Anomalías del extractivismo

Toni Morrison’s Beloved makes clear the imperative of reterritorialization per-haps more poignantly than both Midnight’s Children and Nights at the Circus.

In the former we encountered the horrors of the real, against which the magic

Models of Magical Realism 67

appeared as ineffectual, whereas in the latter, the territorial appeared as a way to resolve the non-relationality of the magic. In Beloved such relational territori-alization is precisely a way the horrors of the real can be faced, but at the expense of the deterritorialization of magic.

Beloved has been repeatedly described in terms by now familiar to us: it is a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fi ction, history and fable, the liter-ary and the oral, and it thus rejects identity as fi xed, critiquing not only racist but also black nationalist notions of black identity.⁵¹ By allowing a multitude of voices and styles to blend without any one taking precedence, the novel rejects the idea of authenticity.⁵² Furthermore, as Maggie Sale states, ‘Not only does Beloved foreground its own construction as history and fi ction, but it asserts that all historical narratives participate in a similar fi ctionalizing’.⁵³ In the face of the atrocities of slavery, an ‘unnatural reality’, the novel reimagines the real to

‘redefi ne history, language, and the purpose of art itself’.⁵⁴ However, the ten-sion between identity and magic we have seen in the novels considered above is also very apparent in Beloved; Peach complains that while the novel favours

‘community, the moral responsibility of individuals to each other, the reclama-tion of tradireclama-tional black values and the importance of the ancestor’, it is also

‘drawn to the dramatic potential of enigma, distances, spaces, dislocation, alien-ation, gaps and ellipses’ that seem to contradict these.⁵⁵ Yet in its ending it is more like Nights at the Circus than Rushdie’s or García Márquez’s novels, as Conner has noticed: ‘In contrast to the spectacular apocalyptic conclusions that characterize so much of late twentieth-century fi ction – one thinks of the conclusions of Gravity’s Rainbow, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Chil-dren – apocalypse in Beloved [. . .] ushers in not annihilation, but renewal’.⁵⁶

Much has been made of the structure of Beloved, which reveals the past in a fragmented manner through the characters’ memories, often in several ver-sions. Certainly there is a more direct polyvocality in Beloved than in One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight’s Children, even Nights at the Circus, but as opposed to Fevvers’s auto-narration in this novel, the voices in Beloved work more like Saleem’s rational narrator in Midnight’s Children. The voices included in Morrison’s novel are more indebted to the ‘classical’ slave narrative than many critics allow, giving the novel the authenticity of accounts by eye-witnesses to and, crucially, victims of the events that they recount.⁵⁷ As readers, while we have to work at it, we can piece together a fairly coherent linear progression of events from the time during slavery at Sweet Home to the present of the frame narrative in post-abolition Cincinnati.

Morrison has indicated that she wants her writing to speak the ‘unspeakable’, and many critics have interpreted the character of Beloved as this unspeakable, thus reading the magic of the novel as a way of articulating horrors that have been repressed. However, Morrison does a much better job at actually just speaking these horrors in the ostensibly realist passages of the character’s reminiscences. Sethe’s memory of her milk being stolen by her new master’s nephews, while he watches and takes notes, and her subsequent fl ogging, or

Paul D’s memory of the utter humiliation suffered by having to wear the bit at Sweet Home, as well as the physical and sexual abuse he experienced as part of a chain-gang in Georgia, and many more such episodes, are striking precisely because of their unfl inching realism. Without these realist episodes, Beloved would not be perceived as such a signifi cant character, for she only attains her ‘identity’ as a repressed memory through her resonance with these realist passages, in particular the horror of Sethe’s murder of her own daughter.

Notably, this, the central passage in the novel, is entirely realist. However, before we consider Beloved, we need to understand the realism of the novel better, for it nevertheless seems to have an extra dimension to it, not present in the other novels discussed so far.

