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Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Beloved? Meh. It Could’ve Been Important.
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 seemed 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
it is helpful of mr kaufmann in this way to invite further discussion of Morrison’s place in American literature. (i take it that almost the entire posting is a transmission of Crouch’s ideas rather than his own, though for long stretches i can’t be sure). with respect to Beloved, at least (the only novel by Morrison with which i am familiar), i think the critique is justified. the work is skillful in certain respects—if derivative from faulkner—yet morally simplistic. the “judgment” that it is the best american novel of the past 25 years tells us more about post-viet nam stress disorder than it does about prose fiction.
the Times has essentially taken a poll, lumping the opinion of a few legitimate critics like frank kermode with some 200 other persons (a few of whom may deserve our attention), regarding 15 first-place votes from among this crowd as somehow definitive. top ten lists of this sort are cracked in the first place, this one telling us, if anything at all, that minorities and women have at long last been given their due. Crouch can complain, as many of us cannot, that Beloved is reductive of the Black experience in america and weakened by ideology. i would not be surprised, however, if feminists have taken issue with his largely negative assessment, writing him off as a chauvinist male.
dead white males like myself would be wise to keep silent, though perhaps if i confine my attention to the work of women over the last quarter century, i may be forgiven for believing two other american novels roughly contemporary with Beloved superior to it: e. annie proulx’s The Shipping News, and carol shields’ The Stone Diaries. both are narrower in scope than Morrison’s but truer to life and more inventive.
what mr. kaufman has managed to do is nothing more then espouse his personal standards on the term ‘suffering,’ ‘tragedy,’ and ‘story.’ what i think mr. kaufamn forgets is that such a definition is reserved solely for the individual discussions we each hold with ourselves. who are we to decide that the experience of the african-americans, those reared in the backdrop of slavery, or persecuted by hitler and his crew are of more or less significance, literary or otherwise, then the other. is that not to say that one man’s suffering or the loss of one human life is of more value then that of another? i think the one thing mr. kaufman did communicate quite clearly is the richness and varietal opinions ms. morrison’s work offers the reader. if for no other purpose but to provoke discussion, force discovery and encourage an investigation in our own history, then i would have to agree with the times that it may in fact be one of the best american novels in the past quarter century. for the purpose of literature, of writing, of expression in any of it’s forms is not to create concensus or even to record truth (for this is the most subjective of all concepts) . . no. the point of expression, whether it be literary, artistic, musical or in an all together incomprehensible form is to present, for our consideration, the impression of the author of the work. and this, ms. morrison’s beloved, ms. walker’s work and i’m sure mr. kaufman’s work as well, does with profound clarity.
Hmmm . . . . It’s been so long since I read Beloved that I’m not sure I have a serious opinion about it. I liked it a lot and am not at all surprised that it got top place in this poll. But that lack of surprise has as much to do with my sense of how such exercises run as with my sense of the novel’s quality.
I could almost say the same thing about Crouch. I first read him in a magazine called Players—a black version of Playboy—where he reviewed a book on minstrelsy. Then I read some an essay collection in the in the early 90s, Notes of a Hanging Judge. I thought it was pretty interesting stuff. I’d also been reading some of his stuff in TNR. I recall a rather over-wrought piece on Miles Davis—with a clever title, “Sketches of Pain” (a play on an album title, “Sketches of Spain")—and, it turns out, his review of Beloved. I didn’t recognize the review as Scott laid out the quotes, but it all fell into place when he revealed the author at the end. At which point I recalled that I didn’t much like Crouch’s review of Morrison.
That should not be taken as implying that I think Beloved really is the top American novel of the last 25 years or even that I think it’s a keeper. On the latter, I just don’t know, it’s been too long. On the former, I can’t take that kind of exercise seriously. It’s an amusing parlor game, but no more.
As for Crouch, he’s smart, stylish, and in a rut deep and long. I’ve got the impression that he’s got one or two things to say and uses whatever as an occasion to say one or the other. Has he yet published his Great American Novel about Charlie Parker? Seems to me he may have. I’d be surprised it it’s better than Beloved.
I sometimes like Crouch—any man who calls out Farrakhan as a nutcase in a public debate with Cornel West can’t be all bad—but he’s also had the habit of trying way too hard, at times, to be contrarian.
His issues with the industry of race, valid though they can be, can take on an air of lightweight salon blather when he’s incautious or gets carried away. One has to wonder, for instance, if he really imagines that an honest account of Black life—or for that matter, any life—in a great many periods and places on the North American continent isn’t going to involve some elements of “catastrophic experience.” So what constitutes “elevating” these experiences (if Beloved is supposed to be an example, it would seem that merely writing about them qualifies)? Are writers just supposed to skirt around them? Give us stories of stiff-upper lipped folks doing good works in nice, buttoned-down communities? It was tried in CanLit, and trust me, you really don’t want to go there.
Similarly, the “blackface holocaust novel” schtick seems a tad overdrawn, giving the impression that Crouch has simply overlooked the fairly central role of anti-slavery in the American national mythos dating back to the Civil War (for good or ill, slavery had a place in the “big-time martyr” sweepstakes long before Morrison came along)—not to mention a little novel by Alex Haley some ten years prior. Crouch’s call to “transcend race” when talking about a heavily-racialized form of slavery seems facile at best, and the charge of “sentimentality” seems like a clean miss from what I can remember of Beloved‘s prose.
Crouch isn’t even that interesting in taking Morrison to task about writing Beloved as a primarily American story. It would be nice to see a book tackle the African side of things more thoroughly—though it’s not easy to do convincingly, to put it mildly; even Equiano’s famous “first-hand” account in the 18th century is now questioned—but the American dimensions of the story have more than enough of the “true sense of the tragic” for everyone concerned that Crouch’s posturing seems over-the-top. (How much, really, would it “complicate matters” to have had a part of Beloved‘s narrative mea culpa-ing about how Africans were involved in the slave trade, too? Did the predominance of African slave raiders in the continent’s interior ever make the European buyers on the coast, or the predominantly “white” slavemasters in the Americas, look sympathetic?)
As it happens, I don’t think Beloved is Morrison’s best novel; for my money, that title belongs firmly to Paradise. But I think there’s good reason that Crouch’s dissension from the general opinion of the book didn’t gain much traction. It just wasn’t very convincing.
. . . but he’s also had the habit of trying way too hard, at times, to be contrarian.
Yes. As though being against it is the first move, and rationalizing his opposition is an after-thought.
Lit Crit is not in trouble, as the story often goes, because it’s too theoretical. It’s in trouble because no one writes clearly about what they want out of a novel and what the novel gives. I’m sick of anti-Morrison backlash (Crouch’s old review, in 1988, might be the leading edge of the backlash) because it always criticizes her for not writing something different from what she successfully writes, which the critic would prefer her to write. Crouch would prefer her to account, like a historian, for all the complex historical realities surrounding the slave trade (which are hardly relevant to a setting in the 1870s!), when what she does is 1) place a story of suffering into a mythic, folkloric frame and 2)explore the internal experience of people (such as slaves) who are otherwise only seen externally in historical accounts. Crouch wants the historical account, so he calls her incompetent in handling the mythic stuff. First understand what the novelist wants to do, then critique it. Otherwise it’s not criticism, it’s grouchiness and bad faith.
Among the bad effects of this bad criticism is that it prevents us from looking at any of Morrison’s actual weaknesses. I think she does aestheticize suffering, as in the funeral scene of _Song of Solomon_. The characters stop being convincing as real people or as archetypes—when the presentation is too polished and the sentences too beautiful, we lose the sense that the events are happening in time instead of playing out the script of a perfect scene. They just about break into a musical number.
But a critique like that’s not a reason to airily dismiss her as some kind of minstrel, or affirmitive action choice, or any of the other idiotic labels that I hear all the time. All authors have their habits and weaknesses. The worst reason to hate any of them is that wrote X kind of novel instead of Y or B. Ask if it’s good as X.
There are other good titles that could have won, of course. But _Beloved_’s as good a choice as any to win the silly poll.
Oh, and who said slavery was the only subject of the novel? Motherhood, treated fairly unsentimentally, is at least as big. Is it feminist rhetoric to work with a character who murders her baby, somehow, or is that just an off-topic question?
Seen in The Onion (scroll down a bit): “Beloved is just another example of angry minorities trying to do away with the canon by generating moving works of literary genius.”
jim: Crouch can complain, as many of us cannot, that Beloved is reductive of the Black experience in america and weakened by ideology. i would not be surprised, however, if feminists have taken issue with his largely negative assessment, writing him off as a chauvinist male.
They’ve done far worse, but then again, he’s asked for it. (Amardeep informs me he slapped Dale Peck around a few years back.) Still, I don’t believe that “many of cannot complain that Beloved is reductive of the black experience in america and weakened by ideology.” I’ll do so proudly: it’s both, which is why I prefer those Morrison novels in which she’s less reductive, less preachy, and more concerned with telling a story representative of some slice of that African-American experience. Like Song of Solomon.
chloe: who are we to decide that the experience of the african-americans, those reared in the backdrop of slavery, or persecuted by hitler and his crew are of more or less significance, literary or otherwise, then the other. is that not to say that one man’s suffering or the loss of one human life is of more value then that of another?
I want to add that my parody of a “truly tragic” slavery novel revolved around the formal, Aristotelian notion of tragedy, not a hierarchy of suffering. That said, while we can’t determine who suffers more, we’re well within our rights to discuss which author better represents the suffering of his or her characters, or creates a stronger empathetic bond between reader and character, no?
Bill and Dr. Slack, I’m in general agreement with y’all--although not about Paradise, which I disliked for reasons I don’t altogether remember, but which may have just been that it was one of the last novels I read duing my “Morrison phase"--but I wonder if there’s not some real usefulness to someone as intelligently bombastic as Crouch pointing out deficiencies in novels which, for whatever reason, have been canonized almost from the moment of their publication. Sure, he had a bone to pick, but at least he had that. So many reviews are timid and unopinionated, perfunctorily positive, almost. Even when I absolutely disagree with a negative review, the reviewer’s posture incites thought instead of assent. I know authors aren’t fond of them--Adam sent me <a hef="http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,1287385,00.html">this review of Snow a few months back</a>--but they do seem to learn more from them, even if it’s only that they vehemently disagree with a particular point about genre or what-not.
rm: It’s in trouble because no one writes clearly about what they want out of a novel and what the novel gives. I’m sick of anti-Morrison backlash (Crouch’s old review, in 1988, might be the leading edge of the backlash) because it always criticizes her for not writing something different from what she successfully writes, which the critic would prefer her to write.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair, as Crouch goes into great detail (as you note in the next sentence) outling precisely what the novel should and shouldn’t have contained: more history, less kowtowing to what he sees as pernicious feminist influence. I think his complaint, if wrong, at least justified; then again, so is yours (on both counts). A negative review’s always going to include a fair bit of “what I think you should have written,” just as when I mark a student essay or article, I’m doing so on the basis of what I think the student should’ve written. Your point, if I understand it, is that a critic should consider the object before them as an object, complete and coherent, answerable only to those questions of form and content it raises. That sounds right to me: does Novel X effectively accomplish what it attempted to?
Crouch would (and did) say Beloved failed to evoke the sense of the tragic it aimed to. Now, as jim and chloe respectively note above, there’s a way in which that decision’s based as much on the reader and his/her expectations as it is the author and what he/she does/doesn’t accomplish. I can accept that, but then again, I have no choice. The question of a qualitative analysis of literary value is addressed often but rarely effectively. (I.e. it’s too big for me to write about here in a comment box. What is it with all these big questions being bandied about today?)
mr. crouch is indeed contentious to a fault [see. e.g., the few paragraphs devoted to him in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Crouch],
and yet he affords the rest of us the opportunity to evaluate Beloved as a work of fiction rather than a denunciation of slavery. is it the best american novel of the last 25 years? no, it isn’t, the Times’ poll a silly exercise, exploded by socrates in the Crito more than 2000 years ago, and again in swift’s “Argument Against the Abolishment of Christianity” in the opening paragraph. in the present case, we are not even crediting “the majority of opinions.” fifteen of two hundred is considered more than enough.
in our own discussion here, leaving aside the folly of judging literature by a show of hands, conversation tends to slide from the issue of literary merit to peripheral matters, nothing much directed to the substance of the novel. were discussants to read the book again, i believe they would find it defective in certain ways, if, that is, they can evade the moral opprobrium that Morrison has deliberately set in the middle of things to disarm any critics. let them consider Schoolteacher as a character, for instance, so absolutely and one-dimensionally evil as to justify Sethe in murdering her own child, or Sethe herself, so earthy and attractive (the various Pauls at the same time so respectful of her) that copulating with cows is the only way for them to express their admiration. to me, these two are both difficult to take seriously, as is the title character, and a considerable portion of the plot.
i confess to an impatience with novels that rely on supernatural occurrences for their effect, so may be peculiarly unreceptive to the charms of Beloved, however moving and ingenious others may find them. in my less charitable moments, like crouch, i suspect that their readiness to grant it a free pass to the top is based on extra-literary considerations, foremost among them a self-righteous desire to rid themselves of any residual connection to slave-owning.
slavery was a horror but will not for that reason alone make a story about it impervious to literary criticism. that Beloved is incredible in various regards might be explained as intentional; that it is also false is more troubling because by calling it what it is, we might seem to excuse what it has taken such extraordinary pains to condemn.
Scott, I’m afraid I have to disagree about the intrinsic worth of sloppy criticism coming from an intelligent and bombastic source. Off-target bombast, even from the usually intelligent, throws up noise where signal is sorely needed. In fact, if I thought Beloved were as awful a book as Crouch seems to have thought, I’d find his review doubly frustrating in that it’s exactly the sort of thing that would immunize the unworthy object from really useful criticism. So, in short, I agree with rm.
Put bluntly, much of the recent spasm of anti-Morrisonism strikes me as either fashionable but vapid contrarianism—Metcalf and his embarrassingly superficial “Land of Cockaigne / what civil wars has Beloved started” review, for instance—or extensions of “Culture War” partisanship that try to portray Morrison and her various readers and critics as a phalanx of PC thought police keen to drive all discussion of literary merit from the field by the mere act of mentioning slavery. (Hate to pick on you, Jim, but you mostly strike me as an example of the latter. Funny how you’re keen to talk about the feminists probably dismissing Crouch as a chauvinist while you’ve simultaneously built a self-sealing rationale for ignoring defenses of Morrison’s work or, God forbid, her motives.) I’m more than happy to see useful critique of Morrison’s work, Beloved included. More signal, though, less noise.
Second rm and Slack, with not much to add.
Do you agree or disagree with crouch’s review why or why not?