Toni Morrison and Tea Party Schools of Resentment
“they hurt each other, are hurt, and don’t heal in a straight arc”
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Before I begin with what I think Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child is, let me define what I’m sure it is not. I have little patience with any criticism of her work that is based on race; and—like all of her novels, Child doesn’t have any comforting post-racial statements that have nothing to do with the organic structure of a novel. I also don’t care for any criticism that takes the words of an individual character and interprets them as Morrison's own beliefs without regard to the contextual dynamic of the stories she creates; and there are characters that make off-handed references to whites. I have no time for the Charles Johnson School of criticism that says Toni Morrison can’t write about black men; and the male protagonist of Child is depicted as a complicated man and not a rascally saint who walks on water. In short, if you demand that white people have a central place in the lives of African American Characters, this isn’t the review for you.
Those more prone to see her as a writer than a right-wing talking point might find a lot to talk about in Child, a book more in the tradition of her experimental novels. If one really reads her, they might find her to be a wildly experimental writer, someone who has more in common with Claude Simon than James Baldwin. The Bluest Eye is structured as a counterpoint to Jean Toomer’s cane, and has more symbolism in it than The Wasteland (though one can read the powerful core of the narrative in its own right). In its experimental prose, Jazz owes more to the post modernism of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters than it does to Richard Wright. And Beloved—I’m sorry—suffers toward the end when she cuts her breathtaking story with the Virginia Woolf-styled narrative shifts that she can never get quite right (it’s still a very good book).
I have my favorite Morrison in; The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy, Home, the first 3/4ths of Beloved, and the first 2/3rds of Love, she has created some of best and the most innovative fiction I have ever read in my life. In them, she showed herself to be the clearest heir to the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston: finding the universal in the vernacular, myth, ritual, ceremony and interrelationship dynamics of African American life. Combining that with experiments in Magical realism, modernism and post modernism, she shifted the landscape of African American fiction by creating fiction that wasn’t about messages to white people, but stories about the interiors of black characters.
When she hasn't been on her A-Game (2/3rds of Jazz, Paradise, half of Tar Baby) her experiments seem like inorganic stitches that tie dynamic pieces of writing together. At times, Child fell square into the latter category. Morrison still likes Woolf’esque transitions (and did them better than she ever did in Home, her last novel), but here they seem jarring and inorganic again. Some of the monologs of the novel’s characters were too expository for my taste, statements to help the novel get to its finish line.
But dear black Jesus, the best parts of this novel! I don't know what the hell critics are talking about when they complain about Morrison's later prose: A Mercy and Home have a minimalist power and effect that her often grandiose 90's voice didn't have. In Paradise, Morrison's inhabitants of Ruby sound exactly like her, and it reads like a companion to the bad novels of Nabokov, Updike, or James. In Child she almost completely lets her characters get away from her, and the novel's best moments, IMO, make it a success and worth the reader’s time.
The plot, I'm on shakier ground to be declarative about. Not because I hate it, but it relates to complex relationships between women that cause me to fall back and not assume that I have the definitive opinion on the subject. Child is Morrison at her most directly interpersonal core: A trauma narrative around Lula Ann, an abused child who became a powerful cosmetics exec, the light-skinned mother who abused her as well because of her dark color, her wounded ragamuffin boyfriend who struggles to deal with his shit, and a circle of friends who have been through various stages of hell. At the center of the novel are the loaded relationship dynamics that her characters have had, ones between mothers and daughters, between best of friends, between men who fuck over and who have been fucked over.
Black Feminist scholars of her work have been dealing with/arguing about these dynamics for over 45 years. I can see how most critics can love this novel. I can see how Kara Walker can be queasy about it. It’s also easy to see how a good deal of Morrison’s readers are on the fence about it. The only thing I can add is that it's a startling, powerful novel, and remarkably so.
Are their arguments to be made against Toni Morrison's work? Yes, just like there are arguments to be made against any major writer, especially given the fact that Morrison is 84 years old.
I could imagine an ethical reader more interested in the grounded magic of Chekhov, Trevor, and Munro who might not take Morrison’s experimentalism to their liking. Critics need to deal with what she’s written, however, instead of making her a highbrow tea party talisman. The idea that there wasn’t a comforting post-racial statement in God Help the Child, that the people are messy, human, and wounded, that they hurt each other, are hurt, and don’t heal in a straight arc, were the best things about it for me. To see it as a protest novel about white people (which almost every conservative critic has accused it of being) only presents a negative side of the political correctness they claim to despise.
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Header image courtesy of Dana Stirling. To view more of her photography, go here.
