Beloved: General

Question 1

In ‘The Salon Interview’, Toni Morrison says she doesn’t write any certain ‘ist’ novels - ie. ‘feminist’ - what does she say that she strives towards?

Answer 1

“leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity”

Question 2

When was Beloved published?

Answer 2

1987 - set after the American Civil War (1861–1865)

Question 3

Who is the story based on?

Answer 3

ex-slave Margaret Garner

Question 4

How does Morrison’s story work as an act of revision?

Answer 4

• she desires to “invent her life” external to the dominant condemnatory discourses around her act of infanticide
• might call these the frameworks of power/ authority

Question 5

When did metafiction emerge?

Answer 5

1960s

Question 6

Why does Sethe not directly confront her own trauma?

Answer 6

• E. Priya: she attempts to erase the trauma “from the psyche in order for the psyche to cope”

Question 7

What is the Lockean formulation of personal identity?

Answer 7

• that the “basis of personal identity” is derived from a “unity of consciousness”
• basically states that if the individual has memories of their previous state of being then it confirms that they have retained the same consciousness and are thus the ‘same person’ even if the body changes

Question 8

What does Paul D struggle with according to Thomas M. Linehan?

Answer 8

• struggles to reconcile that “a man or woman preserves the same psychological identity in both cases, slave or free”
• because this forces Sethe into a spiral of indefatigable guilt

Question 9

How does Paul D reconcile his struggle with the Lockean formulation of personal identity?

Answer 9

• comes to see that the “‘I’ during and after slavery should be considered different entities”
• even if Sethe retains the unity of consciousness across her memory - this does not mean that she maintains the same personal identity because the psychological trauma of slavery provokes a suspension of the normal conditions of her personal identity

Question 10

How could Beloved be considered a work of historiographic metafiction?

Answer 10

Morrison reassesses the artificiality of historical discourse

Question 11

Who had the power to define?

Answer 11

“definition belonged to the definers - not the defined”

Question 12

After WW2, the mass media became the dominant mode of mimetic representation - in reaction, the postmodern metafictional novel relinquishes the representation of the real to that media and turns to the philosophical and ethical questions of what representation essentially is - how is this reflected in Beloved?

Answer 12

• questions the very basis of moral law

- asks us instead to empathise with the application of situational ethics

Question 13

What became unhinged in American authors post-1945?

Answer 13

• faith in mimesis and what a “reality” unmediated by images, language, and ideology could be

Question 14

Most people might resist the label of ‘black writer’ but Morrison embraces it - what did she say?

Answer 14

“I’m writing for black people”

Question 15

Who came up with ‘historiographic metafiction’?

Answer 15

Linda Hutcheon

Question 16

Postmodernist texts don’t just return to the past - what do they do?

Answer 16

• not just a nostalgic return to the past but a “critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society”

Question 17

What is the contradiction of historiographic metafiction?

Answer 17

• that it must work within the framework of history while subverting/ questioning it

Question 18

How does postmodernism differentiate between ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’?

Answer 18

• ‘difference’ is not the same as ‘otherness’ - identifies that postmodernist culture contradicts dominant/ liberal humanist culture because its version of ‘difference’ is aways multiple and provisional

Question 19

What is the difference between modernism and postmodernism in relation to metanarratives?

Answer 19

• modernists were considered humanistic, and they held a paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values while also realising the impossibility of this
  (sincerity)
• postmodernism refuses to appeal to such structure/meta-narrative such as art or myth that was consolatory for modernists
  (cynicism)

Question 20

What is the purpose of historiographic metafiction?

Answer 20

to demonstrate that “our culture is not really the homogenous monolith (male, white, Western) that we might have assumed”

Question 21

How does Morrison ‘transpose’ Garner?

Answer 21

• transposes Garner into a fictional realm in which her voice can be foregrounded and “a little ambiguity” improves upon historical dogma

Question 22

Why does Morrison utilise Derrida?

Answer 22

• because the message becomes that that to decentralise the stabilising signifier, the potentially marginalised signified can inhabit new meanings