Rereading two novels

Rereading Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

When you are past sixty-five, the radicalism of your youth may turn into regret . One advantage of age, however, is being able to remember what were crucial issues in the USA fifty or more years ago. Of course, you can  tell convincing lies about "the good old days."  You can prevaricate with gusto and count at the end of the day how many red herrings you were able to sell.  If those who listen to you are very young and have not developed the skills needed to segregate fact from fiction, they quite likely believe your tales are true.  They may be too preoccupied with the troubles of now to fact-check your statements about a better time in America's history. They are little aware that you are lying with a purpose in a tradition that novelists cherish, a tradition quite easily co-opted and imitated in sinister discourses. When societies and cultures hold fiction hostage, more harm than good may be the outcome.

 Does an instructive purpose justify a costumed lie? Perhaps. Fiction is often a free space where emotional truths defy verification for the sake of moral or ethical improvement, but a terrifying danger lurks in the fact of the lie. Fiction can cross the psychological  line of no return and produce more harm than good.  Think of the demonic  fictions which sprawl out of control in the Age of Trump, leaving the fact of the lie amorally  nude in sunlight and moonlight. There is something terrifying in moments when you choose to be severely honest, whether you are old or young : the "what was then" is a replication of the "what is now."  Fiction morphs into the nonfiction of the changing same!  Stop lying to yourself.

 The present is a stage for division and national  trauma --- the cancers of hate and self-hatred thrive daily;  the moral compass is dysfunctional  and incapable of giving proper  directions to anyone or anything; natural and man-made violence negates the smallest dreams of peace everywhere on our planet;  the rule of law is broken;  "hope" is a vulgar word; nostalgia for the past is a terminal illness, and yearning for a future is too often an obscene exercise.  You laugh to keep from dying not from crying.

Rereading The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Bluest Eye, first novels published in 1970, with fellow senior citizens engenders unsettling recognitions about how very bad and prophetic the "good old days" inadvertently were and continue to be.  What you dismissed, condemned, or minimized in the name of racial and ethnic solidarity when you read these novels back in the day now haunts you.  How sublimely  myopic you were. Yes, you were and  are complicit, no matter how much you try to deny the horror of truth, with the production of "now." Time ensures that you can find no sanctuary in dreams, in hopes incarcerated in promises.  These novels bludgeon you as you attend more passionately in your old age to their narrative strategies;  they are whetstones for cognition. You find yourself not speaking truth to power but speaking the most painful truth about power, articulating the unending warfare of cosmic evil and will power. Unless you are brain-dead, the unsettling recognitions empower you to discard nostalgia, to modify your terms of engagement with this world, to fight, and to send the lies about the better days that never were  to a gas chamber of oblivion.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            October 25, 2018