Toni Morrison's Beloved: ghosts of a brutal past

In the final instalment of her series on the novel, Jane Smiley on why Toni Morrison’s Beloved - a sensational story of slavery and racism in America - has endured

Top 10 ghost stories

Jane Smiley

Saturday 8 July 2006

I

t is clear from Morrison's dedication ("Sixty Million and more") that she intends to embrace the social document potential of the novel, as, indeed, any novel that treats injustice and its effects must do. This acceptance of the novel's power to shape opinion actually frees her to do anything she wants artistically - novelists who are careful to avoid social questions tend to limit their subjects to personal relationships or aesthetic questions that seem, on the surface, to be perennial, though in fact the novelist is usually simply avoiding the social and economic implications of what he or she is saying. For Morrison and most other writers of the 1980s, though, everything about the novel, from plot to style to characterisation, that had once seemed fairly neutral was seen to be fraught with political implications. Like Tolstoy, who also embraced the novel as a social document and openly used it to express his opinions, Morrison had a theory - a vision of slavery and black/white relations in America - that was in some ways old-fashioned, but still inflammatory and unresolved. The task was to remake the old story in a compelling way, and also to separate her own telling from that of earlier writers, especially Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Dostoevsky

Top 10 toxic families in fiction

From Edward St Aubyn’s damaged addict to Roald Dahl’s ingenious bookworm, Hannah Beckerman picks her favourite tales of families at war

Hannah Beckerman
Wed 20 Mar 2019 11.00 GMT

Magical morality tale … Matilda. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

T

oxic families in fiction go back as far as the art of storytelling itself. Greek mythology is awash with dysfunctional families, from Kronos swallowing his children to ensure they never usurp him to Zeus and the Olympians overthrowing their parents, the Titans. The Old Testament gives us fratricide with Cain and Abel, sibling rivalry with Joseph and his brothers, and the devastating effects of parental favouritism with Jacob and Esau. Fairytales delight in wicked stepmothers, neglectful fathers and evil sisters. For 3,000 years or more, storytellers have known that there is no narrative so powerful as the warring family.

Jane Smiley / ‘All you need is for one reader to love your book’

Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley: ‘All you need is for one reader to love your book’

The acclaimed US novelist on literary heavyweights, why she doesn’t like to complain and how her current and former husbands helped her write her new midwestern family saga

Robert McCrum
Sunday 26 October 2014 09.45 GMT

V

irtually all you need to know about the novelist Jane Smiley is encrypted on to the dedication page of her new book, Some Luck, which thanks four men for “decades of patience, laughter, insight, information, and assistance”. Who are they, these merry, long-suffering, dedicatees, John, Bill, Steve and Jack? Smiley’s three ex-husbands of course, plus the incumbent. And are they still her friends? Smiley’s infectious laugh punctuates her answer. “Oh yes, they’re all great guys, all easy-going guys, and I’m fond of all of them.” That’s one of the things about her: apparently no hint of darkness. Indeed, at a skinny 6ft 2in, Jane Smiley is something of an honorary “guy” herself, and the more you dig into her creative life you find a woman who wants to conduct every bit of her professional career with the same “easy-going” detachment.

Janey Siley / On Donald Trump

 Jane Smiley
Photograph by Peter Dasilva

Jane Smiley

ON DONALD TRUMP

Friday 12 August 2016 15.00 BST

For me, the most informative book about the fix we are in is Colin Woodard’s American Nations. Woodard explores the US as a cluster of 11 different cultures, some of which we share with our neighbours, Canada and Mexico. In order to understand Trump and his appeal, I think we can focus on Appalachian culture, which was exported from the Scottish borders in the 18th century, and was marked by an affinity for conflict and evangelical protestantism. These people had been trained to do battle in the Scottish wars, were later put to work in the coal mines, and are now out of work (the most evocative portrait of the lives these immigrants left behind and what they did when they got to America is in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed). Another intransigent American culture is that of the deep south, slaveholders who came to the US from the sugar plantations of Barbados and were much more hierarchical and ruthless than the slaveholders in Virginia.

Perhaps the most interesting and relevant nation, though, is New Netherland, founded in 1624, a partly Dutch nation, very diverse, not religious, but authoritarian and corporate (run by the Dutch West Indies Corporation). Now New York City, it is the extreme capitalist nation, which has never minded making a buck from no matter what, including the slave trade. Woodard writes, “Indeed, full on slavery was introduced to what is now the United States not by the gentlemen planters of Virginia or South Carolina but by the merchants of Manhattan.”

Three hundred slaves were imported by the Dutch West Indies corporation in 1655 and auctioned – “In the last decade before the [1685] English conquest, New Amsterdam was rapidly evolving into North America’s greatest slave market.” Woodard says that our 11 nations are only partly integrated with one another and have always been that way. I would say that the resistance to having a black man as president, which laid the groundwork for the current fix we are in, comes from the deep southern and Appalachian nations; but the mercenary and ruthless lack of conscience (hello, Donald Trump!) comes from the Manhattan nation.

• Jane Smiley’s most recent novel is Early Warning (Picador).

THE GUARDIAN