How Beloved Solves the Baldwin vs Howe Problem
Throughout this class, we've discussed what makes a protest novel and what doesn't. In doing so, we read James Baldwin's critique of Native Son and Irving Howe's critique of Invisible Man. Among James Baldwin's problems with Native Son, a major problem he has is that Wright made his book too much like a pamphlet, suggesting that protest literature must have a strong message that overpowers the dimensionality of the characters and the quality of the prose. Howe's problem with Invisible Man (though likely a racist one) is that it does not have enough of a message. Howe seems to suggest that Invisible Man doesn't do what a Black author is supposed to do: make a protest novel that comes from a place of rage. Instead, Ellison created a more thoroughly developed character because he wasn't only shaped by his surroundings.
The problem these two books seem to highlight is achieving a balance between good writing and a strong message. While not all literature needs to have a strong message, Irving and Howe seem to present that if somebody is trying to convey a strong message, they will have to sacrifice writing quality. If somebody writes with better-flowing prose and stronger characters, their message will be weakened.
This made sense to me until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved because it definitely seems to do both. So, I asked myself how Morrison achieved such strong, three-dimensional characters and such beautiful writing all while conveying the message of haunting slavery in a way that is arguably more powerful than Wright's message. I decided that a huge part of this achievement comes from Beloved's story structure.
Beloved follows the characters' respective histories individually with little regard for chronology in a way that highlights each individual character's perspective. By slowly revealing more and more through differing perspectives, the reader gains a sense of what the same events mean to different people. Understanding different motivations and every character's backstory gradually develops the characters as only a small amount of time passes in the "present." This specific structure further reinforces Morrison's idea that characters cannot escape the past or slavery. It also helps the reader sympathize more with characters like Sethe before we find out about what she did so we can understand her a little better and understand the meaning a little better.
On top of the overall structure of the novel, the specific timeline within the present-day 124 conveys the message about society being haunted by slavery by creating an allegory for both the larger context within the novel and the historical context outside the novel. As we watch Beloved haunt Sethe, we continuously also see every character including Sethe get flashbacks and "rememories" of the haunting past. We see a message being conveyed allegorically and literally at the same time in one novel in very little time from different characters' perspectives which develops the characters more.
Thus, Toni Morrison solves the problem of having too much or too little message that affects the quality of the writing by intricately weaving character and plot structure together.
Not only that, Morrison's writing in Beloved is incredibly difficult to understand. It definitely forces the reader to understand what's going on and that's incredibly powerful. The most surprising shift for me was the series of chapters only discussing the perspectives of one character at a time, from Sethe to Denver to Beloved. Morrison's writing is like a shape-shifter, it can take so many forms and perspectives, is confusing and sometimes jarring, and supernatural, but this all weaves an incredibly complex web of meaning.
ReplyDeleteI also think that since Morrison shows the message in that way, it is more powerful. We feel connected to the characters than in a book like "Native Son." This connection means that we feel the pains of the characters much more, making us more emotionally attached to the story. Through this, the message gets across better. Morrison does this masterfully and communicates the novel's message in a more influential way.
ReplyDeleteI like Lauren's phrase--"a complex web of meaning"--to describe Morrison's "message" in this novel. Because it's so complex, paradoxical, and nuanced, I balk at talking about _Beloved_ in terms of "a message" that it conveys--but the idea that its complex, past-present-blurring, supernatural narrative of haunting conveys a range of related and overlapping ideas about slavery, history, the past and present, and "nothing ever really dies" makes a lot of sense to me. The book is, as you say, obviously centrally concerned with contemplating the persistence of slavery dynamics beyond Emancipation--more so than "protesting" slavery 120 years after the fact. It's therefore a *much* different kind of
ReplyDeletenovel than _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and I'm confident that Baldwin would very much approve of Hurston's finely developed characters. Morrison cites Baldwin as a massive influence on her own writing, and unfortunately he died the year _Beloved_ was published, so we'll never know what he thought of it. But I'm sure he never would have called it "mere protest fiction."
I definitely think that Morrison solved the problem of having only a protest aspect or strong character development. However, she might not have been able to do so without the works of Ellison and Wright to reflect on and learn from. Because she had strong and prominent examples of the two extremes, she was able to soften each side to create a perfect blend. I think that we can't be too hard on Ellison and Wright, because they were among the first to write novels about black people living in America and they were pioneers in their own right who produced extremely influential and very good novels. However, Morrison was able to build off of that and get the best of both worlds.
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