In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 12 Toni Morrison Ulysses, Badmen, and Archetypes—Abandoning Violence Theyarethemisunderstoodpeoplein theworld.There’sawildnessthattheyhave,a nice wildness. It has bad effects in society such as the one in which we live. It’s pre-Christ in the best sense. It’s Eve. When I see this wildness gone in a person, it’s sad. This special lack of restraint, which is a part of human life and is best typified in certain black males, is of particular interest to me. It’s in black men despite the reasons society says they’renotsupposedto haveit.Everybodyknowswho“thatman”is,andtheymaygive him bad names and call him a “street nigger” but when you take away the vocabulary ofdenigration,whatyou haveissomebodywho isfearlessand who iscomfortablewith that fearlessness. It’snot about meanness. It’sa kind of self-flagellantresistanceto certain kinds of control, which is fascinating. Opposed to accepted notions of progress, the lock-step life, they live in the world unreconstructed and that’s it. Toni Morrison1 OUTLAWS It is amazing to me that it is Toni Morrison, among living black novelists, who brings the most probing and insightful eye to the tradition of the violent man and provides the most ¤tting conclusion to my study. Perhaps that is what makes her a worthy Nobel laureate. She speaks as a member of a black intellectual elite that desires to preserve the uniqueness of the African American sensibility, establish a sense ofcommunalindependence,and participate inthe Americanmainstreamon its own terms. No discussion of any aspectof black literary history would be complete without taking her contributions into account. It is not only her international reputation that makes her one of the dominant voices in current black writing, but also her range of reference, her readiness to experiment, and her devotion to the themes and conventions of the African American tradition. “I think long and carefully about what my novels ought to do,” she says in a 1981 interview. “They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.” It is what she says next, though, that makes her one of the most signi¤cant spokespersons on the badman and brings her explicitly within the purview of my discussion. “My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it.”2 These make up one of the “archetypes ” which Morrison feels herself called to explore. 180 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” Many men who are outlaws, not so much contemporary type outlaws but the outlaws that I knew in my youth (laughter), were those kinds of people. They were, oh, I don’t know, episodic; they were adventurers. They felt they had been dealt a bad hand, and they just made up other rules. They couldn’t win with the house deck and that was a part of their daring. They looked at and that was solution to them [sic], whereas other Black people—they were horri¤ed by all that “bad” behavior. That’s all a part of the range of what goes on among us, you know. And until we understand in our own terms what our rites of passage are, what we need in order to nourish ourselves, what happens when we don’t get that nourishment, then what looks like erratic behavior but isn’t will frighten and confuse us. Life becomes comprehensible when we know what rules we are playing by.3 Outlaws, in other words, can be a source of nourishment and liberation for the African American community, leading the more timid into new modes of consciousness , toward otherwise inconceivable choices and identities. In Morrison’s view, paying attention to and respecting such “outlaws” and their behavior lies at the core of her art. The African American sensibility is complete only when it embraces the lawbreaker. It does this through “irony,” and irony is the basis of the “Black style.” She does not purport to explain this style in technical terms but describes it as a form of black laughter, a peculiar sense of humor which “has nothing to do with what’s funny at all,” but rather “with taking that which is peripheral, or violent or doomed,” what other cultures would see no “value” in, and conferring importance upon it, like the “duress” under...

Share