The novels of Toni Morrison

...I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket...

...Morrison's eye is on the story itself and the sheer pleasure of storytelling overrides everything else...

...But in general her men—Breedlove and Soaphead in The Bluest Eye...

...But the notion of his great-grandfather's winged escape is thrill 428 • DISSENT Books ing to Milkman It frees him to reconcile with his family, take pride in his lineage, learn the meaning of love, defy his murderous, raceenraged friend .Guitar, and emulate his forefather on an outcropping of rock called Solomon's Leap...

...This bit of deus ex machina reveals nothing about either Milkman or the tangled line of black history in America or "what all human relationships boiled down to...

...And given the collective expectations borne on her career, her role as epic poet and public inspiration, it would be difficult for anyone not to become impatient...

...Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him...

...It's the name of Milkman's great-grandfather, who, he learns, was "a flying African...

...What Lawrence called the "mob-self" had heard the tremendous chorus of celebration, crescendoing in the Nobel Prize...

...Are my judgments bruised by the sense of being not just under attack, but worse, passé, used up, left out...

...straightforward descriptive passages...

...Under pressure the sensitive and liberal mind, with its unshakeable bad conscience, tends to hesitate, second-guess, mute, glide over, skirt around, before emerging from these private adjustments with a presentable public opinion...

...Sula (Plume, paper...

...One reader's gimmick is another's genius...

...But being an icon of a movement has its disadvantages, and in Toni Morrison's case it may have brought out weaknesses that would have remained dormant had she simply been a good writer producing a novel every four years or so...

...Its hero, Milkman Dead, is a sour, careless young man who begins an inadvertent but increasingly obsessive uncovering of his history...

...The one dutifully longs to join the choir and is terrified of singing solo...

...Beyond this point the matter turns on judgments...

...Tar Baby, says New York magazine, "transform[ s] individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability...

...Jazz (Plume, paper...

...Molten...

...In theory, the first trend ought to be independent of the second: one can celebrate a collective freeing of talent and energy without suspending the ability or will to judge it...

...Emotion and imagery that arise in the first passage from the material itself are breathed mouth to mouth into the second, so that the power of authorial lungs rather than character and incident becomes the focus...

...If I find these manipulative and overwrought instead of dazzling and rhapsodic, it betrays my preference for a more natural, less self-conscious prose, for emotion that is won instead of willed, and for fiction in which characters' destinies are worked out through motive and incident instead of supernatural intervention...

...They are all like that, these women...

...his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness...

...the other makes up his mind not to be awed, and confirms the power of mob thinking by reaction...

...The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, ear wax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts—all the natural SUMMER • 1994 • 427 Books excretions and protections the body was capable of—disquieted him...

...Morrison's distance on this pedophile allows her a degree of pity, irony, and sharp insight...

...Does it also betray a deficiency that is ultimately attributable to factors like race and sex...

...His attentions therefore gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children...

...The late Ralph Ellison refused to sign on, saying that Morrison didn't need their help to get her Pulitzer...

...It's as though Morrison stopped trusting the more ordinary narrative talents to endow her novels with the weight and scope she wanted for them...

...Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly...

...In the second passage character itself has dissolved into a generic female rage, whereas the preferences and disgusts of Soaphead in The Bluest Eye are his alone...

...But in the later books the trend toward both extreme inwardness and mob consciousness becomes dominant—a highoctane lyricism that insists on powering one woman's emotion with transpersonal resonance...

...A lot of them flew back to Africa...

...The tendency is perceptible in all her work, starting with The Bluest Eye's self-conscious first-person sections and its failed experiments with right-margin justification and Dick-andJane headings...

...she's a gifted novelist even though a posse of letter-signers said she is...

...But having examined oneself honestly and faced the possibility of bias or blindness and tried not to be ruled by them, one is left with the judgment of the individual self...

...The pace is swifter, the action more compelling, the tone more matteroffact, the language plainer and yet more vivid...

...and some will be overwhelmed by the ghost's musings in Beloved ("I am Beloved and she is mine...

...He was what one might call a very clean old man...

...His sexuality was anything but lewd...

...What seems impossible is to sit down to read Morrison free of prejudice...

...the first third of Sula (1973), which introduces the black neighborhood of Medal lion, Ohio, in the early century and populates it with two families and an odd collection of extras...

...In Song of Solomon Morrison sustains her narrative strengths until the very last pages—rapid, witty, epigrammatic dialogue...

...Milkman Dead, his father Macon, and his friend, Guitar, in Song of Solomon: Paul D and Stamp Paid in Beloved—live on the page more persuasively than her women...

...a plot that keeps taking improbable yet irresistible turns...

...and a grasp of generational lineage that explains the complexity of the living in terms of the dead...

...Here, for example, is her portrait of Soaphead, the perverted healer to whom Pecola goes with her request for blue eyes: His cravings, although intense, never relished physical contact...

...The difference between these two passages is partly explained by their positions at opposite ends of her career, two decades apart...

...The Bluest Eye (Wasshington Square Press...

...Some readers will be breathtaken by flying Africans...

...Tar Baby (Plume, paper...

...Anyone who reads through all her work knows that it is not in hock to cultural fashion...

...One day, Solomon took flight, leaving behind Milkman's grandfather and twenty other children to contend with the pains and liberations of life on American ground...

