South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature

ONE: Humor in Alice Walker’s: The Color Purple

One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Humor in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple A Repeated teachings of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) require constant vigilance in terms of what one offers students. Each return to the novel invites reevaluations and reexaminations of themes, approaches, structure, or whatever else may be highlighted upon additional readings. After the rash of controversy surrounding the novel in the three or four years following its publication and after the depressing responses many of my students had to it, I decided that, whenever I taught the novel again, I would focus on whatever humor I could find in it. In classes I have taught since then, I have asked my students what, if anything, they found lighthearted or humorous about the book. One woman commented: “The voice of Celie is fresh and new to me it delights me as if she’s real, almost from the first word, and I think of her as a funny character. I don’t mean haw-haw funny, but smiley funny. She certainly does not live through humorous situations, but her comments on them often are.”1 While I did not share that student’s overall, blanket evaluation of the humor, I did become more attuned to the lighter moments in the novel. Obviously it is fairly easy in reading The Color Purple to concentrate on the brutality and violation of the human spirit that Celie endures rather than upon what repeated readings make clear: abused though she is, Celie has an understated but striking sense of humor. It is frequently manifested in a carefully controlled playfulness of narration as well as in the usual incongruities in situations that we identify with 2 . . . Walker’s The Color Purple humor. While the question of how anyone so abused can find the wherewithal to see anything funny in her life is a sticking one, Celie nevertheless manages rather well. In her ability to keep on keeping on, to laugh instead of crying, she lives in a state of blues transcendence. The type of humor Celie relies upon is in keeping with her personality ; it is quiet and sometimes subtle. It is the kind of humor that evokes smiles and light laughter rather than guffaws or belly laughs, and it is the kind that depends upon what readers bring to the novel; it is, in other words, a participatory humor in which readers are invited , as Toni Morrison would assert, to fill in various “holes” and “spaces” in the text by supplying some of the interpretive details. Our knowledge of how people usually act and react in various situations enables us to supply the missing links for some of Celie’s abbreviated humorous references. For example, we have been socialized to believe that men beat their wives, not vice versa. When we learn that Harpo’s reaction to his inability to beat his wife is a logic that tells him to gain weight as a solution to his dilemma, we recognize the absurdity of such an endeavor. It is comparable to that of an African American folktale, “The Knee-High Man,” in which a man barely eighteen inches high eats and eats in an effort to squeeze into his itsy bitsy body the same muscle power as that of a horse or a bull. He converses with both to uncover the secret of their size, but his increased eating only gives him stomachaches. An owl finally points out to him that, instead of being bigger in the body, he needs to be bigger in the brain. So does Harpo. In addition to recognizing the absurdity of Harpo’s desire to beat a woman who has been a good wife to him and an excellent mother to his children, Celie relates the incident in such a way that Harpo’s actions take on the features of slapstick comedy. What Celie allows us to fill in in the abbreviated narrative privileges us to Harpo’s plight and involves us in Celie’s evaluation of it. Her detachment, which is a part of what makes the humor work narrationally, derives less from lack of concern than from conscious understatement. When Harpo Walker’s The Color Purple . . . 3 decides he needs to underscore his manhood by making Sofia “mind” him, he is advised to beat her. Celie writes: Next time us see Harpo his face a mess of bruises. His lip cut. One of his eyes...