7 posts tagged “toni morrison”
Usually I like to finish a book before I write about it in the blog but this one is particularly fascinating and who knows, once school starts in a week, what time I will have for reading and writing.
The other day, I was “cracked open” by a song. I can only assume that you can relate. It was sort of like someone slipping a key into my brain and unlocking a thought or an emotion or both that had been trapped in there. One second I was fine. Two lines into the song, I was crying. I don’t know about you but when things like that happen to me, I get curious. So yesterday, I started reading Daniel Levitin’s book This is Your Brain on Music. I will just say that it is fascinating. I want to just come over and read the whole thing to you. Grin.
But here are some excerpts.
“This direct mapping of pitches so important, it bears are repeating. If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precicely that frequency, causing the electrode emit electrical activity at 440 Hz- for pitch, what goes into the ear and comes out of the brain!” p. 29
“When the sound is generated on a piano, flute, or any other instrument -- including percussion instruments like drums and cowbells -- it produces many modes of vibration occurring simultaneously. When you listen to a single note played on an instrument, you're actually hearing many, many pitches at once, not a single pitch. Most of us are not aware of this consciously, although some people can train themselves to hear that. The one with the slowest vibration rate -- the one lowest in pitch -- is referred to as the fundamental frequency, and the others are collectively called overtones.
To recap, it is a property of objects in the world that they generally vibrate at several different frequencies at once. Surprisingly these other frequencies are often mathematically related to each other in a very simple way: as integer multiples of one another. So if you pluck a string and its slowest vibration frequency is 100 times per second, the other vibration frequencies will be two times 100 (or 200 Hz), 3X times 100 Hz (300 hertz), etc.. If you blow into a flute or recorder and cause vibrations at 310 Hz, additional vibration will be occurring at twice, three times, four times, etc. this rate …
The brain is so attuned to the overtone series that if we encounter a sound that has all of the components except the fundamental, the brain fills it in for us in a phenomenon called restoration of the missing fundamental. A sound composed of energy at 100 Hz, 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz is perceived as having a pitch of 100 Hz, its fundamental frequency. But if we artificially create a sound with an energy at 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, and 500 Hz leaving off the fundamental, we still perceive it as having a pitch of 100 Hz. We don't perceive it as having a pitch of 200 Hz, because our brain “knows” that a normal, harmonic sound with a pitch of 200 Hz would have an overtones series of 200 Hz, 400 Hz, 600 Hz, 800 Hz, etc. we can also fool the brain by playing sequences that deviate from the overtones series . . . in cases like this, the perceived pitch shift is away from 100 Hz in a compromise between what is presented and what a normal harmonic series would imply.” P. 42-43
“The introduction of energy to an instrument – the attack phase- usually creates energy at many different frequencies that are not related to one another by simple integer multiples. In other words, for the brief period after we strike, blow into, pluck, or otherwise cause an instrument to start making sound, the impact itself has a rather noisy quality that is not especially musical -- more like the sound of a hammer hitting a piece of wood, say, than like a hammer hitting a bell or piano string, or like the sound of wind rushing through a tube. Following the attack is a more stable phase in which the musical tone takes on the orderly pattern of overtone frequencies as the metal or wood or other material at the instrument is made up arts to resonate. This little part of musical tone is referred to as the steady state -- in both instances the overtone is notably stable while the sound emanates from the instrument during this time.
“… After Shafer edited out the attack of orchestral instrument recordings, he played back the tape and found that it was nearly impossible for most people to identify the instrument that was playing. Without the attack, pianos and bells sounded remarkably unlike pianos and bells, and remarkably similar to one another. If you splice the attack of one instrument into the steady state, or body, from another, you get varied results: in some cases, you hear an ambiguous hybrid instrument that sounds more like the instruments that the attack came from than the one the steady state came from. Michael Castellengo and others have discovered that you can create entirely new instruments in this way; for example, splicing a violin bow sound onto a flute tone creates a sound that strongly resembles a hurdy-gurdy street organ. The experiment showed the importance of the attack” p. 54-53.
