I had to read the first page of Toni Morrison's Beloved about four times before I thought I understood it well enough to go on to page two.* I had to read the first three pages about seven times before I let myself go onto to page four. I kept going over her pages, virtually memorizing every word of Beloved's opening because something told me "This is very important," while something else about it, perhaps not just one thing but a set of distraction, was constantly throwing me off balance. I was continually grasping to understand the story, as I read it. And as I read it I was constantly becoming fascinated and distracted by some bright shiny object, a jewel of language or of something else I had not noticed before that suddenly seemed irresistible.
Perhaps as a reader of both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved that's how I would explain why it took me so long to read both works. For example, in the middle of a long paragraph that uses the word "he" more than once I would forget which character the author was referring to. That is typical of what was happening as I read and reread the opening of Toni Morrison's Beloved.
Who is Toni Morrison? She is a Nobel-prize winning American author. What is Beloved? Its Toni Morrison's fifth novel, published in 1987. Beloved is now considered to be one of American's best-loved novels. (It's official place on America's best-loved novels is #60 out of the top one hundred. For more information Google: PBS Great American Read.) Morrison is the only living American Nobel laureate. She is one of those extremely rare authors both critically and popularly acclaimed. Her novels are required reading in high schools and universities across the country. In the edition of Beloved I'm reading, the novel was preceded by three pages of stellar blurbs from publications' reviews from every echelon and region of our country. Without question Beloved is universally beloved. Then why did I struggle, and why do I continue to struggle to appreciate her work?
How about this? I'm stubborn.
By the way, it's not until page five that we learn why the house is haunted: A baby girl was murdered there. Her mother, Sethe, "had forgotten the soul of her baby girl." "Not only did she (Sethe) have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut, but her knees were as wide open as the grave, more pulsing than the baby blood that soaked her (Sethe's) fingers like oil." It's the murdered baby that haunts the house. We don't learn until later why the mother murdered her newborn baby.
Don't worry. I won't tell.
There's something else very important I think we all expect to learn or at least have hinted at on page one of any novel, and that is how time passes in that novel. In Beloved the nature of time isn't openly discussed until page 35, but by the way time is handled it's apparent in the opening pages. Characters reported to have died come back to life and continue living. That tripped me up a few times. Then we learn on page 35, in a dialogue between Sethe and Amy (a white lady who is a positive, helping influence in the story):
"I was talking about time. It's so hard or me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there…"
"Can other people see it?" asked Denver.
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes…"
What are we taught about the nature of time in Beloved? The same things keep happening over and over again. They never end. They never go away. And they never stop happening. By the way that is exactly the nature of time in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I love the inventiveness of Morrison's language: "I used to think it was my rememory."
Everything is continually being remembered over and over again; it's being "rememoried."
It's not surprising critics say Toni Morrison's Beloved owes a tremendous debt to Garbriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude we find the flowering of "magical realism." And what is magical realism? Let's put it this way: A house that has it in for its occupants is a perfect example. A house sending some people away while not allowing others to leave? A period of history refusing to ever end? A period of time in a sense keeping those living through it its prisoner? It's not that dissimilar from what we see in Beloved. The idea of the events of history continually repeating themselves? The idea that a person's life can simply live itself out over and over in succeeding generations? That's certainly the plot of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it has that approach to time in common with Beloved.
I'll cut to the chase: Why do Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude fascinate me as much as they do? Because the characters in both novels display and the way both novels are written also happen to display many of the chronic effects that emotional trauma has on people. The feeling that one is enslaved to time is perfect for a novel like Beloved that is attempting to come to terms with the long-term after-effects of slavery in America down through history.
Emotional trauma: Now that's a subject that interests me; it's the subject of my novel, Charging the Jaguar. But more about that later.
Suffice it to say, for now: Don't just sit down to read Beloved (like I did) without preparing yourself to read it. Consider using a reader's guide. Today I purchased one on my Kindle for $2.99: A Study Guide for Toni Morrison's Beloved (Novels for Students). Reading it first would have been far easier than memorizing the opening of a novel word for word. But maybe in certain ways I'm better off for having struggled as I did. I'll let you know.
*Read for yourself what we have on the first page of Toni Morrison's Beloved. I copied it verbatim below:
"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Seth and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old, as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Sugs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.
"Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realized that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road."
Okay. That's page one.
Do we encounter a setting here? Yes, we do. I guess. It's a house in Cincinnati, Ohio, located at 124 Bluestone Road in 1873 although the address wasn't officially established until much later.
Do we encounter characters? Not in the conventional sense, but we're told about the existence of Baby Suggs, the grandmother; Sethe, her daughter, and Denver who is Sethe's daughter. We're told about two "boys" Howard and Buglar. But they're not really characters; they're just names on a page. We're told they're so spooked by weird goings on in the house that they leave.Do we encounter a scene? I supposed we do: A scene of two sons being driven out from what is obviously a haunted house. By the way, no explanation is given as to why Baby Suggs and her daughter, Sethe, remain in the haunted house, or why Baby Suggs wasn't wondering why it took Sethe much longer than the two boys to realize the house was haunted, and to leave. It looks like the rules boys and men are expected to follow in this world Toni Morrison is describing to us are very different from the rules girls and women are expected to follow. In that respect, it's not that dissimilar from real life, I suppose.
Do we encounter the evanescent beginnings of a story? Yes, in a rudimentary sense.
I would argue that the haunted house itself triples as the setting, the scene and the only real character on page one of Beloved. The house is spiteful. It has a personality. The people are characters in name only. They only react in that they leave or don't leave depending on whether they're males or females.
Everything described happens inside the house; the setting is obviously the house. The scene, for example, of the two boys leaving the house, also is the house; the house drives them out.
Why am I going through this textual analysis? Am I looking for sympathy because I chose to read page one so many times before going on to page two? No.
I felt it necessary to read the opening of this novel so many times because I've had horrible results in the past when I would just go on and read more of a work before I truly understood the opening. And I wanted to understand it inside out and outside in. It's that important to me.
