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Daring literature
By Sharon Schuman
Toni Morrison doesn't write to make readers comfortable but to challenge them to try to understand their lives
Now that Toni Morrison has won the Nobel Prize, there will be a great rush to buy her books. Instead of merely speculating about whether or not she deserved the National Book Award (withheld in 1987) or the Pulitzer Prize (granted in 1988), consumers can now know that for sure that she is a name-brand author. If the postinaugural treatment of Maya Angelou is any indication of what will happen, she can expect to become a celebrity even more durable than Michael Jordan.
But will people actually read her books They might be more likely to wear "Beloved T-shirts or sip lattes from "Jazz" coffee mugs. If they settle for this, they will miss out on phrases like, "a life already splintered like a cheap windowpane." They will miss sentences like, "Opinions, decisions, popped through the crows like struck matches," or, "In his company, forgetfulness fell like pollen."
They will also miss Morrison's Shakespearean ability to create minor characters, brief presences (like Golden Gray, the boy the color of champagne, who takes off to find, then kill, his father, but saves a woman and a baby instead) about whom whole novels could be written.
Above all they will miss her enormous contribution to understanding what she has called "the powerfully destructive emptiness" of race in America. "Beloved" (1987), her post-Civil-War epic, does more than any Other single work of literature to reconcile us to our history and give us the courage to own it without condoning it. "Jazz" (1992) continues this mission by bringing us forward to 1926 in the City. But neither novel is easy to read.
This is not merely because we are not a nation of readers. Morrison's novels are both difficult to get into and uncomfortable to be inside once we're there.
"Beloved," for example, begins, "124 was spiteful." These cryptic words require a whole book to unpack. Gradually we grasp that 124 is an address, and that a house can be spiteful if it is inhabited by the ghost of a baby killed by its mother. But to really absorb the richness of this opening, where we first glimpse the house with a history too painful to confront, we need to read the whole book, then start over.
This is a lot to ask of the MTV generation.
As if to make amends, Morrison tells the whole story of "Jazz," her latest novel, in the first paragraph. There we learn that Violet (later called Violent) has crashed the funeral of her husband's 18-year-old lover, Dorcas, to cut' her face, even though Joe Trace, her 53-year-old husband, has already shot and killed her.
The apparent candor of this opening, however, is deceptive. Morrison tries to warn us with her first sentence, "Sth, I know that woman." Again she has begun a novel with a non-word, this time as if to say, "Look out! This narrator doesn't know any more than you do."
The opening snap-shot of the crime and its aftermath is framed by the gossipy, choral presence of a narrator we never quite figure out. Later she says of one character, "I like to think of him that way." Or, frustrated with her own limitations, she bursts out, "I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am."
With this dubious guide, Morrison spends the rest of the novel undermining our confidence about judging the opening sequence of violent acts. By the end, we feel more sympathy for the murderer than the victim, and we find the layers of imagination and memory, through which daily life gets filtered, more fascinating than either.
Among the things "Jazz is not about, then, is how a murderer gets caught, charged, convicted, or incarcerated. The ambulance never comes; the arrest never gets made. Our usual ways of processing injury and crime become curiously irrelevant.
This approach is frustrating for readers weaned on "America's Most Wanted" and "General Hospital," or confronted every morning with gruesome statistics about crime.
We have to wonder if the Nobel committee has made a big mistake. Why hand out the grand prize of civilization to someone who draws a sympathetic portrait of a mother who kills her own baby ("Beloved") and a man who first seduces, then kills, someone young enough to be his daughter ("Jazz")?
Half a century ago the editors of the "New York Times" had similar misgivings when they protested awarding the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner (to whom the present committee compared Morrison). They objected that Faulkner's field of vision "concentrated on asociety that is too often vicious, depraved, decadent, corrupt." They concluded with indignation, "incest and rape may be common pastimes in Faulkner's 'Jefferson, Miss.' but they are not elsewhere in the United States."
Although contemporary readers would scoff at this self-righteous posturing and wonder how the editors of the "Times" could fail to grasp the obvious (from our vantage point) greatness of Faulkner, we can't help but have misgivings about the events and characters Morrison chooses to dwell on.
To understand better what she might be up to, we can look at the book of essays she recently edited, "Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality" (1992). In her introduction, she discusses two persistent myths about black people in Arnica: "On the one hand, they signify benevolence, harmless and servile guardianship, and endless love. On the other hand, they have come to represent insanity, illicit sexuality, and chaos."
According to Morrison, these myths - symbolized at one extreme by Robinson Crusoe's servant "Friday," who lovingly lays his head beneath his masters foot, and at the other by Willie Horton, the rapist - frame white perceptions of black people even now. They came into play during the confirmation hearings, for example, when Thomas was ultimately cast as happy and harmless, Hill as neurotic and sex- obsessed.
To Morrison, this tendency toward dualism undermines real meaning, which depends instead on a sense of "perspective," "context," and a kind of "reflective sorting out" that requires "multiple points of address and analysis." This dualism also encourages people to "cash in on black victimhood, to claim victim status," which she accuses Thomas of having done. Morrison wants to blast these myths out of the water. Thus in her novels she gives us the behavior that scares whites most, sex and murder, then denies the normal categories for judging it and refuses to give us any victims. Instead, she uncovers layer after layer of memory, context and perspective. She invites white and black alike to approach the borders of her characters' lives and marvel at their ability to help each other create music out of circumstances designed to grind people down.
It's not their victimization or the need to pass judgment that catches her eye, but their resilience and imagination.
This is why we need to turn off the TV and read Morrison's novels. Instead of voyeuristic violence served up in the intervals between commercials, she gives us something like the improvisations of jazz. A core of meaning is present (Joe killed Dorcas; Violet tried to cut her corpse). To understand it, though, we need the improvised interpretations of multiple instruments, moments, and minds. As "Jazz" weaves back and forth between the northern city and the southern village, between the minds of abandoned children, lost parents, workers, hunters, lovers, and friends, Morrison creates the improvised memories and conversations that give meaning to the original theme of sex and death.
At the end of "Jazz," the woman who tried to cut the corpse and the man who created it are reunited by a friend of the murdered girl. As Morrison describes the middle-aged couple lying peacefully together, she telescopes the whole novel, with its memories of the bullet in Dorcas' shoulder, the mother Joe Trace hunted by looking for birds, the mother who abandoned Violet by committing suicide in a well, and the father who surfaced only long enough to give her presents: "Lying next to her, his head turned toward the window, he sees through the glass darkness taking the shape of a shoulder with a thin line of blood. Slowly, slowly it forms itself into a bird with a blade of red on the wing. Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on his chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well and down there somebody is gathering gifts (lead pencils, Bull Durham, Jap Rose Soap) to distribute to them all."
These characters have earned their moment of peace, which brands them not as heroes, villains, or victims, but as wayfarers who have figured out how to find each other in the dark. The finding has involved being able to absorb each other's histories and contexts as well as individual acts.
Morrison's novels take us as close as we can go to the brink of understanding lives that we will never live but that we are constantly tempted to think we already know. We are all like the narrator in "Jazz" who knows "that woman." We are all ready to read the paper, put its events in convenient categories, and go to work.
Morrison wants us to abandon this convenience in favor of a more nobleeffort to understand our lives in terms of history, memory, and imagination. Only then can we redeem each other by forgiving what there is to forgive and improvising the rest.
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