{"id":99261,"date":"2015-05-03T09:13:40","date_gmt":"2015-05-03T13:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=99261"},"modified":"2016-02-18T10:11:10","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T15:11:10","slug":"the-books-passions-of-the-mind-toni-morrison-beloved-by-a-s-byatt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=99261","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Passions of the Mind<\/i>, \u2018Toni Morrison: Beloved<\/i>,\u2019 by A.S. Byatt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"51yoF-rPhRL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nOn the essays shelf<\/a> (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!) <\/p>\n

NEXT BOOK: Passions of the Mind<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, a collection of essays by A.S. Byatt.<\/p>\n

Toni Morrison’s harrowing and brilliant Beloved<\/a>\"\"<\/i> came out in 1987, and it swept through my group of friends like a brush fire. I was in college. Everyone was broke, and there were only a couple of copies of the book in the university library, so we passed around one copy. It passed from hand to hand through the theatre department. And it was understood that we had to hold back talking about it until we all had read it. It was like watching a TV show, and trying to avoid spoilers until everyone was all caught up. That’s how major the book was – not a revelation, of course it was major – but that was how its major-ness was felt in one small group of college kids in Rhode Island. The book was dog-eared by the time it made it through all of our hands. It was a group experience, reading that book. Sometimes it happens like that. The same thing happened with The Shipping News<\/i>, although that was localized in my own family. Everyone else had read it, I hadn’t, and everybody could not believe I hadn’t read it yet, and demanded I read it, so that I could join in the discussions. I was busy at the time, and was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it,” until finally my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and sent me a copy through the mail. I love my family. <\/p>\n

So every time I think of Beloved<\/i>, 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.” <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

Like most great books, Beloved<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

There’s nothing else quite like Beloved<\/i>. It is sui generis.<\/i><\/p>\n

A.S. Byatt is slightly obsessed with Beloved<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

I’ll excerpt just a bit of her essay on Beloved<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Excerpt from Passions of the Mind<\/a>\"\"<\/i>: ‘Toni Morrison: Beloved<\/i>‘, by A.S. Byatt<\/big><\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Toni Morrison has always been an ambitious artist, sometimes almost clotted or tangled in her own brilliant and complex vision. Beloved<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n