Beloved by Toni Morrison
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No novel of recent years has been more honored than Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988,
and was a major reason for Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in
literature five years later – a distinction all
the more striking when once considers that
only three other native-born US writers
earned this prestigious award during the
second half of the 20th Century. More
recently, Beloved trounced the competition
in The New York Times survey of authors
and critics to determine the best book of
American fiction during the last twenty-five
years.
But if the Nobel judges love Morrison,
college professors love her even more. The
Toni Morrison Society lists some 150 dissertations on the author,
and enough academic articles to keep a graduate student in the
library for years. I can’t imagine another novel of recent years
assigned by more teachers in more classrooms. Do a Google search
on “Beloved” and “syllabus,” and take a look yourself. Beloved is
that rarity among contemporary novels: it was selling by the
truckload even before Oprah gave it her stamp of approval.
Hence, one might assume that Beloved is the most canonical of
modern novels, if not the foundation of the New Canon. Yet there is
some heavy irony here, since Beloved might also be the first book
picked for The Anti-Canon, the novels that upset the applecart of
traditional literary canonization. As one commentator has noted,
Toni Morrison is the Living Black Female to counter the Dead White
Males who have long dominated literary studies.
Beloved also challenges the ‘old school’ standards by which novels
have been evaluated –- based on factors such as poetic writing,
creative use of language, metaphor, etc. Yes, you can find these
elements in Beloved, but they are a little beside the point. Morrison
herself has admitted to getting “annoyed at people who said there
were poetic things in my writing.” In short, this novel goes hand-in-
hand with post-colonial, post-patriarchal, post-Eurocentric
attempts to restructure not just the priorities of fiction, but also the
ways and means by which fiction is assessed and appreciated.
Of course, the language of Beloved is poetic. Sometimes it is
animated with the timeless force of myth and folklore; at other
points it stretches out in longer phrases that circle in on a subject
with Faulknerian indirection. Some of my favorite passages take on
a sweeping Biblical tone. This final comparison is an apt one. The
King James Bible is also poetic, but if you mentioned that to the
most devoted fans of the Good Book, they would say that the poetry
is a little beside the point.
For the most part -- as the dissertations and articles makes clear --
Morrison’s readers look to her fiction primarily for the many ways
in which it grapples with the issues of race, gender, sexuality and
power. Morrison infuses each of these factors, moreover, with
several layers of history, not just the antebellum and postbellum
time periods in which Beloved is set, but also the earlier history
raised in the book’s epigraph “Sixty Million and more,” referring to
the black Africans who died in the Middle Passage. This past haunts
the story, in a novel in which there are many hauntings, many ghosts
hovering on the margins or moving into center stage.
All of these factors are set in play through the character Sethe, the
protagonist of Beloved, a black woman of extraordinary power. She
is the “one who never looked away,” as her daughter Denver
describes her at one point in the book, and Sethe’s fierce
independence is the catalyst that sets off key elements in the
narrative. Sethe nearly dies in her attempt to escape to freedom
from the Kentucky plantation incongruously named Sweet Home,
and join other members of her family in Ohio. The plot hinges on
decisions she feels compelled to make, above all on how much she is
willing to sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also
to prevent her children from falling under the yoke of forced
servitude.
Morrison’s narrative is enriched by the roundabout way in which
she unfolds this tale. The novelist once described to an interviewer
her fascination with the “moments of withheld, partial or
disinformation” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and to some
extent her storytelling here is similarly indirect. The central tragedy
of Beloved is hinted at almost from the novel’s start, but only in the
sketchiest manner. Gradually Morrison circles in on the key
elements of her plot, as a vulture circles on its prey, and with a
tension that is heightened by the non-linear structure of her account.
Morrison adds another twist by mixing magical and realistic
elements into her story. As a result, some readers have tried to link
her writing to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet
you could also look at Beloved as a post-colonial Turn of the Screw,
only here the “extra turn” of the screw is a much larger haunting that
echoes down the generations – so much so that, as Sethe sees it,
nothing ever dies, and the future is often “a matter of keeping the
past at bay.” In truth, echoes of many different strains of the
American literary tradition – Southern Gothic, slave narratives, the
macabre tales of the supernatural– can be traced in the pages of
Beloved.
Not everyone has bought into the canonical status of this work.
Stanley Crouch has argued that Morrison’s writing is too often
interrupted by “maudlin ideological commercials” and that Beloved
“reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of
the miniseries.” Crouch’s comments are (as so often with this critic)
thought-provoking, and deserve to be part of the on-going debate
and discussion surrounding this novel. On the other hand, trying to
purge melodramatic and ideological elements from a book of this
sort would be like trying to get the bloodshed out of a war novel, or
the fight scenes out of a Jackie Chan movie. One suspects that these
very elements have contributed in no small part to the success and
appeal of this author.
In the final analysis, the importance of this book is no longer a
matter of good or bad writing, and perhaps never was. For twenty-
somethings and thirty-somethings, this is the book that spurred
them into dialogues on race and gender and other thorny issues that
still haunt our national debate just as the ghost of Beloved haunts
Morrison’s novel. As such, this book will continue to loom large
over current day American fiction. And it is testimony to the
strength of the “canon” that it can (once again) make room for such
an anti-canonical work, and even give it a prized place at the head of
the table.
