Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundr...

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10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

GHOSTS, METAPHOR, AND HISTORY IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED AND GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE



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Daniel Erickson





Copyright © Daniel Erickson, 2009.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-61348-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-61348-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Erickson, Daniel. Ghosts, metaphor, and history in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One hundred years of solitude / Daniel Erickson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-230-61348-9 (alk. paper) 1. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 2. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928- Cien años de soledad. 3. Metaphor in literature. 4. Ghosts in literature. 5. Literature and history. 6. Magic realism (Literature) I. Title. PS3563.O8749B4345 2009 813'.54—dc22

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A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: March 2009 10

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Acknowledgments 1. The Spectral Metaphor

vii 1

2. Realizing Absence in Beloved

23

3. Absenting Presence in Beloved

45

4. Spectral and Metaphorical Domains in Beloved

73

5. Spectral Excess and Metaphorical Supplementation in Beloved

97

6. Spectral and Ideological Figuration in The Eighteenth Brumaire 123 7. Spectral History in One Hundred Years of Solitude

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8. Ideological Mirages in One Hundred Years of Solitude

175

9. Ideology, Magical Realism, and Metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude

195

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of the Reader

211

Notes

215

Bibliography

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Index

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Contents




I would first like to thank my doctoral supervisor, Associate Professor Daniel Brown, for his invaluable advice, encouragement, and tolerance of my haunting presence for so many years. I wish to thank the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science at the University of Western Australia for the assistance provided through a postdoctoral publication grant. I would also like to thank my parents, family, and friends for the years of support and tolerance they have provided. Lastly, I want to thank Ealhsie, without whom I would never have finished this manuscript.



Acknowledgments




The Spectral Metaphor Communicative Figures This book examines the relationship between the figure of the ghost and the use of metaphor in two exemplary modern fictions, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.1 In The Satanic Verses, a novel that bears a family resemblance to both Morrison’s and García Márquez’s novels, Salman Rushdie offers a definition of the ghost that is particularly suggestive for the relationship between spectrality, metaphoricity, and history that this book will trace.2 It is first given by the octogenarian ex-colonial wife, Rosa Diamond, who explicitly denies the specter’s otherworldly nature: “I know what a ghost is, the old woman affirmed silently . . . And I know what it isn’t, too, she nodded further, it isn’t a scarification or a flapping sheet, so pooh and pish to all that bunkum. What’s a ghost? Unfinished business, is what” (129). Shortly after this, we see Rosa so preoccupied with the “Unfinished business” of her colonial past in Argentina that her imaginative recuperations of the past invade the real world of the present. Her definition of spectrality is repeated in the novel’s final pages in the thoughts of the protagonist, the actor Saladin Chamcha, as he reflects upon his own imaginative recuperations of the past. Saladin earlier used his talents for invention and mimicry to consciously manipulate events to his own ends, but he increasingly feels haunted by his own imaginative creations: he had a strange sense of being haunted, a feeling that the shades of his imagination were stepping out into the real world, that destiny was acquiring the slow, fatal logic of a dream. “Now I know what a ghost is,” he thought. “Unfinished business, that’s what.” (540)



Chapter 1

Ghosts, Metaphor, and History

This definition captures some of the key associations of the spectral figure that I will trace in this book, such as historical inheritance, imaginative translation, and realization. In accordance with this definition, Rushdie uses the spectral throughout his novel as a metaphor for the way in which the “Unfinished business” of the past unavoidably reveals itself in the present, returning in a translated spectral form. Rushdie’s conception of the ghost as “Unfinished business,” manifesting the unresolved problems and conflicts of the past, succinctly encapsulates its main role in literary history, one that is exemplified in the gothic tradition. This function can be traced back to one of the seminal spectral episodes in Western literature, the first act of Hamlet, in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the former king, returns to seek retribution for the “Unfinished business” of his murder.3 The apparition of the former king initiates the plot of the play, presaging the specter’s principal role in the gothic tradition, where it returns from the dead to avenge past injustices.4 Moreover, a close examination of this foundational spectral episode is also suggestive for the particular relationship between the ghost and the figure of metaphor that I wish to chart in this book. While the spectral in Hamlet does not exhibit the marked self-reflexive metaphoricity that will be traced in Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude, it does foreground the long-standing and integral parts of the literary tradition of the spectral upon which this self-reflexive metaphoricity rests. One key element of the spectral appearance of King Hamlet that suggests a relation to metaphor is the ghost’s clearly communicative function. Like the ghosts of gothic novels, the former king addresses the “Unfinished business” of the past by communicating with the living. King Hamlet’s ghost does not achieve retribution directly, but rather indirectly, by imparting the true circumstances of his death to his son, transmitting information that would otherwise remain unknown. From its very first appearance, the living characters assume that the purpose of the ghost’s otherwise improbable manifestation is to communicate. The ghost’s manifestation of the dead king prompts its perceivers to assume that, in Horatio’s words, its presence “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (I, i, 69). They immediately try to understand this perceived significance by communicating with the apparition. Marcellus wants Horatio to see “this apparition” with his own eyes, so that he might “approve our eyes and speak to it” (I, i, 29). Bernardo observes that “it would be spoke to,” and Marcellus implores, “Question it, Horatio” (I, i, 45–46). Throughout the ghost’s visitation, Horatio repeatedly exhorts the ghost to communicate: “Stay! speak! speak! I charge thee, speak!” (I, i, 51); “If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, Speak to me . . . Speak to me . . . O! speak” (I, i, 128–135). Although the ghost remains silent, the characters continue to assume that it has appeared



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in order to communicate and that its silence indicates that its intended audience is Hamlet: “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him” (I, i, 171). When told of the apparition, Hamlet asks Horatio, “Did you not speak to it?” (I, ii, 214). The ghost itself continues this communicative preoccupation. When Hamlet encounters it, the ghost asks Hamlet to “lend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold.” Hamlet answers, “Speak; I am bound to hear” (I, v, 5–6), and the ghost then tells Hamlet the truth of his father’s death, a transmission of information that sets the plot in action. King Hamlet’s ghost thus achieves retribution through the indirect action of communication, mediating between spirit and matter. The text’s insistent focus on the ghost’s indirect figuration of the dead also suggests a further relation between spectral presence and metaphoricity. Shakespeare does not depict the ghost of the former king as the king himself, returned from the dead, but as a transfigured apparition of his living presence, an appearance that the characters initially assume is somewhat duplicitous. Although it is made clear that the ghost looks like the king, the characters do not automatically assume that it is the king himself, his essence or soul, but instead repeatedly remark that it is an apparition “like” the king, a “form,” “shape,” or “figure” of his living presence, which may conceal a hidden reality or purpose.5 Insofar as the ghost manifests the past, it does so in an indirect rather than a direct form, a necessary consequence of the fact that it is an apparition of a presence that is supposedly dead and absent. When the ghost enters, Bernardo exclaims, “In the same figure, like the king that’s dead,” and asks Horatio: “Looks it not like the king?” Horatio answers, “Most like” (I, i, 40–44). Horatio asks the ghost: What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and war-like form In which the majesty of Denmark Did sometimes march? (I, i, 45–49)

Horatio refers to “Our last king, / Whose image even but now appear’d to us” (I, i, 80–81). Bernardo calls the ghost “this portentous figure . . . so like the king” (I, i, 109–10). Although the ghost stands before him, Horatio commands, “Stay illusion!” (I, i, 127). The next morning, Horatio tells Hamlet that Bernardo and Marcellus encountered “a figure like your father” (I, iii, 199) and that when he accompanied them his doubts were assuaged by the “Form of the thing” (I, iii, 210). Throughout the first act, all the characters repeatedly refer to the ghost as “it” and wonder what purpose its “form” conceals, rather than assume



3

The Spectral Metaphor


that it is the king himself. Even the ghost seems to refer to itself in a similarly indirect way, emphasizing its distinction from Hamlet’s father as a living person: “I am thy father’s spirit” (I, v, 9); “If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . . Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (I, v, 23–25). The appearance of the ghost does not simply signal the return of the king, but the return of the “form” of the king, a signification of his incorporeal absence from the world of the living. It is a “figurative” representation, in that its appearance manifests something that it is not. In fact, this indirect figuration of the spectral is closely tied to its communicative role. As observed earlier, the characters assume that some mysterious communication is the only explanation for such a “portentous figure.” Hamlet sees the ghost’s assumption of his father’s form as an indication of its communicative purpose: “If it assume my noble father’s person, I’ll speak to it” (I, ii, 243–244). When he sees it, he wonders what hidden reality underlies its impossible form and decides to communicate with it explicitly as if it were his father: Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, father; royal Dane, O! answer me: Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements. (I, iv, 40–48)

Like the other characters, Hamlet assumes that communication is the purpose underlying such a “questionable shape.” The ghost’s very manifestation of the absent dead is thus connected to its communicative role in giving voice to what has been hitherto unknown and unspoken. Shakespeare depicts the ghost as an indirect, communicative “figure,” in which the “Unfinished business” of the past is translated and transfigured, working its effects through an indirect engagement with the present rather than an unmediated return. Both The Satanic Verses and Hamlet suggest that the ghost is not mere fancy but is inextricably tied to both the “Unfinished business” of the past and to ideas of communication and figuration. In accordance with these associations, this study will show that both Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude use a complex interrelation between spectrality and metaphoricity to respond to their specific historical concerns. As I will show, both the supposedly immaterial, fanciful, and unearthly spectral figure and the



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poetic and ostensibly ornamental linguistic figure of metaphor are firmly grounded in the historical content and contexts of these two works.

My reading of Hamlet shows that even before the advent of the gothic tradition the ghost is strongly tied to communication and to the idea of figuration, representing an absence in a transfigured, altered form. To further elucidate this figurative component of the specter, I now want to leap centuries and genres to examine Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro”:6 The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet black bough.

This notoriously brief poem introduces the key factors of the relationship between spectral presence and the “figure” of metaphor that I will examine in this book and serves as a useful prologue to the particular ways in which this relationship works in Beloved. It has two main sources of interest for my discussion of the relations between the ghost and metaphoricity. First, the strikingly simple but unusual structure of the poem exposes features of metaphorical creation and understanding that are often obscured in more conventional and elaborate examples. The poem’s neat syntactic separation of its two metaphorical terms, what I. A. Richards calls a metaphor’s “tenor” and its “vehicle,” into two distinct, seemingly independent scenes enables us to see clearly how metaphorical reference works.7 The second factor of interest lies in the word “apparition” in the first line of the poem. This word acquires a particular resonance within the metaphorical structure of the poem and captures the overall effect of this structure on the poem’s images. By describing the “faces in the crowd” as an “apparition,” Pound also self-reflexively highlights their existence as a poetic image. The word “apparition” evokes the Imagists’ intention to create poems composed of distinct and evocative “images,” rather than mere verbal flourishes.8 This self-reflexive invocation of images makes us conscious of the poem’s status as an artistic creation. However, the word “apparition” also brings spectral connotations into play. It denotes an intersection of the concepts of the ghost and of appearance, suggesting a parallel between the visual manifestation of an image and the manifestation of the spectral presence.9 As I will show, Pound’s use of “apparition” in the poem foregrounds the connections between spectral presence and the mechanics of metaphorical representation and understanding that



The Apparition of Metaphor


this study will trace and reveals the self-reflexive metaphoricity lying within the spectral figure. The most immediate effect of the word “apparition” is to make explicit a spectral quality that is already present in the particular images that Pound presents in the poem. Both the faces and the petals are notable for their fleeting and fragile nature. A face in a crowd is a part that is swallowed up by the whole, a pale flicker against a dark mass of clothing.10 Likewise, petals are a temporary natural phenomenon, ephemeral in comparison with the backdrop of a solid bough, its concrete materiality emphasized here by the adjectives “wet” and “black.” Both images consist of small, pale, individualized units set against a large, dark “whole” of which they are part. The fragility of these images accords with the self-reflexive invocation of mental images signaled by the word “apparition.” Each image given in the poem distils the transitory and insubstantial nature of mental images themselves and parallels the phenomenological effect of images in the mind, emerging from the dark, murky mass of everyday consciousness. The connection between the poem’s particular images and the nature of the mental image itself is suggested in Pound’s recollection of the poem’s composition in his essay “Vorticism,” which explicitly describes the mental image in terms of fleeting visual appearance: Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along Rue Rayonouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in splotches of colour.11

Pound’s recollection describes the poem as an attempt to capture a fleeting visual impression. The word “suddenly” is used twice here, and the poem’s inspiration is described as a “sudden emotion.” Likewise, Pound’s vague description of “splotches of colour,” seemingly at odds with the Imagists’ insistent recommendation of “concrete” and “hard and clear” images, also evokes a fleeting, indefinite appearance.12 Pound also appears to recognize that, despite his usual insistence on directness, “primary pigment” and avoiding “second intensity,”13 the poetic process necessarily involves transfers and shifts between different registers of perception and understanding, even suggesting that his “experience in Paris should have gone into paint.”14 Poetic composition always involves



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an indirect, secondary semblance rather than the direct presentation of “the thing itself.” Hence the appropriateness of the word “apparition,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “A seeming to the eyes or mind, appearance, semblance.”15 The word “apparition” betrays both the visual orientation of the poem and the secondary insubstantiality of its images, their existence as ghosts of reality, and thus highlights the tension between the Imagists’ professed “Direct presentation of the ‘thing’” and their dependence on capturing visual images with words.16 This tension is particularly evident here because, as Pound’s recollection indicates, a large part of the poem’s subject matter is the problematic and spectrally elusive nature of the poetic image itself. Pound seizes on images that dramatize this elusive nature of the image. By dramatizing the nature of the mental image the poem seems to suggest that the poetic image itself is indeed an apparition, a “semblance,” to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, a mere flicker in the mind’s eye. Pound’s recollection of an ephemeral vision of color and light also accords with the ghostliness indicated by the word “apparition.” Ghosts are traditionally assumed to be pale or composed of light rather than substance, not unlike the mental image as it is perceived in the mind’s eye. They too flicker into insubstantial being, only to disappear into the darkness from which they emerged. Like the visual image, once gone they exist only in memory, that is, in even less solid form, where they change over time. Like Pound’s “Image”—“that which presents an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time”17—ghosts come with a whole complex of cultural associations and connotations that stay after their brief appearance, like a visual afterimage. The word “apparition” thus signals a correspondence between conceptions of the image and of the figure of the ghost; it suggests that the ghost is an “image” and the image is a kind of “ghost.” Furthermore, there is a relationship of correspondence between the ideas of the image and the ghost and the two images actually used in the poem, that is, the faces in the crowd and the petals on the bough. The word “apparition” distils the numerous parallels between these two images, the concept of the mental image itself, and the idea of the ghost, each characterized by flickering, ephemeral insubstantiality. The parallels between the poem’s two otherwise distinct images point to another, more subtle way in which the spectral connotations of the word “apparition” are activated, namely, its metaphorical structure. The poem presents two images that correspond to each other in various ways, although they are syntactically and logically separate. The reader of the poem, in an attempt to integrate the two distinct and seemingly disparate “scenes,” assumes a metaphorical correspondence between them. This should not surprise any reader familiar with Imagist poetry; Pound




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The famous “thinginess” of the imagists, the chinese-inspired idiogram, turns out to be quite metaphorical. As Pound himself observed, “The one image poem is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another.”19

Citing Pound’s essay “Vorticism” here, Hrushovski finds metaphoricity to be inherent within the Imagists’ conception of the poetic image. Pound’s attraction to the minimalist form of the haiku accords with this idea of “super-position”; the haiku’s simple and direct presentation of the “thing itself ” forces the reader to look for some kind of metaphorical significance underlying the given image.20 Imagist poetry, inspired in part by the haiku form, employs the concrete and direct language of metaphor, where the superimposed secondary referent is assumed to be literally present, in contrast to the merely hypothetical language of simile. Pound and his fellow Imagists cautioned against the use of simile, arguing that it weakened the poetic image to one of “likeness,” rather than of “concrete” actuality: Imagists deal but little with similes, although much of their poetry is metaphorical. The reason for this is that while acknowledging the figure to be an integral part of all poetry, they feel that the constant imposing of one figure upon another in the same poem blurs the central effect.21

Metaphor, for Pound, is desirable because it does not impose “one figure upon another,” as he claims simile does, but instead presents the thing itself. Presumably, he means that simile “blurs the central effect” of a poem by explicitly comparing one thing to another. Pound’s criticism of “imposing one figure upon another” is, however, somewhat inconsistent with his actual poetic practice in “In a Station of the Metro.” It is not a “one image poem” in the manner that Pound lauds in “Vorticism,” but rather comprises two images.22 The poem does not directly present the “thing” itself, but clearly posits two distinct and logically unconnected images. Unlike Pound’s favored “one-image poem . . . of super-position,” where a single image implies an underlying metaphorical significance not explicit in the language of the poem, “In a Station of the Metro” is closer to the “imposing of one figure upon another in the same poem” that Pound repudiates because it “blurs the central effect.” The metaphor is generated by the relationship between the poem’s two images.



himself noted that “much of their poetry is metaphorical.”18 Discussing the poem in the context of metaphor, Benjamin Hrushovski observes,

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In fact, the poem’s strength lies precisely in the very process of superimposition, the addition of the image of the petals to the poem’s main subject, the crowd at the station. As his recollection attests, Pound struggled to articulate his feeling in the station because he had not yet thought metaphorically, had not yet conceived of superimposing the logically disconnected image of the petals onto that of the faces. It is only when Pound conceives of what he calls “an equation,” that is, a relationship between two things, that he feels somewhat satisfied. To represent his emotional experience within the station, Pound must introduce the extra, foreign presence of the petals on the bough, going beyond the literal frame of reference indicated by the poem’s title, the “Station of the Metro.” This is not directly representing “the thing itself,” but is a form of indirect reference, a kind of secondary representation of the poem’s “real” subject that endeavors to capture the elusive feeling he experienced “In a Station of the Metro” by importing an additional presence. The unconventional structure of the poem’s metaphor enables us to see that metaphor involves more than its traditional conception as a mere linguistic embellishment. This traditional conception, as Richards argues, incorrectly “made metaphor seem to be a verbal matter, a shifting and displacement of words.”23 In more conventional metaphors, the two metaphorical terms, “vehicle” and “tenor,” are grammatically conflated into a single linguistic unit, where one thing is referred to as if it were another: Sam is a fox, Juliet is the sun, and everything is going swimmingly. In such examples, metaphor can quite easily be thought of as merely an ornamental use of an inappropriate word or phrase within a sentence, a mere linguistic “grace or ornament,” as Richards puts it.24 In “In a Station of the Metro,” however, the semicolon separates the two metaphoric terms into distinct scenes with multiple referents, each scene charting a defined referential dimension within which words clearly carry their literal meaning. By positing a distinct secondary dimension comprising multiple referents and properties (petals, wet black bough), the poem rules out a conception of metaphor as merely using an inappropriate word or phrase as an embellishment, transferring a name to another thing, or attributing a metaphorical meaning to individual words. Here, metaphorical creation is explicitly an operation of referential augmentation, the superimposition of a distinct secondary object, situation, or context foreign to the primary subject. It is the imposition of the “alien” frame of reference of the petals on the bough that creates the metaphor.25 As Hrushovski observes, “metaphor exists only if two domains exist vividly in a text,” only when “two frames of reference are established.”26 The reader conflates the two seemingly self-sufficient frames of reference and thus perceives metaphorical conflation not simply as a grammatical





process, an ornamental manipulation of word meaning, but as one that involves the superimposition of two dimensions, situations and thoughts. Pound’s recollection of his struggle to turn his mental experience into words suggests that the process of metaphorical augmentation arises as a response to a perceived absence. He writes, “I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.”27 His addition of the secondary frame of reference, the petals on the bough, is an attempt to respond to this perceived deficiency in the linguistic resources that literally apply to the “Station of the Metro” and go beyond the “impasse” that confronted him.28 For Pound, the use of metaphor fills a semantic space, indirectly representing the feeling that he “could not find any words” for. By introducing an additional frame of reference, metaphor is used to supplement what is absent from the linguistic resources that literally describe the primary subject, the faces in the crowd. The poem’s structure also foregrounds another key process of metaphorical communication that is often left at a more intuitive level in the understanding of more conventional predicative or descriptive metaphorical forms: the transference and correspondence of associations between the two frames of reference in a metaphor. Earlier, we noted that the rich correspondence between the poem’s two images prompts the reader to integrate them into a metaphorical relationship. There are no overt semantic, grammatical, or syntactical signals in Pound’s poem to encourage this integration, unlike many more conventional examples of metaphorical predication, where metaphorical interpretation is provoked by an absurd literal meaning. Although such examples can range from the Homeric cliché of “Achilles is a lion”29 to Melville’s striking “Christ is a chronometer,”30 it is clear that the obvious literal absurdity of such subject-predicate forms provokes the reader to metaphorically integrate their otherwise unconnected frames of reference.31 In contrast, Pound’s poem is not characterized by such a clear form. As Hrushovski comments, “there is neither a formal metaphor nor an overt simile. Two frs [frames of reference] are simply placed next to each other.”32 Hrushovski notes that we “could read the poem without integrating the two lines,” as if it were a list, but then asserts that the “wish (and convention) for integration of a text, however, forces us to turn one of the lines into a metaphor, in order to project it on the other fr.”33 However, it is not altogether clear how the wish, and indeed convention, for textual integration of the two distinct images could automatically force metaphorical integration upon us, as Hrushovski assumes.34 This assumption neglects the role that is played by the parallels between



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the poem’s images in promoting their metaphorical integration. If the images did not correspond in the way that we outlined earlier, the poem would seem more like a list and would not facilitate a metaphorical interpretation so easily. A metaphorical interpretation arises because of the influence of the images’ correspondence on the general “wish (and convention) for integration of a text.” Therefore, while the semicolon does ultimately signify a relationship of metaphorical identity (“are”) or similitude (“like”), this arises from the correspondence of the images, rather than the other way around. It is the images themselves, and the correspondences between them, that influence the act of metaphorical integration. Once acted upon, metaphorical integration, in turn, reinforces this correspondence, encouraging the reader to attempt to identify further points of correspondence. Moreover, Pound’s statement that he found the solution to his difficulties in “an equation” suggests the importance of correspondence to the creation, as well as the interpretation, of metaphor. According to Pound’s own account of the poem’s composition, this “equation,” suggestive of a relationship between two things, evidently preceded the actual words of the poem. This shows the intimate connection between augmentation and correspondence—that an additional presence must be posited in order for any comparison to be possible, even if that additional presence is at first mere “splotches of colour.” While the poem’s parallel structure does not automatically give rise to a metaphorical interpretation, it does highlight the importance of the correspondence between the two images to this interpretation, the way that metaphor is, in Richards’s words, “a transaction between contexts.”35 The separation of the two images undermines traditional views of metaphor as merely a substitution of one word for another, or of a change in meaning of a word,36 instead emphasizing the transference of implications and associations between two distinct frames of reference. In most simple metaphors the transference and correspondence between the two frames of reference is less marked because they are conflated within a single metaphoric phrase. In “In a Station of the Metro,” on the other hand, we distinctly perceive a correspondence between two things or situations because they are posited as separate and independent of each other. The transference of connotations and implications that metaphorical understanding and explication involves is quite clearly experienced as a transfer from one distinct “place” to another. By grammatically separating the two frames of reference into distinct entities, the semicolon paradoxically accentuates their connection by making the process of transference explicit as an interrelation between distinct frames of reference. The grammatical separation also highlights the way that the process of semantic transfer, somewhat like the interchange at the Metro station, is





bidirectional. As Hrushovski notes, metaphor involves a “two-way process”37 of correspondence rather than a simple one-directional process of substitution. Not only do the petals make us “see” the faces in a certain way, but the “apparition” of the faces also modifies them. We envision the crowd as a dark mass, perhaps wet after the rain like the “wet black” bough, and we transfer associations of fragility and impermanence from the petals to the pale faces that punctuate this dark mass. Yet we also “see” the petals as lightly colored, like pale Parisian faces, and as small intimate and individual parts of a larger, more solid whole. Although the image of the petals is ostensibly introduced to augment that of the faces, there is actually a two-way transference of associations between the faces and the petals. The structure of “In a Station of the Metro” allows us to see the duality of this transference more clearly, in a way that we do not in more conventional forms such as metaphorical predication, where the secondary frame of reference is seemingly subordinated to its role in illuminating the primary subject. We often read such forms as we read conventional predication, as being about its subject, and thus the way in which the primary frame of reference colors the secondary frame of reference is obscured.38 The two-way correspondence between the two distinct images suggests the potential for a metaphorical reversal. Hrushovski admits this possibility in the very act of denying it: “The title decides which is the basic fr; it could easily be the opposite: a poem about petals like faces.”39 Now, while the title does tell us which is the grounding frame of reference, the possibility of metaphorical reversal is nevertheless present in the lines of the poem, which actually constitute the metaphor. This is especially evident in the bidirectional correspondence between them. In a sense, it already is “a poem about petals like faces”; the two-way logic of correspondence presumes that the petals must be “like” faces for the faces to be “like” petals. The independence of the “petals on a wet black bough” supports such a reading; since they are presented as a literal, selfcontained scene, they cannot be reduced to merely metaphorical status as easily as a single incongruous word can be in a conventional metaphor. The potential for metaphorical reversal is also accentuated by the use of material adjectives (“wet black”) for what is supposedly the metaphorical, and hence “nonexistent,” image of the petals on the bough, in contrast to the mere “apparition” of what is supposedly the poem’s “reality.” Pound’s technique, where, as Hrushovski notes, two frames of reference “are simply placed next to each other,” facilitates this potential reversal in a way in which examples of metaphorical predication, giving a thing an incongruent property or identity, do not.40



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The metaphor’s potential for reversal, highlighted by the separation of its two frames of reference, has a destabilizing effect on the poem’s fictional ontology. When reading a metaphor we usually suspend the fictional existence of the secondary frame of reference and consider it as merely imaginary and rhetorical in the text. As Hrushovski notes, in Pound’s poem the title encourages the reader “to turn one of the lines into a metaphor and project it on the other.”41 The “petals on a wet black bough,” seemingly a distinct dimension in the text, are thus, in Hrushovski’s words, “ denied existence” in the world of the text.42 However, if the poem is read as a poem about petals like faces and the metaphorical structure is reversed, then the faces become the secondary frame of reference to the primary frame, that is, to the petals.43 In other words, the faces must then be considered as a hypothetical presence, there only in order to metaphorically “illuminate” the petals. The poem’s simple presentation of two independent frames of reference carries the potential that the referential priority could be reversed and applied to the faces, which, after all, are but an “apparition.” The word “apparition” appears to preemptively signal what happens to the image of the faces when the second line is read as an existent referent that is literally present. As with viewing one of the ambiguous images central to gestalt theories of perception, or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “duck-rabbit” figure, the reader can prioritize either image, but not both at once.44 Again, here, the poem’s structure highlights processes of metaphorical composition and comprehension. First, the act of suspension involved in reading a metaphor is highlighted by the grammatical independence of the images, especially their portrayal as independent scenes, with multiple concrete referents. Whereas in a conventional metaphor the reader’s suspension seems to occur simply at the level of the metaphorical word, here the reader must suspend the reality of a miniature “world,” a distinct and independent referential dimension described in the text. Second, this suspension is accentuated by the way that the structure, and the clear duality of correspondence, suggests the possibility of metaphorical reversal. The poem highlights the suspension of reference that occurs in a standard metaphor by extending it to both images involved, causing both images to oscillate between the presence that is linguistically inscribed and the absence that metaphorical understanding entails. If we consider the poem as a metaphor about petals like faces, then the faces fade away into nonexistence in the textual world. With such an evident possibility of reversal, the poem appears to present an unstable ontology. The consideration of either image as the poetic “reality” causes the other image to be suspended, “denied existence” in the primary frame of reference.





We are now in a position to see more fully how the word “apparition” resonates with the poem’s metaphorical structure. The most obvious and simple connection to the spectral is the way that metaphor posits a reference in excess of a text’s world, superimposing an alien metaphorical vehicle on the tenor, in a way that resonates with the immaterial specter that haunts material reality. Pound creates his metaphor by augmenting the literal frame of reference of the poem—the petals on the bough are added to the poem’s “reality,” the crowd at the station. Respecting the authority of the title, the reader considers this frame of reference as secondary and merely hypothetical; it thus assumes the position of a ghost-image, superimposed on the basic, literally present frame of reference of the faces in the crowd. There is a parallel between the metaphorical positing of a secondary frame of reference, in excess of the literally present primary frame of reference, and the phenomenon of the ghost, an image that also exceeds the materially present physical world. While referring directly to the faces, the word “apparition” resonates with the initial step in creating metaphor of superimposing an additional presence in excess of the poem’s basic posited reality, its present “world.” The process of referential augmentation, furthermore, supplements an absence in the literal primary frame of reference. This use of metaphor to give presence to an absence also recalls the nature of spectral presence. Pound introduces the secondary frame of reference, thus creating a metaphor, in order to indirectly capture the elusive feeling he has in the crowd, one which, as his recollection emphasizes, he could not grasp with the linguistic resources that literally describe the crowd at the station. Thus, the secondary “apparition” of the petals on the bough supplements an absence in the primary frame of reference. This indirect presentation of absence bears a relation to spectral presence, which represents absence in a similarly indirect way, marking that which is not literally present. As shown earlier in the case of Hamlet, the spectral figure, something more than the material world, is not the deceased person themselves but a manifestation of their absence from the material world. Another parallel between the spectral connotations of the word “apparition” and the poem’s metaphorical workings lies in the notion of transference. The transference and correspondence between the poem’s two frames of reference that the reader perceives suggests a parallel with spectral transference from one world to another. The poem narrates the movement from one place to another—as we read, we travel from the urban scene of the metro station to the natural scene of the petals. This movement recalls the etymological roots of the word “metaphor,” located in the Greek words meta, “to carry,” and phorein, “across.” Metaphor is a way of bridging disparate objects, situations and domains,



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creating a connection and making associations despite discontinuity. Unlike more conventional metaphors, where the two frames of reference are grammatically conflated into a single phrase, “In a Station of the Metro” clarifies this process of transference between two otherwise separate frames of reference, highlighting Richards’s contention that metaphor is a “transaction between contexts.”45 This recalls the traditional function of the specter in literature and popular culture, transferring from a world of the absent dead to the material world of the living in order to pass on a message. The unresolved manner in which this metaphorical “transaction” takes place in reading Pound’s poem also suggests a further parallel with the incomplete nature of spectral transference. Metaphor sets up a relationship of transference and conflation between two frames of reference, two separate “worlds,” which, as we have seen, is a dual process. This recalls the way in which the specter does not fully manifest itself in the world of the living, but instead represents a point of conflation and simultaneity between the two worlds of the living and the dead. The specter transfers between two worlds, but its transient presence somehow remains in both worlds, yet not wholly in either. Finally, the word “apparition” resonates with the flickering and unstable nature of metaphorical reference, which is the result of the reader’s suspension of the secondary referent upon recognizing the presence of metaphor. This is highlighted in “In a Station of the Metro” through the possibility of metaphorical reversal, which causes each image to appear to be somewhat provisional—potentially absent and present at once. The entire poem appears subject to an ontological “flicker” of the kind Brian McHale identifies with metaphorical referents. McHale notes that “metaphorical objects . . . both exist and do not exist. They are at one and the same time present, in the sense that the reader may partially concretize (visualize, ‘realize’) them, and absent, in the sense that they are excluded from the presented world.”46 There is a tension between the literal seeming grammar of metaphor, which, unlike the clearly hypothetical language of similes, refers to the secondary frame of reference as if actually present, and the hypothetical way in which it must be read in order to understand and integrate it within its textual context. This is highlighted in “In a Station of the Metro,” which presents both images as independently present, but carries the potential for both images to be, in McHale’s phrase, “excluded from the presented world.” The word “apparition” resonates with the tension between the direct language of metaphor and the referential suspension that must be enacted in order to understand a metaphor. McHale traces a link between this metaphorical dynamic and textual reference itself, proposing that “metaphor by its very





nature foregrounds the ontological dimension of the text.”47 Metaphor represents a kind of fiction within a fiction, an even more “unreal” frame of reference than the fictional world of the text. The metaphorical referent is evident as a textual apparition, a presented absence that haunts the text’s reality, invading it yet remaining excluded from the primary frame of reference. As such, it highlights the general sense in which fiction posits an imaginary world. The spectral connotations of the word “apparition” in “In a Station of the Metro” accord with the dynamics of metaphorical creation and interpretation, giving the word a self-reflexive connotation that may not be immediately evident on a first reading. The poem foregrounds the self-reflexive connections between spectral presence and metaphorical reference that I will explore in Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude. As shown, in Pound’s poem these connections emerge from certain problems inherent to the subject matter: both the word “apparition” and the use of metaphor in the poem arise as a response to Pound’s concern with the elusive and ephemeral status of the mental image. Turning to Beloved, I shall show that the relations between the specter, metaphor, and self-reflexivity in this novel are ultimately grounded in its far more problematic subject matter, the history of slavery.

Beloved and Metaphorical Realization Unlike much of the fiction that is characterized as “magical realism,” where spectral appearances are largely episodic, the figure of the ghost occupies a central position in Beloved. The spectral figure is not used merely as an ornamental or antirealist gesture, but instead underpins the entire narrative and its thematic structure. The ghost’s major function is to metaphorically represent the past and the way that the traces of the past persist in the present. Morrison’s focus upon the struggles of exslaves during the post–Civil War period of the “Reconstruction” is sufficient to suggest an allegorical interpretation of the ghost’s presence, as a representation of the persisting, haunting presence of slavery in the collective consciousness of Americans, and more particularly, of African Americans. However, in addition to this general idea of historical persistence, the spectral presence also transposes specific features of the history of slavery. Spectral presence is drawn out and elaborated upon, exploited for its possible associations with slavery and its position within American historical consciousness. Furthermore, Morrison’s use of the spectral figure also betrays a degree of self-reflexivity; that is to say, it reflects upon the novel’s narrative form and the way that it represents its historical



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concerns. In this way, it suggests a similar self-reflexive metaphoricity to that of the word “apparition” in “In a Station of the Metro.” The selfreflexivity of the spectral presence foregrounds its own metaphorical function in the novel, to the point where the ghost can be seen partly as a vehicle for metaphorical thought itself. As we look closely, however, we will also see that this self-reflexivity is not employed for its own sake, for the purposes of narrative sophistication and aesthetic reflexivity, but is itself determined by the novel’s engagement with the history of slavery and its inheritance. The self-reflexivity of the specter signals the novel’s metaphorical response to the problematic history of slavery. Morrison uses the self-reflexive metaphor of the spectral in order to register the crucial importance of issues of representation and interpretation to the history of slavery and to the reclamation of that history, which is the principal thematic concern of Beloved. Beloved centers on the haunting of the occupants of “124,” a house on the outskirts of Cincinnati, in the years following the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the United States. Upon this basic situation, Morrison hangs various external trappings of the gothic and fantastic literary traditions, as Hélène Christol observes.48 Sethe, an escaped slave, and her daughter Denver occupy 124, along with the baby ghost of Denver’s older sister, whom Sethe killed as a two-year-old when her previous owner came to repossess her and her children. The full details of this crucial event, however, remain ambiguous and obscured until halfway through the narrative. As if to mirror this sustained narrative “repression,” the baby ghost that haunts 124 is introduced in ambiguous terms in the novel’s first two sentences: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” (3). This introduction is ambiguous because, if not for the more detailed description of this disembodied spite that follows, it could easily be taken as a standard metaphorical statement that captures the way that people perceive emotion as emanating from within things and places. This ambiguity is sustained, as the ghost is not referred to explicitly as a ghost until several more oblique references are made. Morrison has commented upon her ambiguous introduction of the ghost: “A few words have to be read before it is clear that 124 refers to a house . . . and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather, the source of the spite.”49 Indeed, these evasive descriptions continue through the first few pages of the novel, even after the explicit acknowledgment of the spectral nature of this “spite.” These references are split between repeated descriptions of the ghost in terms of its own emotion and behavior, as “spite,” “fury,” and “outrage,” and attributions of agency to the house: “the house committed . . . the one insult” (3); “the lively spite the house felt for them” (3); “the outrageous behavior of that place” (4); “what the





house permitted” (4). While it is clear that we are reading about a ghost, it is referred to as if it were the reification of externalized sentient emotion, extended in physical space. By the time the reader gets to statements such as “124 was so full of strong feeling” (39), it is clear that, irrespective of the actual existence of the ghost, a metaphorical relationship is being developed between the figure of the ghost and strong emotional states. In the terms of Hrushovski’s model of metaphor, we have two frames of reference here— “emotion” and “ghost”—that interact with each other and form metaphorical connections. One frame of reference is spoken about as if it were another.50 This is not, however, a conventional metaphorical attribution of physical presence to emotion, such as that found in Keats’s “To Hope”: “And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom.” Paul Henle uses this line in his discussion of metaphor to show that the “enwrapping,” or figuratively suggested “cloak,” of gloom is only metaphorically presented;51 it is, to use Hrushovski’s phrase, “denied existence” in the projected world of the poem. In the textual world of Beloved, however, the ghost of “strong feeling” really does palpably surround things and hover within 124, occupying physical space through its manifestation as the baby ghost. The first direct descriptions of the ghost are given when Paul D first arrives at 124, and he is surprised by “a pool of red and undulating light” (8) hovering in the doorway. Sethe assures him that the ghost is “not evil, just sad” (8), a judgment that is confirmed by Paul D’s physical contact with it: “She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it—dry eyed and lucky” (9). This first spectral appearance confirms the novel’s initial description of externalized, reified, emotion. While the presence has by now been specified as a ghost, it is still formulated in terms of emotion; even its visual appearance is described as a “kind of weeping” (10). Thus, while the ghost exists as an extended entity in the novel’s world, it still functions as a metaphorical presentation of the emotional intensity of the household. Indeed, Paul D feels the emotion as the very substance of the ghost. The ghost is “sad” in that sadness is the “substance” that it is composed of. In contrast to the absent “cloak” of “gloom” in Keats’s poem, here we have an example of what the Russian Formalists labeled “realization of metaphor”: the metaphor’s secondary frame of reference is posited as existing within the textual world, where it would usually only be considered present within the reader’s imagination. While the ghost is a metaphor for the perception of emotion as seemingly “external” to the mind, it is clear that it is depicted as a real, existent phenomenon within the world of Beloved.



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The concept of realized metaphor is inextricably tied to the fantastic and, more specifically, is closely connected to the supernatural manifestation of the ghost. Metaphorical phrases, as many commentators have noted, are often irrational or absurd when read as literal statements.52 In identity metaphors, for example, a “thing” is literally presented as another “thing.” If such a phrase is rendered literal, with its illogical literal meaning realized as a description of the text’s projected “world,” it follows that the textual world will commonly take the form of the supernatural.53 This crossover of metaphor from a figure of speech to an ontological statement in the text breaches a rational concept of reality, because the metaphorical phrase itself is irrational, absurd, or “semantically deviant.”54 The potential for an irrational, supernatural textual world or event lies latent in the absurd literal meaning of most metaphorical statements. A good example of this link between the supernatural and realized metaphor can be found in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis,55 where the fantastic and absurd situation that is depicted is derived from a simple metaphor. The fantastic situation of the story, the transformation of Gregor Samsa into an unspecified form of insect-like vermin, can, as Paul Coates suggests, be read as a realization of the literal meaning of the metaphorical predication “Man is a vermin,” a phrase that is absent from the story’s discourse.56 In fact, Gregor Samsa’s transformation acts out the transformative “logic” of metaphor itself, where one thing is another; by virtue of language, one linguistic thing (a man, Gregor Samsa) literally “becomes” another linguistic thing (a vermin). The frame of reference, “vermin,” which in the conventional metaphorical statement is merely a hypothetical reference, becomes a full-fledged existent object in the textual world, and Gregor Samsa, as human-vermin, represents the resulting ontological conflation of the two frames of reference that are linguistically conflated in the metaphor. The realization of a fantastic situation is accomplished through the realization of a metaphor. In his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov addresses this connection between metaphor and the supernatural. He notes the abundance of rhetorical figures in fantastic literature and the figurative origins of the fantastic in language: “The supernatural often appears because we take a figurative sense literally.”57 Todorov accordingly sees metaphor in the fantastic as not merely “an individual feature of style, but . . . a property linked to the structure of the fantastic as a genre”: The different relations we have observed between the fantastic and figurative discourse shed light on each other. If the fantastic constantly makes




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The fantastic, of which the ghost story is a subgenre, is for Todorov a linguistically preoccupied genre, one that has a deep structural link to figurative language. Todorov locates this link precisely in the way that figurative language posits referents that must usually be considered absent from the world of the text. For Todorov, the supernatural “originates” in rhetorical figures, because figurative language, by positing hypothetical referents, gives presence grammatically to what is otherwise absent. The fantastic man-vermin that Gregor Samsa becomes is suggested in the literal meaning of an otherwise banal metaphorical comparison, which posits the existence of what is otherwise absent. This relationship between the fantastic and the figurative has, for Todorov, metafictional implications, in that it depends on the common representation of absence, a quality which is, he argues, at the heart of fiction itself: “By its very definition, literature bypasses the distinctions of the real and the imaginary, of what is and what is not.”59 The literary fantastic, especially when it involves the realization of metaphor, foregrounds the nature of fiction itself; the supernatural “is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof.” The supernatural, created by figural reference, which is itself indicative of the power of language to refer to absences, is also the “proof ” of the nature of fiction itself, highlighting the process whereby fiction creates a nonexistent world. Todorov, then, locates a parallel in fantastic literature between the manifestation of the absent supernatural and realized metaphor’s manifestation of the usually nonexistent secondary frame of reference. This parallel is of even greater importance in discussing the fantastic figure of the ghost, since its very existence and nature as a fantastic presence is entirely dependent upon a process of realization, upon spectral manifestation. Unlike Todorov’s “devil and vampires” and other fantastic figures, the supernatural status of specters and ghosts is defined precisely by their realization from the absence of death. In order to be a ghost, a figure need not possess any supernatural attributes other than their realization, their simple presence despite their corporeal absence from the world of the living.60 Their supernatural nature is defined by their manifestation of an absence. In this sense, the specter explicitly enacts the very process of figurative realization that Todorov sees as a textual precondition for the fantastic. The very presence of the ghost, which signals an invasion and



use of rhetorical figures, it is because it originates in them. The supernatural is born of language, it is both its consequence and its proof: not only do the devil and vampires exist only in words, but language alone enables us to conceive what is always absent: the supernatural. The supernatural thereby becomes a symbol of language, just as the figures of rhetoric do.58

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rupture of the natural, material, real world by the supernatural, immaterial, and unreal, distils the nature of the fantastic. The materialization of the ghost directly parallels the “materialization” of realized metaphor, dramatizing the manifestation of the usually absent secondary referent. As was argued earlier in analyzing “In a Station of the Metro,” there is a strong parallel between the apparition of spectral presence and the posited apparition of the metaphorical object in a text. The realization of metaphor in the form of a spectral manifestation highlights this relationship, drawing out the correspondences between ghostly materialization from physical absence and metaphorical materialization from logical absence. The parallel between spectral and metaphorical realization suggests that the spectral figure has an even greater metafictional potential than that which Todorov detects in the supernatural in general. For, in the parallel between spectral manifestation and metaphorical realization, one can see the spectral figure as an emblem of textual signification; it represents the positing of a referent as an existent entity in the fictional world of the text. Just as Todorov sees the supernatural as a symbol of language in the literary fantastic, the spectral can be read as an even more distilled textual figure with its “coming into being” dramatizing the “coming into being” of the linguistic referent in a fiction. The manifestation of the ghost from being merely imagined to being actually present traces the same course as metaphorical realization, from an imagined presence to an existent object in the text’s fictional world. This has important implications for fictions that use the spectral as a central figure. In the following chapters, I will argue that the link that Todorov makes between figurative language and the literary fantastic suggests that fictions that specifically focus on the spectral contain a structural link with metaphor and that the spectral functions as a figure of fictional representation itself. As Todorov observes, the function of metaphor in fantastic fictions is not merely ornamental, “an individual feature of style,” but structural, fundamentally related to the narrative and thematic organization of such texts. This structural use of metaphor, however, is even more pronounced in the case of the spectral fantastic, in that the spectral manifestation acts as a vehicle and a sign for the metaphoricity of these fictions. In the following four chapters, I will focus upon particular elements of spectral presence in Beloved in order to develop the structural analogy between the supernatural figure of the specter and the textual figure of metaphor. The four characteristics of the spectral that I will focus upon are those that were associated with metaphor in the earlier analysis of “In a Station of the Metro”: its manifestation of absence, its liability to vanish, its transference between worlds, and its augmentation





of the material world. By analyzing these dimensions of the spectral in Beloved, I will demonstrate that it is not simply a metaphor, but a selfreflexive representative for metaphor in the world of the text; indeed, that it acts as a metaphorical “vehicle” for metaphorical thought itself. The ostensibly formalist orientation of my initial analysis does not, however, obscure the historical content of Beloved. A concentrated focus upon the spectral metaphor in Beloved will ultimately enable a richer understanding of the novel’s engagement with the historical subject of slavery, demonstrating that one of the novel’s main thematic concerns is the problematic nature of the representation of that history. In Beloved and, as we shall see later, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the self-reflexive metaphoricity invested in the ghost serves a particular thematic importance. While the metafictional function that Todorov describes in the literary fantastic is even more apparent in the spectral, it will be shown that in both novels, this function is not an end in itself but foregrounds the relations between textual metaphoricity and the particular histories that these novels address.



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Realizing Absence in Beloved As my introductory chapter observed, the spectral presence of the baby ghost that Beloved opens with is a realized metaphor for emotion. This chapter will argue that this use of realized metaphor is an integral part of the novel’s representation of slavery. Realization is not simply a formal matter of metaphorical referents being posited as textual realities, but is registered in the novel’s represented world, its use of the specter and its discursive use of metaphor. I will show that Beloved exploits the realizing impulse inherent in both metaphorical reference and spectral presence in order to respond to slavery’s legacy of absence. The novel uses both metaphorical reference and the particular metaphor of the ghost to give presence to the immense loss that slavery has bequeathed to the African American community. Realization, Metaphor, and Emotional Energy The baby ghost, whose realized haunting opens the narrative of Beloved, is not a simple conversion of metaphor into textual reality, but is complexly related to the metaphorical discourse of the narrative. The description of the disembodied and palpable sadness that Paul D feels interacts with various phrases that do not refer directly to the ghost, but are simply conventional metaphorical descriptions of the emotional intensity of the household. These phrases do not refer directly to the ghost in their immediate context. They do, however, metaphorically describe emotion as a spatialized presence in a way that nevertheless evokes the ghost despite their immediate frame of reference. We read of “the sadness that crouched in corners” (20) and that “124 was so full of strong feeling” (39). The first quotation is from the account of Paul D and Sethe’s first sexual encounter and relates to Sethe’s forgetting of how “desire . . . worked”; “how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


Chapter 2


all else—door knobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference” (20). The second quotation describes Sethe’s perception of the omnipresence of memory and emotion: “124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all” (39). In their immediate context, neither statement functions as a direct description of the ghost but as standard metaphorical descriptions of the emotional intensity of the household, the way that emotion seems to be invested in objects and spaces. The description of the “sadness that crouched in corners” does not refer to the ghost, but merely the metaphorical way in which emotion, to Sethe, seems to lurk as a reified entity within spaces and rooms. However, coming after Paul D’s encounter with the “sadness” that literally floats in the doorway of 124, it indirectly evokes the baby ghost’s occupation of actual space. The wider context of the narrative, in which spectral emotion is extended spatially in the house, outside an individual psyche, encourages the reader to attach this realized significance to what would otherwise be standard, merely rhetorical, metaphor. The reader is encouraged to read these phrases literally, against their immediate contexts, as descriptions of the presence of the baby ghost. Although these metaphorical phrases do not refer directly to the ghost, they evoke its presence because their language inherently reifies emotion, regardless of whether or not they are “realized metaphors” in the manner defined by the Russian Formalists. Whereas the metaphor underlying Metamorphosis, “man is a vermin,” states that one material thing is another material thing, these two phrases instead describe immaterial emotions in terms of materiality. They metaphorically attribute space and physicality to physically absent, unextended emotional states: “sadness” crouches while “strong feeling” fills the house, as if it were a vessel filled with fluid. Regardless of their realization in a referential sense, the very language of these statements attributes form and materiality to physical absences. The reifying language of these metaphors suggests that, in Beloved, the realization of absence is not simply an abstract formal issue of fictional reference but is a thematic preoccupation of the text that is reflected in the equation between the ghost and emotion. In fact, the realization of emotion and mental states into spectral presences in physical space is explicitly theorized in the novel by Sethe, when she attempts to explain to Denver her belief in the persistence of memory and time. When Denver asks Sethe what she talks to herself about, Sethe answers, “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the



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place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you will 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. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.” “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.” Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. “Nothing ever does,” she said. (35–36)

While Sethe does not explicitly invoke the concept of the ghost, it is clear that the floating “thought picture[s]” she refers to are related to the spectral manifestations in the novel. Sethe’s concept of externalized memory and thought explicitly reiterates the premise that underlies the descriptions of the baby ghost: that mental states are present in the external world, outside the confines of the subjective mind. This description of the persistence of mental states outside the individual psyche accords with the baby ghost’s description as externalized, reified emotion. There are also other associations with the general concept of the ghost. The persistence of these presences despite death is strong, as Denver concludes, “nothing ever dies.” Sethe emphasizes that her own reified memories will live on beyond both her own death (“even if I die”) and the death of their original subject matter (“Even if . . . every tree and grass blade of it dies”). The persistence of these presences, furthermore, is specifically cast as a return (“it will happen again”), thereby evoking the revenant nature of spectral presence, which is why Sethe finds it “so hard . . . to believe in” time. There are two ways in which absence is realized here. First, there is the realized absence of things and places that are “gone”: “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays.” Sethe’s description emphasizes that things “stay” despite their demise; these “thought pictures” are thus the presence of an absence. Second, this realized absence is elaborated in that thought is itself a physical absence. The presences Sethe describes are not merely manifestations of the absent past, but manifestations of the physically absent mental states of that absent past.



Realizing Absence in Beloved


Sethe’s belief in reified mental states has antecedents in the cultural history of the ghost. Her theory closely replicates the Victorian era’s spiritualist theory of the spectral. As observed in A Dictionary of English Folklore, spiritualist theory resulted from the combination of the scientism and supernatural preoccupations of the Victorian middle class.1 Spiritualism, the dictionary observes, “was a theory redefining apparitions as not involving the actual presence of dead persons, but merely some kind of mental flash-back whereby the percipient ‘sees’ a past event ‘imprinted’ on the surroundings by the emotional energy it once generated.”2 As the dictionary notes, this “scientific” theory “was fed back into popular belief ”; we now think about ghosts in terms of “emotional energy.” While not specifically referring to ghosts, Sethe’s idea of the persistence of memory directly replicates this theory whereby “emotional energy” is “imprinted” on physical surroundings; she claims that “the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened” (36). Like the Victorian Spiritualists, Sethe does not see such apparitions as traditional ghosts, as the “actual presence of dead persons,” but as a kind of emotional residue, a “mental flash-back” to the past. However, while not positing the existence of traditional ghosts, both Sethe’s theory and spiritualism still entail an immaterialist ontology, with spectral apparitions still characterized as an objective phenomenon haunting the material world. The objective presence of Sethe’s apparitions of “rememory,” however, is undermined by the resemblance of her description to the experience of what psychologists call posttraumatic stress syndrome. Numerous critics have pointed out the affinity between Sethe’s belief in externalized memory and the experience of posttraumatic stress.3 This affinity suggests that Sethe’s belief in the persistence of memory is a reflection of her psychological character, rather than an accurate description of the world. Known earlier as “soldiers heart,” “shellshock,” and “battle fatigue,” it was not until after World War I that any systematic study of posttraumatic stress was undertaken.4 Like Sethe’s speech to Denver, Sigmund Freud’s psychological studies of posttraumatic stress attempted to explain the involuntary persistence of traumatic memory. In posttraumatic stress syndrome, memory is experienced as a persistent, haunting presence, a revisitation of the event itself. Furthermore, this experience is characterized by an externalization of the traumatic memory, a reification of it as outside the sufferer’s own mind, as an independently recurring entity in time and space. The fact that the memory returns against the subject’s wishes only reinforces his or her belief in its objective and external nature. Sethe’s character suggests affinities with the experience of posttraumatic stress. There is a connection between Sethe’s belief in externalized



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memory and her somewhat futile attempts at “keeping the past at bay” (42), at “beating back the past” (73). Despite these attempts, memory keeps flooding back as if actually and uncontrollably there: “She worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious . . . Nothing else would be in her mind . . . Nothing . . . Then something . . . and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (6). Sethe’s thoughts on her “rebellious brain” (70), after Paul D tells her of the last time he saw her husband, Halle, suggest a similar connection between her traumatic past, the unavoidable memory and “strong feeling” (39) she experiences and the “spite” (3) that is the baby ghost: Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can’t go back and add more . . . But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I’d love more—so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping . . . there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that . . . But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day . . . Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she? Other people’s brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new. (70)

While there is no direct reference to the baby ghost here, it is nevertheless evoked by Morrison’s imagery. Sethe repeatedly states that she is “full” of memories, just as 124 is filled with spectral emotion, and refers to her overloaded brain as a “greedy child.” The omnipresence of memory induces Sethe’s feeling of temporal stagnation, her inability to imagine the future, which accords with the revenant nature of the ghost. Sethe is “Loaded with the past” by recurrent memory, and so “her brain was not interested in the future” (35). Such connections between Sethe’s haunted psyche and the ghost, while giving a supporting background to the spectral manifestation, conversely undermine its independent existence in the textual world. The paragraph that begins “124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all” (39), continues the implicit connection between the ghost and Sethe’s strong emotions in a way that suggests that the ghost is merely an expression of her imagination. After




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When she woke the house crowded in on her: there was the door where the soda crackers were lined up in a row; the white stairs her baby girl loved to climb; the corner where Baby Suggs mended shoes, a pile of which were still in the cold room; the exact place on the stove where Denver burned her fingers. And of course the spite of the house itself. There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made. (39)

The connection between Sethe’s psychological haunting and the spectral “spite of the house itself ” suggests that the “actual” haunting could be her reified memory, traumatically conceived by her as an external “foreign” agent. This is accentuated by the fact that, as we noted earlier, while the “strong feeling” does evoke the ghostly sadness, it actually refers in the passage to Sethe’s purely metaphorical “haunting” by her memories of the house, rather than the actual ghost that haunts it physically. The relation of seemingly unavoidable traumatic memory to the spectral presence serves to undermine its textual reality in subtle ways. For the traumatized patient, the “realization” of memory is more accurately described as reification, a psychological misconception, which occurs purely within the mind. The notion of reification as it applies to trauma does not refer to a process of realization in external reality, but is a purely mental operation, closer to its critical use in Marxist analysis. The theory of posttraumatic stress syndrome, while acknowledging the persisting presence of past, absent memories does not involve any claim that such immaterial presences have an external reality. If we consider the context of Sethe’s troubled psyche, her insistence on the external reality of memory appears to be a symptom of her psychological condition rather than a trustworthy description of reality. Her “ghosts” can be read as hallucinations brought about by her traumatized state of mind, reifications of the memories that still “haunt” her thoughts. The novel uses the spiritualist characterization of the spectral as “emotional energy” as a means of faithfully registering the effects and experience of trauma. The notion of traumatic recollection, while sharing many superficial characteristics with Sethe’s theory of “rememory,” tends to undermine the independent reality of spectral realization by seeing it as a psychological reification of memory or overwhelming emotion, a mental conceptualization rather



describing Sethe’s dreams of her absconded sons, the paragraph proceeds to describe the memories that are evoked for her in various parts of the house and then connects this metaphorical “haunting” by memories with the actual haunting of the ghost that “fills” the house like memory:

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than an objective external reality. In a way, Sethe’s spiritualist-like reification of her memories is precisely that which is theorized by the idea of posttraumatic stress. The psychological theory of trauma circumscribes the reifying dynamic that Sethe, and the novel itself, presents as a reality and threatens to reduce the presence of the ghost to the status of a hallucination. The picture of the spectral in the novel, as we shall see, continually hints at both conceptions: the ghost is alternately an actual ontological realization or merely a mental reification brought about by emotional intensity. Throughout the novel, the spectral lies in the centre of competing rationalizations alongside the traditional idea of spiritual haunting, rationalizations that tend to modulate it in terms of something else, such as “emotional energy,” whether conceived of as an existential reality or as a psychological consequence of trauma. Spectral Ontology and the Social World The tension surrounding the spectral figure, between its being an actual realization or a hallucinatory reification of intense emotion and memory drawing from Sethe’s traumatized psyche, is evidence of the thematic importance of the idea of realization to the narrative. The realization of absence is a dynamic that is depicted, elaborated, and explored in the presentation of the ghost. The fundamental sine qua non of the spectral, its manifestation of the absent dead, is used as a vehicle to realize other absences, apart from just Sethe’s dead daughter as an individual person. While the baby ghost is a manifestation of Sethe’s dead daughter, it is also used to give form to physically absent emotion: Sethe’s guilt, Denver’s loneliness, and the imagined “spite” of the baby. The ghost is used as much to give form to absence itself, as to manifest the presence of the daughter Sethe had killed. The novel’s depiction of the ontological state of the spectral elaborates the basic dialectic of spectral presence and relates this to the naturalistic world of the text. The baby ghost is not presented as an individuated, specifically human specter. The lack of individuation, obscuring any concrete reference point, draws closer attention to its ontological state as a manifested absence. It is incompletely realized as the formless substance of thought rather than an individuated identity. This is evident from the nature of the metaphors used in its description. As we have seen, it is first described in the narrative’s “present” (the year 1873), when Paul D walks through the entrance of 124, as a “pool of red and undulating light” (8). The idea of “light” is linked to both the insubstantial, phenomenal state of the ghost, via the etymology of “specter,” as well as the ghost as the incorporeal soul or essence, a concept that draws from religious doctrine.5 Light is traditionally related to the ghost, being a kind of





immaterial presence in the material world; it is objectively present and perceptible, yet insubstantial, a form of energy rather than physical matter.6 The fluidity that is suggested by the word “pool” accentuates this ontological insubstantiality that light suggests. While the description of light as a “pool” is a dead metaphor, its interaction with the word “undulating,” referring to a wave-like motion, reawakens its liquid connotations and exploits the wave theory of light to render the ghost’s insubstantial, amorphous presence. When Paul D walks through the pool of light and a “wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry” (9, my emphasis), the liquidity suggested by these somewhat dormant metaphors is fully reactivated and a concrete link between the metaphor of fluidity and the emotion is made, since grief makes one cry fluid tears. This is confirmed further when Paul D looks back at “the spot where the grief had soaked him” and sees that the “red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air” (10, my emphasis). This passage follows the schema that Hrushovski outlines, whereby many extended metaphors do not refer directly to the secondary frame of reference but merely “provide scattered semantic material,” ensuring that dead metaphors are reborn, so to speak, when furnished with the secondary context.7 By connecting the semantic material of fluidity with that of sadness and emotion, Morrison gives another “tropological” support for the ghost’s existence. The workings of metaphor here are complex. The ghost, as we have shown, is in large part a realized metaphor for mental states; over this, Morrison layers another frame of reference, “fluidity,” which reinforces this realization, giving it a material substantiality. Since the use of fluidity here is metaphorical, we should take this as an invitation to make correspondences between the frames of reference. Fluid is an intermediate state between the seeming insubstantiality of gases and the concrete materiality of solids. It can take on other shapes, fill vessels, and be transferred between vessels, but does not itself indicate a clearly defined thing in a unitary or discrete sense, simply a substance. When Paul D walks through the pool of light he feels the grief even though he does not know its source. As metaphorically fluid, the ghost occupies, fills, an area of the house and can flow through whoever passes through that area as a “wave of grief.” Furthermore, like a fluid, the ghost is presented more as a substance than as a discrete individual identity or thing. There is a pattern of interaction and associative reinforcement between all three frames of reference here: “ghost,” “emotion,” and “fluidity.” Although this metaphorical use of fluidity flows through the whole narrative, I want to stress its particular relevance here to the ontological state of the ghost, an absence made present. Fluidity indicates an intermediate and amorphous presence rather than a singular discrete presence. It emphasizes the formlessness of



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the ghost, its suspension between absence and the presence of the material world. The ontological status of the baby ghost is thus pictured as an indeterminate synthesis—the paradoxical endowment of presence to absence creates a temporary synthesis of these ontological poles, which is expressed through the metaphor of fluidity. The realization of absence in the case of Beloved presents a quite different situation. Whereas in the case of the baby ghost, the manifestation of absence produced a fluid, intermediate state, something between solid materiality and nothingness, in the case of Beloved the relation between absence and presence is more obviously unstable. With the absence made flesh as Beloved, the physical, human manifestation of the spirit at the age the baby would have been were she still alive, there is a shift from the amorphous synthesis of the baby ghost to an unstable oscillation between presence and absence. From the baby ghost’s existence as provisionally realized emotion and fluidity, the spectral is transformed, literally personified as a strong physical presence, who eats and drinks voraciously, suffers incontinence (54), is “strong as a bull” (56), and falls pregnant. In contrast to the baby ghost, Beloved’s presence is markedly physical. However, this physicality is also countered by the persistent indications of absence, ranging from her apparent lack of a past history to the persistent intimation of a lack of individual identity. As Denver observes, “deep down in those big black eyes there was no expression at all” (55). Despite the fact that she “Sleeps, eats, and raises hell” and has become “flesh” (255), the other characters continually fail to sense her presence: “Beloved came through the door and they ought to have heard her tread but they didn’t” (100); “He should have been able to hear her breathing . . . she took a step he could not hear” (116); “She moved closer with a footfall he didn’t hear” (117); “No footfall announces her, but there she is, standing where before there was nobody when Denver looked” (123). There is a tension between exaggerated signs of physical presence (bodily functions, unnatural strength, and pregnancy) and indications of nothingness that are teased out of the cultural tradition of the ghost. Her realization from absence into a world of presence is also played upon when, just after her arrival, she wakes from sleep: “‘Heavy,’ murmured Beloved. ‘This place is heavy’” (54). Beloved is tired simply from being. This is reiterated in Beloved’s monologue in terms of the dialectic between presence and absence: “I need to find a place to be . . . the air is heavy . . . I am not dead . . . I am not” (213). The statement “I am not” is not just a repetition of “I am not dead” but encapsulates negative existence—she is “not.” The heaviness that Beloved feels reflects her realization (“to be”) from absence (“I am not”). Her extreme tiredness comes from having to begin to use a physical body in a physical world. This exploits the basic conceptual dialectic of spectral presence.





