With this book, I feel like I have more questions than answers.\u00a0 But, who knows, maybe I can still offer some insight through my line of questioning.\u00a0 I agree with the previous post that\u00a0Morrison’s\u00a0“Beloved” seems out of character compared to the other \u00a0“postmodern” novels we’ve read.\u00a0 I think the fact that the\u00a0book gives us an altered, unexpected view on a certain historical period is the main reason for labeling it postmodern.\u00a0 However, there is a connection I made with this text and another postmodern text.\u00a0 Like the character\u00a0Beloved in Morrison’s text, Don DeLillo also uses a ghostly figure\u00a0to focus his novella “The Body Artist.”\u00a0 When I first read DeLillo’s book I was puzzled by the ghost.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With Morrison, the ghost makes more sense.\u00a0 Ghosts are often linked with history because they can exist outside of time.\u00a0 Also, the concept of “haunting” works well as a link for the guilty conscience.\u00a0 Okay, so maybe it works for Morrison, but I still don’t quite understand the link between ghosts and postmodernism.<\/p>\n
On the first day of class, someone said “All I know about postmodernism is that it doesn’t work with religion.”\u00a0 It seems like most of the postmodern books we’ve read are working against any kind of ontology.\u00a0 So why use ghosts?\u00a0 Don’t ghosts represent a higher power, someone in control of things we don’t understand?\u00a0 Can we separate ghosts from the idea of religion?\u00a0 Morrison does not attempt to separate ghosts from religion, but DeLillo does.\u00a0 DeLillo’s seperation\u00a0struck me as somewhat jarring, where Morrison’s connection seems more natural.\u00a0Morrison calls attention to the link between religion and ghostsby deliberately making Baby Suggs a preacher.\u00a0 When Sethe visits the holy ground where Suggs used to preach, she finds herself choked by Beloved’s ghost.<\/p>\n
What I wonder about is the way this all plays out.\u00a0 Baby Suggs status as a gifted preacher seems to make the other town folk jealous.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 After that, Baby Suggs stops preaching and appears to stop believing in a god.\u00a0 By the end of the story, both god and Beloved’s ghost\u00a0have disappeared as if\u00a0they were never really there.\u00a0 The way these events play out makes me think that Morrison wants ontological views to be seen as a negative force within the text.\u00a0 Religion and the idea of the afterlife only cause problems in the book,\u00a0never solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With this book, I feel like I have more questions than answers.\u00a0 But, who knows, maybe I can still offer some insight through my line of questioning.\u00a0 I agree with the previous post that\u00a0Morrison’s\u00a0“Beloved” seems out of character compared to the other \u00a0“postmodern” novels we’ve read.\u00a0 I think the fact that the\u00a0book gives us an … Continue reading Ghosts and Postmodernism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[56,58,27,57],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-10-beloved","tag-beloved","tag-ghost","tag-morrison","tag-postmodernism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":479,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions\/479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}