Beloved? Meh. It Could've Been Important

[Now new and x-posted!]

The New Republic's "This Week in the Arts" mailer suggested that since "The New York Times recently proclaimed Toni Morrison's Beloved to be 'the single best work of American fiction published in the past 25 years,'" I should check out how TNR reviewed back in 1988.  A quick dip in the archives and I was reading "Aunt Medea."  It opens with a misguided slam of James Baldwin.  In stunning prose, Baldwin claims

people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.  That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his efforts, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human like that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. 

Baldwin may not always be correct, but few sound so good being wrong.  According to TNR's reviewer, with Baldwin

the claim to martyrdom, real or merely asserted, began to take on value.  One on longer had to fear the charge of self-pity when detailing the suffering of one's group.  Catastrophic experience was elevated.  Race became an industry.  It spawned careers, studies, experts, college departments, films, laws, hairdos, name changes, federal programs, and so many books. 

Then came the feminists.  They exposed the patriarchial assumptions of black male protest literature. 

But exposing the shortcomings in protest writing by black men didn't automatically make writing by black women any better.  Writers like Alice Walker revealed little more than their own inclination to melodrama, militant self-pity, guilt-mongering and pretensions to mystic wisdom.

Enter Toni Morrison:

With Song of Solomon, which appeared in 1979, she became a best-selling novelist, proving that the combination of poorly digested folk materials, feminist rhetoric, and a labored use of magic realism could pay off.

Beloved is no better:

It is designed to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn't weaken.

For Beloved, above all else, is a blackface holocaust novel.  It seems to have been written in order to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest, a contest usually won by references to, and works about, the experience of Jews at the hands of Nazis.

That Morrison chose to set the Afro-American experience in the framework of collective tragedy is fine, of course.  But she lacks a true sense of the tragic.  For all the memory within this book, including recollections of the trip across the Atlantic and the slave trading in the Caribbean, no one ever recalls how the Africans were captured.  That would have complicated matters.

That's not a bad point.  Erasing the role of Africans in the slave trade is a matter of political pragmatism which does strip some formal element of tragedy from the slave trade.  Wouldn't it be far more tragic to be sold into slavery by your cousin.  Better yet:

A young African woman gives birth to a baby boy who, it has been augured, will one day lead her tribe to victory over the rival tribe to the east.  During a raid, she is wounded and disoriented.  When she comes to the boy is nowhere to be found.  He is presumed dead.  He isn't.  The tribe to the east kidnapped him and for the next ten years raise him as one of its own.  The mother eventually becomes the queen of her tribe.  She takes revenge for the "death" of her son by ordering an assault on the tribe to the east.  In the course of the attack, her son, the greatest warrior in either tribe, is taken prisoner.  After the battle, she orders all the prisoners sold to a Portuguese slave trader bound to America.  A few years later, the tribe to the east launches a successful attack on her tribe.  The leader of the tribe to the east spares the queen's life long enough to confront her: "Why did you sell your son, the greatest warrior in either tribe, to the white slaver?"

Now that would be a tragedy.  The book could continue following the son's brutal life as a slave and then he could die a heartwrenching and properly tragic death.  Does Morrison do that?

In Beloved Morrison only asks that her readers tally up the sins committed against the darker people and feel sorry for them, not experience the horrors of slavery as they do.

Apparently she can't even get the heartwrenching part right:

Morrinson, unlike Alice Walker, has real talent, an ability to organize her novel in a musical structure, deftly using images as motifs; but she perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.

She could write a heartwrenching novel were it not for her desire to insert bold ideological statements in her book.  In classic creative writer's argot: she tells instead of showing.  "Beloved reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries."  Ouch.

Were Beloved adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison's literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this:

"Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.  [Adolescent sons are shown fleeing.]  Meet Paul D, who had a passion for Sethe when they were both slaves, but lost her to another.  [Sethe shown walking with first husband Halle, smilin as Paul D looks on longingly.]

The parody continues on far longer than its enabling conceit actually allows.  The reviewer's point is that "Morrison almost always loses control" and that "she can't resist the temptation of the trite or sentimental."  The stuff of miniseries.  The final evaluation?

Too many attempts at biblical grandeur, run through by Negro Folk rhythms, stymie a book that might have been important.

Yet to render slavery with aesthetic authority demands not only talent, but the courage to face the ambiguities fo the human soul, which transcend race.  Had Toni Morrison that kind of courage, had she the passion necessary to liberate her work from the failure of feeling that is sentimentality, there is much she could achieve.  But why should she try to achieve anything?  The position of literary conjure woman has paid off quite well.  At last year's PEN Congress she announced that she had never considered herself American, but with Beloved she proves that she is as American as P.T. Barnum.

STANLEY CROUCH

Stanley Crouch?  STANLEY CROUCH?  I knew this argument sounded familiar.  However, this little exercise says something favorable taking arguments seriously.  That bit in the middle about Morrison's failure to face the larger tragedy of slavery strikes me as somewhat compelling.  May even account for why I prefer Charles Johnson's Middle Passage to Beloved.  The reductio of Crouch's argument could be entertaining:

THE HORROR!  (points to the east)  THE HORROR!  (points to the west)  THAT HORROR TOO!  (points to the south)  AND THAT ONE!  (points to the north)  ALMOST FORGOT THAT ONE!  (points to the southeast)  NO DOUBT!

Comments

[Brandon]

I guess Crouch delivered a verbal punch in the face rather than the actual ones he's so notorious for giving.

Stephen Metcalf, diletantte at large for slate.com, also takes on Beloved's preeminence on the NYT list (http://www.slate.com/id/2141971/). He argues that the novel is so well regarded because the novel's commitment to "therapeutic self-renewal" in response to a personal trauma fits in perfectly with the burgeoning culture of self-help and actualization. One need look no further for evidence than the scene in the clearing with Baby Suggs where she tells her congregation to love themselves because no one else will. This passage is the final scene of the movie adaptation starring none other than Oprah Winfrey.

[Doctor Slack]

It's pretty intriguing to be treated to the spectacle of Crouch complaining that Beloved elevates suffering and Metcalf complaining, almost twenty years later, that it downplays it. And complaining, no less, that Beloved has a "Land of Cockaigne" sensibility because its slave characters actually manage to find a place where they can cook, bed down and make ends meet. (No doubt a different line of ideological attack should have been possible had Morrison been careful to strip away any hint of such comforts.)

Which is not to say that Metcalf's point is totally implausible (or for that matter, totally convincing). But man oh man. The "Uncle Tom's Cabin started the Civil War, what has Beloved done?" riff: dumb, dumb, dumb. (Do tell us, sir Metcalf, have de Lillo and Updike started any civil wars, lately? Is that really how you want to assess literary merit? Of course it isn't.) Reminds me why most lit theorists don't focus on "taste" and so-called "love of literature" any more... and why that's probably a good thing.