Beloved Critical Commentary

>>Article Used: The Story Must Go On: The Fantastic, narration, and Intertextuality In Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz, by Martha J. Cutter(Of course, I'll really only be focusing on the points about Beloved, since we haven't read her other novel, Jazz. I've heard it's excellent, though) 

Beloved in an exceedingly complicated novel. No one can really agree if Beloved was truly a ghost, if she was a figment of everyone' imagination, of if she was just some bad luck woman who really did exist, who really did cause all of that harm at 124. The scholarly essay talks about the idea of metatextual reading, how the reader and Sethe's viewpoints become in in the same, and how that can make it hard to separate from metatextual reading.

Metatextual reading itself is a crazy topic. It's the idea that one text can critique or comment on another through it's writing. The way this comes across is how the story can inspire the reader to seek out what made it so fantastic in the first place(Fantastic here is referring to the genre, not the adjective- "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". [Cutter, 2]) It's hard to deny this is true. Beloved leaves us with a prolonged feeling of something eerie, particularly when it comes to Beloved herself- was she a ghost? She had to be. "According to Todorov's definition, Beloved is an almost perfect fantastic narrative. However, some of its rhetorical strategies cause ti to seem more marvelous than fantastic. More specifically, its narration so closely entangles the characters' point s fo view with the point of view with 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 returning ghost of Sethe's deceased, crawling already? baby." (Cutter 3)That's when our ideas start to bleed over into our real world experiences; Is that actually a man I see in the corner of my vision, or is it just a tree? it has to be some kind of ghost, right? We are predisposed to the idea of the ghostly interference in our own lives because of what we've seen in Beloved. That hesitation between rationality and the supernatural is considered "the realm of fantastic".

By implanting the idea of the fantastic hesitation in our minds, Beloved becomes a metatextual reading on the real world itself- are we really so much different from Sethe now that we're experiencing the same ghostly occurrences? By the time we reread Beloved itself, it becomes impossible to make that separation- we are now stuck in the metatextual viewpoint. The reader is inexplicably linked with Sethe in their fantastic view on the world, in their second guessing of everything around them. Realistic explanations for events in the novel become harder and harder to believe, because we now have that silent commentary hovering over our heads. "At the end of a fantastic text the confluence 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." (Cutter 3) We can't abandon the newfound view of metatextual commentary, even in our own lives.

All in all, the article was complicated, but ultimately rewarding. I had never thought about the idea of metatextuality before, hell I hadn't even heard of the phrase. but it makes so much sense now that I think about it. Beloved was so spooky because much of it was possible in the real world- how many stories have you heard that include apparitions like the white dress, or a ghost throwing an epic tantrum with someone's furniture, like id did in 124? Beloved is both a commentary on the world we cannot always explain and how we deal with those uncertainties. I agree wholeheartedly with Cutter; once you see the metatextual side, you'll never be able to move past it. that's just one more way Beloved makes itself known to your memory forever, sticking there whether you'd like it or not. So the next time you think you see something over your shoulder, think to yourself- Is that my own Beloved?