Mercy and Hope
A Mercy demonstrates once again Toni Morrison's almost frightening literary strength. Comparable only to Faulkner and García Márquez and Marcel Proust himself, Morrison challenges our ideas of human nature under immense strain: she provides us fallible characters who do the most outrageous and violent and at the same time the most loving and kindest acts one could expect from anyone.
In the now-canonical Beloved, a mother tries to kill her children in an attempt to save them from the horrors of slavery which she herself has experienced. Teachers teach little children that she is both human and animal, she has a very prominent scar on her back, her husband has become a crazy man. She succeeds in killing a daughter. White men stop her from killing the rest, her two sons soon run away from home, leaving her and her other daughter alone.
This ghost of the murdered child would soon haunt the mother, the girl calls herself Beloved, maybe from the epitaph which was made only in exchange for a sexual act. Sethe thinks that if she did it a little longer she could have gotten Dearly Beloved instead, but calms herself with the thought that she got the one word that matters.
Employing Faulknerian time-bending, Morrison tells the story of a girl who has to deal with the fact that her mother chose her kid brother over her, and that this same mother has knelt in front of a white man to take her instead. This is the time before slavery, before black and slave became synonymous.
There is a family in this short novel, soon destroyed by the world itself, and by people who can't cope with its changes and hence has to turn to forces larger than them for protection, for anything other than solitude. The book ends with the voice of the mother, who, in an extraordinary confession, tries to explain her act of mercy. She cannot change things as they are, she says, but she believes they could be different.
A Mercy is Beloved's equal in power and literary scope. After a series of novels - Paradise, Love - that did not seem to live up to her status as one of the greatest writers of our time, Toni Morrison shows that she has not lost her touch. She remains a formidable force in world literature in both style and the enlightening but never didactic content of her works.
In the now-canonical Beloved, a mother tries to kill her children in an attempt to save them from the horrors of slavery which she herself has experienced. Teachers teach little children that she is both human and animal, she has a very prominent scar on her back, her husband has become a crazy man. She succeeds in killing a daughter. White men stop her from killing the rest, her two sons soon run away from home, leaving her and her other daughter alone.
This ghost of the murdered child would soon haunt the mother, the girl calls herself Beloved, maybe from the epitaph which was made only in exchange for a sexual act. Sethe thinks that if she did it a little longer she could have gotten Dearly Beloved instead, but calms herself with the thought that she got the one word that matters.
Employing Faulknerian time-bending, Morrison tells the story of a girl who has to deal with the fact that her mother chose her kid brother over her, and that this same mother has knelt in front of a white man to take her instead. This is the time before slavery, before black and slave became synonymous.
There is a family in this short novel, soon destroyed by the world itself, and by people who can't cope with its changes and hence has to turn to forces larger than them for protection, for anything other than solitude. The book ends with the voice of the mother, who, in an extraordinary confession, tries to explain her act of mercy. She cannot change things as they are, she says, but she believes they could be different.
A Mercy is Beloved's equal in power and literary scope. After a series of novels - Paradise, Love - that did not seem to live up to her status as one of the greatest writers of our time, Toni Morrison shows that she has not lost her touch. She remains a formidable force in world literature in both style and the enlightening but never didactic content of her works.
posted by jake @ 6:54 PM
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