Not asking Toni Morrison about race. Morrison: a Catholic writer, a Rust Belt writer, a lower-middle-class-to-professional-class writer. Abortion, Roe vs. Wade. Liberal gothic and what’s wrong with The Handmaid’s Tale. Toni Morrison on Clarence Thomas: the cultures we share and don’t, that love us and hate us. Individualism vs. collectivism. The compassion of great writers. Beloved. Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and the postmodern historical novel. Feminism’s racial divide over domesticity and reproduction. Beloved as a novel about abortion. Beloved as a tragedy. Beloved as therapeutic text. Slavery’s anti-pastoral and Morrison’s political and apolitical neo-Romanticism. Morrison’s formalism and numerology: the novel incarnating black history and the female body. Sethe and Amy: Morrison rewriting Huckleberry Finn and Morrison’s political imagination. Morrison on nature. Morrison on masculinity and gender. Morrison on who belongs to the land and who the land belongs to. Morrison’s guilty conscience as a member of the professional class, the problem with collective racial consciousness, and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals. Beloved as psychological novel: a case history and a text of trauma. Freud, Lacan, modernism, psychiatry, TikTok traumatology. Baby Suggs’s sermon, loving the flesh, and Morrison’s Catholicism redux: kneel down and you will believe. Morrison’s quiet conservatism. “A woman who is a friend of your mind.”
Note: my essay on Beloved.
Ep. 16. Body Politic