
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 9, 1993                   TAG: 9310120010
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NOVELS CAPTURE THE HORRORS OF HISTORY

Violent, heart-wrenching events occur in Toni Morrison's fiction: a fleeing slave cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw; a cosmetics salesman hunts down his mistress and shoots her dead; an old woman burns her own son to death for having become a junkie. These are not random, senseless deaths, but deaths wrought by history, by decades of familial disappointment and pain and an ineradicable racial memory of slavery and betrayal.

In fact, for Morrison's characters, "caught midway between was and must be," innocence does not exist.

"An innocent man is a sin before God," she wrote in "Tar Baby." "Inhuman and therefore unworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines."

In six novels that progressively open out to encompass 300 years of American history, Morrison has spun the horrors of slavery and its emotional and spiritual legacy into a fiercely woven mythology all her own. Her achievement here exists less in providing an alternative to the traditional, canonical literature of white America that she assailed in a recent book of essays ("Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination") than it does in creating a body of work that stands radiantly on its own as an American epic. She has taken the specific and often terrible history of black people in America and lofted it into the timeless realm of myth.

Yes, race relations and racism are eviscerated in her novels, but never in any didactic way. Although works like "The Bluest Eye" and "Sula" give the reader an exacting portrait of an entire community and way of life, Morrison is not really concerned with social conditions (or social realism), but with the consequences those conditions have on the hearts and minds of men and women.

In "The Bluest Eye," a young black girl from a small town longs to have blue eyes. In "Tar Baby," a beautiful black woman finds herself torn between the rich, white world of Paris and the world of her black lover, an escaped criminal from north Florida.

The writing in these novels is urgent, lyrical, sinuous: Faulknerian in its rhythms, Garcia Marquezesque in its imagery, Proustian in its ability to fuse time past and time present into a single, shimmering moment of perception. Fantastical events are taken for granted by Morrison's characters. They are used to living in a world in which the ordinary seems out of reach. They are on intimate terms with a history that has been surreal in its cruelty and deceptions.

Some of Morrison's men are memorable - Milkman, who nurses at his mother's breast long after childhood; Son, who prowls the swamps of a Caribbean island in search of his girlfriend - but it is her women who ask to take up permanent residence in the reader's mind: the grandmother in "Sula" who sticks her leg in front of a train so that she can live off the $10,000 injury compensation; Reba in "Song of Solomon," who lives "from one orgasm to another"; Jadine in "Tar Baby," who is so beautiful she can make "those white girls disappear. Just disappear right off the page," and the old women in "The Bluest Eye," who "were through with lust and lactation, beyond tears and terror," who were "old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring the presence of pain."

Witches, sorceresses and survivors, these women at some point have all been avid for life, eager to embrace danger and passion and love, even though they know the dangers of caring too much, even though they know that loss and leaving are conditions of their lives. Parents die, children grow up, lovers move on, land is sold, possessions are stolen: this is the first lesson that Sethe, the heroine of "Beloved," learns at considerable cost. The second lesson she learns is that the past must sometimes be left behind, that redemption is to be found not in remembering but in forgetting.

Indeed redemption always remains a possibility for Morrison's characters, because as brutal as her vision so often seems, she writes with a deep appreciation of "the music the world makes," as she puts it in "Jazz." "What is curious to me," she once said, "is that bestial treatment of human beings never produces a race of beasts."

by CNB