All of this is my own meandering; there is no logical argument.
As a writer (and reader who reads like one), Enishte Effendi’s brush with death
in Venice in Pamuk’s My Name is Red and
the Catalonian bookseller’s world-weary flight from Macondo in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude thrill me
most; the vignette form and its brand of humanity under narrative pressure trumps
any devastating psychodrama.
What interests
me is not the conflict within the human heart. Give me a heart, sure, but a
heart in extraordinary circumstances and a getaway with dreadful odds. In Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, fugitive slave
Sethe, a woman heavy with her own sins and those of others, finally requites
freedman Paul D’s twenty-year love. Though both were whipped the same by the
impassively diabolical schoolteacher (who never earns a name), their empathy is
silently understood.
His look begs
for caring hands on his “tobacco tin” of a heart, and Sethe knows; “he wants me
to ask him about what [his bridling] was like for him…held down by iron…the wildness
that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back” (84). How does
one begin to articulate that violence? Paul D’s enslaved smile, the leather scouring
his mouth’s corners… A slave knows death without dying. And perhaps the saw in the toolshed was the
proverbial bit in Sethe’s own mouth.
But we’ve seen
this anguish before; in One Hundred Years
of Solitude, patriarch José Arcadio Buendía unravels time as nothing but a
construct and in his madness is tied to a tree until his death years later. Yet Beloved isn’t a
fable/parable/creation myth, but rather a neo-slave narrative. “Sixty million and
more,” the book’s epigraph reads. Morrison’s Sethe and Paul D stand against a
background of institutionalized evil, having lost some fragment of selfhood (otherwise
they are “something else and that something else was less than a chicken
sitting in the sun on the tub)" (86). Schoolteacher’s perverse plantation
management is the insult to the blunt force trauma of American slavery. These
raised stakes make that moment of wild eyes all the more pitiful.
I should soon
be a critic and not a reader.
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