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Cynique
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 05:40 pm: | 
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Here's another prominent black writer's take on "Love"
What is this thing called love? In Toni Morrison's haunting, masterful new novel, romantic love is in tatters and filial love is fraught. You must search the book for the real thing and even for the word itself, which hangs over the work and dares us to look for it in complex forms.
Lack of love is punctuated by allusions to big-band and doo-wop songs that emblematize love's artifice, its popular cultural facsimiles. Love in "Love" is thwarted, rent and distorted. It resists direct expression or articulation. It is miscalled, for does a grown man take a child bride out of anything we could truthfully call love? The only real joy in the book is the interrupted joy of girl's play and the pointedly momentary joy of sexual pleasure, which is always followed by something darker and more vexing.
"Love" is set in a community called Silk, and the characters orbit around the ghost of Bill Cosey, a suave ladies man who once ran a resort for blacks that "had more handsome single men per square foot than anyplace outside Atlanta or even Chicago. They came partly for the music but mostly to dance by the sea with pretty women."
Cosey died under mysterious circumstances, or, as one character observes, " 'Hale at breakfast; dead at lunch.' " That is one mystery a reader moves through this book to unravel. Cosey is a hero to some whom he hired away from grueling work in nearby fish canneries:
" 'He paid us good money . . . and taught us, too. Things I never would have known about if I'd kept on living over a swamp in a stilt house.' "
To others he is a greedy patriarch who would sell out his community, and an unrepentant dog who would let his carnal desires (which are other longings made manifest) destroy his family. To still others he remains an enigma. To one character who never knew him, he is an obsession.
Ostensibly this book is about the women who loved Cosey in the wake of his death, but that doesn't get at the emotional truth of the story. The women are bound in the name of different kinds of love for Cosey, but the things they do to each other under that aegis in this book are not for the fainthearted. The relationship at the heart of the book is between two older women who live in the same house, Christine and Heed (Morrison and names! Heed is an abbreviated form of the woman's full name, Heed the Night.). The women's lives and fates are forged together by the white heat of their hatred for each other. As we move through the book, we learn about the love that is the root of their enmity: They were childhood best friends, two berries on a single stem, until their love was interrupted when Christine's grandfather, Bill Cosey, took 11-year-old Heed as his bride.
Yes, an 11-year-old bride. This is Morrison Gothic, which is American village Gothic. She remains fascinated with exploring the intimacies in close communities, the way a community's history lives and breathes, the way the past is never too far away, how it presses on the present. History as such makes an appearance when we learn how this once-autonomous black business that anchored a community (as well as bred resentments) fell apart. When Christine is banished from home--her girl presence makes explicit the perversity of her grandfather's having taken her 11-year-old best friend for a bride--she runs to a brothel, then to ill-advised marriage, then to a second marriage and the flush of involvement in black-power politics. The few scenes in those worlds feel a galaxy away from the village and its faded heyday.
"Love" is sister to Morrison's 1973 masterpiece, "Sula," which also took seriously the potency and centrality of girlhood friendships and their reverberations into and throughout womanhood. Both books also explore the incipient presence of sexuality that can creep, or be forced, into a girl's consciousness before she is ready to process it.
In "Love," Morrison also looks at the first incursion of sexuality into the life of a young man, Romen. He is staying with his grandparents, Sandler and Vida, and performing odd jobs around the community while his parents complete military service. He has two signal experiences. First, he stops a gang rape at a party of his peers. Second, he begins an intense sexual relationship with a 19-year-old newcomer to town, Junior. Junior is a girl with a past, as they say, newly out of "Correctional," and hired by Heed to help her prove that the house she and Christine share and both lay claim to is rightfully Heed's.
Morrison gets into the dark corners of sexual imagination and what it means to come through a rite of passage without full cognizance of what is happening. Here is her description of Romen at school, after he has stopped the rape and later had his first sex with Junior:
"When he approached the lockers that first day, they knew. And those that didn't, he told--in a way. Anybody who needed to get drunk, or tie somebody up, or required the company of a herd, was a punk. Two days earlier Theo would have knocked him into the wall. But on November 13, Romen had new eyes, ones that appraised and dared. The boys hazarded a few lame teases, but Romen's smile, slow and informed, kept them off balance. The clincher came from the girls. Sensing something capable in his manner, they stopped rolling their eyes and smothering giggles. Now they arched their backs, threw back their shoulders in great, long deceptive yawns. Now they cut question-and-answer glances his way."
Romen is mesmerized by Junior's "sci-fi eyes" and freaky-deaky ways, which sidle up to violence.
