On Reading Toni Morrison


ON READING TONI MORRISON

Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.  354 pp.



Fortunately, I had almost finished reading The Source of Self-Regard before Namwali  Serpell's "On Black Difficulty: Toni Morrison and the thrill of imperiousness" (SLATE, March 26, 2019) came to my attention.


The words "difficult" and "imperiousness" themselves possess a degree of difficulty, and they can enlighten and obscure in the same moment.  Serpell contends "…Toni Morrison is difficult.  She's difficult to read.  She's difficult to teach.  She's difficult to interview.  Notwithstanding, the voluminous train of profiles, reviews, and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she's difficult to write about.  But more to the point, she is our only truly canonical black, female writer and her work is complex. This, it seems, is difficult to swallow."  Like Lady Macbeth, Serpell  protests a bit too much.  She is imperious in her yearning "for that specific human, black, female freedom to feel at ease to be difficult." She is at once right and wrong.



To be sure, Morrison's fictions and non-fictions are not easy or transparent.  Her novels demand  as much interpretive work as, for example, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway or Octavia Butler's Kindred. And her inscription of positions and perspectives in Playing in the Dark, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard call for a kind of sweating provoked by engaging moral meditations which  Marilynne Robinson and Martha Nussbaum write.  And behind all the effort one hears a snide, accusatory, very American question: Is it worth it after all?  Readers answer in accord with their degrees of cultural literacy.  Whether they are thrilled or enthralled by imperiousness is a different, difficult question.  Whatever the case, readers who lack genuine intellectual curiosity ought to leave the game, to have the bravery to admit defeat.  But imperiousness or arrogant assurance is a far cry from the blessed assurance readers can purchase with tears from James Baldwin's fiction and non-fiction and Ta-Nehisi Coates's non-fiction,  or with laughter from Maurice Carlos Ruffin's much-acclaimed We Cast A Shadow.



Serpell's phrasing "she drags behind her" threatens to toss Morrison into a "mules of the world" briar patch, and it serves to remind astute readers that Zora Neale Hurston is truly as canonical, black, female, and complex as Morrison.  The implication that the world can afford only one canonical woman writer at a time is unmitigated, Eurocentric  cowshit. The Source of Self-Regard is Morrison's debatably honest effort to specify her own limits and possibilities; it is her confession that she is a human being not a mythological goddess who writes, her admission that no writer, female or male, is immune to debate.  There is indeed, as Morrison suggests at one point in the book a difficult difference between a fact and a truth.  Reading The Source of Self-Regard is a worthwhile exercise in discovering the ontology of such difference.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 25, 2019

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas, Kwanzaa, 2018

Blog 12.19.2017 CHRISTMAS I have a reason for not being anxious to celebrate Advent and Christmas Day.   Sixty years ago, my father died on December 25.   Fifty-nine years ago, my favorite uncle died a few days before Christmas.   I do want other people to be happy, but I am most at peace when Christmas has gone with the snow, the sunshine or rain, the wind.   I still say "Merry Christmas."   The only genuine happiness I experience, however, is listening to Handel's "The Messiah" and a few songs I've treasured since childhood,   attending Midnight Mass, having home-made fruitcake   after Mass, and eating a special meal with relatives on the excessively commercialized holiday. KWANZAA Umoja ---Decide with whom you should seek unity. Kujichagulia --Expand the terms of engagement for 2018. Ujima ---Cooperate on a project with people you can trust. Ujamaa --Be frugal.   Shop selectively. Nia ---Remember ou...
Read more

implacable violence, part one

Implacable Violence, Part One The death of Senator John McCain quickens our   interest in how to deal with contemporary   narratives of life history.   McCain's touchstone story pertains to American conservative values, the consequences of trauma,   military and public service, violence, and   a sense of honor.   Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence, the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of "race."   Narratives about McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of sexism, constipated values,     inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism, sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service.   Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set...
Read more

DuBois and Black Reconstruction

  PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH   DuBois, W. E. B.   Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 . (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998).   Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction .   He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934).   His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings…"   DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization…"   Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization.   Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published   two years before Black Reconstruction ?   No.   It wasn't an accide...
Read more