Beyond Great

Beloved  a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  324 pp.  $16.00. *****

I’ve been asking myself lately what literary greatness is, and how it comes about.  Does the artist actually see and understand more than the rest of us, or does she just put it into words better?  Back in the old days we talked about writers having talent, other writers having genius, as if that were another thing altogether.  But those are just words.  What do they mean?

I’ve said that I think Toni Morrison was a great writer from the start, all her novels are great in some way, but Beloved is at another level.  If she had not written this novel she probably wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize, and wouldn’t have the high standing she occupies.  But the question “How did she do this?” is utterly stupefying to me.  It’s like confronting the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or that whole book.  As a jazz musician once said about Louis Armstrong, “You just wonder where a guy like that came from.”

There’s also the sheer nerve involved, the possibility that the world would find it laughable, or offensive.  We look back now and say that could never be true, but her daring impresses me as much as anything else.  Again, as Faulkner said when his third novel, Sartoris, had failed and he was about to start The Sound and the Fury, he would just write it and be damned.

In the documentary about Morrison, Oprah Winfrey claims that she read Beloved in a single day, starting in the morning and finishing that evening.  I don’t see how she could take it.  As great as Beloved is, and as magnificent the language, it was difficult to pick up every night.  It was too heavy, too painful.  Once I got into it every evening the language carried me away.  But that reluctance never left.

On one level, Beloved is a ghost story.  In 1873, a house in Cincinnati is haunted by a spirit.  The woman who lives there, Sethe, is a former slave, and her daughter Denver is so traumatized by the situation that she never leaves the house, and is terribly shy and withdrawn.  Her brothers, twins named Howard and Buglar, have already left, at the age of 13, and Sethe’s mother in law, a preacher named Baby Suggs, has died.  A friend of Sethe’s from her past named Paul D, a man who knew her when they were both slaves, comes to visit, and in the process of becoming Sethe’s lover—something he had dreamed of in the old days—he rids the house of the spirit, and brings the place back to reality.

But then one day a young woman appears—as we see her in the novel, she emerges from a lake—and waits for the family.  She’s the age Sethe’s other daughter would have been if she hadn’t died.  She says her name is Beloved.  That’s the word on the dead daughter’s tombstone.

This isn’t a spirit.  She’s not a hallucination.  She’s a flesh and blood human being who walked out of a lake.

It’s like an act of resurrection.  It’s like Jesus emerging from the tomb.

There is so much in the novel that is startling, even to get to this point in the plot, that it’s hard to remember it all.  Paul D and Sethe had been slaves at a small plantation called Sweet Farm where the owners were relatively benevolent.  Still, the young men, including Paul D—there were five in all—had no sexual outlet whatsoever, so they had sex with barnyard animals until the teenage Sethe, a new arrival, made her choice.  When the owner of the farm died, his wife brought in another man to oversee the place, and he was not nearly as benevolent as his predecessor.  The fact is that all of these slaves, young vibrant people, were owned by other human beings.  One slave who found freedom—it may have been Paul D—was startled when he woke up one morning and realized he could do whatever he wanted to.  No one was prescribing his actions.

That seems to be the bottom line of slavery, apart from all the dreadful abuses we’ve read about.  Your life was not your own.

Sethe eventually tells Paul the truth, far into the novel.  The two of them had both been part of a plot for all the slaves to escape Sweet Home, and also perhaps other plantations, a plan that partly succeeded and partly went awry.  Sethe’s husband, for instance, the father of her children, didn’t make it.  But when they had settled in Ohio, and the overseer came looking for her, Sethe decided to kill her children rather than let them be taken back into slavery.  She wanted them to be in a place where they were safe, and she regarded the realm of death as a safe place.  She had time to kill only one before a man in the community stopped her.  Denver was about to being killed.  The two boys saw the killing.  The overseer decided he didn’t want to take Sethe and her children back if they were this far gone.  So Sethe was left with her children, while the child she killed haunted her house, then returned as a person.

All of Morrison’s books—as she explains in the documentary—focus on the African American experience, but do not try to explain or justify it to white people.  This novel goes to the heart of that experience, the basis of all the injustice.  In that way it is the foundation for her work, though she didn’t write it unto well into her career.

Americans are in the process, the never-ending process, of trying to understand the issue of race.  It seems that the deeper we get into it, the more there is to understand.  There’s something about fiction that is beyond explanation: it takes us into the experience of other human beings.  Toni Morrison has an extraordinary ability to re-create the totality of the African American experience, though she has only been alive for a small part of it.  That is the greatness of a writer, that she is able to imaginatively absorb experience beyond her own and re-create it for the rest of us.  It’s an enormous gift.

Beloved is its finest product.