His grandfather, Sandler, shows his love by putting Ice-Off on the drive so his wife won't fall, by delivering the meals she prepares for shut-ins, by gossiping about events present and past at the dinner table. When grandfather and grandson discuss the scary perimeter of the boy's relationship with Junior, Sandler says:
" 'Looks like you hooked yourself up with somebody who bothers you, makes you feel uneasy. That kind of feeling is more than instinct; its information, information you can count on. You can't always pay attention to what other people say, but you should pay attention to that. Don't worry about whether backing off means you a wimp. It can save your life."
The words come back to Romen when he most needs them. They tend him from afar.
The key to thinking about the concept of love in this book is in the narrator, who speaks with ancestral authority from the dead, as Morrison has done before. She is known to us as L (the force of Love itself?). She, like Morrison's stance in this book, is flintily anti-sentiment. Yet she is the primary nurturer of the community--literally, the one who feeds, because she was the cook in Cosey's hotel for 50 years--and its historian, the one with the long view who knows where the bodies are buried. L is the restorer of order, "priestly" in her chef's hat, whose acts of love are devotional. She calls her words her "hum," and that hum is the contouring background music of the book, the metronome, the base-, or bass, line. L's italicized narration is an epic lament as well as a griot's song of the village. L is ambient, the one force that can keep those under the Cosey umbrella from utter destruction. Here L holds forth as Romen and Junior begin their affair:
"Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the coupe standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. . . . People with no imagination feed it with sex--the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that--softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that's why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course."
There are many examples of Morrisonian logic, pronouncements that she makes seem inevitable but are in truth earned wisdom:
"All over the world, traitors help progress. It's like being exposed to tuberculosis. After it fills the cemetery, it strengthens whoever survives, helps them know the difference between a strong mind and a healthy one; between the righteous and the right--which is, after all, progress. The problem for those left alive is what to do about revenge--how to escape the sweetness of its rot. So you can see why families make the best enemies. They have time and convenience to honey-butter the wickedness they prefer. Shortsighted, though. What good does it do to keep a favorite hate going when the very person you've poisoned your life with is the one (maybe the only one) able or willing to carry you to the bathroom when you can't get there on your own?"
Morrison's style can hardly be described as stark. It is a meeting of ripeness and razor precision. This novel is nonetheless distilled, both in its knowledge and in its language.
Morrison gives us the delicious key to one of the mysteries of "Love" at the end of the book. She directs us to the New Testament, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, which meditates on "love," or "charity," depending on the translation. Love therein is patient, kind, greater than faith or hope. As charity it goes back to the Latin root caritas, love directed first toward God but also toward oneself and one's neighbors as objects of God's love. Generous and judicious, L practices this type of love, which, along with its absence, is the potent terrain of Morrison's splendid novel.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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What is this thing called love? In Toni Morrison's haunting, masterful new novel, romantic love is in tatters and filial love is fraught. You must search the book for the real thing and even for the word itself, which hangs over the work and dares us to look for it in complex forms.
Lack of love is punctuated by allusions to big-band and doo-wop songs that emblematize love's artifice, its popular cultural facsimiles. Love in "Love" is thwarted, rent and distorted. It resists direct expression or articulation. It is miscalled, for does a grown man take a child bride out of anything we could truthfully call love? The only real joy in the book is the interrupted joy of girl's play and the pointedly momentary joy of sexual pleasure, which is always followed by something darker and more vexing.
"Love" is set in a community called Silk, and the characters orbit around the ghost of Bill Cosey, a suave ladies man who once ran a resort for blacks that "had more handsome single men per square foot than anyplace outside Atlanta or even Chicago. They came partly for the music but mostly to dance by the sea with pretty women."
Cosey died under mysterious circumstances, or, as one character observes, " 'Hale at breakfast; dead at lunch.' " That is one mystery a reader moves through this book to unravel. Cosey is a hero to some whom he hired away from grueling work in nearby fish canneries:
" 'He paid us good money . . . and taught us, too. Things I never would have known about if I'd kept on living over a swamp in a stilt house.' "
To others he is a greedy patriarch who would sell out his community, and an unrepentant dog who would let his carnal desires (which are other longings made manifest) destroy his family. To still others he remains an enigma. To one character who never knew him, he is an obsession.
Ostensibly this book is about the women who loved Cosey in the wake of his death, but that doesn't get at the emotional truth of the story. The women are bound in the name of different kinds of love for Cosey, but the things they do to each other under that aegis in this book are not for the fainthearted. The relationship at the heart of the book is between two older women who live in the same house, Christine and Heed (Morrison and names! Heed is an abbreviated form of the woman's full name, Heed the Night.). The women's lives and fates are forged together by the white heat of their hatred for each other. As we move through the book, we learn about the love that is the root of their enmity: They were childhood best friends, two berries on a single stem, until their love was interrupted when Christine's grandfather, Bill Cosey, took 11-year-old Heed as his bride.
Yes, an 11-year-old bride. This is Morrison Gothic, which is American village Gothic. She remains fascinated with exploring the intimacies in close communities, the way a community's history lives and breathes, the way the past is never too far away, how it presses on the present. History as such makes an appearance when we learn how this once-autonomous black business that anchored a community (as well as bred resentments) fell apart. When Christine is banished from home--her girl presence makes explicit the perversity of her grandfather's having taken her 11-year-old best friend for a bride--she runs to a brothel, then to ill-advised marriage, then to a second marriage and the flush of involvement in black-power politics. The few scenes in those worlds feel a galaxy away from the village and its faded heyday.
"Love" is sister to Morrison's 1973 masterpiece, "Sula," which also took seriously the potency and centrality of girlhood friendships and their reverberations into and throughout womanhood. Both books also explore the incipient presence of sexuality that can creep, or be forced, into a girl's consciousness before she is ready to process it.
In "Love," Morrison also looks at the first incursion of sexuality into the life of a young man, Romen. He is staying with his grandparents, Sandler and Vida, and performing odd jobs around the community while his parents complete military service. He has two signal experiences. First, he stops a gang rape at a party of his peers. Second, he begins an intense sexual relationship with a 19-year-old newcomer to town, Junior. Junior is a girl with a past, as they say, newly out of "Correctional," and hired by Heed to help her prove that the house she and Christine share and both lay claim to is rightfully Heed's.
Morrison gets into the dark corners of sexual imagination and what it means to come through a rite of passage without full cognizance of what is happening. Here is her description of Romen at school, after he has stopped the rape and later had his first sex with Junior:
"When he approached the lockers that first day, they knew. And those that didn't, he told--in a way. Anybody who needed to get drunk, or tie somebody up, or required the company of a herd, was a punk. Two days earlier Theo would have knocked him into the wall. But on November 13, Romen had new eyes, ones that appraised and dared. The boys hazarded a few lame teases, but Romen's smile, slow and informed, kept them off balance. The clincher came from the girls. Sensing something capable in his manner, they stopped rolling their eyes and smothering giggles. Now they arched their backs, threw back their shoulders in great, long deceptive yawns. Now they cut question-and-answer glances his way."
Romen is mesmerized by Junior's "sci-fi eyes" and freaky-deaky ways, which sidle up to violence.
His grandfather, Sandler, shows his love by putting Ice-Off on the drive so his wife won't fall, by delivering the meals she prepares for shut-ins, by gossiping about events present and past at the dinner table. When grandfather and grandson discuss the scary perimeter of the boy's relationship with Junior, Sandler says:
" 'Looks like you hooked yourself up with somebody who bothers you, makes you feel uneasy. That kind of feeling is more than instinct; its information, information you can count on. You can't always pay attention to what other people say, but you should pay attention to that. Don't worry about whether backing off means you a wimp. It can save your life."
The words come back to Romen when he most needs them. They tend him from afar.
The key to thinking about the concept of love in this book is in the narrator, who speaks with ancestral authority from the dead, as Morrison has done before. She is known to us as L (the force of Love itself?). She, like Morrison's stance in this book, is flintily anti-sentiment. Yet she is the primary nurturer of the community--literally, the one who feeds, because she was the cook in Cosey's hotel for 50 years--and its historian, the one with the long view who knows where the bodies are buried. L is the restorer of order, "priestly" in her chef's hat, whose acts of love are devotional. She calls her words her "hum," and that hum is the contouring background music of the book, the metronome, the base-, or bass, line. L's italicized narration is an epic lament as well as a griot's song of the village. L is ambient, the one force that can keep those under the Cosey umbrella from utter destruction. Here L holds forth as Romen and Junior begin their affair:
"Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the coupe standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. . . . People with no imagination feed it with sex--the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that--softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that's why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course."
There are many examples of Morrisonian logic, pronouncements that she makes seem inevitable but are in truth earned wisdom:
"All over the world, traitors help progress. It's like being exposed to tuberculosis. After it fills the cemetery, it strengthens whoever survives, helps them know the difference between a strong mind and a healthy one; between the righteous and the right--which is, after all, progress. The problem for those left alive is what to do about revenge--how to escape the sweetness of its rot. So you can see why families make the best enemies. They have time and convenience to honey-butter the wickedness they prefer. Shortsighted, though. What good does it do to keep a favorite hate going when the very person you've poisoned your life with is the one (maybe the only one) able or willing to carry you to the bathroom when you can't get there on your own?"