...The conflict between powerful but conventional gifts and an ambition to wring them into something more exalted appears most vividly in Song of Solomon, her best novel and the one that made her famous...

...If you are white and male, honesty requires that you ask yourself some unpleasant questions: do I resent having the limelight on groups I can't take out membership in...

...Not at all...

...In as much as they represent tendencies in her writing, they show her becoming more lyrical, less precise, less straightforward, more pumped up...

...They were usually manageable and frequently seductive...

...However limited and flawed, we need it if we are to keep our various mob selves from doing our reading for us...

...Prose-poems, one-sentence paragraphs, folk-talk, elaborate metaphor: in the latter part of Beloved and throughout Jazz every line quivers under the burden of these demands...

...Song of Solomon (Plume, paper...

...Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury...

...Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts...

...has become a sort of personal devotion that serious writers are rarely the objects of (the New York Times, which isn't prone to lose its head, reported her Nobel lecture as an experience of rapture and transformation...

...Persuasion gives way to assertion...

...Taken together, these examples suggest a surprising generalization: she is at her best when she is writing about men...

...A large amount of work by Americans whose collective voices were stifled or ignored throughout our history has appeared, which is a very good thing...

...I set out recently to read the complete novels of Toni Morrison with a mix of expectation and resentment that was probably unavoidable...

...SUMMER • 1994 • 429...

...Whether it goes under the rubric of folklore or magical realism, an ending in which men actually fly is the book's first wrong move...

...There is no writer on the contemporary American scene who comes as close as she to unanimity of approval, and in Morrison's case the approval 426 • DISSENT Books Discussed in this Essay Beloved (Knopf, paper...

...Almost visibly the novel falters on its last step, loses faith in a quieter, more personal recognition, and begins very rapidly beating its wings...

...He abhorred flesh on flesh...

...They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage...

...All of which suggests that her best writing is released by characters who don't represent herself...

...Compare that description of repressed emotion with this from her most recent novel, Jazz (1992): This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it...

...But they wouldn't like it...

...On the book jackets critics tout this tendency away from individuality as a token of strength, the mark of a major writer: "One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator's mind," says the New York Times...

...But in practice this seldom happens, for before the Books individual self can speak, the mob self intrudes with a long list of warnings and demands...

...The process is natural and in some ways justifiable...

...The second passage sounds more "literary," with its manipulations of rhythm and syntax, but it wills effects that the language interferes with...

...Her star has risen in a period when two cultural trends have taken place...

...Thick and slow-moving...

...To assume that the coincidence of career and Zeitgeist has worked entirely in her favor is to miss what can be insidious and undermining about the relation between the two...

...the first half of Beloved (1987), in which Sethe's slave past, her crossing to freedom, and her terrible decision to kill her child are interwoven with her fragile new life with Paul D; and above all the whole of Song of Solomon (1977), the high-spirited, terrifically inventive story of Milkman Dead's search for identity and history...

...So the mob self approaches her work feeling bound to be not just impressed but overwhelmed, and of course the individual self folds his arms and refuses...

...And a related generalization: her minor characters—parents, townspeople, and others—often have more life than her protagonists...

...But somehow asking these questions resolves nothing, for as soon as you begin your true feelings recede further until they are all but irrecoverable...

...Five years before, when a group of writers fired off a letter to the Pulitzer judges demanding that they not stiff Beloved as the National Book Award had done, the novel became a candidate for public office with angry, long-disenfranchised constituents doing the canvassing...

...This isn't always true: in Tar Baby (1981), her weakest novel, the sections told from Joe's point of view are even more predictable than Jadine's, and in Beloved the surviving daughter, Denver, is probably the novel's most fully realized character...

...That question, born in English departments and now widespread, valid but stifling, leads back to the ones I raised earlier, to which the only real answer is: maybe...

...And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls...

...And in this atmosphere of timidity, evasion, and consensus, Toni Morrison has become perhaps the country's leading writer...

...They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down...

...It provides a shiver of mythmaking and a surprise solution to Milkman's ambivalence toward family and love: a solution that comes not out of the characters' lives on the page but out of the author's hat...

...It takes him from his prosperous, unhappy family life in a midwestern town to the back roads of Virginia and deeper into the past, from bizarre names to the equally bizarre stories that explain them, from legend and riddle to truth, until he arrives in a hot, empty place where everyone seems to have the same name: Solomon...

...Without simple, direct statement the stories are difficult to get through, and for extended periods there is no story at all...

...These habits of mind have been widespread for a decade or so...

...and this upsurge has been accompanied by a reluctance to criticize on the part of wellintentioned people, which is a bad thing made worse by the difficulty of even pointing it out...

...Do I, as the cliché goes, really even get it, given the limits of perception imposed by my group affiliations...

...It's also to do Morrison an injustice, because, pace Stanley Crouch, she is not just a "literary conjure woman...

...His response implied that literature belongs mainly to individuals' private judgments, that it has little to do with consensus, and that the mob reaction is bound to corrupt it...

...No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy...

...Long stretches of the novels show what a first-rate storyteller Morrison has always been: the later sections of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), which recount the tortured histories of Cholly Breedlove, Pauline, and Soaphead, who together contrive to destroy young Pecola...