What is so interesting to me is how it reminds me that none
of us “hear” the same thing when we hear. Even if our eardrums vibrate in the
same way, our brains are rascals to us. It is entirely possible for us to “hear”
things that were NEVER played! (Men have known this for centuries. Grin). The
facts are clear. Something can be taken OUT of a message and if the piece
removed is expected, it will still be “heard”. Designed to help, our brains can
deceive. Whatever the FIRST thing heard is, may control how everything AFTER is heard. As he says, if you splice the attack sound of a bell onto the steady state of a Tuba, you may just find that the whole sound, is heard as a bell. Sometimes, your brain doesn't wait to hear what the attack leads it to expect. How IMPORTANT is THAT analogy for resolving conflicts, I ask you?
One of the experiments the author talks about involves actual sound recordings of owl brains (some people get paid to do the weirdest things!) Because sound frequencies get translated into electrical frequencies in the brain, a person with the right equipment can record the electrical frequencies and play back the sound as transmitted through brain signals. That way, you can literally take frequencies OUT of the input and listen to them after the brain has re-inserted them.
No one who has ever had a marital argument should be without
this piece of scientific evidence. Heaven only knows how many times I may find
myself using it from here on out. ;-)
What I am looking forward to exploring in the book, to get back to my original question, is just whether or not music literally performs a "chiropractic adjustment" in our neural wiring. Is it possible that music is as important to our brains as say, sleep, or food? Did the "combination" of words, timbre, melody, pitch, rhythm, tempo, volume, key, or reverberation just put the tumblers in place? Or is there a higher power at work here?
I find it interesting that I am not one who is typically "moved" by music though I listen to it all day long. Something Levitin said about a friend of his struck a cord (no pun intended):
“Our culture, and indeed our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers -- the Arthur Rubinstein's, Ella Fitzgeralds, Paul McCartneys -- and the rest of us. The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us. Jim knew that he wasn't much of a singer or a dancer and to him, a public display of singing and dancing implied he thought himself an expert. The villagers just stared at Jim and said, ‘what do you mean you don't sing?! You talk!’ Jim told me later, ‘it was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.’ Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody's lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone. The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world's languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.” P. 7
It makes me wonder, what did we lose when we started turning on TV's (I don't have one) and stopped playing music together and dancing?
One last quote that I absolutely hope to never forget:
“The Catholic Church banned music that contained polyphony (more than one musical part playing at a time), fearing that it would cause people to doubt the unity of God.” P. 13
Banning polyphony. That is just going to have to go on my list of the 10 dumbest things the church ever did. I mean ... How many beings are there in a TRINITY people? Sigh. What if God cannot be heard WITHOUT the polyphony?
It is not hard to see how this connects to things I have written about Toni Morrison's writings or various artists like Cezanne.
Question for Comment: When was the last time you got "torn open" by a song? Do you prefer to look at what is happening in your brain when that happens? Or does that take the essential mystery of it all out of the experience for you? Can a person believe in both the brain physics of the experience without discounting that there might be some ONE behind it as well?
Ever felt different? Ever felt like the balloon in a tack factory? Like you really didn't belong? Ever wonder how someone with internal strength would set their internal thermostat so that it did not matter? The following comes from Zora Neale Hurston's How it Feels to be Colored Me (1928) kindly pointed out to me by my friend Denise. As it relates to the Toni Morrison work I have been doing and particularly to what she has to say about her work and its connection to music, I will include just the following excerpt.
"I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/theireyesessay.htm
Hurston insists, back in 1928, that she refuses to dwell on the trauma of slavery (Morrison doesn't think American society is done yet and gives us Beloved). Huston writes:
"But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory."
Many would probably call her an "Uncle Tom" for seemingly aiding and abetting white people in their wish to just forget what they did and pretend that African Americans struggle, not because of what was done to them, but because of who they are. I tend to think that Toni Morrison would share some of these perspectives. She likes to compare her literary work to music. In a tranitional blues song, the singer starts out grieving for some offence, some hard luck. But then he or she gets up and gets on a train and moves on. they move on. Both are important to blues music.
Question for Comment: What wounds, hardships, bad luck, or offense is making it difficult for you to move on?
It is hard to know where to begin a book review of The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable Edited by Marc C. Connor particularly without knowing what you, the reader, might be interested in. The following are simply some of my gleanings from the book.
1. Morrison’s work has drawn from Western literary roots but it is primarily to be seen as an African American challenge to many of the principle ideas revered in Western Euro-American aesthetics.
