CHINA IV is coming.

Yukuo and I
have great respect
for things ancient and spiritual.

July 6, 2012

The cranes and I love the Yellow Tower.

Reading Notes

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