Her presence, while resolutely physical, is still redolent of absence. Rather than the limbo-like synthesis of the baby ghost, Beloved represents the instability that results from the manifestation of absence, being at once both more absent and more present than the baby ghost. We can see, then, that while the spectral manifestation of absence is emphasized in the indeterminate ontological states of both the baby ghost and Beloved, there are telling differences between them. The differences between the two manifestations are important because they demonstrate the way that the spectral presence is related to the natural (i.e., nonsupernatural) world in which it appears. The two ghosts serve different aims relative to the context in which they appear in the narrative, manifesting two different social dynamics. Whereas the baby ghost’s synthesis of absence and presence distils what David Lawrence calls the “unhealthy equilibrium”8 in which Sethe and Denver live before Paul D arrives, the clearly enunciated dialectic at work in Beloved crystallizes the competing claims that begin to manifest themselves and act on the characters. The difference between the two specters and their associated social dynamics is marked by Paul D’s arrival at 124, which signals an awakening of consciousness on the part of Sethe and Denver and a movement away from the dulled state in which they have been living. Paul D drives the baby ghost out of the house and draws the previously submerged and repressed emotions of Sethe and Denver out into the open. Both these “actions” are part of the same movement away from the emotional limbo that the baby ghost manifests. These connections between the ghost and the social dynamic of the household are evident when Paul D’s and Sethe’s familiarity makes Denver feel lonely and wish for the appearance of the ghost: Hot, shy, now Denver was lonely. All that leaving: first her brothers, then her grandmother—serious losses since there were no children willing to circle her in a game or hang by their knees from her porch railing. None of that had mattered as long as her mother did not look away as she was doing now, making Denver long, downright long, for a sign of spite from the ghost. (12)

Denver’s wish for “a sign of spite from the ghost” is a wish for a manifestation of the spite that she herself feels toward Paul D’s and her mother’s familiarity. Denver feels left out by Sethe and Paul D’s talk of the past and mentions the ghost instead of actually expressing her emotions: “ ‘We have a ghost in here,’ she said, and it worked. They were not a twosome anymore” (13). The ghost is a surrogate for her emotions. Feeling lonely and rebuked by her mother’s averted gaze, Denver instead describes the ghost 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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as “Lonely and rebuked” (13). Paul D’s arrival brings all these feelings out further until she actually expresses herself. After Denver sarcastically taunts Paul D and Sethe about their reminiscences of Sweet Home, she begins to cry. Sethe, genuinely surprised, asks, “What is the matter with you? I never knew you to behave this way” (14). Denver then describes her loneliness in the house: “Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by.” Denver’s feelings of loneliness, although they are to be expected and have been latent for many years, are new to Sethe, and, in a conscious sense, new to Denver herself: “Denver was shaking now and sobbing so she could not speak . . . tears she had not shed for nine years” (14). Paul D’s arrival has a similar effect on Sethe. She becomes conscious of Paul D’s effect on her the day after he arrives and drives off the baby ghost, when she suddenly notices how colorless the house is. Sethe becomes aware of this colorlessness and realizes that her previous ignorance of it was “deliberate,” even though she was unaware of it. It is thus a form of unconscious denial: Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way that Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen . . . Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it. (38–39)

Sethe’s inability to appreciate color is clearly a metaphor for her emotional numbness before Paul D’s arrival, an emotional numbness that is also given concrete form in the nascent and intermediate presence of the baby ghost, which left “no room for any other thing or body” (39). Indeed, the only bright colors in the keeping room, the “two patches of orange” on the quilt, “looked wild—like life in the raw” (38, my emphasis). It is only after Paul D has “arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else” (39), that Sethe can recognize the lack of color in the house and start to recognize her own hitherto obscured emotions: So, kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was. He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. (39) 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson




This is the key summation of what Paul D achieves by arriving and driving off the baby ghost: “Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were.” Paul D’s arrival strips back the selfdeceptiveness of the household, so that Sethe and Denver are made to directly confront their underlying feelings and situation. Sethe becomes conscious of how the household really is, how it “manifests” itself, so to speak. Before this, the intermediate presence of the baby ghost was the sole outward manifestation of their repressed feelings, and its dull form of haunting was a manifestation of the very dynamic of repression and emotional stagnation; now, with it gone, the tensions underlying its formless presence have come out into the open. The period immediately preceding the novel’s main narrative is portrayed as deceptively dulled, devoid of color, an extended unhealthy limbo. However, the return of the past in the shape of Paul D, and, even more crucially, the appearance of Beloved four days later, irrevocably alters this equilibrium. Sethe’s sudden apprehension of color is a metaphor for her awakening from the emotional numbness that the baby ghost’s formless presence distilled. Later in the novel, after Sethe realizes Beloved’s apparent identity as her daughter, she promises herself that she will “look at things again”: And my girl come home. Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too. After the shed, I stopped. Now, in the morning, when I light the fire I mean to look out the window to see what the sun is doing to the day. Does it hit the pump or the spigot first? See if the grass is graygreen or brown or what. Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before . . . I don’t believe she wanted to get to red and I understand why because me and Beloved outdid ourselves with it. Matter of fact, that and her pinkish headstone was the last color I recall. Now I’ll be on the lookout. (201)

While Sethe’s idyllic picture of the future will not be realized, she is right in seeing Beloved’s return as a distinct development from the previous period of repression and dullness, which was manifested by the baby ghost’s formless synthesis of absence and presence. The reference to Sethe’s earlier ruminations on her ignorance of color serves to clearly delineate the difference between the two periods, between the dull haunting of the baby ghost and the subsequent period of instability after the appearance of Paul D and Beloved, when as Sethe recognizes, “Things became what they were” (39). The spectral manifestation, in both the baby ghost and Beloved, is an integral part of the narrative world, not simply an “alien” imposition upon it, reflecting the social dynamic from which it emerges. Paul D



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both brings Sethe and Denver’s emotions to the surface and drives out the baby ghost whose intermediate presence had manifested their repression and emotional numbness. This cements the connection between the spectral presence and the nonsupernatural emotional landscape of 124. Both “actions” of Paul D are part of the same shift from the limbo life preceding the main narrative to the violent tension that will characterize its course. The shift from the amorphous baby ghost to the unstable but corporeal Beloved reflects the shift from a dynamic of repression to a more violent struggle with memory and emotion. The ontological state of the spectral figure not only manifests emotion but also reflects the entire social and narrative dynamic of the textual world; the social dynamics of the household are reflected in how the ghost is realized.

The Reality of Absence We have shown that the supernatural specter is strongly connected to the natural world that it has imposed itself upon. This connection is also evident in the way that absence is objectified in decidedly “natural” terms, quite apart from its more dramatic supernatural incarnations. Morrison seizes upon naturalistic conceptions of absence as a perceptible entity throughout the novel. There is a persistent stress on concepts such as loss or silence, which endow the lack of something with a presence or substance, as a quality or thing to perceive or feel. Loss is, indeed, a large part of the thematic framework of Beloved and the main naturalistic concept through which absence is manifested in the novel. We can see the same conceptual objectification that lies within the spectral in Denver’s contradictory regret that “her own father’s absence was not hers” (13). Denver envies her mother, grandmother, and Paul D for their apparent “ownership” of Halle’s absence, regretting her own lack of ownership of her father’s absence: They were a twosome, saying “Your daddy” and “Sweet Home” in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers. Once the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby—a son deeply mourned . . . Then it was her mother’s absent husband. Now it was this hazelnut stranger’s absent friend. (13)

The lack of a father becomes here a “thing” to be possessed, or, in Denver’s case, to want to possess. This paradoxical situation of not having a lack displays the same conceptual tension that lies in the fantastic embodiment of absence. It shows, furthermore, that the conceptualization of absence as





a presence is found in the more mundane aspects of the world the novel depicts. Loss is an idea that presupposes the presence, and the phenomenal perceptibility, of absence. It invokes the notion of a perceptible void. This palpable lack is similar to the way that silence is pictured in the novel, particularly in Denver’s deafness that envelops her as a young child, “a silence too solid for penetration” (103), and her refuge in the boxwood “where the silence was softer” (28). The spectral presence is a dramatic enactment of Morrison’s more general concern with the perception and conception of absence as palpable. The presence of absence is voiced explicitly when Paul D returns to 124 at the end of the novel and perceives a palpable absence in the house: It is stone quiet. In the place where once a shaft of sad red light had bathed him, locking him where he stood, is nothing. A bleak and minus nothing. More like absence, but an absence he had to get through with the same determination he had when he trusted Sethe and stepped through the pulsing light. (270)

Paul D perceives this absence as “something” to get through, as a quality in space, rather than a lack of it. This passage emphasizes the objectification of absence, even in the metaphorical phrase “It is stone quiet.” The text repeatedly highlights absence as a perceptible property itself, whether in resolutely natural terms, such as Paul D’s feeling of Sethe’s absence at his side in the snow—“Paul D felt icy cold in the place Sethe had been before Beloved came” (130)—or in the supernatural manifestation of absence as a specter. The objectification of absence, its rendering as palpable or perceptible, is not simply confined to the fantastic depiction of the spectral, but is a wider thematic operation in the text, extending to resolutely naturalistic concepts such as loss. This demonstrates that the spectral is not simply a rupturing imposition on the world of the novel, but rather it distils the intrinsic reality of absence in that world.9 The overriding presence of absence for the characters derives from the massive loss that the historical phenomenon of slavery has engendered in the African American community that is the focus of Beloved. This is seen in Sethe’s reflections on her life: “Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable” (58, my emphasis). All the novel’s characters continue to experience an inheritance of loss derived directly from the institution of slavery: “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized” (23). As Sethe says to Paul D, “Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone” (42). The magnitude of loss that slavery 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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Well that’s the carnage. It can’t be abstract. The loss of that man to his mother, to his wife, to his children, to his friends, is a serious loss and the reader has to feel it, you can’t feel it if he’s in there. He has to not be there . . . I and the reader have to yearn for their company, for the people who are gone, to know what slavery did.10

This is why Denver can only sense her father as lack, a lack that is not even her own: “Only those who knew him . . . could claim his absence for themselves. Just as only those who lived in Sweet Home could remember it, whisper it and glance sideways at one another while they did” (13). Denver’s lack of ownership of her own father’s absence is here specifically related to her lack of ownership of the memory of slavery, which has nevertheless dominated her life. The absence of slavery is twofold for Denver, in that while it has bequeathed loss to her, she feels it as something she was absent from, and thus it is a “gleaming” (63) absence in her life. This domination that she so resents is itself articulated in terms of absence: “Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself . . . The rest was a gleaming, powerful world made more so by Denver’s absence from it. Not being in it, she hated it” (63). Slavery bequeaths loss and absence even to those who did not directly experience it. Denver’s two-year deafness, the “silence too solid for penetration” (103) mentioned earlier, is also a response to slavery’s legacy. It starts as a denial of her mother’s murder of her sister, Sethe’s “rough response to the Fugitive Bill” (171). When her classmate Nelson Lord asks her “Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder?” (104), Denver asks her mother the same question, but her hearing is “cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear” (103); “Even when she did muster the courage to ask [Sethe] Nelson Lord’s question, she could not hear Sethe’s answer, nor Baby Suggs’ words, nor anything at all thereafter” (103). The silence that envelops Denver is another more indirect manifestation of the loss that has been inherited from slavery. The ghost renders this overwhelming inheritance of absence, engendered by slavery, into palpable form. The spectral, as we have shown, is used as a presence to realize absence beyond that of a dead individual. The spectral manifests all of the loss and absence that slavery has inflicted and bequeathed. One of the most forceful images of this is the presentation of the ghostly voices that “ringed 124 like a noose” (183). A literalization of prosopopoeia, of speaking without a speaker, the voices also signify the corporeal absence of the “black and angry dead” (198), as Stamp Paid surmises. 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


has engendered in the African American community is rendered as a definite and perceptible absence in the world. Morrison has spoken of trying to make palpable the absence that slavery has created, specifically referring to the “characterization” of Halle as a glaring lack in the novel:


They are the voices of the lost, the literally disembodied dead of slavery, the “people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons” (181). The embodiment of absence in this “wall of talk” (184) is emphasized further in that it is “undecipherable,” signs with no clear or available referent, language that reveals nothing but absence. That language itself is the medium of realization only adds to the absence evoked by their manifestation. Audible voices usually suggest immediate presence, but here they are voices without speakers, without differentiation, and without apparent meaning. While the spectral here represents the presence of the dead, it also represents their absences, their specifically unrecognized and uncounted status as dead slaves. The fact that these voices are “clamoring around the house” (198) while Beloved haunts its interior, posits Beloved’s presence as more than just the incarnation of Sethe’s daughter, but rather, as a distilled representative of the wider loss of slavery. Early in the novel, Baby Suggs describes the ghost quite explicitly as an expression of the everyday loss, the “dead Negro’s grief,” that slavery has instilled in the African American community: Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? Or yours? Don’t talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don’t you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody’s house into evil. (5)

The spectral directly embodies the overwhelming loss that slavery has instilled in the lives of the African American community that is represented in the novel. Absence is grounded as a constitutive part of the characters’ world, one of its main components, and in this sense the spectral stands as an intensification of the day-to-day perception and the conceptualization of these gaps. The ghost is a means of making the reader “feel” the absence that slavery has instilled, in the same way that Morrison makes Halle’s absence palpable: “he has to not be there.” Beloved is the principal embodiment of this absence, a composite figure of “the black and angry dead” whose voices Stamp hears outside the house while she haunts within. In this respect, the novel’s epigraph from Romans 9:25 gives us an insight into Beloved’s presence and the use of the spectral: “I will call them my people, which were not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved.” Beloved represents the absence of all those who were “not beloved,” the overwhelming legacy of loss that slavery has bequeathed to the African American community.



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This representative role of Beloved is exemplified in her manifestation of one specific part of the wider historical phenomenon of slavery, the forced migration of African slaves to the Americas, a journey that has come to be known as the Middle Passage. Beloved partly represents the immense loss of life that occurred on the slave ships, the loss of people whom, as Morrison told Marsha Darling, “no one’s ever assumed responsibility for . . . Nobody knows their names and nobody thinks about them.”11 The Middle Passage represents an ultimately incalculable loss of people and cultural ties, with its nameless dead lost in an historical abyss. There has been considerable critical focus on the presence of the Middle Passage in the novel, inspired by Morrison’s willingness to identify it as a crucial context.12 However, it is actually a rather elusive element of the text, not immediately apparent to the reader, and only directly mentioned in the brief episode where Sethe suddenly remembers being told of her mother’s journey “from the sea” (62). The most sustained references to it are contained in Beloved’s contributions to the series of interior monologues late in the novel, “the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (199). Beloved’s monologues (210–214, 215–217) can be read as descriptions of a young African girl’s experience of being captured, and transported on a crowded ship across the sea. The descriptions of the sea, crouching in the dark for a seemingly endless period of time, “the men without skin,” “the little hill of dead people,” and “the iron circle . . . around her neck” all substantiate this. However, the discourse of these sections is exceedingly vague, also evoking the world of death from which Denver and Sethe assume that Beloved has returned. Furthermore, reference to the Middle Passage is dispersed throughout the narrative in hints and allusions rather than direct description. I will look at the Middle Passage in more detail later, but at this point wish to note its relevance to the specter’s manifestation of absence. It explains Morrison’s answer when asked why she wrote Beloved: “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it.”13 The figure of Beloved and the novel Beloved are manifestations of these “disremembered and unaccounted” (275) absences. Metaphorical Substantialization We can see, then, that the spectral is part of a wider thematic pattern in the novel that entails the conceptualization of absence as a presence, a pattern that is part of the representation of the inherited social effects of slavery. Looking closely, it is clear that this mode of conceptualization is





metaphorical. A phrase such as “It is stone quiet,” especially as it is contained in a passage that describes absence as a quality in space, suggests as much. It metaphorically attributes “stone-like” features to the “quiet”: impenetrable, hard, blank, featureless, and inanimate. Likewise, silence cannot literally be “solid” or “soft.” Such phrases rest on a standard, and basically metaphorical, way of conceptualizing silence as a “sound” itself, rather than as the absence of sound, an idea that is also evident in the clichéd description of silence as “deafening.” The metaphor in this case lies precisely in giving an absence (silence), presence (sound). Furthermore, the adjectives used—“solid” and “soft”—are also metaphors in reference to sound, treating it as a material substance, rather than a subjective phenomenon. This is similar to the metaphorical attribution of substance and dimension to emotion and mental states, of presence to absence, which we related to the ghost earlier: “124 was so full of strong feeling” (39) and “the sadness that crouched in corners” (20). As we observed, these phrases function as local metaphors in the text, ostensibly without ontological force. Yet, within the larger context of the novel, they also describe the baby ghost’s realization of emotion. These phrases reify physically absent emotion through the workings of metaphor, speaking of physically absent concepts as if they were present in space. The basic process of speaking of, or conceptualizing, absence as if it were a presence or entity, is a metaphorical process of “speaking of one thing,” that is, no-thing, “in terms of another.”14 The ghost is a sign of a wider metaphorical pattern that runs throughout the narrative, whereby absence is objectified, a pattern that is underpinned by slavery’s inducement of a palpable sense of loss and absence. The pattern we have been tracing in Beloved entails the metaphorical use of a more concrete secondary frame of reference in order to conceptualize qualitative absences (“silence,” “loss,” “absence,” “nothing”) as manifestly present; “silence” is said to be “soft” or “solid” like substance, “quiet” is said to be “stone,” and a man’s absence is said to be “owned” as if it were a thing. Absence is being metaphorically referred to as if it were presence. This connection between metaphor and the objectification of absence in Beloved is not incidental but draws from a fundamental process of metaphor itself. The presentation of absence reflects one of the basic impulses behind metaphorical language. Karsten Harries has spoken of this metaphorical grasping of absence in somewhat abstract terms: “Metaphors speak of what remains absent. All metaphor that is more than an abbreviation for more proper speech gestures towards what transcends language. Thus metaphor implies lack.”15 In more exacting terms, James J. Paxson, in a study on personification, designates “substantialization”—“whereby any non-substantial quantity . . . is given



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a material form”—as a “master trope” of sorts. It lies behind the common conceptualization of abstract, immaterial, and intangible properties and entities in more familiar terms.16 Paxson, focusing on personification, shows that one of the principal uses of tropes, suggested by the very notion of ‘figure,’ is to give conceptual form to the apparently formless, to “substantialize” the abstract, the absent, and the amorphous via figurative language. Paxson’s concept of “substantialization” is backed up by an examination of the uses of metaphor. One of the principal uses of metaphor is to give form to what can only literally be conceived of as absent through the superimposition of a secondary frame of reference, which is more familiar and less abstract. This lies behind, for example, many of the metaphorical “descriptions” (or perhaps, more accurately, form bestowing conceptions) of God in theological discourse; for example, “God is love” or “God is light.” Such examples do not presume to describe literally what “God” is, but, as David Tracy argues, must be taken as employing metaphorical indirection in their constitutive terms.17 Metaphor, as figurative expression, is used to give form to the absent, abstract, or imperceptible. The secondary frame of reference indirectly embodies that which cannot be directly described. This religious use of metaphorical substantialization is also related to the role that metaphor, analogy, and modeling serve in science. The creation of new (hitherto absent) knowledge requires a metaphorical impulse to give it form and to thus render sensible those theories dealing with that which is inaccessible to (and thus absent from) experience, making them conceivable through known means.18 This amounts to the often-repeated reason for using metaphor—that one could not say what one meant without it. It is used to bring the hitherto unknown or inexpressible into recognizable form. Metaphor is generative, used to expand the resources of language. Paul Ricoeur has described this generative function of metaphor well, paraphrasing classical rhetoricians’ accounts of metaphorical transference. The classical rhetoricians saw the purpose of metaphor as “to fill up a lexical lacunae, and therefore to serve the principle of economy which rules the endeavor of giving appropriate names to new things, new ideas, or new experiences.”19 While, as Ricoeur notes, the classical account of metaphor as merely a process of denominational change is not tenable, the generative goal ascribed to metaphor by classical rhetoric is still applicable. Pound’s goal in constructing the metaphor of “In a Station of the Metro” was to grasp something linguistically that was, to use Morrison’s word, “unspeakable” (58) in literal terms; he could not “say it” otherwise. As we saw, Pound’s use of metaphor derives from his struggle to express the elusive feeling that he had in the crowd at the metro station. As he





states, “Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language.”20 He felt that he could not communicate his impression of the crowd without the metaphorical imposition of the image of the petals; metaphor, the “language of exploration,” was a way of getting out of his “impasse,”21 a way of indirectly representing the “lexical lacunae” that his feeling constituted. The substantialization of absence that we have found in Beloved, then, is connected to metaphor’s general function in filling lexical and epistemological gaps, to indirectly account for that which the normal resources of language cannot. This returns us to the connection Todorov makes between realized metaphor and the fantastic through their common realization of absence. Realized metaphor makes metaphorical substantialization more apparent, by transferring it from a discursive level to the level of story, where the realized entity gives fictional substance to the underlying intangible tenor. Thus, in order to really manifest the phenomenological force of the “strong feeling” of traumatic recollection that, for Sethe, seems to “fill” 124, it is not just described as if it were physically present, but is actually substantialized as a presence within the novel’s textual world. The metaphors describing her emotions as substance are themselves realized in the textual world. The literalization of the phrase “124 was so full of strong feeling” into a textual reality is a further extension of the substantialization that is already implicit in the language of the phrase. The realization of the secondary frame of reference is an extension of the implicit substantialization of the metaphor; rather than just giving an indirect concreteness to the intangible or abstract tenor of the metaphor, it gives actual narrative form to it by fully manifesting the vehicle that represents it within the world of the text. In this respect, it is notable that Paxson does not see the realization of metaphor simply as a “literalization” of the metaphorical phrase, but rather, as a metasign of the impulse to “substantialization” that lies behind all figural language. This explains how realization of metaphor, while taking the deviant metaphorical sentence literally, does not thereby invalidate the metaphorical comparison that underlies its ontological character. Paxson sees metaphoric realization as an explicit enactment of the substantializing impulse into the world of a text. According to Paxson, metaphorical realization “is the self-reflexive sign of the cognitive process whereby substance and contour is given to that which has no physical substance. It is the figure of figuration.”22 Paxson’s analysis sees metaphorical realization, not only as a literalization of the metaphorical phrase, but as enacted substantialization, a realization of the bringing-into-being that is implicit in metaphor’s figurative function. Paxson argues that metaphorical realization is a distilled sign of the substantializing impulse inherent in figurative language, which attempts 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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to give form to the formless. This suggests that the use of metaphor and the realization of metaphor are techniques that are grounded in the confrontation with the history of slavery. The pattern of substantialization in Beloved, which connects the novel’s use of metaphor, the realized metaphor of the ghost, and the loss that slavery has bequeathed, suggests that metaphor, ostensibly a stylistic consideration, is actually part of the novel’s thematic project, a response to the absence and loss that marks the history of slavery. It has been demonstrated that the spectral manifestation of absence is part of a wider metaphorical pattern, in which absence is objectified, and that this pattern is grounded in the inheritance of loss and absence in the African American community. The metaphoricity of such objectification is not incidental, but is related to a fundamental function of metaphorical discourse. What Paxson calls “substantialization” is actually a basic impulse of metaphorical language, related to metaphor’s function in filling lexical gaps, indirectly “figuring” that which cannot be approached directly with the literal resources of language. The representational technique of such metaphorical substantialization is provoked by the confrontation with an absent, abstract, immaterial, concealed or otherwise inaccessible subject. This relation between subject matter and representational technique has important implications for the use of the spectral metaphor in Beloved. In the same way that the use of linguistic metaphor is provoked by the confrontation with an absent, abstract, or unknowable subject, so too Morrison’s use of metaphorical and spectral substantialization is also provoked by the confrontation with the absence that slavery and its inheritance entails. Such a confrontation motivates the use of the spectral metaphor, as a means of giving form to the pervading sense of absence and loss that constitutes the inheritance of slavery. In writing about the effects of slavery, Morrison is confronted with a world that has been hollowed out, where everyone and everything has been “run off . . . hanged . . . rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized” (23), “gone away, . . . taken, … chased” (5). To register this pervasive absence, Morrison must use metaphor and the specter to give form to that absence and loss. The spectral in Beloved distils the wider reality of absence and loss that slavery has engendered in the African American community and in the subsequent historical inheritance that the narrative implies. Morrison has spoken of the spectral figure of Beloved as a means of bypassing the abstraction that often comes with thinking of the totality of slavery: “The purpose of making her real is making history possible, making memory real—somebody walks in the door and sits down at the table, so you have to think about it.”23 The spectral metaphor is part of the novel’s general pattern of metaphorical substantialization, in Morrison’s words, “making history possible, making 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson




memory real.” The spectral is used in the novel to do the work of metaphor in giving form to absence and to represent that function in the fiction as a strategy of historical reclamation, a response to slavery’s overwhelming legacy of absence and loss. In the sense in which metaphor is part of this pattern, and the specter is itself a metaphor, the specter is a figuration of metaphorical substantialization. Like realized metaphor for Paxson, it is a “figure of figuration,” “the self-reflexive sign of the cognitive process whereby substance and contour is given to that which has no physical substance.”



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Absenting Presence in Beloved My last chapter examined the way in which the spectral metaphor is used to make absence present in Beloved. As shown, the novel uses the substantializing impulse inherent to both the specter and metaphor to reclaim the immense absence and loss that marks the history of slavery. In this chapter, I want to further the connections between the ghost and metaphor by looking at another register of spectral negativity in Beloved, distinct from its presentation of absence and manifestation of the dead. As suggested in our examination of “In a Station of the Metro,” the spectral figure is not just an absence made present but is also a disappearing figure, liable to fade away or vanish once perceived and to be subsequently denied as merely a hallucination. In this chapter I want to follow this distinction and, in contrast to the previous chapter’s concentration on the attribution of form to absence, examine the active reduction, suspension, and erasure of already posited reference or presence. While this distinction between absence and erasure may appear abstract and while Morrison intentionally conflates different senses of negation and absence into an overwhelming impression of negativity, it will become clear that these two different registers of the negative serve quite different purposes in the wider thematic framework of the novel. Drawing out the distinct senses in the localized depiction of the ghost will reveal their particular force and application in the wider context of the narrative and its historical project. In this chapter, I will look at the way spectral erasure, negation, and denial in Beloved transpose the novel’s key thematic concerns, particularly those relating to the history of slavery, and also self-reflexively represents the specter’s own textual function as a metaphor, a function that is nevertheless tied to those thematic concerns. I will argue that the way in which Beloved depicts spectral erasure is another site where the



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ghost takes on the work of metaphor, exhibiting strong parallels with its conceptual structure and its function in communication.

My previous chapter showed that spectral substantialization is part of a wider thematic concern with the presence of absence. Similarly, spectral negation builds on the novel’s wider thematic concern with the interplay between negation and denial. In the last chapter, it was observed that the world of the characters has been “hollowed out.” This hollowing out is an active negation of the life, dignity, and freedom of slaves. When Baby Suggs speaks and thinks of the loss that pervades the African American community, it is clear from the repeated use of active verbs that it has been inflicted upon them: the lost are “gone, . . . taken, . . . chased” (5), “hanged . . . rented out . . . stolen . . . seized” (23). Baby Suggs’s insistent verbs attest to the active process of negation as opposed to the void that is left after that action. Slavery has subjected the African American community to an immense “erasure” of presence, an active operation of “disappearance” on a massive scale, which is then represented by the negative presence of the ghost. Distinct from the actual negation that is engendered by death and slavery, which entails the disappearance of what is negated, the novel also depicts a pattern of denial, which generally arises as a response to the loss that slavery has inflicted. Unlike actual negation, denial is merely an attempt to block out information. Denver’s deafness is one example of denial. It is a willed retreat into silence—she suspends her hearing in an attempt to deny the knowledge of her mother’s crime. As we noted in Chapter 2, Denver goes deaf in an attempt to erase the truth about her mother that is raised by Nelson Lord’s question, which she then asks Sethe: “She went deaf rather than hear the answer” (105), her hearing “cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear” (103). This denial is clearly distinct from a real act of negation; despite the way that Denver thinks of it, the “silence” she perceives is the loss of her hearing, a loss of the recognition of sound, not the actual lack of sound itself. And, of course, while Denver may not want to hear it, Sethe’s crime is real in the world of the book. A similar example, which was also noted in Chapter 2, is Sethe’s refusal to see color after killing her daughter, a futile attempt at erasing or suspending the memory of that event, which is associated with the red blood that she and “Beloved outdid ourselves with” (201). As we saw earlier, Sethe becomes aware of her denial of color (“Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate”) when she realizes that “the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her



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baby girl” (38). Sethe suspends her perception of color in order to deny the past, just as Denver goes deaf in an attempt to block out painful information about the past. Yet neither act of denial actually erases the deleterious effects of the past, which continue to dominate their lives. In fact, by diverting attention away from the underlying, unresolved problems, such efforts of denial ensure that such problems will continue. Sethe and Denver’s suspensions of reference are thus both figured as merely negations of signs and their apprehension, rather than reality, a futile attempt to erase information that they already know. The ineffectual erasure of denial underlies the intertwined struggles of Sethe and Paul D with their pasts. Their meeting signals the beginning of their slow emergence out of denial; Sethe begins to notice color the morning after he arrives, and when Paul D sees “Halle’s wife alive, barefoot with uncovered hair,” the “closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock” (41). From this point, the plot follows their shared struggle to remember what they have buried and suppressed. Their denials of the past have been ineffective. Sethe has been trapped in a dulled emotional state, in which the past, although unrecognized, is always there, like the dulled and impersonal haunting of the baby ghost. Similarly, Paul D has hitherto “shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing . . . he asked for no more, for more required him to dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo laughing” (41). They already know what they have denied, but they do not recognize it. The plot follows the tension between their struggle to recognize their pasts and their wish to forget it, a tension that presupposes the ineffectual erasure of denial. The “false” negation of denial can accordingly be distinguished from acts of ontologically effective negation, where what is negated is no longer present. This distinction between actual negation and mere denial can, however, become blurred. The ostensibly subjective, virtual negation of denial can have objective consequences in the external world, especially if the denying subject acts in accordance with their denial within circumstances that they partly control. Sethe’s denial of color is an example of this. The reason she acknowledges her denial is because after Paul D arrives, she realizes “how barren 124 really was” (39); “it was clear why Baby Suggs was so starved for color. There wasn’t any except for two orange squares in a quilt that made the absence shout” (38). Sethe has created this real colorlessness of 124 in accordance with her psychological ignorance and denial of color, as it is her own home, over which she exercises a degree of control. There is only “the full range of the dark and the muted” (38) that reflects (and is determined by) her “dark” and “muted” mental state before Paul D arrives. Although relatively unimportant in



Absenting Presence in Beloved


itself, the way in which Sethe’s act of denial acquires real force, within certain circumstances that are under her control, is important for the conflation of denial and erasure in Beloved’s final disappearance, to which I will now turn. This interplay between denial and erasure has important implications for the spectral figure, and particularly its manifestation of the historical legacy of slavery. The disappearance of Beloved that concludes the novel is the most obvious episode of spectral negation and denial. This disappearance, and especially its elaboration in the two-page coda, is the novel’s most explicit development of the dialectic of absence and presence as it is manifested by the spectral figure. Beloved disappears in the climactic confrontation scene (257–262) involving the inhabitants of 124, the black women of Cincinnati, and the house’s owner, Mr. Bodwin. Morrison does not directly describe the actual disappearance, but breaks off the chapter at the point where Beloved sees Bodwin “rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her” (262). Beloved’s disappearance is instead relayed through second-hand accounts, which are delivered after the fact and exploit the confusion surrounding the confrontation at 124: Here boy, feeble and shedding his coat in patches, is asleep by the pump, so Paul D knows Beloved is truly gone. Disappeared, some say, exploded right before their eyes. Ella is not so sure. “Maybe,” she says, “maybe not. Could be hiding in the trees waiting for another chance.” But when Paul D sees the ancient dog, eighteen years if a day, he is certain 124 is clear of her.

(263)

The return of the old dog appears to confirm the supernatural nature of Beloved’s disappearance, in keeping with traditional beliefs regarding animals’ perception of the supernatural.1 However, the phrase “some say” suggests that this supernaturalism is uncertain and subject to conjecture. That she has vanished is clear, as Paul D’s thoughts attest, “One point of agreement is: first they saw it and then they didn’t. When they got Sethe down on the ground and the ice pick out of her hands and looked back to the house, it was gone” (267). There are, however, suggestions that she simply fled when everyone was distracted in the tumult: “Later, a little boy put it out how he . . . saw, cutting through the woods, a naked woman with fish for hair” (267). Paul D and Stamp Paid express doubt as to whether she was even present at all, even though both of them undoubtedly saw her earlier in the narrative: “‘You believe they saw it?’ ‘Well, they saw something’” (265). Beloved’s disappearance, even more so than the rest of the novel, is focused through the perceptions, thoughts, and reports of other characters, thereby casting doubt on its reliability.



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Whether Beloved disappeared, ran off, or was even there at all is subject to the unreliability of these varying reports. As Hélène Christol observes, this uncertainty exploits the literary tradition of the gothic fantastic.2 The uncertainty surrounding Beloved’s disappearance is fully developed in the novel’s coda (274–275), which describes the aftermath of Beloved’s disappearance. This section exploits the indeterminacy of the spectral figure to a greater degree than any other episode. It is the most clearly stressed episode of negation and absence in the novel, full of repeated negative words: “nobody,” “disremembered and unaccounted,” “lost,” “no one,” “never.” Different senses of negation are collapsed into one another. In addition to her actual physical disappearance, Beloved is also virtually erased from both private and communal memory. The diminution of collective memory is characterized as an act of communal denial, but it is one that far outflanks the small efforts of Sethe and Denver that were described earlier. In the coda, the community’s denial of memory appears to enact an actual, and retrospective, erasure of Beloved’s existence: They forgot her like a bad dream. After they had made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those that had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all. So, in the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. (274)

Three parallel “negations” are conflated here. First, there is the actual disappearance of Beloved from 124 that occurs prior to the coda in the climactic confrontation scene. Beloved has literally absented herself, whether it be by vanishing supernaturally or simply by fleeing. A second negation lies in the denial of the memory of Beloved, the way “those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her”; in addition to her actual disappearance, she is also erased from the memory of “those that saw her.” The third negation is the reduction of Beloved’s status to an imagined presence, in that “those who had spoken to her . . . began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all.” Those who had seen and spoken with Beloved ended up believing that she was just something that they had imagined, “like a bad dream.” These last two “negations” are thoroughly conflated into a single process whereby the obliteration of memory accompanies the obliteration of Beloved’s independent existence. In fact,





each of these different negations depends upon the other; it is the forgetting of Beloved that causes the characters to begin “to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all.” This reduction of Beloved to “what they themselves were thinking,” in turn, facilitates the final denial of her memory by “those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her”; “So, in the end, they forgot her too.” Once Beloved is reduced to the mere workings of the imagination, it is easier for Paul D, Sethe, and Denver to forget her, as if “she hadn’t said anything at all.” The reduction of Beloved to a figment of the imagination rests on a long tradition of cultural antecedents. The description of Beloved as “like a bad dream” and the characters’ reduction of her presence to “what they themselves were thinking” exploits the psychological tradition of the spectral, which was briefly examined in Chapter 2, in the connection of the spectral to emotional intensity and Sethe’s traumatized psyche. As Kathleen Brogan describes it, ghosts “externalize a character’s state of mind or inadequately repressed feelings,”3 although here the site of externalization has shifted into the communal “psyche.” The depiction of the ghost as a disassociated (that is, disembodied) projection of the perceiving consciousness is exemplified by Shakespearean ghosts. Lady Macbeth tells her husband, after he “sees” the ghost of Banquo, that it is “the very painting of your fear” (II, iv, 61). Gertrude similarly tells Hamlet that his father’s ghost is “the very coinage of your brain” (III, iii, 135). A similar picture of hallucinatory dissociation and projection informs such canonical ghost tales as Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” and also the concept of the double that is exemplified by Edgar Allen Poe’s “William Wilson.” All of these examples depend on the same relationship between inner psychological states and spectral apparitions that we saw in Sethe’s “theory” of disembodied “thought pictures.” There are differences, however, in the use to which this relationship is put. Jack Sullivan describes this tradition as one in which ghosts “emerge from within as well as invade from without,” a statement that is useful in discerning the two directions possible in the relation between psyche and specter.4 In the last chapter we showed how the specter is used to realize absence, depicting mental states as palpably present and extended in space. In Gertrude’s and Lady Macbeth’s dismissive statements, the relation works to the opposite effect, essentially de-realizing the specter; instead of the realization of psychological states, here we see the specter reduced to the workings of the imagination, to a mere mental state. The relationship between mental states and the spectral serves to undermine the objective reality of the apparition, rather than bolster it. This is what the coda appears to do with Beloved’s presence. Although the preceding novel has centered on



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her apparent flesh-and-blood reality, the coda suggests that she is merely a hallucination of “what they themselves were thinking.” The coda develops a number of important implications of Beloved’s reduction to thought. One implication is that Beloved manifests something that already lies within the hallucinating and perceiving psyche, a psyche that is, in this case, collective. The denial of her memory is formulated as a denial of something lying within the community itself: “Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name.” In contrast with Ella’s earlier description of Beloved as an “invasion” (255), the coda portrays her as somehow intrinsic to the community itself, something that now lies locked away within collective memory: “Where the memory of the smile under her chin might have been and was not, a latch latched and lichen attached its apple-green bloom to the metal. What made her think her fingernails could open locks the rain rained on?” (275) The communal denial, like that of Sethe and Denver, is figured as denial in the specifically psychological sense, the denial of troublesome memory: “Remembering seemed unwise” (274). Like psychological denial, it is an attempt at erasing an unnerving presence that lies within, only here it is a collective rather than an individual attempt. The whole community is depicted as being in denial of some collectively buried knowledge, which, while “more familiar than the dear face” in a photograph, is nevertheless locked away by “locks the rain rained on”; “They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do” (275). Another implication following from the characterization of Beloved as a projection from within, and which is unusually stressed in the coda, is that her existence is thus apparently guaranteed by the presence and directed attention of others. Beloved’s presence is precarious because, like objects for Bishop Berkeley,5 her very existence appears to rely on others perceiving her. If she is only a collective hallucination—both perceived and constructed within the same space of consciousness—a lapse in this process of imaginative construction and perception will result in her disappearance. As the conclusion states, Beloved is erased precisely “because no one is looking for her,” no one is positing her by perceiving her, or, more accurately, by creatively conceiving of her. This conceit of creation through conception and perception is illustrated further in the description of her footprints: “Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go . . . Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they will disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (275). The footprints only exist when someone occupies them. Anyone who steps in these footprints makes prints themselves, marks which themselves denote the absence of the marker.





The image of the footprints, erasing themselves once they are stepped out of, suggests that the existence of the spectral depends on its perceptual inhabitation and creation by the perceiving agent. Beloved’s dependence on the perceptions of others is foreshadowed earlier in the novel. In the climactic confrontation scene, Beloved disappears because she feels alone, abandoned by Sethe: “But now her hand is empty. Sethe is running away from her, running . . . and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running . . . and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again” (262). Here, her disappearance appears to confirm the fear of fragmentation and dissolution that she feels when left alone earlier in the narrative. When Beloved loses a tooth straight after Sethe leaves her to go upstairs with Paul D, she fears that she is starting to come apart: Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is it. Next would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of those mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. She had two dreams: exploding, and being swallowed. When her tooth came out . . . she thought it was starting. (133)

Foreshadowing the coda, Beloved feels here that her existence is guaranteed, kept from “exploding, and being swallowed,” by the proximity and attention of Sethe and Denver: “It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself.” While at this point in the narrative Beloved’s fear of dissolution seems to be simply an exaggerated fear of abandonment, a closer examination of this passage reveals its connection to Beloved’s final disappearance. Beloved’s fear of “exploding, and being swallowed” foreshadows the coda’s description of her disappearance in similar terms of explosion and swallowing: because “no one is looking for her” and “she is not claimed,” “the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her away” (274). Morrison’s use of the same language and images in these episodes suggests that the conclusion is a confirmation of Beloved’s earlier fears of dissolution when she is left alone and unattended. Beloved, finally abandoned by the collective consciousness that has created and maintained her presence, has apparently dissolved into nothingness; there is no one to guarantee her presence through “what they themselves were thinking.” The suggestion that she is a projection of thought underwrites the fear of dissolution that



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Beloved experiences when left alone; for if no one is left to hallucinate her into being, she will disappear. If to be perceived is paradoxically a precondition for the specter’s existence, then it will cease to exist upon being ignored, unattended, or denied. The key implication of this exploitation of the psychological aspect of the spectral is that its perceptual abandonment will ensure actual erasure and disappearance. This is similar to Sethe’s denial of color and the actual resulting drabness of 124 that was described earlier. Since those who perceive Beloved control the circumstances of her existence, just as Sethe controls the amount of color in 124, then their inattention, neglect, and fading memory will actually ensure her disappearance. Put simply, an imagined presence must be actively imagined by someone in order to exist and for this existence to persist. Although the novel’s conclusion appears to belatedly admit that Beloved was simply a collective hallucination, an epiphenomenal product of others’ minds and perceptions, this is by no means an unequivocal reading. In fact, not only her existence but also her negation is rendered provisional in the coda. So far, we have documented the way that the coda conflates denial and erasure, picturing an effective denial of an imagined presence. However, there are suggestions that Beloved’s denial is a futile, or largely ineffective, attempt at eradicating a presence merely by refusing to recognize it. One important complication that resists the unequivocal reduction of Beloved to a hallucination is that, as we have observed, the consciousness that supposedly creates and perceives the specter is collective. While the possibility of collective hallucination cannot be ruled out, it is difficult to discount the problems this would present given the preceding narrative, where she is pictured as an independent character, apparently interacting objectively with the other characters. The reader has by this time got to the end of a novel centered on what is a strikingly independent “hallucination.” Hence, the coda’s suggestion that such a hitherto independent character is only a hallucination strikes the reader as a rather belated denial after the fact, a rationalization rather than a strong ontological claim. In any case, if a hallucination, she appears to be one that transcends what is conventionally meant by that word, as she entails some external ontological dimension. As Neil Cornwell observes, if “Beloved were to have been hallucinated into ‘reality’ by Sethe, the ontological problem posed would be no less severe than were she to have been a ghost.”6 The narrator’s intimation that the community’s perspective is subjective and unreliable also indicates that their denial of Beloved’s existence is not to be trusted. We read that “those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her,” forget her, “until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe





that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all” (274). The phrase “began to believe” implies that their belief in Beloved’s nonexistence is not necessarily true, that it is actually a rationalization of their failing memories of her disturbing presence. Here, the air of conjecture and suspicion that surrounds Beloved does not just render her existence uncertain, but also her supposed nonexistence. Her denial is subject to the same uncertainty as her presence is, being filtered through her perceivers’ beliefs and rationalizations. The uncertainty and unreliability of Beloved’s denial is further confirmed by the coda’s hints that her presence persists, albeit in a more diffused form: So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. (275)

This passage suggests that a trace of Beloved’s presence persists in an altered form even though she is denied and neglected by those who supposedly hallucinate her into being. This passage describes clear attempts at rationalizing a persisting presence as merely imagined, like “an unpleasant dream,” but suggests that such attempts are unreliable. The qualifying word “seem” hints at this unreliability, much as the phrase “began to believe” does in the preceding paragraph. The fact that the “knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep” only “seem to belong to the sleeper” (my emphasis) implies that they actually belong to someone other than “the sleeper.” The implication here is that, despite denial and rationalization, a trace of Beloved remains as a feeling of unease. Moreover, there is the possibility that this persisting presence will be reactivated if it is acknowledged: “They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do.” This persistence undermines the community’s relegation of Beloved to an imaginary presence, suggesting instead that it is a dismissive rationalization that attempts to explain away her presence, since “Remembering seemed unwise.” Forgetting and dismissing her is a way of denying the persisting unease that accompanies her memory. Although, as noted earlier, the coda largely conflates erasure and denial, this spectral persistence highlights the difference between the two concepts. While it contradicts the supposed erasure of Beloved, it is perfectly consistent with the denial and



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deliberate forgetting of her, for, as was noted earlier, denial is only the virtual negation of a continuing persistent presence. Sethe’s denial of her painful memory does not actually negate either the memory or the event. Rather, it is a performance of erasure that ensures that the memory will continue to haunt Sethe’s life. Similarly, the community’s denial of Beloved ensures that her unrecognized presence will continue to haunt them. Historical Denial and Persistence The coda’s picture of spectral presence is, then, highly uncertain in a number of ways. First, it is filtered through the perceptions of the characters. The actual circumstances of her disappearance are not directly described, but given to us indirectly, filtered through the characters’ beliefs and assumptions: “After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them . . . they realized they couldn’t remember . . . and began to believe.” The narrator gives us the characters’ feelings, suspicions, and beliefs rather than an objective description. In addition to this filtering, the dialectic of spectral presence is thoroughly exploited, so that the ghost simultaneously signals a negated delusion and a haunting persistence. The coda’s images and language are all subject to conflicting readings as to the nature of both spectral appearance and spectral disappearance. While there are strong suggestions of erasure and denial of the spectral presence, there are also indications of its persistence, autonomy, and objective reality. In short, the novel exploits spectral indeterminacy through to its last word, so that even as it appears to discount the very existence of the ghost it still suggests an irresolvable remainder of presence.7 It is clear that there is a strong historical significance to the complex picture of spectral denial and persistence in the coda, which extends Sethe’s struggle with the specters of the past to the wider community of ex-slaves, and, by implication, African Americans as a whole. The metaphorical register of the coda is signaled by the way Beloved’s unresolved haunting departs from the personal resolution that Sethe, Paul D, and Denver experience. Denise Heinz notes that the coda, which “does not end on a conciliatory note,” departs from the “hopeful note” of Paul D and Sethe’s reconciliation.8 The personal story of Sethe, Paul D, Denver, and Beloved (in so far as she is Sethe’s daughter) is largely resolved, with Paul D’s and Sethe’s reunion suggesting that Sethe will finally escape from the debilitating ghosts of the past.9 However, the wider story of African Americans and their history, for which Beloved is, in Cornwell’s words, a “standard-bearer”10 for “the black and angry





dead,” remains unresolved. The coda represents the parting of the novel’s literal and metaphoric registers. Beloved’s continued haunting, after the story of Sethe’s crime and atonement has largely been laid to rest, clearly shows that she represents more than just herself, holding a metaphorical significance that transcends her individual relation to Sethe. The dynamics of spectral erasure and persistence are a metaphor for the precarious status of historical knowledge. Most simply, the absence invested in Beloved and her final disappearance capture the sense in which the past really is gone—it can never again be fully present. Because the past really is gone, historical knowledge is never a question of direct access and immediate presence but is always dependent upon the attentions of those who reconstruct it in the present. Historical knowledge thus relies on people perceiving, recollecting, and transmitting it in order to exist. The spectral’s dependence on recognition metaphorically represents this precariousness of historical knowledge. The suggestion that Beloved’s presence is guaranteed by the attentions of others metaphorically represents the way that the past is kept alive by those who are conscious of it. Just as Beloved metaphorically represents the past, so her disappearance after being abandoned by Sethe and the wider community represents the loss of the past when it is not recorded, investigated, recollected, and passed on. Beloved’s erasure metaphorically represents the way in which the past really does disappear from view when it is not actively investigated: her memory fades because “no one is looking for her” and “she is not claimed.” Like the spectral footprints of Beloved, history needs to be “stepped into” in order to exist. Anyone who walks in Beloved’s footsteps ensures their persistence, yet once they “take them out . . . they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there,” just as historical knowledge fades when not recorded and investigated. The precarious nature of historical knowledge is complicated, however, by Beloved’s haunting revenant persistence, which suggests that the legacy of the past is unavoidable. As shown earlier, Beloved’s abandonment and disappearance is offset by the intimation of a persisting “trace” of Beloved in the “rustle of a skirt” and the “something more familiar” that moves into “the photograph of a close friend or relative” (275). Although this haunting presence fades until “By and by all trace is gone,” the fact that the novel’s last word is “Beloved” indicates the persistence of the past. Importantly, this persistence is developed and extended outside the time frame of the novel, as is evident in the somewhat anachronistic description of the “photograph of a close friend or relative”; poor African Americans in the year 1873 would definitely not own casual snapshots.11 The dominance of the present tense in the description of these persisting traces and family photographs also suggests that the coda’s significance



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extends well outside the time frame of the novel, into the present day: “Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes . . . Sometimes . . . They can touch it if they like” (275). Countering the basic absence of the past, this spectral persistence suggests that while the past can be forgotten and erased, its effects continue within the present, and thus, in a sense, its legacy is still “here.” Beloved “has claim,” even though “she is not claimed” (274). The past, even when it is forgotten and erased from knowledge, still has a persisting claim on the present to which it bequeaths its legacy. The dialectic between the denial and persistence of the specter carries specific implications for African American history in particular. The history of slavery has been neglected and denied to a considerable extent, and thus, in a sense, lost to the wider American cultural sphere; yet its effects live on in the present situation of black Americans. This denial of slavery’s importance and legacy is not simply the result of white domination in documenting and writing history, but also stems from from African Americans turning away from the horror of their own past, since, as the coda acknowledges, “Remembering seemed unwise” (274). Morrison described African Americans’ neglect and denial of their past to Marsha Darling in an interview given shortly after the publication of Beloved: I think Afro-Americans in rushing away from slavery, which was important to do—it meant rushing out of bondage into freedom—also rushed away from the slaves because it was painful to dwell there, and they may have abandoned some responsibilities in so doing. It was a double-edged sword, if you understand me. There is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course there’s a necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in which the memory is not destructive.12

The “double-edged sword” of such a difficult memory explains the dialectical picture of spectral presence in the coda, which balances the “claim” that Beloved has with the way that remembering “seemed unwise.” Sethe’s difficulty in recounting her painful past is representative of the wider collective difficulty of African Americans with their own painful past; although they cannot completely escape from the legacy of slavery, it seems easier and wiser to leave it alone. The abandonment and denial of Beloved’s presence is, therefore, not simply a turning away from an abstractly conceived “history,” but specifically from those who Beloved embodies: “the black and angry dead,” forgotten and lost in the passage of time. This denial gives an added resonance to the epigraph from Romans 9:25: “I will call them my people, which were not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved.” Beloved is a representative





of the “not beloved,” people denied as “not my people.” The dialectics of presence that are inherent in the spectral figure are used to represent the contradictory impulses that are involved in recalling the denied and forgotten history of the dead, a history that is at once both resisted and inescapable. The coda’s specific references to the Middle Passage throw the resistance to an inescapable history into sharper relief. Chapter 2 briefly observed that Beloved functions as a representative of the Middle Passage, especially of those slaves who died at sea, never arriving in the Americas. The coda’s spectral dialectics develop this function further. Similar to Beloved’s monologues, the coda obscures its reference to the Middle Passage through its use of markedly vague language. Once it is recognized, however, it gives a more specific grounding to the “familiar” (275) uncertainty of the spectral presence. It is first evoked in the coda’s second line, where the “loneliness that can be rocked” by a motion that is “unlike a ship’s” is distinguished from the “loneliness that roams,” presumably that which Beloved represents. This implies that this “loneliness that roams,” unlike that which “can be rocked,” does bear some relation to a ship. The coda’s second paragraph, riddled with contradictory statements that resemble the novel’s epigraph, extends the connections to the Middle Passage by borrowing images from Beloved’s monologues: Everybody knew what she was called, but no one anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where the long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her away. (274)

The paragraph’s last line appropriates images from Beloved’s monologues describing the Middle Passage. The “chewing laughter” that will “swallow her all away” corresponds to the “chewing and swallowing and laughter” (212–214, 216) that Beloved repeatedly mentions in the monologues, and “the place where the long grass opens” alludes to her description of her mother in Africa: “she opens the grass” (210). The reiteration of these images connects the elusive “she” that Beloved has become in the coda to the denied memory of the Middle Passage, especially the unknown victims who never arrived in the Americas. The distinction between what “she” is “called” and “her name” at the start of the paragraph recognizes that, while the dead of the Middle Passage can be “called,” referred to as a collective whole, they can never be called by their forever-lost names.



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The Middle Passage represents the severance of African Americans from their African names. The repeated phrase “disremembered and unaccounted for,” not only denotes historical denial and neglect but also that those lost were dis-membered and uncounted, physically removed from Africa and removed from African American history. They were taken from their homelands, families, and cultures, in ultimately unknown, nameless numbers.13 The precarious presence of Beloved captures the precarious status of the memory of the Middle Passage. Although Beloved, as the personification of the Middle Passage, “has claim” on subsequent generations of African Americans, being the foundation of their very identity as African Americans, this is countered by its neglect and denial (“she is not claimed”), and the unclaimed historical status of the dead. The dependence of the spectral presence upon the perceptions of others also carries a particular importance for the unknown and unacknowledged victims of the Middle Passage. Their experience, as Morrison observes, has not been recorded in African American culture: “they never survived in the lore; there are no songs and dances and tales of these people.”14 The link between Beloved’s spectral presence and the Middle Passage is cemented by the disappearance of her spectral footprints: “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there” (275, my emphasis). Beloved manifests metaphorically “the water . . . and what is down there,” the lost and forgotten millions whose final resting place is the Atlantic Ocean. Unless someone “walks in the footsteps” of the nameless dead, their historical presence fades since there is no substantial record of their suffering, even more so than those who died in the Americas and at least became part of American history. Since there is no record of the individuals who died, then, if no one will “place his feet in” their footsteps, they will “disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.” For the Middle Passage to be manifestly and consciously present in the cultural memory of African Americans, it requires people in the present day to actively acknowledge and investigate it. Yet, although it demands conscious recognition, there is an intimation here that it will persist in some form even without such recognition. It is akin to an unconscious factor in the experience of African Americans: “Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep” (275) it is still present in an altered form, despite its neglect, aversion, and denial. The coda uses the Middle Passage to exemplify the problems that attend the reclamation of slavery, a painful history that has been obscured and denied, but which refuses to go away of its own accord. The slave past will continue to affect African Americans whether it is recognized or





not, since it has bequeathed the continuing effects of institutionalized racism. Recognition and remembrance may be painful, or seem “unwise,” but they offer the possibility of a real solution to a problematic history, rather than a false resolution, like Sethe’s numbed state of denial in the years before Paul D’s and Beloved’s arrival from the past. Morrison suggests that African Americans’ denial of the painful memory of slavery merely ensures that such a history will continue to haunt the present in less apparent, and perhaps more insidious, ways. This is why, as she notes, there is a “necessity for remembering the horror.” Such a dilemma is registered in the double meaning of the apparent disclaimer: “It was not a story to pass on.” As many critics have noted,15 the repetition of this phrase insists on its double meaning, with “pass on” meaning “tell again” and also recalling Sethe’s earlier use of the phrase to mean “die”: “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay” (35). While appearing to negate the entire narrative, to warn against its retelling, it is also an injunction not to let it “pass on” and not to “pass on” its telling. Like the precarious presence of Beloved, this phrase attests to the “double-edged sword” Morrison identifies—the dilemma between the “necessity for remembering the horror” of slavery and the potentially “destructive” nature of that memory. Its double meaning transposes the dynamic that Morrison described as central to her novel in an interview with Elsie B. Washington: I think what’s important about it is the process by which we construct and deconstruct reality in order to be able to function in it. I’m trying to explore how a people—in this case one individual or a small group of individuals—absorbs and rejects information on a very personal level about something [slavery] that is undigestible and unabsorbable, completely.16

The spectral’s negation and persistence in the conclusion reflects this conflict between absorbing and rejecting the “undigestible and unabsorbable” history of slavery. The community’s denial of Beloved’s memory and existence is an attempt “to be able to function within” the reality that the painful past has bequeathed to them.

The Spectral Metaphor and Deconstruction Morrison’s somewhat casual use of the word “deconstruct,” in the passage cited above, to describe the denial and rejection of the memory of slavery is suggestive for the way that the specter absents itself in the conclusion to Beloved. It suggests the self-destructive dynamics of spectral negation and also points to its potential metafictional significance. In



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addition to metaphorically translating the historical complications of slavery, the intricate dialectic of spectral presence in Beloved’s conclusion also constitutes a self-reflexive meditation on the novel itself. The abstract dynamic of the conclusion, particularly the resistance to an inescapable history of absence and erasure, resonates strikingly with Jacques Derrida’s concept and the wider philosophical enterprise of deconstruction. Although the novel’s more general spectral dialectic of absence and presence bears a broad resemblance to the conceptual preoccupations of deconstruction, it is in the specific dynamics of Beloved’s conclusion that this connection is most visible. The coda’s belated erasure of a presence that is, as we saw in Chapter 2, already constituted by absence bears a striking similarity to Derrida’s writing “sous rature” (“under erasure”), where words that denote indispensable, yet ultimately untenable, concepts are printed as crossed out on the text’s pages.17 This technique presents both the word and its effacement on the page, and so visually transposes and distils the fundamental tension between the simultaneous indispensability and untenability of philosophical concepts that deconstruction thrives on. Christopher Norris’s summation of the function of writing sous rature could be applied to Derrida’s entire philosophical project: “The marks of erasure acknowledge both the inadequacy of the terms employed—their highly provisional status—and the fact that thought simply cannot manage without them in the work of deconstruction.”18 The deconstructive project still needs the very concepts and words that it deconstructs, and thus, despite their visual and conceptual effacement, these ideas still preserve a residual presence or “trace,” to use a word that both Derrida and Morrison employ. In the project of undermining any conceptual system, deconstruction must reinscribe that system and its fragile distinctions and thus cannot be reduced to either of the impulses contained in the word deconstruction. Therefore, while in the essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida clearly wishes to critique and undermine the concept of structure in thought and language, he also acknowledges that this critique must inevitably use the concept of structure that is deeply imbedded “into the soil of ordinary language”:19 We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.20

This dynamic of flawed, inescapable indebtedness seems peculiarly similar to the spectral’s function as a metaphor for the potentially “destructive”





“necessity” of African American historical memory. However, the main importance of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction for our discussion lies in the crucial position of metaphor in his theory. The following examination of metaphor’s crucial role in deconstruction will show that the spectral erasure in Beloved’s conclusion exploits the inherent self-annulment of metaphorical reference. This will build on the relationship between selfreflexive metaphoricity and the novel’s historical subject matter that was delineated in Chapter 2. However, while Beloved may use a localized deconstructive dynamic in the spectral figure, it is in no substantial sense a deconstructionist text. There are clearly points at which Morrison’s historical project directly contravenes more “radical” and antirealist conceptions of deconstructive thought and practice.21 Morrison’s novel cannot be considered as a deconstruction of historical reality, for it affirms the reality of its historical referent, even when, or indeed especially when, it cannot be directly known. In Beloved’s conclusion, the dynamics of deconstruction are used to make realist claims, rather than promote the antirealism that some see in deconstructive theory and practice. The novel deconstructs its own spectral metaphor, exploiting the conceptual structures of metaphorical reference and spectral presence. However, the novel uses this deconstruction to recognize that its representation of the uncertain, but undeniably real, historical phenomenon of slavery and the Middle Passage is only a provisional reclamation. It uses the deconstructive potential of the spectral metaphor to emphasize that while metaphor can, and even must, be used to represent the obscured and denied history of slavery, its limitations and provisional nature must also be recognized out of respect for the historical reality of slavery. The concept of metaphor plays a crucial role in deconstruction’s dialectic of inadequacy and indispensability. In undermining direct linguistic access to knowledge, deconstruction shows that indirect metaphorical reference is a constant companion of literal reference, inseparable and irreducible to it. Metaphor is the central concern of one of Derrida’s most well-known essays, “White Mythology,” in which he addresses its ubiquity and importance in science and philosophy, disciplines that are supposedly characterized by the use of literal language.22 Derrida argues that metaphor’s function in philosophy and science is defined by a provisional dialectic of indispensability and inadequacy, similar to that which is visually transposed in his writing sous rature. He focuses on philosophical attempts to distinguish between concept and metaphor and argues that such attempts inevitably end up arguing their case with recourse (albeit unconscious) to metaphor. In this way, he argues that metaphor, in effect, “contaminates” supposedly literal discourses like philosophy and science, most crucially affecting any attempts



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to define and distinguish between metaphor and literal speech or “proper” concepts.23 Yet, this thesis of unavoidable metaphorical contamination is countered by Derrida’s insistence that the conceptual apparatus of metaphor, in particular its distinction from “concept,” is indispensable to any thinking about metaphor. The implication of this is that statements to the effect that “all concepts are metaphors” are as misguided as the claims of unequivocal literality that are Derrida’s main target in the essay. His argument can be seen most clearly in his reading of Aristotle’s famous definition of metaphor in the Poetics: Metaphor (metaphora) consists in giving (epiphora) the thing a name (onomatos) that belongs to something else (allotriou), the transference being either from genus to species (apo tou genous epi eidos), or from species to genus (apo tou eidos epi to genos), or from species to species (apo tou eidous epi eidos), or on the grounds of analogy.24

Derrida then notes that this is both “a philosophical thesis on metaphor. And it is also a philosophical discourse whose entire surface is worked by a metaphorics.”25 That is, within Aristotle’s definition of metaphor lurk various latent metaphors. Derrida lists the way each term in the definition proposed by Aristotle bears “the mark of a figure”: Metaphora or epiphora is also a movement of spatial translation; eidos is also a visible figure, a contour and a form, the space of an aspect or of a species; genos is also an affiliation, the base of a birth, of an origin, of a family, etc. All that these tropes maintain and sediment in the entangling of their roots is apparent.26

Thus, according to Derrida, the very definition of metaphor is contaminated by its own metaphors.27 He writes, “Metaphor is less in the philosophical text . . . than the philosophical text is within metaphor.”28 Derrida’s essay is filled with similar examples of philosophical accounts of metaphor that themselves seem to employ terms metaphorically. Yet this apparent contamination of the definition of metaphor by that which it defines does not render it useless. Indeed, Derrida argues that it is the definition itself that allows us to identify the metaphors that work within it. Although metaphors are littered throughout science and philosophy, the very ability to identify them, in turn, depends on this philosophical thesis, even though it too is seemingly littered with its own metaphorics. The main reason that philosophical definitions of metaphor continue to function effectively, despite being contaminated by an inheritance of metaphorics, is that metaphor erases itself. This is the most important point of Derrida’s essay for my analysis of Beloved. Derrida sees metaphor





as an important consideration for deconstruction in that there is an element of “self-destruction” involved in its being understood properly: “The metaphoric . . . gets carried away with itself, cannot be what it is except in erasing itself, indefinitely constructing its own destruction.” This self-destruction refers to the suspension of the metaphorical referent and accommodation to the primary frame of reference, “the circular reappropriation of literal, proper meaning,”29 as Derrida puts it. In understanding a metaphor as a metaphor, the reader negates the secondary frame of reference, relegating it to the imagination and accommodating it to the text’s primary (or what Derrida calls its “proper”) frame of reference. Derrida concludes, “Metaphor, then, carries its death within itself.”30 Metaphor, in this sense, exemplifies Derrida’s contention in “Structure, Sign and Play” that “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.”31 Metaphorical reference constantly haunts literal language as a referential superimposition, but is consistently suspended and negated in the process of reading and understanding. In Derrida’s essay, it is painted as a microcosm of the dynamics of deconstruction. Metaphor emerges as the exemplary deconstructive figure, constantly bequeathing its own deconstruction, its “death,” within its conceptual structure. The dynamic of metaphorical persistence and self-destruction that Derrida describes bears a striking resemblance to the trajectory of spectral presence in Beloved’s conclusion. Like metaphor for Derrida, the spectral figure of Beloved is pictured both as hauntingly persistent and an erased presence. Moreover, like metaphor, its dissolution arises from its very conditions of existence. While its presence is predicated on the existence of similarly immaterial substances and qualities, this also ensures that it can easily be considered nonexistent. As we saw earlier, the disappearance and reduction of the specter to a mere hallucination is drawn from within the concept of the ghost. The psychological associations of the ghost hold the potential for its own undoing, reducing it to a figment of the perceiver’s imagination. Like metaphor for Derrida, the ghost “carries its death within itself,” and Beloved’s conclusion exploits this potential for self-destruction. This resemblance between spectral dissolution and metaphorical selfdestruction suggests that Beloved’s denial and incomplete erasure is a selfreflexive depiction of her own metaphorical status in the novel. To see this, we should first consider the self-destructive mechanics of metaphorical interpretation, the “death” that metaphor “carries . . . within itself,” in greater detail than that provided by Derrida. Reading a metaphorical statement as a metaphor involves negating the textual reality of the secondary metaphorical referent, recognizing that it does not refer to a



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posited object, and reinterpreting it in relation to the text’s primary frame of reference. Such a reading process resolves the incongruous secondary referent of a metaphor, which is referred to as if it is actually present in the textual world. As Hrushovski observes, a metaphor’s secondary frame of reference does not in fact refer to an existent situation in the textual world but is merely “presented to the imagination of the reader” for the purposes of interpretation.32 Writing about metaphor in modernist poetry, Hrushovski describes the process of denial, rationalization, and accommodation that the reader performs to make sense of the metaphorical sentence: The secondary fr of a metaphor, denied existence in the Field of Reference of the poem, does not state a belief but sets the reader’s imagination in a new situation, breaking the continuity of a plausible representation and forcing on him some kind of accommodation between the two, either in metaphoric transfers and semantic resolutions or, at least, in the tension perceived.33

This interpretive process described by Hrushovski is the “self-destruction” that Derrida refers to in somewhat more elusive terms. To understand a metaphor, its reader suspends the secondary frame of reference, rationalizing and accommodating it in relation to the world that is posited by the text. Although metaphorical statements, unlike similes, literally refer to the secondary frame of reference as if it were actually present, reading and understanding a metaphor involves suspending the existence of this secondary frame of reference, denying it any function beyond the imaginary. In the coda of Beloved, the spectral presence undergoes a process of interpretive rationalization and negation similar to that described by Hrushovski in metaphorical interpretation. The images of Beloved’s fragmentation, where she “erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy . . . to swallow her away” (274), are charged with self-reflexive connotations, foreshadowing the reader’s inevitable metaphorical interpretation, appropriation, and consumption of such a fantastic figure upon completing the novel. Beloved’s dissolution when the community neglects and denies her memory metaphorically figures African Americans’ neglect and denial of the troubling memory of slavery. Yet, coming at the close of the narrative, it also describes the dynamics of the reader’s metaphorical interpretation of Beloved, her or his analysis of Beloved “into her separate parts,” which will resolve and “swallow . . . . away” her troubling, fantastically realized presence. Beloved’s interpretive elaboration and negation in the coda selfreflexively acknowledges the novel’s metaphorical technique. A process of interpretive elaboration, embellishment, and rationalization accompanies





her disappearance and denial: “after they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her . . . quickly and deliberately forgot her” (275). The community interprets and suspends the invasive presence of Beloved in a similar fashion to that undertaken in the reading of metaphor, where the reader suspends and rationalizes the superimposed secondary referent in relation to the text’s posited world. Just as the reader of a metaphor reduces its secondary frame of reference to a purely imaginary role, which is nonexistent in the text’s projected world, so too the community reduces Beloved’s presence to a figment of their own imaginations, denying that she ever existed in their world. Indeed, they “began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all” (274). Beloved’s imaginative interpretation, rationalization, and negation by the other characters closely parallel the reading of metaphor, where the reader rationalizes the metaphorical referent as obtaining only within their imagination. Beloved’s denial in the conclusion suggests a further development of the self-reflexivity of the spectral figure traced in Chapter 2, which showed that the spectral functions as a figuration of metaphorical substantialization, self-reflexively representing the novel’s metaphorical depiction of various absent or normally imperceptible properties as manifestly present. Here, in the novel’s coda, the community’s disbelief, dissolution, and rationalization of Beloved self-reflexively represents the reading process of the text’s own central metaphor. The conclusion thus represents the text’s recognition of its own metaphorical workings. It dramatizes the reader’s acknowledgment, in finishing the novel, that the ghost was a figure, a metaphor for something else, the historical memory and inheritance of slavery, rather than just a character. The difference between realized metaphor in Beloved and its workings in more “conventional” examples highlights this self-reflexivity. Most instances—Kafka’s Metamorphosis again serves as a good example— maintain the realization of metaphor within the text’s depicted world; realization is implicit in the fantastic or absurd situation depicted, and this situation is maintained in the text’s world. In such examples of realized metaphor, the recognition of the figure as metaphorical and the accompanying negation of the metaphorical referent lies mainly outside the text, in the reader’s interpretation.34 Although the reader is “pushed” into identifying the realized figure as merely metaphorical in an attempt to resolve or make sense of the absurd or fantastic situation depicted, this situation remains a reality within the world that is posited by the text. It is only the reader’s adoption of interpretive distance from the textual world that rationalizes and reduces the realized metaphorical referent to its function as a figure for something else. In Beloved, however, the spectral



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figure, explicitly realized throughout the novel, is actually unrealized and reduced to an imaginary presence within the narrative world. In this derealization, as shown, the spectral figure incorporates its own metaphorical status within itself. The exploitation of the dynamics of metaphor results in a metaphorical realization that includes its own rationalization and de-realization within it. As shown in my introductory chapter, fantastic metaphorical realization is an extension of the literal absurdity of metaphorical language. Beloved ’s de-realization of the spectral presence can accordingly be seen as an extension of the way that the reader, in understanding a metaphorical statement, imaginatively accommodates and resolves such metaphorical absurdity, cancelling the literal meaning. The spectral’s de-realization is akin to a subtler version of the kind of selfreading “moral” that often concludes fables and allegories. As Todorov notes, such endings “efface” the fantastic by providing an explicit allegorical justification for the narrative’s events, rationalizing the violation of realism as merely a rhetorical and fanciful depiction of some underlying truth.35 Like such allegorical admissions, Beloved’s de-realization effaces her fantastic presence by rationalizing it as simply a figure of the imagination within the textual world, but, unlike such admissions, it does so without breaking the continuity of the fictional world. The characters rationalize the ghost’s fantastic presence from within the world, albeit incompletely, thus staging the reader’s external rationalization of her fantastic presence as a metaphor. The self-reflexive de-realization in Beloved exploits the traditional dialectics of spectral presence in order to display the text’s metaphoricity. Initially used to represent metaphorical substantialization, as shown in Chapter 2, here, the transience of the ghost is used to represent the provisional nature of this metaphorical strategy. The ghost’s liability to vanish and its associations of delusion and hallucination are used to suspend the novel’s realization of metaphor. The conclusion exploits the traditional correspondence between ghosts and psychological states. As we noted earlier, the psychological associations of the ghost can both reinforce and, as in the conclusion, undermine spectral presence. Whereas in the spiritualist theory the equation serves to animate and bestow substance upon the spectral, in Beloved ’s conclusion it serves to rationalize and reduce it to the status of a hallucination. This reductive potential, inherent to the concept of the ghost, is used to self-reflexively represent the process of reading a metaphor, where the secondary frame of reference is suspended and rationalized. The use of the spectral metaphor facilitates the ontological transformation necessary to substantialize absence, as we saw in Chapter 2, and also enables its subsequent recognition and rationalization as a metaphor. By exploiting the psychological





associations of the ghost, the text depicts its own metaphor’s reduction to the imagination of its perceivers from within the confines of the spectral metaphor itself. The coda uses the deconstructive potential of the ghost to show that metaphor, in Derrida’s words, “carries its death within itself ” and “cannot be what it is except in erasing itself.” The conclusion is a selfreflexive deconstruction of the novel’s own referential and semantic strategy of metaphorical substantialization, but one that is initiated from within that strategy. In the conclusion, the metaphorical figure of the ghost is pulled apart from inside the very conceptual structures of both the ghost and metaphor. Deconstruction and Realism The spectral and metaphorical deconstruction of the coda is not just a self-reflexive narrative trick but rather an integrated response to the historical subject matter of slavery. The deconstruction of the spectral metaphor stems from the potentially problematic relation between fiction, especially fantastic fiction, and the historical reality that it attests to here. As I have demonstrated, in confronting the horrifically real history of slavery and attempting to represent the diffuse power of its inheritance, Morrison uses the metaphor of the ghost to represent the complexity of this inheritance. She thus superimposes the supernatural on what is otherwise a detailed and relatively faithful engagement with the reality of nineteenth-century African American life. This raises a potentially problematic relationship between the supernatural metaphorics that Morrison uses and the historical reality to which she wants to do justice. The self-reflexive acknowledgment and suspension of the spectral metaphor in the coda aims to resolve this tension. It represents the kind of acknowledgment of metaphorical reference that is demanded by the resolutely historical subject of slavery. In the context of her historical project, Morrison signals this metaphorical use she has made of the ghost. The use of metaphorical and supernatural superimposition is acknowledged in order to preserve the integrity of the historical referent. The need for such an acknowledgment of metaphorical and spectral superimposition is thrown into relief if we recognize that in Beloved, as Satya P. Mohanty has argued, Morrison is “engaged in a realist project with a deep belief in the possibility of objective knowledge.”36 Mohanty argues that “Morrison’s vision of the writer’s historical task . . . is what we would call realist or cognitivist.”37 Such a vision presumes that the objects of historical knowledge are real regardless of whether they are known or not and that historical knowledge is not a constructivist enterprise but an enquiry, an enterprise of discovery. One of the major themes of the novel,



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which is evident in Sethe’s and Paul D’s personal struggles, is that the reality of the past can be known, reconstructed through collaborative memory. However, as Mohanty argues, such a task of reclamation is complex and difficult. Mohanty sees the indeterminacy, loss, and general uncertainty of the conclusion as an acknowledgment, a “necessary caution” that “such remembering is never easy, nor is the moral growth that is closely tied with it irreversible, for fallibility, or at least the danger of forgetting what is essential, is always a historical possibility.”38 The fallibility of memory that the conclusion captures serves to strengthen rather than invalidate the novel’s realist project. The complex of forgetting, neglect, and denial in the novel’s conclusion presumes that something is forgotten, denied, or unknown. The negation and uncertainty of the conclusion, by positing a presence that escapes the apprehension of the community and the individuals who constitute it, actually reinforces the novel’s realist view of history.39 The spectral dialectic in the conclusion suggests that historical events are real and can be known, but that they can still have effects independent of their knowing. It presumes that there is a reality of slavery to be reclaimed and reconstructed, or neglected and forgotten. Underlying the supernatural presence of the ghost is a realist view of the past, which, while it recognizes the importance and the difficulty of imaginative reconstruction, nevertheless presumes that such efforts of reconstruction are enquiries into the reality of the past, rather than simply imaginative constructions. The persistence of an unresolved “trace” of Beloved, despite her being erased, forgotten, and denied by the community, also supports this reading of the novel’s historical realism, capturing the way in which the past, even if it is not consciously known, still influences the present. The perceivers’ denial of the spectral presence does not reduce the reality of that which Beloved represents; the diffuse inheritance of slavery is not dissipated with her denial and disappearance, but lives on as a “trace,” continuing to affect the present whether it is consciously recognized or not. The spectral figure metaphorically represents the past’s persistence as an unconscious presence, “Like an unpleasant dream,” which carries a latent power; if they “touch” it, recognize it, “things will never be the same.” The very fact that this “something more familiar” can persist regardless of its conscious acknowledgment presupposes a realist view of history. The novel’s commitment to historical realism motivates the specifically self-reflexive and deconstructive aspects of the spectral metaphor that I have outlined in the second half of this chapter. The deconstruction of the ghost acknowledges the use of metaphorical speculation to reclaim the problematic, but undeniably real, history of slavery. In a review article and interview with Morrison, Elizabeth Kastor describes





how Morrison, approaching the historical narrative of Margaret Garner on which Sethe’s story was based, became increasingly conscious of the difference between history and fiction: “As she explored the unknown, she came to think that the story could be told only in fiction, in art.”40 Morrison tells Kastor that historians “can’t speculate,” they neglect the “surrounding pathological” environment of slavery in favor of discussing “precedent” and “rationales that are clear.”41 Despite the vagueness of her statements and her somewhat dismissive criticism of historians of slavery,42 Morrison’s comments are valuable because they highlight the distinction between the powers (and corresponding limits) of fiction and those of historical research. Her main point here is that in contrast to the traditional historian, who neglects the emotional life of people under (and after) slavery, the novelist can “speculate,” imaginatively accessing the emotional landscape of slavery and building on its verifiable historical reality.43 The spectral metaphor in Beloved is an intensified form of such speculation. As was demonstrated in Chapter 2, the spectral is a manifestation of the otherwise largely inaccessible emotional landscape of slavery. It captures the invisible magnitude of that emotional landscape of accumulated loss and pain. The use of metaphor in the novel is tied to a wider attempt to indirectly access the emotional experience of slavery. It is, then, an intensified speculative figure within the more general speculative operation of fiction. The coda’s deconstruction of spectral presence is a self-reflexive recognition of the limits of this fictional and metaphorical speculation, distinguishing Morrison’s supernatural fiction from the reality of history, and thus recognizing and respecting the historical reality of its subject matter. By reading Beloved’s presence as a metaphor within the text, the coda recognizes the speculative nature of the spectral metaphor in the face of the historical reality of slavery. It deconstructs the ghostly and metaphorical superimposition that the novel has employed in engaging with an otherwise undeniably real, credible historical context and within a fundamentally realist project of historical reclamation. Morrison’s attempt to reclaim the unknown experience of those who died on the journey of the Middle Passage adds a particular urgency to this self-reflexive recognition of metaphor. The attempt to represent such a highly uncertain and inaccessible historical referent further necessitates both the use of metaphorical speculation and its self-reflexive acknowledgment in the coda. The self-reflexivity of the coda’s denial and reduction of the spectral figure acknowledges that metaphor is only a provisional reclamation of a historical experience that may be ultimately unknowable. The novel acknowledges and represents its metaphoricity in order to honor the reality of that subject matter, by recognizing that the spectral metaphor is only a



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speculative and provisional form of access to an uncertain, obscured but undeniably real history. The incomplete and unresolved nature of the deconstructive dynamic also reflects Morrison’s realist historical perspective. The reduction of the spectral to an unconscious presence persisting within the community represents the interpretative reduction of the metaphor’s realized secondary referent, its vehicle, back to the tenor that it represents and manifests: the sometimes elusive, disseminated power that the inheritance of slavery continues to hold for African Americans. While its metaphorical figuration is read, rationalized, and dissolved within the text, the persisting and elusive reality of this inheritance is not negated. The spectral deconstruction of the coda acknowledges the novel’s metaphorical superimposition, but does not dismiss that which the metaphor aimed to represent, still preserving the denied history of slavery as a presence that nevertheless persists. The deconstruction of the spectral acknowledges its speculative metaphoricity, but also affirms the reality of the subject of speculation; even though slavery, especially the Middle Passage, often eludes our direct understanding, it was a real phenomenon, and present generations will continue to inherit its legacy whether or not it is recognized. The deconstructive dynamic of the coda is thus used to indicate the provisional nature of the project of historical reclamation that the novel, and, more specifically, the spectral metaphor, sets out to achieve. This deconstruction recognizes the speculative nature of the substantialization of absence that was traced in the last chapter. Brogan usefully describes the dual function of the spectral metaphor as a means of representation and as a recognition of the speculative nature of these means: to “‘fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left,’ to reinvest absence with presence, Morrison . . . turns to the ghost as a sign of the necessarily imaginative reconstruction of a lost, unrecorded history.”44 The ghost is both the means to “reinvest absence with presence,” as shown in Chapter 2, and the “sign of the necessarily imaginative” nature of this reconstruction. It is used as a sign of metaphoricity itself, the necessity of which arises because of the uncertainty surrounding this “lost, unrecorded history.” Just as Morrison uses the metaphor to substantialize the loss and absence that slavery has engendered, so the conclusion’s spectral negation recognizes that such a metaphorical strategy is only a provisional and speculative reclamation of the undeniable historical reality of slavery and its inheritance.







Spectral and Metaphorical Domains in Beloved In my introductory reading of “In a Station of the Metro,” I drew upon Hrushovski’s analysis of metaphor through what he terms its constitutive textual “domains” or “frames of reference.” Hrushovski considers the conflation of two frames of reference in a text to be the essential condition for the presence of metaphor: “A metaphor exists only if two domains exist vividly in a text; the metaphorical expressions belong literally to one and metaphorically to the other.”1 The structure of “In a Station of the Metro,” which presents separate, self-contained, and seemingly independent scenes, foregrounds the essential importance of such “domains” to metaphor. The syntactic separation of the two images shows that metaphor is not simply a matter of manipulating words and their meanings, but entails a “transaction between contexts,”2 bridging two logically distinct frames of reference. By making the reader integrate the two distinct frames of reference, the poem highlights this relationship of referential transference and conflation that is central to metaphorical creation and understanding. As was demonstrated earlier, the word “apparition” in “In a Station of the Metro” self-reflexively encapsulates the poem’s dual metaphorical structure by invoking the specter’s similar position between two worlds of the living and the dead. The word “apparition” resonates with the poem’s movement from one place to another and the resultant referential duality of the poem. In this chapter, I want to develop the connections between spectral and metaphorical duality that are suggested by “In a Station of the Metro” by looking at the way that Beloved is organized around the demarcated domains and distinct frames of reference that are peculiar to slavery. The journey from slavery to freedom undertaken by the characters in 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


Chapter 4


the novel continues to make itself felt in their lives. By depicting the different worlds that define the characters’ lives, Morrison foregrounds the way that slavery is still obscured by temporal, cultural, geographic, and linguistic gulfs. The spectral acts as a sign for both the separation and the connections between these domains. This reading will build on the relationship I have drawn between the textual figure of metaphor and the fantastic figure of the ghost and elucidate another way in which the spectral figure signals the grounding connections between the novel’s structural use of metaphor and its problematic historical content. The task of bringing disparate frames of reference together is crucial to the reconstruction of the history of slavery. The spectral and metaphoric figure of Beloved is designed for this task. Both her spectral nature, as an emissary between worlds, and her metaphorical nature, as a conflation of frames of reference, are employed to this effect.

The Other Worlds of Slavery and Death The relationship between slavery and freedom in Beloved is consistently formulated in terms of demarcated spatial domains.3 The major example of spatial demarcation in the novel is the separation between the free North (“North. Free North. Magical North” [112]) and the slave-owning South. While it depicts the continuing hardship of the emancipated black population, the novel highlights the “world of difference” that separates slavery and emancipation. Indeed, the characters conceive of North and South as different “worlds,” with their separation marking a fundamental border in their conception of reality. Brian Finney describes the narrative’s alternation between two spatially and culturally distinct time periods and observes that “the Ohio River symbolizes a geographical, historical, cultural, and ethical divide which the major protagonists of the novel have to cross.”4 Almost all of the novel’s characters have undergone the transfer between these domains, with the physical border marked by the Ohio River, over which Stamp Paid ferries “contraband humans” (169) to freedom. This separation renders classifications of self, love, family, and even life itself in completely different terms on each side of the border. Sethe herself thinks of her existence in each territory in terms of two different lives that are clearly demarcated but always liable to intersect: To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one. The fact that Paul D had come out of “that other one” into her bed was better too; and the notion of a future with him, or for that matter without him, was beginning to stroke her mind. As for Denver, the job Sethe had



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Spectral and Metaphorical Domains in Beloved

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This passage voices the notion that is central to the spectral metaphor, that the past is a presence within the present, but it does so in terms of separate but coinciding “lives.” Sethe characterizes freedom as a “better life” than slavery (“that other one”), which, however, continues to exist. She conceives of slavery not just as the past, now left behind, but as a distinct realm, an alternative “other” life that Paul D can “come out of ” and that “was still waiting” for Denver. The conception of slavery and freedom as drastically different lives, which the characters cross between, is also shown in Baby Suggs’s transfer to the North. For Baby Suggs, the transfer to freedom is akin to being brought to life and discovering her own self, discovering “the heart that started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River” (147): Something’s the matter. What’s the matter? . . . suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, “These hands belong to me. These my hands.” Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? (141)

Coming out of slavery is like coming to life because a slave’s life and body are not their own, but are owned by another. This idea is also expressed in Sethe’s claim about her love for her children: “maybe I couldn’t love them proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love” (162). The new self that emancipation creates is directly opposed to the lack of individual identity under slavery. Sethe’s comment demonstrates that the two worlds of slavery and freedom are different frames of reference, in which the significance of “self,” “love,” and “life” are rendered markedly different. This difference is also highlighted when Baby Suggs, after shifting from a large and intolerable plantation in Carolina to the relatively benign slavery of Sweet Home, reflects that “It’s better here, but I’m not” (140). She realizes that the fundamental problem of being a slave is not the terrible conditions of life but the inability to determine one’s “self ”: Sweet Home was a marked improvement. No question. And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew



of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered. (42)

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Baby Suggs realizes that even though Sweet Home is better than where she was, as a slave, she still does not own herself and therefore is not fully alive. This denial of self under slavery is voiced in more active and violent terms in Sethe’s explanations of infanticide. Sethe, presuming that Beloved is her daughter, tells her that by killing her, rather than letting her return to slavery, she was saving her, because if she “hadn’t killed her she would have died” (200). The death Sethe refers to here is not only the very real possibility of literal death under slavery, but also the metaphorical “death” of the self that slavery effects, which is Sethe’s justification for the real death of her daughter: where “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (251). Sethe and Baby Suggs’s thoughts on this erasure and lack of self suggest slavery is a kind of “social death,” where the slave is denied the ability to even think of, let alone be, who they are.5 Slavery and death are not only connected through specific associations, such as those relating to a lack of selfhood, but also through their common portrayal as other worlds to the free, living world of the present. While death is chiefly associated with absence, there is also—in accordance with the substantialization of absence examined in Chapter 2—a consistent portrayal of death as an alternate ontology or world. Both slavery and death are depicted as dimensions or domains that are separated from the emancipated, living, present, but are always liable to overlap with it. Baby Suggs’s resignation at the end of her life is described as a suspension between worlds: “Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it” (4). Importantly, Baby Suggs has entered this state because Sethe’s crime has shown to her that the two worlds of slavery and freedom continue to overlap. This characterization of death as another world is further accentuated by Baby Suggs’s knowledge that “death was anything but forgetfulness” (4). Sethe’s intention in attempting to murder her children displays an even stronger understanding of death as a distinct ontological realm, rather than as simply absence or negation. By killing her children, she aimed to transfer them across a boundary to another place: She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged



more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. (140)


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This depiction of death as an other world, separated by a distinct, but apparently permeable, boundary, evokes the separation of the two worlds of freedom and slavery, quite apart from the “new life” that freedom offers and the extinguishing of selfhood under slavery. Sethe’s picture of death here as a place “over there, outside this place,” echoes its consistent reference as “the other side” (5, 200, 215, 241), a phrase that evokes the Ohio River’s separation of North and South. Despite their Christianity, the characters frequently view death as a neutral realm akin to the classical underworld, demarcated from the world of the living, but not specifically good or bad.6 Its attraction for Sethe is not that it is intrinsically good in itself, but that it is “out, away, over there . . . outside this place.” The demarcated worlds of the living and the dead are mapped on to the spatially, culturally, and temporally separated worlds of slavery and emancipation, connected by the common depiction of slavery and death as distinct yet permeable worlds, each being “the other side” to freedom and life. The spectral figure of Beloved stands at the centre of the association between the alternate worlds of slavery and death. When she first arrives at 124, she is assumed by Paul D and Sethe to be a fugitive from the aftermath of slavery, trying to “beat a life of tobacco and sorghum” (52). More specifically, Sethe and Stamp Paid assume that she has “been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door” (119, 235). Sethe thinks that Beloved’s inability to explain her previous whereabouts and origins derives from such a traumatic experience: “she must have escaped to a bridge or someplace and rinsed the rest out of her mind” (119). Paul D initially refrains from enquiring about her origins on the assumption that she is a refugee from the South: “He was about to ask who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman drifting was drifting from ruin” (52). Similarly, Beloved’s “careful enunciation” of the letters of her name makes him think of himself and others fleeing the aftermath of slavery, and so “he did not press the young woman with the broken hat about where from or how come. If she wanted them to know and was strong enough to get through the telling, she would” (53). Her initial lethargy, her lack of memory or family, and her vacant personality—characteristics that are attributable to her spectral nature, as was observed in Chapter 2—are, initially, assumed by the other characters to result from the “ruin” of the South or her escape from this ruin. The markedly “characterless” characterization of Beloved, particularly her limited memory and



them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there, outside this place, where they would be safe. (163)


scant self-explanations, resonates strongly with the effects of slavery on limiting individual identity, where, in Sethe’s words, “you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (251). However, apart from the more specific associations between Beloved’s character and slavery, she is also connected to slavery simply through her nature as an emissary between separate worlds. The novel associates her spectral transference between worlds with the slaves’ deliverance from the South. Like the ex-slave characters, Beloved has undertaken an arduous journey in order to arrive at 124: “I walked here . . . A long, long, long, long way. Nobody bring me. Nobody help me” (65). Her journey from death is depicted in terms that evoke the journey from “the other side” of slavery; Denver euphemistically asks her, “What’s it like over there, where you were before” (75), echoing Sethe’s similarly evasive description of Sweet Home as “Where I was before I came here” (36). This association is also clear from Beloved’s reply to Sethe’s ambiguous question, “Didn’t you come from the other side”; “Yes. I was on the other side” (215). The question and its reply simultaneously refer to the journey from the other side of death and the journey from the other side of slavery. Beloved’s crossing of a river, emergence out of water, and transfer from “the other side” all echo the transfer from slavery that most of the novel’s other characters have undertaken. This association between slavery and the ghost is made through a common schema of transference across boundaries and between domains. Beloved’s spectral transference between worlds is represented in analogous terms to the slaves’ transference from the world of captivity to that of freedom. This association between spectral transference and the deliverance from slavery also extends to the incomplete and unresolved nature of both transfers. The ghost transfers from death to life, but does not simply become another living person; instead, it sits in media res, between different states of being. Ghosts are not simply agents that cleanly transfer from one place to another, but constitute points of overlap between the two worlds of the living and the dead. While she takes “flesh” (255), the absence that is invested in Beloved shows that she is in a sense still dead. She has not become a living character altogether, but manifests the coexistence of the world of the dead with the world of the living. She represents a point of overlap and conflation between the two worlds. The concrete predicament of the ex-slave characters of the novel grounds this potentially “otherworldly” conceptual scheme of spectral conflation. The duality of spectral presence manifests the unresolved duality experienced by the novel’s ex-slave characters. Indeed, one of the



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main functions of the spectral in the novel is to give form to the way in which slavery still “exists” in the memories of the emancipated characters. Susan Bowers observes that, in contrast with the original slave narratives that traced “the individual’s life in slavery, escape, and the journey to freedom,” “Morrison reveals . . . that the process must be repeated twice: first to leave physical enslavement by whites and the second time to escape the psychological trauma created by their brutality.”7 This abiding process that Bowers describes is voiced in the novel through Sethe’s thoughts: “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (95). The characters’ continued suffering from the psychological effects of slavery produces a dual state in which they are simultaneously free from, yet still “captive” to, its power, still situated uneasily between past horror and the happiness that eludes them. For Sethe and Paul D, the world is an unresolved conflation of past and present, slavery and freedom, and the living and the dead. Sethe lives almost as much in the past as in the present, subject to its intrusion into her world at any time: “Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away” (36). Deliverance from slavery is pictured as a continuing, incomplete process for the characters, so that they are still effectively trapped between both worlds. The liminal presence of Beloved, representing the conflation of two realms, manifests the real coexistence of the characters’ enslaved past and their free present. The ghost’s intermediate existence represents the parallel worlds in which the characters live, simultaneously negotiating their enslaved past and their emancipated present. In manifesting the debilitating duality that the characters endure, Beloved also represents a way out of it, not by ignoring the connections to the past, as Sethe has futilely tried to do for years, but by revisiting it. Although the characters constantly live with the past, they spend most of their time “keeping the past at bay” (42), failing to make the necessary connections between their current predicaments and their horrific pasts. Beloved’s conflation of the past and the present represents a means of bridging the gap between these two worlds. She forces Sethe to fully revisit her past and pries open Paul D’s “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (113), in which he has locked away all his memories of slavery: “Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper” (113). In this sense, while Beloved represents the duality of their existence, she also represents a more concrete connection with their pasts, facilitating the difficult journey back to slavery, via conscious memory, that Sethe and Paul D will accomplish through the course of the narrative. Beloved’s incomplete transference between the worlds of the dead and the living is associated with the complex relationship between the worlds of slavery




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and freedom and the characters’ ongoing struggle to negotiate these two worlds.

The association between the specter and slavery is, then, based upon a common schema of distinct but overlapping worlds. This schema is registered in the novel’s discursive mechanics, particularly in the ambiguity that characterizes Beloved’s presence. The text creates this ambiguity by conflating various distinct frames of reference through which the ghost may be interpreted, so that its significance alters according to which frame of reference is adopted. Ella’s indignation at Beloved’s “invasion” of her world is one example. It follows from her indignation with the enslaved past and the possibility that one may continue to pay for it after it is supposedly gone: “There was something personal in her fury.” Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present . . . she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy. Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life—every day was a test and a trial . . . nobody needed a grown-up evil sitting at the table with a grudge. As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place—shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such—Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds but this was an invasion. (256–257)

Ella’s judgment on this spectral “invasion” follows from her meditations on the relationship between “Slave life” and “freed life.” Hence, her thoughts on “a little communication between the two worlds,” ostensibly referring to the “two worlds” of the dead and the living, also evoke the “two worlds” of slavery and freedom. This is similar to the phrase “the other side” and the references to death as “over there” that were discussed earlier. Sethe understands Beloved’s coming “from the other side” (215) as a reference to her journey back from death, but, as we have noted, it also refers to “the other side” of slavery, viewed from the vantage-point of freedom. These phrases are ambiguous because they refer simultaneously to two situations, two interpretive frames of reference in the text, one relating to the dead and the living and one relating to slavery and freedom. This ambiguity not only distils the thematic associations we have



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been tracing, but also suggests a connection between the ghost’s borderline ontology and its textual function. The ambiguity of these phrases, which themselves infer boundaries and different domains, arises because they are capable “of being understood in two or more ways,” “partaking of two characters or being on the boundary line between.”8 This points to the ghost’s textual position in between two interpretive worlds. The referential ambiguity9 we are looking at here is a linguistic phenomenon that is akin to the spectral presence: just as the specter’s liminal presence lies between two worlds, so too, ambiguity arises because a linguistic unit can be interpreted within two (or more) different frames of reference. These particular examples of linguistic ambiguity distil the more sustained way in which the text constructs, rather than just describes or represents, the indeterminacy of Beloved’s identity by manipulating different interpretive frames of reference that the reader is forced to negotiate. Beloved is not only ontologically located in media res, but also interpretively and referentially. She sits at the centre of competing and mutually exclusive interpretations, especially with regard to her identity, previous circumstances, and origins. Her identity is ambiguous because various explanations and interpretations of it that are otherwise incompatible are nevertheless associated with each other through the use of common language. The ambiguity is accentuated by the narrator’s lack of any explicit, objective confirmation of who or what she is, independent of the other characters’ speculations and suppositions.10 Although the narrative is dominated by the interpretation of Beloved as Sethe’s dead daughter, we are also given alternative interpretations, which, while not given equal weight, still retain some credibility due to their referential associations with the dominant interpretation. Beloved’s own explanation of her previous whereabouts is scant and vague, only coming out when she is insistently prompted by the other characters: Beloved, scratching the back of her hand, would say she remembered a woman who was hers, and she remembered being snatched away from her. Other than that, the clearest memory she had, the one she repeated, was the bridge—standing on the bridge looking down. And she knew one whiteman. (119)

Her memory of a “woman who was hers” supports the central supernatural reading of her as Sethe’s daughter, “snatched away” by death. But what of the “bridge” and the “whiteman”? Reflecting upon Beloved’s scant comments, Sethe offers her own, decidedly natural, explanation to Denver early in Beloved’s stay at 124, which is inspired by the similar past





experience of Ella: “she believed Beloved had been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door. That she must have escaped to a bridge or someplace and rinsed the rest out of her mind” (119). When Paul D tells him about Beloved’s appearance at 124, Stamp Paid seems to give support to Sethe’s initial theory when he recalls that there “Was a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that’s her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup” (235). Sethe’s and Stamp Paid’s alternative interpretation of Beloved as a girl who has been imprisoned for most of her life fleshes out her connection to slavery, individualizing the more allusive connections to the slave past. It suggests that Beloved is an actual, individual ex-slave, rather than just a spectral and metaphorical “standard-bearer of symbolic significance,” to use Cornwell’s phrase.11 While the novel’s irreducibly fantastic elements and focus on Sethe’s apparent recognition of Beloved as her dead daughter undermine the authority of this rational explanation, it retains some credibility due to the suggestive traces dispersed throughout the narrative, most tellingly in Beloved’s own words.12 There are strong suggestions of sexual exploitation in both her monologues and her more erratic explanations of her previous whereabouts. Her descriptions of “dead men [that] lay on top of her” and “the ghosts without skin [who] stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (241) appear to corroborate Stamp Paid’s story. Similarly she answers Denver’s question about her name by saying “In the dark my name is Beloved” (75). In the three-way interior monologue (215–217) Beloved asks, “Where are the men without skin? . . . One of them was in the house I was in. He hurt me.” The “crouching” (210) she repeatedly speaks of in her monologues is also consistent with this story of prolonged imprisonment. The reference to “crouching,” however, also suggests a point of connection with the dominant explanation of Beloved as the ghost of Sethe’s daughter by evoking the early description of the baby ghost as “the sadness that crouched in corners” (20). Her childlike ways, difficulty with language, and her “breath [which] was exactly like new milk” (98) also reinforce this association. She is described as “so agitated she behaved like a two year old,” while Sethe has a “suspicion that the girl’s touch was also exactly like the baby’s ghost” (99). She has deficient language skills, skin that is “soft and new” (52) and “lineless and smooth” (50, 254), and a sweet tooth, “as though sweet things were what she was born for” (55). This pattern of infantile characterization appears to give weight to the dominant supernatural reading of her as the incarnation of the baby ghost and Sethe’s dead daughter.



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This pattern of “infantile” characterization, however, is also compatible with the story of lifelong imprisonment put forward by Stamp Paid and Sethe. Carolyn Foster Segal has pointed out the similarities between Beloved’s “infantile” identity and actual documented cases of prolonged confinement, resulting in what she calls the “classic wild child.”13 As Foster Segal observes, victims of prolonged imprisonment lack social skills, language skills, and even basic physical coordination. Hence, the infantile characterization of Beloved, her weakness, and her difficulty with language, the very features that indicate that she is the ghost of the “crawling already?” child, also support the conflicting thesis that she is a runaway slave, who has been imprisoned for most of her life. Foster Segal notes the referential ambiguity at work here: “It is significant that the very characteristics of Beloved that suggest that she is the incarnation of Sethe’s infant daughter are also those of the classic wild child.”14 This mechanism, where the infantile characteristics of Beloved simultaneously point to two incompatible explanations, distils the textual construction of Beloved’s ambiguity. The use of overlapping but logically incompatible frames of references is most pronounced when Beloved’s relation to the Middle Passage is considered. In the novel’s final stages when Paul D asks Denver if she thinks Beloved was her sister, Denver’s answer is somewhat equivocal: “At times. At times I think she was—more” (266). Although Denver is the first character to believe that Beloved is indeed the ghost of her sister, this answer suggests that she has revised this judgment. Denver’s use of the word “more” accented by a pause is a good indication of the way in which Beloved functions in the text, evokes an additional frame of reference within which Beloved can be interpreted by recalling the novel’s dedication “Sixty Million / and more.” As Morrison has stated in interviews, this dedication refers to those who died before even making it into American slavery, on the journey of the Middle Passage.15 In Chapter 2, we observed that Beloved’s interior monologues describe the experience of the Middle Passage, but that this function is obscured by the vagueness of the language. More specifically, the monologues obscure the Middle Passage by simultaneously evoking the two other incompatible explanations of Beloved’s identity that we have looked at—that she is the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter and that she is a runaway slave. This technique ensures that the Middle Passage is obscured even as it is referred to. The phrase “the other side,” for example, not only refers to “the other side” of death, and the enslaved South, but also to “the other side” of the Atlantic Ocean, Africa. Its applicability to spectral transference, however, ensures that it is easily assimilated into the main narrative thread, reinforcing Beloved’s identity as the baby





ghost and thus obscuring the context of the Middle Passage. Similarly, Beloved’s statement in her monologue that “All of it is now . . . it is always now” (210) tallies with the idea of death as a timeless state, specifically corresponding to Sethe’s wonder that “her daughter could come back home from the timeless place” (182), but also describes the long and confined experience of the Atlantic crossing. Likewise, her statement in the monologues that “there will never be a time when I am not crouching . . . I am always crouching” (210) could refer to the story of lifelong imprisonment or the baby ghost’s “sadness that crouched in corners,” but also recalls the position that passengers on slave ships were forced to adopt.16 These associations connect what are otherwise logically incompatible explanations of Beloved’s identity. While Beloved’s relation to the Middle Passage cannot be logically reconciled with her role as Sethe’s daughter, an association is nevertheless made using language that can apply to both frames of reference. Despite the association between the Middle Passage and the world of death, they are nevertheless still incompatible explanations of Beloved’s identity—Sethe’s daughter could not have had such an experience. This incompatibility is depicted in the conflict between Beloved and Sethe toward the end of the novel. Their arguments are not disagreements but rather misunderstandings, as if they were talking about completely different things, within different frames of reference. When Sethe attempts to justify the killing of her daughter, whom she presumes Beloved to be, Beloved does not directly contest her reasons but simply deems them irrelevant, countering Sethe’s justifications with what seems to be descriptions of the Middle Passage: “None of [it] made the impression it was supposed to . . . Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat” (241). As Sethe exhausts herself trying to explain her actions, Beloved just “looked at her. Uncomprehending everything except that Sethe was the woman who took her face away, leaving her crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile” (252). Elizabeth House uses these apparent misunderstandings between Sethe and Beloved to argue that Beloved is not a ghost at all but a reallife survivor from the Middle Passage.17 She argues that the novel “is a story of two probable instances of mistaken identity,” with Sethe and Beloved misreading each other due to their respective losses.18 House thus reduces the uncertainty that is generated by the clash of different interpretations to human error on the part of the characters. House’s reading has value in that it focuses on the individual human aspects of the narrative and its historical subject. However, this explanation is qualified by the clear and irreducible indications that Beloved must be the



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returned ghost of Sethe’s daughter. The most important example lies in Beloved’s memory of the song that Sethe sang to her children: “‘I made that song up . . . and sang it to my children. Nobody knows that song but me and my children.’ Beloved turned to look at Sethe. ‘I know it,’ she said” (176). This episode indicates that Beloved, contrary to House’s reductive reading, must be Sethe’s daughter, that she “knows too much” not to be Sethe’s daughter. Although the explanation that House traces is undeniably present in the text, it is, like the dominant interpretation of Beloved as Sethe’s daughter, also contradicted and qualified by other details. The question of Beloved’s identity, although it may be skewed in one direction, seems ultimately irresolvable; the contradictory and indeterminate picture ensures that she cannot be reduced to any single interpretation. Furthermore, each competing interpretation is backed up by evidence in the novel. This suggests that Beloved’s ambiguity is not simply a reflection of the characters’ misinterpretations and not only a discursive effect of the text, but is actually intrinsic to her identity in the world of the novel, deriving from a multiplicity within her very being. Speaking to Darling, Morrison describes the “levels” on which Beloved functions in a way that echoes the pattern of referential ambiguity that we have been tracing and suggests that Beloved is in fact more than one identity: I will describe to you the levels on which I wanted Beloved to function. She is a spirit on one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead. And she must function like that in the text. She is also another kind of dead which is not spiritual but flesh, which is, a survivor from the true, factual slave ship. She speaks the language, a traumatized language, of her own experience, which blends beautifully in her questions and answers, her preoccupations, with the desires of Denver and Sethe. So that when they say “What was it like over there?” they may mean—they do mean—“What was it like being dead?” She tells them what it was like being where she was on that ship as a child. Both things are possible, and there’s evidence in the text so that both things could be approached, because the language of both experiences—death and the Middle Passage—is the same.19

Morrison clearly describes the kind of referential ambiguity that we have been examining: “Both things are possible . . . because the language . . . is the same.” Morrison describes the misunderstanding between Sethe, Denver, and Beloved that follows from this linguistic ambiguity, where certain phrases simultaneously refer to both death and the transatlantic crossing, but does not reduce this complexity to a single interpretation.





While she describes Beloved’s experience of the Middle Passage, she nevertheless maintains that she is still Sethe’s dead daughter: “literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead. And she must function like that in the text.” Morrison states that Beloved is both things in the world of the text.20 Her identity really is constituted by a conflation of the experience of death, relating to the main plot, and the experience of the Middle Passage. The confusion does not simply rest on a case of mistaken identity but on Beloved’s irreducibly dual identity: “She is also another kind of dead.” Morrison’s comments are backed up in the text by Denver’s identification of Beloved as “more” (266) than her sister. Although Denver does not answer unequivocally in the affirmative, neither does she deny that Beloved was her sister. She does not say that Beloved was not her sister, only that “At times” she was “more” than just her sister. Denver’s equivocation does not indicate a suspicion of mistaken identity, her own uncertainty, or a lack of knowledge, but Beloved’s intrinsically conflated identity. Denver’s use of the word “more” to describe Beloved suggests another factor that is missed by a reductive reading of her as simply a girl who has been mistaken for a ghost; she is not an individual ghost but a manifestation of all the victims of the Middle Passage, and, indeed, of slavery as a whole.21 As evidenced by the “conflagration” (172) of voices surrounding 124, “the mumbling of the black and angry dead” (198), Beloved is not just a single person but an embodied representative of sorts, in Foster Segal’s words, “a composite symbol,” but not just in a figurative sense, but in the text’s actual world.22 As Morrison has acknowledged, Beloved is “those black slaves” who did not survive the transatlantic crossing.23 Barbara Claire Freeman reads the vagueness of Beloved’s monologues as an expression of a collective, rather than an individual, consciousness: Beloved’s subjectivity, bound up with her ancestors and to a diffuse, unrepresentable history, is not one. Her voice speaks for a people, across space and time: it is a composite, both personal and collective, joining the tale of a survivor of the Middle Passage with that of the preconscious “consciousness” of a murdered child.24

Similarly, Deborah Horvitz describes Beloved as a conflation of all the “generations of mothers and daughters” who suffered the Middle Passage: “As such, she is, unlike mortals, invulnerable to barriers of time, space, and place. She moves with the freedom of an omnipresent and omnipotent spirit who weaves in and out of different generations.”25 The conflation of Sethe’s baby daughter with the girl from the Middle Passage is evidence of a larger multiplicity, whereby Beloved embodies all the “black and



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angry dead” of slavery. This multiplicity partly explains her final eruption into “separate parts” (274) in the novel’s conclusion, where the personal story of Sethe’s crime and retribution parts ways with the novel’s wider, unresolved historical meanings. She is a composite of Sethe’s dead daughter, the dead of the Middle Passage, and the dead of slavery, and her eruption in the coda signals the dissolution of these “separate parts.” Like the ambiguous statements that describe her and evoke two frames of reference at once, she is a manifestation of more than one situation within a single figure. Metaphorical and Spectral Conflation I have traced the ambiguity and contradictions of Beloved’s identity to show that indeterminacy invested in her is not simply depicted or described but is textually constructed from the juxtaposition of irreducible but corresponding frames of reference. The alternative explanations of her presence are all given a degree of credibility within the narrative. While each one would logically rule out the other one, none is allowed to assume the position of a final grounding truth; although the explanations are separate and distinct, they are connected and mutually reinforced through semantic transfers and associations. The resulting effect bears similarities to the referential effect produced in “In a Station of the Metro.” The “object” of Pound’s poem is decidedly indeterminate, seemingly suspended between the two frames of reference that constitute the poem. Pound uses poetic structure to create the effect of a flickering mental image, rather than simply depicting or describing his mental impression in such terms. Hrushovski’s description of the poem’s operation—“juxtaposing discontinuous frs [frames of reference] . . . and forcing metaphorical transfers on the reader”26—pinpoints Beloved’s function in the novel, where her presence conflates and associates logically discontinuous frames of reference, forcing the reader to transfer and map aspects of one upon the other. Like Pound’s poem, the novel offers logically discontinuous and incompatible frames of reference, which are nevertheless associated through similar implications and features, forcing the reader to map out a flickering, indeterminate “Field of Reference.”27 The irreducible conflation of distinct frames of reference in the figure of Beloved is strikingly similar to that which occurs in all metaphorical language. The referential ambiguity that we have been tracing resembles the phenomenon of “bifurcation” that Roger White observes in metaphorical sentences, where words often simultaneously refer to the two situations (primary and secondary) whose conflated description constitutes the





metaphorical sentence.28 White sees the phenomenon of bifurcation as evidence of the fundamentally hybrid nature of metaphorical sentences, showing that they are created by conflating two sentences that refer to different, but somehow analogous, situations. We have shown that Beloved is herself a “hybrid” figure, composed through the conflation of distinct and logically disconnected frames of reference. The reason she does not make complete sense is that she cannot be reduced to either frame of reference or explanation. Rather, as Morrison suggests to Darling, one must recognize the different “levels” that constitute her presence in the text. This suggests a strong similarity with White’s description of what interpreting a metaphor entails. For White, reading a metaphor involves disentangling the two situations that are used to constitute its literally nonsensical linguistic form: The only way to discover the significance of a metaphorical sentence is . . . to respect its status as a linguistic hybrid, and hence as an invitation to recover two implied sentences from which it may be derived, in order to restore significance to the nonsensical pattern of words we actually find on the page.29

Beloved’s “hybrid” identity realizes these linguistic mechanics of metaphor, transposing the discursive, referential complex that White describes into the represented world of the text. This realization exploits the specter’s incomplete transference between two worlds, in order to transpose metaphor’s structure of conflation and transference between frames of reference into a real situation within the world of the novel. Like White’s account of metaphorical interpretation, we must “recover” the two frames of reference that constitute Beloved in order to make sense of her ostensibly “nonsensical” presence. The characters’ confusion regarding her presence is due to their inability to disentangle these frames of reference, their failure to realize that she is the result of a conflation of two frames of reference, one grounded in the text’s immediate world and the other relating to all those who suffered under slavery, particularly in the Middle Passage. The misunderstanding between Sethe and Beloved is due to Sethe’s inability to see that Beloved is not only her dead daughter, but is also a composite of “the black and angry dead” of the Middle Passage and slavery as a whole. While Denver’s attribution of “more” to Beloved at the end of the novel suggests that she, at least, has recognized the multiplicity of Beloved’s identity, Sethe misreads Beloved because she fails to realize that, apart from her daughter, she is also the incarnation of all the lost and denied victims of slavery. This misreading is an internal depiction of metaphorical misreading, of the inability to grasp the conflated frames of



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reference that create Beloved’s metaphorical presence. The spectral is not simply used as a metaphorical vehicle for the dead of slavery, but is used as a vehicle by which these distinct frames of reference can be metaphorically conflated in the world of the text. The ghost’s status as an emissary between two worlds is used to bring the mechanics of metaphor into the real world of the text. A good example of the way that metaphor’s textual mechanics and spectral presence work together occurs toward the end of the narrative, when Paul D remembers having sex with Beloved in the cold house. His feeling of constrained desperation is invested with a wider historical dimension through the use of metaphor. This metaphorical significance is not isolated, but is set up by a pattern of association between the cold house and the Middle Passage. The cold house becomes a key site of the bifurcation that characterizes Beloved’s presence. As Eusebio L. Rodrigues observes, it “becomes the locale where the racial past is reenacted.”30 Paul D is first supernaturally “moved” there by Beloved, in a way that is clearly meant to evoke the forced transportation of slaves: “She moved him” (114, 221). Paul D equates his lack of power explicitly with being enslaved: he is not his own man. Beloved’s power over Paul D makes him rethink his manhood, apparently bestowed by the benevolent master Garner and then subsequently refuted by schoolteacher’s treatment of the Sweet Home slaves like animals: “If schoolteacher was right it explained how he had come to be a rag doll —picked up and put down anywhere any time . . . It was being moved, placed where she wanted him, and there was nothing he was able to do about it” (126). Paul D sees Beloved’s power over him as akin to the lack of self-determination and self-control, and, particularly, the forced lack of ties under slavery: “And then she moved him . . . long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root—she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll” (221). Scholars of slavery see such a condition of forced rootlessness as a key distinguishing factor between slavery and other forms of coerced labor.31 The Middle Passage is a drastic example of this aspect of slavery, where millions of people were uprooted, taken from their homeland to labor in another continent. The link between Paul D’s forced movement and the Middle Passage is supported further by the description of the cold house, where he is “taken” by Beloved, in terms that evoke the hold of a ship. There are, for example, sustained references to its holding of long-term stores. Paul D finds himself “out there, separated from the main part of 124, curled on top of two croaker sacks full of sweet potatoes, staring at the sides of a lard can” (116). There are “molasses and six pounds of cheddar hard as





bone . . . The shadows of potato sacks, a lard can and a side of smoked pork” (122); “There is the pallet spread with old newspapers gnawed at the edges by mice. The lard can. The potato sacks too” (263). The Middle Passage is more clearly suggested when these descriptions of stores are combined with the repeated image of light coming through the cracks of the cold house’s walls, an image that recalls Beloved’s description of a ship’s hold in her monologue: “daylight comes through the cracks . . . small rats do not wait for us to sleep” (210). When Beloved disappears in the cold house and leaves Denver distraught, the cracks of light are described with a suggestive use of water imagery: It is noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. A few cuts of sun break through the roof and walls but once there they are too weak to shift for themselves. Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows . . . [Denver] looks up toward the light to check and make sure this is still the cold house and not something going on in her sleep. The minnows of light still swim there; they can’t make it down to where she is. (122)

Beloved’s disappearance causes Denver to experience some of the abandonment and disorientation that are conveyed in Beloved’s memories of the slave ship. As Rodrigues observes, “the dark shed becomes the ship’s hold as Beloved forces Denver to re-live the experience of panic, suffocation and thick darkness (with cracks of daylight) where the self is reduced to nothing.”32 Echoing Beloved’s monologues, Denver’s distress at being abandoned is marked by water imagery and a loss of self: If she stumbles, she is not aware of it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold . . . This is worse than when Paul D came to 124 . . . Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no self . . . She can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing . . . She decides to stay in the cold house and let the dark swallow her like the minnows of light above. (122–123)

Like Beloved on the slave ship, Denver has a precarious sense of her own self: “she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an arm, a foot or a knee.” Her perception that she is “melting” into fluidity and darkness in the cold house suggests a strong connection with the experience that Beloved describes in her interior monologues. When Beloved reappears she explicitly connects the cracks of light to her



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“crouching,” adopting her position in the ship’s hold: “‘Look,’ she points to the sunlit cracks . . . Beloved drops her hand. ‘I’m like this.’ Denver watches as Beloved bends over, curls up and rocks. Her eyes go to no place; her moaning is so small Denver can hardly hear it” (123). This pattern of connections situates the cold house as a key site where the Middle Passage invades the characters’ world. When Paul D remembers having sex with Beloved, Morrison uses the linguistic mechanics of metaphor to register the dynamics of Beloved’s connection to the Middle Passage. He looks into the cold house, and the image of light seeping through the cracks initiates the connection to the Middle Passage: In daylight he can’t imagine it with moonlight seeping through the cracks. Nor the desire that drowned him there and forced him to struggle up, up into that girl like she was the clear air at the top of the sea. Coupling with her wasn’t even fun. It was more like a brainless urge to stay alive. Each time she came, pulling up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame, he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to. (264)

This passage uses references to ocean drowning to link Paul D with the original slave transportations, and those who died at sea, escorting Paul D to the “ocean-deep place he once belonged.” The use of metaphor here is not limited to a single word or phrase but is extended through the entire passage, which is infused with scattered references to this secondary frame of reference of ocean drowning. This passage can be dissected in the way Hrushovski and White do: by pulling apart the language of the two frames of reference (Hrushovski) or sentences (White) that it conflates. By ignoring all specific references to the immediate events, the passage can be read as a description of near drowning: “drowned him there and forced him to struggle up into . . . the clear air at the top of the sea . . . It was . . . like a brainless urge to stay alive. Each time . . . a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over . . . his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air . . . having been . . . to some ocean-deep place he once belonged.” For Paul D, having sex with Beloved felt like drowning in “ocean-deep” waters. The passage metaphorically conflates Paul D’s experience of sex with Beloved and the experience of those who died en route to the Americas. His “contact” with Beloved, “that drowned him,” is figured as a contact with the lost and denied dead of the Middle





Passage. This contact cannot be explained by a reductive reading of Beloved as a survivor of the Middle Passage who has been mistaken for a ghost. Moreover, while Beloved’s interior monologues seem to identify her as an individual, and importantly, a survivor, from a slave ship,33 here she appears to encapsulate the experience of those who drowned. Beloved is neither a survivor nor a ghost of one victim of the Middle Passage, but embodies the entire historical phenomenon, manifesting those who suffered under its torturous conditions, the torturous conditions themselves, and the lack of records and historical neglect of this experience. Thus Paul D does not simply sense that Beloved is one of the drowned, but feels that he has been drowned himself. Although the Middle Passage is brought into this scene as a secondary frame of reference, it is clear that Paul D’s contact with it is not simply figurative. Paul D actually feels the mysterious significance that is invested in Beloved. The ostensibly rhetorical references to “some ocean-deep place” attest to a reality within Beloved’s presence. However, neither can Beloved be reduced to being a cipher for this reality, in the manner of a traditional allegory; as should be clear by now, there is a lot more to the novel than just the Middle Passage, and, in Morrison’s own words, “literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead.”34 In fact, this passage substantiates our earlier statement that the reality of the text is bifurcated, composed of two frames of reference: Paul D is simultaneously having sex with Beloved, who is (at least in part) Sethe’s daughter, and coming into contact with the drowned of the Middle Passage. Caught between two frames of reference, which are both real, Paul D feels a palpable conflict between two distinct sets of emotions. On the one hand, he feels incomprehensible desperation and is subsequently “thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged.” On the other hand, he experiences the more explicable feelings of “repulsion and personal shame” related to his personal dislike of Beloved and betrayal of Sethe and his own free will. This emotional conflict derives from the disparity between the two distinct frames of reference that are conflated to create the real duality within Beloved’s “identity.” Spectral and metaphorical conflation function alongside each other, with the realized presence of the ghost paralleling the discursive function of metaphor. Beloved’s spectrally conflated presence, in Horvitz’s words, “invulnerable to barriers of time, space, and place,”35 brings the distant experience of the Middle Passage into the text’s reality, enabling Paul D to apprehend, but not recognize, the “ocean-deep place he once belonged to.” Similarly, metaphor, combining usually distinct frames of reference, is used to bring the Middle Passage into the text for the reader.



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The specter and metaphor work as one by connecting what would normally be disconnected. This parallel suggests that it is the historical conditions of the Middle Passage that ground and impel Morrison’s use of the spectral metaphor and indeed metaphor itself. The recollection of the Middle Passage is characterized by historical discontinuity, an abyss between distant frames of reference. It signals the severance of African Americans from their ancestral culture and language. Those who died on the journey, transferred from Africa but never arriving in the Americas, died in media res, and thus lie outside the strictly demarcated confines of African and American history. As Jean Wyatt observes, they died “midway between a place in African history and a place in the history of American slavery” and thus “never made it into any text.”36 The metaphorical conflation of Beloved’s identity stems from Morrison’s desire to confront these specific historical problems that have been bequeathed by the Middle Passage. Earlier, we quoted Morrison’s description of the linguistic bifurcation that signals Beloved’s conflated identity. It is telling that Morrison immediately follows her description of Beloved’s coexistent “levels” by speaking of the discontinuity, the “gap,” that the present has inherited from the Middle Passage, and the means of bridging this gap by “assuming responsibility” for the dead: Both things are possible, and there’s evidence in the text so that both things could be approached, because the language of both experiences— death and the Middle Passage—is the same. Her yearning would be the same, the love and yearning for the face that was going to smile at her. The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It’s bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one’s ever assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en route.37

Here, Morrison implies that Beloved’s conflated identity is an attempt to breach the separation engendered by the Middle Passage, figuratively representing the bridging of the “gap” that separates “us,” the novel’s readers, from the Middle Passage. Beloved’s interpretive position in media res within the novel reflects the position of “those that died en route,” suspended between Africa and America, and also attempts to figuratively reclaim them by bridging these disparate frames of reference through the use of metaphor. The bifurcated identity of Beloved, where “Both things are possible,” is part of the novel’s attempt to bridge the “gap between Africa and Afro-America . . . between the living and the dead and . . . between the past and the present.”



Bridging the Gaps of History


Morrison’s description of how this gap is “bridged” hints at the close connections between Beloved’s historical subject matter and its use of spectral presence and metaphorical reference. As we have seen, Beloved repeatedly states that she waited on a bridge over the water before her arrival at 124 (65, 212, 235). This is yet another point of bifurcation, referring to both a bridge over a river and the bridge of a slave ship. However, the bridge is also associated with communication. Paul D, wanting to know how Beloved got to 124, asks her “Somebody tell you about this house?” She answers “She told me. When I was at the bridge, she told me” (65). From this, Sethe thinks that Beloved must be referring to “somebody from the old days,” when North and South were separated, “when 124 was a way station where messages came and then their senders. Where bits of news soaked . . . until they were soft enough to digest” (65). The bridge is associated with communication between domains, recalling Ella’s identification of the ghost as a form of “communication between the two worlds” (257). Bowers notes the communicative significance of the bridge, describing Beloved as “a bridge between the ‘other side’ and the living . . . Like a bridge, Beloved enables passage to knowledge of the other side that otherwise would be impossible.”38 She equates Beloved’s presence with that of medieval chapels built in the middle of bridges “so that passengers could contemplate passage from one state to another.”39 As the transferring agent from “the other side,” of slavery, death, and the Middle Passage, Beloved fulfils the traditional role of the ghost as a messenger, as an emissary presence carrying information and knowledge between separate frames of reference. She is a metaphorical bridge between what is known and present and what is unknown and lost, allowing passage between the characters, the readers, and the unrecorded, “disremembered” (275) experience of the Middle Passage. This communicative function highlights the self-reflexive metaphoricity of the spectral figure: it is not just any metaphor but one that reflects the work of metaphor itself. This use of metaphor to bridge a gap recalls the etymological roots of metaphor itself. As was observed in my introduction, metaphor derives from the Greek words meta, “to transfer,” and phorein, “across,” a formulation that gives a spatial dimension to discourse. Thus, the linguistic roots of metaphor themselves involve a spatial metaphor, implying the crossing of a boundary and the movement from one place to another. While being wary of the etymological fallacy,40 these etymological roots do foreground the way that metaphorical language bridges two distinct situations, condensing an underlying analogy within a single sentence. The notion of “bridging gaps” is linked etymologically and conceptually to metaphorical thought



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itself. Bowers’s description of Beloved’s function as a bridge enabling “passage to knowledge of the other side that otherwise would be impossible,” perfectly describes the function of metaphor. Metaphor enables the gaps within and between distinct frames of reference to be imaginatively “bridged.” It works as a communicative bridge across the unknown and between seemingly irreconcilable frames of reference, such as “between Africa and America . . . between the living and the dead” and “between the past and the present.” Beloved’s use of metaphor is a response to the drastic transference between places, cultures, languages, and social conditions entailed by the Middle Passage. Metaphor bridges the disparate frames of reference that such a history has bequeathed. Beloved is the realized metaphor that Morrison uses as the bridge by which she, and the reader, can reach across the gap between the present day and the Middle Passage and thereby assume responsibility for those who have been left in this gap. This function of Beloved as a metaphorical bridge is not confined to the specific abyss that separates the Middle Passage from the present day but also responds to the separations that circumscribe the historical understanding of slavery as a whole. As we have noted, Morrison uses the Middle Passage as a paradigm for the wider problems that attend the reclamation of slavery.41 Morrison not only wants to bridge the “gap between Africa and Afro-America,” but also the more general “gap between the living and the dead and . . . between the past and the present” that characterize the wider phenomenon of slavery. Earlier in this chapter we showed the importance of boundaries to the everyday lives of the characters, where they feel themselves to be trapped between one world and another. This importance foregrounds the spatial, temporal, and cultural separations between the slave past and the present day that continue to impede the historical understanding of slavery. The need to overcome boundaries and reach across different frames of reference circumscribes any attempt to engage with the historical phenomenon of slavery as a whole, not just the reclamation of the Middle Passage. The use of the spectral metaphor to breach the separations that inhibit the reclamation of slavery is foregrounded by Sethe’s use of the word “veil” to describe her attempted murder of all of her children: she “carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there . . . Outside this place” (163). Ostensibly the “veil” here is the boundary between life (“this place”) and death (“over there”) and thus the boundary that Beloved has crossed in order to return to life. However, Morrison has also used the word “veil” to refer to the difficulties attending the reconstruction of the history of slavery. In “The Site of Memory,” an





essay published just before Beloved, she discusses the way that the authors of the original slave narratives habitually use the word “veil” to refer to a narrative barrier covering events deemed too horrific to recount: “Over and over, the writers pull the narratives up short with a phrase such as, ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’”42 After discussing the reticence of the slave writers, Morrison goes on to state that, as a “black and a woman,” writing “not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation,” her “job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’”43 Morrison uses the slave narrator’s own image of a “veil” to represent the boundaries that inhibit the wider reclamation of slavery—between the known and the unknown, the presentable and the unpresentable, the living and the dead, and the present and the past—and sees her work as an attempt to cross such boundaries. The metaphorically conflated figure of Beloved is the manifestation of Morrison’s wish to rip the veil that inhibits the recollection of slavery. Beloved manifests the central event in Beloved, Sethe’s killing of her daughter, a prime example of “proceedings too terrible too relate.” By pushing her daughter “through the veil” of death, Sethe also pushes her through the veil that conceals such events in narratives and histories of slavery. Beloved is, in Bowers’ words, the “manifestation of the world beyond the veil.”44 She signifies the ripping of the veil that Sethe “carried, pushed, dragged” her over and manifests the novel’s intention to access what lies beyond the veil of slavery, to bridge the boundaries that inhibit its telling, from the personal reticence of the slaves to the massive abyss of the Middle Passage. Morrison uses the veil, like the bridge, as a metaphor for barriers and access to the unknown, for marking both the separation and the traversal of disparate frames of reference. As Freeman observes, “The veil, like a bridge, connects the familiar to what lies beyond.”45 As we have shown, this is the work of metaphor itself, breaching boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. Morrison uses the spectral metaphor and metaphor itself, both “figures” that breach boundaries and bring together disparate domains, to reach across the abyss that separates slavery from the present, an abyss that is acute in the particular case of the Middle Passage, but which also characterizes any engagement with slavery.



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Spectral Excess and Metaphorical Supplementation in Beloved My previous three chapters have analyzed Beloved by developing the connections between the ghost and metaphor that were traced in my introductory discussion of “In a Station of the Metro.” Each chapter has traced a different way in which the spectral figure in Beloved displays its own metaphoricity and the way that the novel’s historical concerns ultimately ground this self-reflexive metaphoricity. Chapter 2 analyzed its role in presenting absences as perceivable reality and traced the connections that this has with the novel’s narrative function in articulating gaps and absences in knowledge. Chapter 3 outlined the spectral erasure, denial, and suspension of already posited presence in the novel’s conclusion, and, drawing on the similarities with deconstruction, showed that this concluding negation is the novel’s self-reflexive recognition of its metaphorically speculative response to the uncertain and obscured historical reality of slavery. In Chapter 4, I traced the connection between the ghost as a communicative agent, which transfers between separate worlds, and metaphorical conflation and transgression of different frames of reference, again noting the way this responds to the gaps that inhibit the reclamation of slavery. In these three areas, it was shown that metaphor and its manifestation and self-reflexive depiction in the spectral figure emerge as a response to the novel’s problematic subject matter, the history of slavery. In this chapter, I want to examine the novel’s depiction of the ghost as an excessive supernatural phenomenon, which offers another point of connection to the linguistic phenomenon of metaphor and is also grounded in problems specific to the history and historiography of slavery. 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


Chapter 5


My introductory analysis of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” showed that metaphor is created by augmenting the primary frame of reference, which is designated by the poem’s title, with a secondary frame of reference. Without the additional “scene” of the “petals on a wet black bough,” Pound’s poem would cease to be a metaphor, describing only the “Station of the Metro” that the title designates as the base frame of reference. Although this referential augmentation is a feature of all metaphor, it usually goes unremarked and is only emphasized here by the distinctive structure of the poem, where its two metaphorical terms are syntactically separated. In more simple and conventional metaphors, the additional frame of reference is incorporated into the metaphorical phrase simply through the use of a logically inappropriate word. Pound’s poem shows that metaphor is not just a transfer or ornamental use of one word for another, but the addition of a distinct referential dimension to the text’s basic frame of reference. Metaphor augments a text’s primary frame of reference with a secondary frame of reference that is superimposed on, but not given presence within, the text’s world. The superimposed secondary frame of reference exceeds the text’s base frame of reference, referentially “haunting” it, giving the word “apparition” such a self-reflexive resonance in Pound’s poem. This “haunting” referential augmentation suggests another parallel between the workings of metaphor and the spectral. In her book Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Kathryn Hume posits a relation between metaphorical augmentation and the fantastic, particularly in what she calls “literature of vision,” which uses “additive methods” to create an “augmented world.”1 Hume argues that such literature, in order to add “suppressed or repressed material and contrasting views,” often involves the “addition of a mythological or metaphoric dimension to the mimetic level of the plot.”2 This highlights the connection between the referential augmentation that metaphor performs and the ontological, or “mimetic,” augmentation that the fantastic often involves. Since metaphor adds a referential dimension to the posited world of a text, its realization, in which it is rendered literal, will ontologically augment that textual world.3 The ghost is, of course, one of the most obvious fantastic motifs of ontological augmentation, intrinsically implying an ontological dimension in addition to the material world of the living. The following chapter examines the novel’s exploitation of the spectral as an indication of excess, of something beyond the immediate frame of reference. Morrison exploits the traditional conception of the ghost as an excess of the material, known world, in order to stage the novel’s supplementary intervention upon the history of slavery and highlight the addition of, in Hume’s words, “suppressed or repressed material and contrasting views”



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to our understanding of slavery. Morrison exploits the supplementary nature of both the ghost and metaphor to engage with the deficient record of the experience of slavery. The spectral supplementation of the material world foregrounds the metaphorical strategy that it exemplifies; metaphor is used to represent more than the impoverished immediate resources by supplementing them with an additional frame of reference. The most developed connection between spectral excess, metaphor, and the novel’s historical subject matter is, however, to be found in the unspecified “something” that the characters perceive in Beloved’s presence. The descriptions of this elusive significance suggest the convergence between the historical subject matter of the novel, especially that of the Middle Passage, and the metaphorical technique with which it is approached. This convergence is highlighted by the way that Beloved appears to demand interpretation. Her demanding nature is similar to the mechanics of metaphorical interpretation, to the way that metaphor often demands active reconstruction from the reader and brings them closer to the creative enterprise by which it was constructed. This is one of the key reasons for Morrison’s use of metaphor: to performatively enact the historical demands slavery requires from its interpreters. Such demands are especially acute for the largely unrecorded experience of the Middle Passage. Morrison’s focus on the supplementary dynamic between the reader and the object of interpretation, whether it be metaphor, ghost, or the history of slavery, exemplifies the way that the formal qualities of Beloved register its problematic historical subject matter. Tracing this pattern of supplementation will further elucidate the way that the novel uses the specific metaphor of the ghost and the structure of metaphor itself to engage with the problematic history of slavery. The Supplementary Presence of the Specter After concentrating mainly on the spectral as a sign of absence and negation, it seems perverse to claim that it also signifies excess and addition. Yet it is quite clear that the very idea of an immaterial presence presupposes an addition to the material world, something whose very presence resides in excess of the physical realm. In Beloved, the spectral is clearly used to signify the augmentation of the physical world. This is developed in some of the episodes we have already looked at. Sethe’s belief in the reified persistence of memory, which, as we have shown, bears a close relationship to the actual manifestations of the spectral, clearly presumes an augmented level of external reality. The realm of “rememory” that Sethe perceives is one where “things” can live on despite their material demise, on another level to that of material reality: “out there, in the world . . . a



Spectral Excess


picture floating around outside my head” (36). Sethe perceives external reality to consist of both the physically present (“things,” “places”) and an additional emotional landscape of “rememory,” superimposed on the material world (“the place—the picture of it”). She clearly specifies that these presences do not exist in the same way that the material world does: they are composed of immaterial “thought” but exist outside of a subjective psyche. The whole dynamic of the episode draws from the fact that present material reality is always augmented (in Sethe’s view, literally), whether it be by emotional effect, its mediation in thought and memory, the memory of past situations, or the traces of the past in the present. This characterization of the spectral as something in excess of the material can also be seen clearly in the image of the “undecipherable language clamoring around the house” (198). The haunting of 124 is distinctly characterized as an augmentation of its material existence; returning to 124 at the end of the novel, Paul D “looks toward the house and, surprisingly, it does not look back at him. Unloaded, 124 is just another weathered house needing repair” (264, my emphasis). With the disappearance of the ghost, the house has been stripped off its additional spectral “load,” reduced to the bare materiality of “just another weathered house needing repair.” This is also emphasized earlier in the novel, after Paul D “evicts” the baby ghost: “But it was gone now. Whooshed away in the blast of a hazelnut man’s shout, leaving Denver’s world flat” (37, my emphasis). Similarly, Paul D succinctly describes the spectral augmentation of 124 when reflecting on his arrival and his relationship with Sethe: “this was not a normal woman in a normal house. As soon as he had stepped through the red light he knew that, compared to 124, the rest of the world was bald ” (41, my emphasis). The metaphorical relation between the baby ghost and emotion, which was examined in Chapter 2, posits the ghost as the difficult “personality” of the material structure of the house: “Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits” (29). This characterization of the ghost as “personality” positions it as an excess of the “flat” materiality of the house: “There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made” (39). In all these manifestations, the spectral is explicitly positioned as an ontological augmentation of the physical realm. The ghost’s characterization as an extramaterial excess exploits the traditional status of the specter as a supplementation of the material world. As one of the key indicators of an extramaterialistic worldview, the ghost has always entailed an augmentation of physical reality as it is empirically



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conceived. In his book Appearances of the Dead; A Cultural History of Ghosts, R. C. Finucane observes that the ghosts sighted in the Victorian period seemed to have lost the explicitly “purposeful” character of earlier apparitions. Prior to the Victorian era, reported apparitions, like their fictional counterparts in Shakespeare and the gothic novel, interacted with the human social world in practical ways, revealing and avenging past crimes, discovering lost fortunes, and divulging otherwise inaccessible information. In the Victorian era, ghosts are inexplicable and generally silent. He describes in detail the cultural forces that accompanied this change, principally the shift from the conflict of the Reformation, when the nature of apparitions was often the subject of debate, to the wider post-Enlightenment conflict between religion and science, when their very existence became the question at hand. Despite the apparently “pointless” existence of nineteenth century ghosts, Finucane observes that “still they performed one very important function”: All of the encrusted functions of previous centuries had been stripped away, leaving the most fundamental of all. In a Christian society assailed by scepticism and science, but influenced too by romantic hopes and visions, Victorian apparitions satisfied the thirst for immortality. In an earlier chapter we quoted Defoe: “The Inquiry is not, as I take it, whether they do really come hither or no . . . ” True enough, perhaps for his enlightened age, but by the later nineteenth century that was precisely the question. The answer was provided by silent grey ladies who stood at the foot of the bed, and dark nameless figures that floated away without so much as a word.4

The loss of ghosts’ explicit social functions in the Victorian era exposes the implicit social function of the concept of the ghost, which is “the most fundamental of all” its functions. In his words, they are the “answer” to the Victorian “question” of whether anything exists other than empirical material reality. They indicate the augmentation of the material, mortal world by a spiritual and immortal dimension. Finucane argues that this social function has always been implicit in the very idea of the ghost, but that it gains particular importance in the post-enlightenment period in reaction to the growing status of scientific materialism. With, in Finucane’s words, “the increasingly effective attacks by the scientificphilosophical establishment upon traditional Christian beliefs from the eighteenth century to the present,” the very augmenting existence of the spectral becomes its principal attribute and its main function within such a defensive traditional culture.5 The functional role of the spectral within Victorian society, as an augmentation of the material world, responds dialectically to a perception of



Spectral Excess


deficiency. As Finucane states, the augmenting presence of the ghost “satisfied the thirst for immortality” that existed in a “Christian society assailed by scepticism and science.” In Victorian culture, the social need for the specter arises from the failure of scientific materialism to account for certain conceptions (God, the soul, immortality, morality) that are deemed necessary within a Christian culture. Such practitioners of materialist and positivist science as the zoologist A.R. Wallace and the chemist William Crookes, who became ardent spiritualists, epitomize this wider social need for the augmenting presence of the ghost.6 In this role, spectral augmentation is specifically a dynamic of supplementation rather than simple addition; a supplement is “Something added to supply a deficiency” in the main body of an entity.7 The spectral in Beloved performs the basic supplementary function that Finucane describes. Sethe’s positing of spectral “thought pictures” arises from her need to account for the phenomenally real presence of memory despite the material demise of what is remembered. The reality of memory is a necessary concept in Sethe’s traumatized worldview, and the physical world’s failure to account for it causes her to posit another level of reality where “Some things just stay . . . out there in the world.” Memory for Sethe is as real as the material world, and since the physical world does not account for such a reality, she must supplement it with an additional dimension of reality “out there in the world.” In an essay that discusses Beloved’s relation to historical studies of slavery, Gary Daily links the spectral’s supplementation of the material world to Morrison’s wider project of historiographical and intertextual supplementation. Daily sees the supplementation of the physical world as one of the major factors impelling Morrison’s writing of Beloved, the elucidation of the emotional realities of slavery that she feels are missing from conventional historical accounts.8 Daily connects the use of the ghost as a metaphor for emotional states with Morrison’s aim to reconstruct the psychological landscape of slavery, her wish to “narrow focus with depth” in contrast to conventional historical accounts, which Morrison sees as “big and flat.”9 The ghost as fully realized embodiment of pain, emotion, and memory accordingly crystallizes Morrison’s intention to give voice to what is missing from traditional accounts of slavery, and thus to supplement, rather than cancel, a strictly materialist or institutional understanding of the historical experience of slavery.10 The spectral realization of subjective emotion supplements the objective concerns of conventional histories of slavery and the original slave narratives by recognizing the extramaterialist psychosocial landscape of slavery. This supplementation of the historical understanding of slavery adds to the larger project



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of supplementing American history simply by addressing the neglected issue of slavery. The initial motivation for the book, as Morrison has acknowledged in interviews, is simply to address the large hole, what she calls “national amnesia,” that slavery constitutes in American history.11 Morrison has repeatedly emphasized the way that slavery is passed over as one of the defining elements in American history, often referred to as if it had nothing to do with the “main body” of that history.12 In this respect, to write about slavery at all is to supplement such a deficient conception of American history. Morrison’s novel and its focus on the psychological landscape of slavery is thus an attempt to supplement both a whitewashed conception of American history as a whole and the narrowly “institutional” understanding of slavery that Morrison believes dominates what public discourse there is on the subject.13 Spectral excess in Beloved is a metaphorical sign of both these supplementary aims: a manifestation of the “dead Negro’s grief ” (5), which is neglected in institutional analyses of slavery, and of the neglected presence of slavery in general within the public discourse of American history. The supplementation of the deficient resources of history by adding the excessive presence of the ghost is strikingly similar to metaphor’s supplementation of literal language. In an analogous way, the addition of the secondary frame of reference to the base frame of a text also responds to the deficiency of the immediate referential resources of literal language, what Ricoeur terms “lexical lacunae.”14 Such a function was observed in Chapter 2; the use of metaphor is often taken to arise from an inability to say what is intended using the literal language pertaining to a subject. As was demonstrated in Chapter 2, its use is motivated by a lexical gap, an inadequacy in the literal resources of language. However, there we were principally concerned with metaphor’s substantialization of absence, while here, I want to stress the way that such conditions of referential deficiency promote the referential excess of metaphor, which compensates for the lack by positing an excess of reference. When literal language and direct reference will not suffice, they are supplemented by an additional, metaphorical frame of reference, which then haunts what is literally presented as a referential excess. Metaphor haunts the posited world of a text as a kind of referential “load,” not unlike the way that the spectral presence haunts the material structure of 124. Similar to the case of metaphor, where a deficiency in lexical resources and conditions gives rise to their metaphorical supplementation, in Beloved the deficient resources of conventional history give rise to their metaphorical supplementation by the ghost. The excessive presence of the ghost signals Morrison’s intention to supplement slavery’s understanding and the metaphorical means by which she performs this supplementation.



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I have shown that the implicitly supplemental presence of the ghost is used to metaphorically supplement what Morrison sees as deficient, reductively materialist historical conceptions of slavery. However, a more explicit dynamic of supplementation is depicted in the figure of Beloved, one that points toward more extensive connections between the spectral, the use of metaphor, and the representation of slavery. This dynamic exploits the ghost’s indications of excess far beyond its usual extramaterial connotations. One example of this is Paul D’s apprehension of an excessive absence on his return to 124, after the disappearance of Beloved. While at first he senses “nothing” where “once a shaft of sad red light had bathed him” (“A bleak and minus nothing. More like absence,” 270), on further reflection, he comes to think that this absence signals something in addition to his immediate perceptions: Something is missing from 124. Something larger than the people who lived there. Something more than Beloved or the red light. He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses. (270–271)

Paul D’s perception of an absence, his feeling that “Something is missing from 124,” prompts him to intuit an indefinable excess, “Something larger . . . Something more.” This presence is in excess of what is or has been immediately apparent, more than “124 . . . the people who lived there . . . Beloved or the red light.” Paul D perceives, but does not identify, “an outside thing” that lies “just beyond his knowing,” just outside his immediate frame of reference. It is indicated by the scene before him, but not integrated into it. The combination of connection and estrangement that Paul D feels, that “embraces while it accuses,” also exemplifies the supplementary dynamic; like a supplement, the presence is linked to the immediate situation, but only indirectly, at one remove from it. This passage exploits and elaborates the basic supplemental nature of spectral presence, its superimposition in excess of the material world. The pointedly abstract language used here highlights this supplementary dynamic and foregrounds the interpretive context in which it arises. The presentation of the spectral, particularly in the figure of Beloved, is constantly interpreted by the characters in abstract and indeterminate terms; the repetition of the word “something” throughout the novel testifies to the way in which the spectral presence intimates something, but what this is remains obscured. The abstract terms used to describe Paul D’s apprehension of what is “missing” from 124 highlight the elusive significance



Ghost, Metaphor, and Slavery as “outside things”

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of the spectral figure in the characters’ eyes, which persistently escapes their interpretive capabilities: Paul D “can’t put his finger on it,” it is “just beyond his knowing” (271). Paul D also tells Stamp Paid of this perceptible, familiar yet unrecognizable “something” when speaking about Beloved shortly before the conclusion: “She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I’m supposed to remember” (234). Paul D’s inability to recognize what he perceives resembles his earlier feeling when Beloved manages to evade his questions about her origins and means of travel to 124: “Paul D had the feeling a large, silver fish had slipped from his hands the minute he grabbed hold of its tail. That it was streaming back off into dark water now, gone but for the glistening marking its route” (65). Like Paul D, Denver senses an indefinable excess of significance within the absence that appears to characterize Beloved’s identity: At such times it seemed to be Beloved who needed something—wanted something. Deep down in her wide black eyes, back behind the expressionlessness, was a palm held out for a penny which Denver would gladly give her, if only she knew how or knew enough about her, a knowledge not to be had by the answers to the questions Sethe occasionally put to her. (118)

Denver apprehends “something” that lies “back behind” the absence manifested in Beloved’s “expressionlessness,” suggesting that her spectral presence is constituted by “more” than what it appears to be. Again, there is a combination of absent space and excess here, with Denver sensing something that is both an absence and a vaguely perceptible extra dimension within Beloved. As with Paul D’s interpretation of Beloved, Denver’s feeling that Beloved “needed something—wanted something” causes her to recognize the limits of her knowledge; it is something that “Denver would gladly give her, if only she knew how or knew enough about her” (118, my emphasis). Moreover, this knowledge is not to be attained directly, “not to be had by . . . the questions Sethe occasionally put to her.” The “something” that Denver senses in Beloved, like that sensed by Paul D, is “an outside thing,” lying “just beyond” her, or Sethe’s, direct “knowing” (271). These descriptions of Beloved’s elusive significance resemble Denver’s belief that Beloved was “more” (266) than her sister, which was discussed in the previous chapter. Like Denver’s claim, these descriptions of spectral excess also refer to Beloved’s embodiment of the dead of slavery, especially those of the Middle Passage. Earlier, we showed that spectral excess implicitly signifies both the supplemental relation of slavery to American



Spectral Excess


history as a whole, outside the main body of that history, and the similar supplemental relation of the psychological contours of slavery to a narrowly materialist or institutional understanding of its history. The more explicit invocation of unidentifiable excess in the passages quoted above not only reiterates this supplemental position of slavery and its emotional experience as “an outside thing” in relation to accepted historical understanding, but also suggests further connections. The dynamic between absence and excess in Beloved represents the immense magnitude of loss and suffering that slavery has incurred; the multitudes of the “black and angry dead” that Beloved embodies are both “missing” and something “more” and “larger.” Their loss is compounded by the general absence of records of the identities and experience of slaves, a lack that is even more acute for the “disremembered and unaccounted for” (275) dead of the Middle Passage. This explains the intrinsically abstract nature of this “Something more,” the way that it eludes and exceeds Paul D’s and Denver’s interpretive attempts. The paucity of names and recorded experiences of those who endured the transatlantic crossing ensures that it cannot be apprehended directly, but only indirectly, as “an outside thing,” an experience that is “just beyond” our “knowing” (271). The excessive presence of the spectral not only captures the immense suffering and loss of life, but also the way that knowledge of the Middle Passage escapes our grasp: Paul D “can’t put his finger on it.” Like Beloved’s true significance for Paul D and Denver, the experience of slavery and the Middle Passage lies outside our immediate frame of reference, in excess of our capacities of direct apprehension. The peculiar feeling of estranged familiarity that the characters feel toward the spectral presence is grounded in the relationship between African Americans and the Middle Passage. Paul D and Denver feel a connection, and even a familiarity, in this spectral excess, but also feel estranged from this unknown “outside thing.” Paul D feels its “glare” that “embraces while it accuses” (271). Similarly, he confesses to Stamp Paid that Beloved “reminds me of something . . . I’m supposed to remember” (234). This feeling of estranged familiarity captures the disconnection, via cultural neglect and denial, of African Americans from what is nevertheless the foundation of their cultural identity. It reflects Morrison’s contention that, in “rushing from slavery,” African Americans “also rushed away from the slaves because it was painful to dwell there, and they may have abandoned some responsibilities in so doing.”15 As the origin of his cultural history and identity as an African American, the Middle Passage “embraces” Paul D, but as an “outside thing” its “glare” also “accuses” (271) him, and later generations, of its denial. More specifically, this simultaneous estrangement and connection also suggests a further meaning to the apparent contradiction of the novel’s epigraph—“I will call them my people 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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which were not my people, and her beloved which was not beloved”— which was looked at in Chapter 3 in the context of African Americans’ denial of slavery and the Middle Passage. This epigraph also alludes to the specific relation between the lost multitudes of the Middle Passage, who were extracted from Africa but never became African Americans, and future generations of African Americans. While the Middle Passage is the origin of the existence of African Americans and while those lost were fellow Africans of those who survived, they have been forgotten, their names lost, and, furthermore, in dying before arriving in the Americas, they have been cut off from the ancestral chain linking Africa and America. For Morrison and the characters of her novel, the millions of Africans who died on the transatlantic crossing and were unceremoniously buried at sea are “my people which were not my people.” While a part of their history of slavery and forced transportation, their death even before reaching America cuts them off from African American history, making their presence the embracing “glare of an outside thing” (271). The supplementary dynamic invested in Beloved not only captures the excessive historical presence of slavery and the Middle Passage but also reflects the mode in which this is represented, that is, metaphor. The phrase “an outside thing” not only refers to the historical and historiographical peculiarities of slavery and the Middle Passage but also describes the metaphorical way in which these are incorporated into the immediate events of the narrative. It refers to the metaphorical referential strategy of allegoria, of “speaking otherwise,”16 that is used in Beloved’s embodiment of the horrors of slavery and the Middle Passage, as something “outside” what is literally presented. This is particularly acute for the novel’s incorporation of the Middle Passage. While Beloved does metaphorically represent the larger history of slavery, distinct from her literal presence as Sethe’s daughter, it is in her specific embodiment of the Middle Passage that metaphor’s referential excess is most pronounced. This is because the experience of the Middle Passage occupies a more tangential position to the frame of reference of the main narrative, lying well outside the confines of the novel’s central plot. Relative to 124, its living inhabitants, and the novel’s setting in Ohio during the Reconstruction, it is well and truly “an outside thing.” Reflecting this, the phrase “Something larger than the people who lived there . . . more than Beloved or the red light” captures the novel’s metaphorical representation of the Middle Passage perfectly. It is something that lies beyond the novel’s immediate plot, characters, and social world, 124 and “the people that lived there,” and beyond “Beloved and the red light” in their individual roles as manifestations of Sethe’s dead daughter. Like Denver’s statement that Beloved was “more” than her familial relation to herself and Sethe, the intimations of “Something larger . . . Something more” refer self-reflexively 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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to Beloved’s metaphorical role in the text as an excess of her literal character, more than what she appears to be. Beloved’s metaphorical significance extends “outside” the parameters of the main plot and the interpersonal dynamics between Sethe, Paul D, Denver, and Beloved, the story of their individual pasts, present, and future. Beloved’s supplementary presence captures both what she signifies (slavery and the Middle Passage) and how she signifies it (metaphor). The dual resonance of these descriptions indicates the complex connection between the historical subject matter and the metaphorical structure of the text. The use of metaphor draws from Morrison’s thematic intentions. She uses the spectral metaphor to simultaneously address the magnitude of slavery, its “big and flat” contours, and account for its intimate psychological effects on individuals, to “narrow focus with depth.”17 The elusive references to “an outside thing,” that is something “more” and “larger” than that which is immediately present, reflect the necessarily wider metaphorical significance of the narrative’s strategically “narrow focus” on Sethe’s personal battle with the past. Beloved’s metaphorical significance is necessarily “outside” the narrative’s immediate frame of reference, which focuses on the interrelations of the inhabitants of 124 and the return of Sethe’s dead daughter. The supplementary presence of the ghost thus captures the metaphorical strategy used to indirectly signify a huge, haunting history while maintaining a “narrow focus” on slavery’s effects on individuals’ personal struggles and social relationships. The self-reflexive depiction of metaphorical supplementation in the spectral figure, which suggests the presence of an alternative frame of reference to the literally depicted events, also attests to the novel’s thematic engagement with the historiographical status of slavery. It is not merely self-referential, but indicates the determinate connection between the problematic representational conditions of the subject matter and the use of metaphorical supplementation. Confronted with an immense but elusive referent, Morrison uses the supplementary dynamics of metaphor to indirectly represent it. The experience of the Middle Passage cannot be accessed directly, and Morrison echoes this by depicting it as a supplementary frame of reference, outside the immediate world of the characters. Metaphor is used to posit an “outside thing,” referentially emulating the elusive nature of the history of slavery and the Middle Passage, which lie outside our immediate historical grasp. The Demand for Supplementation The connection between the historical subject matter and metaphorical supplementation is strengthened if we consider the way that the spectral figure, by intimating an elusive supplementary significance, demands



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interpretation from the characters. For Denver, Beloved “wanted something—needed something” from her, like a “palm held out for a penny” (118, my emphasis). Similarly, Beloved reminds Paul D of something he is “supposed to remember” (234, my emphasis). This demanding nature of the spectral presence suggests a more precise connection between the history of slavery and spectral and metaphorical figuration. As we have shown, both figures are used to supplement an apparent deficiency in, respectively, the lexical resources of literal language and physicalist conceptions of the world. However, in Beloved the spectral metaphor is not merely a supplemental presence itself but also demands its own interpretive supplementation from both the characters and the reader. This is strikingly similar to the supplementation that metaphors demand from their readers in order to be adequately understood and suggests that Morrison uses metaphor to performatively enact the interpretive demands of slavery and to elicit the reader’s own imaginative supplementation of this desiccated history. In The Structure of Metaphor, White describes the interpretively demanding nature of metaphor in terms that are highly suggestive of the supplementary presence of the Beloved. He foregrounds this demanding nature by focusing on a crucial point of contention between Monroe Beardsley and Richards over the identification of the metaphorical “vehicle” in any given metaphor. Beardsley objects to Richards’s classification of “vehicle” and “tenor” because it often involves the mental importation of a referent that is not specified in the words of the metaphor, especially in more complex metaphors.18 White sees Beardsley’s objection as an insightful error that illuminates the frequent “underdetermination” of the metaphorical referent; often, the exact identity of the metaphorical vehicle remains unspecified, being suggested merely by a verb or an adjective, rather than its name or an obvious reference. Arguing in favor of Richards’s mode of analysis, White sees Beardsley as inadvertently pointing out one of the most important features of metaphorical reference and its interpretation, the fact that metaphor involves more than just the words on the page. White argues in favor of Richards’s claim that metaphor is first a mental operation, which is then transposed into verbal form by the writer. For White, the fact that metaphor is such an “underdetermined” figure, one that demands the importation of ideas external to the words on the page in order to be adequately construed, favors the idea that metaphor, while a linguistic phenomenon, is nevertheless based in thought.19 White regards the “importation,” which Beardsley condemns in Richards’s theory as “idiosyncratic imagery,” as an essential part of metaphorical interpretation, preventing the “poverty” and “grossly enfeebled apprehension” that Beardsley’s strictures would place



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on metaphorical interpretation.20 Metaphor demands the importation of ideas lying outside its explicit verbal form because, as White argues, “the significance of a metaphor goes essentially beyond what is directly given to us in the words used in the text of the metaphor.”21 In White’s description of metaphorical interpretation, the result of the linguistic underdetermination of metaphor is, conversely, an excess of significance, the importation of differing metaphorical vehicles and their multiple implications. This excess lies not merely in the plurality of possible vehicles but in the very notion of importation, the bringing of “an outside thing” (to reappropriate Paul D’s words) into the interpretation of the metaphor. White quotes Winifred Nowottny on the reader’s importation of external considerations into a metaphorical utterance: “The reader pieces out the metaphor by something supplied or constructed from his own experience, according to the specifications given linguistically by the utterance in which the metaphor occurs.”22 Thus, in Nowottny’s words, reading a metaphor demands the importation of an “unnamed something which is present in the situation described by the metaphor but is not verbally specified in the metaphor itself.”23 The words on the page, which are themselves referentially inadequate, must be supplemented by an “unnamed something” outside of them. There is a direct relationship between the lack of specific referential determination and the excess of interpretations and external considerations that must be imported into the metaphor. In this way, there is an internal dynamic of supplementation in the interpretation of metaphor, a figure which is, as we have shown, already a form of textual supplementation, used to say something that otherwise could not be said. The process of interpretive supplementation that White and Nowottny describe resembles Beloved’s interpretation by the novel’s other characters in quite specific ways. It is Beloved’s underdetermination that evokes the intimation of excess: her “expressionlessness” inspires Denver to read “something,” to posit an excess of significance to Beloved. Denver perceives a demanding space in Beloved’s spectrally underdetermined identity: “a palm held out for a penny which Denver would gladly give her, if only she knew how or knew enough about her” (118). Beloved’s underdetermination seemingly demands additional input from Denver; she “needed something—wanted something” (118). Paul D and Denver both perceive “something” that is somehow implied by, yet absent from, Beloved’s presence. To use Nowottny’s description of metaphor, it is an “unnamed something which is present in the situation . . . but is not verbally specified,” a significance that is implied and demanded from within, yet must be imported from without. The excess



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that Beloved implies seems to derive from the experience of her interpreters. That Beloved “needed something—wanted something” from Denver, causes Denver to reflect on her own knowledge: “if only she knew how or knew enough.” The fact that Beloved “reminds” Paul D of something he is “supposed to remember” (234) similarly suggests that her significance stems as much from his own experience as from within her. Beloved’s demanding nature draws Denver and Paul D into an exploratory quest that depends as much on their own experience as what is inherent to her presence. Beloved’s underdetermined presence makes Paul D and Denver work at her interpretation and causes them to reflect on, and search through, their own knowledge and experience. This parallels the crucial role of the reader’s own knowledge and experience in reconstructing the significance of the metaphorical figure. The significance of a metaphor is not its literal meaning, which as we have seen is often nonsensical, but something that depends upon the reader’s own experience as much as upon the words on the page. The reader of metaphor must bring outside ideas and experiences to it in order to understand it adequately, and the writer of metaphor presupposes such ideas in using this “underdetermined” linguistic figure.24 The reader’s act of interpretive supplementation is an attempt to “reconstruct” the mapping of thoughts that lie behind the linguistic form of metaphor. Accordingly, White argues that metaphor is a “collaborative creative process” between author and reader, in that both have a creative stake in the metaphor beyond the words on the page.25 The whole dynamic between reader and text is one where the reader acts as a supplement to the text. According to White, metaphor elicits an active and exploratory response from the reader, “collaborating,” so to speak, with the author’s own explorations: “To use a metaphor is to initiate an enquiry, to invite an exploration of a comparison.”26 Reading and understanding a metaphor is, for White, to be pulled closer to the position of the author, in that both involve a certain level of creative exploration. This is similar to a point Ted Cohen makes, in describing the “cultivation of intimacy” that the metaphorical utterance initiates between maker and interpreter. Cohen argues that a successful metaphorical exchange throws into relief the “acknowledgement of community” that is implicit in all linguistic communication.27 Morrison has often expressed her desire to involve the reader as a conscious participant in her fiction in a way that closely resembles the active and participatory demands of metaphor. In an interview given well before Beloved was written, Morrison described this intention to Claudia Tate, in terms that nevertheless suggest strong connections with the



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My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and that I think is what literature is supposed to do. It’s not just about telling the story; it’s about involving the reader. The reader supplies the emotions. The reader supplies even some of the color, some of the sound. My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it. He or she can feel something visceral, see something striking. Then we . . . come together to make this book.28

Morrison describes her writing and its interpretation in precisely the dialectic terms of supplementation we have been addressing in this chapter. She speaks of “holes” and “spaces” used to draw the outside presence of the reader “into” the text. The gaps in the text allow the reader to bring in something from outside the work, the reader “supplies the emotions . . . some of the color . . . some of the sound.” In another interview, with Nellie McKay, also given well before Beloved was written, she likens her intent to that of Jazz and Spirituals, where there is “a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends,” further emphasizing the connection between textual incompleteness and the intimation of excess: There is something underneath them that is incomplete. There is always something else that you want from the music. I want my books to be like that—because I want that feeling of something held in reserve and the sense that there is more—that you can’t have it all right now . . . they don’t give you all, they only give you enough for now . . . One always has the feeling, whether it is true or not, they may be absolutely parched, but one has the feeling that there’s some more.29

Again, Morrison describes a connection between the “incomplete” nature of the text and its ability to offer “something else,” “some more,” to the reader. In both these statements, Morrison is situating the reader within a supplemental relationship to the underdetermined words on the page, where she or he must bring their own experience and knowledge into the text in order for it to function properly. Strikingly similar to White and Nowottny’s accounts of metaphorical interpretation and Paul D’s and Denver’s interpretations of Beloved, it is the implied absences, the “holes and spaces,” that encourage the interpreter to import “something more” into the given ‘text,’ whether it be novel, metaphor, or ghost. Morrison’s intention is to draw the reader into an active, exploratory reading, forcing them to attempt to reconstruct the pattern of thoughts that lie behind the words on the page.



“holes and spaces” that characterize both the discourse of Beloved and its representation of the spectral figure:

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The similarity between Morrison’s aim to create participatory fiction and the dynamic that is depicted in the figure of Beloved suggests that Beloved is a foregrounded, self-reflexive example of one of the intentionally underdetermined and demanding “holes and spaces” she speaks about, which demand that the reader uses their own experience and knowledge to actively participate in the construction of textual meaning.30 But why represent and foreground such a process of participatory interpretation in the figure of Beloved? The answer is that this process of active, interpretive supplementation is in fact a major part of her subject matter in Beloved, the underdetermined history of slavery. Morrison depicts the demand of slavery for interpretive supplementation and also stages this demand for the reader in the use of metaphorical underdetermination. The self-reflexive use of metaphor in the spectral presence of Beloved, positing a figure that demands the reader’s exploration and supplementation, foregrounds her wish to register the interpretive demands of the history of slavery. The episode where Denver begins to tell Beloved the story of her birth (76–78) shows the way that slavery demands an active process of interpretation. The episode develops the participatory nature of storytelling, by depicting Denver, the teller, as a secondhand receiver as much as she is the creator of the story, and Beloved, the listener, as cocreator. The participatory nature of narrative is evident even before Denver begins retelling the story. Denver’s storytelling is initiated by one of Beloved’s inexplicably knowing questions: “Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat” (76). Denver answers that “She never told me all of it,” which merely prompts Beloved to repeat her demand: “Tell me.” Beloved’s questions dislodge Denver from automatically retelling what she has been told, instead prompting her to “see” the story as an unfolding event, rather than just words that have been passed on to her: “Now, watching Beloved’s alert and hungry face, how she took in every word, asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it” (77). Beloved’s questions about “the color of things,” which echo Morrison’s statement to Tate that the reader supplies “some of the color,”31 cause Denver to visualize and imaginatively reconstruct the event. This visualization, which goes beyond the words of the story and is prompted by the identification with Beloved as a new receiver of the story, is itself accompanied by a sympathetic identification with its subject, Sethe, which is registered in the narrator’s shift to the present tense: there is this nineteen-year-old slave girl—a year older than herself—walking through the dark woods to get to her children who are far away. She is



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Denver’s identification with, and visualization of, Sethe’s experience, combined with the awareness of Beloved’s curiosity, results in the embellishment of what she has been told, the supplementation of the “scraps” she has been given with imaginative “blood”: And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. (78)

The reconstruction of the past is pictured as a generative and collaborative effort, supplementing the “scraps” that she has been told with the “blood” and “heartbeat” of the imagination. Denver is drawn into the story and starts to imaginatively recreate the experience rather than just retell it in the words that have been handed down to her.32 Denver consciously supplements the “underdetermined” scraps of what she has been told, trying to capture an experience that she could never really know: “Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two of them did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it” (78). Their collaborative and imaginative process of reconstruction emerges as a response to their lack of access to Sethe’s mind and from the lack of resources Denver has been given due to Sethe’s traumatized withholding of her past. While Denver and Beloved are separated from Sethe’s experience, their sympathetic identification with Sethe allows a provisional exploration of “how it must have felt,” an ability to paradoxically “create what really happened.” While Denver has never experienced such a situation, she can still try to imagine what it would mean to be a “nineteen-year-old slave girl—a year older than herself.” It is mainly through this sympathetic identification with Sethe, who is both the original “author” and the subject of “what really happened,” that Denver and Beloved’s reconstruction can even be initiated. The emotional and imaginative identification between “reader,” “author,” and “subject” facilitates the giving of “blood to the scraps” left by the past.



tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost . . . Denver was seeing it now and feeling it—through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. (77–78)

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Denver and Beloved’s reconstruction of Sethe’s experience is clearly an image of the overarching historical project of the novel, which similarly attempts to imaginatively reconstruct an obscured past. Denver’s supplementation of the “scraps” she has been given with imaginative “blood” succinctly captures Morrison’s larger narrative project of supplementing the “big and flat” historical accounts of slavery with a focus on its emotional landscape, trying to gauge “how it must have felt” to slaves like Sethe. The wider historical significance of this episode is intimated in the inheritance and indebtedness that is invoked from the outset: “Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat” (76, my emphasis). Denver’s birth on the waters of the Ohio River figures her as a representative of the postslavery generations of African Americans, implying that they too have a responsibility to identify with the sacrifices of their forebears. Denver’s attraction to the story is complicated by an elusive feeling of indebtedness: “She loved it because it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her” (77). What eludes her is the recognition of the sacrifices her mother had made for her very existence, a recognition that has a metaphorical significance for all African Americans. While never living directly under slavery, Denver must acknowledge that her life is shaped by it and by her mother’s response to it. The visualization and identification with Sethe, which results from Beloved’s “downright craving to know,” is a step toward paying this “bill owing.” This suggests that a similar identification must be made between present-day generations of African Americans, and other interpreters of slavery, and the slaves themselves, as a means of imaginatively supplementing the abyss that has been created by the combined forces of black denial, white obfuscation, a lack of documentation, and the passage of time. Imaginative sympathy is depicted as a means of overcoming the difficulty of knowing exactly “how it must have felt” to be a slave. This episode shows that the underdetermined history of slavery makes demands on those investigating and recounting it, which can only be met with an imaginative identification and supplementation, a conscious attempt to feel “how it must have felt,” despite, or because of, the limits of accessibility and uncertainty defining its reconstruction. One of the few direct references to the transatlantic crossing in Beloved, where Sethe suddenly remembers being told of her mother’s transportation from Africa, shows that the reconstruction of the experience of the Middle Passage is even more demanding than that of slavery in general. Sethe’s memory is similar to the story of Denver’s birth, in that it concerns her own mother’s experience, Sethe’s conception and birth, and thus her own “bill owing.” Tellingly, it is also prompted by Beloved’s



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literally demanding presence; just as Denver elaborates the scant details of her birth in response to Beloved’s questions, so too Sethe’s memory is also prompted by Beloved’s knowing questions about Sethe’s mother. The memory itself startles and troubles Sethe: “she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind” (61). Significantly, she does not directly remember her mother, but another woman, Nan, telling of how they were transported together. Even before the Middle Passage is mentioned, this incident foregrounds the difficulty of recollecting the past from deficient resources, in this case due to Sethe’s loss of her African language, quite literally, her “mother tongue.” Sethe remembers “Nan . . . who used different words”: Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. She believed that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing and dancing and how crowded it was. What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message—that was and had been there all along . . . she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. (62)

The “message” that Nan tells the young Sethe concerns her mother’s and Nan’s journey “from the sea,” where they were repeatedly raped by the crew. Nan tells Sethe that Sethe’s mother “disposed” of all the resulting babies, “Without names, she threw them.” However, she kept Sethe: “She threw them all away but you . . . You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around” (62). The memory thus describes the trauma and separation that defines the Middle Passage, especially in the loss of those “without names,” yet also suggests continuity and inheritance, in Sethe being named after her African father. Sethe’s memory of her mother, marked as it is by traumatic separation, nevertheless links her back to the African past and the Middle Passage, in the same way that Denver’s storytelling is a way of exploring her links to the slave past that she has never directly experienced but which has determined her life. Indeed, Sethe’s memory concerns her African parents, her conception, her birth, her naming; that is, the very origins of her identity. The indirect process of recall and interpretation by which Sethe remembers the African origins of her mother complicates the continuity that her memory suggests. From the start, the act of remembering is complicated, not pictured simply as a process of automatic and immediate recall, but a problematic struggle to remember “something she had forgotten she



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knew” (61). It is clear that this forgetting, in which the memory “had seeped into a slit in her mind,” is due partly to denial; the memory is “privately shameful.” The unconscious effort of denial is, however, not successful, as the episode attests to, and the memory keeps “getting clear and clearer as she folded and refolded damp laundry” (62). The other dimension to Sethe’s forgetting involves the means by which she remembers: Nan “used different words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now” (62). This loss of language is connected to the loss of the memory of the past: “She believed that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing and dancing and how crowded it was.” However, despite forgetting the language, and specifically “What Nan told her,” she nevertheless salvages a “message” out of it, “picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood.” Indeed, the “message . . . was and had been there all along.” Like White’s account of metaphorical interpretation, here we have Sethe trying to reassemble a message despite the incomplete linguistic form in which it is transmitted. Morrison uses this brief episode, dealing with Sethe’s personal memory of her mother, to depict the problems that attend the reconstruction of the radically underdetermined history of the Middle Passage. Sethe’s process of remembering, “picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood,” encapsulates the process of historical reconstruction that we have been tracing. Similar to the story of Denver’s birth, this episode concerns a problematic, elusive inheritance. Even though the present generation of African Americans lack crucial information about the Middle Passage, just as Sethe has lost the African language she was brought up with, it is nevertheless the foundation of their very identity. For Sethe, this “message . . . was and had been there all along” (62). However, as with Denver’s elusive “bill,” Sethe cannot fully determine the meaning of the memory of her conception: “she was angry, but not certain at what” (62). The status of Sethe’s memory, whose “message” has survived despite the passing of its “code,” its original form, is akin to the status of a ghost. The ghostly “message” of the Middle Passage, a historical memory that is blocked in numerous ways—by the lack of direct access, denial, cultural estrangement and fragmentation, the erasure of information—still manages to live on, as a residue in excess of the specific form (the “code”) in which it was originally passed on. Yet, even though the memory “was and had been there all along,” Sethe still needs to “pick” at the “no longer understood code” in order to retrieve it. While the past is always present, haunting the present despite its neglect or denial, it still needs to be consciously called up and reconstructed if it is to be adequately understood. The experience of the Middle Passage is inevitably “known” as the



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fundamental origin of African Americans, but it can be paradoxically “forgotten” that it is known, culturally repressed, and so needs to be actively reassembled. Sethe’s secondhand and fragmentary memory of her mother shows that the reconstruction of the Middle Passage is even more problematic than that of slavery generally, its reconstruction reliant on even more limited “scraps” of information. This suggests that the kind of active imaginative reconstruction that we see in Denver and Beloved’s storytelling is even more necessary for the highly underdetermined experience of the Middle Passage. Metaphorical Underdetermination and the Role of the Reader It is clear that Morrison’s novel and her use of the supplemental presence of the spectral metaphor perform the kind of imaginative reconstruction that the history of slavery and the Middle Passage requires, by giving emotional “blood” to the “scraps” that have been left. However, what is important in these examples is the focus on active, participatory interpretation. As we showed earlier, the spectral figure of Beloved is not just a supplement, but demands its own supplementation; it demands an “unnamed something” from its interpreters in the same way that the figure of metaphor does. This demand points to the way in which Morrison uses the underdetermined spectral metaphor to elicit an active, imaginative interpretation from us, the readers. Morrison is not content simply to supplement the history of slavery herself, but wants to draw the reader into a collaborative exploration of its “holes and spaces” and creates the underdetermined metaphorical figure of Beloved for this purpose. Metaphor, as we have seen, is a demanding use of language; its underdetermined linguistic form makes demands on its readers, provoking them to attempt to imaginatively reconstruct the thoughts from which it originated, even though they may be ultimately inaccessible. This demanding quality of metaphor is used to discursively replicate the historical elusiveness of the experience of slavery and the Middle Passage and to provoke the active, exploratory, and reconstructive reading that this fragmented and obscured history demands. Beloved’s name is itself an indication of Morrison’s intention to draw the reader into the active reconstruction of the history of slavery. Her name signals the importance of an emotional identification between the readers and the subjects of history, and the interpretive demands that she makes on the novel’s readers. The word “beloved” is the single word adorning the headstone over Sethe’s baby’s grave, derived from the only two words that Sethe can remember from the preacher’s address at the



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funeral: “Dearly beloved.” The name accordingly refers to and addresses both the mourned and mourners. While it evokes the dead as “beloved,” it is primarily an address to the listeners at the funeral, an address to a gathered community. The word itself thus signifies the bridging of the gap between the novels’ readers and slavery, between a community of mourners and the mourned themselves. It also signifies an intense emotional connection and, as Freeman observes, “when divided, functions as an imperative, affirming that what was once reviled must now be loved.”33 Beloved’s name thus signals attachment, identification, and an acknowledgment of community despite the separation of death. It signifies that we, the readers, are being invited to actively reconstruct the underdetermined history that lies behind her presence. Beloved’s underdetermined presence self-reflexively represents the metaphorical space in which Morrison draws the reader into the text, demanding that he or she reconstruct the underdetermined metaphor by bringing an emotional and imaginative response to it. Morrison uses underdetermination to draw the reader into the text and the history of slavery, to be confronted with its demands, and to identify with the almost unknowable experience of the slaves, supplementing the impoverished record with an emotional and imaginative response. Beloved’s monologues exemplify this use of underdetermination. As Horvitz observes, their discourse “communicates what may first appear to be an unintelligible experience, a story of images which the reader must grope and finally fail to figure out.”34 Wyatt has described the way that the elusive discourse of these passages, with its elisions, vagueness and lack of punctuation, is not simply experimental, but transposes their subject matter: Since Morrison does not identify these scattered impressions as observations of life on a slave ship or tell how Beloved came to be there or give any coordinates of time and place, readers are baffled: they have no idea where they are. Their confusion thus imitates the disorientation of the Africans who were thrown into the slave ships without explanation, suspended without boundaries in time and space . . . The fragmented syntax and absence of punctuation robs the reader of known demarcations, creating a linguistic equivalent of the Africans loss of differentiation.35

As Wyatt observes, the monologues’ striking formal qualities, vagueness and abstraction register the overwhelming disorientation that would have been experienced by Africans, taken from their homeland and all that they knew; the linguistic abstraction renders the physical abstraction, that is the “withdrawal, stealing”36 of the slaves from their homelands. This linguistic disorientation and abstraction also registers the placeless



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and unrecorded fate of those who died en route. This discursive abstraction also captures the historiography of the Middle Passage. The reader must grapple with the lack of detail and vagueness just as anyone investigating the Middle Passage must deal with the lack of concrete historical records of names, numbers, and origins. As we read these monologues, we must use our imagination to supplement the scanty record that is given to us. The passage we looked at in the last chapter, in which Paul D remembers having sex with Beloved in the cold house (264), exemplifies the novel’s wider use of metaphorical structure to performatively emulate the elusiveness and demanding nature of the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage is not directly present for the reader, but is only incorporated as an elusive secondary frame of reference, evident only in the oblique references to drowning. Considered in isolation, these phrases seem to be simply individual similes or metaphors for the literal event, figurative ways of describing Paul D’s desperation. It is only by connecting each part of that frame of reference that the reader can appreciate it as a whole, bringing the metaphor to life, so to speak; the “ocean-deep place” becomes a real dimension in the text rather than simply a way of speaking about the immediate literal events.37 The reader must actively integrate the separate parts of the frame of reference and actively interrogate the text in the manner outlined by White and Nowottny, identifying the “unnamed something which is present in the situation described by the metaphor but is not verbally specified in the metaphor itself.”38 The description of Paul D’s memory creates a correspondence between three different interpretive acts: Paul D’s interpretation of Beloved, the reader’s interpretation of the passage, and the historical interpretation of the Middle Passage. Here, as elsewhere, Morrison does not simply give us Beloved’s underlying significance, but instead uses metaphor to draw us, the readers, into the characters’ interpretive quest, making us work to discover the “unnamed something” of the Middle Passage, which is “not verbally specified” in the text. The obscured experience of the Middle Passage and its haunting, repressed presence in African American cultural consciousness is discursively replicated in its presentation as an elusive secondary frame of reference, incorporated in separate traces that must be integrated in order for the entire metaphor to become clear. The task of reading the passage’s metaphorical discourse, integrating and interrogating its metaphorical structure, mirrors the task of interpreting the history of the Middle Passage. The interpretive demands of metaphorical reference are used to performatively simulate, for the novel’s reader, the demands that the underdetermined history of slavery makes on its interpreters. This oblique metaphorical presentation



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of the Middle Passage in the text provokes the kind of imaginative reconstruction that its oblique history, evident only in traces and hints, demands. Metaphor is used to elicit an exploratory response from the reader, to use his or her own experience and imagination to give the meaning to the “scraps” that are given. The parallels between the metaphorical workings of the text and the historiographical problems of slavery show that the self-reflexive metaphoricity invested in the spectral figure is not a sign of concern with discourse in its own right, but signals the close performative relations between the novel’s discourse and its subject matter. It registers the novel’s intention to place the reader within an exploratory relationship with the demanding history of slavery and the Middle Passage, eliciting their imaginative identification with the experience of slaves. Because the experience of slavery and the Middle Passage can never be fully known by any direct means, the novel does not simply approach slavery as a “brute fact,” but concerns itself more with the relationship between slavery and subsequent generations and with the problems that attend the representation of such a horrific and obscured history. Indeed, the relationship between slavery and its present-day interpreters is all important, since it is only through active interpretation and supplementary reconstruction, with present-day interpreters claiming, and identifying with, the experience of the slaves, that the ultimately inaccessible experience of that “brute fact” can be properly recognized and honored. The use of metaphor, and its self-reflexive depiction in the spectral figure, foregrounds the necessity of this exploratory and supplemental relationship to the history of slavery. The use of metaphor to highlight the relationship between presentday readers and the historical experience of slavery exploits a fundamental feature of analogical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant distinguishes between the “quantitative” nature of mathematical analogies, which give the unknown term itself, and the “qualitative” nature of analogies outside mathematics: in philosophy the analogy is not the equality of two quantitative but of two qualitative relations: and from three given members we can obtain a priori knowledge only of a relation to a fourth but not of the fourth member itself. The relation yields, however, a rule for seeking the fourth member in experience, and mark whereby it can be detected.39

White uses Kant’s account of philosophical analogy to foreground the essential uncertainty of metaphorical creation and interpretation, where “there is no automatic answer to the question of whether, and how, a



Spectral Excess


metaphor can be extended.”40 This uncertainty arises because, like analogy, metaphor is based on the relations between things that are necessarily indefinite. Morrison exploits this relational nature of analogy and metaphor in order to engage with the uncertainty that surrounds the history of slavery, especially that of the Middle Passage. The historian Herbert S. Klein concludes his book The Middle Passage with an assertion of the powers of quantitative historical research that simultaneously acknowledges its limits: Though the individual African experience of surviving the forced migration and becoming a slave in America cannot be recaptured, the quantitative reconstruction of the mass migration of Africans to the shores of the New World helps to define the limits within which that experience took place.41

While attesting to the knowledge we do have of the Atlantic slave trade, Klein acknowledges that “the individual African experience” cannot be recaptured. This qualification is even more important for the “individual African experience” of those who did not survive the crossing. Morrison uses the relational nature of metaphor to “define the limits within which that experience took place.” She does not directly represent the Middle Passage so much as give us, to borrow Kant’s words, “a rule for seeking [it] in experience,” to “mark whereby” its spectral traces and remains “can be detected” in the present day. Since we cannot access the experience of slavery and the Middle Passage directly, Morrison uses the exploratory structure of metaphor to situate us in relation to this experience, so that we are enjoined to supplement the lack of knowledge with our own experience and imagination. Because the obscured and unknown memory of slavery depends on an active process of interpretation, Morrison uses the spectral metaphor to put the novel’s reader in an analogous position to the “reader” of slavery. The self-reflexive metaphoricity of the spectral figure aligns our own interpretive efforts with those of the characters and with other interpreters of the underdetermined history of slavery, confronting us with its problems and provoking the kind of imaginative, supplementary mode of interpretation with which these problems can be overcome. The ghost’s self-reflexivity is thus not merely a reference to the purely technical form of metaphor, but highlights the performative use of metaphor as a provisional, exploratory response to the novel’s problematic subject matter, supplementing the underdetermined, interpretively demanding history of slavery.



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Spectral and Ideological Figuration in The Eighteenth Brumaire The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks1

In the preceding chapters I have argued that in Beloved, Morrison extends and elaborates the spectral figure as a basic metaphor for the persistence of the past, creating a complex relationship between the use of metaphor and her subject matter, the history of slavery. Morrison is concerned with a lost, unrecorded, and possibly unrecoverable history, particularly the psychosocial landscape of slavery, its “psychic toll.”2 The particular metaphor of the ghost and the general mechanics of metaphorical reference are used to represent this history and to dramatize its problematic nature for the reader in the discourse of the novel. García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is the subject of the following chapters, also uses the spectral to develop a relationship between its historical subject matter and self-reflexive metaphoricity, albeit in quite different ways to Beloved. Rather than a lost, denied, and unrecorded history, García Márquez addresses the way that historical reality can be obscured as it happens to the people who participate and act within it. Like Morrison in Beloved, García Márquez uses the spectral metaphor to engage with psychosocial phenomena of history. His concern, however, is not with the emotional but the ideological landscape of history. Ideology mediates social reality. It is an intermediate presence



Chapter 6


between matter and consciousness, which haunts the material world like a ghost. The spectral metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude accordingly acquires a more overtly social and political orientation than in Beloved, where it articulates the intimate, personal effects of larger historical forces. García Márquez uses it to capture Latin America’s history of political and economic dependence and underdevelopment and to register the way that ideological consciousness mediates these social conditions. In this chapter, I will elucidate the ideological connotations of the spectral metaphor by considering its use in Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,3 which is very suggestive for that of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The affinities between the two texts suggests an alternative to the common interpretations of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a “parable” or “myth” of fate and determinism, of human powerlessness in the face of a malign and predetermined history.4 Like García Márquez, Marx uses the ostensibly gothic metaphor of spectrality to register the flux and ideological figurations that blossom with the onset of capitalist modernity. The gothic imagery of Marx’s text has been read as a crucial inconsistency, suggesting the uncanny, inexplicable irrationality of history, directly conflicting with both Marx’s explanatory and political intentions.5 In a similar way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is often read as an expression of philosophical fatalism, depicting history being swallowed up by myth. This is quite at odds with García Márquez’s personal political convictions, which Gerald Martin calls his “determinedly optimistic conception of the march of history.”6 However, Marx clearly uses the spectral metaphor to debunk a metaphysical conception of historical repetition that is strikingly similar to that which critics have often read in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rather than an inconsistency, Marx’s use of the spectral metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire actually draws from his concern with the ideological figurations of French politics. He uses the spectral metaphor to enact a critique of the very ideological figurations that it initially appears to represent. Marx’s manipulation of the spectral metaphor points toward a similar critical reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude as an immanent critique of the ideological metaphors that haunt Latin American history. The Specter of Repetition Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is principally an account of the tumultuous events that followed the unsuccessful French revolution of 1848 and culminated in the coup d’état enacted by Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, in December 1851. The spectral metaphorics of The Eighteenth Brumaire begin with Marx’s opening ruminations, where the specter’s



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Hegel remarks somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidierre in place of Danton, Louis Blanc in place of Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–51 in place of the Montagne of 1793–5, the Nephew in place of the Uncle. And we can perceive the same caricature in the circumstances surrounding the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire! Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language.7

This passage initiates a continuing rhetorical pattern of spectrality, which resurfaces frequently in the more detailed analyses of the 1848 revolution and its aftermath that follow the introductory establishment of the metaphor. In this opening passage, the spectral metaphor captures two distinct, but closely related ways in which history assumes the form of a ghost. The first concerns the haunting “given and inherited circumstances” of the past that circumscribe the ability of present historical actors to “make their own history.” According to Marx, the “tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.”8 The spectral metaphor communicates the way in which the present, and hence the future also, is haunted by its antecedent circumstances. The second way in which history takes on a spectral aspect occurs when the nightmarish weight of the “tradition of the dead generations” on “the minds of the living” forces them to “conjure up the spirits of the past.” The haunting power of the past causes historical actors of the present to compulsively repeat it. This compulsive historical conjuration appears to confirm the inescapable haunting power of the “given and inherited circumstances” of the past. The ghost’s revenant nature, signaling the return of the dead, captures the active recall of earlier events. Although Marx’s spectral metaphor applies initially to the “given and inherited circumstances” of the past, its main focus is the returning specters



haunting revenant presence is used to capture the determining power of the past and the repetition that seems to follow from this power:


that the living actively “conjure” out of their historical inheritance. The focus upon repetition is heralded in the first lines: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”9 Following this general speculation, Marx then describes the events of 1848–1851 as a manifestation of this historical repetition, mirroring both the original French Revolution and, more importantly, its reactionary aftermath. The otherwise inconceivable ascent of Louis Bonaparte is accordingly explained by such historical repetition, where the French nation compulsively repeats all the circumstances surrounding the original event, including Napoleon I’s postrevolutionary coup d’état. The events of 1848–1851 thus constitute the “second edition” (146) of the first revolutionary period. It is not just the idea of revolution, but the whole historical period that appears to have resurfaced from the past: An entire people thought it had provided itself with a more powerful motive force by means of a revolution; instead, it suddenly found itself plunged back into an already dead epoch. It was impossible to mistake this relapse into the past, for all the old dates arose again, along with the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, long abandoned to the erudition of antiquaries, and the old minions of the law, apparently long decayed. (148)

This regression, which Marx calls a “process of world-historical necromancy” (147), occurs precisely when the actors of the present are attempting to do away with the past, to awaken, like Stephen Dedalus, from the “nightmare” of history.10 Here, an “entire people thought it had provided itself with a more powerful motive force by means of a revolution,” but “instead . . . found itself plunged back into an already dead epoch.” Attempts at fundamental historical change thus fatally depend on a throwback to an “already dead epoch.” Periods of “revolutionary transformation,” which attempt “the creation of something which does not yet exist,” are inevitably marred by their “resurrection of the dead” (148). The “dead weight” of the past retards the impulse of progressive change, instead enforcing its own repetition. Terry Eagleton has observed that Marx’s deterministic depiction of historical repetition appears to undermine his political project: “The doctrine of material determination by the past with which Marxism counters idealism is, politically speaking, a source of potential tragedy: history would seem to condemn men and women to parodic repetition.”11 The determining influence of the events of the past on “the minds of 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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the living” threatens to override the change that this determination is supposed to impel, instead enforcing historical repetition and circularity. In Revolution and Repetition, Jeffrey Mehlman seizes on this apparent logic of repetition as evidence that Marx’s historical project has run aground, or, more accurately, run out of ground.12 The spectral rhetoric of repetition seems to contradict Marx’s conception of historical materialism, and any recourse to the idea of historical progress, yet he must resort to it in order to “explain” the otherwise inexplicable rise to power of Louis Bonaparte. The seemingly unintelligible and “unheimlich” regression that Bonapartism represents exposes the “arbitrariness”13 at work in history, suggesting that Marx forfeits a class-based analysis and admits that “absolutely anything may come to occupy the positions of the repetitive structure.”14 The repetition that is signaled by the spectral metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire is, however, offset by its more concrete analysis of historical change. Over the course of the text, Marx clearly delineates the changing circumstances over the period concerned and also specifies in the introductory section that the recall of the past can actually serve the processes of change. The “heroes of the old French Revolution,” for example, “accomplished the task of their epoch, which was the emancipation and establishment of modern bourgeois society, in Roman costume and with Roman slogans” (147). For Marx, even the “farce” of 1848–1851 accomplished significant change; indeed, he argues that “the intervening period has not gone unused”: Between 1848 and 1851 French society, using an abbreviated because revolutionary method, caught up on the studies and experience which would in the normal or, so to speak, textbook course of development have had to precede the February revolution if it were to do more than merely shatter the surface. Society now appears to have fallen back behind its starting-point; but in reality it must first create the revolutionary startingpoint, i.e. the situation, relations, and conditions necessary for the modern revolution to become serious. (150)

In fact, it is the changes and developments in France’s class and political structure, the development of “the situation, relations, and conditions necessary for the modern revolution to become serious” (150), that are the main focus of the detailed analyses Marx performs throughout The Eighteenth Brumaire. This change forces us to examine what is actually meant by the “repetition” that is invoked; if it is not “events,” then what is repeated? Kojin Karatani has argued that “what is repeated is not the events themselves, 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson




but the form immanent in them.”15 Karatani sees the repetition of an underlying political and economic “form or structure”16 in otherwise different epochs, a structural similarity that underlies surface contingencies. This is true in so far as The Eighteenth Brumaire traces the similarities of the course of the two periods, in which similar social situations and structures form and produce similar resolutions; both the first revolutionary period and that of 1848–1851 see the “resolution” of the instability of factions and interests through a political dictatorship. However, from the very opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx displaces the notion of repetition that he appears to be inscribing. His modification of the “Hegelian” notion of historical repetition, positing the displacement of tragedy to farce, highlights the “form immanent” to the two periods, only to emphasize the difference and displacement between these two forms. Rather than signaling the structural similarity underlying different surface contingencies, repetition is invoked here in order to emphasize the difference underlying the surface similarities. The notion of “repetition” is thus barely announced before it is renounced. Furthermore, the particular displacement from tragedy to farce undermines the notion of “form immanent” itself; the “genre” of historical farce that Louis Bonaparte exemplifies for Marx is one of empty comedy, the ridiculous circulation of images, signs and “wild and empty agitation” (170) that mask a lack of underlying content. Marx’s reference to farce exploits its generic characteristics of “hollow pretence, mockery”17 and insincerity; farce is a ridiculous play of signs. Louis Bonaparte’s farcical rise does not repeat the underlying “form or structure” that Karatani detects, but merely repeats a pure “formalism,” irrespective of content. Both the revolutionaries and the Bonapartists simply repeat the external signs of the original events, mere “phrase” rather than the real “content” (149) that supposedly impelled both the revolution and its subsequent reaction. This explains Marx’s insistent concentration on the repetition of the external trappings of the past: “language,” “masks,” “disguise,” “old names,” formal “edicts,” and laws. Whereas the original revolution aggrandized substantial objectives in borrowed costume, its “second edition” (146) appears to be only borrowed costume, only “venerable disguise and borrowed language” (146). The historical actors of 1848–1851 have adopted the external trappings of the original revolutionary period in order to bolster the prestige of their actions, but instead, this act of dislocation has emptied the past of its content, reducing the depth of tragedy to the shallowness of a farce. It seems nothing more than a dress rehearsal of a “new world-historical scene” (146, my emphasis), a repetition of tropes, signs, and metaphors; in short, a repetition of rhetoric. Indeed, in the description of change cited above, Marx



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explicitly distinguishes the regressive appearance from the changing reality: “Society now appears to have fallen back behind its starting point; but in reality it must first create the revolutionary starting point” (150, my emphasis). The superficial nature of the Bonapartist reaction corresponds to the superficial nature of the revolution, its failure “to do more than merely shatter the surface” (150). Even more than past revolutions, the 1848 revolution, and, consequently, its defeat, is dominated by “phrase” over “content” (149), superficial, outward form rather than intrinsic meaning. The historical inheritance and repetition that the ghost initially signals in Marx’s opening is offset by the focus on the displacement and insubstantiality of such apparent repetition. In accordance with this development, Marx manipulates the spectral metaphor: from initially capturing the haunting and revenant past, it increasingly comes to signal the displaced and diminished nature of such spectral returns. As Marx continues, the inevitability of return and persistence that initially powered the spectral metaphor is undermined by the insubstantial and ephemeral presence of the returning specter. His description of the differences between the original English and French revolutions and that of 1848 demonstrates this: In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt the new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again. For it was only the ghost of the old revolution which walked in the years from 1848 to 1851 . . . (148)

Marx makes a distinction here between what he sees as the relatively enlightened self-deceptions of the old revolutions and the completely delusive repetitions of 1848–1851. However, even in the original revolutions, the “ghosts” that are recalled are no longer so much confirmations of history’s determining power, as mere stylistic flourishes, rhetorical exaltations, and imaginative exaggerations of the event that is actually occurring. This insubstantiality is accentuated in the years from 1848 to 1851, where such embellishment hides an even more impoverished reality. The spectral no longer represents the nightmarish weight of the “tradition of the dead generations,” but is now only a shade, “only the ghost of the old revolution” (my emphasis). The spectral captures the superficial nature of the 1848 revolution, as opposed to the essential “spirit” of the





old revolutions. In this spectrally insubstantial period, “Men and events appear as Schlemihls in reverse, as shadows which have become detached from their bodies” (171). Hence, the displaced and diminished presence of the specter actually undermines the doctrine of repetition that it initially represented. Here, Marx pits one part of the metaphor against the other, creating tension in the extension of what was originally a simple metaphor. The spectral is introduced as a figure for historical inheritance and repetition, for “the tradition of the dead generations” and “the resurrection of the dead,” but ultimately signals the farcical, insubstantial form that such repetition takes. By extending the metaphor, the appearance of repetition is reduced to being a mere ghost, a rhetorical shadow of the impoverished aims of both bourgeois revolutionaries and reactionaries. Metaphorical and Ideological Figuration The “process of world-historical necromancy” that Marx describes, whereby actors conjure up the past to embellish their present, is not just generally rhetorical but bears a specific resemblance to metaphor. It is akin to a process of metaphorical supplementation, drawing upon the resources of a secondary, literally absent frame of reference in order to embellish and aggrandize somewhat impoverished historical intentions. Marx asserts that, in the English revolution, “Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament” (148). In both the English and original French revolutions the purpose of such “borrowed language” was “to exalt the new struggles . . . to exaggerate the given task in the imagination” (148). Their use of “borrowed language,” speaking of one thing as if it were another, accords with metaphor’s importation of an absent secondary frame of reference. Historical actors embellish their given reality, their primary frame of reference, so to speak, by drawing from the resources of a secondary frame of reference that is different but analogous to it, but is not present in the situation itself. Marx illustrates the way that historical actors speak of, and do, one thing (e.g., the original French revolution, the English revolution, or the flux of 1848–1851) in terms of another that is not present (respectively, the Roman republic, the Old Testament, and the original French revolution). Furthermore, the ideological aims of this importation of the past—to embellish, exaggerate, and aggrandize the political present—accord with metaphor’s rhetorical aim to transcend the given object itself, to see it anew. Such borrowing is “generative” in the way that we saw in Chapter 2; as Marx states, it is precisely “in the creation of something which does not yet exist”



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(my emphasis) that historical actors “timidly conjure up the spirits of the dead.” In attempting to fill such an unfamiliar “lexical lacunae,”18 they revert to the familiar language of the past, borrowing semantic resources from another frame of reference that is not directly linked to the situation that confronts them. The difference between the original use of revolutionary metaphor and the empty rhetoric that occurs, according to Marx, after 1848 can be rephrased using Richards’s analytical terms of “vehicle” and “tenor.” In the original French revolution, the use of the metaphorical vehicle of Ancient Rome did not serve to obscure the tenor of the revolution but to enhance its achievement in reality. While the “ghosts of Rome” (148) served a partially deceptive function, “[o]nce the new social formation had been established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared along with the resurrected imitations of Rome” (147). The metaphorical vehicle of the Roman republic was suspended and forgotten as soon as the revolution’s “content,” its tenor, was accomplished. Just as reading a metaphor involves suspending and integrating the secondary frame of reference in relation to the text’s primary one, so bourgeois society abandoned its “Roman costume” and returned to its true “sober reality” (147), “the production of wealth and the peaceful struggle of economic competition” (148). In the case of the 1848 revolutions and Bonaparte’s reaction, the “vehicle” of the past has overridden whatever insubstantial “tenor” there was in the present. The spectral presence of the metaphorically borrowed frame of reference has apparently overtaken the real situation that it was supposed to embellish and justify; the participants’ course of action thus appears to be predetermined by the past from which they borrow. The spectral in this sense becomes a metaphor for the participants’ uncritical belief in their own metaphorical figurations, for the way in which “the minds of the living” are deluded by their own imaginary self-representations. Thus, Marx portrays Louis Bonaparte as actually believing his own rhetorical disguise, actually taking himself for Napoleon: Only now that he has removed his solemn opponent, now that he himself takes his imperial role seriously and imagines that the Napoleonic mask represents the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious clown who no longer sees world history as a comedy but his comedy as world history. (198)

Marx emphasizes Louis Bonaparte’s self-deception in taking himself for another in reality, forgetting the purely pragmatic function of his “Napoleonic mask.” The belief in spectral “repetition” is akin to





misconstruing metaphor by taking its vehicle to be a literal presence. Whereas the original revolutions ultimately recognized their use of metaphor, here the metaphorical “mask” supersedes the actual situation. The use of the spectral suggests that the metaphorical phantoms created by “the minds of the living” have proliferated and been mistaken for reality. Akin to someone believing in ghosts, “the minds of the living” have reified their own metaphorical creations. This misconstrual of metaphorical phantoms as reality is clearly ideological and is grounded in the representational structure of French politics in the period. The spectral metaphor is part of a whole economy of ideological displacement, detachment, and insubstantiality attending the notion of political representation. In elucidating the complex social forces at work, Marx focuses on the indirect form in which such forces are politically represented, exemplified in his account of the relationship between the Montagne, the democratic republican representatives, and the mass of the petty bourgeoisie whom they represent: Only one must not take the narrow view that the petty bourgeoisie explicitly sets out to assert its egoistic class interests. It rather believes that the particular conditions of its liberation are the only general conditions within which modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Nor indeed must one imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or their enthusiastic supporters. They may well be poles apart from them in their education and their individual situation. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that their minds are restricted by the same barriers which the petty bourgeoisie fails to overcome in real life, and that they are therefore driven in theory to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social situation drive the latter in practice. (176–177)

Marx describes a relationship of analogy between the political consciousness of the democratic representatives and the material conditions of the petty bourgeoisie, a parallel despite the fact that their own material conditions may be “poles apart” from the mass of the petty bourgeoisie. Political representatives are related to classes because they are “driven in theory to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social situation drive the latter in practice.” Like analogy and metaphor, political representation is not a simple relationship of identity but a displaced connection, one which Antonio Gramsci memorably called “a kind of suture.”19 The ideological process of political representation is also an abstraction from more fundamental social realities; the relationship between the class and its representatives is akin to the relation



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between practice and theory or between a material thing and the sign that represents it. In essence, one thing (representative) stands for another (represented). Political representation involves a similar process of transferred, indirect, and displaced reference to the linguistic workings of metaphor. For Marx, the very structure of parliamentary politics is based on ideological displacement and abstraction from concrete social conditions. He describes parliament as a play of signs, indirectly transposing the underlying interests of classes but, like ideology, only resolving them on a superficial, “imaginary” level. He argues that France is subject to a “peculiar epidemic which has prevailed over the whole continent of Europe since 1848, parliamentary cretinism, which holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world” (210–211). This “epidemic” of “parliamentary cretinism” is a self-deceptive immersion in ideological representation, “in an imaginary world,” displaced from the actual social classes that are supposedly represented. In this way, the parliament is an ideological institution. The representative relation of parliament to society parallels the relation of ideology to the social reality that it represents and from which it emerges. It is the very representational structure of the parliamentary system itself, rather than what is said within it, that “holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world.” Marx sees parliamentary representation as a discursive elaboration, embellishment, and obfuscation of the real forces underlying society, at once linked to, and determined by, these forces and at the same time detached from them. The whole notion of parliamentary representation, whereby one “thing” stands for another, structurally reflects the relation between ideology and social reality. Marx depicts the actual nature of politics in France as having taken on a somewhat metaphorical character, entailing an indirect and analogous, rather than direct, connection with the social reality of France. Marx’s use of the spectral metaphor is in part an expression of this structural metaphoricity. However, we should not deduce from the “imaginary” quality of parliamentary politics and ideology, that it is merely epiphenomenal, with no causal effect of its own. In such an ideologically saturated context, individual ideologies are not simply passive rhetorical reflections of material interests, but determining factors themselves. In his introduction to The Eighteenth Brumaire, David Fernbach notes that although Marx shows that the various ideological positions are grounded in material economic interests, he nevertheless “goes on to stress that this ideological disguise also imprisons those who wear it,” having “its own




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It was therefore not so-called principles which kept these fractions divided, but rather their material conditions of existence, two distinct sorts of property; it was the old opposition between town and country, the old rivalry between capital and landed property. Who would deny that at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house? A whole superstructure of different and specifically formed feelings, illusions, modes of thought and views of life arises on the basis of the different forms of property, of the social conditions of existence. The whole class creates and forms these out of its material foundations and the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives these feelings, etc. through tradition and upbringing, may well imagine that they form the real determinants and the starting-point of his activity. (173–174)

The ideological articulation of the “social conditions of existence,” the “old memories . . . fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions” that bind the “single individual” to social formations, is clearly part of the spectral economy of the text. Accordingly, these ideological ghosts come to haunt the brute materiality of more fundamental social conditions. Although Marx’s main intention here is to demystify the idea of binding “principles,” he nevertheless acknowledges that such ideological figurations have their own deceptive use in social formation. The “world-historical necromancy” that Marx argues has overtaken French politics, is a paradigm case of the way that the ideological figurations of social reality come to exert a determining power within that social reality. The French people’s quasi-metaphoric dependence upon spectral precedent is similar to the attachment of the “single individual” to their “old memories . . . fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions”; indeed, the French people “may well imagine that they form the real determinants and the starting-point of [their] activity.” Lacking an understanding of their real material determinants, the French people, deceived “through tradition and upbringing,” instead imagine that the ghostly inheritance of “inevitable” revolution and Napoleonic reaction are the real determining forces of their current predicament, rather than mere ideological elaborations of their political alienation. Such ideological entrapment is clearly



specific effects on the political struggle.”20 This is evident in Marx’s discussion of the rival royalists, the Orleans and the Bourbons. Marx outlines the material basis of these political factions and their attendant ideologies. However, he also suggests that these ideologies in turn inform how such underlying material interests are articulated and acted upon:


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“And I, a freeborn Briton,” sighed the mad Englishman, “must bear all of this to make gold for the old pharaohs.” “To pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,” sighed the French nation. As long as he was in his right mind, the Englishman could not free himself of the obsession of making gold. As long as the French were engaged in revolution, they could not free themselves of the memory of Napoleon . . . They yearned to return from the dangers of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt. (149)

The French nation appears entrapped in its own ideological constructions, which illuminate events like the “exiguous light of a lamp fixed on his own head” through which the mad Englishman views his “subterranean” world. The people of France are constrained by imaginary limits; their alienation from actively participating in their social conditions is bolstered through their ideological consciousness of those conditions. The French people’s capitulation to the revenant “memory of Napoleon” is, like “parliamentary cretinism,” a misrecognition of an “imaginary” resolution for an actual resolution of social conflicts and problems. Such misrecognition effectively prevents any effective action to the contrary. The historical determinism that the ghost initially signals is thus reformulated as an imagined, illusory determinism, but one that transposes the French people’s political alienation and, in turn, plays a part in maintaining this condition.

Textual Metaphor and Ideology Critique Marx depicts the ideological imprisonment of the French, who misread their own metaphorical figurations for reality, as akin to believing in ghosts. Ideology rhetorically elaborates and haunts, yet ultimately misrepresents, the more fundamental social conditions from which it arises. This figurative nature of ideological representation clarifies the performative relation between Marx’s elaborate rhetoric and his subject matter. The situation itself is already saturated with ideological rhetoric and metaphor, and Marx’s use of metaphor performatively registers this saturation by ideological figurations. Marx’s rhetorical exuberance in The Eighteenth Brumaire is not imposed upon the events, but draws from the period and its actors’ own ideological rhetoric. Paul Hamilton correctly identifies the correlation



proposed in Marx’s allusion to the “mad Englishmen in Bedlam, who thought he was living in the time of the pharaohs . . . as a gold digger in the Ethiopian mines, immured in his subterranean prison, by the exiguous light of a lamp fixed on his own head”:

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in identifying the precedent (Napoleon’s seizure of power from the Directory of 9 November 1799) by which Louis and his supporters justified their putsch, he also foregrounded the rhetoric by which they would hide from themselves the true content of their actions. Marx did not thereby dismiss these flourishes, but recognized in them the means of historicizing the actions they embroidered . . . Marx criticizes Proudhon’s account for pretending to objectivity. By contrast Marx argues that historical interpretation must not discount ideology but analyse the instructive angle at which it stands to truth, until we can see how it is in the nature of this truth to have provoked just this ideological tangent. Accordingly, Marx immerses himself not just in attributable views of Louis Bonaparte’s coup, but in all the rhetorical possibilities arising out if a historical comparison with the earlier Napoleon.21

Hamilton observes that Marx adopts the very ideologically loaded rhetoric that he intends to undermine. Marx recognizes that it is not enough to pretend that ideology has no power, but that its attractions and justifications must be recognized. The spectral metaphor and the mechanics of metaphor itself are used to imitate the ideological reification of social reality; through metaphor the haunting ghost of ideology is made real, its determining power as a “nightmare on the minds of the living” given its fullest expression. Moreover, as Hamilton observes, ideology is not reproduced at face value but is subjected to a critique from within its representation. Marx employs the spectral rhetoric and misrepresentations of the past in order to actively replicate and then critique and negate such ideologies. Hamilton argues that Marx uses his elaborate rhetoric to “extend and not just record any ideological vociferousness, improving on, elaborating, and . . . deconstructing avant la lettre its governing allusions and tropes.”22 This deconstruction can be seen in the displacement of the spectral metaphor, which shifts from its initial representation of historical repetition to signaling the rhetorical nature of any repetition, merely a shadow of the dead. Marx uses the spectral metaphor not only to capture the haunting allure and determining power of ideological representation but also to undermine this power, by recognizing its figurative and imaginary misrepresentation of reality. The shift in the spectral metaphor, from representing historical repetition to representing the emptiness of that repetition, indicates Marx’s reading of ideological representations as merely figurative translations of a more fundamental reality, merely misread metaphors. Spectral reduction



between Marx’s use of figurative rhetoric and his subject of ideological figuration and thus identifies the critical role that Marx’s spectral rhetoric serves:

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parallels the process of metaphorical interpretation, where the seemingly literal presence of the metaphorical referent is interpreted as a secondary, rhetorical elaboration of the real subject and is consequently reduced to an imaginary presence. Marx’s suspension of the spectral metaphor is similar to the imaginative reduction that concludes Beloved, which was analyzed in Chapter 3. There, we showed that the specter’s final reduction to the collective imagination signaled the self-reflexive reading of Beloved as a metaphor from within the confines of the text, a deconstruction of the novel’s own use of metaphor. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx uses a similar spectral reduction as a figure for metaphorical interpretation, in order to subject the ideological figurations of French politics to a critique by recognizing their “imaginary” nature. The spectral metaphor does not simply faithfully reproduce ideology, but subjects it to a critique through the manipulation of the self-destructive potential of both the specter and metaphor. While first given form, made present, the ghost of ideology is finally reduced to a shadow; ideology is read as metaphor and reduced to the imagination. Furthermore, Marx’s deconstructive negation, which uses the very ideas that it intends to critique, is tied to the dynamics of revolutionary social transformation. Marx believes that social revolution “cannot begin its own work until it has sloughed off all its superstitious regard for the past” (149). Whereas earlier revolutions needed nostalgic metaphorics to mask and “deaden their awareness of their own content,” the future proletarian revolution “must let the dead bury the dead” (149). It must be a literal event, whose “own content” must be transparently present, not obscured by “phrase,” by deceptive outward form. However, as we have seen, Marx’s account is not an example of such revolutionary literalness, but a deconstructive manipulation of ideological figurations. This deconstructive inhabitation of ideology is an attempt to mirror the political dynamics of revolution and social transformation. Although Marx desires a negation of the past, his method mirrors the more complex course of proletarian revolutions, which, according to Marx, “constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course”: They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever; they shrink back before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until




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Marx’s deconstructive critique reflects the self-critical dynamic that he sees as inherent to social revolution. For Marx, revolution is the way in which social reality critiques itself from within, and his deconstructive method in The Eighteenth Brumaire mirrors this. Like proletarian revolutions, his own text attempts to “return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again,” to “mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects” of earlier attempts, “with merciless thoroughness.” His adoption of the ideological rhetoric of spectrality and repetition is akin to the way that proletarian revolutions “seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them.” Like proletarian revolutions, Marx returns to the past to make sure that the opponent is defeated in reality, not merely “conjured . . . away in imagination,” as in the case of the bourgeois democrats of 1848, who “had lost all understanding of the present in their inactive glorification of the anticipated future” (151). Revolution must seize on the self-critical aspects already immanent to the social formation that it attempts to transform and therefore depends on the very circumstances that it aims to overthrow. The conditions that a revolution intends to transform are also its own conditions of possibility; revolution does not rain down from heaven, from the “inactive glorification of the anticipated future,” but emerges from the tensions and conflicts within the concrete social situation it aims to transform. Marx’s text, with its deconstructive dependence upon the ideological rhetoric of the past, attempts to mirror the self-critical nature of social revolution itself, which derives its force from within the very social situation that it attempts to transform and negate. Marx manipulates the spectral metaphor in accordance with his conception of historical transformation. This undermines postmodern and poststructuralist readings of The Eighteenth Brumaire that see it as an unwitting deconstruction of its own arguments. Rather than being unconsciously held captive to his own rhetoric, it is clear that Marx employs such metaphorical and spectral figurations in an intentional and highly self-conscious way, in accordance with his analytical objectives and conception of history. Rather than an unwitting aberration, his use of the spectral metaphor accords with classic principles of Marxist analysis,23 particularly the idea of immanent critique that Marx attempted in Capital, whereby the internal logic of capitalism and classical



the situation is created in which any retreat is impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here! (150)

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political economy are subjected to the force of their own contradictions. As Hamilton observes, Marx does not fall victim to, nor “dismiss,” the metaphorical flourishes of ideology, but perceives in them “the instructive angle at which they stand to truth.” Marx’s use of the spectral metaphor is not mere rhetorical technique but dramatizes the ideological figurations that are his object of critique. His aim is to expose the overwhelmingly figurative nature of the period’s own representations, which emerge with the bourgeois parliamentary system. This is done by the employment and “reading” of ideological figurations as mere metaphors. The structural dynamic that is shared between ideology, metaphor, and the spectral is used to deconstruct ideological representation, to expose its figurative misrepresentations of a real social situation. Marx’s immanent critique of the “imaginary” representations of the spectral, ideology, and metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire, which exposes the more fundamental social conditions that these figures translate, prepares the way for my discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In García Márquez’s novel, the spectral metaphor is related to temporal recurrence and historical determinism in a similar manner to that which we have found in Marx’s text. However, just as Marx uses the spectral to represent the specific spectacle of French politics from 1848 to 1851, the seemingly inevitable spectral repetitions and regressions of One Hundred Years of Solitude are grounded in the particulars of Latin America’s historical development. García Márquez displays the same reticence toward unmediated history that is evident in The Eighteenth Brumaire, instead concerning himself mainly with the ideological mediation of historical reality. Like The Eighteenth Brumaire, One Hundred Years of Solitude employs the similarities between the spectral, metaphor, and ideology to performatively register and critique the ideological figuration of Latin American history. As the following chapters will show, García Márquez’s novel also uses the conceptual complexity of the spectral and the mechanics of metaphorical reference to immanently critique ideological representation. Marx’s development of the spectral metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire illuminates the critical and dialectical aspects of García Márquez’s use of both the spectral and the fantastic in general, which are often neglected by critics of the novel, suggesting an alternative, demystifying reading of the novel. A close examination of the spectral pattern in One Hundred Years of Solitude will elucidate the complex relationship between “magical realism” and the ideological transposition of Latin American history.







Spectral History in One Hundred Years of Solitude A passage toward the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude resonates strikingly with Marx’s spectral metaphorics in The Eighteenth Brumaire. As Macondo and the Buendía household slowly self-destruct under the inherited weight of the past, Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula, his aunt and lover, are disturbed by the accumulated ghosts of the Buendía family’s history: Many times they were awakened by the traffic of the dead. They could hear Úrsula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and José Arcadio Buendía searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsession can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after another species of future animal would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man. (331–332)

The “traffic of the dead” that disturbs Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula’s sleep recalls Marx’s description of the prevailing “tradition of the dead generations,” which “weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.” In fact, García Márquez also echoes Marx’s image of spectral weight only



Chapter 7

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He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebeca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, and in which Amaranta Úrsula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. (334)

This seemingly contradictory description of the “crushing weight” of the spectral past, both heavy and ghostly, exploits the dialectics of spectral presence in a similar manner to Beloved. García Márquez uses these dialectics to manifest the continuing power of the past despite its apparent corporeal absence. As in Beloved, the past is literally present in its “shape as apparitions,” with Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula being awakened by the ghosts of a past that they were not privy to. The behavior of the ghosts that awaken Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula suggests a further similarity to The Eighteenth Brumaire. Like the French people’s obsession with the “memory of Napoleon” (149), the Buendía ghosts are all engaged in the compulsive, repetitive, and selfdeceptive fulfillment of a “dominant obsession”: “Úrsula fighting against the laws of creation,” “José Arcadio Buendía searching for the mythical1 truth of the great inventions,” “Fernanda praying,” and “Colonel Aureliano Buendía stupefying himself with the deception of war.” Occurring near the end of the novel, this catalogue summarizes the seemingly useless, repetitive obsessions that preoccupy the Buendías throughout the narrative. Not only do the ghosts haunt the living here, but they are also haunted themselves by the repetition of their own past lives. The association between the spectral and the persistent, repetitive presence of the past is evident throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude. As in the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire, the ghost invokes a deterministic circularity that denies progressive time, picturing the present as subordinate to the past even to the extent of incessantly repeating it. This is, however, only one component of the spectral metaphor. As the previous chapter demonstrated, Marx extends the spectral metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire, pitting the displacement and insubstantiality of spectral presence against its haunting revenant nature. Similarly, in One Hundred Years of Solitude the ghost is a more complex figure than is often assumed in critical analyses of the novel, which often take its specters,



three pages after this description of the “traffic of the dead,” when Aureliano again senses the family’s accumulated past:

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regressions, and circularities at face value as indications of an ahistorical “magical realism.” This chapter will address two closely related aspects of the specter’s complexity in One Hundred Years of Solitude that are illuminated by the historicity of Marx’s spectral metaphorics in The Eighteenth Brumaire. First, I will show that the specter in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as in The Eighteenth Brumaire, does not reflect an ahistorical scheme of cyclical time, but captures the dynamic relation between the past and the present that occurs within the progressive movement of time. While critics have often read One Hundred Years of Solitude as an expression of ahistorical, cyclical time,2 this chapter will demonstrate that the clear indications of change and transformation in Macondo’s history undermine such a reading. Although the ghost ostensibly indicates recurrence, closer examination shows that, as in The Eighteenth Brumaire, its returning presence is displaced, and that it is firmly situated within this scheme of progressive, historical time in the novel. This leads to the second aspect of spectral complexity in One Hundred Years of Solitude; the ghost and the displaced repetition that it evokes are, in fact, firmly grounded in the particular development of Latin American history. Lois Parkinson Zamora’s argues that magical realist ghosts, including those of One Hundred Years of Solitude, “unsettle modernity’s (and the novel’s) basis in progressive, linear history; they float free in time, not just here and now, but then and there, eternal and everywhere.”3 I will argue that, contrary to this reading, the spectral figure does not “float free in time,” and is not “eternal and everywhere,” but metaphorically transposes specific aspects of Latin America’s continuing history of dependence and underdevelopment, a history that, however regressive seeming, is directly tied to the “progressive, linear history” of modernity. Attending to its placement within historical time and space will show that the spectral, although a fantastic figure, is not an antirealist figure, but is part of García Márquez’s engagement with the changing history of Latin America. Circularity and Change The reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude as an expression of temporal circularity rests largely on the narrative authority of Úrsula, the Buendía family matriarch. Úrsula frequently describes time as cyclical, constantly returning to the same, original, point: “I know all of this by heart, . . . It’s as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning” (162). Indeed, Úrsula’s recognition of temporal circularity itself recurs many times throughout the novel. Late in the novel, when she is speaking to José



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When he recognized his great-grandmother’s voice he turned his head towards the door, tried to smile, and without knowing it repeated an old phrase of Úrsula’s. “What did you expect?” he murmured. “Time passes.” “That’s how it goes,” Úrsula said, “but not so much.” When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. (272)

Here, the circularity is accentuated in that Úrsula “once again” realizes that time “was turning in a circle.” Her conception of circular time, which is here itself cyclically restated, underpins the narration of the Buendía family’s history. The narrator constantly compares current actions to those of the past and future and invokes fate as unavoidable or foreseen, giving the impression that the Buendías’ history is a series of recurrent cycles. Indeed, the narrator’s reiterations are so persistent that they go beyond the commonplace literary technique of foreshadowing and instead suggest a cyclical philosophy of time and history. As Birute Ciplijauskaite has argued, textual phenomena of foreshadowing, premonition, and “cyclical reiteration . . . are tightly interwoven with the main themes of the book” and “can be studied as integral parts of the ‘story’ as well as that of the ‘discourse.’”4 Úrsula’s conception of cyclical time thus appears to encapsulate the novel’s reality, rather than just her subjective impression or a narrative technique of the author. Úrsula’s belief in temporal repetition resonates with Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Like the French people perceiving that they have “plunged back into an already dead epoch” (148), Úrsula perceives the tensions surrounding the Banana Company as a return to the “dangerous times” that preceded the Colonel’s wars: The atmosphere of the following months was so tense that even Úrsula perceived it in her dark corner, and she had the impression that once more she was living through the dangerous times when her son Aureliano carried the homeopathic pills of subversion in his pocket. She tried to speak to José Arcadio Segundo, to let him know of the precedent . . . but . . . no one knew his whereabouts. “Just like Aureliano,” Úrsula exclaimed. “It’s as if the world were repeating itself.” (242)



Arcadio Segundo, Úrsula realizes that she has just repeated one of her conversations with Colonel Aureliano Buendía word for word:

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Úrsula’s “impression” that José Arcadio Segundo’s union activities rehearse Aureliano’s revolutionary wars is particularly striking, in that both their actions attempt to effect historical change. This is comparable to Marx’s depiction of revolutionaries as historically rehearsing the past, conjuring up the dead “just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings” (146). The inhabitants of Macondo, despite their progressive “revolutionary” bravado, repeatedly find themselves saying the same phrases, thinking the same thoughts, and performing the same actions that they and their forebears had performed in the past. Like the revolutionaries Marx describes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans and costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language” (146). The reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude is confronted with a puzzling family tree of recurring names, characters, and actions, just barely differentiated from generation to generation. The French people’s worship of the original revolution and the “memory of Napoleon” (149) is paralleled in One Hundred Years of Solitude by the worship of the memory of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a hero despite his 32 lost civil wars. The same element of recurrent “names, slogans . . . and borrowed language” that Marx describes can be seen in the recurring cries of “Long live the Liberal Party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendía!” (104, 131, 136, 167), which seem more a sign of the Macondans’ regressive political impotence than a rallying call to arms. Similar to repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the seemingly compulsive regressions of Macondo and the Buendía family invoke an extreme version of historical determinism, where the past not only determines the present but actually reappears in the present. The characters appear to replay similar actions and phrases from previous generations as if they are linked by name to a historical design already scripted for them. Úrsula comes to believe that the repetition of names in the family predetermines the characters and eventual fates of their bearers: Úrsula . . . could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign. (152)

As Martin has pointed out, repetition here acts as an emblem of determinism: “If you call a child Aureliano, he will turn out like ‘an



Spectral History


Aureliano.’ There is no escape; and no second chance.”5 Like many gothic novels, where the hero-avenger often bears the name of his wronged ancestor, who lives on as a ghost, the repetitive names indicate the unresolved persistence of the past.6 As with the invocation of past struggles in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the repetitive naming is an intentional effort to recapture the glories, and perhaps to correct the mistakes, of the past. This is seen in Aureliano Babilonia’s naming of his ill-fated child at the novel’s end: “We’ll name him Aureliano and he’ll win thirtytwo wars” (332). However, for Úrsula, it inevitably brings out the worst of the past, as is clear from her thoughts on the twins, José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo: It was as if the defects of the family and none of the virtues had been concentrated in both. Then she decided that no one again would be called Aureliano or José Arcadio. Yet when Aureliano Segundo had his first son she did not dare go against his will. (158)

Although Úrsula is bothered by the historical repetition that the recurring names appear to suggest, she accepts such naming in accordance with her fatalistic resignation to the predetermined course of cyclical time. Her resignation is akin to Marx’s depiction of the French fatalistically awaiting the return of Napoleon. The idea of precedent makes each new event an inevitable rehearsal of the past, its course seemingly laid out before it occurs. A closer examination of the text reveals that Úrsula’s conception of circular time is in fact belied by clear indications of change, and that, as she admits to Colonel Aureliano Buendía, “Time passes” (107). Aureliano Triste’s introduction of the railway to Macondo is the clearest example of change, demonstrating the way that Úrsula’s claims of circularity are undermined by the wider context in which they occur. It is yet another moment in which Úrsula, “once again,” perceives time as circular: “Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendent of the plans with which José Arcadio Buendía had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Úrsula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle” (183). However, as the narrator’s language subtly indicates, this judgment is merely a misplaced “impression,” a misreading of what is actually a sign of historical transformation. The sketch that confirms Úrsula’s “impression” of cyclical time is a plan for the introduction of the railway, a symbol of modernity that the text heralds as an agent of change and history: “The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and



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unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo” (184). Martin has noted that this is “precisely the moment when history, and the consciousness of modernity, has finally broken through to Macondo.”7 The introduction of the railway is set within a larger historical narrative of capitalist economic expansion. Aureliano Triste introduces the railway because of the phenomenal success of his ice factory, which has exceeded the local market. Martin observes that this action of Aureliano Triste, “the man who turned the magical ice into a commodity,” is “representative of the impact of the embryonic local bourgeoisie.”8 The ice factory’s phenomenal success begins with the addition of Aureliano Centeno to the workforce. He is first described when the 17 Aurelianos are brought to Macondo: “One, large for his age, made smithereens out of the flower pots and china because his hands seemed to have the property of breaking everything they touched” (128). On his return to Macondo, he is remembered because “in a few hours he had destroyed every breakable object that passed through his hands”: Time had moderated his early impulse for growth . . . but his amazing power of manual destruction remained intact . . . But to make up for that irremediable power, which was exasperating even for him, he had a cordiality that won the immediate confidence of others and a stupendous capacity for work. In a short time he had increased the production of ice to such a degree that it was too much for the local market and Aureliano Triste had to think about the possibility of expanding the business to other towns in the swamp. It was then that he thought of the decisive step, not only for the modernization of his business but to link the town with the rest of the world. “We have to bring in the railroad,” he said. (183)

This clearly signals the beginning of a new era in Macondo’s history. Such a historical transformation is accentuated by the playful allusions to Marx’s famous account of the revolutionary impact of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto.9 Aureliano Centeno’s involuntary destruction of breakable objects, “which was exasperating even for him,” evokes Marx’s description of the bourgeoisie’s involuntary powers of destruction: he is “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”10 His powers of destruction echo the bourgeoisie’s destruction of all previous cultural forms: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,



Spectral History


all that is holy is profaned.”11 Like the bourgeoisie, his infectious “cordiality” wins “the immediate confidence of others,” and his “stupendous capacity for work” increases the production of ice so that markets must be expanded, demanding the introduction of the railway and bringing about the breakdown of localized traditional economic relations. The introduction of the railway is part of the expansion and modernization of the business, designed to incorporate it into the world market, and “to link the town with the rest of the world.” This echoes Marx’s description of capitalist expansion: “The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”12 The introduction of the railway is clearly a part of capitalist modernization and historical transformation, a progressive pattern that accordingly undermines Úrsula’s “impression” of circularity. The fact that the introduction of the railway is an intentional, rationally calculated action, which Aureliano Triste arrives at by confronting changing circumstances, further undermines Úrsula’s “impression” of cyclical inevitability. The text explicitly contrasts the success of Aureliano Triste’s plan with the failure of what Úrsula identifies as its “original,” José Arcadio Buendía’s designs for solar warfare. While the sketch may remind Úrsula of José Arcadio Buendía, unlike his forebear, Aureliano Triste did not lose any sleep or appetite nor did he torment anyone with crises of ill-humour, but he considered the most hare-brained of projects as immediate possibilities, made rational calculations about costs and dates, and brought them off without any intermediate exasperation. (183)

This distinction between the successful, rational calculations of Aureliano Triste and delirium of José Arcadio Buendía reinforces the railway’s place in the progressive drive of incipient capitalism and again echoes Marx’s description of the bourgeoisie in The Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations . . . It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.13

The ice factory itself is a rationally calculated embodiment of José Arcadio Buendía’s dream: “Aureliano Triste . . . set up on the edge of town



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the ice factory that José Arcadio Buendía had dreamed of in his inventive delirium” (180). Aureliano Triste’s ice factory, which commodifies the magical ice that is discovered in the novel’s first sentence, exemplifies the ruthless pragmatism and “egotistical calculation” of emergent capitalism. Initially, José Arcadio Buendía’s “heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery”: “Intoxicated by the evidence of the miracle . . . as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures,” he proclaims that it “is the greatest invention of our time” (22). Now, however, Aureliano Triste produces a surplus of the “miracle” ice. To borrow Marx’s words, Aureliano Triste drowns the “heavenly ecstasies” of José Arcadio Buendía “in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” The immediate and overwhelming impact of the railway also undermines Úrsula’s perception of cyclical regression: “Dazzled by so many and such marvellous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began” (185). It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía under the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all through the house even in broad daylight. (186)

The train’s effect on the town invokes the revolutionary and unsettling influence of modernity, where, as Marshall Berman has argued, “All that is solid melts into air.”14 The impact of the railway clearly signals the irruption of modernity into Macondo, which unsettles “the limits of reality.” Within a page and a half of the introduction of the train, this irruption of modernity brings the trader, Mr. Herbert, and twentieth-century imperialism in the form of the U.S. banana company. The connections between the ice factory, the railway, and the banana company exemplify Macondo’s progressive historical development, which is initiated by an intentional, rational act, rather than simply the repetition of the past, as Úrsula claims. Aureliano Triste’s introduction of the railway, rupturing Macondo’s seemingly mythical isolation, undermines Úrsula’s “impression” of cyclical, ahistorical time in the same way that the ice factory commodifies and demystifies the “miracle” of ice. The novel contains an explicit modification of Úrsula’s theory of recurrence in the thoughts of Pilar Ternera, who acts as the earthy alternative matriarch of the novel. Pilar corrects Úrsula’s picture of a



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the history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spinning into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle. (320)15

Ricardo Gullon uses this image to support his contention that “the novel has the circular and dynamic structure of a gyrating wheel.”16 However, this ignores Pilar’s recognition of the “progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” upon which the Buendías’ repetitions are situated. Martin correctly views Pilar’s conception of the Buendía family history as a “metaphor of dialectical decline,” picturing the family’s history as a “downward spiral” rather than a recurring cycle.17 She subsumes Úrsula’s cycles of perpetually recurring time, instead situating them within a progressive spiraling motion, a linear axis that prevents the perpetual motion of such a repetitive “machine.” This displacement of repetition by change accords with the way that the recurrences are presented in the novel. Although there appears to be recurrences throughout the novel, they are marked by a displacement that induces a forward motion, creating what Jerry Root sees as a “pull” toward the conclusion.18 Rather than giving a picture of endless cyclical time, the novel’s “repetitions” actually highlight the change that has occurred since the original event that they supposedly reiterate. When Aureliano Segundo tries to return to “replicas” of his earlier revelry after the deluge, he quickly realizes how much has changed: “Those humble replicas of the revelry of former times served to show Aureliano Segundo himself how much his spirits had declined and to what a degree his skill as a masterful carouser had dried up. He was a changed man” (274). In accordance with Pilar’s image of a wearing axle, such change undermines the veracity of the “replicas” of the novel. From the prosperity initially achieved by Úrsula’s candy animals to that achieved by Aureliano Segundo’s real animals, from the unconsummated coupling of Amaranta and her nephew Aureliano José to the consummated coupling of Amaranta Úrsula and her nephew Aureliano Babilonia, the “recurrences” often reiterate a motif only to highlight the variance in its reappearance. The Illusion of Spectral Return The revenant figure of the ghost exemplifies the displacement of repetition. Although the ghost ostensibly indicates inescapable inheritance and recurrence, closer examination shows that it is situated firmly within the 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


repeating wheel of history by situating its cycles within a larger progressive movement:

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progressive scheme of time that underlies the novel’s apparent repetitions. Rather than a simple indication of repetition, the ghost actually signals the illusion of repetition. The novel’s first ghost, Prudencio Aguilar, is a good example. Although Prudencio’s reappearance suggests the haunting, seemingly inescapable persistence of the “given and inherited circumstances” of the past, it also attests to the passage of time. His presence clearly acts as a reminder of the town’s beginnings and to the incident that initiated its foundations. Prior to the foundation of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía kills Prudencio for casting aspersions on his sexual potency. Not long after, Prudencio’s ghost starts to haunt José Arcadio’s and Úrsula’s home, appearing as a traditional manifestation of guilt, like the baby ghost in Beloved; José Arcadio Buendía tells Úrsula that Prudencio’s reappearance “just means we can’t stand the weight of our conscience” (25). In an attempt to escape Prudencio’s haunting, José Arcadio Buendía begins the expedition that eventually founds Macondo. Not much later in the narrative, however, Prudencio’s ghost arrives in Macondo, after searching for José Arcadio Buendía for years. Thus, even Macondo’s prehistory is given form in the present. José Arcadio Buendía interprets Prudencio’s return as evidence of his and Macondo’s imprisonment within what Marx calls the “tradition of the dead generations.” In the novel’s early stages, José Arcadio Buendía is obsessed with bringing scientific progress to Macondo. Like political revolutionaries for Marx, he is constantly striving for “the creation of something which does not yet exist” (146). The reappearance of the past in the form of Prudencio prompts José Arcadio Buendía to turn his back on progress and instead become obsessed with the seemingly eternal reiterations of time: José Arcadio Buendía conversed with Prudencio Aguilar until dawn. A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him: “What day is today?” Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. “I was thinking the same thing,” José Arcadio said, “but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too.” . . . On the next day, Wednesday, José Arcadio Buendía went back to the workshop. “This is a disaster,” he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.” That night Pietro Crespi found him on the porch, weeping for Prudencio Aguilar, for Melquíades, for Rebeca’s parents, for his mother and father, for all of those he could remember and who were now alone in death . . . On Thursday he appeared in the workshop again with the painful look of ploughed ground. “The time machine has broken,” he almost sobbed . . . He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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On seeing Prudencio, José Arcadio Buendía abandons his obsession with progress and instead becomes obsessed with the past, collapsing into a belief in unchanging timelessness and lamenting that the “time machine has broken.” His belief that time has stopped resembles Sethe’s denial of progressive time in Beloved, in response to the apparently spectral persistence of “rememory”: “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it” (35). Like Sethe, José Arcadio Buendía interprets the spectral reappearance of the past as an indication that time has stopped progressing, that the present is now fixed in an eternal and seemingly omnipresent past: “Today is Monday too.” For José Arcadio Buendía, Prudencio’s return indicates his entrapment within the origins of the past. This return to supposed origins is continued in José Arcadio Buendía’s madness. Reverting to a “state of total innocence” (71), he thinks that everyday is Monday, that is, the start of the week and begins to speak a “high-sounding and fluent but completely incomprehensible language,” which turns out to be Latin, the linguistic origin of Spanish. To José Arcadio Buendía, the apparent reappearance of origins suggests that the present cannot escape its “given and inherited circumstances” and that he is caught in an unchanging state of timelessness. José Arcadio Buendía’s judgment, however, is undermined by his concurrent descent into madness and, more importantly, his failure to consider the clear indications that Prudencio’s specter is imbedded in progressive time. On first seeing Prudencio Aguilar’s ghost as an “old man with white hair and uncertain gestures,” José Arcadio Buendía is “startled that the dead also aged” (70). Later on, just before José Arcadio Buendía’s own death, Prudencio’s ghost is described as “[a]lmost pulverized at that time by the decrepitude of death” (119). Similarly, Úrsula later sees José Arcadio Buendía’s own ghost “much older than when he had died” (149). Just as the novel’s apparent recurrences actually display temporal progression and displacement, so too the revenant form of the ghost is also subject to an analogous progression and change. Although Prudencio’s appearance signals Macondo’s “inherited circumstances,” it also highlights the subsequent movement of history, that he is now dead and Macondo has been founded. Prudencio’s ghost does not exist outside of time, but continues to live within it. Although at first José Arcadio Buendía notices that Prudencio has aged, he later forgets this living, progressive element of the ghost, instead taking



would reveal the passage of time. He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquíades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress. But no one came. (70–71)

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his return as a sign of the inescapable hold of the past, an indication that the “time machine has broken” (71). He reverts from an obsession with progression to an obsession with the past and its inescapable hold on the present. This reversion is foregrounded by his failed attempts to create perpetual motion machines “based on the principle of the pendulum” (68, 70). This pursuit exemplifies José Arcadio Buendía’s initial obsession with entirely undetermined progress, completely free from the constraining influence of “given and inherited circumstances.” His obsession with this enterprise induces the “fever of insomnia,” where his imagination threatens to drag him “into a state of perpetual delirium from which he would not recover” (70). Prudencio’s ghost appears during this delirious state. After Prudencio’s appearance, Pietro Crespi finds him “on the porch, weeping for Prudencio Aguilar, for Melquíades, for Rebeca’s parents, for his mother and father, for all those he could remember and who were now alone in death” (71) and asks “him what had happened to . . . building a pendulum machine that would help men to fly.” José Arcadio Buendía answers “that it was impossible because a pendulum could lift anything into the air but it could not lift itself ” (71). He abandons the illusory freedom from determination that the perpetual motion machines indicate, instead falling into despair over the apparent inescapability of constraints, moaning that the pendulum “could not lift itself.” While he now recognizes the determining “given and inherited circumstances” that Prudencio’s return represents, this recognition prompts him to ignore the modification of these circumstances by the forward passage of time. José Arcadio Buendía has misread the ghost. After being startled that Prudencio has aged, he then forgets this progression even in the dead, and falls into a notion of timelessness. Prudencio’s spectral appearance is thus a sign of José Arcadio Buendía’s own delirious misinterpretation, rather than of repetition or stagnant timelessness. The association between the ghost and a delusive state of mind is evident throughout the narrative. Insofar as the ghost is associated with a scheme of deterministic recurrence, it also implies that this scheme is based on the delusive misjudgment of the characters. The mock-gothic figure of Rebeca, for example, becomes “a spectre out of the past” (133) after José Arcadio’s mysterious death. She locks herself away in the “stagnant air” and “shadows of her house,” “where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms” (133). Like Marx’s depiction of historical actors obsessively reliving the past, Rebeca’s obsession with the past causes her to become spectrally insubstantial; Colonel Aureliano Buendía has “the impression that the phosphorescence of her bones was showing through her skin” (133). Although still living, she becomes dead



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to the world, living a ghostlike existence as a “vision from another world” (181). When she pays for the restoration of her house with coins long drawn out of circulation, the Buendías see “to what a fantastic point her separation from the world had arrived” (182). Rebeca’s delusional regression causes her to see her own ghosts. She looks at Colonel Aureliano Buendía “as if he were the one who looked like a ghost out of the past” (133). When Aureliano Triste comes across her in her crumbling house, she regresses to “the haze of other times” (181) and mistakes him for her long dead husband, José Arcadio, “materialized” from the dead. Her apprehension of her husband’s ghost, like her entire life, is a delusive regression from the present to the “haze of other times.” Úrsula, the main exponent of temporal recurrence, is also the character whose perception of revenant ghosts is most clearly delusional. The illusory associations of the ghost come to signal her inability to see the present as it really is, thus undermining her judgments of circularity that are given such authority in the text. Úrsula’s tendency to see the past repeated in the present increases as she declines into senility and blindness: Something, indeed, must have happened to her mind during the third year of the rain, for she was gradually losing her sense of reality and confusing present time with remote periods in her life to the point where, on one occasion, she spent three days weeping deeply over the death of Petronila Iguaran, her great-grandmother, buried for over a century. She sank into such an insane state of confusion that she thought little Aureliano was her son the Colonel during the time he was taken to see ice, and that the José Arcadio who was at that time in the seminary was her firstborn who had gone off with the gypsies. She spoke so much about the family that the children learned to make up imaginary visits with beings who had not only been dead for a long time, but who had existed at different times. (266)

In her senile state, Úrsula has completely succumbed to the family’s repetition of names. The similarity between her misrecognition of little Aureliano and José Arcadio and her earlier, more sober identifications of familial repetition implies that they too are delusional. Úrsula’s senility exaggerates her earlier conceptions of temporal circularity: She was tying a colourful string of chatter together, commenting on things from many separate places and many different times, so that when Amaranta Úrsula returned from school and Aureliano grew tired of the encyclopedia, they would find her sitting on her bed talking to herself and lost in a labyrinth of dead people. “Fire!” she shouted once in terror and for an



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instant panic spread though the house, but what she was telling about was the burning of a barn that she had witnessed when she was four years old. She finally mixed up the past with the present in such a way that in the two or three waves of lucidity that she had before she died, no one knew for certain whether she was speaking about what she felt or what she remembered. (277)

Like Rebeca, Úrsula has regressed to the “haze of other times.” These senile “ghostly visits” (266) highlight the limited scope of her earlier assertions of recurrence. When José Arcadio Segundo’s union activities remind her of the “precedent” of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s wars, the narrator subtly undermines her “impression” that the world was “repeating itself ” (243) by hinting that her perspective is limited: “even Úrsula perceived it in her dark corner” (242, my emphasis). The novel uses the ghost as a sign of delusional misrecognition in order to undermine the claims of circularity that Úrsula expresses within the text. Her progressive blindness and senility, “losing her sense of reality” (266) and increasingly seeing the ghosts of the past everywhere, foregrounds her metaphorical blindness throughout the earlier sections of the narrative, consistently perceiving time as circular despite the clear changes and transformations in Macondo’s history. This recalls Marx’s description of the French people’s blindness to the reality of their historical present, nostalgically obsessed with previous revolutions and “the memory of Napoleon”: “As long as the French were engaged in revolution, they could not free themselves of the memory of Napoleon” (149). Marx pictures the French as blinded, by obsessive nostalgia, to the changes that have taken place since the original events, ensuring that the Bonapartists can successfully exploit their supposed precedent. Marx uses the spectral metaphor to foreground this delusional obsession with the past, which causes the French to misread the present. Similarly, the ghost in One Hundred Years of Solitude does not simply signify recurrence, but signifies the illusory nature of such recurrence. By using the ghost to represent illusion, García Márquez, like Marx, draws upon the dialectic presence of the ghost, exploiting its indication of absence, rather than just its positive, haunting presence. As in both Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and Beloved, this negativity is also used to represent the basic absence of the past from the present, the obvious sense in which it has passed on, to borrow a phrase from Beloved. The spectral does not simply represent the past’s haunting persistence, but also its progressive displacement and diminishment, fading and changing with the passage of time. José Arcadio Buendía is still haunted by Prudencio’s death, but only in the diminished form of a “pulverized” specter. In this way, the ghost 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


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does not simply represent the inevitable repetition of the past, but captures the dynamic way in which the legacy of the past is continually modified as it is inherited by the present. This undermines the fatalism that Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía read into spectral repetition. Assuming that things do not change but simply repeat themselves, they accordingly resign themselves to such an unavoidable pattern. However, the placement of spectral recurrence within a clearly progressive temporal motion suggests that the characters’ fatalistic perceptions of temporal circularity are simplified misinterpretations of more complex circumstances. The spectral is not just a metaphor for the continuing presence of the past, but captures the illusion that this persistence entails inevitable recurrence and determinism. As in The Eighteenth Brumaire and Beloved, the spectral presence is a site of tension, rather than simply a representative of repetitive historical determinism. Its embodiment of apparent contradictions in textual meaning stems largely from its dialectic of absence and presence. The ghost represents a more complex relationship between the past and present than simple recurrence or the complete subordination of the present to the influence of the past. Although it appears to embody the revenant presence of the past, it also seems to suggest the literal absence of the past, implying that any recurrence will be provisional at best, displaced by the passage of time. The Specters of Colonialism . . . we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! [“The dead clutches on to the living”] Marx, Preface to 1st edition of Capital 19

As was observed earlier, Prudencio Aguilar’s ghost exemplifies spectral progression in One Hundred Years of Solitude, showing that despite its revenant, recurrent nature, the ghost is nevertheless subject to the progressive course of time. Prudencio’s posthumous return also demonstrates that the seemingly immaterial spectral figure is situated within social and geographical space: After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his



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Impelled by a “pressing” need for social contact, Prudencio enquires after José Arcadio Buendía among distinct regional communities of the dead, “from Riohacha . . . from Upar valley, those who came from the swamp.” The specifically Colombian references to Riohacha and Upar valley serve to situate Prudencio’s travels firmly within human geographical space, furthering the materiality that the impact of progressive time invests in his spectral presence.20 This suggests that the spectral world of the dead is a connected social world, with definable regions and limits, rather than a completely disembodied realm of absence. The image of a community of the dead in which Prudencio Aguilar travels is similar to that evoked by the first line of William Kennedy’s 1983 novel Ironweed: “Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods.”21 Although Francis Phelan is here thinking of the arrangement of the cemetery’s “inhabitants” according to class, the novel that follows portrays an everyday ghostliness, very similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Francis Phelan’s conversations with the still loitering ghosts of his past are treated on equal terms with the ordinary reality of his surroundings. The novel’s ghosts are related through Francis Phelan’s personal history to the social history of Albany, New York. The ghosts meet up with each other, ride the tramlines, and, like Prudencio’s posthumous wanderings, mark Albany as a social and historical space. The ghosts of both novels, by representing and bringing their respective histories to life, are primarily social and regional ghosts. The spectral belonging that is depicted in both Ironweed and Prudencio Aguilar’s travels acts as a counterpoint to the ghost’s intimations of disembodied, immaterial absence. As shown in the discussion of Hamlet, the figure of the ghost has traditionally evoked associations of dislocation, immateriality, and estrangement. Literally disembodied and insubstantial, set free from the physical world, the haunting specter signals a transcendence of earthly demands and limits. The earlier discussion of Beloved showed that Morrison exploits these associations of disconnection and insubstantiality in order to transpose the lost, unknown, and neglected victims of slavery and the Middle Passage.



worst enemy. He had spent a great deal of time looking for him. He asked the dead from Riohacha about him, the dead who came from Upar valley, those who came from the swamp, and no one could tell him because Macondo was a town that was unknown to the dead until Melquíades arrived and marked it with a small black dot on the motley maps of death. (70)


Beloved’s dislocated absence is, however, balanced by her ties to the person of Sethe, the place of 124, and the African American community as a whole, all of which posit a chain of historical connection in which she can be placed. This spectral belonging is also part of the traditional dialectics of spectral presence, as the gothic tradition attests; although incorporeal, the ghost is usually the ghost of something or someone and haunts a specific place. The specter’s belonging to a specific place, region, or social community counterbalances its seemingly rootless immateriality, similar to the way that spectral change undermines the appearance of repetition. The grounding of the spectral figure is extremely important to the historical function of the ghost in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like Marx’s spectral “tradition of the dead generations” and the ghosts of Ironweed and Beloved, García Márquez’s metaphorical use of the spectral presupposes a concrete “tradition” of historical time and space. Prudencio Aguilar’s conversations with “the dead from Riohacha . . . the dead who came from the Upar Valley” show that the ghost is grounded in the specific social and geographical landscape of Latin America.22 Although the specter indicates the general transaction between the past and the present, García Márquez also uses it to represent the particular way that such a dynamic of inheritance and progression has functioned within Latin American history. The dialectical presence of the specter carries a particular significance for Latin American history, which is haunted by the continuing legacy of colonialism. This historical grounding illuminates the seemingly cyclical history that the ghost is associated with, showing that it is underlain by the Latin American historical realities of dependence and underdevelopment. This reading challenges both the ahistorical orientation of much criticism of the novel and the uncritical acceptance of its fantastic and spectral elements as magical or antirealist motifs. The regional grounding of the ostensibly fantastic and immaterial figure of the ghost exemplifies the historical grounding of much of the novel’s ostensibly metaphysical, mythical, and fantastic elements, which are actually coded metaphorical representations of Latin American historical conditions and problems. The most obvious connections between the spectral and Latin American history in One Hundred Years of Solitude lie in its depiction of the haunting specters of European colonialism. As critics have noted, the “one hundred years” of the narrative roughly traverses the course of postIndependence Latin America.23 Colonialism, while supposedly left behind, nevertheless continues to bequeath a considerable legacy to postcolonial Latin America. The novel exploits the dialectical presence of the specter to capture the seemingly anachronistic persistence of the colonial past in postcolonial Latin America.



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Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armour of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. (17)

The empty and now useless Spanish galleon, stranded miles from the sea and centuries from its temporal origins, is invested with a spectral quality of dislocation and absence. This is akin to Marx’s description of the “ghosts of Rome,” which had little direct relation to the real conditions of Revolutionary France, or the “memory of Napoleon” still haunting France in the middle of the nineteenth century.24 James Higgins sees the galleon as a “symbol of a heritage that is anachronistic, out of context and ill-equipped to tackle the awesome American environment.”25 Similarly, Roberto González Echevarría sees its “voided presence” as a representation of “a period whose ideological structure is no longer current.”26 Such colonial spectrality is also found in the fifteenth-century suit of armor that José Arcadio Buendía unearths, “which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd” (10).27 These two relics seem to suggest that the colonial past is an alien, dislocated, seemingly irrelevant presence, empty of any real content in the postcolonial world of the characters. The spectral character of these relics lies not only in their absence and estrangement, but in the dynamic between absence and presence, dislocation and connection, that is invested in them. For all their dislocation, emptiness, and absence, these relics of colonialism are nevertheless entrenched within the geographical and temporal landscape. This suggests that the colonial past continues to haunt Latin American society, even though it has supposedly been broken with in the postcolonial era. The sound of the suit of armor, after all, is not silence but a “hollow resonance,” a phrase that encapsulates the persisting traces of colonialism in the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although the galleon is empty and lost, it has now been found. Although it initially “seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the



The Spanish galleon that José Arcadio Buendía and his fellow adventurers find in the jungle exemplifies the spectral depiction of colonialism. The galleon, a stranded relic of colonialist expansion, appears to be a decontextualized, empty presence within the landscape:


vices of time and the habits of the birds,” it has later been reduced to a “carbonized skeleton” (240) by the passage of time, similar to the ageing ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, who becomes “pulverized” by the progressive “decrepitude of death” (119). This reinforces the galleon’s concrete materiality, its presence within geographical space and progressive time. Despite the perceptions of the adventurers, it clearly does not “occupy its own space . . . of solitude and oblivion” and is not “protected from the vices of time.” The operative word in the description of the galleon’s suspended animation is “seemed,” an important qualification on the part of the narrator. It indicates that the narrator is adopting the perspective of the adventurers, who are largely ignorant of their colonial past. For the adventurers of Macondo, the galleon is an alien, ghostly presence, for they can sense no historical connection with it; to them, it really does seem to “occupy its own space . . . of solitude and oblivion.”28 Of course, the galleon occupies their space, and in a sense their society is a product of it. Though they may feel alienated from it, colonialism has partly formed their society. The galleon’s seemingly alien presence within the landscape reflects its distant origins and present Latin American resting place, capturing the “hollow resonance” that characterizes colonialism in Latin America; it is a haunting presence, alien yet familiar, supposedly having passed on, yet actually persisting. These spectral dialectics of alien familiarity and absent presence are also used to characterize Fernanda del Carpio, who is herself an anachronistic colonial “relic” like the galleon and suit of armor. Her home city in the highlands is characterized in a mock-gothic tone as a ghost town, a spectral remnant of the colonial past: Fernanda was a woman who was lost in the world. She had been born and raised in a city six hundred miles away, a gloomy city where on ghostly nights the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets. Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen. The air had died in the cypresses in the courtyard, in the pale trappings of the bedrooms, in the dripping archways of the garden of perennials. (170)

Fernanda’s city and the social order it represents are presented as anachronistic remnants of Spanish colonialism and the aristocracy, the belated ghosts of a moribund European aristocratic heritage. The spectral pattern surrounding Fernanda also suggests that this heritage is somewhat illusory or insubstantial. Fernanda has been brought up by her parents to “be a queen,” supposedly like her great-grandmother, whose ghost Fernanda



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sees when young, as a “beautiful woman dressed in white crossing the garden towards the chapel” (171). Fernanda identifies herself with this “fleeting vision,” feeling that “it was exactly like her, as if she had seen herself twenty years in advance.” This identification with the spectral suggests the illusory nature of her and her family’s royal pretensions: “Many years later . . . Fernanda doubted her childhood vision, but her mother scolded her disbelief. ‘We are immensely rich and powerful,’ she told her. ‘One day you will be a queen’” (171). Of course she is not to be queen, except in Macondo’s disastrous carnival, and the absurdity of that “strange joke” (172) only reinforces the emptiness of her family’s pretensions to royalty. Like the galleon and suit of armor, they are the relics of a dead social order, their continued existence being as spectral and illusory as the “ghostly nights” on which “the coaches of the viceroys still rattled through the cobbled streets.” Fernanda’s city and social order, like the presence of the Spanish galleon, are not completely “otherworldly,” no matter how dead and ghostly they appear. Indeed, Fernanda’s highland city is modeled on Colombia’s real-life capital, Bogota, which García Márquez has described as a “distant and gloomy city where an unrelenting drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century.”29 Moreover, like the real-life Bogota, Fernanda’s social order is part of the ruling social order. Much is made of Fernanda’s “stuck-up” highland origins (106, 263, 172), which aligns her with the remote central government that repeatedly subordinates Macondo’s autonomy. The soldiers that the government sends to Macondo to break the strike are described as “men from the uplands” (246). Fernanda indignantly quotes José Arcadio Segundo’s statement that “the damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck-up highlander, . . . a bossy highlander, a highland daughter of evil spit of the same stripe as the highlanders the government sent to kill workers” (263). For all her ghostly archaism, Fernanda is nevertheless a part of this ruling social order. This is underscored by Fernanda’s influence within the house, despite the ridicule and disobedience of the other family members. After Úrsula’s decline, “the circle of rigidity begun by Fernanda from the moment she arrived finally closed completely and no one but she determined the destiny of the family” (175). So, despite Fernanda and the highland city being “lost in the world,” they nevertheless manage to function within, and even dominate, the social world of the present. In depicting the remnants of colonialism, García Márquez exploits the spectral’s dialectic presence in order to capture the real contradictions and tensions that have resulted from Latin America’s colonial heritage. The spectral’s dialectic between absence and presence, displacement and



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belonging, and disconnection and connection is used to capture the postcolonial tensions between the past and the present, the foreign and the local, and original and replica cultural forms. The spectral character of Fernanda, her city, and her social class cannot be regarded as merely baroque ornamentation; the anachronistic presence of the ghost, appearing in the wrong time, is used to metaphorically represent the persistence of European colonial social structures within postcolonial Latin America. Indeed, in an interview, García Márquez has attributed a combination of unreality and domination to the city of Bogota that is similar to that which characterizes Fernanda: Bogota was “that remote or unreal city” that was also “the centre of gravity of the power which had been imposed on us since our earliest times.”30 For García Márquez, the Colombian highlands are home to an archaic, alienated, and unreal, but nevertheless dominant, political power, inherited from colonial times. His use of the spectral in One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the continuation of a colonial class structure despite the ostensible discontinuity of political independence. Many historians argue that Latin America’s independence from Spanish domination did not signal a fundamental rupture with the past, but in some ways intensified the social relations that existed under colonialism.31 The spectral’s anachronistic persistence captures these tensions between historical continuity and discontinuity, persistence and change. Dependence and Underdevelopment The examples of spectral anachronism and dislocation that we have traced in One Hundred Years of Solitude are not merely isolated relics of colonialism, but signs of Latin America’s continuing postcolonial conditions of what political economists call dependence and underdevelopment. As Katalin Kulin observes, the novel’s anachronisms are not signs of authorial exuberance but of Latin America’s continuing history of economic and political dependence upon Europe and, later, the United States: The anachronisms of the novel—though they may seem the consequence of the arbitrariness of the author to those accustomed to European historical categories of development—are in fact nourished by non-autonomous Latin American development. Economic, political and military dependence—in other words, neo-colonialism—puts fetters on Latin America, makes healthy development impossible.32

Latin America’s economic and political dependence “makes healthy development impossible,” causing old forms, like the colonial social class



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that Fernanda represents, to persist and resurface, like ghosts haunting the present and the future. The political economist Theotonio dos Santos describes dependence as “a situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected.”33 The development of peripheral regions is not self-determined, but only reflects the successful development of the dominant economic and political centre. Dos Santos observes, A relation of interdependence between two or more economies and between these and world trade, assumes the form of dependence when some countries (the dominant ones) can expand and be self-sustaining, while other countries (the dependent ones) can do this only as a reflection of that expansion.34

The dependent region’s development is a mere “reflection” of the dominant region, “conditioned by the development and expansion” of others. This fettered, reflected “development” that Kulin and dos Santos refer to is more accurately described as underdevelopment, the dysfunctional and seemingly regressive development that results from the constraints of economic and political dependence. Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment provide particularly fertile grounds for interpreting Macondo’s spiraling history and its transfiguration in the ghost. The concept of underdevelopment suggests a historical explanation for the progressive reiterations and spectral returns that characterize the history of Macondo. As observed earlier, Macondo’s progressive, changing history belies Úrsula’s conception of cyclical time. Nevertheless, Macondo is still clearly constrained by its past, the traces of which resurface persistently within the overarching linear development of the narrative. Pilar Ternera’s image of the Buendía family’s history encapsulates this combination of recurrence and change, where its “unavoidable repetitions” are offset by “the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (320) on which they turn. This somewhat paradoxical depiction of progressive regressions is explained by what the political economist Andre Gunder Frank calls “the development of underdevelopment” in Latin America, where underdevelopment is considered as a historical process rather than a social state.35 In the introduction to their seminal study, Dependence and Underdevelopment, James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson observe that “no country was ever in an original state of underdevelopment, although it may have been undeveloped.”36 They criticize the common belief that underdevelopment “is an original state, characterized by ‘backwardness’



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or ‘traditionalism,’” and that “underdeveloped countries have no long history of change. On the contrary,” they argue, “research indicates that these countries do have a history, and that their underdevelopment has been produced by the development of mercantilism and later, industrial capitalism.”37 Underdevelopment only appears to be a state of stagnant regression. While underdeveloped regions seem to be characterized by “backwardness” and “feudal seeming”38 social relations, such apparent regression is actually historically produced by the progressive development of modern European capitalism. The historical production of seemingly anachronistic regression is comically represented in José Arcadio Buendía’s rediscovery that the “earth is round, like an orange” (12). Higgins observes that this episode is an early indication that the “Spanish colonial heritage is . . . one of the principal factors in Latin America’s continuing underdevelopment.”39 Although the entire town thinks José Arcadio Buendía is mad, Melquíades returns to give “public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown in Macondo until then” (12). Melquíades’s “public praise” suggests that José Arcadio Buendía does not repeat the past because of his childlike innocence but simply because the earth’s spherical shape was “unknown in Macondo until then.” His repetition is a result of the regional and cultural isolation produced by the alienated political structures inherited from Spanish colonialism. Higgins correctly argues that in this episode and others, the “novel . . . ironically debunks Spain’s claim to have bequeathed to America the benefits of European civilization.”40 Only through an active process of cultural underdevelopment, rather than the inexorable cycles of fate, could Latin Americans (especially Colombians) not know of the “discovery” of their own New World.41 José Arcadio Buendía’s admirable yet ignorant regression is the result of the town’s isolation from their own history, from the events that have determined and created their society. This suggests that the novel’s repetitions and regressions are not inevitable products of cyclical time but historically contingent, grounded in Latin American underdevelopment. The effect of the banana company’s exploitation of Macondo is the novel’s most crucial example of the historical “development of underdevelopment” that occurs in conditions of economic dependence. As numerous critics have noted, the banana company’s invasion and the massacre of its workers are closely modeled on the United Fruit Company’s invasion of Colombia, and in particular García Márquez’s birthplace, Aracataca, in the early twentieth century.42 As the representative of U.S. capital, the banana company is an alien, external power,



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“with means which had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times” (188). This likening to “Divine Providence” highlights Macondo’s increasing dependence on the company for its wealth and prosperity, as if waiting on the fortune of the gods. The company’s abandonment of the town accordingly leads to its subsequent decline into peripheral solitude. When the gypsies return to Macondo after the banana company’s departure, the town appears to have regressed to its isolated past, akin to both José Arcadio Buendía’s delirious reversion to “a state of total innocence” (71) and Úrsula’s senile regression: they found the town so defeated and its inhabitants so removed from the rest of the world that once more they went through the houses dragging magnetized ingots . . . and once again they concentrated the sun’s rays with the giant magnifying glass, and there was no lack of people standing openmouthed watching kettles fall and pots roll. (280)

Of course, this “backwardness” of the Macondans, “removed from the rest of the world,” has actually been caused by their prior dependent ties to the world economy, by the banana company’s “development of underdevelopment” in Macondo. Aureliano Babilonia identifies this explicitly later in the novel, when “someone at the table complained about the ruin into which the town had sunk when the banana company abandoned it.” The young Aureliano objects to this justification of Macondo’s dependence, arguing that “contrary to the general interpretation . . . Macondo had been a prosperous place and well on its way until it was disordered and corrupted and suppressed by the banana company” (282). Aureliano’s account is supported by the description of Macondo just before the banana company’s arrival: “Macondo was swamped in a miracle of prosperity” (161). Macondo, “well on its way” to self-determined development, was frustrated, “disordered and corrupted and suppressed” by its initial incorporation into a dependent relationship with the banana company, not by the company’s departure. Macondo’s decline is not due to the company’s abandonment, but rather to its initial arrival, which fostered a relationship of economic dependence. The exhausted backwardness produced by the banana company’s exploitation of Macondo exemplifies Frank’s description of the effects of intensive exploitation in Latin America. He asserts that such intensive exploitation has often turned the previous boom town or region into a degenerated ultraunderdeveloped social complex, whose inherited colonial class structure, not to mention its sometimes exhausted natural resources, no longer permit



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Frank’s description of such a “degenerated ultraunderdeveloped social complex” is highly applicable to Macondo, especially its “regression” to the past after the banana company’s departure. As Higgins has noted, the Buendías, and especially Fernanda, represent an “inherited colonial class structure.”44 The degeneration of the previously “enchanted region . . . where later on the banana plantations flourished” to become “a bog of rotting roots” (268) exemplifies the “exhausted natural resources” that Frank describes. In Macondo’s postboom decline, we also see “extreme poverty,” “fundamentalist religion, and corrupt reactionary politics.” Moreover, as the gypsies’ return shows, Macondo has become immersed in, to use Frank’s words, an overwhelmingly “obscurantist dominant culture,” with the townspeople “lost in the “voracity of oblivion, which little by little was undermining memories in a pitiless way” (280). This delusion marks the difference between this “regression” and the town’s original state. Macondo is no longer the isolated “truly happy village” that the gypsies first visit, “where no one was over thirty years of age and no one had died” (15), but the exhausted, exploited site of a massacre. Macondo’s wonder at the return of the gypsies is not the wonder of the innocent, but the wonder of the deluded. Macondo’s final regression to this isolated and “obscurantist” state of delusional amnesia is, like the “ultraunderdeveloped” state that Frank identifies in postboom regions, produced by the prior incorporation into the networks of foreign capital as a thoroughly dependent economy. As Higgins argues, the story of the later Macondo illustrates Latin America’s neo-colonial status as an economic dependency of international capital, particularly North American. No sooner has Macondo embarked on a phase of autonomous economic development than it falls under the domination of North American capital and, incorporated into the world economy as a source of primary products, becomes subject to cycles of boom and recession determined by the fluctuations of the international market.45

The cycles of regression that appear to characterize Macondo’s history can be viewed as a metaphor for Latin America’s historical subjection to “cycles of boom and recession determined by the . . . international market.”



any sustained development. Thus, the most underdeveloped regions of Latin America today, which are characterised not only by their extreme poverty but also by their obscurantist dominant culture, fundamentalist religion, and corrupt reactionary politics, are all regions that developed during export booms of agricultural and mining products and labor.43

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The numerous specters of the novel are grounded in the historical conditions of dependence and underdevelopment. The displaced anachronism of the spectral figure metaphorically distils the progressive regressions of underdevelopment. As Prudencio Aguilar’s “pulverized” (119) return demonstrated, the specter is not a sign of repetition in the way that the characters perceive it, but signals the progressive displacement of “repetition,” where supposed recurrences accentuate the change that has taken place since their “original” appearance. The ghosts of the past do not come back in their original states, but are reiterated in a new context, with a new function. Although appearing to signal repetition, further investigation reveals the displacement with which they return. In this way, the displaced and only apparent return of the spectral figure metaphorically represents the “development of underdevelopment,” the historical production of what superficially appears to be archaic “backwardness,” “traditionalism,” or “feudal seeming” relations. The displaced, insubstantial, and epiphenomenal presence of the ghost also reflects the lack of self-determination resulting from economic and political dependence, which restricts or even negates the autonomy of its subjects. Higgins’s description of Macondo’s later history emphasizes its passive status: Macondo “falls under the domination” of foreign capital, is “incorporated into the world economy,” and “becomes subject to cycles” that are “determined by . . . the international market.” As dos Santos observes, the development of dependent regions is not “self-sustaining,” but only a “reflection” of that of the foreign metropolis.46 The relation of dependence thus makes the dependent a spectral “reflection” of another’s design. The alien, imitative spectrality that surrounds Fernanda captures this peripheral “reflection” of the dominant economic and political centre. The spectral character of Fernanda’s city not only derives from its anachronistic persistence, beyond its natural life, but also captures its dislocated and dependent imitation of a distant European “original.” Fernanda’s quasi-aristocratic social class is not indigenous or self-determining but a transplanted “reflection” of a European cultural form, conditioned by its dependence upon the distant metropolis.47 This spectral insubstantiality is compounded by the historical shift from direct colonial dependence to more indirect postcolonial dependence. The dependent ties between Fernanda’s archaic social class and the former Spanish metropolis are becoming increasingly irrelevant in an era of neocolonial dependence upon new masters. This use of the spectral is similar to Marx’s spectral depiction of the 1848 revolution, which fails to find “its own content” (149) due to its deference to the models of the past. Fernanda’s colonial social elite is like the entire city of Macondo after the banana company’s departure, in that it too has been abandoned by its patron.



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As with many aspects of Fernanda’s character, the metaphorical relationship between her spectral insubstantiality and the dependence of her quasi-aristocratic class distils a wider quality of the Buendía family and the city of Macondo. The proliferation of specters in Macondo captures their own lack of self-determined “content,” what dos Santos calls “selfsustaining”48 development, that comes with economic and political dependence. Rather than the “unreality” of the world, or the inherently fantastic reality of Latin America, the specters of Macondo register the experience of peripheral dependence, of being, in Martin’s words, “echoes of someone else’s history, the last link in the centre-periphery chain.”49

The Mirages of Dependence and Underdevelopment The apocalyptic conclusion of the novel extends the metaphorical relation between spectral unreality and economic and political dependence that we see in the individual character of Fernanda to encompass the entire world of Macondo. While it is often read as a confirmation of fatalism, like the proliferation of ghosts in Macondo, the conclusion is a metaphorical transposition of the historical conditions of dependence and underdevelopment. The novel concludes with Aureliano Babilonia cracking the code of Melquíades’s manuscripts, finding that they are a prophetic “history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time” (335). His revelation coincides with the onset of a “biblical hurricane” (336), which wipes out both him and Macondo just as he finishes deciphering the manuscripts. This ending can easily be read as a devastating confirmation of the characters’ metaphysical fatalism. The invocation of a prophetic “history” suggests that what was to happen was already immutable “history.” Aureliano Babilonia discovers that his incestuous relationship with Amaranta Úrsula was fated centuries earlier: Only then did he discover that Amaranta Úrsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. (335–336)

This revelation recalls the novel’s second chapter, where Úrsula invokes the same historical incident as a fated precedent: “every time that Úrsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over



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Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. (336)

It appears that even Aureliano’s attempt to decipher the prophetic manuscripts was predetermined. The conclusion suggests that the Buendías were merely specters, whose predetermined existence was guaranteed by Melquíades’s prophetic writings, and thus the family line ends with the final line of the manuscripts. This imprisonment within fate is dramatized by the end of the novel itself. Aureliano and Macondo are “wiped out” at the “precise moment” at which he finishes deciphering the manuscripts, which is also the “precise moment” at which the reader will finish “deciphering” One Hundred Years of Solitude, as the inclusion of the title in the last line reminds us. The characters are “condemned” to One Hundred Years of Solitude and subsequently are reduced to fictional specters when the reader finishes the novel. The entire history of Macondo, then, appears to be one of specters, not simply foreseen but conjured into being, and subsequently annihilated, by Melquíades’s prophetic writing and by the novel itself. The reduction of Macondo to a textual city of specters has inspired an alternative reading to the mythic, fatalistic reading mentioned earlier, which sees the conclusion as a declaration of the novel’s entirely self-referring, “autarchic” separation from the reality that lies outside it.50 However, as Edwin Williamson observes, such a reading “cannot explain the political and historical allusions in the novel.”51 Moreover, close examination of the conclusion reveals the historical grounds that are neglected by both these textualist and fatalistic readings, which instead shows that this final apocalypse and reduction of Macondo to a spectral “city of mirrors (or mirages)” metaphorically transposes Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment. The



three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha” (23). The reference to this precedent in the conclusion appears to confirm Úrsula’s belief that “three hundred years of fate” have determined the family’s history. This is accentuated in the novel’s final line, when Aureliano Babilonia discovers that his and Macondo’s end have been “foreseen”:


conclusion must be read in relation to the historical significance of the novel that precedes it. The initial clue to the historical significance of the conclusion lies in Aureliano’s discovery that the end of the Buendía family line was ensured when “the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century” (23). This undermines Úrsula’s earlier conception of “three hundred years of fate” (23), suggesting instead that the origin of their apparently malign fate is located in more than “three hundred years of ” colonial conquest and plunder. The conclusion represents the historical chain of connection between Latin America’s colonial past and continuing conditions of dependence and underdevelopment. Further clues to the metaphorical historicity of the conclusion can be found in the wealth of connections between the banana company plague, which is the pivotal moment in Macondo’s history of dependence and underdevelopment, and the seemingly mythic whirlwind that eventually razes the city. The narrator first explicitly indicates the final “fated” apocalypse with the onset of the dispute between the company and its workers: “The events that would deal Macondo its fatal blow were just showing themselves when they brought Meme Buendía’s son home” (239).52 Meme Buendía’s son is, of course, Aureliano Babilonia, illegitimate son of the banana company mechanic Mauricio Babilonia, who will eventually decipher the manuscripts at the conclusion. The phrase “fatal blow” does not refer merely to Macondo’s postmassacre decline but evokes its “fatal” demise in the conclusion. Moreover, the use of such a phrase to describe the historical confrontation between foreign capital and organized labor signals the metaphorically coded way in which the concept of fate works in the novel. The description of the workers’ massacre itself clearly presages the final annihilation of Macondo. García Márquez uses similar language to describe both events. The action of the machine guns on the crowd takes on a swirling form, prescient of the “cyclonic” (335) destructive wind that will annihilate Macondo. The wind itself is prefigured in the allusions to the voices, sighs, and breaths of the crowd. At first, the guns do not “bring on fright but a kind of hallucination” (248); “not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd” (249, my emphasis). Then, a sudden “cry of death tore open the enchantment,” and a “seismic voice, a volcanic breath, the roar of a cataclysm broke out in the centre of the crowd with a great potential for expansion” as the crowd “swirled about in panic” (249, my emphasis). This description of voice, breath and swirling, and potentially expansive motion anticipates the final cyclonic wind that begins as “incipient, full of voices of the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of



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disenchantment” (335, my emphasis). The fleeing crowd takes on a self-consuming, cyclical form: “the panic became a dragon’s tail as one compact wave ran against another which was moving in the opposite direction, towards the other dragon’s tail” (249). The predicament of the crowd foreshadows Aureliano Babilonia’s position in the epicenter of the swirling hurricane, getting closer and closer to the “precise moment” of his end: “They were penned in, swirling about in a gigantic whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicentre as the edges were systematically being cut off all around” (249). Perhaps most tellingly of all, José Arcadio Segundo’s loss of consciousness is invested with the finality of apocalypse: “the colossal troop wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, droughtstricken sky, and the whorish world where Úrsula Iguaran had sold so many little candy animals.” In effect, the “gigantic whirlwind” (249) created by the machine guns, like the “fearful whirlwind” (336) in the finale, destroys a world. In accordance with this apocalyptic depiction, Macondo’s subsequent decline is described in postapocalyptic terms that also anticipate the final hurricane. After the massacre, the banana company brings on a deluge to wipe away the town’s memory. Weather here clearly acts as a metaphor for the devastating effects of Latin America’s economic exploitation.53 The storms, which, like the US banana company itself, come “out of the north” (256), leave Macondo in a state of destruction from which it never recovers. When Aureliano Segundo first ventures out after the deluge, the destruction clearly foreshadows Macondo’s final obliteration: Macondo was in ruins. In the swampy streets there were the remains of furniture, animal skeletons covered with red lilies, the last memories of the hordes of newcomers who had fled Macondo as wildly as they had arrived. The houses that had been built with such haste during the banana fever had been abandoned. The banana company tore down its installations. All that remained of the former wired-in city were the ruins. The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth . . . The survivors of the catastrophe, the same ones who had been living in Macondo before it had been struck by the banana company hurricane, were sitting in the middle of the street enjoying their first sunshine. (268)

Here, Macondo lies “in ruins,” having “been struck by the banana company hurricane,” just as it will later become “a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane”



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(336). García Márquez plays with the connections between the banana company, the final hurricane, his themes of fate and prophecy, and his use of textual foreshadowing by suggesting that the company town “seemed to have been blown away in anticipation of the prophetic wind” (my emphasis). This is the author’s hint that the banana company is the real destructive storm here, the historical reality that underlies the mythical apocalypse of the conclusion. The passage, while purporting to describe the effects of the deluge, actually describes the effects of the sudden invasion and departure of the “banana company hurricane.”54 This metaphorical depiction of the banana company as a hurricane goes back to García Márquez’s first novel, Leaf Storm. The novel’s title is a translation of “la hojarasca,” the pejorative name by which García Márquez’s family used to refer to the population influx that accompanied the banana company’s invasion of Aracataca.55 In contrast to One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez opens his first novel, also about a town called Macondo, with a catastrophic “whirlwind,” but one that is clearly metaphoric: Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns, the chaff of a civil war that seemed ever more remote and unlikely. The whirlwind was implacable. It contaminated everything with its swirling crowd smell, the smell of skin secretion and hidden death. In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets.56

Here, the banana company “whirlwind,” brought in with the train as in his later, more famous novel, spins the “rubble of many catastrophes” around. Although critics often see the hurricane as inexplicable or mythic, these connections between the banana company invasion and the metaphor of the hurricane suggest that it is not as “apocalyptic” as it initially appears. It is only a “biblical hurricane” in the way that the company itself is “biblical,” with its clearly historical powers earlier described as “means which had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times” (188). The hurricane imagery used to describe the workers’ massacre suggests that the final “biblical hurricane” is a realized metaphor for Latin America’s exploitation by foreign capital, exemplified by the United Fruit invasion of Colombia. Macondo is “spun about” into “dust and rubble” by the swirling hurricane, just as Latin America has been underdeveloped and exploited by the forces of metropolitan capital. The conclusion is a metaphorical redoubling of the historical devastation already wrought by the banana company, sweeping up the leaf storm which has,



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in effect, already “wiped out” (both 249, and 336) the “whorish world” (249) of neocolonial Macondo. The spectral reduction that accompanies this ostensibly mythic hurricane is also a historical metaphor. Just as the whirlwind is a metaphor for Latin America’s underdevelopment, exploitation, and subjection by foreign capital, so too the revelation that Macondo is merely a predetermined “city of mirrors (or mirages)” can be read as a metaphor for the historical experience of dependence. Aureliano’s revelation that Macondo is a spectral figure of someone else’s design captures the way in which this history of colonial and postcolonial dependence has restricted Latin Americans’ ability to determine their own historical development. Cockcroft, Frank, and Johnson argue that, “given the dominance of the major metropolis,” the economic development that does occur in Latin America is “constantly conditioned by relationships of dependence upon the metropolis . . . a satellite development, which is not autonomous to the region, self-generating, or self-perpetuating.”57 The reduction of the Buendías and the entire city of Macondo to a spectral “city of mirrors (or mirages)” captures this lack of autonomy, of “self,” in which dependent regions can only develop, as dos Santos observes, as a “reflection” of the dominant metropolis.58 The historical significance of the conclusion reflects back on the general sense of unreality that pervades Macondo’s history. Stephen Minta has observed that García Márquez’s theme of solitude is not merely a psychological concern, but an expression of Latin America’s peripheral subordination to foreign centers of political and economic power: solitude . . . fascinates him as an expression of the collective isolation of Latin American people a people for whom history has seemed a process to be endured rather than created, a people divorced from a sense of history because theirs has been written by outsiders, a people condemned to a peripheral role in relation to a greater world whose limits have been defined elsewhere.59

The final spectral reduction and confirmation of fate metaphorically transposes this experience of being a subject of someone else’s history, “defined elsewhere” by the distant, seemingly untouchable powers of the European and North American metropolis. Minta’s conception of solitude pinpoints the reality of political dependence that underlies Aureliano’s final revelation, the powerlessness that results from Latin America’s peripheral relation to the “greater world” that determines its history. The conclusion extends the alien, spectral quality of the Spanish galleon to envelop the entire world that it helped to create, suggesting



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that the history in which the Macondans’ belong is not their own history, in which they purposefully act, but is, in a concrete sense, determined from afar. Macondo’s final reduction to a spectral city is a metaphorical extension of the complex relations traced in this chapter between the spectral figure and the historical conditions of Latin America. This historical significance undermines readings of the novel that see the ghost as an antirealist or mythic counterpoint to its political and historical concerns, instead showing that it is a metaphorical extension of such concerns. As shown earlier, the ghost does not signify a cyclical, ahistorical scheme of time, but a progressively changing one, where the present continually modifies the past that it inherits. Moreover, this dynamic between the past and present is given a more specific orientation in Latin American history, which has been continually bedevilled by its colonial past. The ghost is firmly grounded in Latin American history, and its combination of the resurfacing inheritance of the past and its displacement reflect Latin America’s continuing conditions of dependence and underdevelopment. Moreover, even such irreducibly fantastic incidents as the conclusion also capture Latin American dependence. The spectral metaphor, from the Spanish galleon to the conclusion, manifests the sense in which the Macondans’ history has been out of their hands. The final reduction of the Macondo to a spectral city of “mirages” is a realized metaphor for the social conditions of dependence, which alienates its subjects from their own social determinants, removing their agency and self-determination and forcing them to be replicas and reflections of the metropolis’s creation. The unreality that is suggested by the fantastic and immaterial figure of the ghost actually reflects Latin America’s reality of dependence and underdevelopment.



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Ideological Mirages in One Hundred Years of Solitude My previous chapter demonstrated that García Márquez’s use of the spectral in One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a “magical” or “mythical” counter to the novel’s “realism,” but an integral part of the novel’s engagement with Latin American history. The spectral metaphor captures the complex dynamic between the past and present within Latin American history, which is still haunted by its colonial legacy and continuing conditions of economic and political dependence and underdevelopment. These historical conditions even underpin the fantastic and seemingly “mythic” conclusion, where Macondo is reduced to a spectral city of “mirages” and annihilated by an apocalyptic hurricane. However, as the ahistorical orientation of much criticism of the novel attests to, its historical concerns are not presented in a direct and transparent fashion, but require a reading that digs beneath the novel’s ostensibly “magical” texture. As the last chapter showed, only a close consideration of the fantastic and seemingly ahistorical spectral figure reveals its historical implications. One Hundred Years of Solitude thus exemplifies García Márquez’s repeatedly expressed belief that “every good novel is a poetic transposition of reality.”1 Speaking with Plinio Apuleya Mendoza, he asserts that “a novel is reality represented through a secret code, a kind of conundrum about the world. The reality you are dealing with in a novel is different from real life, although it is rooted in it. The same thing is true of dreams.”2 In an early study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mario Vargas Llosa identifies the particularly indirect mode through which it represents Latin American reality. Vargas Llosa acknowledges the novel’s use of self-reflexivity and the fantastic, but



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In reality, it is quite the opposite. It is not about a castle in the air, but about an imaginary construction that has its roots deeply anchored in Latin American reality, a reality which is reflected through transfigurations and mirages. The landscapes of Macondo contain all the natural elements of Latin America . . . Its dramas also appear refracted in the political and social life of Macondo.3

This description carries more resonance than Vargas Llosa appears to intend, extending not just to technique, but also to the novel’s subject matter. As Vargas Llosa argues, the novel represents Latin America indirectly, through metaphorical “transfigurations and mirages.” Although the novel is, as the last chapter showed, “deeply anchored” in Latin American historical realities, these realities are not presented directly but “appear refracted” in the magical reality of Macondo.4 Vargas Llosa’s use of the word “mirages” to describe García Márquez’s technique of “poetic transposition” suggests that the final reference to Macondo as the “city of mirrors (or mirages)” is a self-reflexive declaration of this metaphorical technique. García Márquez’s modification of the image of “mirrors” with that of “mirages” can be read as an admission that Latin American reality is not represented directly in the novel, in mimetic “mirrors,” but is refracted through metaphorical “mirages.” This self-reflexive declaration of metaphorical transfiguration is a crucial component of the novel’s use of the spectral metaphor, resembling Morrison’s self-reflexive conclusion to Beloved. However, neither the novel’s technique of metaphorical transfiguration, nor the self-reflexive recognition of this technique in the conclusion, can be fully understood without first considering the thematic importance of the concept of “transfiguration.” The transfiguration of social reality that Vargas Llosa describes is not just the novel’s representational mode but is part of its subject matter. One of the main reasons for the novel’s particularly indirect representation of Latin American reality is that it is not primarily concerned with this reality in itself, but with its ideological “transfiguration” by the people who live within it. To reappropriate Vargas Llosa’s description of the novel’s metaphorical technique, it is “about an imaginary construction that has its roots deeply anchored in Latin American reality.” As has been observed by some of the novel’s critics, the narrator presents the magical reality of Macondo through the perspective of the characters.5 This perspective, transfiguring Latin American history through metaphysical, ahistorical “mirages,” is, as this



strongly cautions against the idea that it is “something like an agreeable and brilliant game:

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chapter will demonstrate, a classically ideological perspective. It is symptomatically distorted by the social conditions from which it arises, and, by obscuring these conditions, helps to rationalize and reinforce them. In this chapter, I will show that García Márquez employs a pattern of spectral insubstantiality, similar to that which Marx uses in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in order to represent the ideological transfiguration of Latin American social realities. The proliferation of ghosts in Macondo reflects García Márquez’s thematic concern with the haunting but historically grounded illusions of ideology. The last chapter showed that the spectral is, to borrow Vargas Llosa’s words, an “imaginary construction,” indicative of the characters’ delusions, but is also “deeply anchored in Latin American reality.” The specific figure of the ghost is part of a wider pattern of spectral insubstantiality and deception that envelops the entire social fabric of Macondo and explains its eventual “fate.” This pattern is grounded in Macondo’s history and registers the haunting transfiguration of material social conditions in the ideological consciousness of the characters. This elucidation of the theme of ideology will prepare the way for my final chapter, which will return to the novel’s indirect technique of representation, and its self-reflexive recognition of this technique, in order to show that it dramatizes this thematic concern with the ideological transfiguration of social reality. The Imaginary World of Ideology The clues to García Márquez’s thematic concern with ideology lie in the development of the images of ice and mirrors. These images effectively open and close the novel, starting with Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s memory of discovering ice in the first sentence and culminating in the description of Macondo as a “city of mirrors (or mirages)” in the final sentence. Like the figure of the ghost, they suggest deception, impermanence, and insubstantiality, but are also tied to Macondo’s historical development, suggesting that Macondo’s “unreality” is grounded in the Latin American historical reality that underlies it. The narrative development of this imagery suggests that, from its foundation to its destruction, Macondo has been haunted by the ideological mirages and misinterpretations fostered by Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment.6 The images of ice and mirrors are part of a pattern of deception and misinterpretation tied to Macondo’s history; even the novel’s first sentence misleadingly insinuates that Colonel Aureliano Buendía is to die by firing squad, while remembering his childhood discovery of ice.7 This is continued when the narrative circles back to this memory at the end of



Ideological Mirages


the first chapter. Attention is drawn to the ice’s optical transparency and refraction in a way that anticipates the text’s later play with the deceptions of “mirrors” and “mirages”; the ice is described as an “enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into coloured stars” (22). As if giving expression to the reader’s puzzlement at such an unfamiliar description, José Arcadio Buendía misinterprets this vision as “the largest diamond in the world.” The gypsy immediately corrects him: “‘No,’ the gypsy countered. ‘It’s ice.’” It is here that the reader’s knowledge and the character’s wonder immediately part company: “José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding, stretched out his hand towards the cake” (22, my emphasis). As Edwin Williamson notes: “García Márquez intends the gypsy’s correction as a signal that the character is touchingly misinterpreting phenomena which the reader is presumed to take for granted in his own experience of the world.”8 Martin observes that José Arcadio Buendía’s misinterpretation and awe represents Macondo’s peripheral relations with temperate Europe; discovering ice is “evidently a magical experience in the upside down world of tropical underdevelopment.”9 Like his rediscovery of the earth’s spherical nature, José Arcadio Buendía’s misinterpretation of ice is not an expression of childlike innocence but of his socially isolated consciousness, again showing that his ignorance is rooted in Macondo’s social isolation and underdevelopment. The image of the ice is merged explicitly with that of the mirror in the description of José Arcadio Buendía’s dream that inspires the founding of Macondo. One night, after months of searching for “the land that no one had promised them” (26), the adventurers “camped on the banks of a stony river whose waters were like a torrent of frozen glass” (my emphasis): José Arcadio Buendía dreamed that night that right there a noisy city with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning10 at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day he convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank, and there they founded the village. José Arcadio Buendía did not succeed in deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered ice. Then he thought he understood its deep meaning. He thought that in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of ice on a large scale from such a common material as water and with them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with the heat, but would be changed into a wintry city. If he did not persevere in his attempts to build an ice factory, it was



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This passage condenses the entire history of Macondo. Although José Arcadio Buendía’s vision of a city of mirrors inspires the foundation of the city, it also looks forward to its final destruction; his efforts at “deciphering the dream of houses with mirror walls” anticipate Aureliano Babilonia’s deciphering of the “speaking mirror” (336) of the manuscripts on the last page. In addition, his vision of an ice factory, which is later fulfilled when Aureliano Triste “set up on the edge of town the ice factory that José Arcadio Buendía had dreamed of in his inventive delirium” (180), anticipates the central event in Macondo’s history. As the previous chapter showed, the factory’s commercial success brings about Macondo’s connection to the railway, the incursion of modernity, and, finally, the intrusion of the banana company, which initiates Macondo’s final decline. The images of a city of both mirrors and ice also specifically foreground the conditions of dependence and underdevelopment that characterize Macondo’s history. Just as they do in the conclusion, the “mirror walls” signify Latin America’s dependent “reflection” of the foreign metropolis. This is extended in José Arcadio Buendía’s somewhat disingenuous reinterpretation of his dream as envisioning a city of ice. Building on his earlier wonder at the ice, José Arcadio Buendía wishes, somewhat inappropriately, to transpose the European norm of “a wintry city” into the “burning place” of the tropics, without regard for Latin America’s native conditions. Both images are metaphors for what García Márquez sees as Latin America’s mechanical, “mimetic and unrealistic” replication of alien European and North American political and economic models that fail to recognize the “given and inherited circumstances” with which it must make its own history.11 The allusions to Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment in the description of José Arcadio Buendía’s dream are characterized by a pattern of misinterpretation and self-deception. Since we are told explicitly that José Arcadio Buendía dreams of a city with “mirror walls,” his conception of an ice city is clearly a falsification of his own dream. The narrator’s language subtly suggests this willful misinterpretation: after discovering ice, José Arcadio Buendía “thought he understood its deep meaning” (my emphasis). This is also accentuated later, when Melquíades, combing through the writings of Nostradamus, claims to have found a prediction that Macondo “was to be a luminous city with



because at that time he was absolutely enthusiastic over the education of his sons, especially that of Aureliano, who from the first had revealed a strange intuition for alchemy. (27)


great glass houses where there was no trace remaining of the race of the Buendías” (51). José Arcadio Buendía’s pride in both himself and his family fuels his angry and false response: “‘It’s a mistake,’ José Arcadio Buendía thundered. ‘They won’t be houses of glass but of ice, as I dreamed, and there will always be a Buendía, per omnia secula seculorum’” (51). The foundation of Macondo, which represents the supposed New World of Latin America, is prompted by a dream that is subsequently misinterpreted. Moreover, his misinterpretation is doubly delusive, in that it is completely inappropriate and implausible considering the tropical reality of Latin America. The passage suggests that misinterpretation and self-deception have plagued Macondo from its very foundation, not just dreams and visions, but also the misinterpretation of such fantasies. As Minta argues, “if it is a story about the failure of a dream, it is about a dream that was flawed and irrelevant from the start.”12 The conclusion completes this pattern of deceptive unreality, with its use of the mirror image fulfilling and modifying both José Arcadio Buendía’s dream and Melquíades’s prophecy. Initially, the description of Melquíades’s manuscripts as a “speaking mirror” (335) suggests a transparent, accurate, and immediate representation: Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. (336)

This recalls both Melquíades’s prophecy and José Arcadio Buendía’s founding dream; Aureliano comes to such a state of identification with the written history of Macondo that it takes on the quality of a mirror, which seemingly reflects an immediate and accurate image of the self. However, the final line, which was quoted in the last chapter, immediately complicates the veracity of this representation and, indeed, of the entire novel that precedes it: Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. (336)



180

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The parenthetical comment “or mirages” is, as Williamson notes, an “unprecedented authorial intrusion,” which suggests that the preceding representation of Macondo is deceptive and insubstantial.13 It reinterprets the novel’s own metaphor of the mirror; from being accompanied by misinterpretation, the mirror metaphor is now reinterpreted as a “mirage,” a metaphor for misinterpretation itself. This final sentence also clearly renounces the repetition that appears to characterize the novel: everything that has happened is “unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more,” there is no “second opportunity on earth.” This suggests that the superficially repetitive texture of the novel is in fact one such deceptive “mirage,” rather than a “mirror” of reality. The conclusion extends the illusory associations of the spectral to encompass the entire city of Macondo and its history. The pattern of deceptive insubstantiality that surrounds Macondo is similar to that used by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire to characterize the ideologies haunting French politics in the nineteenth century. Marx argues that the French obsession with parliamentary representation “holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, and all understanding of the rough external world” (211). While Marx’s focus is on parliamentary illusions, José Arcadio Buendía’s implausible vision of an ice city in tropical Latin America reveals a similar lack of “understanding of the rough external world,” indicating that he too is “spellbound in an imaginary world.” Macondo’s final reduction to a spectral city of mirages is similar to this deceptive and insubstantial “imaginary world,” where “Men and events appear as Schlemihls in reverse, as shadows which have become detached from their bodies” (171). In both texts, however, the spectral pattern of deceptive insubstantiality is grounded in a specific set of social conditions. As Hamilton observes, Marx’s depiction of ideological flux and displacement in The Eighteenth Brumaire is not “universalizable” but is tied to the uniquely figurative situation of French politics.14 Indeed, for Marx, no matter how “unreal” ideology seems, it always encodes the set of conditions from which it arises. Similarly, the spectral pattern in One Hundred Years of Solitude also recognizes the historical reality that underlies the illusions of ideology. As we have shown, the final declaration of Macondo’s spectral unreality is the culmination of a pattern that is tied to its historical course, which suggests that the presentation of Macondo as a mythic, magical reality represents the accumulated ideological delusions, deceptions and “mirages” that are fostered by dependence and underdevelopment. Indeed, although the final reference to “mirages” undermines the reflected truth of a mirror, it should not be taken as a flight into complete



Ideological Mirages


illusion, but as a metaphor for the complex relationship between ideological consciousness and social reality. A mirage is an illusion, but it is one that refracts an existing reality and arises in specific atmospheric conditions. Moreover, it is not a subjective illusion but one that is objectively manifested in the external world. The objective appearance of mirages ensures that they can have certain debilitating but real effects on those who perceive them. All these features of mirages correspond to the complexity of ideological illusion. The Truth of Mirages A mirage is more than just an illusion, in that it refracts an existing object and comes about in specific atmospheric conditions. It is an image of something that actually exists, however much it is distorted or refracted, and its distortions wear the imprint of its emergent conditions. The city or oasis perceived by travelers in the desert may not be where it appears, but it does exist. The metaphor of the mirage thus resembles the dialectics of the spectral presence that were traced in the previous chapter, where, despite its immaterial disembodiment and illusory associations, the ghost is nevertheless grounded in the concrete realities of Latin American history. The grounded insubstantiality suggested by the metaphors of the ghost and the mirage reflects the complexity of ideology, which is not merely illusory but is grounded in specific social conditions. Whereas Marx addresses the ideologies that arise with capitalism and the representative system, García Márquez addresses the ideologies of everyday life in Latin America, the ways in which socialized individuals conceive of the larger historical forces that determine their world in ways that obscure the reality of these forces. Úrsula’s repeated “impression” of temporal circularity is a clear example of the way that ideological misinterpretations transfigure and refract specific realities like a mirage. The consideration of underdevelopment in the last chapter illuminated the concrete historical regressions on which Úrsula’s ahistorical misconception of cyclical “time” rests, and the concept of ideology clarifies the nature of this “truthful” misconception. While evidently mistaken, Úrsula’s worldview does give coherent expression to the social circumstances in which the Macondans live. As the tensions between the banana company and the workers rise, Úrsula has “the impression that once more she was living through the dangerous times” that preceded Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s wars, “as if the world were repeating itself ” (242). She thus misrecognises social history as the result of “metaphysical” forces, “belonging to an operation or agency which is more than or other than physical or natural; supernatural.”15



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However, although wrong, her perception of metaphysical recurrence does give expression to Macondo’s continuing dependence. Aureliano’s wars and the workers’ strikes are both struggles against the imposition of powerful external forces, the first being the remote central government, and the second being the banana company, which is facilitated by that same remote central government. While Úrsula does give expression to this continuity of dependence, she does so only by ignoring the change between the “original” and its supposed “repetition,” which, as Gene H. Bell-Villada observes, “represents a later, imperial phase in the story of Macondo and the world.”16 This “repetition,” like those examined in the previous chapter, actually highlights change, specifically the development from more direct forms of political domination to the economic domination by foreign capital. Úrsula fails to note these particularly historical differences and merely sees a repetition of “time,” outside human control. Úrsula’s erroneous transfiguration of history in terms of metaphysical, suprahuman forces is in fact a symptom of the conditions of dependence. This symptomatic distortion is what makes her “impression” particularly ideological, in that part of its truth lies precisely in the nature of her error. Marx and Engels describe a very similar kind of ideological rationalization and reification of larger economic powers in The German Ideology: In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market.17

Marx and Engels describe the way that individuals symptomatically conceive of their incorporation into the ever-expanding global economy of capitalism in metaphysical terms, as “universal” and inevitable. The state of national, even continental, dependence that bedevils Latin America only increases the concrete social grounds on which such a metaphysical misconception rests. Similar to Marx and Engels’s description of conceptual rationalization, Úrsula and the Buendías rationalize their dependence by attributing their decline to malign fate and rationalize their underdevelopment by conceiving of time as cyclical. By reifying these conditions into metaphysical constants, they place them beyond their reach, instead perceiving what Williamson describes as an “irresistible force of destiny which mysteriously impels [them] towards a predetermined end.”18



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if we come across a body of, say, magical or mythological or religious doctrine to which many people have committed themselves, we can often be reasonably sure that there is something in it. What that something is may not be, for sure, what the exponents of such creeds believe it to be; but it is unlikely to be a mere nonsense either. Simply on account of the pervasiveness and durability of such doctrines, we can generally assume that they encode, in however mystified a way, genuine needs and desires.19

While Eagleton recognizes the elements of mystification, falsity, distortion, and inversion within ideological discourse,20 he eschews a reductive definition of ideology as mere delusion or “false consciousness,” identifying the truth that is refracted in such “magical or mythological or religious” doctrine. Similar to such ideologies, the Buendías’ fatalistic sense of cyclical history encodes, “in however mystified a way, genuine needs and desires.” While the Buendías’ ideological conception of metaphysical history contains elements of falsity, deception, inversion, and spurious naturalization, it nevertheless gives expression to the historical truth that they are being “determined” from outside themselves. This imaginary transfiguration of social reality is registered in the spectral metaphorics that culminate in the city of “mirages.” Like a ghost, an immaterial shadow of someone that haunts a specific locale, ideology reflects a mirage of an underlying “original” social referent. Like a mirage, the deceptions that plague Macondo’s history represent an underlying reality, and like a mirage, their distortions of that reality are symptomatic of the conditions in which they arise. The Reality of Mirages The metaphor of the mirage in One Hundred Years of Solitude not only captures the reality that underlies ideological illusion but also captures the reality of ideological illusions, the way in which they are not mere psychological illusions but an objective part of the social fabric, duplicitous but nevertheless real. Marx’s late theory of commodity fetishism exemplifies the conception of ideology as an objective “illusion.” G.A. Cohen observes, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, that, unlike religious fetishism, “the appearance of power in the economic fetish does not result from a thought process, but . . . arises from the way production is organised in



The ideological truth content of the fatalistic worldview of the Buendías is similar to Eagleton’s description of the truth of “magical or mythological or religious” ideologies:

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It is “inseparable from the production of commodities,” and survives even when commodity production is clearly conceived: understanding does not “dissipate the mist” through which the market economy is perceived. The false appearance is, rather like a mirage (and unlike a hallucination), located in the external world. In economic fetishism there is a gulf between reality and its own appearance. The mind registers the fetish. It does not, as in the religious case, create it.22

Cohen distinguishes the image of a mirage from that of a hallucination in order to illustrate the objective duplicity of commodity fetishism, which is not simply “in the head” but draws from the structure of capitalist society itself. A mirage is not simply a psychological illusion but an objective disjunction between appearance and reality, where “the false appearance is . . . located in the external world.” This suggests interesting parallels to García Márquez’s final modification of the image of “mirrors” with that of “mirages.” Both Cohen and García Márquez invoke the objective duplicity of a mirage to illustrate the complex nature of ideology, although they approach it from opposite directions. Whereas Cohen distinguishes the objectively false appearance of a mirage from the subjective illusion of a hallucination, García Márquez distinguishes the mirage from the supposedly faithful image reflected in a mirror. The mirage is thus an intermediate term between the apparent truthfulness of a mirror and the purely subjective illusion of a hallucination. As such, it is a perfect metaphor for the way that ideological illusions are objectively manifested in social life. The social reality of ideological illusion can be seen in Macondo’s decline after the workers’ massacre. After the banana company abandons it to its peripheral “fate,” Macondo is left a dependency without a patron, a situation that prompts its further recession into ideological mirages. Macondo becomes immersed within merely nostalgic remnants of the world that has ended, within what Frank calls the “obscurantist dominant culture” that characterizes “ultraundeveloped” social complexes.23 The surreal amnesia regarding the workers’ massacre highlights this collective delusion. Whenever Aureliano Babilonia would mention the massacre of the workers “one would have thought he was telling a hallucinated version, because it was radically opposed to the false one that historians had created and consecrated in the schoolbooks” (283).



commodity society.”21 The ideology of commodity fetishism is not mere fancy, but is an objectively functioning part of the economic structure of capitalist society. Cohen suggestively compares this objective duplicity to that of a mirage:


People old enough to actually remember it “would repudiate the myth of the workers,” and “insist that after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed” (315). Macondo’s collective delusion is emphasized by the link between Aureliano, the decipherer of history, and Gabriel Márquez, the author’s own representation of himself. They “were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained” (315–316). Their memory of historical realities is distinguished from the unreal world of nostalgia that Macondo has become since the banana company’s departure, the mere remaining “tide” of the real world that has ended, constituted by nostalgic remnants, idealizations, and mythologies of a lost past. However, this “illusory” world is, in fact, real, insofar as Aureliano and Gabriel cannot simply ignore it; it is an objective part of their reality, a “tide” in which they find themselves “off course.” As Cohen observes, “A man who can explain mirages does not cease to see them.”24 The Macondans’ collective acceptance of official fictions as truth and truth as myth suggest that it is largely a world where ideological mirages have finally got the decisive upper hand over historical truth, which has submitted to the weight of idealized nostalgia and amnesia. Williamson argues that after the massacre, José Arcadio Segundo “abdicates his responsibility as a witness to history,” ensuring that its historical reality is largely forgotten: the Buendías lose all vestige of objectivity, and, with it, the capacity to distinguish between elementary differential categories such as truth and falsehood. As a result, the town as a whole suffers the fate that had previously befallen the characters individually. It is completely isolated from the external world . . . and it sinks into a state of lethargy as it begins to lose its grip on reality.25

Although Williamson does not specifically use the concept of ideology, the shift from individual to collective illusions that he describes, which envelop the entire social fabric of the town, is clearly suggestive of ideological deception. The final state of Macondo is, however, not so much the drastic change that Williamson pictures as an exaggeration of a pattern of collective social delusion manifested throughout its history. The banana company’s departure has merely intensified the immersion of Macondo’s entire social fabric in the “obscurantist” ideological mirages of underdevelopment.



