triumphant decline


TRIUMPHANT  DECLINE



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

The qualitative difference between Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and The Origin of Others (2017) is slightly jolting.  The former is rich, original, and  bracing; it remains a seminal contribution to American literary theory and criticism.  The latter is fairly commonplace, derivative , thin as translucent cheese and ham in what it donates to discourse on the Other.  It is important mainly for what Morrison chose to drop about "theatrical exploration in Paradise, about the genesis of Beloved, the destructive force of The Bluest Eye, the curse and blessing awaiting discovery in God Help the Child, the thirty-watt light cast upon Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, the erasing of color in Home and A Mercy.  It is evidence of triumphant decline, the bane of age. Had Morrison not been canonized before her death, the book might be given scant notice or dismissal.  Nothing would be lost.

Worshippers in the church of all things Morrison may bless my ears with howls of execration.  As if I'd give a good goddamn.  Before Morrison wrote anything of value about slavery and the literary imagination, it was Ishmael Reed who put me on notice about Dr. Samuel Cartwright and the significance of  DeBow's Review, first published in New Orleans in 1846, in the production of slavery.  When I made pilgrimage in the early 1980s to do research on Reed's brilliance, I read issues of DeBow's Review in the library at UC-Berkeley.  A bit of iconoclasm is healthy.  Is Morrison America's Shakespeare?

How typical in 2019 it is to teach non-black readers what black people have known since antiquity.  As one of Morrison's anointed, an ostensible heir to James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates would commit heresy if he failed to proclaim in the foreword for The Origin of Others that "we are fortunate to have Toni Morrison, one of the finest writers and thinkers this country has ever produced.  Her work is rooted in history and pulls beauty from some of its most grotesque manifestations" (xvii).  I reckon Coates attempts to pull beauty from the grotesque in his debut novel The Water Dancer (2019) by way of genuflecting to his patron saint.  Nevertheless, I reckon what I currently find in the scholarship devoted to  African American intellectual history by  younger thinkers regarding the Other may prove more efficacious than The Origin of Others.  To deal with the ascent of terrorism, the Other of globalized insanities, we require hard-core, empirical analysis and evaluations rather than piety, triumphant decline,  and platitudes.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 2, 2019

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