Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon

1. The Point of Entanglement: Modernism, Diaspora, and Toni Morrison’s Love

one the point of entangLement: modernism, diaspora, and toni morrison’s LOVE Houston A. Baker, Jr. We must return to the point from which we started. Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion: not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we forcefully turned away; that is where we must ultimately put to work the forces of creolization, or perish. —Edouard Glissant, “Reversion and Diversion” “The hooked c’s on the silverware worried me because i thought he took casual women casually. But if doubled c’s were meant to mean celestial cosey, he was losing his mind.” —L’s utterance in Love erzulie always holds the idea of love in suspension, for those who serve are afer recollections of those experiences that must defeat or question that love. —Colin (joan) Dayan, “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti” Contingent modernism, JournaListiC CritiCism, and diaspora studies a glance at selected journalistic assessments of toni Morrison’s novel Love reveals the intellectual shallowness and implicit critical contempt that are hallmarks of journalistic reviews of Black expressivity.1 here is the judgment on Morrison provided for the New York Times by Michiko kakutani: 17 18 · Houston A. Ba k er, Jr . . . . while there are some beautifully observed passages in this book [Love], where the author’s distinctive style (forged into something new from such disparate influences as Faulkner, ellison, Woolf, and garcia Marquez) takes over, the story as a whole reads like a gothic soap opera, peopled by scheming, bitter women and selfish predatory men: women engaged in cartoon-violent catfights; men catting around and going to cathouses.2 kakutani even allows herself the insult that Love is “an awkward retread of Sula and Tar Baby combined.”3 Writing for The Guardian, elaine showalter retreads journalistic ineptitude when she suggests that Love is “gothic,” and written by an author who “braids the [african american] cultural background with stories of love and hate in a narrative style influenced by garcia Marquez and Faulkner.”4 showalter damns with faint praise. she salutes Morrison’s skillful rendering of christine, one of Love’s most damaged actors. according to showalter, christine’s story “condenses material that would easily provide a dozen novels for another writer. . . . in the hands of, say, philip roth, [christine’s] life history would afford opportunities for rich, sardonic and profound reflections on human experience in the 20th century , beyond, nationality, race, sex, age, class, and ethnicity.”5 in showalter ’s judgment, Faulkner and Marquez gave Morrison language, but the author of Love should have contracted philip roth to teach her how to use it. showalter concludes: Morrison’s imaginative range of identification is narrower by choice; although she would no doubt argue—and rightly—that african american characters can speak for all humanity. But in Love, they do not; they are stubbornly bound by their own culture; and thus, while Love is certainly an accomplished novel, its perfection comes from its limitations.6 showalter’s review differs in chronology only from the racialized presumptuousness of critic louis simpson, who in 1963 wrote of the pulitzer prize–winning african american poet gwendolyn Brooks as follows: gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems contains some lively pictures of negro life. i am not sure it is possible for a negro to write well without making us aware he [sic] is a negro; on the other hand, if being a negro is the only subject, the writing is not important.7 Finally, laura Miller writing for the New York Times provides an example of a review that sketchily merges journalistic pseudo-profundity with african american class fantasy: The Point of Enta nglement · 19 What middle-class blacks in Morrison’s fiction gain in order, stability and mutual support—no small blessing in a hostile white-run world—they lose in vitality, in wildness and perhaps in truth. all of her novels constellate around this perplexing transaction, none more so perhaps than Sula, and Love is the sister to the fiery 1974 book. Sula—wayward, ruthless, precious—personifies the kind of love that ransacks the lives of Morrison ’s characters, leaving them dazed and beref, with blood on their hands.8 The following assumptions are implicit in the reviews cited. Love can be adequately understood in a traditional Western optic of the modern novel. The Black...