Morrison's style can hardly be described as stark. It is a meeting of ripeness and razor precision. This novel is nonetheless distilled, both in its knowledge and in its language.
Morrison gives us the delicious key to one of the mysteries of "Love" at the end of the book. She directs us to the New Testament, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, which meditates on "love," or "charity," depending on the translation. Love therein is patient, kind, greater than faith or hope. As charity it goes back to the Latin root caritas, love directed first toward God but also toward oneself and one's neighbors as objects of God's love. Generous and judicious, L practices this type of love, which, along with its absence, is the potent terrain of Morrison's splendid novel.
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
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Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 10:41 pm: |
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I forgot to give the author of this review of "Love" her props. Her name is Elizabeth Alexander and she teaches at Yale. She has written a collection of essays entitled "The Black Interior," a book which would be released soon by Graywolf Press. Also, the review appears twice in the post by mistake. |
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 10:23 am: |
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You liked it so nice you had to post it twice.
Is this the same Elizabeth Alexander who used to live in Chicago and wrote poetry (one of her most famous poems was "The Venus Hottentot")?
By the way, I have started Zane's NERVOUS and may post a comparison later. (Zane and Toni Morrison? Well yeah, they are both black, right?)
I already see parallels with the differing First Person POV's Zane uses
Chris Hayden
Cynique's Road Dawg
Kola Boof's Spy
Yukio's Arch Emeny |
Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 04:51 pm: |
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Hello All,
Chris signed off with:
"Cynique's Road Dawg
Kola Boof's Spy
Yukio's Arch Emeny"
Damn, Chris, I didn't know it was this bad. You know they have pills for that nowadays. *smile* |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 05:56 pm: |
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I don't know the author of this review personally, Chris, but she is a poet. BTW, what is a "Road Dawg"?? And what a coincidence, I am also reading "Nervous." |
Anonymous
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 08:15 pm: |
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Road Dawg......Homeboy,Partner-Partner, Ace coon boom, Buddy, Right-hand-man, Shotgun, Ace.....i.e,,King Tremain & Sampson.....Easy & Mouse....., Batman & Robin .....Fred Flintstone & Barnie Rubble.....Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis.....Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.....Bonnie & Clyde
Thumper & Brian = Arch Enemies
ABM & Yukio = Lovers
Chris & Cynique = ROAD DAWGS! |
Thumper
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 09:16 pm: |
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Hello All,
Anonymous: Believe me, Brian and I are not "arch enemies". We respectfully disagree from time to time. *smile* And my list of enemies is circling around the block right about now. |
Troy
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - 10:40 pm: |
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Just took my four cheese macaroni out of the oven (it just dawned on me I could bring the laptop to the kitchen). While I was waiting for it to get bubbly I read this review of Love.
It seems to me the reviewer has taken it for granted that the reader has already read the book -- even thought the book is quoted extensively. I could not have appreciated this review unless I already read Love. I finished Love last week.
No review of Love would have disuaded me to read Morrison's book -- her novels are basically required reading.
Cynique what are your thoughts on this review? Have you read Love?
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Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 27, 2003 - 12:23 am: |
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Troy,
Where you been, guy? Me and Chris have been having an ongoing dialogue on "Love." Thumper and Yukio also added their input. In a nutshell, I thought "Love" was a extraordianary mesmerizing novel about skewered people. I tried not to second guess Toni, or to read things into what she wrote. I just put my trust in her wisdom and let her spin her tale in her own inimitable style. I pretty much related to everything this Elizabeth Alexander had to say because I thought her review was a favorable one, and she had some serious writing "skilz", herself. Did you check out the other review that Chris provided a link to?
Anonymous:
Thanks for clueing me in as to what "Road Dawg" meant. That's was what I thought, but I just didn't realize this was how Chris Hayden thought of me. |
ABM
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 27, 2003 - 09:13 am: |
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Anonymous, SSSSSHHHHH!!
Why yu gottah 'out' my game wit' Yukio? I'z dun already told her we need'z tah keep our thang on dah QT.
Dang!
A playah can't even beyah playah without sumbody trynah put his biznaz all out in dah screets. |
Cynique
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, November 27, 2003 - 12:44 pm: |
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Damn! I must've had too much holiday wine when I wrote my last post. I misspelled "extraordinary", and I meant to say "skewed" not "skewered" in my assessment of "Love." (There's nothing worse than misusing and misspelling words when you're trying to expound on a subject. LOL) |
yukio
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 30, 2003 - 04:43 pm: |
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hmmmm...interesting interview. i must read it again.....the nytimes review, not the nytimes.com btw, said that morrison uses the classical usage of love, which is not a kind of sentimental or romantic love....this qualification i believe helps us better understand LOVE w/o characterizing the novel as w/o love. |
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