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 The 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.