“An understanding of Morrison's work requires immersion in ‘ways of knowing,’ to borrow Nellie McKay's phrase, that are not necessarily a part of the Western tradition: African and African American myth and language, African American musical traditions of the spirituals, blues, and jazz, alternative approaches to history, religion, ancestry, culture specific concepts and philosophical ideas of time and cosmology that are often opposed to traditional Western concepts, and many more.” P. xi
The editor insists that one must take both African American and
European-American traditions into consideration though Morrison herself prefers
to lean more heavily on the later:
“The double voicedness of the African-American text consequently requires that African-American writing be approached in a similarly double manner, one that is cognizant both of the specifically African features of the writing, but also the Western, or Anglo European, features of that writing. Only such a double vision is capable of perceiving and interpreting, the manner in which the text moves between the two traditions.” P. xix
Some of the key elements of the way she sees things can be highlighted in the
quote below:
“Though Morrison resists clarifying what precisely [her] principles are, her increasingly voluminous critical writings reveal four main elements that seem to constitute the essence of black writing for her: the presence of displacement or alienation; a close relationship between author and reader; an oral quality to the voice of the text; and at the formal level, a quality of music in the writing that is distinctively black. When these elements come together in the work of art, they produce Morrison's own aesthetic ideal.” P. xxii
2. Toni Morrison, from what I gather wants her novels to sound like Black people talking … better yet, singing … or maybe even better yet, worshiping. She tries to capture the ways that people formed and solidified communities with words. On this topic, I quote the book extensively:
“Toni Morrison claims that ‘writing is a craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion”. This reader response element that pervades Morrison's writing responds to its omnipresent alienation. “One of the major characteristics of black literature,” she asserts, “is the participation of the other, that is the audience, the reader.” To Morrison, this is not only the hallmark of her writing, but the very function of literature: “My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and that I think that is what literature is supposed to do. It's not just about retelling the story; it's about involving the reader” P. xxiii
“For Morrison, this means restoring the oral quality of the language, and making it imitate as closely as possible “the one other art form in which black people have always excelled, that is music.” P. xxiv
“Reaffirmation of community is one of the hallmarks of Black English. Systems of language within the Black English oral tradition are systems that call for the participants to reaffirm their cultural roots, community, and themselves. One of those systems is call/response, defined by Smitherman as “stating and counter stating; acting and reacting.” It is “spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker statements (calls) are punctuated by expressions (responses) from the listener.” . . . “response allows the caller to know that the audience approves of what she is saying and how she is saying it; it is immediate validation.” P. 22
“Morrison allows the reader to become part of the circle of storytelling and thereby witnesses. In African-American culture witness/testify, like Signifin and call/response, uses the act of communication as a metaphor for the unity expressed in the traditional African worldview. The act of witness/testify is the tangible proof that symbolizes or serves as evidence to validate one's existence as part of the group. In the oral tradition of Black English, witness and testify go hand-in-hand: one who witnesses has an obligation to testify. To witness is to affirm, attest, certify, validate, and observed. Thus Smitherman defines testifying as a ‘concept referring to a ritualized form of black communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the efficacy, truth, and power of some experience in which all Blacks have shared.’” P.23
Thus, in many ways, her work takes us back both to the West Coast of Africa and
to the Socratic dialogs of Attica.
3.
One of the central themes of Morrison’s work is
community:
“The great truism of Morrison scholarship is that her primary theme is community. Certainly each novel rigorously engages such issues as what constitutes a community, what functions communities serve, what threatens the community, what help skits survive. As Morrison herself has said, if anything she does, in the way of writing novels, isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.” P. 49
There is a particularly engaging segment on page 54 about how Pecola keeps
getting thrown out of her homes. Like Jesus in a way, there is no room in the
inn. One home after another rejects her because one home after another judges
her by standards of beauty that they have been given rather than standards that
they have chosen. When Claudia concludes that the soil had decided to reject
marigolds that year, she is not criticizing marigolds but criticizing society.
Though marigolds may blame themselves for dieing, the fault lies in the culture
that fails to nourish them.
