“‘Who Janey tell him the naked woman was?’ ‘Told him she didn’t see none.’ ‘You believe they saw it?’ ‘Well, they saw something.'” – Paul D and Stamp Paid, ‘Beloved’
Note: minor spoilers for Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, if you consider “briefly discussing the premise of the book” spoilers.
On a recent The Line Break podcast—maybe this one or possibly this one, listen to them both and let me know—Bob and I lamented how there isn’t more middlebrow literary criticism. Sometimes I wanna read more than a book review, but I never want to read professorial, university-level criticism someone wrote to fill their “publish work to keep your faculty position” quota. Honestly, I kinda want to read, like, a Defector or The Ringer article. But, like, about a novel or poetry collection I just read.
When I finish a movie or TV show, there’s a whole Al Gore’s Internet at my fingertips, full of 1,500-word takes I can casually consume that deepen my understanding of the media I just casually consumed. Books need more of this. It’s possible I’m not reading the right places, if you know of anything like what I’m describing, send it my way.
Anyway, I was looking for some Beloved content, craving a way to experience the book as communally as I would if, say, I’d just left the movie theatre with like six friends. I found my way to Crash Course, the Green Bros-created series designed to help high schoolers cheat on AP exams be a fun, 10-minute exploration of a topic. I absolutely adore Crash Course, but that’s a blog for another time. Today, we’re talking ghosts.
What struck me is John Green’s “Me From The Past” character being confused about whether Beloved is a real ghost or not. Present-tense Green cringes, tries to pull his own eyeballs out of his sockets, and chides Me From The Past for always asking the least interesting questions about books. He’s right, too. Whether or not Beloved is a real ghost absolutely does not matter and is wholly uninteresting. People get hung up on it, though.
Wikipedia tells me there’s actual, real scholarly debate over this. Some “reviewers” “faulted” Beloved as “a confusing ghost story.” The heroic Elizabeth B. House, pulling up like Nick Young from 25 feet, offered a theory that Beloved is a story of two cases of mistaken identity, where Beloved is another runaway who misses her parents and finds Sethe, who misses her daughter, and the two form a parasitic stand-in family. Idk, I didn’t do any research beyond the Wikipedia, because this sort of pedantry and literary fan theorizing is boring.
You know what’s not boring? The fact that in 1812 or 1820ish, Francisco Goya somehow drew a perfect portrait of college-era Chris trying to make a go of it as a singer-songwriter. He even knew I was going to a Jesuit university.
It doesn’t matter if the ghosts are real. One of the core tenets of Magical Realism is that there’s an empirical explanation for what’s happening and a more-real-seeming non-empirical explanation. Escaped orphaned sex slave or supernatural incarnation of Sethe’s murdered baby? No matter what, Beloved is affecting the lives of the residents of 124. Personally, I prefer to take characters at their word. Sethe, Denver, and Paul D are all unreliable narrators in their own way. That doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing a haunting. Even if you were to roll up on 124 (as Stamp Paid keep trying to) and not see anyone besides Sethe and Denver, that doesn’t mean a ghost isn’t there.
It feels silly and high schoolish to be like “don’t forget to read for metaphor.” It’s also entirely possible that I am just attuned to a way of reading that’s out of step with a lot of people. Certainly isn’t the first time I’ve been the weirdo who doesn’t understand how the world works. But you’re already reading a work of fiction, why not trust the text to take you on a journey and not worry about it too much?
This came up back in undergrad reading 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Granddaddy Of Them All Magical Realism novel which also has a Crash Course video (two, in fact). Some scholar whose name I’m not looking up (already refuted his ass in an ENGL 395 paper) said Gabo’s depiction of United Fruit’s Banana Massacre did a disservice to victims. In the novel, the body count’s higher than the actual probable figure in the 1928 event. Here’s the thing: “actual probable figure” is an accurate description, because nobody believes what was reported. So Gabo wrote what it felt like, to great effect.
Besides that, the number doesn’t matter. Workers were striking for the barest minimum of human condition were killed. Novels don’t have to be facts, novels have to be honest. Same with Beloved. Whether or not she’s a ghost doesn’t matter, because the legacy of slavery still honestly haunts the world. How that haunting is perceived and experienced varies from person to person, but make no mistake: a haunting is happening.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris