Ethical Magic : Traumatic Magic Realism in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'

Abstract

Focussing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved this article sets out to show the possibilities magic realism offers to negotiate the difficulties of representation in narratives of trauma. In spite of the common demand for mimetic accuracy, magic realism’s potential for ethical representation lies precisely in its denial of a single coherent reading. By impelling the reader to accept the narrative’s irreducible contradictions, magic realism offers means to express the excess that marks traumatic experience. The bodily presence of the past in Beloved can therefore be read as a literal manifestation of trauma that demands a confrontation of the contradictory needs to forget and to remember. By exploiting analogies between trauma and magic, Beloved points to the ethical necessity of acknowledging the Other as Other and attempts to narrate the Other without defining and fixing it through narration itself.