Toni Morrison confuses me. I'm sure that I'm not the only one that feels this way, but her writing seems to twist and turn in a way that while satisfying seems almost wasteful. Not only do her excess words seem to bother me in a way I can't put my finger on, but her plot points seem just as pointless. Its as if she went on one of those recipe generator websites, through a bunch of non sequiturs in, and wrote the book on a dare.
To me while there are a number of culprits, Baby Suggs in general, Amy Denver who floats in out of nowhere like something oddly similar to an angel, or the fact that a girl was resurrected and given a complete new body. But to me the most interesting culprit is the dog whose sense of smell transcends dimensions.
Think about it, at the start of the book Morrison says, " The baby's spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs" (15). Then later she writes that when Beloved first appears, "Here Boy was nowhere in sight" (61). Now he hadn't seen Beloved at this point, he was gone way before she arrived. This means that its not that he could originally see the ghost, something I can I guess wrap my head around, but that he smelled her while she was in spirit form and remembered that smell well enough to run when he smelled it again.
This means way more than just the fact that Here Boy has an incredible sense of smell though. This means that ghosts smell in Morrison's world. To be blunt, why? In what world does a thing without a corporeal form smell? I don't know, remember I said at the beginning Morrison confuses me.
I agree with this, her writing seems very dense, hard to understand without annotating and reading over and over at times. I feel it is not one of the most fluid books to read, but I still think there's some value to her work, but at this point I don't see the message/theme.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Morrison's writing is dense, but how could you not have a dense writing based on how dense and strenuous slavery was? Every word in her book may seem to prolong the chapter and add non-important information, but every sentence in the chapter is crucial to Morrison. It is easy to say that her writing does not make sense, but slavery did not make sense either. Adding extra words and sentences is our only ability to comprehend the awfulness and dehumanization that took place during slavery. So yes and no. Good point though, could easily argue for both sides.
ReplyDeleteI also completely agree, without annotations or rereading passages it easy to get lost, with such dense writing. I think this has to do with the diction she uses throughout the novel.
ReplyDeleteYou're totally right but I think of it a different way. The mind of Sethe is dark and twisted. She has constant flashbacks and is being "haunted" by her dead child. I think she wrote it this way to show what it might be like to be in a slave's mind.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree with you that many of the things in this book do not seem to make much sense, I think that the fact that such a large part of the book focuses on ghosts, Morrison should be allowed some creative freedom to bend things to match with the story. It also could be something other than smell, like how animals know to retreat when a tsunami is coming.
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