Word: morrisonism
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...ancient Black customs. He is Natural Man, flexible enough to do and be everything for her, but rigid enough to make her as "natural" as he is. The "savannahs in his eyes" lure her, and yet his presence upsets all her next artifices and all those of the household. Morrison identifies Son's revelatory force with his unwashed body's smell which is powerful enough to wake a sleeping Jadine and to arouse her sexually, but horrible enough to mix with her fantasies a sense of shame comparable to that of a bitch in heat, taken by a pack...
...more gentle advances and he takes her away, the artificial peace of the Americans has been completely broken. Their prodigal son Michael never comes to see them, but another Son does inspires the destroying of some myths surrounding Margaret's mothering. White people, for the first time in a Morrison novel, have imaginations also populated with ghosts. Theirs are European images of chivalry on horse back, spirits with gleaming swords that conquered the land. Their dream of Michael's identity is that he is a sort of missionary figure to Indians. Son exposes Jadine to screaming nightmares filled with ghosts...
...GHOSTS dreams and tales seduce Toni Morrison and release her inhibitions, making for some truly enchanting writing. She sees wonder in the strangest places, even traditionally non-haunted places like New York City which she can give a curious other-world quality...
...Morrison, however, indicts the present and sacrifices it, in her prose, to the power of her legends. Where there are no legends, the prose is dead. Jadine shows Son a chic N.Y. of Max's Kansas City at 4:00 a.m., promenades on Third Ave. from the Fifties to Soho listening to "RVR and BLS" and buying "mugs in Azuma's." None of these places mean anything to readers who do not know New York City, and few New Yorkers would claim these spots as immortal landscapes of their city. WRVR has already been taken off the air. This...
...most part, Toni Morrison writes very beautiful stories, and Tar Baby is usually a lovely, intelligent and sensitive novel. Her characters are pieces and products of the symbols and ghosts Morrison treasures as Black heritage and an interesting quality of this work is that the author sounds like she loves her characters. They are a part of American folklore, the general culture and the Black one, a link which Morrison insists on. Son is placed in the legion of "undocumented men" like Huck Finn, Nigger Jim, Caliban, Staggerice and John Henry. Jadine becomes the flip side of a stereotype portraying...