(from the previous issue) :
Morrison speaks of Nel and Sula as two halves of one person; the ideal, she told Bill Moyers on a segment of his PBS television show World of Ideas, would be “a Sula with some responsibilities. “Nevertheless, Morrison will not allow her readers to rest comfortably in any particular moral stance toward the events or characters in Sula: we wonder whether to admire Sula’s grandmother Eva’s bravery in allowing her leg to be cut off by a train in order to collect insurance money to feed her children, or instead to be repulsed by such self-mutilation, just as we vacillate on whether to celebrate Sula’s autonomy or to deplore her selfishness.
Sula garnered more attention than had The Bluest Eye and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. Sara Blackburn’s review in the New York Times Book Review caused a minor controversy because it suggested first that the novel lacked “the stinging immediacy” of Morrison’s nonfiction and then that “Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life.” But Blackburn stood virtually alone in her impression that Morrison’s novel was limited by its focus on a black community.
Faith Davis’s review in the Harvard Advocate was more nearly representative in its assessment that Sula has the capacity to touch all readers: “Her citizens of the Bottom jump up from the pages vital and strong because she has made us care about the pain in their lives.”
In February of 1974, Random House published The Black Book, a volume compiled by Middleton Harris and edited by Morrison. In “Rediscovering Black History,” Morrison explains that she hopes that The Black Book, a scrapbook of 300 years of black life in America, will enable blacks to “recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence, and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks now growing up.” Amid the photographs, patents, newspaper clippings, advertisements, recipes, etc. that make up the book, Morrison found verification of the stories of black achievement-despite slavery, racism, and sexism-that her parents and grandparents had told her when she was growing up: “I felt a renewal of pride I had not felt since 1941, when my parents told me stories of blacks who had invented airplanes, electricity, and shoes….And there it was among Spike Harris’s collection of patents: the overshoe. The airplane was also there as an airship registered in 1900 by John Pickering.” Once again, Morrison had discovered a sustaining connection between her family history and habit of storytelling, black history, and her own sense of identity.
Appropriately, Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, charts a similar discovery. Milkman Dead sets out on a trek down south from his home in Ohio in hopes of recovering lost family treasure. What he finds is not gold, however, but the spiritual wealth of his rich family history. For Milkman, the journey becomes not only one from ignorance to knowledge, but also from selfish materialism and immaturity to joy, love, and selfless commitment to community. Morrison casts the narrative in the familiar mythological pattern of the Odyssey and specifically invokes an African American folktale about a group of African-born slaves who rise up from the plantation and fly back home across the ocean. At the end of the novel, Milkman has clearly freed himself from the confinements of materialism and entered into the realm of possibility, but whether or not he will survive his leap into that unknown remains unresolved.
Song of Solomon secured Morrison’s place as a major writer of American fiction. A critical and commercial success, it became a paperback bestseller and in 1978 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Those critics who had reservations about the novel generally felt that Morrison failed to integrate believably the realistic with the mythic elements. Vivian Gamick wrote in the Village Voice: “At a certain point one begins to feel a manipulative ness in the book’s structure, and then to sense that the characters are moving to fulfill the requirements of that structure.” Other critics discerned, however, that in Song of Solomon Morrison extended her primary themes across a much broader spectrum of subject matter than she had previously dealt with. Song of Solomon sweeps out from one man’s quest for self-discovery to encompass his entire family history-becoming, as Claudia Tate put it in Black Women Writers at Work,” a kind of cultural epic by which black people can recall their often obscured slave heritage.” Reynolds Price summed up this evolution in the New York Times Book Review: “Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives.”
(Concluded)
Morrison speaks of Nel and Sula as two halves of one person; the ideal, she told Bill Moyers on a segment of his PBS television show World of Ideas, would be “a Sula with some responsibilities. “Nevertheless, Morrison will not allow her readers to rest comfortably in any particular moral stance toward the events or characters in Sula: we wonder whether to admire Sula’s grandmother Eva’s bravery in allowing her leg to be cut off by a train in order to collect insurance money to feed her children, or instead to be repulsed by such self-mutilation, just as we vacillate on whether to celebrate Sula’s autonomy or to deplore her selfishness.
Sula garnered more attention than had The Bluest Eye and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. Sara Blackburn’s review in the New York Times Book Review caused a minor controversy because it suggested first that the novel lacked “the stinging immediacy” of Morrison’s nonfiction and then that “Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life.” But Blackburn stood virtually alone in her impression that Morrison’s novel was limited by its focus on a black community.
Faith Davis’s review in the Harvard Advocate was more nearly representative in its assessment that Sula has the capacity to touch all readers: “Her citizens of the Bottom jump up from the pages vital and strong because she has made us care about the pain in their lives.”
In February of 1974, Random House published The Black Book, a volume compiled by Middleton Harris and edited by Morrison. In “Rediscovering Black History,” Morrison explains that she hopes that The Black Book, a scrapbook of 300 years of black life in America, will enable blacks to “recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence, and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks now growing up.” Amid the photographs, patents, newspaper clippings, advertisements, recipes, etc. that make up the book, Morrison found verification of the stories of black achievement-despite slavery, racism, and sexism-that her parents and grandparents had told her when she was growing up: “I felt a renewal of pride I had not felt since 1941, when my parents told me stories of blacks who had invented airplanes, electricity, and shoes….And there it was among Spike Harris’s collection of patents: the overshoe. The airplane was also there as an airship registered in 1900 by John Pickering.” Once again, Morrison had discovered a sustaining connection between her family history and habit of storytelling, black history, and her own sense of identity.
Appropriately, Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, charts a similar discovery. Milkman Dead sets out on a trek down south from his home in Ohio in hopes of recovering lost family treasure. What he finds is not gold, however, but the spiritual wealth of his rich family history. For Milkman, the journey becomes not only one from ignorance to knowledge, but also from selfish materialism and immaturity to joy, love, and selfless commitment to community. Morrison casts the narrative in the familiar mythological pattern of the Odyssey and specifically invokes an African American folktale about a group of African-born slaves who rise up from the plantation and fly back home across the ocean. At the end of the novel, Milkman has clearly freed himself from the confinements of materialism and entered into the realm of possibility, but whether or not he will survive his leap into that unknown remains unresolved.
Song of Solomon secured Morrison’s place as a major writer of American fiction. A critical and commercial success, it became a paperback bestseller and in 1978 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Those critics who had reservations about the novel generally felt that Morrison failed to integrate believably the realistic with the mythic elements. Vivian Gamick wrote in the Village Voice: “At a certain point one begins to feel a manipulative ness in the book’s structure, and then to sense that the characters are moving to fulfill the requirements of that structure.” Other critics discerned, however, that in Song of Solomon Morrison extended her primary themes across a much broader spectrum of subject matter than she had previously dealt with. Song of Solomon sweeps out from one man’s quest for self-discovery to encompass his entire family history-becoming, as Claudia Tate put it in Black Women Writers at Work,” a kind of cultural epic by which black people can recall their often obscured slave heritage.” Reynolds Price summed up this evolution in the New York Times Book Review: “Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives.”
(Concluded)
