I was terrified by Susan HILL’S The Woman in Black. My Boxing Day was frosty in every way! So when I bought The Mist in the mirror for a week in Anglesey by the sea, I did reconsider several times if another creepy tale from Susan Hill was the right choice for a holiday. But her Strange Meeting novel about Friendship and intimacy in the most dire circumstances, made me want more of her writing, more of her acute and tender insights into the human spirit.
But although I enjoyed the novel, I was neither terrified nor moved, AND her use of the very ‘neutral’ narrator exasperated me. I think you have to care to scare! Even if your care is disorderly!
Part Two tomorrow…have promised to watch NCIS.
Dr Janet Lewison
TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ – BEING IN LOVE AND IN TROUBLE.
Binding itself to the Afro-American literary concept of being in love and in trouble, Jazz retains a dialogical relationship with other Blabkwomen’s writing such as Zora Neale Hurston’s, ‘Their eyes were watching God’ and Alice Walker’s ‘In Love and Trouble’ itself. For, in such texts, male and female accounts of Black history are intricately examined through the use of semi-autobiographical narratives that I like to call dream-scapes. In these texts images of “Southerness” proliferate the idea that the other side of the social frontier (one that is more Afrocentric) is the real setting for an exploration of ‘origins’ as a deviation away from traditional Western ways of living/Being. For example, Jazz explores the influence of “Southerness” upon the CITY whose geography is one which suggests a metaphorical similitude to a more “materialistic”, even hedonistic view of a strong female presence in the text. The CITY becomes the place of the dream offering the reader a ‘surface’ sign of profundity, wealth and excess through which a bricolage of historical events are established. The same theme scan be found in ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Beloved’ and indeed ‘Paradise’.
Valerie Smith suggests that:
” In addition to their common subject, the majority of the stories by Blackwomen share a common structure. Most of the stories establish a community of insiders, disparate voices brought into unison, poised in a continuous present”.
In Jazz then, we see the figure of the mother as a trope of insurrection against psychical and cultural fragmentation – a rage against a love that brings trouble, and a stand against racial abuse and historical powers that silence Blackwomen’s history. Jazz revisits the historical spaces in which lost generations of women are to be found in an analysis of the mother/daughter and the mother/son, plot threatening at times to ..”lead the daughter {son} back into those secret chambers … becoming like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored’ (page 26). Dorcas, therefore, I see as a political “sign” – a political agitator through which all others must ‘pass through’ in order to re-trace their roots. Similarly, in passing through Jim Crow laws, Joe starts to …”shape a story for himself” (p154). And finally – there is “Wild” – groundless , she prefigures in the present the insidious and beguiling nature of the “Citified” American girl Dorcas – the greatest of characters whose omnipotence and omni-presence in the text (although already dead) makes this narrative sing and swing on two if not more linguistic, historical and spiritual levels.
TONI MORRISON’S DEAD CHARACTERS.
JAZZ – DORCAS.
BELOVED – BELOVED.
Dorcas’ death and subsequent absence within Jazz forces quite literally (as in Beloved), a dead group of women to “speak” of their histories as they connect the reader to a community of ‘narrative ordeals’. For instance, it is the traumatic exploration of ‘death’ (singular or communal), that involves what I will call a transformation of “silence” into language and action!. In both texts the idea of absence is evoked to create a presence that is vitally present to the idea of cultural and historical transformation of a group of people. Moving in and out of the past, present and the future Morrison’s ” dead characters” re-cover and re-discover their roots through the mediation of inner thoughts situated around a bad kind of nostalgia as well as utopian settings that evoke a paradise lost. Seductive, tactile and incantatory passages within Jazz draw out the lower ‘frequencies’ that I personally adore in Morrison’s work:
This is from Jazz and it speaks of Wild, but it also speaks of Beloved and Dorcas – those dead girl characters who just won’t lie down:
” I’d love to close myself in the PEACE left by the woman who lived there and scared everybody. UNSEEN because she knows better than to be seen, After all who WOULD see her, a PLAYFUL woman who lived in a rock? Who would, without fright? OR HER LOOKING EYES LOOKING BACK? I wouldn’t mind. Why should I? SHE HAS SEEN ME and is NOT AFRAID OF ME. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her. RELEASED IN SECRET. Now i know” (p221)