The Color Purple (review)

194 the minnesota review I take it all in from far away, Joaquin. It doesnt reach me. I laugh at them, the truth is. They think I'm this. They think I'm that. What do I care what they think! They think I'm a pin-up. An easy lay. A reckless woman, a helpless person. Whatever, (p. 320) When Cantor isnt interrupting the flow of discourse with periods, he's doing it with commas , dashes, ellipses, parentheses: "The uprising—badly coordinated, poorly armed—misfires, is put down, is . . . (but what word for poUtical error, historical misfortune might make vivid so many deaths?) ... by Kuomingtang troops" (p. 3). One wonders what impelís Cantor to carve up discourse Uke this, so that each image, idea, and argument is abandoned almost as soon as it is introduced. And one wonders, too, what makes him think that readers wUl attend for long to such exhausting and unedifying locutions. Once again Cantor himself finally puts his finger on the problem, expresses our exasperation. " Will you sit stili!" (p. 578) demands the same voice that breaks in at last to chastize Cantor for his sourness. But perhaps Cantor's jumpy style is deUberatdy designed to ¡mobilizes the reader, to make us sit still. The syntactical discontinuities are consistent, of course, with the radically discontinuous structure of the novel itself, but they are also consistent with the novd's indictment of conventional narrative. As Cantor sees it, narratives of a certain kind, drawn out of a collective cultural reservoir of desires and presented as coherent images of the possible, are powerful instruments of revolutionary agitation. They are, in fact, the chief means by which people are mobilized for revolution: Fidel's voice is the Cuban Revolution. Not his presence, but his voice. It is as if the island were a narrative of his, a continual improvisation by a master storytdler. He is making them up as we go along: creating characters . . . and yet one feels at each turn that the story could not be other than it is. (p. 27) According to Cantor, this illusion of inevitability is produced in part by Castro's "rhythmic cadenced sentences" (p. 28). Arguably, then, Cantor's own style is ddiberatdy counter-revolutionary; his arhythmic, discontinuous prose is designed to cancel the invitation to action that is issued when words are allowed to flow. As a person less convinced than Cantor that all revolutions are futile and so less ready to condemn the forms of discourse that sponsor them, I take some pleasure in noting that one effect of his strategy is to produce virtually unreadable prose. JOHN McCLURE Alice Walker. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. 245 pp. $11.95 (cloth). Asked once what she considered to be the major difference between the literature written by black and white Americans, AUce Walker replied that "for the most part, white American writers tended to end thdr books and thdr characters' Uves as if there is no better existence for which to struggle. The gloom of defeat is thick. ... By comparison, black writers seem always involved in amoral and/or physical struggle, the result of which is expected to be some kind of larger freedom." Walker's insight provides one possible explanation for the tendency of some poUtical critics and theorists to hail the Uterature of "marginal" groups as the last preserve of a political spirit—a literature, it might be said, that embodies what the Frankfurt School called the "utopian" promise formerly offered by religion. Certainly by the end of The Color Purple, the "gloom ofdefeat," which at the beginning thickly surrounds the main character, CeUe, has been dispdled—so much so that some readers accustomed to bleaker sorts of novels might fed that the "larger freedom" is patent wishfulfillment rather than Utopian promise. Walker not only bestows on her heroine moral and physical wdI-bring, but endows her with a significant portion of worldly goods, performs miracles of character transformation, and even, in a way, restores the dead to the reviews 195 Uving. The ending is far from the "figure for death" that Walter Bejamin saw in novelistic closure; instead, its "resurrection" theme may...