticky fingerprints on each page and character fleshed by Morrison.

The number of casualties, disputed by some historians, has an enormity that puts it out of the scope of recognition. It is too big a figure to recognise individual faces and names. Most of this sixty million lie invisibly in the unmarked graves of history.

Against this rigid historical statistic, a footnote to the text, Morrison has created a work of fiction, so transparently and overtly fictional that it crosses into the genre of magical realism. Beloved is complete with a ghost who makes mischief and meddles and serves to paint an alternate vision of history.

Beloved makes the statement that history is haunted. It has ghosts and skeletons who have not been given the platform or a blank page to testify. The project of Beloved is somewhat to testify on behalf of these silenced characters who receive no chapters or biographies in non-fiction or historical texts.

In ventriloquising their stories and exposing some of the silences left by traditional history, the novel suggests that fiction has a key role in giving a holistic vision of history.

www.arts.unimelb.edu.au