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The objective, social nature of ideology suggests a further resonance to the metaphor of the mirage. Although mirages are immaterial illusions, their objective appearance means that they have can have real consequences, causing their perceivers to follow their illusory image. This detrimental effect of mirages accords with the characters’ misinterpretations of the ghost as indications of inevitable historical repetition. As in the gothic, ghosts haunt the material world, luring their perceivers into a mistaken course of action, or, indeed, inaction. This haunting, deceptive power of both ghosts and mirages evokes ideology’s determining power; not only do ideological “mirages” emerge from real social conditions, but they also have a part to play in creating or maintaining these conditions, haunting social reality like a ghost. Ideology is no mere epiphenomenal illusion, but can function as a determining factor within social reality, leading its subjects into fulfilling certain patterns of action by circumscribing and reinforcing the parameters of interpretation within which they act. The immersion within an objective fabric of social illusions means that one’s actions and their consequences are determined partly by such duplicitous and illusory representations and that one will generally act in accordance with those beliefs, helping to reinforce the situation from which they arise. A condensed image of such ideological self-fulfillment can be found in the character of Fernanda. As shown in the last chapter, the spectral represents the anachronistic persistence of Fernanda’s social class, as a dependent reflection of European past. In addition, the spectral captures the particularly ideological survival of such a social class, which has now lost what practical social role it ever had and is declining into further uselessness. Similar to Macondo as a whole, Fernanda becomes ever more immersed within delusions as she gets older. As she approaches senility, she moves closer toward the “world of her parents, where one did not suffer from day-to-day problems because they were solved beforehand in one’s imagination” (293, my emphasis). The anticipatory workings of Fernanda’s imagination, where “day-to-day problems” are “solved beforehand,” hints at the way in which ideology anticipates future actions by keeping consciousness and action locked into certain parameters. In Fernanda’s case, her elitist ideology rules out considering the contradictions between her fantasies and the “day-to-day problems” of social reality. Moreover, Fernanda’s elitist alienation from practical social conditions eventually causes the Buendía household to conform to her worldview and withdraw even more from the social life of the town as a whole: “The house stayed closed on Fernanda’s orders” (273).



The Consequences of Mirages


Fernanda’s self-fulfilling imaginary world is a microcosm for the ideological entrapment of Macondo as a whole. A more extensive depiction of real effects of ideological consciousness can be found in the banana company’s rapid invasion of Macondo. The banana company is able to take advantage of the townspeople’s collective “magical realist” consciousness.26 The invasion of modernity that immediately precedes the banana company’s entrance elicits much wonder and awe from the culturally isolated townspeople, who largely fail to distinguish between technology and magic. As Williamson argues, “Having been deprived of ‘the benefits of science,’ they regard such wonders as products of magic and miracle; so much so that ‘nobody was able to tell for sure where the limits of reality lay.’”27 The banana company’s exploitation of this “underdeveloped” consciousness of the townspeople is foreshadowed by the description of the largely unsuccessful traders who arrive with the railway, trying to take advantage of the town’s mystified inhabitants: In a town that had chafed under the tricks of the gypsies there was no future for those ambulatory acrobatics of commerce who with equal effrontery offered a whistling kettle and a daily regime that would assure the salvation of the soul on the seventh day; but from those who let themselves be convinced out of fatigue and the ones who were always unwary, they reaped stupendous benefits. (186)

This description foreshadows the banana company’s invasion, which follows shortly after. Indeed, “Among those theatrical creatures,” dressed in colonial regalia, “riding breeches and leggings, a pith helmet and steelrimmed glasses” (186), comes Mr. Herbert, who will usher in the banana company’s much more successful exploitation of Macondo. The narrator’s denial of the townspeople’s gullibility is a characteristic sleight of hand, since the very next pages describe precisely how the banana company (“those ambulatory acrobatics of commerce”), reaps “stupendous benefits” by taking advantage of the “unwary” “fatigue” of the townspeople. The description of “those who let themselves be convinced out of fatigue and the ones who were always unwary” is actually an accurate description of the consciousness of the townspeople as a whole, capturing their ignorance and mystified resignation to whatever “fate” is imposed upon them. The last chapter showed that the invasion of the railway and the banana company is a paradigm of historical transformation and change, echoing Marx’s description of capitalist modernity in The Communist Manifesto. However, the townspeople largely follow Úrsula’s misinterpretation of Aureliano Triste’s initial plans for the railway by misreading the arrival of modernity and historical change as another



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ahistorical repetition of the past. Although Aureliano Triste announces his plan for the railway ahead of time, the townspeople ignore the signs of its arrival, interpreting them as yet another repetition: “During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies” (184). Similarly, the “intricate stew of truths and mirages” (186) that overwhelms the “unwary” Macondans with the train’s arrival, and their consistent habit of seeing the present in terms of the past, also distracts them from finding out what Mr. Herbert and the banana company are up to. The reappearance of the “solemn lawyers . . . who in different times had followed Colonel Aureliano Buendía everywhere . . . led the people to think that” it all “had something to do with the war” (187). The sole dissenting viewpoint is Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who is, as Williamson points out, the most individuated and historically conscious figure of the novel;28 “‘Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into,’ Colonel Aureliano Buendía said at that time, ‘just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas’” (189). Later, he sees the exploitative nature of the company: “When he saw Mr Brown in the first automobile to reach Macondo . . . the old soldier grew indignant at the servile excitement of the people” (196). However, even his dissent is limited by the town’s general isolation and lack of development; as the narrator observes, his opposition to the company is based upon “reasons that were still very confused” (196), echoing his earlier “very confused notions about the differences between Conservatives and Liberals” (84) before the civil wars. Despite his insight, his consciousness is still constrained by the cultural and political underdevelopment that envelops Macondo. The “underdeveloped” historical consciousness of the characters clearly plays a considerable part in the banana company’s rapid and unquestioned exploitation of the town. This episode shows that Macondo’s subsequent decline is not a confirmation of fate, but that its inhabitants’ mystified deference to such imagined metaphysical forces contributes to their exploitation by the more concrete historical forces of foreign capital. The townspeople’s ideological consciousness causes them to misinterpret their circumstances at a time when a correct interpretation may well have proven valuable for their future. Their mystified ignorance of the “magic” of modernity, their own “magical realism,” is fostered by their social conditions of underdevelopment and dependence, but also plays a part in maintaining those conditions by ruling out the possibility of social transformation. Their conception of their history as subject to seemingly inevitable external forces, outside their control or understanding, facilitates their further capitulation to the foreign, but historical, powers of the banana company.



Ideological Mirages


The ideological specters that Marx elucidates in The Eighteenth Brumaire have a similar determining influence within social reality. The fatalistic resignation that Marx described in the French people (“‘To pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,’ sighed the French nation”) is an expression of their political alienation, but comes to play a part in reinforcing those conditions. Marx shows that the Bonapartist reaction seemed “inevitable” according to the ideological parameters that dominated French politics up to and through the 1848 revolutions, anticipated by both revolutionary and reactionary ideology alike. Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état is, in a way, forecasted by the French worship of the ghosts of Napoleon: “They yearned to return from the dangers of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt, and 2 December 1851 was the answer” (149, my emphasis). Because it fulfills the nostalgic yearning for postrevolutionary reaction, it thus appears inevitable. Like Fernanda’s worship of the imaginary “world of her parents,” the French nation’s worship of the “memory of Napoleon” ensures that any misgivings, like Fernanda’s “dayto-day problems,” are “solved beforehand” in the collective “imagination” that is parliamentary politics. As in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the fatalistic conception of historical repetition is an active determinant of social reality, rather than a disinterested judgment. Terry Eagleton has described the active “functional” role of fatalistic ideology in a way that perfectly applies to both The Eighteenth Brumaire and One Hundred Years of Solitude: A fatalistic group of oppressed individuals may not recognise that their fatalism is an unconscious rationalisation of their wretched conditions, but this fatalism may well not prove serviceable for their interests. It might, on the other hand, prove functional for the interests of their rulers.29

This describes precisely the relation between the metaphysical fatalism and the social conditions depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude; the Macondans’ fatalism is an “unconscious rationalisation” of their economic and political dependence on powerful external forces, and in turn has a “functional” role in maintaining these conditions. By rationalizing their preceding social conditions of dependence and underdevelopment, their fatalism also anticipates the interests of their new rulers by preventing the consideration of any alternative to such “wretched conditions.” The active function of this fatalism accords with Eagleton’s general characterization of ideology as a form of “performative” representation that is “directed toward the achievement of certain effects”:30



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The Macondans’ ahistorical consciousness exemplifies ideology’s active “achievement of certain effects.” Eagleton’s further elucidates this performative function of ideology when he addresses its naturalizing effects: Ideological statements may be true to society as at presently constituted, but false in so far as they thereby serve to block off the possibility of a transformed state of affairs. The very truth of such statements is also the falsehood of their implicit denial that anything better could be conceived.32

By conceptually marking out parameters for interpretation and action, ideological statements reify, naturalize, and thereby legitimate what is and thus implicitly deny what could be. Ideological statements can thus appear to predict the future since they reinforce the very reality that they describe. The active, performative role of ideology, working to maintain the situation it supposedly describes, suggests a striking reading of the novel’s theme of fate and prophecy. Fatalism admits of only one outcome, implicitly denying any alternative possibilities. Its internal logic thus exemplifies the general performative logic of ideology described by Eagleton, where ideology reinforces the situation that it transfigures by implicitly denying alternative possibilities. By influencing the responses of social agents to their surrounding conditions and helping to bring about the future that it describes, ideology can seem to anticipate that future. This suggests that, in addition to being an ideological transfiguration of dependence, fatalism is also a metaphor for the more general way in which such ideological transfigurations have trapped Latin America within self-fulfilling patterns of historical interpretation and action. Fatalism is a metaphor for the particular part that ideology has played in maintaining historical dependence, by locking the interpretation of Latin American history into certain patterns that deny alternative possibilities. The relations between fatalism and ideological determination further illuminate the final image of Macondo as a city of “mirages.” Aureliano’s revelation is akin to realizing that one has been following a mirage upon arrival at one’s final destination. It suggests that Macondo’s seemingly “fated” history, inexorable decline, and ultimate destruction have been set in train by the delusive pursuit of ideological mirages, in the same way



it is fundamentally a matter of fearing and denouncing, reverencing and reviling, all of which then sometimes gets coded into a discourse which looks as though it is describing the way things actually are. It is thus, in the terms of the philosopher J.L. Austin, “performative” rather than constative language: it belongs to the class of speech acts which get something done . . . rather than the discourse of description.31


that mirages can lead on their perceivers in vain quests. The narrative seemingly confirms fatalism in order to illustrate the feeling of entrapment that ideology can performatively create. From within such an ideologically “predetermined” situation, events can indeed seem fated, in that they conform to one’s ideological parameters. In his study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Martin quotes Hector Murena’s description of the connection between misinterpretation and Latin America’s seemingly inevitable history: Through misinterpreting their past, Latin Americans construct false projects for the future, and every step they take in the present in accordance with those projects, vitiated by that initial falseness, only serves to sink them deeper in their sickness, as in a circle from which there is no way out.33

Murena links the misinterpretation of the past with the entrapment within “false projects for the future,” “as in a circle from which there is no way out.” In a similar way, García Márquez’s use of fate and circularity represents the way in which the ideological misrecognitions of Latin America’s colonial and neocolonial historical conditions have inhibited the transformation of these conditions. The manuscripts’ prophetic insight is a metaphor for this constricting and self-fulfilling function of postindependence ideology; Macondo’s history has effectively been predetermined, “written . . . one hundred years ahead of time” (335), by neocolonial ideology.34 Insofar as the fatalistic collective consciousness bred by colonialism facilitates the later neocolonial exploitation by the banana company, this later neocolonial phase of exploitation is effectively “foreseen” by the Macondans’ ideological consciousness. The limiting parameters of fatalistic neocolonial ideology ensure that it can be “foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind” (36). The motifs of prophecy and fate are metaphors for this ideological fixing, where ideological “mirages” hold the future within them as “false” truth, truth that is made by the implicit denial of alternative possibilities. The conclusion does not confirm the reality of fate, but dramatizes the detrimental effects that such seductive but duplicitous representations of history can acquire. Just as Eagleton observes that ideologies “may be true to society as at presently constituted, but false in so far as they thereby serve to block off the possibility of a transformed state of affairs,”35 so the novel’s fatalism can be read as being “true” in the sense that the novel takes its influence and consequences seriously, yet “false” in its implicit denial of alternative possibilities. Macondo’s apparent fate is only real



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insofar as surrendering to ideological mirages can have real consequences, thereby restraining historical consciousness and action within an ideologically predetermined pattern. Like the ghosts that have haunted its history, Macondo’s reality has been haunted, obscured, and partly determined by ideological mirages. The final reduction of Macondo to spectral mirages underscores the way that ideological transfiguration ensured that Macondo and the Buendías always were ghosts to some extent, alienated and estranged from their own history, not only victims of the harsh reality of dependence and underdevelopment but also of the ideological illusions that haunt and reinforce such social conditions.



Ideological Mirages




Ideology, Magical Realism, and Metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude Man also possesses “consciousness”; but, even so, not inherent, not “pure” consciousness. From the start the “spirit” is afflicted with the curse of being burdened with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology1

In Chapter 7 I showed that the spectral metaphor is grounded in the historical conditions of Latin America. The dialectics of spectral presence are used to represent the particular tensions arising from Latin America’s colonial heritage and continuing economic and political dependence and underdevelopment. Following this, the last chapter demonstrated that the spectral metaphor, which culminates in the final reduction of Macondo to a city of “mirages,” also represents the ideological “mirages” that arise from, transfigure, and haunt these historical conditions like ghosts. This chapter will integrate the metaphorical technique and ideological subject matter of the novel, showing that the oblique mechanics of metaphorical reference are used to dramatize the way that ideology transfigures social reality. The magical reality of Macondo is an assemblage of ideological “mirages” that dramatizes the complex relations between ideology and social reality. Many critics have acknowledged that the novel does not represent an unmediated reality, but transposes its reality through the



Chapter 9


social consciousness of its characters. What has not been addressed is the way in which this very technique of mediation dramatizes the ideological transfiguration of social reality. By representing historical reality through the magical and ahistorical frame of reference of the characters’ ideologies and thus obscuring the very reality it represents, the novel discursively dramatizes the ideological transfiguration of Latin American reality. The use of metaphor is a crucial part of this discursive dramatization of ideology. The novel draws on the similarly indirect representational dynamics of metaphor and ideology in order to immerse the reader within what Vargas Llosa calls an “imaginary construction” that is nevertheless “deeply anchored” in Latin American reality. Furthermore, as this chapter will show, the dynamics of metaphorical interpretation are exploited in order to critique the ideological transfigurations that metaphorical reference is used to install. This involves a further, self-reflexive significance to the novel’s spectral metaphorics. The spectral is used to register the text’s ideological and metaphorical transfiguration of social realities and to signal the deconstruction of this assemblage, its reduction to a mere spectral mirage. Discourse and Ideology The relations between the novel’s discursive mechanics and ideology are foregrounded in an episode that is often taken as a quintessential example of “magical realism,” the ascension of Remedios the Beauty. While this episode does not use metaphor, it does highlight the novel’s duplicitous dynamic of representation of which metaphor is a crucial element. The episode is famous for its straight-faced description of a fantastic event, setting the miraculous ascension within the everyday task of hanging up washed sheets,2 in the everyday “environment of beetles and dahlias . . . as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end” (195). A passing reading of this event accepts it at face value, as an alluring description of a magical reality. However, such a reading misses the narrator’s crucial expression of doubt, which indicates that the version the novel privileges is actually a convenient fiction: “The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her irrevocable fate of a queen bee and that her family was trying to save her honour with that tale of levitation” (195). This admission undermines the myth of the ascension even as the narrator gives expression to its general acceptance as fact by the Macondans, who mostly “believed in the miracle and they even lighted candles and celebrated novenas” (195). The doubt of the outsiders accords with García Márquez’s account of this episode’s inspiration, offered to his friend and interviewer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza as proof that there is “not a single line in my novels which is



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not based on reality”; “The fact behind it? A woman whose grand-daughter had run away from home in the early hours of the morning, and who tried to hide the fact by putting the word around that she had gone to heaven.”3 The expression of doubt, buried within the description of the miracle, actually attests to the unpalatable truth that lies behind the fiction invented to preserve the family’s honor. The narrative’s dependence on the perspective of Úrsula, the progressively senile and blind family matriarch, who is obsessed with the family’s legitimacy, also supports this reading. Although Úrsula was “almost blind at the time,” the narrator assures us that she “was the only person . . . to identify the nature” of the wind, and “she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios waving goodbye in the midst of the flapping sheets” (195, my emphasis). The truthfulness of the magical reality that the novel represents as fact is thus undermined by its dependence on the perspective of the family’s progressively blind and senile guardian of honor and the critical doubt of the “outsiders.” The narrator subtly suggests that the “magical” reality the text presents us with is actually an invention propagated by the local elite for their own social interest and accepted by an uneducated and culturally isolated population. While the story itself is not so much an ideology as a deliberate and outright fiction invented by the family, it does draw on ideologies of family honor, religious morality, and chastity. The religious resonance of the incident accentuates this ideological content. Moreover, the story clearly serves an ideological function, used to maintain and even elevate the Buendías’ class position in the town: not only does it prevent their family shame, but it also reinforces their elite status within the community, since they now appear to be the beneficiaries of miracles. The “outsiders, of course,” adopt a critical perspective because they lie outside this ideological community. The discursive mechanics of this episode, whereby the text privileges an account that it surreptitiously suggests is untrue, register the complex relationship between ideological “mirages” and social reality that was traced in the last chapter. James Higgins argues that this episode exemplifies the novel’s wider strategy to “present events, not as they actually occurred, but as they were perceived and interpreted by the local people.”4 While Higgins does not specifically employ the concept of ideology, he does stress that such episodes give “expression to the world-view of a rural people living in remote isolation from the modern developed world.”5 Higgins observes that “it is the family’s version . . . which the text privileges and recounts in full and plausible detail, since it was the one which was widely accepted in the community.”6 Insofar as the ascension is accepted, it becomes an objective part of the community’s social



I d e o l o g y, M a g i c a l R e a l i s m


fabric, with the townspeople even lighting candles and celebrating novenas. By accepting and privileging the miraculous explanation for the disappearance of Remedios, the discourse gives expression to the social reality of the fiction, recreating for the reader the coherence, allure, and ultimate consequences of such collective delusions.7 This discursive expression of the social reality of ideological illusions even circumscribes the indication of the mundane truth that underlies the miracle. The narrative does not assume a blatantly critical position, outside the ideological community, but critiques it from within the represented consciousness of the townspeople, qualifying the truth with a disparaging reference to the ignorant “outsiders.” Although the truth is present, the discursive acceptance of the Buendías’ version obscures the reality of the event, just as ideology obscures the reality from which it arises. The critical element in the narration of the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, however, cannot be ignored. It suggests that the novel’s “magical realism” cannot be considered as a faithful expression of non-Western and nonrationalist regional or indigenous belief systems,8 but entails a more complex, intentionally duplicitous, narrative strategy. Higgins observes that episodes like Remedios’s ascension suggest that “if Cien años sets out to subvert Eurocentric attitudes, it also simultaneously subverts Latin Americans’ perceptions of their own history.”9 Similar to Higgins, Edwin Williamson argues that the “sense of the marvellous afforded us by magical realism is . . . transient, for soon enough García Márquez tips the wink at his reader, as it were, creating a complicity behind the back of the characters.”10 As Williamson states, such knowing asides indicate that the novel’s magical realism is a “wilfully specious discourse that inevitably betrays its hallucinatory character.”11 Unlike the characters’ own magical realist consciousness, the narrative mode critically exposes the “hallucinatory” ideological nature of the very consciousness to which it gives voice. A similar dynamic is evident in the novel’s overarching depiction of Macondo’s history as subject to metaphysical forces of fate and circularity. The narrator appears to privilege a fatalistic cyclical view of history, constantly invoking inexorable fate and comparing current events with their supposed precedents. This discursive acceptance sympathetically registers the coherence, “pervasiveness and durability” of such a worldview within Latin America’s real social context of dependence and underdevelopment. However, the indications of the progressive movement of time, the effects of human agency, and the historical forces that determine Macondo’s decline point toward the more mundane truth underpinning such a perspective, serving a similar purpose to the expression of doubt in the ascension of Remedios the Beauty. By hinting at the historical



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realities that are obscured by this ahistorical perspective, the novel subjects it to a subtle critique, indicating that this worldview is ultimately a mystified, ideological distortion of Latin America’s dependence and underdevelopment. The “wilfully specious discourse” of “magical realism,” as Williamson calls it, dramatizes the dynamic relations that Eagleton identifies between “magical or mythological or religious” ideologies and real social conditions that were traced in the last chapter. Although deceptive and mystified, the discourse nevertheless encodes “genuine needs and desires” and gives expression to the “pervasiveness and durability” of such ideological mystification.12 The truth is present but it is refracted by the ideological fiction that the narrator privileges. By duplicitly representing Latin American reality through the ideological perspective of the characters and subtly hinting at this narrative strategy, the novel dramatizes the duplicitous structure of ideological representation. Like ideology, the narrative discourse obscures the very reality it represents. The novel’s discourse immerses the reader within the alluring duplicity of ideological consciousness and representation, even while it indicates the reality that is obscured. Metaphorical Transfiguration Metaphor is a crucial part of the novel’s “wilfully specious discourse.” Its oblique referential mechanics are used to dramatize the way that ideological consciousness transfigures social reality. There is a clear convergence between the novel’s metaphorical presentation of Latin American history and the characters’ ideological apprehension of their own history. The novel’s realized metaphors for Latin America’s history of underdevelopment and dependence are lifted, as it were, from the characters’ ideological misconceptions of this history. Historical underdevelopment is accordingly transfigured as metaphysical temporal recurrence or anachronism, and political and economic dependence is transfigured as the subordination to malign and inescapable fate. Thus, what is variously called the novel’s metaphorical “transfiguration,” “transposition,” or “transcription” of Latin American history parallels its characters’ misinterpretations of their history. This parallel between the text’s metaphors and the characters’ ideology is not merely incidental, but is built on the similarly indirect referential structure of metaphorical “transfigurations” and ideological “mirages.” As noted throughout this study, metaphorical representation performs a curious referential operation. A metaphor’s superimposed secondary frame of reference is anchored in the primary frame of reference of the





text, yet transfigures that primary frame of reference; despite its analogous relationship with the subject, it clearly is not that subject but something else, a secondary representation of it. The secondary frame of reference is, in a sense, a mirage of reference—a referent that is a secondary representation of something else, an analogous, “refracted” image of the underlying primary frame of reference of the text. When this reference is realized as a literal presence in a fiction it obscures the primary frame of reference that it is supposed to transpose. The first half of this book elucidated Morrison’s exploitation of these oblique referential mechanics in Beloved. Morrison uses metaphorical obliquity to dramatize the difficulty of accessing and reconstructing a lost, unrecorded history, particularly its emotional and psychological effects. The use of metaphor ensures that the reader, who struggles to interpret the underdetermined metaphorical figure of Beloved, is made to feel the difficulties that attend the historical reconstruction of the Middle Passage and slavery as a whole. One Hundred Years of Solitude also uses metaphor’s oblique referential structure to register its thematic concern with problems of historical interpretation, but its main concern, as the last chapter showed, is with the enveloping allure of ideological “transfigurations,” which obscure the historical foundations from which they arise and which they represent. The novel exploits the similarly indirect, mediated referential structures of ideology and metaphor. As Eagleton has suggested, the representational structure of ideological rationalization is like metaphor in that “one set of conceptions stands in for another.”13 Similar to metaphor, ideology superimposes an imaginary frame of reference over the underlying reality that it indirectly represents. Both ideology and metaphor encode an underlying primary frame of reference in terms of a superimposed imaginary frame of reference. Drawing on this similarity, One Hundred Years of Solitude substitutes “one set of conceptions,” the mythical, ahistorical, and magical elements of the novel, “for another,” Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment. By doing this, it immerses the reader within the “imaginary world” of ideological consciousness. The novel’s realization of its secondary frame of reference, by which, as Michael Wood observes, “beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact,”14 is a way of registering the reification of ideological conceptions. As critics have noted, many of the individual fantastic incidents of the novel are realizations of metaphorical expressions.15 This realization dramatizes the process whereby social concepts are reified into independent realities. When José Arcadio dies, a “thread of blood” (114) flows from his body, through the streets, and stops in the Buendía family kitchen at his mother’s, Úrsula’s, feet. As critics have noted, this is a literal realization of the metaphor of a family “bloodline,” returning to its



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origins, a concept we see earlier in the narrative, when José Arcadio Buendía “could not tolerate the idea that an offshoot of his blood should be adrift” (38).16 By making what is essentially a metaphorical concept into an independent physical reality, García Márquez emulates and exaggerates the ideological reification of social concepts into independently existing objects. The novel’s ghosts are similar representations of ideological reification. Rebeca’s obsessive and nostalgic solitude, where “memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation” (133), condenses the consciousness of the town itself, which similarly reifies its own nostalgic memories and ideological idealizations of the past. As in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the spectral represents the way that the ideological “mirages” of the past are reified into present realities. The deceptively reified presence of the specter can be seen as a figure for the novel’s “wilfully specious,” metaphorical discourse. The novel’s realized metaphorical structure presents us, the readers, with an alluring “specious” magical reality, duplicating the ideological refraction of social reality and giving expression to the way that such refractions are taken for reality itself. The realization of the novel’s metaphorical frame of reference transfigures, masks, and obscures Latin American history, mirroring the ideological blindness of the characters for the reader. Gerald Martin observes that while problems of “underdevelopment, dependency or imperialism” underlie the frustrated and seemingly fated history of Macondo, they are conspicuously absent from the novel’s discourse; as he states, the author’s “genius lies in apparently having managed to ‘forget’ them.”17 The novel’s overarching metaphysical frame of reference is thus somewhat akin to what is called metaphor in absentia, where, in Ricoeur’s words, “the substitutable term [i.e., the metaphor’s tenor] is absent from discourse,” only represented through its secondary figuration.18 It is as if Pound were to give us only the image of the petals of the bough, demanding that we “find” the more mundane subject that they transfigure. Although there are numerous indications of historicity throughout the novel, as Chapter 7 showed, the use of the characters’ ideological consciousness as a realized metaphorical frame of reference obscures these more mundane historical explanations. Due to this metaphorical masking of its historical content, the novel can easily be read in mythic terms. Such readings, however, misinterpret the novel’s metaphorical reference in strictly literal terms, taking what are essentially its metaphorical “vehicles”—fate, circularity, spectral unreality— as its main subject matter, thereby failing to register the historical “tenor” that underlies these ahistorical “vehicles.” García Márquez uses metaphorical reference, which obscures the underlying primary frame of reference with a superimposed secondary frame of reference, to discursively emulate





the ideological obfuscation and mystification of historical reality, not to endorse an ahistorical worldview. Critics who read the novel as a metaphysical parable or myth fail to grasp this performative relation between the novel’s metaphorical discourse and its ideological subject matter. They are seduced by the duplicitous metaphorical construction of the “city of mirrors (or mirages)” in the same way that the characters have been seduced by the ideological ghosts and “mirages” of their social reality. In using metaphor to emulate ideological deception, García Márquez exploits the association between metaphor and misleading or deceptive language. As Ted Cohen has shown, this association has been a key component in the history of analytic philosophy, which has, until recently, generally “denied to metaphors and their study any philosophical seriousness of the first order.”19 Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, having described the communicative uses of language, goes on to explain its corollary abuses, one of which he associates with metaphor: First, when men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for; and thereby deceive others.20

Later on in the same chapter, Hobbes argues that such “inconstant signification . . . can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.”21 Although he judges metaphors as “less dangerous” than other inconstant signification, Hobbes nevertheless clearly aligns them with deceptive, and specifically self-deceptive, abuses of language.22 There is a clear connection between the self-deceptive “inconstancy” that Hobbes associates with metaphor and ideological deception. The metaphoricity of One Hundred Years of Solitude exploits this association, using the intentional misrepresentation of metaphor to textually rehearse the deceptive character of ideological discourse. García Márquez uses metaphor to “deceive others” (namely, the novel’s readers) in order to show how ideological “inconstancy,” to borrow Hobbes’s word, can cause people to “deceive themselves.” The text itself admits this intentional duplicity when Aureliano Babilonia, in the company of Gabriel Márquez and the author’s real-life friends, realizes that “literature was the best plaything ever invented to make fun of people” (314).23 By using metaphorical duplicity, the novel makes fun of us, the readers, to allow us to experience the seductive duplicity of ideological illusions.



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The novel’s use of metaphorical “inconstancy” is a means of dramatizing the duplicitous ideological transfiguration of social reality. This technique of metaphorical duplicity, however, would not serve its function if it were complete. As Hobbes argues, for metaphors to function properly and thus be “less dangerous,” they must “profess their inconstancy.”24 Or, in Derrida’s more apocalyptic and deconstructive formulation, metaphor “cannot be what it is except in erasing itself, indefinitely constructing its own destruction.”25 For the novel’s metaphorical emulation of ideology to serve its purpose and not merely reinforce ideological myths, the reader must recognize the “inconstancy” between the novel’s metaphorical, metaphysical, and mythical vehicle and the historical tenor that it duplicitly transposes. Such a profession of discursive “inconstancy” is found in the final revelation that Macondo was a spectral city of mirages and in the devastating erasure that accompanies this revelation. In the conclusion, the dynamic we see in the individual spectral figures, which undermines what it initially appears to represent, is extended to encompass the entire world of Macondo. In addition to metaphorically representing Latin America’s dependence and ideological haunting, as the previous two chapters have demonstrated, this final erasure of the “mirages” of Macondo is also a self-reflexive acknowledgment of its metaphorical structure. Like the spectral negation that concludes Beloved, which was examined in Chapter 3, the final erasure of Macondo represents a self-reflexive reading of the novel’s own metaphors. Both spectral erasures are pictured as the result of interpretation. As demonstrated, Beloved’s erasure and suspension of presence is part of the community’s interpretive resolution of her troubling presence. In a similar way, Aureliano’s decipherment of Macondo’s history brings about its erasure. Aureliano’s decipherment of the manuscripts summons up the wind, full of nostalgic and disenchanted “voices,” “murmurs” and “sighs” of the past, in the form of the self-consuming cyclone. The wind increases as Aureliano reads on, with its increasingly “cyclonic strength” (335) paralleling his approach of his own future in the manuscripts. This parallel course of consummation culminates finally in Macondo’s destruction at the “precise moment when Aureliano would finish deciphering the parchments.” This suggests that Aureliano’s decoding of the manuscripts is an active decoding of the past, which erases the presence of Macondo, since it never existed independently of its representation in the manuscripts. As in Beloved, where the significance of the spectral Beloved shifts with her disappearance and erasure from communal memory, so too Macondo shifts from a city of



Metaphorical Suspension and Ideological Critique


mirrors—suggesting immediacy and transparency—to the indirect and deferred presence of a mirage, a shift that strongly suggests its metaphorical “inconstancy,” to use Hobbes’s word. As shown in Chapter 3, the conclusion of Beloved dramatizes its own metaphorical approach to an inaccessible history by erasing the metaphorical figure of Beloved from the fiction’s reality, even from the memory of its characters. In a similar way, Macondo is “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men” (336). As in Beloved, this erasure of the novel’s reality, set in train by Aureliano’s decoding of the written history of Macondo, self-reflexively represents the reading of the novel’s own metaphors and their suspension and resolution with the reader’s completion of the novel. Macondo’s imaginary status is confirmed by its erasure as Aureliano, and we, the readers, complete our reading of its history. Aureliano’s decipherment of the manuscripts negates the secondary frame of reference upon which the text’s “magical realism” is built. This dramatizes the way in which a reader understands a metaphor, by suspending the existence of its superimposed secondary referent. As Hrushovski observes, in the course of reading a metaphor, the secondary frame of reference is “denied existence,” relegated to a merely imaginary role.26 To understand or “decipher” a metaphor, its reader must negate the presence of the secondary frame of reference, despite the apparently literal way in which it is referred to. The final negation of Macondo, where the novel suspends its own creation, represents this act of interpretive neutralization and suspension. The entire narrative world of Macondo is finally “denied existence.” By erasing the textual world of his novel, García Márquez self-reflexively displays the metaphorical “inconstancy” of his representation of Latin America, reading his own metaphors as metaphorical “mirages”—secondary, dependent transfigurations of the more basic reality that they simultaneously represent and obscure. Aureliano’s destructive reading dramatically anticipates and encourages our own reading of Macondo as a metaphorical representation upon completing the novel. The novel’s admission and self-reflexive reading of the text’s metaphoricity develops the spectral metaphor in a similar deconstructive direction to that traced in Beloved. The ghost’s insubstantiality is used to acknowledge that the text’s metaphors are merely imaginary, figures of an underlying reality rather than reality itself. As a metaphorical “city of mirrors (or mirages),” Macondo, to reappropriate Derrida’s succinct description of metaphor’s deconstructive impulse, “carries its death within itself.”27 The recognition of metaphoricity and dramatization of metaphorical understanding in the conclusion is a means of critiquing the very ideological representation that the novel’s metaphorical structure is used to



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install. Self-reflexivity here, as Roberto González Echevarría observes, is not a narrative trick but “a way of disassembling the mediation through which Latin America is narrated, a mediation that constitutes the pre-text of the novel itself.”28 The conclusion acts as a necessary admission of the entire narrative’s duplicitous use of metaphorical reference and thus serves a similar demystifying purpose to the “outsiders” expression of doubt in Remedios the Beauty’s ascension to heaven, but encompasses the entire metaphorical world of the text. Since ideology continues to mediate Latin America’s historical interpretation, it cannot simply be denied; its allure and coherence must be recognized and explained in the process of critique. Metaphor, a figure that grammatically posits a referent that must be “denied existence” for it to be understood, is the perfect figure for such a deconstructive critique of ideology, used both to recreate and recognize the ideological world and to erase it. Just as the referential dynamics of metaphor are used to install an ideologically seductive representation of Latin America, allowing the reader to inhabit and experience ideology’s “pervasiveness and durability,” so the dynamics of metaphorical reading are used as a means to critique such ideological duplicity. Although the novel realizes metaphorical misrepresentation in order to immerse the reader within the magically real logic of ideological consciousness, it effectively professes this metaphorical and ideological “inconstancy” in the conclusion by reading its own metaphors, acknowledging that its dominant “magical realist” frame of reference is merely an imaginary spectral mirage. The self-destructive dynamics of metaphorical reference and interpretation are used to install, recognize, and finally critique such ideological mirages. The reader is thus put into the position of being both subject and decipherer of the novel’s ideologically encoded magical reality. She or he must follow Aureliano by, in Martin’s words, “deciphering the magical reality and labyrinthine fantasies of the previous one hundred years of solitude,”29 decoding the text’s metaphors and recognizing Macondo’s imaginary and metaphorical status. Decoding and unmasking the novel’s metaphors reveals its primary frame of reference, Latin America’s history of dependence and underdevelopment, which is also the social foundation of the characters’ ideological transfigurations. The motif of decipherment is thus a metaphor for the skeptical mode of reading that must be used to decode both the text’s discourse and Latin America’s ideologically obscured history, to salvage the historical core that is obscured by its metaphorically and ideologically coded discourse. The conclusion exploits the deconstructive nature of both metaphor and the ghost to enact this ideological critique. Both are figures that, in Hobbes’s words, “profess their own inconstancy.” The shift in the spectral





over the course of the narrative, from Prudencio’s initial manifestation of “given and inherited circumstances” to the final reduction of Macondo to “mirages,” parallels Marx’s development of the spectral metaphor in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Whereas ghosts initially manifest the haunting persistence of the past and the ideological haunting of Latin America’s history, the final spectrality of Macondo undermines the persistence of such imaginary figurations. García Márquez exploits the illusory associations of the ghost to undermine the inheritance, repetition, and determinism that it initially appears to signal. As in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the spectral metaphor is used to install and then critique ideological conceptions of Latin American history. Although it gives expression to the characters’ fatalistic conceptions of their history, these conceptions are ultimately undermined by the ghost’s illusory associations, which, in the conclusion, are extended to encompass the entire city of “mirages.” Once Macondo is no longer believed in, recognized as merely “mirages,” it ceases to exist, vanishing into thin air like a ghost. One Hundred Years of Solitude’s development of the spectral metaphor, from inheritance to insubstantiality, echoes Marx’s text, where spectral insubstantiality finally signals that ideological illusions, such as the “superstitious regard for the past,” must be “sloughed off ” (149), read as merely metaphors, figures for reality rather than reality itself. Like ghosts and mirages, ideology must be disbelieved. The spectral erasure of Macondo similarly signals the deconstructive reading of the text’s own metaphors as merely imaginary figures and thus critiques the very ideological figurations they were used to install. Historical Erasure and the Spectral Metaphor As in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the deconstructive use of the spectral metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude is not merely a textual operation, but draws its force from a conception of historical transformation. Like Marx, García Márquez uses the mechanics of metaphor for the purposes of a deconstructive critique of ideology, which is not dismissed from an external point of view but is inhabited, accepted as authoritative, only to be dissolved as a fictional mirage from within its representation. One Hundred Years of Solitude thus exemplifies immanent critique, which, as Terry Eagleton argues, “does not pass judgement on the present from the Olympian height of some absolute truth,” but “installs itself within the present in order to decipher those fault lines where the ruling social logic presses up against its own structural limits, and so could potentially surpass itself.”30 The notion of immanent critique draws from a belief that social reality immanently critiques itself, through the “fault lines” where it “presses up against its own structural limits.” Immanent



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critique then seizes on this self-critical potential that is internal to a social formation. This suggests a more political orientation to the deconstructive negation of the conclusion than is often assumed by critics, which is not merely an illustration of entrapment, but also represents a positive, liberating historical transformation.31 Borrowing Eagleton’s description, we could say that Aureliano deconstructs Macondo’s history “in order to decipher those fault lines” that suggest Macondo “could potentially surpass itself.” There are numerous depictions of internal “fault lines” of the kind Eagleton describes in Macondo’s final stages, where the city descends into a self-consuming state akin to deconstruction. Macondo’s declining state is described as “the last that remained of a past whose annihilation, consuming itself from within, ended at every moment but never ended its ending” (325).32 The town and the Buendía family are slowly disassembling as the novel draws to its end, even down to the “tenacious assault of destruction” that “the voracity of nature” (330), in the form of the red ants, is wreaking on the house. This self-consuming decline confirms Pilar Ternera’s belief, cited in Chapter 7, that the Buendía family history “was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spinning into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” (320).33 As argued earlier, Pilar recognizes that the possibility of change is internal to the very system that seems to foreclose it: the “progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle” around which the family spins will prevent its “spinning into eternity” and finally destroy its entire structure. This accords with the final “biblical hurricane” (336), which, as we have shown, is connected to the “banana company hurricane” (268). Macondo’s destruction does not descend upon Macondo but emerges from within, beginning as fatalistic and nostalgic specters of the past: “Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia” (335). The unfinished business of Macondo’s past reveals itself in order to destroy the city. Aureliano’s decipherment is akin to Marx’s depiction of revolution, as it is part of the deconstructive potential that is immanent to Macondo. Unlike the “posthumous twins who gave up deciphering the parchments, not simply through incapacity and lack of drive, but also because their attempts were premature” (335), Aureliano’s decipherment, which finally unravels the self-destructing city, is not “premature,” but is enacted when, in Marx’s words, “the conditions themselves cry out” (150). Aureliano is himself part of these conditions that “cry out” for transformation. He is depicted as an unresolved aberration within the Buendía





dynasty; Fernanda conceives of him as “the return of a shame that she had thought exiled by her from the house forever” (239). In a sense, he is and is not a Buendía, an ambivalent status that is foregrounded in the last line when he is named as Aureliano Babilonia, recognized by the narrator as the “bastard” (296) son of Mauricio Babilonia, the illiterate banana company mechanic, an illegitimate heir to the family dynasty. Aureliano, the decipherer of history, emerges from within the family, but is a product and an agent of its impending destruction and transformation.34 His decipherment and negation of the history of the family is a metaphor for the emergence of revolutionary forces from within a social formation, the transformative “fault lines” that lie within the irreparable circularity of Latin America’s neocolonial history. The self-destructive state of Macondo accords with García Márquez’s view of Latin American history. In a 1971 interview with the Cuban press agency Prensa Latina, García Márquez described Latin American history in a similar way to Pilar’s image of the Buendías, seeing change as an immanent possibility within Latin America’s repetitions and clearly connecting it to the “biblical hurricane” that eventually wipes out Macondo: I believe that our history is a circulus vitiosus, within which even the names never change; our structures are gone to ruin, for they have spun round so many times that their reparation is no longer possible; in time they will go from bad to worse and the only solution that remains is the wind of destruction that will tear everything out by the roots so we may start from scratch once more.35

Similar to Pilar Ternera’s theory of the “progressive and irremediable wearing” down of the Buendía family history, García Márquez believes that the “structures” of Latin American history “have spun round so many times” that they will eventually “go from bad to worse” and bring on the “wind of destruction.” García Márquez sees Latin America’s transformation as a possibility immanent to its repetitive “structures,” whose persistence is ever more precarious. Change will not descend from without but will come unavoidably from within. Aureliano’s act of decipherment and the final “wind of destruction” that it summons is thus given a clearly revolutionary meaning. Although the conclusion signifies Latin America’s dependence, underdevelopment, and ideological entrapment, it also represents a liberating self-negation of the constraints that have hitherto determined Latin America’s history. As Martin and Higgins observe, it represents the destruction, not of the world, or of Latin America itself, but of the “one hundred years” of the neocolonial era.36 For García Márquez, writing in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, “the



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only solution that remains” is the self-destruction of the repetitive “structures” of dependence and underdevelopment. The parallel dynamics of self-annulment in the conclusion to One Hundred Years of Solitude are clearly related to a conception of historicity that sees social forms as carrying their own negation within themselves as the “Unfinished business” that inevitably reveals itself. The self-absenting figures of the ghost and metaphor are part of a general dynamic of selfannulment in the conclusion that represents Latin America’s capacity for social transformation. The parallels between the self-absenting potential of the spectral metaphor, textual deconstruction, Macondo’s history, and the history of Latin America itself suggest that the resonance between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Marx extends beyond The Eighteenth Brumaire. In many ways, the conclusion to One Hundred Years of Solitude echoes Marx’s account of the dialectical approach to history in the postface to the first volume of Capital: it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.37

Marx’s description of the dialectical method evinces a similar dynamic of inscription and negation as that which we have identified in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a dialectic between presence and absence that recalls the “transient” form of the ghost. The novel’s adoption of ideology as its metaphorical frame of reference reflects “its positive understanding of what exists,” whereas the final negation of that frame of reference is the “simultaneous recognition of its negation.” Moreover, Marx’s description of the dialectical method suggests the conception of historical transformation that underlies the novel’s deconstruction of the world that it has so evocatively constructed. Despite ideological self-representations of metaphysical inevitability and naturalness, there is always the possibility of transformation lying within any “transient” social formation. The spectral metaphorics of the novel reflect the historical contingency of the social formation of Macondo (and by extension, Latin America), its internal capacity for transformation and negation despite its seemingly inevitable and fated reality. The referential mechanics of metaphor, which inscribes a reference that must be denied existence, and the vanishing presence of the ghost both parallel the dialectic historical conception that Marx describes. Although the novel’s spectral metaphorics are used to





represent the ideological figurations of Latin America’s neocolonial history, in the conclusion they raise the possibility of the negation of neocolonialism, its contingent “transient” state and “inevitable destruction.” The conclusion of One Hundred Years of Solitude thus exploits the deconstructive capacity of both the spectral and metaphorical figures, their tendency to erase themselves, in order to highlight Latin America’s capacity for ideological and social transformation. The spectral metaphor is used to install and then deconstruct a particularly alluring but ultimately debilitating ideological representation of Latin America, clearing the way for a revolutionary estimation of Latin America’s true conditions, devoid of the spectral figurations that have so far haunted Latin American history.



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The Unfinished Business of the Reader This book has argued that Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude use the particular metaphor of the ghost and the general dynamics of metaphorical reference to respond to the problematic histories that they, respectively, address. Although they are very different, both novels develop and extend the spectral metaphor in similar directions, especially in their deconstructive conclusions. Both end with a spectral erasure of presence that self-reflexively recognizes their structural use of metaphor and displays the particular relations that this metaphoricity has to the specific concerns of each novel. Both approach the “Unfinished business” of their historical subjects—the legacies of slavery and of colonialism and dependence, respectively—by using the hauntingly “Unfinished” figure of the ghost and the linguistically “Unfinished” figure of metaphor, which haunts what it represents like a ghost. Metaphor is, in both texts, a way of immersing the reader in the “Unfinished” histories that they represent. By self-reflexively recognizing their metaphoricity, these texts foreground the general relationship between imaginative fiction and the realities of history. Ricoeur, drawing on Roman Jakobson’s notion of the “split reference” of poetic language, has compared metaphorical reference to fiction in a way that resonates strongly with the way Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude represent history: Jakobson . . . acknowledged that what happens in poetry is not the suppression of the referential function but its profound alteration by the workings of the ambiguity of the message itself. “The supremacy of poetic function over referential function,” he says, “does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message finds



Conclusion


correspondence in a split addresser, in a split addressee, and what is more, in a split reference, as is cogently exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of various people, for instance, in the usual exortation of the Majorca story tellers: Aixo era y no era (it was and it was not)” I suggest that we take the expression “split reference” as our leading line in our discussion of the referential function of the metaphorical statement. This expression, as well as the wonderful “it was and it was not,” contains in nuce all that can be said about metaphorical reference. To summarize, poetic language is no less about reality than any other use of language but refers to it by the means of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.1

Ricoeur connects the suspended, imaginary reference of metaphor to the “make-believe” of fictional reference in general, which is read with a suspension of belief. In the same way that metaphors are often thought of as miniature fictions, speculative fictions like Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude can be considered as extended metaphors. Their engagement with problematic historical realities through the fantastic metaphor of the ghost exemplifies the kind of “truthful lying” that Ricoeur, following Jakobson, sees epitomized in the storyteller’s phrase “It was and it was not.” Each of these novels is, to borrow Ricoeur’s words, “no less about reality than any other use of language but refers to it by the means of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.” The relation of these novels to the historical realities they represent is akin to that between a metaphor’s secondary and primary frames of reference. Fiction is a kind of metaphorical transposition of reality, removed from, and connected to, the external world through a relationship of analogous transcription. Both novels superimpose a metaphorical fiction, what García Márquez calls a “poetic transposition,” onto the historical reality that they represent, which haunts that reality like a ghost. The referential strategy that Ricoeur describes, however, is made explicit in both Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude. They both represent the “essential component” that Ricoeur argues is usually only implied in metaphorical reference, the “suspension” and apparent “abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language.” In their conclusions, both fictions condition the implicit “it was” of their preceding fantastic narratives with an “it was not,” suspending direct reference and distinguishing themselves from historical reality. However, just as Ricoeur maintains the links between metaphor and reality, these final negations are only “seemingly an abolition” of reference. They are not



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expressions of the complete separation of fiction from reality or admissions that historical reality is unknowable and unrepresentable, but recognitions of the necessarily indirect and mediated form in which fiction engages with nonfictional reality. Both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved differentiate themselves from historical reality, not to effect a complete antirealist separation, but rather to distinguish their fictional, metaphorical speculations from the brute actuality of history that they have nevertheless transposed. The principal way in which these novels highlight their connections to history is by foregrounding the imaginative act of reading. Both novels immerse the reader within an imaginary, metaphorical reconstruction of a particular history, a “poetic transposition of reality,” and then pull away from that representation at the end. By disengaging from their represented histories, however, they dramatize the reader’s return to historical reality. This return to reality highlights the reader’s engagement with and responsibility within the historical reality to which they are returned. These declarations of fictionality and metaphoricity transfer responsibility to the reader, who is dramatically thrust back into the real world after having experienced the haunting spectral presence of fictional representation. In the coda of Beloved, the repeated assertions that it “was not a story to pass on” act as a kind of belated “was not” to the entire narrative’s implicit “was.” Freeman observes that the shift in tense in the third version of this injunction reflects a heightened self-reflexivity and activates the dual meanings of the phrase “pass on”: The shift from “It” to “This” and the change in tense from “was” to “is” reflects the shift in responsibility from the community, whose survival depends upon letting go of the past and who must now put the story in the past tense, to the reader, who is enjoined not to let the story die.2

Although these statements serve to highlight the difference between fiction and historical reality, they also assert the reader’s responsibility within historical reality as a witness to the story that Morrison tells. The Middle Passage is “Unfinished business” in that it continues to bequeath a neglected and ambiguous legacy to the present day, a legacy that the reader is enjoined to assume responsibility for. The reader is given the responsibility for investigating and passing on the obscured and unfinished history of the Middle Passage, to recognise the unrecoverable experience of the millions of “not beloved” slaves that Beloved represents within the confines of the fiction. By suspending its metaphorical and spectral representation of this historical experience, Morrison conversely highlights its reality, which necessarily escapes our provisional representations.



The Unfinished Business of the Reader


The final parenthetical phrase in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “or mirages,” signals a similar address to the reader. It tells the reader that the novel’s world is not a mirror of reality but an ideological, metaphorical, and fictional assemblage that will cease to exist when the novel is completed. Throughout the novel, the reader has been immersed in the novel’s magical reality, made to understand its coherence and bewitching allure; the finale, as Martin observes, “turns the reader . . . back into the history outside the text,” just as the text’s magical reality is exposed as an imaginary construction of metaphorical and ideological mirages.3 Minta argues that the novel thus “seeks . . . to force the reader out of the imaginative world of the novel into a confrontation with the real world of experience and of suffering.”4 Like Beloved, this self-reflexivity attributes responsibility to the reader, demanding that, like Aureliano, he or she must decipher the ideologies that haunt and obscure Latin America’s history outside the novel. The reader is forced to recognize that there is no mythic repetition in the real world, that despite the apparent circularity of the events written in the manuscripts and the novel, “everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth” (336). The emphasis upon the act of reading suggests that the novel’s readers must take this realization with them as they interpret the real history of Latin America and that they should not be bewitched by the ideological mirages that continue to haunt that history and arrive at a sober estimation of Latin American reality. By dramatizing the differences between imaginative, metaphorical fiction and historical reality, these novels also point to the connections between them, the way that fictional reality exists, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “at a slight angle to reality,”5 not completely removed from it. The spectral metaphorics of these fictions reflect this indirect relationship between their fictional, metaphorical worlds and the historical reality that lies outside of them. Like a ghost, the metaphorical, fantastic fiction haunts the nontextual reality outside it. Both Beloved and One Hundred Years of Solitude superimpose a fictional world on nontextual reality, establishing a metaphorical relationship between the imaginary world of the fiction and the reality to which the reader is returned upon completing the text. The use of the spectral metaphor is thus an integral part of these fictions’ engagement with historical reality. They use the spectral metaphor to recognize that while they are not history themselves, they are nevertheless inextricably linked with their specific historical contexts and contents. Both novels make their readers imaginatively engage with their spectral metaphorics to emphasize their readers’ agency and responsibility within the unfinished business of historical reality.



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Chapter 1 1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; London: Picador-Pan, 1988); Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1967; London: Picador-Pan, 1978). 2. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988). 3. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1988) states that the spelling “ghost” was not in wide use until the late 1500s, with Shakespeare among the first to use it to refer to a manifested “apparition or specter” of the dead, rather than just the soul of the dead. 4. The spectral manifestations in the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), collected in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (London: Penguin Books, 1968), are clearly indebted to Hamlet. 5. This idea of the “form” or “figure” of the ghost is emphasized by its proto-gothic armor, “from head to foot” (I, iii, 26–27). Such armor cladding will become a common feature of gothic ghosts, giving the dead an outward form, but no internal substance. The giant suit of armor in The Castle of Otranto is the foundational example. We will later see that the “hollow resonance” (12) of a suit of armor in One Hundred Years of Solitude represents the spectral legacy of Spanish colonialism. 6. Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 95. 7. The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936) 96. 8. F.S. Flint, in “Imagisme” (Poetry March 1913, in Jones, 129), claimed that the Imagists “held . . . a certain ‘Doctrine of the Image,’” although he does not clarify this doctrine. Pound, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” claimed that “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works” ( Jones, 130). The unsigned “Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916,” which bears the heavy influence of Pound, asserts that “Imagism . . . means a clear presentation of whatever the author wishes to convey” (Jones, 136). Pound, in a 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe, wrote “Language is made of concrete things. General expressions in non-concrete terms are a laziness” ( Jones, 142). 9. The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) alternately defines “apparition” as “A seeming to the eyes or mind, appearance, semblance” (sense 6) and “An immaterial appearance as of a real being; a specter, phantom, or ghost” (sense 9). 10.1057/9780230619753 - Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Daniel Erickson


NOTES

Notes

10. Considering the context of the poem’s composition, one naturally thinks of a darkly dressed crowd in accordance with the period, reminiscent of Renoir’s earlier paintings of station crowds, echoing the “wet black” bough. 11. “Vorticism,” Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London: Laidlaw and Laidlaw, 1916) 100. 12. The unsigned “Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1915” recommends that poetry be “hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite” (Jones, 135). 13. Pound, “Vorticism,” 101; 103. 14. Ibid., 101. 15. “Apparition” (sense 6), The Oxford English Dictionary. 16. Flint, “Imagisme,” Jones, 129. Pound’s probable response to such a charge would be that the poem expresses the sense of “apparition” itself in a concrete and clear manner, directly presenting rather than indirectly describing a feeling of fleeting vagueness. While this may be true, especially considering the brevity and evocativeness of the poem, this fleeting vagueness is itself an indication of the problematic nature of the “Image.” 17. Pound, “A Few Don’ts,” Jones, 130. 18. “Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916,” Jones, 137. 19. Benjamin Hrushovski, “Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference,” Poetics Today, 5.1 (1984): 39. Hrushovski quotes Pound from “Vorticism,” 103. 20. Both David E. Cooper, in Metaphor (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 195, and Roger White, in The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 83, argue that haiku-like forms, where all words function figuratively, are still metaphors. 21. “Preface to Some Imagist Poets 1916,” ed. Jones, 137. This criticism of the “constant imposing” of figures must be, one assumes, read as distinct from the “presentation” of figures that Pound approves of in the “oneimage poem” in Vorticism. It should be noted that much of Pound’s poetry is actually based on simile rather than metaphor—for example, “Alba,” “Fan-piece for Her Imperial Lord,” “The Encounter,” “The Garden,” in Jones (95–97). 22. Pound, “Vorticism,” 103. 23. Richards, 94. 24. Ibid., 90. 25. Here, I am excluding whatever metaphorical significance the word “apparition” can be said to hold. First, since it is a different metaphor from the one that we are concerned with. Second, since it literally means image or appearance, it is not so much a metaphor but rather a polysemic, complex word with a variety of compounded senses. 26. Hrushovski, 7–8. 27. Pound, “Vorticism,” 100. 28. Ibid., 103. 29. White notes that this example, a cliché in discussions of metaphor, is actually a travesty of Homer’s complex metaphorical comparison (244). 30. Donald Davidson, in “What Metaphors Mean,” On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), uses this



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31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

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example (33), which is from Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (New York: HFS, 1949) 248. Although there may be no grammatical rules for identifying and composing metaphor, it is clear that such examples of patently incongruent or absurd identification and predication push a metaphorical interpretation onto us through the obvious clash between their simple and familiar grammatical form and the absurd or incongruent meaning that arises when they are read in a literal fashion. This may go some way toward explaining the overrepresentation of metaphorical predication in critical analyses of metaphor that Roger White describes: “the great majority of metaphors, including almost all the most interesting examples, are not of subject/predicate form, or of the related ‘subject and modifier’ form . . . metaphorical predications form only a small proportion of the metaphors actually used” (234–235). Hrushovski, 38. Ibid. While it is clear that a metaphor between the two grammatically similar phrases is created, it is not clear that this is necessarily a result of the poetic structure. Considered abstractly, the grammatical structure of the poem (A;B) does not presuppose any relation of identity or predication, between the two images, metaphorical or otherwise, in the way that manifestly absurd forms of metaphorical predication do. It could just as easily entail, say, two sequential statements, or a (brief ) list of separate images, without needing metaphorical integration. It is easy to think of an alternative, grammatically similar, second line of the poem, which does not require metaphorical integration; for example, “the train in the station,” “cars on the street.” Richards, 94. White and Hrushovski criticize such theories in very similar terms. White’s entire book, in particular, demonstrates that the idea of metaphor involving a change in meaning to some “metaphorical sense” is fundamentally incoherent; he argues that metaphor does not involve changes in the meaning of words, but a conflation of two sentences in one. The words in a metaphor carry their usual meanings but refer to two situations in the one sentence. Hrushovski, 9. While obscured, this reverse process is still a vital component of simple metaphors, as Max Black observes in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962): “If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would” (44). White echoes this point (192). Hrushovski, 38. This potential, it should be noted, is kept in check by the title, the line sequence, and the immediacy of “these faces.” Cooper (186) observes that the significance of metaphorical comparisons and similes is usually transformed completely if they are reversed.