“Pecola is destroyed within her very community, and that community not only fails to aid her, they have helped cause her isolation.” P. 55
“The Bluest Eye concludes with Claudia's final meditation on Pocola’s state, in which she views the shattering of Pocola as part of an entire economy of sterility and death, which embraces as well the community and even the land itself: “It was the fault of the earth -- the land -- our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” P56
4. My favorite chapter in the book is about the aesthetic that Toni Morrison wishes to see replace the one that destroys Pecola Breedlove. It is an aesthetic that says that any human being will become beautiful while we pay loving attention to it and use our imaginations to understand why it is worthy of the tangible love we bestow on it.
Toni Morrison's Beauty Formula Katherine Stern
“The concept of physical beauty as a virtue,” Morrison wrote in 1974 “is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructiveideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.” Morrison was responding to the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ - what she took to be ‘a white idea turned inside-out’ that still reduced the worth of people to their bodily appearance. Concentrating on whether we are beautiful,” she wrote, “is a way of measuring worth that is wholly trivial and wholly white and preoccupation with it is an irrevocable slavery of the senses. “However much beauty matters to white people” she added, “it never stopped them from annihilating anybody.”
Morrison's impatience with the very idea of physical beauty will be familiar to readers of The Bluest Eye, where the narrator calls beauty “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” and tells how Pauline Breedlove was never able, after her education in the movies, “to look at a face and not assign it's a category in the scale of absolute beauty.” In a piece for the New York Times Magazine in 1971, Morrison wrote that it must be just as well for black women to “remain useful” rather than to strive for a more decorative status. The romanticism of beauty worship seemed to her “a needless cul-de-sac, an opiate that eventually must separate us from reality.” P. 77
“Critics have been fascinated by Morrison's treatment of the destructive, devaluing power of white standards of beauty but few have tried to describe the alternative approach to beauty that she offers. . . .
“In this essay, I show how Morrison draws our attention away from the visual, the static, the remote, or idealized object, towards an experience of physical beauty that is tangible and improvisational, relational and contextual, involving mutual efforts to feel as well as see. Morrison does not merely circumvent Western aesthetic standards, but invents entirely original ways to approach the beautiful as work or process. In her narratives, beauty depends on the beholder's craft or intention and results from labor upon the body either by the hands or the imagination.” P. 78“Morrison's emphasis on the tactile over the visual conveys an implicit challenge to the Western aesthetic fascination with sight and corresponding degradation of touch. Aristotle considered touch the most lowly, animalistic sensation and Renaissance theorists echoed him. To Vincenzio Borghini touch seemed ‘bestial’ compared to sight, the most crude and most material of the senses. Leon Battista Alberti chose as his emblem a winged eye, explaining that ‘the eye was an obvious symbol of super mystique, more powerful than anything, swifter, more worthy... it is such as to be the first, chief, king, like the God of human parts.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, declares that ‘the eye counsels and corrects all the human arts and its sciences are most certain.’”
“In general, the discourse on aesthetics has endowed the visual faculty with objectivity, autonomy, and hence, dominion. Because visual sensation covers remote distances, its reach is considered lordly and authoritative, whereas tactile sensation, limited to the local in specific, seems lowly by comparison.” P. 83
“Beauty takes place in Morrison's novels when some active imagination makes the body’s unforeseen beauty suddenly apparent. Thus for Morrison, the experience of beauty is much more subjective and dynamic than its visual, static dimension would suggest. Beauty is ultimately provides a subtle, and unaccountable, unpredictable response. And beauty is narrational, for Morrison is uninterested in any notion of beauty unmediated by fantasy, storyline, the contingencies of context. . . . For Kant, the beauty of an object must be distinct from the fictions that it inspires, whereas for Morrison, the aesthetic object cannot be disassociated from the montage of perceptions whereby it comes to be both felt and imagined.”
“By reminding us of the contributions of imagination to the appreciation of the body, Morrison suggests that responsiveness creates the experience of beauty, rather than the usual notion that physical beauty preexist it elicits a response.” P. 88
“With an awareness of how Morrison tends to devise interactions between physical touch and imagination, and how she stages beauty as a surprise effect of mental imagery brought to bear on handiwork, we can reread the narrator's strange self disclosure at the end of Jazz and understand exactly how and why the book takes a body, conveying its experience of the hands cupped around it: ‘I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now and missed your eyes when you went away from me... look where your hands are. Now” … Surpassingly gorgeous, the ending of Jazz is a perfect example of the beauty of imagined touch, Morrison's aesthetic trademark.” P. 91
Question for Conversation: What do you think about this notion that beauty "occurs" to the person willing to love others with touch and imagination? How does one go about changing people's ideas about beauty in a world so permeated with visual tools for contact?