The recollected episodes of slavery and escape often emerge from the involuntary memories of the characters, and the link to Proust has been made on occasion.⁵⁸ Sethe tries hard not to remember her days of slavery, and is often successful: ‘The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard’; but then some-thing will trigger her memory: ‘The plash [sic] of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had fl ung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not want to make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty’.⁵⁹ In Proust and Signs, Deleuze considers the signs of involun-tary memory that the narrator in of À la recherche du temps perdu experiences as part of the ‘apprenticeship of signs,’ as a step towards understanding the signs of art. However, these signs of memory are still only a beginning:

‘Reminiscences in involuntary memory are still of life: of art at the level of life [. . .]. On the contrary art in its essence, the art superior to life, is not based upon involuntary memory’ (PS 55). What the signs of memory do, however, is foreground the difference inherent in the process of art:

The essential thing in involuntary memory is not resemblance, nor even identity, which are merely conditions, but the internalized difference, which becomes immanent. It is in this sense that reminiscence is the analogue of art [. . .]: it takes ‘two differ-ent objects,’ the madeleine with its fl avor, Combray with its qualities of color and temperature; it envelops the one in the other, and makes their relation into something internal. (PS 60)

That is, the signs of involuntary memory introduce a break in the text, by show-ing up the difference between the narration and the narrated, shattershow-ing the illusion of representation. However, reminiscences do not go as far as the signs of art, since they are, says Deleuze, less ‘dematerialized’ and still depend on associations, and are therefore easily reinterpreted ‘objectively’ – as realism – or ‘subjectively’ – as symbols (PS 64). The device of memory thus accounts for Beloved’s ‘self-awareness of history and fi ction as human constructs’,⁶⁰ as it does

Models of Magical Realism 69

in Midnight’s Children, but again we see that such a characteristic is not what defi nes the magic of magical realism.

Indeed, the memories of Sethe and Paul D are reterritorialized within the linear narrative of the story of Beloved, as passages of realism. However, they do seem to have an almost autonomous, physical presence. As Sethe explains to her daughter, Denver, ‘Some things just stay [. . .]. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear.

And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else’ (BD 43). These involun-tary ‘rememories’ are the legacy of slavery, and, as has been often noted, seem to be as real and persistent as the scars on Sethe’s back. They are, we could argue, the remnants of a different regime of signs within the regime of subjec-tifi cation that governs the realism of the novel. Indeed, the frame narrative of the novel is set in a world segmented and ordered like Macondo. At the centre is the family, however small, and the domestic setting, and then the black neighbourhood in Cincinnati, placed the ‘right’ side of the all-important line dividing North and South. The year is 1873 and both the benefi ts and the disap-pointments of abolition are dramatized by the various characters inhabiting this setting. Certainly the third-person matter-of-fact narration of this frame setting establishes the authenticating voice of realism. However, while the voices of the characters remembering their past also speak under the regime of signs of realism, they describe a different kind of regime. Slavery can be seen as part of what Deleuze calls a ‘despotic regime’, as opposed to the State, which is part of the regime of signifi cation (there may have been a State for the white slave-owners, but clearly from the slaves’ perspective there was no sanction of their subjection through reason). In brief, in this regime all signs are sanc-tioned by the despot, all signifi cation imposed from this ‘signifying centre’.

(TP 111–148) Rather than the constant reterritorialization of fl ows that charac-terizes the State, the despotic regime is an extreme territorialization (although it may be very local – applied only to the slave population for example). In Hallward’s terms, it is a system under which individuals are entirely specifi ed.

The racist discourse that underpins the specifi cation of blacks as slaves is dra-matized most explicitly in Beloved by Schoolteacher, the new master of Sweet Home, who has his nephews measure the slaves, writing down their ‘animal’ as well as ‘human’ characteristics. However, the specifi cation of slaves as animals, as childlike, or as inhuman is constant throughout the character’s recollections.

