ÿþ<html> <head> <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=unicode"> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered)"> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:.7in 1.0in .7in 1.0in;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> </head> <body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple> <div class=Section1> <p class=MsoNormal>Eric Miles Williamson</p> <p class=MsoNormal>3913 Martin Avenue</p> <p class=MsoNormal>McAllen, TX 78504</p> <p class=MsoNormal>(660) 909-3605</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'><a href="mailto:guniter@earthlink.net">guniter@earthlink.net</a></p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>&nbsp;</p> <p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:200%'>Toni Morrison and the School of American Meta-Realism</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>&nbsp;</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           In America literary fiction writers are categorized by whether or not they have a penis, what gender they prefer to have sex with, and whether or not their ancestors were historically oppressed, slaves, or trounced in wars.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           We have mafias of Latino authors, gay authors, African-American authors, lesbian authors, Mexican-American authors, Chinese American authors, Japanese American authors. American literary anthologies sort authors like varieties of beans on the supermarket shelves. Toni Morrison, though a Nobel laureate, gets sent to the African American Female literary short bus.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           As these groups fight for visibility and power, a category of authors has formed that permits a broader view of what I believe to be a major literary movement.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           The authors involved in this movement (often unaware of each other s work) write something that appears at first glance to be a form of Realism. It isn t, though, because they incorporate the formal and linguistic innovations of the Postmodernists, infusing their fiction with Postmodern techniques. They do not, however, embrace Postmodern aeathetics: unlike the Postmoderns, who tend toward cynical and self-congratulating onanistic spew, writers as various as Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Dagoberto Gilb, Larry Fondation, Barry Hannah, Paul Ruffin, Cormac McCarthy, William T. Vollmann, and Percival Everett, have been coalescing into what I name The School of American Meta-Realism.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           As the Postmoderns sputter and die off, taking their nihilism and abnegation of social responsibility with them, the Meta-Realists fill the American literary void. Males, females, writers from both rich and poor backgrounds, all ethnicities, they are university trained, studied not only in the classics but in French and Russian literary theory and Postmodern fiction. Like the Postmoderns, their Meta-Realism is self-consciously deliberate, based on linguistic presentation first and foremost. The words, their arrangements on the page, take precedence over plots and characterization.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           Note, for example, the quirky and jolting verbal juxtapositions we find in the fiction of Barry Hannah, the brilliant and strange, now lush, now stark poeticism of Paul Ruffin and Cormac McCarthy, the deliberately awkward and sometimes halting, sometimes lyrical lines of Dagoberto Gilb: these authors call attention to the words, to the units of fictional construction. Unlike the Realists of 100 years ago, whose prose styles were secondary to their didactic tales, American Meta-Realists put style at the forefront of their works.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           The American Meta-Realists tend to be didactic, to write about the destitute, the morose, the downtrodden and the wicked, apt subjects for preaching. Whereas the Realists of a hundred years ago strove for verisimilitude, today s Meta-Realists prefer allegory, attempting to create not individuals, but universal American <i>types</i>. Cormac McCarthy s <i>Blood Meridian</i> is difficult to read without considering it a Nietzschean allegory, Judge Holden starring as the American Übermensch. And who can read the works of Toni Morrison without seeing them as morality tales, her characters not individuals but symbolic straw men and women?</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           I m no fan of Toni Morrison and her lachrymose characters, her predictable subject matter (downtrodden Negroes), the obviousness of her hatred for white men (as if every one of us is a slave-owning rapist), the in-your-face <i>ad miseracordiam </i>whine and wimper that runs through all her oeuvre, but she is clearly an American Meta-Realist, as her latest novel, <i>A Mercy</i>, demonstrates.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           <i>A Mercy</i> is set in the late 1600s in America. There s plenty of sobbing and weeping, plenty of dead babies, plenty of white savagery. A Dutchman, Jacob Vaark, takes a Negro girl, Florens, as payment for a debt owed him. He also houses a native American girl, Lina, whose tribe has been wiped out by the pox. Another woman, Sorrow, is near idiotized as a result of surviving a shipwreck. These three women round out the oppressed and pathetic servant trio. Vaark dies as a result of white over-ambition, and his wife and the servants are left to fend for themselves. The book ends with their isolation from each other and the world.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           What s relevant about <i>A Mercy</i> is not the story, which is no great shakes, and not the characters, who aren t very interesting, but the <i>presentation</i>. <i>A Mercy </i>is exceedingly self-conscious. The characters are given individual, idiosyncratic voices that read more surreal than authentic: Florens, for instance, tells her semi-literate narrative through ungrammatical and semantically jumbled linguistic tropes that finally read like a strange poetry. The chapters are told from a variety of points of views, calling attention to themselves as constructs. One of the slave-women is allegorically named Sorrow, and, of course, she s sorrowful until the birth of her child, at which point she re-names herself Complete, an act of such maudlin sentimentality that most readers will find themselves seeking a bucket in which to vomit. Even the landscape of Maryland is rendered more symbolically than factually, reminiscent of Hawthorne s New England. According to Frank Norris definition, <i>A Mercy</i> wouldn t be a novel at all: it would be what he calls a  romance, along the lines of Melville and Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           Just because <i>A Mercy</i> is a work of Meta-Realism doesn t mean it s a good book, because it s not. When a stinking bum on the streets hassles me for money, I want to kick him in the teeth with my cowboy boot. But when I see someone quietly shivering in the cold, I want to give him my jacket and my pocket money and buy him a meal, and I ve done so. Morrison seems pathologically compelled to beg for our sympathy: I want to kick her characters in the teeth.</p> </div> </body> </html>