IT is not an easy thing to write a book review of an encyclopedia. By definition, the work is an anthology of thoughts by different authors often overlapping. I picked this book up a few weeks ago and started working my way through it because I am scheduled to do a workshop on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in a month and I have been trying to gather my thoughts as best I can. Perhaps what is of most interest to me is how this book connects to others in the Aesthetics course to which it is attached and to the CORE curriculum that it is linked to.
In the introduction, Elizabeth Beaulieu writes:
“Through her novels, Morrison forces us to acknowledge that the lives we often overlook and rarely celebrate are perhaps the lives we can learn most from.” p. vii
One cannot help but connect this approach to the work of artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, all of whom would be willing to marry or paint a common tavern woman or housemaid and portray them as the Virgin Mary. VanGogh in particular could make a pair of old boots holy and all three felt deeply about blurring the line between saints and sinners, even as Morison does.
Another interesting connection between Morrison’s work and the work of artists is the mutual understanding that both this author and many artists share about the power of suggestion. What so many people find fascinating about the Mona Lisa is the way that Leonardo DaVinci leaves some of the most essential information (the corners of the eyes and mouth) shrouded in shadow. The Italian word for this is sfumata and it is one of the things that Morrison does in the way that she tells her stories through multiple narrators who do not always tell us everything. Jane Atteridge Rose puts it in the Encylcopedia Article, Approaches to Morrison’s Work: Pedagogical expresses it this way:
“In a discussion of The Bluest Eye, Morrison makes the following points, which could apply to any of her novels. She explains that as she developed the pieces of that story, she discovered that she preferred them unconnected. She feels that the resulting narrative, with events that relate, but do not flow coherently or directly, that communicates the story of the fractured perceptions resulting from a splintered life. . . . Students pondering these assertions realize that they must actively participate in the interpretive experience to fulfill the author's intent.” P. 25, 27
It would be impossible not to see the connections between this strategy and the work of artists like Manet, Monet, and even Rembrandt in his later work. By allowing the eye of the viewer to fill in details, the painter or author allows that viewer to be a participant in the painting/writing and thus the characters that emerge are more “real” to each reader than they would be if completely described the artist creating them.
What is particularly interesting about this optical and psychological phenomenon, as it is applied to Morrison’s work, is that she suggests that the dot-connecting must take place in the context of communal observation, not individual. As Lisa Cade Wieland writes in the article “Memory,” “Beloved’s plot is constructed to mirror the way that memories unfold.”
“The plot emerges in nonlinear fragments as different characters remember their experiences and share them with the reader and/or each other. Since many of these memories have been repressed for a long time, the process of uncovering them is slow and painful. The recognition of the past involved in rememory requires the effort of the entire community, and cannot be accomplished by one individual. Like the central character, Sethe Suggs, readers of the novel must engage in the act of creative reconstruction. They have to piece together the fragments and different accounts in order to find coherent meaning for themselves. However the narrative always foregrounds the subjectivity of any memory created. Morrison's narrative approach to memory in Beloved and in her other fiction allows the novel to go back and forth between the past and the present, and blurs the distinction between them. . . . Morrison uses the term re-memory instead of memory in Beloved. This term underscores that to remember is to put together, or creatively reconstruct, the pieces of something. However, re-memory does not depend on just one individual subjective reconstruction. Morrison establishes a community of rememberers whose consciousnesses overlap at times, and at other times remain independent. ” Encyclopedia, p. 207-208
Another fascinating connection between Morrison and the work of artists can be found in the way that she uses her gifts to “smuggle messages of dissent” into the wider culture that “pays her bills”. According to authors Benjamin Blech and Roy Dolinor in their book The Sistine Secrets, Michelangelo, in his work on the Sistine chapel, embedded all sorts of subliminal and not so subliminal messages that directly challenged the world view, theology, and policy of the pope that hired him. In a similar way, Morrison undermines some of the sacred authority of the culture that later awards her a Pulitzer. Again, a quote from Lisa Cade Wieland’s Encyclopedia article on “Memory:
“Morrison has stated that using multiple narrators in her fiction enables her to give credibility to various and significantly different voices, which replicates the complexity and polyvocality of African-American culture itself. Morrison's incorporation of multiple narrative voices also challenges Western (patriarchal, white linear) plot driven narrative, and replaces it with circular, nonauthoritarian narrative.” Encyclopedia, p. 244
A subsequent Encyclopedia article by Fiona Mills on Song of Solomon suggests that Morrison’s work in that novel retells the epic of Odysseus - only in this retelling, the hero does not overcome his challenges as an individual but only as a person who regains his ties to the community to which he belongs. In Song of Solomon the protagonist, Milkman Dead has to reconnect with the African American community rather than abandon it in order to achieve hero status. Mills writes:
“[Morrison] offers an alternative to western individualistic ideologies by rewriting the typical hero quest myth. As such, she insists that those ideologies do not work for African-Americans.” Encyclopedia, p. 321
As if that were not enough, the article discussing Morrison as “Trickster” – written by Cynthia Whitney Hallet – makes it clear that Morrison has, Michelangelo-like, used her verbal judo on several well known folk-tales of the white European and American literary tradition.
