Toni Morrison: A Full Circle in Motion
Abraham Lincoln’s
surmising that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin begat the War Between the States is a folkloric salute to the
power of language and imagination. Stowe used a lot of sugar to advance the
cause of abolition. Superior to Stowe and members of her liberal tribe, Toni
Morrison has avoided traffic in sugar or kindred flavorings. She is a realist. The proof is in the astringent quality of her
fiction and nonfiction. From the thick
descriptions that lend heft to The Bluest
Eye (1970) to the control of perspectives which justify the deceptive
“thinness” of God Help the Child
(2015), Morrison has challenged her fellow citizens to deconstruct historical
process and its consequences. Morrison’s being true unto herself has been no
balm from Gilead for the most sensitive, hypocritical, self-deluded nerves of
the American body politic. She has earned respect, but not love, for exposing
systemic ailments that are beyond cure.
Great writers understand
that (re)presenting a truth may require the rejection of love. Contemporary
writers understand also that in the 21st century, ingratitude and
entrapment have displaced genuine, multicultural communion and civil
disagreement. Writers who are smart do
not try to walk on the quicksand of fame. Unlike Stowe, Morrison has the literary skill
and mother wit to escape being a target for the moral scrutiny of a James
Baldwin. And no American
Commander-in-Chief shall surmise that she is complicit in promoting military
warfare, no matter how much Americans hunger for political fakelore. Morrison knows
how best to deal with epic absurdity by creating Lula Ann Bridewell
(Bride), Booker (an intelligent black
man), and Rain, a scared and whitely abused little white girl.
With God Help the
Child, Morrison comes full circle back to the core of pain in her first
novel, thereby creating space for total reassessment of her work to date. Perhaps her aims are better understood
outside the United States than within our country. For some Americans, her work can only be read
under the influence of fear associated with a rapid ascent of post-human racism. In short, as far as literary journalism goes,
writers for The Guardian trump
writers for the New York Times,
although the UK is as besmirched by racism and fascism as the USA. British
literary politics march to a different drummer.
In an interview with Hermione Hoby, published in the April
25, 2015 issue of The Guardian,
Morrison asserts: “I’m writing for black people in the same way that Tolstoy
was not writing for me, a 14-year-old girl from Lorrain, Ohio. I don’t [write about white people] ---which
is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not to have the white critic sit
on your shoulder and approve it.” The
location of Morrison’s utterance provokes remembering that she and readers who
are some shade of color( psychologically, physiologically, and spiritually)
have the option of accepting or not accepting Phillis Wheatley as a literary ancestor. These readers might note a structural kinship
between As I Lay Dying and God Help the Child, but they have no
obligation to claim William Faulkner as a bastard cousin. It is no surprise that Bernardine Evaristo
concludes her April 19 Guardian review of God Help the Child (Chatto & Windus edition) with a fine
British tone: “Morrison’s characteristically deft temporal shifts and precisely
honed language deliver literary riches galore.
And while this novel is very readable, the pleasure is in working for
its deeper rewards.” Being obtuse is not the apex of aesthetic achievement.
The phrases “while this novel is very readable” and “its
deeper rewards” may give us pause. The qualification in the first phrase
suggests that a readable text is problematic.
Is Albert Camus’ very readable The
Stranger somehow less good than James Joyce’s convoluted Finnegans Wake? Morrison’s
novel is loaded with rewards. One is her naming the unjustly incarcerated
victim “Sofia Huxley,” a clever alluding to wisdom and science; another, and
one of the richest, is Booker’s saying to Lula Ann Bridewell:
Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so
racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but
still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it (GHTC 143).
Booker’s words are a
necessary and definitive indictment. They are related to killing a mockingbird
and pimping a butterfly, because they cast light on the games Morrison’s
American reviewers are hired to play.
In the United States, deeper rewards do not go unpunished,
especially in the famous review pages of the New York Times and the more august pages of The New York Review of Books.
Under the ambiguous title “Growing Up Too Black,” -----is it possible to grow up too white?
----Francine Prose’s TNYRB review,
May 7, 2015, is generally positive and correctly “literary.” Nevertheless, she
thinks aloud “Does the heady atmosphere of the mythic free the writer from
having to pay attention to the details that, if gotten wrong, can distract the
reader and briefly cast us out of the novel?”(13) Prose justifies her question by writing in the
next paragraph: “In view of the scope and the gravity of Morrison’s themes and
ambitions, why should such points matter?
They do, because plausibility depends on the writer’s punctiliousness
about just details as these.” (13) Hold up. The message Prose sends may be either the
color of sickness unto death or a nice turn of the screw in the back.
Whatever the case, Prose gives us a hint about critical
literary matters at the middlebrow New
York Times, which rarely hides
its mechanics of cultural manipulation. Michiko Kakutani, who has a Pulitzer
Prize for Criticism, wrote, quite accurately, on April 16, 2015
[http://nyti.ms/1FNNgy4 ] that one of Morrison’s great themes “is the hold that
time past exerts over time present. In larger historical terms, it is the
horror of slavery and its echoing legacy that her characters struggle with.”
Kakutani finds God Help the Child to be a “slim but powerful new
novel,” one that “has a musical structure reminiscent of” Jazz (1992). She assumes, I guess, readers will know that the
primary musical referent is Billie Holiday’s and Arthur Herzog’s “God Bless the
Child,” recorded May 9, 1941. She also finds that the novel has “touches of surrealism that may initially seem
jarring and bizarre, but that gradually lend Bride’s story a fair-tale-like
undertow” and that ultimately the novel is “a tale that is as forceful as it is
affecting, as fierce as it is resonant.”
Kakutani’s review is an antidote to the surreal gesture of Kara Walker’s
commentary in the NYT Sunday Book Review,
April 19, 2015, page BR1 [http://nyti.ms/1FEE7xe ]
It is odd, given the impressive number of Toni Morrison
scholars in the USA and abroad, that the New
York Times overlooked them in favor
of a visual artist whose literary achievement is a 2014 installation titled “A
Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.”
I guess the NYT book editors
thought the installation was reminiscent of Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) and that readers needed to be more entertained than
enlightened by a woman anointed and ordained by a MacArthur “genius award.” The
kicker is Walker’s contention that
“The world of ‘God Help the Child’ is crawling with child
molester and child killers –on playgrounds, in back alleys ---but they remain
oddly blurry, like dot-matrix snapshots culled from current headlines. When they join the scene, it’s rarely as full
citizens of the narrative, and this is a loss.”
The real loss is that Walker seems not to grasp that
moralizing is an intimate part of Morrison’s extraordinary storytelling. She should have studied Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) before putting Domino
Sugar in the bowl. Had the NYT editors
really wanted us to profit from sweetness and light, they would have invited
Jessica B. Harris or Mary Helen Washington to write the Sunday review. Such a
decision, however, would have endangered their flippant status as guardians of
the very culture Morrison critiqued in The
Bluest Eye and excoriates, in a new key, in God Help the Child.
At the clichéd end of the day or of the night, our spirits
can be rested that Toni Morrison has come full circle in donating her legacy to
American and world literatures. Ultimately, it is not literary criticism of
Morrison that counts. What counts is
reading her words to construct one’s own knowledge of how history revolves.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 27, 2015
