ACL 1001
Reading Contemporary Fiction
Semester 1 2010

Lecture 11
Tar Baby

Published in 1981. Set in xmas 1979 and the months following, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's fourth novel. It tells the story of a household of expatriate/holidaying Americans gathering to celebrate Christmas on a Caribbean island.

  • Valerian Street
  • Margaret Street
  • Sydney Childs
  • Ondine Childs
  • Jadine Childs
  • The absent Michael Street

They settle into familiar and possibly comfortable patterns of behaviour, each of them having sense of temporary certainty in their roles and relationships. While a sense of unease fills the novel's atmosphere, there is a paradoxical sense of stasis in the early section.

Valerian, Margaret, Sydney, Ondine and Jadine all fall into what seem to be for them typical behaviours. (perhaps stereotypical)

  • Valerian is a rich white guy, confident, full of high class manners and a certain kind of arrogance. Also your wacky rich white guy � music in the greenhouse.
  • Margaret is beautiful white trash made good. The Principal Beauty of Maine. Silly if not stupid; oppressed by her own ignorance and (as we discover) guilt.
  • Sydney; African-American (from Philadelphia) loyal, faithful, conservative butler/man-servant who is ever keen to efface his own presence in the household. P72
  • Ondine; Sydney's wife; sassy, grumpy, plump housekeeper never seen in the main room, only in the kitchen, her quarters or ordering around the �help'.
  • Jadine; beautiful black model; intelligent; mannered; charming; displays no sense of inferiority.
  • Michael; intelligent disaffected spoilt rich kid with leftist, intellectual and poetic pretensions

For the first 80 pages or so we get a developing sense of the history of and interactions between these people. But while we get character and setting; we get little action. Rather, we get a sense of inaction. The early stage of the book is like a soap opera in which events create small but inconsequential disturbances.For example, we get the idea that Michael will not come � despite the fact that Margaret appears convinced he will � because, we are told through the characters of Valerian a number of times (see p64-65) and Ondine and because there's a sense that everything, including failure, repeats in the Street household.This cloying atmosphere is in effect thickened by the opening chapter. In the opening scene an unidentified male character steals away from a ship and sneaks aboard a boat in which some other also-unnamed people are observed by the first character. There's a voyeurism and a hint of violence in this.His hunger and greedy devouring of what food he can find contribute. And the patience and calculation he demonstrates also seem disturbing.This creates a sense of menace which hangs over the first 80 or so pages until we meet this character, Son Green.Who is, himself, a kind of stereotype: dangerous, a potential rapist, physical, uneducated, brutal, dirty, primal.

The atmosphere is also developed by a number of other effects:

  • The motif of dreams and the use of reverie as an important device.
  • Effects which some commentators have called magical realism (the maiden aunts and their hair which recall Margaret's father's fears about her conception; the water-lady's knuckles that brush Son's cheek before he falls asleep) � but which I think are more accurately described as manifestations of myth, imagination and symbolism

Son's arrival creates immediate complication.The soap opera mode changes almost immediately into one in which there is an expectation of change and development. There has been a transgression of the house (and the story) which necessitates reaction and development.

Son has an immediate impact:

  • On Valerian, who responds in a way that seems calculated to upset everyone else.
  • Sydney becomes aggressive, judgmental and angry � losing his control somewhat and threatening violence
  • Ondine expresses insecurity p101. She later reveals the story about Margaret's treatment of Michael.
  • Margaret's hysteria intesifies. Her muffled racism is amplified.
  • Jadine becomes a more emphatic character. Her own racism too is developed. She calls Son an Ape; Earlier she has been guilty of denigrating black culture (p72) and wishing that sometimes she could be non-Black (p45)

It can be argued that Son causes each character to reveal his or her deeper levels and this produces the conflict that was not going to happen while the characters interacted on the practiced, superficial and polite levels prior to his emergence.To take this a step further, Son also challenges the reading like I made about the sense of foreboding being produced by the first chapter. Son rationalises his behaviour on p92-93 and 133-.

But we also need to heed the warning from page 3.

  • Morrison has constructed a story around the interaction of stereotypes in order to undermine them. Unlike the process whereby a writer might employ stereotypes to generate narrative quickly

The first part of the book is the setting up of the stereotypes and the interaction between them; what follows is the deconstructive effect of introducing one more stereotype bound not to fit.Indeed, without the introduction of Son, we have no novel. While the early sections are interesting and thought provoking they are never going to produce the necessary movement (without Morrison shifting genre) for a novel to result.One narrative possibility would have been for Michael to turn up. This would have produced a deal of narrative tension. But it also would have involved Morrison writing about white characters more than she feels able or willing. (See 118 in reader) She needed a character like Son if she was going to explore the issue of racism from within black relationships.

Some of you might be wondering why I think it was necessary for Son to be injected into the story. Why couldn't the novel have just continued the way it was going.I'll refer you to a text worth reading, Aristotle's PoeticsThe Poetics was Aristotle's instruction manual for how to write and identity tragic, as opposed to epic, drama. Tragedy was taken to be the highest form of writing and Aristotle claimed that for a drama to be truly tragic it needs to involve one main action and all other actions need to be intertwined around and supportive of that main action. Until Son arrived, Tar Baby was a novel in search of that unifying action: the romance, relationship and separation between Jadine and Son.

Is the love affair forced by Morrison ?

As I said last week, Tar Baby is organised around the figure of the tar baby: fable.

You've all had a chance to read the novel. ???????

It seems to me that there are at least two obvious possibilities: Son and Jadine. Then we must ask Who is Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit?