Finding Threads of the Post-Modern in Beloved

NB: Unfortunately I've got a different edition from the standard edition we've been using in class, I know that the pages on mine tend to be about 20 pages lower than the one cited in class. Also, I'm going to be working with the chapter that starts with Paul D saying "That ain't her mouth."

As we've been reading Beloved I feel like I've noticed something, in general, that's quite different from the other novels we've read so far. Namely, it seems that this novel is less explicitly concerned with the post-modern concepts we saw especially in Pynchon, but also quiet powerfully in DeLillo and Yamashita. This isn't to say that those ideas aren't present in the novel, I simply feel that they are less clearly drawn out than the obvious plays at simulacra and simulation, for instance, in The Crying of Lot 49. I'm not sure why that exactly is the case, and that's not really important. However, I remember we noted early in our reading of the novel that someone (or maybe several people) had said this is the best novel of the 20th century, and I might tend to agree (or at least the best one I've read), precisely because it manages to deal with the concerns of post-modernism, while also engaging with so many other narratives and ideas in a way that is not as obtrusive as the other writers we've read so far.

All the above, however, leads me to the fact that though it's not as rampant as in the other novels, I think Beloved is after all significantly more concerned with the ideas in post-modernism (particularly, as I would like to point out, simulacra the hyperreal) that I had previously though.

The chapter where Stamp Paid reveals (or attempts to reveal) Sethe's past to Paul D really brings this out for me. Even from the first sentence, the section is freighted with double meaning having to do with the hyperreal. When Paul D says "That ain't her mouth" he of course is attempting to navigate a type of denial that Sethe could do such a thing, but he's also calling our attention to something important: that image of Sethe's mouth in the newspaper quite literally isn't her mouth, it's a representation. More than that, it's a representation already associated with an ideology that is separate from his own. He notes to himself that if a black woman was written about in a white newspaper (as this one was) it wouldn't be anything good, but would rather have to be something that "whitepeople would find interesting" (156). Therefore, this representation of Sethe is not only a representation, but also one guided by an ideology of selection. This renders it fully separate from the actual Sethe, and for some time actually makes that Sethe inaccessible to Paul D (causing him ultimately to stop living with her).

So, then, it seems to me that perhaps part of Morrison's project in Beloved, to the extent that we can talk about the "projects" of authors of fiction, seems to be some sort of moving away of these layers of simulation that have accrued not only over characters within the novel, but also those layers that have built up over the years around the very subjects of slavery themselves. We talked about this a little in class the other day when we spoke about the idea of a master narrative around African American women in general and with respect to slavery in particular. I think that Morrison might be working not only to trouble these master narratives, but also to expose them as, in general, flatly fictional.