Ethical Magic: Traumatic Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
-
Irmtraud Huber
Abstract
Focussing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved this article sets out to show the possibilities magic realism offers to negotiate the difficulties of representation in narratives of trauma. In spite of the common demand for mimetic accuracy, magic realism’s potential for ethical representation lies precisely in its denial of a single coherent reading. By impelling the reader to accept the narrative’s irreducible contradictions, magic realism offers means to express the excess that marks traumatic experience. The bodily presence of the past in Beloved can therefore be read as a literal manifestation of trauma that demands a confrontation of the contradictory needs to forget and to remember. By exploiting analogies between trauma and magic, Beloved points to the ethical necessity of acknowledging the Other as Other and attempts to narrate the Other without defining and fixing it through narration itself
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Terrors of Territory: Mary Rowlandson, Charles Brockden Brown, Shyamalan’s The Village, and the Haunting of the American Frontier
- Stranger on a Train: William Blake and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man – Media and Violence, Poetry and Politics
- Re-Reading George Pal’s The Time Machine: Decolonization, Integration, and the Cold War
- Ethical Magic: Traumatic Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- If… Bernardine Evaristo’s (Gendered) Reconstructions of Black European History
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Terrors of Territory: Mary Rowlandson, Charles Brockden Brown, Shyamalan’s The Village, and the Haunting of the American Frontier
- Stranger on a Train: William Blake and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man – Media and Violence, Poetry and Politics
- Re-Reading George Pal’s The Time Machine: Decolonization, Integration, and the Cold War
- Ethical Magic: Traumatic Magic Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- If… Bernardine Evaristo’s (Gendered) Reconstructions of Black European History
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
