In Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog-series RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I leveled a general criticism against all literary works that use the tropes of either "the despised overclass" or "the despised underclass" for nothing more than fantasies of mastering the respective class involved. In addition to the formal consequences-- that such a utilitarian fantasy is so focused on political advancement that the literary value of free variation is neglected-- such works also encourage the idea that no evil enters the righteous hearts of those opposed to the anathema-class.
I had never read Toni Morrison before this year, but I was happy to see that her third published novel SONG OF SOLOMON evinces the quality of mental freedom that I've termed "self-mastery." SONG bears superficial resemblance to dozens of other works in which members of a Black culture-- usually that of Afro-Americans, but sometimes of native Africans-- ceaselessly disparage the majority culture of Whites, be they Americans or Europeans. I do not reject the base trope of "the Evil Outsiders," since I respect that it was used in folklore and myth long before the rise of formal literature. But the uses made of the trope by someone like Spike Lee are banal in the extreme.
SONG, however, manages to use the Evil Outsiders to achieve self-mastery of her own vision, the vision of Afro-Americans as they exist on the margins of American society of the late 1950s and early 1960s. White Americans do not exist as characters in SONG, but White Society exerts an inexorable influence upon all Afro-Americans of the period, like the gravity of the Earth affecting the course of the moon. In the view of those who live on the margins, Whites are insane, senselessly driven to take Black lives the moment they are given some paltry excuse to do so. White Liberals of the period barely exist in SONG-- there's a passing, distrustful allusion to President Kennedy-- and Morrison elides White Liberals precisely because she wants to use the trope of the Evil Outsiders to its full potential.
But unlike Spike Lee, Morrison does not pretend that everyone within her ingroup is given a halo of nobility by the fact of being marginalized. SONG is built around the central character of "Milkman" Dead, who's about thirty years old within the novel's main timeline. Though Milkman is as aware as anyone of the unpredictable dangers of the White Overclass-- the 1955 murder of Emmett Till is discussed in his presence early on in SONG-- the young man also incarnates some of the worst indulgences for which his ingroup is known. Despite coming to his mother's defense against his father's tyrannies, the novel shows Milkman as having contempt for the many female relatives in his family-- not least his father's sister Pilate and her daughter Hagar, since Milkman persuades Hagar to give him regular sex but eventually rejects her when she becomes clingy, which action has tragic results for both Hagar and her mother. Given Morrison's own gender, it's not surprising that she would be less than approving of the negative attitudes of Black males toward Black females.
But Morrison goes further in articulating a mythos of Black Society that draws upon the many tropes of folklore. The main character is basically an everyman with no special visionary propensities, and so in order to articulate the vision of Black Society, Morrison must send Milkman on a somewhat mundane mission of a "treasure-hunt." Within the space of a blogpost, I can't explore the nature of the rich society Milkman discovers on his quest. But in contrast to the naturalistic tradition of most Afro-American fiction, Morrison's approach is closer to the South American concept of magical realism. Many of the questionable phenomena witnessed by SONG's characters might best be judged as "uncanny" rather than "marvelous," but this orientation does not in the least dim Morrison's ability to lend the ordinary world the patina of magic, without diminishing the real world's mortality.
Sadly, given some of the later examples I've cited of "mastery fantasies without self-mastery," I have the impression that few later talents have pursued the theme of marginalized Black Society with anything like Morrison's combination of wit, social respnsibility and pure joie de vivre.
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