Writing with and against the archive

critical fabulation in Beloved, by Toni Morrison, and The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd

Abstract

This study aims to discuss the relational possibilities between Literature and History, especially with regard to a rewriting of the historical narrative with the help of the fictional narrative. In order to do so, this paper delves into Saidiya Hartman's (2020; 2021) theory of the archive and critical fabulation. According to Hartman, very little has been recorded about the black population brought from the African continent to work as slaves on the American continent and, for this reason, filling in the gaps in the history of this population is a major challenge (2020). In this way, the imagined narrative, approximated in this article to Literature, is used as a tool capable of retelling the history of this population by helping to imagine what could have been. This paper will analyze the novels Beloved (1988), by Toni Morrison, and The Invention of Wings (2014), by Sue Monk Kidd, both of which focus on slavery in the United States and mix historical facts with their fictional narratives. By analyzing the novels, we aim to show how literary narrative can help reconstruct and reimagine official History. Other theoretical perspectives that will help our analysis are the essayistic work by Toni Morrison (2019) and the writings of Hutcheon (1991), Scott (2011) and Figueiredo (2017) on the similarities between Literature and History.