Critiquing critics: Not So Beloved by Rascal

It has been many years since I read Toni Morrison's Beloved, So I don't remember much of the details. I do remember my mother exclaiming when she saw my copy (which she herself had given me months before): what a sad story, what a terribly sad book. And I remember thinking that the book hadn't saddened me actually, even though it did in fact tell of horrible and terrible things.

But I could have fallen on my backside from surprise when I read Charles Taylor's review in Salon Magazine "The Designated Martyr - Jonathan Demme panders to Toni Morrison's guilt mongering in his brutal adaptation of Beloved" and I'm here to take exception. Taylor can trash Jonathan Demme if he wants, he can trash the movie if he wants, but when he starts in on Toni Morrison because she wrote a book about slavery which depicts,unsurprisingly, brutality and inhumanity, then I've got something to say: I didn't feel guilty when I read the book, I wonder why you do?

Taylor objects to Morrison's writing style, offering us a passage for inspection and suggesting it "might induce giggles if it appeared in a romance novel". This makes me wonder if he has ever read a romance novel, because I have. Here's the the passage in question:

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner ... Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad.

Now let's see "... enormous, greedy, more savage..." menopausal women. The stuff and style of romance novels? I don't think so.

As for his critique of the film adaptation, there is a premise I find highly questionable: Taylor accepts and appreciates the need for an opening scene in which innocent men are de-limbed and disembowelled, such as in the movie Saving Private Ryan "because the movie's subject is war". But in the movie Beloved, he complains about the shocking and violent opening scene "What does showing a helpless animal brutalized have to do with slavery?" I gasp at the blinkers this man is wearing. If he has a problem, let him not be taking it out on the messenger of bad news, don't write stuff like "But Morrison is nothing if not canny. Brandishing the fact of slavery and playing on America's collective shame, Morrison has cowed her would-be critics." That's just bitchy. It manages to imply that Morrison's painful investigation into her own cultural history was cleverly conceived and written to confound all overly-kind, politically-correct critics, so no one would pick on her book. Yeah right, and America is no longer a racist country. Our critic says it himself one sentence later: ":We know that horrors as bad or worse than any she describes actually happened." What he all but says is: SO DON'T LET'S EVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN!!! Making a candid, historically correct tale about slavery doesn't make Toni Morrison a guilt-mongerer, but if it makes Charles Taylor feel guilty, maybe that's all the more reason to be writing, talking, and making movies about this big chunk of American heritage. Maybe the subject deserves equal time as all the WWII movies - both excellent and schlocky - that Americans have made and watched.

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