On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind
Toni Morrison’s harrowing and brilliant Beloved
So every time I think of Beloved, I think of my group of friends (we are all still friends today), passing it around amongst us. “You have to read it.” “Have you read it yet?” “What part are you on?” “Can I read you a passage that just killed me?” “Tell me when you finished it. Tell me when you finished it.”
There is so much about it that is brilliant and unforgettable, wholly separate from the theme/story of the book. One of the reasons why the book is so important is Morrison’s sui generis use of the English language. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m talking about. She’s up to something different, something so complex and so focused that it seems to alter language itself. What is language meant to do? Convey meaning? Information? Or is it not up to that task? And how do we use it to express certain things? There is supposed “agreement” on that point, and yet sometimes a figure comes along who calls all of that into question. Who asks, essentially, “Why are these the rules? Cannot I write in THIS way instead? Who says I can’t?” This is Joycean territory. This is the Modernist tradition, the crack-up of certainty that followed WWI, when all of language – which could not avert that catastrophe – lost its power. A new language was required. That’s what Toni Morrison is doing. And you really need to know what you are doing if you enter that territory. Morrison does. Her associations are multi-layered, and almost dream-like (or nightmarish) in their subjectivity and personal quality.
Like most great books, Beloved requires that you submit to it. You are subordinate to it. It is not meant to be an easy read. Again, not just because of the subject matter, but of how she uses language. It is not kitchen-sink realism, nor is it meant to be. It is in the great Modernist continuum. The vision in the book is so grim that it is often unbearable. And the language is a forest of images and symbols and associations, with deep incantatory repetitions, and visions, and confusingly similar names (making a point about the naming convention itself, and how “names” – and therefore identity/individualism were erased in slavery) – all adding up to one harrowing and grim whole. An unendurable vision, and yet that somehow becomes the ultimate point: the characters in the book DID endure such horrors, and so it is beholden upon the reader to endure as well. It becomes a moral responsibility.
There’s nothing else quite like Beloved. It is sui generis.
A.S. Byatt is slightly obsessed with Beloved (she has written on it a lot, and it comes up a lot in her other essays). She ranks it as one of the all-time greats. Byatt describes Morrison’s writing as “singing prose” and that seems to me just right.
I’ll excerpt just a bit of her essay on Beloved.
Excerpt from Passions of the Mind
The book is full of the colors whose absence distresses the defeated Baby Suggs so that she hungers for yellow, or lavender, or a pink tongue even. It is also – and connectedly, through the name “colored people” – full of the marvelous descriptions of the brightness and softness of black bodies – pewter skins of women skating in the cold, Sixo’s indigo behind as he walks home naked after meeting his girl. Whiteness is evil and nothingness – Melville in his chapter on Whiteness in Moby-Dick called it “the colorless no-color from which people shrink.” Beloved perceives whites as skinless. Sethe, full of rage and distress, turns on Paul D. “a look like snow.”
Another profound and patterning metaphor is related to Sethe’s horror when the two brutal and inhuman nephews of her schoolmaster owner write – with ink she made for them – “a list of Sethe’s animal characteristics.” When Paul D. discovers what she did and attempted to do to her children in desperation, he reproaches her, “You got two feet, not four.” This image works subtly all ways. During her escape Sethe crawls towards the river, pregnant, desperate to reach her other unweaned baby (already in Ohio), ripped open by whipping, reduced to animal level by white man’s beastliness. The child she is trying to get to – Beloved – is always described as “crawling – already?” moving on all fours and aspiring to walk straight. The slaves whose stories lie behind Toni Morrison’s novel were thought by whites at this time to be in some way animal. The case for slavery was argued on these grounds. What Toni Morrison does is present an image of a people so wholly human they are almost superhuman. It is a magnificent achievement.
Toni Morrison has always been an ambitious artist, sometimes almost clotted or tangled in her own brilliant and complex vision. Beloved has a new strength and simplicity. This novel gave me nightmares, and yet I sat up late, paradoxically smiling to myself with intense pleasure at the exact beauty of the singing prose. It is an American masterpiece, and one which, moreover, in a curious way reassesses all the major novels of the time in which it is set. Melville, Hawthorne, Poe wrote riddling allegories about the nature of evil, the haunting of unappeased spirits, the inverted opposition of blackness and whiteness. Toni Morrison has with plainness and grace and terror – and judgment – solved the riddle, and showed us the world which haunted theirs.
Great book, but very hard to read and I felt the same way about Roots and The Autobiography of MalcolmX. Required reading by my people. But unlike Roots and MalcolmX, Morrison has the ability to reach across the aisle to the other side and make them see and perhaps understand without generating the anger that the other books did and still do.