“The works of Toni Morrison reflect more than her mastery of folkloric figures, most especially that of the trickster; her stories also exhibit her ultimate skill of author as trickster. In an important critical study, Fiction and Folklore: the Novels of Toni Morrison, Trudier Harris discusses Morrison's novels as a series of reversals, inversions and subversions of well-known folktales in the rhetorical strategies of the folk narrative. According to Harris, in The Bluest Eye Morrison inverts the lesson of the ugly duckling; and in Sulla, she subverts the traditional fairy tale structure, and Song of Solomon she reverses the Odyssean journey; in Tar Baby she subverts details of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty; and in Beloved she reverses and undermines the traditional ghost story. . . .
However, perhaps more important is the fact that Morrison does not simply blur the common designs of certain story patterns; instead, she continues to confound and confuse -- in true trickster fashion-- the familiar narrative models by replacing the European American archetypes with African and African-American folkloric paradigms. In doing so, Morrison completes a perfect act of duplicity and becomes the ultimate author as trickster figure.” Encyclopedia, p. 355
Like Michelangelo, who used the Talmud rather than Catholic church tradition for reference in creating his visual stories – who used the church’s sacred text in the construction of masterpiece of dissent from the social institution that they had been used to create, Morrison has taken the well known story of the Ugly Duckling and turned it on its head in The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove does not turn into a white swan in the end but a victim of the folktale’s point (that all ugly ducklings want to become white beauties).
Finally, it may be worth mentioning one passage that has particular relevance to another assigned work in the CORE curriculum, Plato’s Republic:
“There is no figure in the Bluest Eye who ascends from darkness and emerges into the light, who finds enlightenment and chooses it over the shadows, as one of Plato's prisoners ultimately does. What we do fine in Pauline Breedlove and the sugar-brown Mobile girls is the same unwillingness to step outside of the cave that Plato's prisoners display when they are given the opportunity, an unwillingness driven by fear and the need to exist within the false, albeit familiar, construct because it is easier to do so -- because it is comfortable and safe -- rather than emerge from the cave and faced the painful light of the sun.” Encyclopedia, p. 272
Students who have been exposed to Morrison’s insight now must decide if they wish to descend again into the cave of ignorance or start acting like the media show they have been watching on the flat screen walls of the cave serves them well enough.
Needless to say, there is much more to be said but that’s what I have to say today.
The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning book from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison speaks to me.
One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.
Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and every one would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not:
"“Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe what he felt about the 30 mile woman. “She is a friend of mine. She gather me. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” P. 273
What is particularly interesting to me is that the WAY Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader have to do what the characters have to do. Work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watching what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessently present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant.
"“We could move,” [Sethe] suggested once to her mother-in-law. “What would be the point?” Asked Baby Suggs. “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . . In all of baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.
. . . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” P. 23
... And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the character in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:
"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle -greensleeves, and thought how little color there wasn't the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw a red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."
It taught them tobond to nothing and no one:
“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky. For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well mabe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” P. 45
“So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” P. 162
Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of saftey. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:
" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled barren 124 really was.
He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” P. 39
It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.
“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. It's lid rusted shut. He would not try it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” P. 73
As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy:
“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings to. There is no bad luck in the world but white folks.” (P. 89) . . . but . . . "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free itself was another.” P. 95
Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, Calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.