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
No novel of recent years has been more honored than Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988,
and was a major reason for Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in
literature five years later – a distinction all
the more striking when once considers that
only three other native-born US writers
earned this prestigious award during the
second half of the 20th Century. More
recently, Beloved trounced the competition
in The New York Times survey of authors
and critics to determine the best book of
American fiction during the last twenty-five
years.
But if the Nobel judges love Morrison,
college professors love her even more. The
Toni Morrison Society lists some 150 dissertations on the author,
and enough academic articles to keep a graduate student in the
library for years. I can’t imagine another novel of recent years
assigned by more teachers in more classrooms. Do a Google search
on “Beloved” and “syllabus,” and take a look yourself. Beloved is
that rarity among contemporary novels: it was selling by the
truckload even before Oprah gave it her stamp of approval.
Hence, one might assume that Beloved is the most canonical of
modern novels, if not the foundation of the New Canon. Yet there is
some heavy irony here, since Beloved might also be the first book
picked for The Anti-Canon, the novels that upset the applecart of
traditional literary canonization. As one commentator has noted,
Toni Morrison is the Living Black Female to counter the Dead White
Males who have long dominated literary studies.
Beloved also challenges the ‘old school’ standards by which novels
have been evaluated –- based on factors such as poetic writing,
creative use of language, metaphor, etc. Yes, you can find these
elements in Beloved, but they are a little beside the point. Morrison
herself has admitted to getting “annoyed at people who said there
were poetic things in my writing.” In short, this novel goes hand-in-
hand with post-colonial, post-patriarchal, post-Eurocentric
attempts to restructure not just the priorities of fiction, but also the
ways and means by which fiction is assessed and appreciated.
Of course, the language of Beloved is poetic. Sometimes it is
animated with the timeless force of myth and folklore; at other
points it stretches out in longer phrases that circle in on a subject
with Faulknerian indirection. Some of my favorite passages take on
a sweeping Biblical tone. This final comparison is an apt one. The
King James Bible is also poetic, but if you mentioned that to the
most devoted fans of the Good Book, they would say that the poetry
is a little beside the point.
For the most part -- as the dissertations and articles makes clear --
Morrison’s readers look to her fiction primarily for the many ways
in which it grapples with the issues of race, gender, sexuality and
power. Morrison infuses each of these factors, moreover, with
several layers of history, not just the antebellum and postbellum
time periods in which Beloved is set, but also the earlier history
raised in the book’s epigraph “Sixty Million and more,” referring to
the black Africans who died in the Middle Passage. This past haunts
the story, in a novel in which there are many hauntings, many ghosts
hovering on the margins or moving into center stage.
All of these factors are set in play through the character Sethe, the
protagonist of Beloved, a black woman of extraordinary power. She
is the “one who never looked away,” as her daughter Denver
describes her at one point in the book, and Sethe’s fierce
independence is the catalyst that sets off key elements in the
narrative. Sethe nearly dies in her attempt to escape to freedom
from the Kentucky plantation incongruously named Sweet Home,
and join other members of her family in Ohio. The plot hinges on
decisions she feels compelled to make, above all on how much she is
willing to sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also
to prevent her children from falling under the yoke of forced
servitude.
Morrison’s narrative is enriched by the roundabout way in which
she unfolds this tale. The novelist once described to an interviewer
her fascination with the “moments of withheld, partial or
disinformation” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and to some
extent her storytelling here is similarly indirect. The central tragedy
of Beloved is hinted at almost from the novel’s start, but only in the
sketchiest manner. Gradually Morrison circles in on the key
elements of her plot, as a vulture circles on its prey, and with a
tension that is heightened by the non-linear structure of her account.
Morrison adds another twist by mixing magical and realistic
elements into her story. As a result, some readers have tried to link
her writing to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet
you could also look at Beloved as a post-colonial Turn of the Screw,
only here the “extra turn” of the screw is a much larger haunting that
echoes down the generations – so much so that, as Sethe sees it,
nothing ever dies, and the future is often “a matter of keeping the
past at bay.” In truth, echoes of many different strains of the
American literary tradition – Southern Gothic, slave narratives, the
macabre tales of the supernatural– can be traced in the pages of
Beloved.
Not everyone has bought into the canonical status of this work.
Stanley Crouch has argued that Morrison’s writing is too often
interrupted by “maudlin ideological commercials” and that Beloved
“reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of
the miniseries.” Crouch’s comments are (as so often with this critic)
thought-provoking, and deserve to be part of the on-going debate
and discussion surrounding this novel. On the other hand, trying to
purge melodramatic and ideological elements from a book of this
sort would be like trying to get the bloodshed out of a war novel, or
the fight scenes out of a Jackie Chan movie. One suspects that these
very elements have contributed in no small part to the success and
appeal of this author.
In the final analysis, the importance of this book is no longer a
matter of good or bad writing, and perhaps never was. For twenty-
somethings and thirty-somethings, this is the book that spurred
them into dialogues on race and gender and other thorny issues that
still haunt our national debate just as the ghost of Beloved haunts
Morrison’s novel. As such, this book will continue to loom large
over current day American fiction. And it is testimony to the
strength of the “canon” that it can (once again) make room for such
an anti-canonical work, and even give it a prized place at the head of
the table.
The New Canon focuses on
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time.
In this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews
Beloved by Toni Morrison.
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time.
In this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews
Beloved by Toni Morrison.
| The New Canon |
| The Best in Fiction Since 1985 |
The New Canon
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.