The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,41

now rendered as visual phenomena of a chosen narrative that exploits and sensationalizes sex, race, and family threats for the national resonance and marketability they provide. This chaotic collapse of private and public—the constantly surveyed private life—and the public sphere over which we have no control encourages retreat into the narcissism of difference, a surrender to the shallow delights of entertainment. Or participation in a wholly illusory community shaped by fear and unquenchable desire.

It seems to me that given these already realized subversions and the possibility of more, literature offers a special kind of amelioration. The history of claims for the study of literature circles around three major benefits: (1) literature’s character-building, moral-strengthening capacities, (2) its suitability for high-minded, politics-free leisure activity, (3) its role in “cultivating powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship.” While being educated to citizenship is superior to being educated to consumership, citizenship as a goal has troublesome nationalistic associations. “The problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination…but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home, you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house.” Whether the character-building properties of literature, its rigorous politics-free intellectualism, or its utility in producing good and caring citizens—whether any of those claims still resonate among readers (and I am not sure that the case for literature has changed much since Emerson’s “American Scholar” or F. R. Leavis’s pronouncements), there is nevertheless a level of urgency in the study and production of literature hitherto unimaginable that has manifested itself: fictional literature may be (and I believe it is) the last and only route to remembrance, the only staunch in the wasteful draining away of conscience and memory. Fictional literature can be an alternative language that can contradict and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically visual, the seduction of “virtual.” The study of fiction may also be the mechanism of repair in the disconnect between public and private.

Literature has features that make it possible to experience the public without coercion and without submission. Literature refuses and disrupts passive or controlled consumption of the spectacle designed to nationalize identity in order to sell us products. Literature allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons. And in so doing is far more necessary than it has ever been. As art it deals with the human consequences of the other disciplines: history, law, science, economics, labor studies, medicine. As narrative its form is the principal method by which knowledge is appropriated and translated. As a simultaneous apprehension of human character in time, in context, in space, in metaphorical and expressive language, it organizes the disorienting influence of an excess of realities: heightened, virtual, mega, hyper, cyber, contingent, porous, and nostalgic. Finally, it can project an alleviated future.

These theoretical moves (about the novel’s peculiar affinity for experiencing a receding public life) become explicit moves in the last three books I have written. Beloved, Jazz, Paradise—each has a structural anomaly in common. A postnarrative, extratext, outside-the-book coda that comments not on the plot or story, but on the experience of the plot; not on the meaning of the story, but on the experience of gathering meaning from the story. These coda play an advocacy role, insisting on the consequences of having read the book, intervening in the established intimacy between reader and page, and forcing, if successful, a meditation, debate, argument that needs others for its fullest exploration. In short, social acts complete the reading experience.

Beloved ends narratively with Sethe’s question about her individuality. The extranarrative activity is the reestablishment of the haunting—larger now than what it was assumed to be and what it was limited to in the beginning: a frustrated child, a justifiably malevolent creature of will. Much larger than its own problem of annihilation, it, the figure of Beloved summoned in the book’s “afterlife,” is now the responsibility of those who have shared, participated in, witnessed the story. A private responsibility disguising public or community obligations: “This is not a story to pass on.” “They can touch it if they like.” “They forgot her.” “Loneliness that can be rocked [individual]” “Loneliness that roams [public].”

In Jazz the beyond-the-book gestures are stronger: the characters themselves escape the prognosis of the book, are different from and more complicated than the book ever imagined.