“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And all my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kissed them. Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either. You got to love it, You! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feed the need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you. Know my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; Put a hand on it, and grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. This is the prize.” P. 88-89
One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep it from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?
“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” P. 165
Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.
". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The white folks had tired her out at last.” P. 180
Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says "that
just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it
accuses.” P. 271 I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to kill a child to save a child."
I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:
"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them everyone. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.” P. 199
The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our Traumas.
Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered"
Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaimg our sense of dignity and self worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?
I just finished Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye yesterday and I can see why Betsey has given it a place in the CORE curriculum course on aesthetics. One of its central themes is the imposition of the ideal of beauty into the individual psyche.
"In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap....She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen." pg. 122
In some ways, we may owe this notion of ideal beauty to the Greeks and maybe to Plato in particular. If we can think of an ideal triangle in our minds, we can then compare the triangles we see to it. So also, this habit of thought can be applied to the concept of beauty and to the men and women who never measure up to it. The Greek sculptors were famous for making statues of people that were more perfect than people. they followed principles of math and geometry to make human beings who were better than human beings could ever be. This process can be clearly observed in the transformation of the woman in the Dove commercial, the Evolution of Beauty:
Thus do sellers of beauty products endeavor to sell a concept of ideal beauty that will create the need for their products and thus are human beings set to the task of destroying all those, including themselves, who do not "measure".
"Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window sign - all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. 'Here,' they said, 'this is beautiful, and if you are on this day "worthy" you may have it.'" pp. 20-21
Morrison highlights the insanity of this cultural crime by depicting little black girls - "ugly little black girls" infected with "Shirly Temple virus". You can also see the way even basic children's literature (The Dick and Jane stories) embed conceptions of perfect families into the earliest educational literacy concepts. What child from a wrecked and broken family really needs to be reminded of how far short they fall even before they begin?
“The grade school reader that prefaces the text was (and in many places still is) a ubiquitous, mass-produced presence in schools across the country. Its widespread use made learning the pleasures of Dick and Jane's commodified life dangerously synonymous with learning itself. Its placement first in the novel makes it the pretext for what is presented after: As the seeming given of contemporary life, it stands as the only visible model for happiness and thus implicitly accuses those whose lives do not match up.” Jane Kuenz
We are so often reminded of this ideal, we can't even see what is really beautiful any more, neither in ourselves or others. A collection of quotes from the book detailing the resultant self-hatred can be found HERE. Ultimately, the imposition of the ideal works like an imperialist invasion, wrecking the self-concepts and eventually the lives of everyone it pervades (unless of course they are that ideal). Morrison's three Prostitutes symbolically carry the nicknames China, Poland, and the Maginot Line - all "territories" that had been invaded by fascist imperialists. As so many of Morrison's characters do not have control of their own bodies, so also even fewer of them have control of their own minds. Even the victimizers in the novel, once you hear their stories, have been themselves "invaded" dismembered, and destroyed.
In one of the more poignant (to me ) passages, one of the victimizers, Soaphead Church, describes what it is like to be abandoned by someone, in his case, a woman named Velma:
"She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anonymous. It is not, after all, where you live.
When you no longer need it, you pay a little something for its use; say 'thank you sir,' and when your business in that town is over, you go away from that room. Does anybody regret leaving a hotel room? Does anybody who has a home, a real home somewhere , want to stay there? Does anybody look back with affection of even disgust, at a hotel room when they leave it? You can only love or despise whatever living was done in that room. But the room itself? But you take a souvenir. Not, oh, not to remember the room. To remember the time and place of your business, your adventure. What can anyone feel for a hotel room? One doesn't any more feel for a hotel room than one expects a hotel room to feel for its occupant.
. . That heavenly, heavenly Father, was how she left me; or rather she never left me, because she was never ever there". p. 177-178
And THAT is pretty much hitting the nail on the head.
Question for Comment: How does one defend themselves from this sort of aesthetic "invasion" of their conception of beauty? How does a person who does not meet the measure of cultural beauty defend themselves from being abandoned or, almost as bad, never chosen?
