ACL 1001 |
Lecture 11 |
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.
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)
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:
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:
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.
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. 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?
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