With this book, I feel like I have more questions than answers. But, who knows, maybe I can still offer some insight through my line of questioning. I agree with the previous post that Morrison’s “Beloved” seems out of character compared to the other “postmodern” novels we’ve read. I think the fact that the book gives us an altered, unexpected view on a certain historical period is the main reason for labeling it postmodern. However, there is a connection I made with this text and another postmodern text. Like the character Beloved in Morrison’s text, Don DeLillo also uses a ghostly figure to focus his novella “The Body Artist.” When I first read DeLillo’s book I was puzzled by the ghost. I didn’t see how it fit with the postmodern agenda, or why he found the ghost to be a productive tool to convey his message. With Morrison, the ghost makes more sense. Ghosts are often linked with history because they can exist outside of time. Also, the concept of “haunting” works well as a link for the guilty conscience. Okay, so maybe it works for Morrison, but I still don’t quite understand the link between ghosts and postmodernism.
On the first day of class, someone said “All I know about postmodernism is that it doesn’t work with religion.” It seems like most of the postmodern books we’ve read are working against any kind of ontology. So why use ghosts? Don’t ghosts represent a higher power, someone in control of things we don’t understand? Can we separate ghosts from the idea of religion? Morrison does not attempt to separate ghosts from religion, but DeLillo does. DeLillo’s seperation struck me as somewhat jarring, where Morrison’s connection seems more natural. Morrison calls attention to the link between religion and ghostsby deliberately making Baby Suggs a preacher. When Sethe visits the holy ground where Suggs used to preach, she finds herself choked by Beloved’s ghost.
What I wonder about is the way this all plays out. Baby Suggs status as a gifted preacher seems to make the other town folk jealous. Somewhere in the text (I could not find the exact page) a character posits the idea that the town folk fail to warn Sethe about the police because of their jealousy of Baby Suggs ability to talk to god. After that, Baby Suggs stops preaching and appears to stop believing in a god. By the end of the story, both god and Beloved’s ghost have disappeared as if they were never really there. The way these events play out makes me think that Morrison wants ontological views to be seen as a negative force within the text. Religion and the idea of the afterlife only cause problems in the book, never solutions.