fit despair into the day


FIT DESPAIR INTO THE DAY





Morrison, Toni.  The Origin of Others.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.



Morrison's publishing her 1990 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of Civilization as  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was an event, a moment of gravity in discussions of how a considerable amount of "white" literature masked as  American literature dealt with or sought to avoid dealing with Africanist presence in the United States of America.  Her analyses were razor-sharp, surgical.  They modeled qualities of literary critical thinking one wished to absorb and pass on to one's undergraduate and graduate students.  If one could succeed, to some degree, in transmitting Morrison's insights, one helped students ( as well as oneself) to be more securely grounded in what mattered about history and the need to have  more thorough understandings of literature as expressions of ideology and politics.  The book was a positive disruption of American literary arrogance.



By contrast, The Origin of Others (2017), the Spring 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures is an occasion, a mellowed recycling of some main ideas from Playing in the Dark in order to focus on the universal actuality and too often debilitating consequences of cultural, social, and political expressions and uses of difference, the multiple constructions of the vexed Other of which one's Self is inevitably a part. Coming twenty-six years after the Massey lectures, the Norton lectures are less surgical and hefty, less effective in dealing with the vexed actuality of now.  To be fair, we must admit that The Origin of Others provides crucial insights about Morrison's evolution as a writer and the current status of her ability to critique forms of denial in twenty-first century global rule of madness.  The book positions us to assess and re-assess the enormous contribution Morrison has made to world literature, but it leaves us with the frustrating recognition that historical meditations on race and difference may produce limited enlightenment without  any benefit of redress and resolution.  The book is informed with self-commentary on Morrison's achievements, and that commentary might be used with profit in courses on literature and culture.



Morrison does succeed, however,  in speaking with the  wry charm  of  the lower frequencies  about  "the destabilizing  pressures and forces of the transglobal  tread of peoples"(109).  In his foreword for The Origin of Others,  Ta-nehisi  Coates commends Morrison for understanding "the hold that history has on us all" and for providing "a welcome aid in grappling with how that grip came to be"( xvii).  I stand in polar opposition to Coates about welcoming such aid, because there is better aid to be had from ice cold discourses on the Others, discourses more akin to the work of Frantz Fanon.



 Playing in the Dark gave us radical dreams of agency; The Origin of Others leaves us with despair, with visions of how amoral gods kill us and all the Others for sport.  It is doubtful that we can muster any alacrity to pass on this negative wisdom to future generations.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 23, 2017

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