Love's Shadow, Tragedy, and Beloved

Love's Shadow has a problem with tragedy, wrongly convicting it of melancholy. The book exiles melancholy by embracing instead, in loving detail, great works of human imagination—Wallace Stevens' poetry, Rembrandt's painting, and Shakespeare's comedy and romance—art that strengthens and supports our lives in a secular world. To win this affirmation, Love's Shadow strives against a prestigious, powerful critical view, deriving from Walter Benjamin, which links allegory, redemption, and melancholy. The attack on melancholy thereby eliminates tragedy—it's just collateral damage. The book sides with Plato and against itself. Love's Shadow rejects philosophy as a path of life and chooses poetry, most polemically in its splendid third chapter on Plato's Symposium. Yet Love's Shadow, like Plato, rejects tragedy. Wait! Banish Antony and Cleopatra, Moby-Dick, Beloved?

Tragedy doesn't have to feed melancholy. D. H. Lawrence insisted, "Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery" (Lawrence 1979, 1:459). W. B. Yeats wrote in "Lapis Lazuli," "Hamlet and Lear are gay; / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread" (Yeats 1996, 294). In Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards brought Aristotle together with Coleridge. Richards argued that the tragic emotions of pity and terror, the impulse to approach and the impulse to flee, form a balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. For Coleridge this balance marks the act of imagination in its full power. Therefore, Richards concluded, tragedy brings not melancholy but invigoration. I hope these citations clarify that tragedy comprehends far more of human experience than melancholy. Toni Morrison's Beloved offers a specific instance of tragic art that performs the very achievement Love's Shadow seeks beyond melancholy: imaginative art made in the service of secular life,

But first, a key moment from Benjamin that does not appear in Love's Shadow. Writing in danger of his life, menaced by the Third Reich, in "On the Concept of History" Benjamin envisioned the transfer of culture, the passing on of tradition, as a Roman triumph in which the winners display the spoils of victory. Against this, he spoke on behalf of the losers: we must not forget the "anonymous toil" of all those upon whose labor the "cultural treasures," the masterpieces, depend. This brutal historical inequality meant that every "document of culture" is also a "document of barbarism" (Benjamin 2003, 391-92). For America, chattel slavery underlines the relevance of Benjamin's insight. Benjamin forces us to face this hard question: What do masterpieces contribute to a good life far more widely shared than it has been in any society that we know of? Can we still have masterpieces if we imaginatively affirm the anonymous toilers? Beloved answers: Yes.

Morrison faced a great challenge: how to give the life of imagination to the brute fact of a world, specifically, the United States of America, in which one person could own another and possess absolute power over them. What does it mean, humanly, to live as object or subject of such power? Some white American authors created enduring works that represent and challenge life under slavery, works as various as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Absalom, Absalom! All deviate from central norms of the British novel in the extremes they convey, whether of sentiment, marginality, or Gothic horror. Morrison drew from this tradition, but she also accessed older and foreign resources. Greek tragedy beautifully imagined terrible things. From the slaveholding democracy of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides looked back to when the power of the gods more fully exercised sway over human beings. The arbitrary inexorability of such power resonates with the power of slaveholding.

Morrison felt a sharp affinity with tragedy in her important essay from the time of Beloved, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken." She found "similarity" between Greek tragedy and "Afro-American communal structures (the function of song and chorus, the heroic struggle between the claims of community and individual hubris) and African religion and philosophy" (Morrison 2019, 163). Her perception invites me to think further with Aristotle. The emotional pressure of pity and terror defines an opposition that must not become...