Morrison, Toni. Home.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
The
Nobel Prize in Literature is the most prestigious award the West offers to
writers, but one might ponder whether it is a curse or a blessing for those who
earn it. Does a writer’s creative powers
decline or hibernate after she or he receives the award?
Judgment
is so privatized and relative in the twenty-first century that it matters very
little if a reader says “Yes” or “No.”
Value is a pragmatic commodity.
It has the stability of a theorized subatomic particle. Only a statistically insignificant portion of
the world’s population gives more than a few seconds of thought to the growth
or stasis or decline of the writer’s imagination. No writer can maintain stellar performances
over several decades of doing things with words. But prizes create unreasonable
expectations. Writers who possess them
are often more harshly judged than their peers who create excellent works in
oblivion.
Such is
the case with Toni Morrison since she won the ultimate literary prize in 1993. Not even the protective circle of the Toni
Morrison Society can deflect barbs of disappointment, the neutrality one feels
after reading Home (2012). When you compare it with earlier novels ---The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved,
or Jazz, you think the early works
have the signature richness and depth of songs by Etta James, Billie Holiday,
Nina Simone, and Sarah Vaughn. Paradise,
Love, A Mercy, and Home are good but
not overwhelmingly exciting. They are like the singer who scored number one on
last week’s pop chart. You are disappointed that these later works do not light
your fire.
Bernard
Bell aptly claimed in The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition that Morrison’s fiction was marked by poetic
realism. In Home, realism has been displaced by cruel ironies of postmodern poetry. Its plot is recognizable but thin. Morrison
indulges her privileges. The narrator’s language
floats above the story’s engagement with obscene racism, because Morrison
contemplates her cleverness in the use of language more than she uses language
to provoke consciousness of America’s social and cultural filth –systemic
brutalization of black sensibility, medical experimentation on black bodies
worthy of a Nazi doctor. Its examination
of manhood in post-Korean War
America focuses on the fragility of male subjectivity, while its portrayal of boyhood displays remarkable strengths. Superb imbalance. The protagonist Frank Money nurtures too much
grief and self-pity. “In Frank Money’s
empty space real money glittered” (84). He is truly not “some enthusiastic
hero” (84). When the language of the novel
is not laughing at the reader, it is sweating the reader. It invites hostility and displeasure.
We
should have respect for Morrison’s achievements. Scholars are obligated by literary history to
read her writings –all of them. But
scholars like casual readers do not have to like all of her work, and they are
free not to tarry in the new “home” she has constructed.
J. W. Ward, Jr. ---July
20, 2012 Reading Notes
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