"Lug your guts away salami, or stay and I'll remove you slice by slice!" Cyrano De Bergerac
Cyrano was someone of whom it could truly be said "He was so much cooler online". It is interesting how my literary interests all collided into one point this week. I have been reading Othello with the boys and clearly one of its main messages is how deceiving appearances can be. "Men should be what they seem" says Iago but clearly, as the play demonstrates, they never are. In the car, we have been listening to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and again, the whole issue of appearances comes to the fore. Victor Frankenstein meets his future wife, Elizabeth, when they are just children and she is welcomed into the family before she ever says a word, simply because of the "divine radiance" glowing from her blond Aryan hair. Victor Frankenstein relates:
"She appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin, and very fair. Her hair was the brightest living gold, and, despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and her lips and the moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness, that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features."
As a result of this aesthetic inheritance, Elizabeth is warmly embraced by Frankenstein's family.
"When my father returned from Milan, he found playing with me in the hall of our villa a child fairer than pictured cherub--a creature who seemed to shed radiance from her looks, and whose form and motions were lighter than the chamois of the hills. The apparition was soon explained. With his permission my mother prevailed on her rustic guardians to yield their charge to her. They were fond of the sweet orphan. Her presence had seemed a blessing to them; but it would be unfair to her to keep her in poverty and want, when Providence afforded her such powerful protection. They consulted their village priest, and the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza became the inmate of my parents' house--my more than sister the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures."
One is tempted to say with Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray that looks are everything. For indeed, when Victor Frankenstein creates his "creature" all it takes is one look from the "yellow" eye to know that this monster must be rejected. It can never find a home in a Frankenstein family reunion.
"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips."
One cannot help observing that the poor creature would also be "so much cooler online". The only tenderness he ever receives at the hand of human kind is from a blind man. Like Cyrano, is is doomed to desire love, to know that he deserves to be loved, but to never be the recipient of love. cyrano is about to proclaim his love for Roxanne when she begins to tell him of her infatuation with someone else.
Roxane: His face shines with wit and intelligence.
He’s proud, noble, young, fearless, handsome. . . .
Cyrano: Handsome!
Roxane: What is it? What’s the matter?
Cyrano: Nothing. . . . It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s only a twinge of pain from this little scratch.
Anyone who has ever been in this position knows that it is not a "little scratch". It opens up your jugular and marinates it in battery acid.
But my perfect storm of literary coincidences is not over. the blizzard continues. One of the novels assigned to the students in Champlain college's CORE curriculum is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I was looking over it this week in the context of some work I am doing. Like the above pieces of literature, it too focuses on the use of externalities as a means of ascribing intrinsic worth to oneself. The main character in the book, a nine year old black child named Pecola, concludes that to have value, she needs to have blue eyes. Indeed, in a metaphorical sense, one could say that she determines that she must not only LOOK LIKE a white girl to be valued, she must also SEE like a white girl.
"It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different."
When superficial aesthetic value judgements are allowed to dominate the stock exchange of human communities, eventually, those values are internalized into all who seek to be valued (and who of us doesn't?)
It would be interesting to write an essay comparing and contrasting the different responses that the so-called "deffectives" have to the dilema that their physical traits bestow on them. Cyrano, Frankenstein's "creature", Pecola, and Dorian Gray are ALL having to deal with the thought of life in the "unbeautiful catagory" (though Dorian deals with it only in the hypothetical sense).
Cyrano resigns himself to getting whatever love he can, even if vicariously. He simply overcompensates by being his best self in conversation and writing ("In a poet's pocket you often find the product of an active imagination.")
Christian: I need eloquence, and I have none!
Cyrano: I’ll lend you mine! Lend me your conquering physical charm, and together we’ll form a romantic hero!
Christian: What do you mean?
Cyrano: Do you feel capable of repeating what I tell you every day?
Christian: Are you suggesting . . .
Cyrano: Roxane won’t be disillusioned!
Together, we can win her heart! Will you let my soul pass from my leather jerkin and lodge beneath your embroidered doublet?
The creature exacts his revenge on the society that so rejects and devalues him.
"Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants, and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery. . . . I became fatigued with excess of bodily exertion, and sank on the damp grass in the sick impotence of despair. There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery."
It is a simple solution, really. destroy the system that devalues you.
Pecola fantasizes that she DOES have blue eyes. Dorian takes a "Michael Jackson route" you might say, taking physical measures to insure the immortality of his beauty.
Question for Comment: What is your response when you feel too homely to acquire the love that you want in life?
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