Beloved through the Postmodern Lens

I, like the posts underneath me, had trouble locating the “postmodernism” in this text. In fact, when glancing over the reading list for this course before the start of the semester, I remember seeing Beloved on there and, although I hadn’t read it, I knew enough to be confused as per how it was postmodern. I thought this would be cleared up when reading it, however, but for a few points, I can’t see how this book is the same as say, House of Leaves or The Crying of Lot 49. I went back to the Harvey article from a few weeks ago to review that list he gave insofar as differences between postmodernism and modernism to see what I could dig up or to help with my understanding of establishing this book as indeed postmodern. 

I kind of found a few things that maybe the class can consider. For instance, he lists “Interpretation” under modernism and then “against interpretation or misreading” under postmodernism. So, of course this is clearly evident in a book like House of Leaves which is “against interpretation” because it interprets itself. But how might we think of this in relation to Beloved? I was thinking, possibly, that Beloved herself might fall under the “against interpretation/misreading” due to the fact that this unexplainable phenomena occurs as possible resurrection but there are also existing sources in the book that might propel the interpretation elsewhere… does this make sense? For instance, it is easy to “misread” or misinterpret” Beloved because she can be many things–a ghost, a resurrected being of her dead daughter (thus, the flesh form of the ghost), or the actual daughter (as made a possibility by I think Stamp Paid when he mentions to Paul at the church that there was a girl who had been held captive for the last eighteen years and had just escaped from her tormentor a few weeks before… or something). So, because the way the book handles Beloved, we might see what Harvey distinguished as the one of the difference between modern and postmodern… maybe… or it could simply be something open to a lot of interpretation and not really against interpretation…

Hmmm, on that same note, he mentions “paranoia” under modernism and “schizophrenia” under postmodernism. I was looking at the end of the book, in particular, relating to schizophrenia or the joining of the women. This might be too literal of a stretch here (or maybe just a stretch, literal or otherwise), but there is a certain schizophrenia in the characters–perhaps Harvey was writing more about the writing of a postmodern text as being schizophrenic rather than the content therein as schizophrenic (as opposed to paranoia), but I thought I’d throw that out there for the class.

I’m not sure if Harvey helped or hurt me in my understanding. I looked at Davis too, of course, since she talks about this, but she left me with more questions than answers (which is why I went back to Harvey). For instance, Davis even states that she is suspicious of reading Morrison’s fiction through the lens of postmodernism, poststructuralism, or “white” academic theory… (243) but later states that we should be wary of calling postmodernism a “white phenomenon” (244). She links the lives of black people with postmodernism by way of a complex historical relationship between black protest and liberal academic discourse but doesn’t really say how, specifically. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand the connection–what difference, for instance, does color make when it comes to academic discourse? I mean, I get the part where Davis talks about Morrison “deconstructing and reconstructing” history so as to “tap the well of the African-American presence,” and I know we talked about this on the first day of class–about postmodernism rewriting history–but I honestly don’t see how this book, Beloved, does this. So, it’s not that I don’t understand what Davis is saying, I just don’t understand it in relation to the text… you know what I mean? Sure, Morrison is “filling a gap,” or writing about people that mainstream historians have neglected to write about, but for that matter, so did Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States. There, he wrote about the marginalized voices and people who, also, “mainstream historians” have neglected in textbooks. So, is Zinn’s book “postmodern?”

I think that’s it… if someone can explain to me how the retelling of marginalized history in Zinn’s book is not postmodern but the retelling of marginalized history in Beloved is postmodern, that might help in my confusion….

I really really enjoyed this book; I just feel like I’m missing something when trying to read it through a postmodern lens. Oh, I wanted to talk about the tree/back too… if someone else can write on that, that would be awesome–in the very beginning of the book, I thought “postmodern” at the mention of this tree sprouting out of her back but can’t explain why and now am not sure what the point of that was (metaphor?)…

Oh, and geez, this post is getting long… but what did everyone think about Davis and her connection with the newspapers in the book as example of the gap between representation and reality? Did anyone pick up on this and think of Simulations? And might this lead us to a better lens through which to see this text as postmodern? Or, was this example as much a stretch as my Beloved as “against interpretation” reasoning?