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Chapter 8 The Language of Love: Love
- University of South Carolina Press
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chapter 8 The Language of Love Love Morrison’s eighth novel is a love story that does not read like a love story. Instead of idealism, there is a pointed emphasis on the underside of loving: betrayal, violence, deception, and unfulfilled longing. Tenderness and generosity surprise occasionally, but love is in short supply even though there is a pent-up demand. Only in the final, powerful scenes does the novel appear to earn its title, confirming what Morrison calls “that human instinct to care for somebody else.”1 Until that point, Love is, more than it is not, a tale of exploited childhood, squandered youth, and the ridiculous aging of two clever women approaching their last years. Christine and Heed Cosey were the kind of childhood friends who “fall for one another. On the spot, without introduction.”2 Since childhood, however, they have been guerrilla warriors. But as L, Morrison’s wise, farseeing narrator, explains in the conclusion, if such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one. Most people have never felt a passion that strong, that early. If so, they remember it with a smile, dismiss it as a crush that shriveled in time and on time. It’s hard to think of it any other way when real life shows up with its list of other people, its swarm of other thoughts. . . . Heed and Christine were the kind of children who can’t take back love, or park it. When that’s the case, separation cuts to the bone. And if the breakup is plundered, too, squeezed for a glimpse of blood . . . then it can ruin a the LangUage of Love 111 mind. And if, on top of that, they are made to hate each other, it can kill a life way before it tries to live. (200) Marvelously insightful and important, L’s ontology of unsullied love— “pre-gendered, pre-sexual,” in Morrison’s words—as vital and animating contextualizes the novel’s internecine battles: they are really expressions of thwarted love. And the passage effectively stages Love’s final movement of reconciliation and redemption when Heed and Christine discard the old festering grievances and speak the language of love for the first time in adult life and then, later, in death. Still, much of Love examines emotions other than love: Christine’s and Heed’s bitterness, May’s blinding vengeance, Junior’s insatiable hunger—all centered on each one’s connection or imagined connection to Bill Cosey, the story’s deceased epic villain and hero both. As Morrison puts it, “what sucked up all their ambition about loving one another was turning their attention to him. He was the one who authenticated them. He was the one whose legacy they would all fight over. He was the one who ruined their lives beyond repair. And they lied about it to themselves all the time.”3 Narrating those self-deceptions is the women’s work in the novel, and that femalecentered narrative strategy is Morrison’s method of organizing portions of the story.4 Each of the nine sections—Portrait, Friend, Stranger, Benefactor, Lover, Husband, Guardian, Father, and Phantom—is an aspect of maleness or what Morrison sees as the universal “idea of maleness” that is too often the center of women’s stories about themselves and each other. All but three of the sections comment, primarily and through memories, on the women’s earlier hopes and expectations of Bill Cosey’s role in their lives. “Stranger” and “Lover,” two of the three segments not specific to Cosey, feature fourteen-year-old Romen and the evolution of twenty-one year-old Junior’s determined seduction. These sections chart the escalating thrill of a couple’s sexual recognition and attraction. First, Junior surveys a stranger from Heed’s window, and later, as lovers, she and Romen probe the limits of erotic fantasy and desire. “Guardian,” a third non-Cosey section , focuses on the relationship between Sandler Gibbons and Romen. Sandler recognizes and guides the adolescence’s journey into manhood and personhood. Concerned for his grandson and an astute observer of human nature, Sandler catches the signs of dysfunction in Romen’s involvement with Junior. Learn the difference between a “good good woman” and...