Notes

Notes

41. Hrushovski, 38. 42. Ibid., 16. 43. Karsten Harries has noted a similar destabilization of poetic ontology in William Carlos Williams’s poem “Queen Anne’s Lace,” where an ambiguous description of a common flower seems to be a metaphor for erotic passion, but where, alternatively, an erotic frame of reference can be read as being used to metaphorically describe a common flower. Harries writes, “The erotic theme is obvious enough. But in what sense is it illuminated by the flower metaphor? The image is so strong that the vehicle seems to emancipate itself from the tenor. Is it ever clear what is vehicle and what is tenor?” (“Metaphor and Transcendence,” in Sacks, 77). Harries’s expression of confusion suggests the way that while the “erotic theme” is “illuminated by the flower metaphor” in the poem, the erotic language also conversely “illuminates” the description of the flower. 44. The most well known of gestalt images is that which is simultaneously a white vase on a black background and two silhouetted faces against a white background. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), famously used the ambiguous image of a “duck-rabbit” to discuss issues of perception (194ff ). See White (284n5) for relation to metaphor. 45. Richards, 94. 46. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (1987; London: Routledge, 1989) 134. 47. Ibid. 48. Hélène Christol, “The African American Concept of the Fantastic as Middle Passage,” Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 165–166. 49. Toni Morrison, “The Opening Sentences of Beloved,” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998) 92. 50. Janet Martin Soskice, in Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), defines metaphor as “that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to suggestive of another” (15). Paul Ricouer, in The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), argues that “metaphor consists in speaking of one thing in terms of another that resembles it” (197). 51. “Metaphor,” Language, Thought, and Culture, ed. Paul Henle (1958; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965) 176–181. 52. Samuel R. Levin, in Metaphoric Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), describes metaphor as “expressions that evince a degree of linguistic deviance in their composition. It follows from this deviant character that the ‘claim’ made by such expressions is bizarre, absurd, ridiculous, false, outlandish, non- or contrasensical” (1). White observes that, while not all metaphors are literally absurd, the majority certainly are: “Usually when we try to read a metaphor as a literal sentence,



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53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

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we encounter a sentence which is defective, often grossly so. The typical case of a metaphor presents us with a sentence that, looked at as a literal sentence, is not so much false as nonsensical, and which may even be grammatically incoherent” (205). Levin observes that normalizing a metaphorical expression “would imply the actuality of a world that is ontologically fantastic” (17–18). Ibid., 2. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis (1916), in Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1961). In The Realist Fantasy: Fiction and Reality since Clarissa (London: Macmillan, 1983), Paul Coates writes that Metamorphosis “is obviously based on ‘diese leute sind wie ungeziefer’ (these people are like vermin); where the wie (like) has been removed, unmasked as a means by whereby anyone uttering such a phrase conceals his own brutality from himself” (161). Coates thus relates Gregor Samsa’s ordeal to European antiSemitism. Coates’s sociocultural reading of a story that has such a foundational role in antirealist fiction is relevant to how I will reconcile the metaphorical workings of my targeted novels with their political content. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1973) 77. Ibid., 81; 81–82. Ibid., 167. Recent examples that exploit this are the popular films The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shayamalan, Spyglass Entertainment, 1999) and The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, Walt Disney, 2001). The concluding “twists” of both these films rely on the ghosts seeming to be living people throughout the film.

Chapter 2 1. For a contemporaneous account of this combination of science and the supernatural, see Frederic Engels, “Natural Science and Spirit World,” Dialectics of Nature (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941) 297–310. 2. “Ghost,” Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3. See J. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as its Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) 131–162; Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 124–127; Kathleen Brogan, Spectral Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998) 61–92. 4. Sigmund Freud treated the phenomenon of “shellshock” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950).



Notes

Notes

5. The word “spectre” derives, via Old French, from Latin spectrum: “vision, appearance, apparition,” indicating a phenomenal visual appearance, whereas “spirit,” by contrast, descends from Latin Spiritus, “soul, breath,” related to animating or life-giving principle. See “spectre” and “spirit,” The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. Light has traditionally been associated with “spirit” and the salvation of the soul in religious doctrine. 6. The scientific accuracy of such properties is not really relevant here, for metaphor does not depend on the thing itself but, in Black’s phrase, the “system of associated commonplaces” related to the thing (40). Also, see White (102–103). 7. Hrushovski, 8. Hrushovski’s example, W.H. Auden’s poem “Macao,” presents an almost identical operation. White calls such metaphors “supervenient” metaphors: “A supervenient metaphor arises when a number of closely related ‘subdued’ metaphors are collated in a single passage, in such a way that their proximity has the effect of awakening them all; they thereby regain their full metaphorical life, and metaphorical status is thus conferred on an otherwise literal statement” (132.). 8. David Lawrence, “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, ed. David L. Middleton (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997) 237. 9. Morrison’s depiction of the reality of absence bears an interesting relation to recent nonpositivist work in the philosophy of science. Roy Bhaskar, in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), describes “the positive as a tiny, but important, ripple on the surface of a sea of negativity” (5); “one can refer to absence; including non-existence . . . reference is not tied to positive existence . . . Non-being . . . exists and is present everywhere” (7). 10. Toni Morrison, “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Interview with Marsha Darling, Women’s Review of Books 5.6 (1988): 6. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Ibid.; “The Ghosts of ‘Sixty Million and More.’” Interview with Walter Clemons, in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 46; “The Pain of Being Black: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994) 257. 13. Answer to why she wrote Beloved at “October 1988 forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts”; quoted by Lorraine Liscio in “Beloved ’s Narrative: Writing Mother’s Milk,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 11.1 (1992): 31. 14. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 197. 15. Harries, 82. 16. The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 40–43.



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17. David Tracy, “Metaphor and Religion: The Test Case of Christian Texts,” Sacks, 100–104. 18. See Janet Martin and Rom Harré, “Metaphor in Science,” Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982) 89–105. See also Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 186–189, for examples where analogy and metaphor in science are creative rather than just illustrative. Richard Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’a Metaphor for?” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 356–408, who describes the “generative,” “constitutive,” and exploratory role of metaphor in science. Roger White (307n8, 321n) also discusses the creative use of metaphor in science. 19. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” 143. 20. Pound, “Vorticism,” 101. 21. Ibid., 102; 103. 22. Paxson, 167. 23. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 6.

Chapter 3 1. R.C. Finucane in Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of the Dead (London: Junction, 1982) 220, notes the persistence of this superstition. 2. Christol, 166. 3. Brogan, 2. 4. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978) 11. Sullivan is specifically addressing the “new kind of ghost,” which, he argues, first appeared in Le Fanu’s “Schalken the Painter,” and which straddles the line between hallucination and independent manifestation: “Le Fanu’s creations were real ghosts who stubbornly refused to confine themselves to the shabby psyches of aristocratic neurotics, yet somehow managed to emerge from within as well as invade from without.” 5. Beloved’s presence is akin to the perceived object for Bishop Berkeley, which only exists when being perceived; to be is either to perceive or to be perceived. See “Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” in Berkeley: Philosophical Writings, ed. T.E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1952) 50. 6. Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) 202. 7. In accordance with this “hesitation,” Cornwell has seen the text as an example of the “pure” fantastic, in Todorov’s schema, where there is an irresolvable hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations: “Enough doubt would seem to pertain . . . for Beloved to remain



Notes

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

Notes

within the category of the fantastic, even that of the PF (the pure fantastic)” (207). Denise Heinz, “Beloved and the Tyranny of the Double,” Solomon, 209. While the future remains open, with Sethe responding to Paul D’s assertion that she herself is her “best thing,” with a questioning “Me? Me?” it is clear that Morrison intends this as an indication that their future together is now an open narrative that they can determine (“He wants to put his story next to hers,” 273), rather than an indication of troubling irresolution. The “figure of Beloved is intended to be a standard-bearer of symbolic significance . . . the real meaning of the book lies in its symbolic and historical promotion of a repressed people, by means of the symbolisation of mass history through fictionalised personal history” (Cornwell, 207). I would substitute “metaphoric” for “symbolic,” since the novel uses the fantastic spectral presence as an extended metaphor for the “fantastic” history of slavery. Morrison, speaking to Gloria Naylor while writing Beloved, described how a photograph of a dead 18-year-old girl from the 1920s was instrumental in inspiring the novel. Her original plan was to connect the dead baby girl in 1851 to this young woman in the 1920s via supernatural haunting. While she ended up splitting the ideas up into two novels (the other being Jazz), this demonstrates the importance of photography to Beloved ’s depiction of the haunting presence of slavery: “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,” Taylor-Guthrie, 207. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 5. Although the numbers involved are ultimately incalculable, it should be acknowledged that recent research has made valuable insights into the range of possible numbers, the mortality rates, the regional origins of American slaves, and other previously obscured aspects of the Middle Passage. See, for example, Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); David Eltis, David Richardson, and Stephen D. Behrendt, “Patterns in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1662–1867: New Indications of African Origins of Slaves Arriving in the Americas,” in Diedrich, Gates, Jr., and Pedersen; David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Frank Cass, 1997). However, despite this historical reconstruction, the issues Morrison is concerned with still plague the reconstruction of the experience of the Middle Passage and are especially pertinent regarding its neglected position in American culture. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 5. See, for example, Freeman, 145; Brogan, 71; Mae G. Henderson, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text,” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991) 83.



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16. “Talk with Toni Morrison.” Interview with Elsie B. Washington, TaylorGuthrie, 235. 17. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 19. Derrida borrows this technique from Heidegger, but extends it to denote the inadequacy of the notion of “presence” itself. 18. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London; New York: Methuen, 1982) 69. 19. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1978; London: Routledge Classics, 2001) 351. 20. Ibid., 354. 21. As Christopher Norris has argued in New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti-Realism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Derrida’s writings, especially in the field of literary criticism, have mainly been received in antirealist terms, seeing his work as a reduction of nontextual reality to textual tropes and figures. The reading of deconstruction I will use here is a far less “radical” one than that commonly attributed to it, influenced by those of Norris and Satya P. Mohanty, whose realist reading of Beloved, in Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), I will refer to shortly. Both these scholars see Derrida’s writings as presupposing philosophical realism. 22. “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 23. Ibid., 232. See also Norris, New Idols of the Cave, 91. 24. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 231.. Aristotle quoted from Poetics, trans. I. Baywater, The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924) 1457b6-9. 25. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 232. Whether intentional or not, Derrida’s comment’s “entire surface is [also] worked by a metaphorics.” 26. Ibid., 252–253. 27. Derrida’s argument is somewhat problematic, appearing to rest on the fallacy of “etymologism” that he identifies elsewhere in his essay, confusing real metaphor with polysemia and long-dead “metaphor.” Indeed, it is not certain that, as he argues, “All that these tropes maintain and sediment in the entangling of their roots is apparent.” If metaphor is seen as a use of words, his theory is shaky; since Aristotle’s use of these terms does not invoke their original meanings, then they are not used metaphorically. Indeed, it is arguable that Aristotle’s “metaphors” are actually standard lexical terms for what they are used to denote. However, whether what Derrida is identifying is metaphor or not is unimportant to my discussion; what is important is the crucial importance of the idea of metaphor to deconstruction, where it emerges as the quintessential deconstructive figure, in that it signals contamination and inheritance, and yet, in order to understand it, we must disbelieve what it literally says.



Notes

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Notes

Derrida, “White Mythology,” 258. Ibid., 268. Ibid., 271. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” 358. Hrushovski, 8. Hrushovski is here specifically referring to Auden’s poem “Macau,” but he uses the example to stand as a model for metaphorical reference in general. Ibid., 18. For Hrushovski, “Field of Reference” refers to the posited reality of the text, “a hypothetical, discontinuous universe . . . the so-called ‘fictional world’ of the novel” (15). I say “mainly outside the text” since, as Todorov (79) points out, hints are often present in individual grammatical metaphors scattered throughout the text. As Todorov notes (62–68), allegory effaces the fantastic essentially by recognizing its metaphorical intent and justification. It no longer upsets our conception of reality because it is explained away. Mohanty, 23. Mohanty’s claim is, to my mind, patently obvious when the novel’s treatment of history is considered. It is perhaps indicative of the very confusions in literary theory that Mohanty addresses in Literary Theory and the Claims of History that this realism has to be emphasized at all. Morrison’s novel is not, of course, “realist” in the nineteenthcentury sense, but is underlain by a philosophical realism; otherwise the whole notion of reclaiming the lost, unknown multitudes of slavery is rendered nonsensical. Only philosophical realism can make sense of the very idea of an unknown reality. Ibid., 228–229. Ibid., 229. Beloved ’s coda describes a presence that escapes the community’s conscious knowing, yet affects them nevertheless, countering the idealism that is suggested by her erased memory. This suggests similarities to the importance that recent realist philosophers place in the unknown or extrahuman, indicating that reality has an existence independent of human constructions, in John Searle’s phrase, “radically nonepistemic” (“Does the Real World Exist?” Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, ed. Christopher B. Kulp [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997] 52). Mohanty, drawing on such “postpositivist” realist philosophy, reads Derrida’s writings, against the grain, as also compatible with realism in the insistence that “human knowledge is fundamentally shaped by a network of determined relationships that are not only—and not even centrally—human” (183). “Toni Morrison’s Beloved Country: The Writer and Her Haunting Tale of Slavery,” Solomon, 54. Kastor, 54. We should recognize that there is actually a large body of historical studies of slavery that do not focus on, in Morrison’s words, “precedent,” “ages,” “issues,” “great men,” or “forces,” but that instead attempt to



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“see what these human beings were doing,” to use Morrison’s words. One of the foundational works is that of Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (London: Deutsch, 1975). 43. Brogan also notes the importance of this distinction between Morrison’s “imaginative recuperation” and historical “research” (186n7). Chris Baldick’s analysis of the “Frankensteinian filiations” of nineteenthcentury writing, in In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), is illuminating for Morrison’s use of the spectral metaphor in capturing the history of the “black and angry dead.” He criticizes the unquestioning valorization of fantasy over realism, but acknowledges that while “realism can depict small disturbances to an ordered community, the larger turmoils and metamorphoses of the modern world elude its normal perspective, and can be grasped only by figurative representations of history’s ‘invisible’ workings . . . To show the modern world fully, writers . . . have to shift to a non-realistic register which can apprehend the monstrous dynamics of the modern as well as its visible phenomena” (198). Morrison’s use of the fantastic spectral metaphor is similar to the examples Baldick analyzes; to adequately register the immense psycho-social impact of slavery, she resorts to the metaphor of the ghost. 44. Brogan, 63. Brogan quotes Morrison from “The Site of Memory” from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987) 113.

Chapter 4 1. Hrushovski, 7–8. Hrushovski’s theory is similar to Roger White’s theory of metaphor as a “hybrid” form, constructed by conflating two sentences describing different but analogous situations but with similar grammatical form. 2. Richards, 94. 3. Neil Cornwell observes the importance of demarcated worlds in the novel, noting the resonance between the geographical and social distinctions and the use of the supernatural: “With regard to ‘worlds,’ there is the obvious dichotomy between the world of at least relative freedom enjoyed by the black population of Cincinatti . . . and the slave world . . . Given the apparent supernatural dimension to the novel, the question of a duality of worlds in the sense traditional to the fantastic also must arise” (199–200). 4. Brian Finney, “Temporal Defamiliarization in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Solomon, 105. Also see Philip Page, Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995) 158. 5. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982): “the most distinctive attribute of the



Notes

Notes

slave’s powerlessness was that it always originated (or was conceived of as having originated) as a substitute for death, usually violent death . . . Archetypically, slavery was a substitute for death in war. But almost as frequently, the death commuted was punishment for some capital offense, or death from exposure or starvation. The condition of slavery did not absolve or erase the prospect of death. Slavery was not a pardon; it was, peculiarly, a conditional commutation” (5). Kathleen Brogan has related this to Beloved: “Originating as a substitute for death upon capture by enemies, slavery, Patterson argues, never loses its metaphorical association with death. The slave is incorporated into society as the living dead, a negativity that defines by opposition what lies within the bounds of social order. Existing in a state of marginality, albeit institutionalized, the anomalous slave partakes of the liminality of the ghost.” (Brogan, 89) 6. In this vein, Ann-Janine Morey (“Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison: Reflections on Postmodernism and the Study of Religion and Literature,” in Middleton) argues that Beloved’s use of fluidity displaces “traditionally represented (religious) reality” (249), and “submerges the conventions of western Christianity without necessarily establishing any alternative utopic promises” (251). 7. Susan Bowers, “Beloved and the New Apocalypse,” in Middleton, 215. 8. “Ambiguity”; “Ambiguous,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 9. I use the phrase “referential ambiguity” here because it is a kind of ambiguity that arises from the conflation of two frames of reference. Although a semantic ambiguity can be generated from this, it is distinguished from ambiguity that arises because a word has two possible meanings. In Beloved, the ambiguity of the phrase “the other side” does not arise because of differences between the individual senses of the words in both uses but because it refers to two different situations at once. Roger White sees such referential “bifurcation” as a characteristic feature of metaphor (21–36). 10. Neil Cornwell observes, “Action in Beloved is very largely internally focalized, that is to say depicted, filtered or reflected through the consciousness of one or more characters” (Cornwell, 200). Cornwell links the use of internal focalization with the ambiguity of Beloved’s identity. On focalization, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 189–194. 11. Cornwell, 206. 12. Cornwell argues that Beloved’s identity, as constructed in her monologues, “appears to have little if any reference to the terrible fate of the ‘crawling already?’ baby girl,” apart, perhaps, from her obsession with Sethe (Cornwell, 207). 13. Carolyn Foster Segal, “Morrison’s BELOVED,” Explicator, 57.1 (Fall 1992): 59–61.



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14. Foster Segal also notes the way that such a reading does not undermine the novel’s wider engagement of slavery but adds to it; “The idea of Beloved as a “wild child” or imprisoned closet child, does not diminish the other interpretations; it only adds to this story of memory, pain and longing” (59). 15. At this point, we should recognize that this number is somewhat problematic. The generally accepted range of Africans transported to the Americas is between 10 and 15 million, with an average mortality rate of about 10 percent on the journey. Although there is no way to know how many slaves died in Africa before embarking, it is now known that it could not possibly be as high as Morrison’s number. See Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, (xvii–xxi, 130–160). In interviews, Morrison seems to shift between the number referring to the Middle Passage specifically (Clemons, “Sixty Million,” 46), and slavery in general (“Pain of Being Black,” with Angelo, 257), where it is more accurate. This, however, in itself reflects the ultimate uncertainty of the event in historical consciousness. Although historians have approximated the range of numbers involved, there is no accounting for the individuals who died, their names, or their experiences. The issues of uncertainty around which Morrison structures her novel are still fundamental to the reconstruction of the experience. 16. See Klein, The Middle Passage, 146. 17. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved Who is Not Beloved,” in Solomon, 117–126. House (125n) connects the story of lifelong imprisonment and sexual exploitation to the references to the Middle Passage and argues that Beloved is a girl, now grown up, who was transported from Africa and was then held prisoner for many years. She describes the possibility that Beloved was transported in the late 1850s, when, as W.E.B. Du Bois argues, the antislave trade laws were “grossly violated,” and brought by one of the ship’s officers to the United States via South America, suggested by Beloved’s statement that “the others are taken . . . I am not taken” (212). House quotes Du Bois from The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America: 1638–1870 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965) 183. 18. “Beloved is haunted by the loss of her African parents and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost” (House, 122). 19. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 5. 20. This is also evident in other interviews: “Beloved was also—and it got to be very exciting for me then—those black slaves whom we don’t know, who did not survive that passage, who amounted to a nation, who simply left one place, disappeared and didn’t show up on the other shores. I had to be dragged, I suppose by them, kicking and screaming, into this book, because it is just too much” (Amanda Smith, “Toni Morrison,” Publishers Weekly, August 21, 1987: 51, my emphasis). Morrison’s “was also” illustrates the fantastic simultaneity of Beloved, that her being



Notes

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes

“those black slaves” who did not survive the crossing does not cancel out her being Sethe’s dead daughter. The range of Beloved’s composite identity is acknowledged in Barbara H. Solomon’s introductory survey in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (22–26). Foster Segal, 59. Smith, 51. Freeman, 141. Deborah Horvitz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,” in Solomon, 93. Beloved’s spectral multiplicity is also identified by Bowers, 217, and Robert L. Broad, “Giving Blood to the Scraps: Haints, History and Hosea in Beloved,” African American Review 28.2 (Summer 1994): 190, 192. Hrushovski, 39. “Field of Reference,” as noted earlier, is Hrushovski’s term for the “fictional world” of a text (15) that is produced by the intersection of various “frames of reference.” Roger White argues that referential bifurcation is a definitive quality in metaphor that shows that it is a conflation of two frames of reference into one sentence or unit rather than the use of a metaphorical word (21–36). Ibid., 233. Eusebio Rodrigues, “The Telling of Beloved,” in Solomon, 157. The factor of forced mobility is often characterized as the defining feature of slavery, separating slavery from other forms of forced or coerced labor, such as serfdom. Slaves are a mobile labor force, with no ties to land or kin, who can be bought or sold and transferred to other’s control. Orlando Patterson writes of “natal alienation” as a constituent element of slavery (5–8). Also see Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2. Rodrigues, 157. “The others are taken . . . I am not taken” (212). To the extent to which they are comprehensible, in the monologues Beloved herself does not seem to fall into the sea, but waits on the “bridge,” and appears to be taken prisoner by a white man for sexual purposes. Morrison curiously identifies her as a survivor when speaking to Marsha Darling: She is “another kind of dead which is not spiritual but flesh, which is, a survivor from the true, factual slave ship” (“The Realm of Responsibility,” 5). Ibid. Horvitz, 93. Wyatt, “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Solomon, 218–219. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 5. Bowers, 220. Ibid. Roger White has observed that the etymology of “metaphor” has encouraged many philosophical misconceptions of metaphor that see it merely as a transferred word or name (11).



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41. This is evident in her interview with Marsha Darling, where after addressing the specific cultural denial of the Middle Passage (“nothing survives about . . . that”) she extends her scope to the denial of slavery as a general historical phenomenon: “I think Afro-Americans in rushing away from slavery, which was important to do—it meant rushing out of bondage into freedom—also rushed away from the slaves” (“The Realm of Responsibility,” 5). 42. Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” Zinsser, 109–110. 43. Ibid., 110. 44. Bowers, 220. Bowers reads the novel as an apocalyptic fiction, drawing on the etymological roots of “apocalypse” as meaning an unveiling, or revelation. 45. Freeman, 145.

Chapter 5 1. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Reponses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984) 84. 2. Ibid., 86. 3. This reiterates the connection that Todorov (81) makes between realized metaphor and the fantastic, which I looked at in my introductory chapter. 4. Finucane, 212. 5. Ibid., 222–223. See also Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977): “the new ghosts were essentially urban products, possessing little raison d’etre beyond the mere ability to communicate. They were invoked primarily in order that their messages might prove the existence of the spirit world—they had no further social functions” (52–53). 6. See Engels, “Natural Science and the Spirit World,” 297–310. 7. “Supplement,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 8. Gary Daily, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Rememory, History and the Fantastic” in Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989) 141–147. 9. Ibid., 144. Daily quotes Morrison from Bank Street, a television interview with Morrison, London, 1987. 10. Morrison addressed the immensity of the emotional landscape of slavery in an interview with Elizabeth Kastor: “Also, it’s very large. The cruelty was inventive; it was creative cruelty.” She argues that historians, focused as they are on rational explanations, cannot “deal with the sort of surrounding pathological whatever” (54, Kastor). 11. Morrison, “The Pain of Being Black,” 257. 12. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), which was written shortly after Beloved, Morrison examines the obscured presence of Africans and African Americans in white American literature.



Notes

Notes

13. “I was trying to make it a personal experience. The book was not about the institution—Slavery with a capital S. It was about these anonymous people called slaves” (“The Pain of Being Black,” 257). 14. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” 143. 15. Morrison, “The Realm of Responsibility,” 5. 16. Cicero, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbel (London: Loeb edition, 1939), refers to “a continuous stream of metaphors” as “allegoria or ‘otherspeaking’” (xxvii, 94). See Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique for an outline of the etymology and history of the word allegoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 263–264. 17. Quoted by Daily (144) from the Bank Street television interview, London, 1987. 18. His objection centers on John Crowe Ransom’s identification of the blood “rushing out of doors” in Julius Caesar (III, ii 176ff ) as a page-boy when it very well could have been a “rudely-awakened householder.” See White, 86. 19. “The traditional theory of metaphor . . . made metaphor seem to be a verbal matter, a shifting and displacement of words, whereas fundamentally it is a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a translation between contexts. Thought is metaphoric, and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom”; Richards, 94. 20. White, 92 and 277n8. 21. Ibid., 103. This is a more precise formulation of Hrushovski’s claim that metaphor involves “world-cognitions” (18), that we have to actually think from our experience about the relationship between the two compared frames of reference in the metaphor. 22. Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1965) 59. 23. Ibid., 56. 24. White: “communication by metaphor becomes a collaborative creative process, wherein the interpreter of metaphor is invited to perform an imaginative act of creation that seeks to emulate and re-create the original act of creation of the poet” (108). This need not rely on a naïve idea of authorial intentions. 25. White, 108. 26. Ibid., 180. 27. “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy,” Sacks, 6. Such an invitation and acknowledgment of a community is “involved in any communication, but in ordinary literal discourse their involvement is so pervasive and routine that they go unremarked. The use of metaphor throws [this] into relief ” (6). 28. Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” Interview with Claudia Tate, TaylorGuthrie, 164. 29. Morrison, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Interview with Nellie McKay, Taylor-Guthrie, 155.



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30. Morrison is a deliberate writer and thinker, often intentionally reiterating the same issues and ideas in both her fiction and her critical writings and interviews, making connections between what goes on inside and outside her fictions. The idea of absence as a presence, for example, is a major thread in her critical work and can be seen to structure her readings of the black presence in white American literature in the collection of essays Playing in the Dark. 31. Morrison, Interview with Claudia Tate, 155. 32. Philip Page (157–158) also discusses this episode as a demonstration of the active nature of narrative creation. 33. Freeman, 148. 34. Horvitz, 98. 35. Wyatt, 219. Interestingly, Morrison herself has stated that the ambiguity of the first few pages of the novel is similarly an attempt to render the disorientation of the Middle Passage for the reader: “the in media res opening . . . is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense . . . And the house into which this snatching—this kidnapping—propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed” (Morrison, “The Opening Sentences,” 92). 36. “Abstraction,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 37. This is similar to the process described by both White (132) and Hrushovski (8), whereby dead metaphors are reactivated by their interrelation. 38. Nowottny, 56. 39. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillian, 1929) A179/B222. 40. White, 153. 41. Klein, The Middle Passage, 251.

Chapter 6 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) 276. 2. Daily, 146. 3. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Ben Fowkes, in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, ed. David Fernbach (London: Allen Lane, 1973).



Notes

Notes

4. Ricardo Gullon’s “Gabriel García Marquez and the Lost Art of Storytelling” Diacritics 1.1 (1971) is a good example of such “mythifying” readings. He argues against the idea that Macondo “might be an equivalent of Spanish America,” stating that “Though the novel may suggest parts of Colombia, it clearly transcends physical particularizing and offers instead a parable of creation, man’s history and human nature” (29). However, in The Fragrance of Guava (London: Verso, 1983), a series of interviews with his friend Plinio Apuleya Mendoza, García Marquez specifically denies that the novel is a “parable or allegory of the history of the human race” (72), but does acknowledge that it represents Latin American history (73). 5. Jeffrey Mehlman, in Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), sees the spectral metaphor as compromising Marx’s expressed aims of historical explanation. The spectral signals “something stranger and more disquieting” than “a psychologization of the political” (7). Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 146–147. 6. Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989) 234. In The Fragrance of Guava, García Márquez states, “I want the world to be socialist and I believe that sooner or later it will be” (59). He also describes his political education at his high school, which was “full of teachers who’d been taught by a Marxist in the Teachers Training College . . . The algebra teacher would give us classes on historical materialism during break, the chemistry teacher would lend us books by Lenin and the history teacher would tell us about the class struggle” (97). 7. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 146–147. 8. In Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), Jacques Derrida observes that this phrase “lastet wie ein Alp” can be interpreted as “weighs like one of those ghosts that give nightmares” (108). 9. Hegel never actually said that historical events occur twice. David Fernbach observes that Marx was probably building on comments that Engels had made in a letter of 1851: “It really seems as if old Hegel in his grave were acting as World Spirit and directing history, ordaining most conscientiously that it should be unrolled twice over, once as a great tragedy and once as a wretched farce” (Eighteenth Brumaire, 146n). 10. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”; James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; London: Penguin, 1992) 42. In his introduction to Joyce’s novel, Declan Kiberd notes this parallel, even seeing Marx’s text as a “source” for Stephen’s comment (lxxv). Kiberd also ties Ulysses to One Hundred Years of Solitude, both being “post-colonial novel[s] of magic realism” (lxxx). 11. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981) 164.



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12. Mehlman sees Marx’s rhetoric as a recognition of the fundamental irrationality of the events that undermine Marx’s class analysis; Bonaparte’s rise is “an affirmation . . . of the irrelevance of the category of (true or false) representation,” breaking “with the philosopheme of representation (and, consequently, of truth)” (20). 13. Mehlman, 7. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Kojin Karatani “The Problem of Historical Repetition,” trans. Sabu Kohso Karatani Forum, 27 July 1999, http://www.karataniforum.org/ problem.html. See also Kojin Karatani, “Representation and Repetition—The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte revisited,” trans. Sabu Kohso Karatani Forum, September 10, 2002, http://www.karataniforum. org/represent.html. 16. Karatani, “Problem,” 3. 17. “Farce,” The Oxford English Dictionary. 18. Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” 143. 19. This is Gramsci’s description of the representative relationship between the politically and culturally dominant aristocracy and the economically dominant industrial bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Britain: “The old land-owning aristocracy is joined to the industrialists by a kind of suture which is precisely that which in other countries unites the traditional intellectuals with the new dominant classes.” Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 18. 20. David Fernbach, introduction to Surveys From Exile, 12. 21. Paul Hamilton, Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1996) 103–104. 22. Ibid., 107. 23. Chris Baldick argues that Marx’s frequent use of gothic imagery conforms to both his understanding of capitalism and bourgeois society; 121 and 125.

Chapter 7 1. The Spanish word that Rabassa translates as “mythical” is “quimerica,” which Kenrick Mose in Defamiliarization in the Work of Gabriel García Márquez from 1947–1967 (Lewistin: Edwin Mellon, 1989) translates as “chimerical” (219). This foregrounds the element of mystification and delusion. 2. Gullon, for example, argues that “the circular structure of the novel leads the reader from the chaos and void where creation occurs to the chaos and void where all ends and is resolved” (29). 3. Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 498. 4. Birute Ciplijauskaite, “Foreshadowing as Technique and Theme in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Books Abroad 47:3 (1973): 479.



Notes

Notes

5. Martin, Journeys, 228. 6. The avenging hero of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is the peasant youth Alfonso, who is the heir to the lineage of the good Prince Alfonso, from whom the castle was usurped. 7. Martin, Journeys, 228. 8. Ibid., 230. 9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Morse (1848; London: Penguin, 1985). 10. Ibid., 85–86. 11. Ibid., 83. 12. Ibid., 83. 13. Ibid., 82. 14. In All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), Marshall Berman exploits Marx’s exuberant rhetoric in The Communist Manifesto to characterize the instability of capitalist modernity. 15. The English text has “spilling into eternity,” which may be either a translation error or misprint. Martin translates it as “spinning” ( Journeys, 232). 16. Gullon, 29. 17. Martin, Journeys: “Needless to say, the family members themselves had perceived no spiral, only cycles of futility” (232). Michael Wood, in Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), similarly sees Pilar’s image as an indication that “the future has an end, winds down and dies; the repetitions themselves one day stop repeating” (51). 18. Jerry Root, “Never Ending the Ending: Strategies of Narrative Time in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” RAJAH 15 (1988): 15. 19. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1976) 91. 20. Riohacha is mentioned a few times through the novel and situated as the origin of “the intricate labyrinths of blood” (336) that constitute the Buendía family history. García Márquez’s birthplace, Aracataca, is in the Upar Valley. 21. Ironweed (1983; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 1. 22. Both Wood (26–28) and Martin (Journeys, 234) argue convincingly that while the novel’s world is recognizably Colombian, its ambiguities and omissions of specific political and historical references position it as more generally Latin American. 23. Martin, Journeys, 227. See also James Higgins, “Gabriel García Márquez: Cien Anos de Soledad,” Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction, ed. Philip Swanson (London: Routledge, 1990), who notes that, although the narrative largely traces Latin America’s postindependence, “the early phase of Macondo’s history evokes Latin America’s colonial period, when communities lived isolated from one another and the viceroyalties themselves had little contact with the distant metropolis” (149). 24. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 147–148. 25. Higgins, 149.



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26. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 15. 27. As noted in Chapter 1, the spectral suit of armor is a favorite motif of the gothic novel, with The Castle of Otranto opening with the appearance of a giant suit of armor representing the enormous legacy of the past, the rightful dynasty of the castle of Otranto. 28. Michael Wood suggests that the translation of “olvido” to oblivion misses the sense of “forgottenness, a state of abandonment or neglect which is not quite the blankness of oblivion” (33). 29. García Márquez, Guava, 39. 30. Cited without reference by Stephen Minta in Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987) 39. 31. In The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), Stanley and Barbara Stein argue that the wars of independence achieved the dual aims of the criollo component of the Iberian elite: the “substitution of Iberian dominance” and the “preservation of the colonial heritage of political and social structures.” Immediately after independence, this class’s attentions turned toward the “consolidation of colonial patterns of political elitism and social stratification so as to contain social tensions in the middle and lower strata of colonial society” (160). See pages 159–171 for an overview of the political heritage of colonialism. 32. Katalin Kulin, Modern Latin American Fiction: A Return to Didacticism (Budapest: Akademai Kiado, 1988) 65. 33. Theotonio dos Santos, “The Structure of Dependence,” American Economic Review 60.2, Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-second Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1970) 231. 34. Ibid. 35. Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy, eds. James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson (New York: Anchor, 1972) 3–17. 36. Cockcroft, Frank, and Johnson, Introduction, xi. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., xi and xii. 39. Higgins, 149. 40. Ibid. 41. Michael Wood observes that his discovery is “so foreign to the community that no one believes him. But this new Columbus gets his chance only because his culture has forgotten the old one, and it is of course a lovely, dizzying touch to make a group of Americans forget Columbus” (29). 42. Numerous critics have documented the relations between the novel’s banana plague and the real history of the United Fruit Company. For examples, see Minta (163–172) and Regina Janes, “Liberals, Conservatives, and Bananas: Colombian Politics in the Fictions of Gabriel García Márquez,” Modern Critical Views: Gabriel García



Notes

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

Notes

Márquez , ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1989) 139–144. Andre Gunder Frank, “Economic Dependence, Class Structure, and Underdevelopment Policy,” Cockcroft, Frank, and Johnson, 23–24. Higgins observes that “The patrician Buendías represent that oligarchy which has traditionally ruled Latin America. Macondo’s founding family, they develop into a land-owning class . . . and subsequently they evolve into an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie by branching into business. The solitude that is their dominant family trait is directly related to their egoism” (153). Higgins, 152. Dos Santos, 231. Fernanda’s social class exemplifies the contention of Cockcroft, Johnson, and Frank that the ruling classes in Latin America are themselves dependent, “comprador,” ruling classes (introduction, xviii). Dos Santos, 231. Martin, Journeys, 227. Edwin Williamson has usefully distinguished these two readings of the novel, one with a “denotative” link to a “magical” reality, and the other completely denying any link at all to external reality. See “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings , eds. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 45–46. Examples of this “autarchic” tendency are Emir Rodriguez Monegal, “One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Last Three Pages,” Books Abroad 47.3 (1973), who emphasizes the novel’s “total fictionality” (485); Roberto González Echevarría, “With Borges in Macondo,” Diacritics 2.1 (1972): 57–60; Aníbal González, “Translation and Genealogy: One Hundred Years of Solitude,” McGuirk and Cardwell, 65–79. Williamson, 45. Martin observes that this is “the author’s own prophecy of doom,” which demonstrates that the novel’s “apocalyptic ‘events’ . . . are patently historical ones” ( Journeys, 229). Gene H. Bell-Villada has pointed out less metaphoric possibilities for the deluge, observing that in 1972 a U.S. Senate committee disclosed that the U.S. military had been “seeding clouds so as to generate hurricanes and floods in Vietnam.” See “García Márquez and the Novel,” Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez , ed. George R. McMurray (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987) 217. Gabriel García Márquez, Leafstorm and Other Stories, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Picador-Pan, 1979). Apuleya Mendoza/García Márquez, Guava, 10. Leafstorm, 1. Cockcroft, Frank, and Johnson, introduction, xi.



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58. Dos Santos, 231. Higgins observes the “ironic significance” of Jose Arcadio Buendía’s dream of the city of mirrors, as suggesting that Macondo is merely “reflecting the developed world” (152). 59. Minta, 30–31. In his Nobel prize acceptance speech, “The Solitude of Latin America” (McGuirk and Cardwell, 207–211), García Márquez describes solitude in this-worldly terms, as an alterable conjunction of historical forces.

Chapter 8 1. Apuleya Mendoza and García Márquez, Guava, 35; 96. 2. Ibid., 35. 3. Mario Vargas Llosa, “García Márquez: From Aracataca to Macondo,” Bloom, 18. 4. In a similar way, Kulin has observed that the novel’s “historicity . . . does not derive from the detailed description of Colombian political and social events, but from the perspective ‘transcription’of the country’s specific and peculiar conditions, which makes it possible for other peoples to recognize in them their own situation and conditions” (63). 5. Wood observes that although the narration doesn’t directly mimic the voices of the characters and community, “it strictly (if tacitly) adopts their point of view” (63). Similarly, Martin argues that “García Márquez presents most aspects of reality from the standpoint of his characters” (222). 6. Both Gregory Lawrence, in “Marx in Macondo,” Latin American Literary Review 2.4 (1974), and Jose David Saldivar, in “Ideology and Deconstruction in Macondo,” Latin American Literary Review 13.25 (1985), see ice and mirrors in the novel as images of the alienation of the Buendías from the world they have created. However, neither of their analyses grasps the full importance of this imagery, and its development throughout the narrative, to the eventual fate of Macondo. 7. Wood sees this as representative of the novel’s general duplicity (44). 8. Williamson, 47. 9. Martin, Journeys, 220. 10. Stephen Minta traces the word back to a banana plantation in Cartegena, “Makondo,” and to the Bantu language of the slaves shipped to that region, where it means “banana,” which suggests that the banana company is the central episode in the novel. As Minta notes, Macondo is “a world which is brought into prominence and then obliterated from memory in accordance with its rise and fall as a banana company town” (144). 11. In The Fragrance of Guava, García Márquez tells Apuleya Mendoza that although Latin Americans “can benefit . . . from what other continents have achieved in their long turbulent histories” we “must not go on copying them mechanically as we have done until now.” He argues that to try and “implant” Western-style democracy or Soviet-style socialism “in its raw state” in Latin America is “mimetic and unrealistic” (101).



Notes

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Notes

Minta, 178–179. Williamson, 62. Hamilton, 107. “Metaphysical” (Sense 4.c): “That is above or goes beyond the laws of nature; belonging to an operation or agency which is more than or other than physical or natural; supernatural.” The Oxford English Dictionary. In García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Gene H. Bell-Villada notes that it “is essential . . . to take note of the differing circumstances that attend those seeming recurrences” (97). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. S. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1965) 48–49. Williamson, 49. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991) 12. Eagleton acknowledges that “Even if ideology is largely a matter of ‘lived relations,’ those relations, at least in certain social conditions, would often seem to involve claims and beliefs which are untrue” (26). G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 115. Ibid., 115–6. Cohen quotes from Capital (72 and 74 translator’s note). Frank, 24. Cohen, 331. Williamson, 56. Williamson observes that here “the foreign exploiters . . . have been able to take advantage of magical realism to the detriment of Macondo” (54). He accordingly argues that magical realism is not merely a “narrative style” but “can be shown to be a manifestation of the malaise that causes the decline of the Buendía family” (46). However, he does not specifically use the concept of ideology, merely referring to an unscientific worldview. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Eagleton, Ideology, 25. Ibid., 19. Ibid. Ibid., 27. H.A. Murena, The Original Sin of America, quoted by Gerald Martin, “On Magical and Social Realism in García Márquez,” McGuirk and Cardwell, 95. Martin argues that the “family’s morbid fear of a child cursed with a pig’s tail is a condensed metaphor for the combined ideologies of original sin and biological determinism . . . The religious concept of original sin circumscribed the whole of life in the colonial period, and was overlain by biological determinism after Independence, as an explanation of Latin America’s continuing backwardness and a positivistic justification of the rule of Europeanized minorities” ( Journeys, 228). Martin thus points to



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the particular determining influence of determinist ideologies themselves in mediating the interpretation of Latin America’s social reality, ensuring the persistence of quasi-colonial social relations and continuing dependency. 35. Eagleton, Ideology, 27.

1. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 41. 2. In The Fragrance of Guava, García Márquez himself notes the crucial role of the sheets in making the episode “real”; “she just wasn’t getting off the ground . . . One day as I was thinking about this problem I went out into my garden. It was very windy. A very big, very beautiful black woman had just done the washing and was trying to hang the sheets out on the line. She couldn’t, the wind kept blowing them away. I had a brainwave . . . Remedios the Beautiful needed sheets to ascend to heaven. In this case, the sheets were the element of reality” (37). 3. Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo, and García Márquez, Guava, 37. 4. Higgins, 146. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Michael Wood argues that magical realism acknowledges that “the most fantastic things have actually been believed and asserted by live people somewhere, and often in Latin America.” This belief “doesn’t make these things true but it may make them real” (56). 8. See, for example, Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” Zamora and Faris eds., for an interpretation of magical realism, referring to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which makes particular use of the ghost as a sign that “magical realism is truly postmodern in its rejection of the binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western modernity” (498). 9. Higgins, 147. 10. Williamson, 47. 11. Ibid. 12. Eagleton, Ideology, 12. 13. Ibid., 52. Eagleton is here specifically discussing ideological rationalization as an attempt to substitute rational seeming justifications for irrational emotions, opinions, and interests. However, his description of ideological rationalization as metaphorical holds outside of this particular context. 14. Wood, 57. 15. McHale, 135–136; Rita A. Bergenholtz, “One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Finale,” The International Fiction Review 20.1 (1993): 17; Mose, 206. 16. Gerald Martin has observed that the family’s obsession with incest and the family line is a condensed metaphor for the ideologies of original sin and biological determinism, 228.



Chapter 9

Notes

17. Martin, Journeys, 228. 18. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) 164. 19. Ted Cohen, Sacks, 1. 20. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1968) [Part I, Chap. 4] 102. This also recalls Roger Bacon’s conception of the “idols of the market place,” formed “by the intercourse and association of men with each other.” See Jorge Larrain The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979) 21. As Jorge Larrain observes, Bacon’s conception is a forerunner to the notion of ideology: deception “arise in relation to language, ‘for it is by discourse that men associate’” (21). 21. Hobbes, (Part I, Chap. 4) 109–110. 22. Essentially, Hobbes, like Ricoeur, sees metaphor as a “planned category mistake.” In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur refers to Gilbert Ryle’s concept of category mistake as the “presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another” and states that “it is tempting to say that metaphor is planned category mistake” (197). Ricoeur quotes Ryle from The Concept of Mind (1949; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1963) 10. 23. Martin translates this as “literature was the best game devised for pulling the wool over people’s eyes” ( Journeys, 231), which gives further support to my reading by suggesting an obscuring “mask.” 24. Hobbes, (Part I Chap. 4) 110. 25. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 268. 26. “The secondary fr of a metaphor, denied existence in the Field of Reference [of the text] does not state a belief but sets the reader’s imagination in a new situation, breaking the continuity of a plausible representation” (Hrushovski, 18). 27. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 271. 28. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 29. 29. Martin, Journeys, 232. 30. Eagleton, Ideology, 131. 31. As far as I am aware, only Higgins (154–155), Martin (Journeys, 232), and Gregory Lawrence (57) read the conclusion as a political liberation. Lawrence sees the ending as “the negative moment of a dialectical movement; the responsibility for affirming the existence of the human species is left to the reader . . . the reader is challenged to decipher García Márquez’s novel in the same way that the Buendías are challenged to decipher Melquíades’ parchments.” Interestingly, this is the reading of the novel taken by the political economists Charles K. Wilbur and Kenneth P. Jameson in “Paradigms of Economic Development and Beyond,” The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 4th edition, ed. Charles K. Wilbur (New York: Random House, 1988). They read the novel’s ending as a parable of liberation, deciphering the parchments of development “in an effort to wipe out that history, to call forth the wind



240

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

241

to banish underdevelopment and to facilitate policy which can bring about meaningful development” (24). In the English text, this reads ungrammatically as “ending at every moment but never ending its ending,” which is presumably a misprint or mistranslation. I have corrected the text’s “spilling,” which is translated by others, such as Gerald Martin (232), as the more fitting “spinning.” Similar to Marx’s famous claim in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism produces “its own grave-diggers” (94), Aureliano can be seen as the gravedigger of neocolonialism, born from within the provincial elite that perpetuates it, and finally bringing the neocolonial era to an end. Prensa Latina, 1971. Cited by Kulin with no further reference, 65. Martin argues that the “sense of euphoria” in the novel’s conclusion reflects the period in which it was written, where the early years of the Cuban revolution and the rise of the “New Latin American Novel” seemed to signify “real proof of the end of neocolonialism and the beginning of true liberation” (233). Similarly, Higgins argues that the novel “reflects, at least on the socio-political level, the optimism generated throughout Latin America in the 1960’s by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution,” and that Aureliano, who “has broken out of the narrow perspective of his own privileged class,” finds “the imminent demise of his own class” in Melquíades’s manuscripts (154–155). Marx, “Postface to 2nd edition,” Capital, 103.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4.

Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” 151. Freeman, 146. Martin, Journeys, 233. Minta, 148. Minta also argues that “One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . calls on the reader to recognize that fundamental difference [between the world and the book], with an affirmation of the absolute significance of the present, and a rejection of the labyrinths of nostalgia in which the imagination can so happily lose its way” (178–179). 5. Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983; London: Vintage, 1995): “The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality . . . My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan” (29).



Notes




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250

Absence as legacy of slavery, 36–39 as palpable, as presence, 24–25, 35–38 Allegoria, 107, 230 Allegory, 67, 224 Ambiguity of reference, 80–81, 83, 85, 226 American Civil War, 16, 17 Analogy, 121–122, 132, 221 Aristotle, 63 Auden, W.H., 220, 224 Austin, J.L., 191 Bacon, Roger, 240 Baldick, Chris, 225, 233 Beardsley, Monroe, 109 Bell-Villada, Gene H., 183, 236 Beloved dedication, 83 epigraph, 57–58, 106–107 relation to traditional historical studies, 70, 102–103 Beloved, character ambiguity, 48–49, 54, 55, 80–83, 85 as collective identity, 86 as collective projection, 51, 53 as excess of significance, 104–108 as metaphor for historical knowledge, 56 as persisting trace, 54 as underdetermined, 110–111

dependence on perception by others, 51, 52 embodiment of slavery as phenomenon, 86, 88, 92 historical significance of final disappearance, 55–60, 68–71 incompatibility of explanations, 81, 83–84, 87 infantile characterization, 82–83 instability and the Middle Passage, 59 multiplicity of identity, 85–89, 91–93 significance of name, 119–120 Berkeley, George (Bishop), 51, 221 Berman, Marshall, 149 Bhaskar, Roy, 220 Bifurcation (see also ambiguity), 87–89 Black, Max, 217 Bowers, Susan, 79, 94–96 Briggs, Julia, 229 Brogan, Kathleen, 50, 71, 226 Christol, Hélène, 17, 49 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 230 Ciplijauskaite, Birute, 144 Cockcroft, James D., 163, 173 Cohen, G.A., 184–186 Cohen, Ted, 111, 202 Colonialism, 158–162 and anachronism, 158–159 and dynamics of spectral presence, 159, 161–162 continuing power, 158, 161–162



INDEX

Index

Commodity fetishism, 184–185 Cooper, David E., 216–217 Cornwell, Neil, 53, 55, 82, 221–222, 225–226 Crookes, William, 102 Cuban Revolution, 208, 241 Daily, Gary, 102 Darling, Marsha, 39, 57, 85, 88 Davidson, Donald, 216 Deconstruction and metaphor, 62–64 and sous rature, 61 in Beloved, 62, 64, 68–71 in Eighteenth Brumaire, 136–139 in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 196, 203–206, 209–210 philosophy, 60–64 Denial collective in Beloved’s coda, 51, 54–55 in social world of Beloved, 46–48 Dependence, political and economic, 162–163 and spectral insubstantiality, 163, 167–168, 173–174 Derealization in coda of Beloved, 50, 66–67 Derrida, Jacques, 61–65, 68, 202, 205 Of Grammatology, 223 “Structure, Sign and Play,” 60, 64 “White Mythology,” 62–63 Determinism, 124–128, 135, 139, 153, 184, 190 and dependence and underdevelopment, 168–169 and repetition, 142, 145–146, 156 as metaphor for ideological determination, 191–192 dos Santos, Theotonio, 163, 167–168, 173 Du Bois, W. E. B., 227 Eagleton, Terry, 126, 184, 190–192, 199, 200, 206, 207, 238–239

Fantastic genre, 17, 19–22, 42, 49, 68, 98 Farce as historical genre, 125–128 Fatalism (see determinism) Fernbach, David, 133 Finney, Brian, 74 Finucane, R. C., 101–102 Foster Segal, Carolyn, 83, 86, 227 Frank, Andre Gunder, 163, 165–166, 173 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 86, 96, 119, 213 Freud, Sigmund, 26 García Márquez Leafstorm, 172 politics, 124 Ghost as communicative figure, 2–5 as transfiguration of dead, 3–5 etymology, 215 see also Spectral González Echevarría, Roberto, 159 Gothic, 2, 5, 17, 49, 101, 124, 146, 158, 187, 215, 235 Gramsci, Antonio, 123, 132, 233 Gullon, Ricardo, 150, 232–233 Haiku, 8, 216 Hamilton, Paul, 135–136, 139 Harries, Karsten, 40, 218 Heinz, Denise, 55 Henle, Paul, 18 Higgins, James, 159, 164, 166–167, 197, 198, 208, 234, 236–237, 241 Hobbes, Thomas, 202–205 Homer, 216 Horvitz, Deborah, 86, 92, 119 House, Elizabeth, 84–85, 227 Hrushovski, Benjamin, 8–10, 12, 13, 18, 30, 65, 73, 87, 91, 204 Hume, Kathryn, 98



252

Ideology and encoded truth, 182–184 and metaphor, 130 and political representation, 132–134 and realized metaphor, 200–202 and social reality, 123–124 and spectral metaphor, 135–136 as part of social reality, 184–186 as transfiguration of social reality, 176–177 consequences and effects, 133–135, 187–191 deconstruction, 136–139 Imagist poetry, 5–8, 215 and metaphor, 8 Immanent critique, 124, 138–139, 206–207 and social transformation, 208 Jakobson, Roman, 211–212 Johnson, Dale L., 163, 173 Joyce, James, 232 Kafka, Franz Metamorphosis, 19, 24, 66, 219 Kant, Immanuel, 121–122 Karatani, Kojin, 127–128 Kastor, Elizabeth, 69–70 Keats “To Hope,” 18 Kennedy, William, 157–158 Klein, Herbert S., 122 Kulin, Katalin, 162–163 Larrain, Jorge, 240 Lawrence, David, 32 Lawrence, Gregory, 237, 240 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 50, 221 Levin, Samuel R., 218 Magical realism, 16, 139, 143, 158, 196, 198–199, 204, 214 and social consciousness, 188–189 as intentionally duplicitous, 198–199

253

Martin, Gerald, 124, 145, 147, 150, 168, 178, 192, 201, 205, 208, 214, 234, 236–239, 241 Martin Soskice, Janet, 218 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology, 183, 195 Capital, 138, 156 The Communist Manifesto, 147–149, 188, 241 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 124–139, 141–146, 149, 155, 158–159, 167, 177, 181–182, 190 McHale, Brian, 15 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 127, 232–233 Melville, Herman, 10 Mendoza, Plinio Apuleyo, 175, 196 Metaphor and augmentation, 9–10, 98 and ideological deception, 130–135, 202 and philosophy, 62–63 and predication, 10, 12, 217 and science, 62–63, 221 and supplementation, 10, 14, 103 and thought, 109, 230 and transference, 10–12, 14–15, 73, 88 and underdetermination, 109–110 as collaborative, 111 as emulation of ideological transfiguration, 200–202 as generative, 41, 221 as making absences present, 24, 40 as miniature fictions, 212 as relational, 121 conflation in, 87–89, etymology, 14, 94, 228 exploratory nature, 111, 121–122 literal absurdity, 10, 19, 66–67 suspension of reference in, 13, 15–16, 64–65, 66, 67, 137, 203–204



Index

Index

Metaphorical interpretation and critique of ideology, 204–206 dramatization in Beloved, 64–68 dramatization in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 203–204 Middle Passage, 58–59, 62, 70–71, 82–96, 99, 115–122, 213 and use of metaphor in Beloved, 62, 68–71, 88, 91–96, 99, 107–108, 118–122 as elusive element in Beloved, 39 as excess in Beloved, 105–108 as interpretively demanding, 115–118 as source of absence, 39 historiography, 120, 121 lost names of dead, 58–59, 116 recent historical research, 222, 227 Minta, Stephen, 173, 180, 214, 237, 241 Mirage as metaphor for ideology, 182, 184–185, 187 Mohanty, Satya P., 68–69 Morey, Ann-Janine, 226 Morrison, Toni participatory aims in fiction, 111–113 “The Site of Memory,” 95–96 Murena, Hector, 192 Negation as distinct from denial, 46–47 in social world of Beloved, 46 of spectral metaphor in Beloved, 65–66 of spectral metaphor in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 203–206 Norris, Christopher, 61 Nowottny, Winifred, 110, 112, 120 Patterson, Orlando, 225–226, 228 Paxson, James J., 40–44 Poe, Edgar Allen, 50 Poetic language as suspension of reference, 211–212

Political representation and ideology, 133 and metaphor, 132–133 as displaced and insubstantial, 132 Pound, Ezra “In a Station of the Metro,” 5–16, 41, 45, 73, 87, 97–98, 201 “Vorticism,” 6–8 Prensa Latina, 208 Reader, active role of, 111–112, 118–120, 122, 205, 213–214 Realism and Beloved, 62, 68–71 philosophical, 223–224 Realized metaphor, 18, 66–67, 199–201 link to fantastic, 19–22 Reconstruction, post–Civil War, 16 Recurrence (and repetition), 124–139, 143, 144 and fatalism, 146 and progression, 148–150 and underdevelopment, 163–164 Reification, 28–29 Richards, I. A., 5, 9, 11, 15, 109, 230 distinction between “tenor” and “vehicle” in metaphor, 5, 9, 109, 131 Ricoeur, Paul, 41, 103, 201, 211–212, 240 Rodrigues, Eusebio L., 89–90 Root, Jerry, 150 Rushdie, Salman Shame, 214, 241 The Satanic Verses, 1–2, 4 Russian formalists, 18, 24, Ryle, Gilbert, 240 Saldivar, Jose David, 237 Self-reflexivity, thematic significance of, 68–71, 94–96, 121–122, 205, 206, 211, 214 Shakespeare, William, 101 Hamlet, 2–5, 14, 50, 157 Julius Caesar, 230 Macbeth, 50



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Index

as impulse of metaphor, 40–43 Sullivan, Jack, 50 Swanson, Philip, 234 Tate, Claudia, 111, 113 Todorov, Tzvetan, 19–22, 67 Tracy, David, 41 Transfiguration (or transposition) metaphorical and ideological in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 176–177, 196, 199–202 Underdetermination and history of slavery, 113–115 and interpretive supplementation, 110, 120 and the Middle Passage, 115–120 and the role of the reader, 111–112, 119 as dramatization of historical interpretation, 120–121 in figure of Beloved, 110–111 in metaphor, 109–110 Underdevelopment and recurrence in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 163–166 as historical process, 163–164, 167 United Fruit Company, 164, 172, 235 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 175–177, 196 Wallace, A.R. (zoologist), 102 Walpole, Horace, 215, 234 Washington, Elsie B., 60 White, Roger, 87–88, 91, 109–112, 117, 120–121 Williams, William Carlos, 218 Williamson, Edwin, 169, 178, 181, 183, 186, 188–189, 198–199, 236, 238 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13 Wood, Michael, 200, 234–235, 237, 239 Wyatt, Jean, 93, 119 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 143



Shellshock, 26 Simile, 8, 10, 15 Slave narratives, 79, 96, 102 Slavery and death as other worlds, 76–77 and freedom, divide, 74–76 as interpretively demanding history, 113–115 as social death, 76, 225–226, 228 continuing legacy, 59–60 forced rootlessness, 89, 228 Specter etymology, 220 Spectral and materialism in Victorian era, 101–102 and repetition, 124–130, 142, 150–153, 155–156 and social dynamics in Beloved, 32–35 as absence made present, 30–32 as emissary between worlds, 77–80, 88, 94 as “emotional energy” (see also Spiritualism), 26, 28–30 as excess of physical world, 14, 99–102 as grounded figure, 157–158 as reified emotion in Beloved, 17–18 as sign of illusion, deception, or insubstantiality, 3, 129–130, 150–156 augmentation and traditional history, 102–103 dissolution as acknowledgment of metaphor, 62, 65–71, 203–206 psychological tradition, 50, 67 self-reflexive potential, 6, 16–17, 21, 61 Spirit etymology, 220 Spiritualism, 26, 28, 29, 31, 102 Stein, Stanley and Barbara, 235 Substantialization

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