Figures of Estrangement

Chapter 1 offers a foundational reading of two contemporary works in which literal, embodied ghosts or specters intrude into and transform the terrain of traditional literary realism: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Mahasweta Devi’s novella, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha.” By introducing embodied ghosts into otherwise realistically rendered fictional landscapes, these works intentionally disrupt the familiar narrative protocols that allow them to be made meaningful—both those which insist on the mimetic realness of the supernatural events they depict, and those which invite us to read those events metaphorically. But by staging exorcisms, which banish the supernatural and allow characters like Puran, Sethe, and Denver to re-join the communities from which they had estranged themselves, these works also acknowledge the necessity of compromise: although something is inevitably lost when Beloved and “Pterodactyl” are placed into interpretive circulation, something important is gained as well.