Their memories are part of their extreme territorialization, remnants of the despotic regime erupting in the present. What Beloved emphasizes in the real-ism of these memories is thus identity as specifi ed. The extremity and violence with which it has been specifi ed is clearly an imperative to despecify: and this imperative is akin to the persistence in postmodern literature ‘not only of desire for elimination of domination, inequality and oppression but also of desire for transcendence itself’, as DeKoven points out in her discussion of the novel.⁶¹ In a sense, then, the despecifying magic of Beloved feels more necessary in

Morrison’s novel than it ever did in the others, and the battle between a speci-fi ed identity, a new acceptable identity, and the non-identity of the singular, becomes far more explicitly a matter of extreme importance for the survival of the individual.

The memories of the past, the eruptions of the despotic regime, lead to Beloved’s appearance in the novel. Sethe’s struggle with her memories seems to evoke this magical character, although her appearance cannot be easily explained. In fact, the very ‘slipperiness’ of Beloved that any reader or critic of the novel has to battle against is due to her magic, her absolute deterritorializa-tion, her function as an object = x. As Phelan points out, she is ‘stubborn’, she won’t yield to interpretation; however one rearranges her character, something does not fi t.⁶² No symbolic or real status that critics have attempted to pin on her ever quite holds: whether she is seen as the ghost of Sethe’s murdered baby, a runaway slave, the mother–daughter bond incarnate, guilt come alive, or the collective memory of the Middle Passage. These possibilities are merely reso-nances evoked as she traverses the convergent lines of the realism of the novel.

Harris incisively reads Beloved as not a person but a ‘thing’ without any personality traits or any morality, unleashed and unrestrained, limited only by the imagination. She is ‘the personifi cation of desire, thus epitomizes the demonic’.⁶³ Indeed, say Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are ‘demonic’, a term they specifi cally place outside the order distinguishing the divine and the satanic. Beloved may be a becoming-human of desire, but at the same time as she is also a becoming-other, a becoming-ghost, of the human. According to Heinze, ‘Beloved can never be fully conceptualized because she is continually in a state of transition’,⁶⁴ rather like Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Beloved is always in fl ux because she has no identity of her own. Just as her skin is entirely smooth and unlined, so she is a smooth, deterritorialized entity.

In a sense, she is like Fevvers insofar as she accepts the (pseudo-)identity that others give her (as they speculate on who she is), and she also precipitates the becoming-other of another character. Beloved enters into a zone of impercep-tibility with Sethe: ‘She imitated Sethe, talked the way she did, laughed her laugh and used her body the same way down to the walk, the way Sethe moved her hands, sighed through her nose, held her head. Sometimes [. . .] it was diffi cult for Denver to tell who was who’ (BD 283). However, their mutual deter-ritorialization seems to spin out of control, enter into the territory – or rather the lack of it – where things are torn asunder, as in the case of Saleem or Macondo.

Conner reads Beloved as a creature of the ‘sublime’, which he explicitly links to the annihilation of self and the disruption of individual and community.⁶⁵ As Corey has noted, after Paul D leaves the house it enters a ‘liminal period when time seems to stop’,⁶⁶ as if it becomes a piece of the ‘timeless place’ from which Beloved has ‘come back home’ (BD 214). We can compare this timelessness to that of Melquíades’s parchments, as it embodies, quite literally, a simultaneous

Models of Magical Realism 71

experience of the events of 1873, Sethe’s memories, as well as the suffering of the Middle Passage. This absence of time is implicitly connected with death.

The place to which Sethe’s daughter ‘went’ and the Middle Passage are united as an experience of death, and Sethe, in the present, seems to enact it, being sucked dry of life. Again we are made aware of the dangers of total deterritori-alization, the total loss of identity.

Beloved, as the magic element in the novel, is thus clearly not an element that allows any kind of individual healing after the horrors of slavery. She is not only ineffectual, like Saleem, but deadly. She causes Sethe to go through a personal

‘apocalypse’: the loss of her sense of identity. However, at the end of the novel, the singular Beloved is exorcized by the community, re-establishing relations with Sethe and her family, bringing her back into the land of the living – the territorial State – as well as bringing her back, explicitly through Paul D, to the possibility of an identity. As Conner indicates, Paul D’s return to Sethe is the joining of two people in order to fi nd their identities, something like Walser and Fevvers at the end of Nights at the Circus. Paul D ‘put[s] his story next to hers’ and by telling her that she, not Beloved, is her own ‘best thing’, a glimmer of self appears in Sethe’s response ‘Me? Me?’ (BD 322), as if she has only just become aware again of her existence separate from Beloved. To Conner this is indicative of the regeneration of the self and the community in the face of the in-human and other-worldly sublime. Conner also points out how order, law and boundaries are contradictory to the sublime.⁶⁷ Indeed such a reading of Beloved in terms of the sublime is comparable to what we concluded from Midnight’s Children and Nights at the Circus: the magic is a movement antithetical to the search for identity. In Beloved, the imperative for such a search becomes far more clear: in the face of an extremely specifying, despotic, regime of signs, despecifi cation becomes a question of survival. The magic of the character Beloved provides such a despecifi cation for Sethe through a precarious process of losing all identity, one, however, which ultimately allows her a reconstruction of identity.

What our readings of Midnight’s Children, Nights at the Circus and Beloved suggest, then, is that the problems encountered by critics of magical realism stem from a misunderstanding of the nature of the magic and the real. The historical or social content of magical realism does not reside in its magic.

Instead these aspects of magical realism are rooted in its realism. It appears that the two main elements of magical realism refer to what Hallward usefully desig-nated as two different poles of the ontological orientation of things in Deleuze’s thought: towards the actual or towards the virtual. The very structure of realism means that it is oriented fi rmly towards the actual. This structure is apparently mirroring a world of fi xed territories and a rigid organization. In fact, however, realism is not a representation of an external world so organized, but as an expression of the same organizational principle, a regime of signs. This regime determines meaning as well as ordering society, in the State. Thus realism is relevant, albeit not by means of representation, to society, history, geography

and politics. In distinct contrast, the magic of magical realism is radically divergent from the ordered series of the realism. It appears deterritorialized and free of the strict organization of the actual. The magical events defy deter-mination by place or function, and can be seen to ‘move’ across the series and segments of the realism. Importantly, however, the magic, in its divergence, is removed from not only the details of daily social life depicted by realism, but also from its engagement with the negotiation of identity, and indeed, with any historical or geographical situation.

However, despite its divergence from the territorial world of realism, the magical elements certainly seem to have some kind of effect, not the least in the apocalyptic destruction of the society of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude and of Saleem’s identity Midnight’s Children. In Nights at the Circus and Beloved, on the other hand, we saw that the presence of magic need not have such wholly destructive implications. Rather, for Fevvers and Sethe, the magic, while in itself antithetical to a reconstruction of identity, seems to act as a kind of impetus or catalyst to this reconstruction. If a Deleuzian analysis has revealed the magic as antithetical to the realism of magical realism, it will also allow us to consider in what way the magic can be reappraised as effectual in this way, in an ahistorical, apolitical framework. In fact, it is the very fact that the magic is removed from society and history, indeed, from the human, that enables it to

However, despite its divergence from the territorial world of realism, the magical elements certainly seem to have some kind of effect, not the least in the apocalyptic destruction of the society of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude and of Saleem’s identity Midnight’s Children. In Nights at the Circus and Beloved, on the other hand, we saw that the presence of magic need not have such wholly destructive implications. Rather, for Fevvers and Sethe, the magic, while in itself antithetical to a reconstruction of identity, seems to act as a kind of impetus or catalyst to this reconstruction. If a Deleuzian analysis has revealed the magic as antithetical to the realism of magical realism, it will also allow us to consider in what way the magic can be reappraised as effectual in this way, in an ahistorical, apolitical framework. In fact, it is the very fact that the magic is removed from society and history, indeed, from the human, that enables it to