Day 110: Thoughts on Beloved So Far

It's my last day at the beach, so of course it's raining and the water's cold. I didn't want to get sunburned again anyway. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

Today I want to talk about the book I've been reading, 'Beloved,' even though I'm not finished with it yet. More specifically, there's an aspect of Morrison's writing that took me completely by surprise. In countless writing videos, essays, books, courses, and internet posts from amateur writers, I've seen the advice that head hopping is just always bad. It's confusing and annoying for most readers because when a book switches to a new character's perspective all the sudden, the reader may lose track of who is thinking what and be forced to go back and reread a section. I've read writing like this and I agree. It is quite annoying. I've even written some chapters like this just to see how it goes and it does not go well, trust me. There are some writing techniques that are difficult to pull off, but ultimately doable, but I didn't think rapid head hopping was one of them. Third person omniscient, sure, but switching perspective on the fly with no indication except the tonal shift or the name that comes up? No way. Like everybody else, I thought it went beyond difficult and into impossible territory, just something to avoid at all costs like severely misspelling words or info-dumping for multiple chapters at a time.

Somehow, Morrison has proved me wrong. She head hops often, switching from Paul D to Sethe to Denver to Beloved as the story demands, giving insight into their innermost thoughts, butting their secret memories and feelings right up against each other as well as plain descriptions of the scene without the need for so much as a double line to mark the changes. Somehow, she always pulls it off. I've only lost track of the perspective once, even though she's hopping around pretty much constantly. Now I'm convinced it is doable, albeit supremely difficult. She's like a painter who blends every color into one another to create a impression of reality, as opposed to most authors who seem to write more like architects, who must define each hard line as clear as day because doing anything else would end up an unreadable mess.

The most insane part of this is how the structure of the novel is diegetic. It's not just a writing technique to get the plot across, it's actually how the story exists within the pages of the novel. Maybe that doesn't make sense at first, but read this quote from Sethe and I think you'll see what I mean.

"Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the 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 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."

Within the story itself, the characters believe that thought and memory, experiences, places, people, everything that ever existed in the past, still exists outside of the minds those who experienced them. In 'Beloved,' humanity is like a hivemind that goes beyond the confines of any individual body or brain. The characters may not exactly experience each others' thoughts directly, but they are truly all in the same space at the same time, made open and clear to the reader by Morrison's incredible skill. A third person omniscient point of view where everybody's minds are blended together into a coherent stream of shared consciousness might just be the only way to tell a story like this. The head hopping is not only done well, but an integral part of the characters' experience of reality.

I'm completely blown away by Morrison and it makes me feel like everything I've ever written is a color-by-number by comparison. I like to keep a certain Hemingway quote in mind when I start to feel like this:

"Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged."

Of course he doesn't mean to just give up. He means that feeling discouraged in the face of something incredible will forge a better writer in the long term. Still feels rough to read someone so far and away better than me though.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley