Print
They say hearing voices is a sign of insanity. In Toni Morrison it is a sign of genius. Yet Morrison’s recent novel has earned some indifferent–even negative-reviews. It averages a lowly three stars at Amazon. Such is the fate of a Nobel laureate and the state of American criticism.
In my usual contrarian mode let me state that despite what many reviewers think, I believe that A Mercy is not only Morrison’s best book; it may well be the best novel of our generation. It is also her most difficult book, a technical tour de force that ranks right up there with the best of Faulkner.
In fact Faulkner, among others, is one of the antecedents to this novel, with his multiple voices in novels such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But the Faulkner work this most reminds me of is his novella The Bear. Like that piece, A Mercy seeks to recover the American past for the present, to attempt nothing less than what the greatest of our fiction has sought–works like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn that wrestle with the American myth and in that epic struggle seek to recast the meaning of the American experience.
What Morrison, like Faulkner, has accomplished is something singular for its times–the creation of a style and voice that is so sure of itself that you can read a paragraph or two and immediately identify the author. In the cacophony of schools, styles, theories and pretenders that characterize our times, that voice rings out over the din.
In a way it represents the literary equivalent of John McLendon’s basketball system. Multi-voiced novels have become like fast-break basketball–they can be flashy and attention-grabbing along with appearing individualistic, even out-of-control. In the same way that McLendon’s basketball system had nothing to do with flash and individualism, neither does Morrison’s style. Like the patterns of McLendon’s offense, everything in this novel has a purpose.
This represents that elusive quarry that used to be termed “the Great American Novel,” whose task was always a courageous and laudable attempt to meet head on the paradoxes of our constantly renewing past. One of my mentors, David Noble, titled a book The American Adam in the New World Garden to describe this quest for rebirth. In her novel, Morrison plays Eve to Noble’s Adam–and in this case the gender shift is at the heart of what she is about for Morrison seeks nothing less than a rebirth, that places a feminine stamp on mythic America.
The Nobel Prize seems to have spurred Morrison to another level, one in which she takes on some of the novel’s most difficult technical problems while at the same time confronting some of this nation’s most difficult issues.
The story spills from separate voices, all but one women’s voices. Symbolically she begins with the white, male voice, for that has been the dominant voice of our past and those who choose to interpret it in fiction. That this voice should lay dying not long into the book, deliriously demanding to be carried in a rainstorm to the preposterous new mansion he has commissioned but will never inhabit directly severs a line that goes back to Ishmael, the wanderer who lived to tell the tale of the white whale and the peglegged Captain Ahab whose late night walks seared themselves into the sleep and dreams of all who dared travel with him on his twisted quest.
If Moby Dick is about whiteness, A Mercy is about color, particularly people of color who also are women. That said this is not a book that will end up in the clutches of Oprah’s book club, for it dares too much and in doing so raises some uncomfortable questions. Morrison, for example dares to juxtapose the African American and Native American traditions. She dares to juxtapose the threads of the African American experience which has been far from the unified voice white America has clung to for far too long.
That this novel should emerge as an African American acquired the keys to the White House reverberates with multiple meanings that even now all Americans find themselves confronting. If you truly seek to understand the significance of Barack Obama, then don’t buy one of the potboiling “making of the President” bits of instantaneous shallow analysis that crowd the space at major booksellers and independents alike, but rather pick up this book.
Like Barack Obama, Toni Morrison has made a bold gamble that hinges on the ability to understand and speak to multiple voices. Morrison’s book and Obama’s election are important for the same reason: America is finally confronting the reality that we are–and always have been–a nation of multiple voices, not the single monolithic voice of the American myth. Demographic data tell us this, if nothing else does, for in a half century or so those many voices will no longer carry the demeaning term of “minority,” but in fact whites will be the new “minority.”
That both Morrison and Obama are African Americans is no accident. For sheer survival purposes–as Morrison makes clear–African American have had to hear voices. Whites have operated under the false assumption that they do not. In fact those whites who have attempted to hear–and on rare occasions even heard–multiple voices have often face derision, misunderstanding and even persecution.
Understanding voices–and the ability of those voices to understand each other–is the central theme and stylistic dilemma of Morrison’s novel. The women in the novel are left to fend for themselves on the frontier with their survival depending on their ability to understand each other, not merely communicate. Can a Native American survivor of cultural genocide, the widow of a white landowner, a half-mad woman named Sorrow and an African American slave who must save them all by finding the mother who gave her away bond together or will they implode on their own contradictions?
That is the central question Barack Obama and America face, for as exit polls from November attest, America is much like those four women, struggling to survive. If they face the multiple perils of their own times, we face the worst combination of domestic and international crises since the Roosevelt Administration. That is why I recommend reading this novel instead of all that post-election analysis, for this novel deals with those crises in a more profound way.
Morrison is too skilled a novelist to ride roughshod over this theme. The success of her novel depends on how well she can draw us into each of her characters so we not only see them, but hear them and understand their realities. Use of language is critical for this, for each word spoken by each character must reflect that character and open up a portal between that character, their reality and ours.
A paragraph near the closing of the novel makes that clear:
If you never read this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room. Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth.
I need only briefly comment at the incredible control of language in this paragraph. Note especially the double meanings and puns on “out in the world,” “fall,” “clouds cut by rainbow.” Or the descriptions in the last paragraph, especially “eternal hemlocks” and “flavor the soil of the earth” (which also has a double meaning).
The critical part of opening the portal is that in order to maintain the integrity of her characters, their world and her craft, Morrison must do this on their own terms. This also demands that we readers must reach out to them just as they reach out to each other. That means that this novel is far from a page-turner, but rather one where the more you give it of yourself by pondering every word, the more you will be rewarded. Morrison is telling us that this novel demands it; this world demands it.
Whether Barack Obama will master the issue to the same degree as Toni Morrison is still an open question. Politically he faces the same dilemma Morrison confronts aesthetically: he must understand multiple factions whose voices now have become the naked reality of American politics, he must bring them together on their own terms, and he must get us to grasp that understanding.
As with Morrison’s novel that will require some effort on our part. Toni Morrison is telling us that the time has come for all of us to hear voices, but she makes plain the terms of that bargain:
It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.
A Mercy is Toni Morrison’s mercy to all of us. Will we accept it?
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