I’m curious about how you read it. Was it reality to you or a fable? I read it as both. It was brutally real, but parts of it touched on the stories that I heard and learned when I was a child from my grandmother who grew up in Georgia and whose grandparents were slaves. To my great grandmother, the color of black people meant that they were of the earth. That we were rooted in the earth. White people, in her eyes, were rootless and lost. (This is my grandmother speaking, not me.)
The fact that you noted the language is particularly enlightening (although I expected no less) because I’m not sure if reviewers of that time realized the importance of that. For me, I loved the story and the visuals and the “color” but I was a little annoyed because the words she used were words that I understood but had been taught not to use. It took me a while to understand that it had to be written that way. There was no other way.
Carolyn – Thanks for your thoughts!
// I’m curious about how you read it. Was it reality to you or a fable? //
I’m not sure I experienced it as either, at the time. It felt like reality – it was as harrowing as reality – but as processed through a nightmare – as well as language used to express feeling/dreams/colors swirling around events that could not be named. Just felt, scrabbling on the periphery. It was haunting. And compelling – practically a page-turner, once I clicked into the rhythms of the language. And submitted to – her writing is so dominant that you can feel how much you must submit to it – like you must submit to Joyce, or Proust, or any of those “difficult” Modernist writers, who twisted language to express their subjective experiences – because that was the only way to go, once “certainty” had died for them and for European artists in the trenches of WWI.
And so language itself had to be interrogated. Turned inside out. Not in the facile way that sometimes happened now – but in a deeply deeply subjective way. Linguists, essentially.
And Toni Morrison’s symbols – images – tone-poems – moods – are so her own that you must enter into it. I love how opaque the book often is, as though it’s coming to you through a fog, or seen only dimly on a dark dark night – because again it feels like a nightmare – or like you had a nightmare and then purposefully forgot it, but all day you feel like, “Something terrible has happened, I just can’t remember what.”
I think, too, like Joyce – it is clear that Morrison comes out of an oral tradition. That’s in her writing. The Irish experience is my culture, so I can talk about that with familiarity because it’s passed on to me. The Irish pass on tales. The tales grow and morph in the telling. It keeps the culture together, a culture that had been attacked so viciously that the language itself, the native language, was erased from the earth. I mean, it still exists …but it was wiped out nonetheless. It vanished. Along with a famine-genocide. So passing things down – history, stories, geneology – through word of mouth is a way to protect the culture from an invading force. You may burn our books and force us to write in English, but we still can talk to one another in Irish, and pass it on down. Joyce always said that FINNEGANS WAKE was meant to be read out loud. And that book is damn near impenetrable if you try to read it silently but when you read it aloud, Abracadabra, it cracks open for you, revealing itself.
The way words SOUND are almost more important than what they MEAN, and I’m not even sure that makes sense with Morrison, but there might be something there.
The Paris Review Interview with Morrison is really great. I love it because she’s a gigantic brain of a word-smith, and she uses it in a way that is instantly and automatically recognizable as HERS. Very few authors – only a handful – can do that.
// but I was a little annoyed because the words she used were words that I understood but had been taught not to use. It took me a while to understand that it had to be written that way. There was no other way. //
Very very moving. I agree.
I’m sure you’ve read the Paris Review interview with her, but just in case:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison
Thanks, Sheila.
You’re welcome! It’s such a great interview series.
MORRISON
… I’ve tried to overcome not having orderly spaces by substituting compulsion for discipline, so that when something is urgently there, urgently seen or understood, or the metaphor was powerful enough, then I would move everything aside and write for sustained periods of time. I’m talking to you about getting the first draft.
INTERVIEWER
You have to do it straight through?
MORRISON
I do. I don’t think it’s a law.
I read Beloved again last year, for the first time since it was new. I remembered the power and horror. What surprised me and made me laugh out loud with its very beginning was the beauty of the language. How could I have forgotten that? And yet I had. This is why we must revisit masterpieces. Necessary.
KathyB – I’ve been meaning to re-read it. It’s been a very long time – and I agree, re-visiting masterpieces is so important! Especially if you read them when you were a teenager – and even if you loved it then – it’d be a totally different experience as an adult. I have experienced that so many times with books I read in high school or college.
You just bring to bear so much more knowledge to the table – AND I think sometimes books beg to be read twice. Beloved is so challenging sometimes, that approaching it a second time – you may be more relaxed, it may be more accessible. (I found that to be true with Ulysses. Second time a BREEZE compared to the first.)