reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019



Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political.



Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.  The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement," a topic only a few thinkers bother to explore.  My new teacher warns me not to underestimate the relevance of the Black Lives Matter phenomenon or the possibility that BLM can have some transnational implications.  He warns me to recall that protests in Ferguson, Missouri were complemented by protests about problems the West assiduously sponsors in the Middle East.  But what has any of this to do with Morrison's intervention about what was wanting in American literary history and criticism in 1992?  We can say at least that Morrison challenged her readers to make dangerous journeys.  In the Age of Trump and his tribe, the dangerous journey has exceptional moral and analytic value.



When we read Morrison's  third lecture "Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks" in Playing in the Dark, we may return to the masked autobiographical aspects of Morrison's proposal about the treasure trove of American literature and the Fort Knox of an Africanist presence.  Her proposals assume a special urgency when we contemplate what has come to surface since the elections of 2016.  A sort of full disclosure of white supremacist ideologies has arisen from the wine dark seas of American society and its politics, and what Morrison disclosed a few decade ago renders great service.  The unfolding of American literary history and democracy is clearer as a result of her interventions.  Clearer but not less complicated, because the unfolding is shaped like a double helix.  We welcome ourselves to a banquet of excess which resonates Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's premise: everywhere man is free, everywhere he is enchained.  We eat at the reinforced table upon which a feast of race and American humors is laid out. And for some of us, the menu is despicable, effectively poisonous.



If we are ambitious , we read Morrison's modifications of her original assumptions about reading and writing as we find them in The Source of Self-Regard (2019), the last book published before her death.

They are stunning, opening both new angles from which to see  Africanist presence and Morrison's presence in her fiction and non-fiction. The modifications provoke.  They are touchstones of a rage to explain, a rage that informs pre-future thought about trends of reversal (returns to a segregationist past in the present in the strange progress of literary discourses).  They do tell much about nurses, sharks, and the ebb and flow of American politics and political narratives in the guise of the novel.  They tell about the eternity of Cain and Abel, Prospero and Caliban the Taliban.  Decipher contemporary hieroglyphics.



One goal in Morrison's third lecture is commentary on the lush and lusty metaphor of race as it functions "to articulate and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture" ( Playing 66 ). She wanted, I believe, to at once affect and inflect the minds of readers as they negotiate texts and referents.  Morrison did not permit us to be passive.



From James Snead's Figures of Division: William Faulkner's Major Novels (1986), Morrison borrowed six "figures of racial division" ----1) synergistic union, 2) marking visual characteristics, 3) spatial and conceptual separation, 4) pleonastic reinforcement of antitheses, 5)invective, and 6) paralepsis ----and renamed (re/membered) them as

·         economy of stereotypes

·         metonyic displacement

·         metaphysical condensation

·         fetishization

·         dehistoricizing allegory

·         repetitive language (Playing 67-69)

Morrison's mastery of the literary critical lexicon forces ordinary readers to flee to dictionaries of literary terms.  Her purpose was to dazzle readers into awareness, and she made productive use of language in analyzing special features of Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden, those powerful works that make the case for the forbidden, for an invisible perplexity in literary histories which exclusively embrace black/ white male/female American writers in general, which  always bring into view  the facts beneath a  historical  presence of the African and the Other (s)  in the matrix of the United State of America . Question yet to be answered: can "pro-Semitic" thinkers stand the heat?



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            September 14, 2019