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What are you reading? August 25, 2023 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-25
I fear that in the rush to monumentalize Morrison, to make her a palatable icon of black wisdom or black joy or black excellence, we may inadvertently veil—even shroud—her with beatifying (or burnt-edged) sheets.
But to tear down a monumental figure or to prettify it are not our only options. Morrison’s own work is instructive in this regard. She had a hard-won sense of how we ought to attend to cultural artifacts, whether they were what she called “dark valleys of unraised consciousness” like those black jockeys and the raucously racist Amos ‘n’ Andy, or the canonical works of art and literature that inspire and disgust us. Much of her criticism—and some of her fiction as well—was aimed at uncovering the roiling, sometimes disturbing forces underlying the creation of art. In the Tanner Lectures she delivered at the University of Michigan in 1988, she spoke of what she called “the Africanist presence” at the heart of white American literature, a “ghost in the machine” that made it go, that made it function—even as it relied upon the racist logic of a grotesquely dehumanizing and objectifying violence.
Morrison didn’t want to erase this art, she wanted to know how it worked; she was interested in what the image of “serviceable” black bodies enabled for those white writers, and why. So careful, so intelligent was she that even her sharpest critique bestowed dignity on its object. I would describe her sensibility as a combination of grace and acuity, as the highest form of discernment, as what black people first named shade, which, as Dorian Corey says, is not just a “vicious slur fight” but rather when your reading goes “to the fine point.” Take Morrison’s equanimity about the blatant racism in an Ernest Hemingway novel: “an author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them.” Or her plainly accurate description of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in her introduction to a new edition as “this amazing, troubling book.”
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