Literature and the Urban Experience - Toni Morrison 1980

thank you we come to short henry adams said for the cathedral that fills our ideal james baldwin looking at the same cathedral said i am terrified by the slippery bottomless well to be found in the crypt down which heretics were hurled to death and by the obscene inescapable gargoyles strutting out of the stone when james baldwin looked at shot he was doing more than reflecting on what he believed to be the schizophrenia of western civilization he was responding to what is universally believed to be the best and the most magnificent features of pre-industrial life from the singular position of a black rider his is an extraordinary observation for many reasons one of which is that it brings up the question of how a dispossessed people a disenfranchised people a people without orthodox power or orthodox channels of power views the cities it inhabits but does not have a claim to when black writers write whether they profess love of urban life as langston hughes often did or despise it as baldwin seems consistently to do whether they are ordered by the city or terrified of it the emotion cannot be compared to sandbergs or fitzgeralds or henry james simply because the sources are not the same collectively they have not contributed to the major decisions in founding or shaping the city minor decisions yes the specious powers sometimes of numbers yes the fraudulent repulsive power of the patient yes for black people are generally viewed as patients victims wards pathologies in urban settings not as participants and they could not share what even the poorest white factory worker a white welfare worker recipient could and that is feeling in some way that they belonged to the city consequently his literary view of the city and his comp concept of its opposite the village or the country is certainly extremely telling perhaps more so than the predictable and rather obvious responses of mainstream american writers to post industrial society dehumanization and the curtailing of individualism which they imagined existed in the city but not in the country it may be that the positive and negative aspects of urbanism can best be articulated by those who know it but have no vested political cultural philosophical philosophical interest in supporting or rejecting it as it presently exists and who seldom see themselves as disengaged from society in spite of their historical urban labor and enterprise black owned oyster houses in wall street black stone masons in manhattan iron workers of new orleans in spite of that the affection of black riders whenever it's displayed for the city seems to be for the village within it the neighborhoods and the population of those neighborhoods the city itself was a crypt down which heretics were hurled it was ellison's underground hideout rights nightmare violence but what repelled them was not eliot's wasteland nor was it the mechanization of life the horror of industrialization has always seemed to me mostly an elite preoccupation laborers seem to have an affinity for machines when they allowed dominion over them rather than in hostility toward them perhaps because they are the ones who are familiar with them and who work with them the anti-urbanism among black writers is not an attitudinal response to that which they perceive as ugly newly decayed nor is it nostalgia for something that was once grand it is not the suffocation of a contemporary paul bunyan robotized by the city similarly pro-urban views of city life among these early writers is not the result of the pride and excitement of having created something in them with one's own hands or solve some problem in them of social order his pro-urbanism his eagerness for acceptance in the city his anxiety to be individually free there seeking entrance in and associations with the very institutions his white brethren deride is clearly a statement against segregation rather than a respect for the intrinsic value of the institution itself the rewards the city can bestow on him are rewards for proving the stereotype to be wrong now that makes for some ambivalence and occasionally some contradiction langston hughes professed to love harlem and loved the glittering skyscrapers downtown the eye in i2 america is obviously we blacks and the thrust is integrationist but unlike thomas elliot's river his river is an urgent connection with and celebration of racial past not the scene of modern man's futility while individualism and escape from the community was frequently a major theme in black writing it should be regarded for what it was a devotion to self-assertion can be a devotion to discovering distinctive ways of expressing community values social purpose mutual regard or even affirming a collective experience now these community values which are represented can be connected to personal self-assertion and i call them village values are generally uppermost in the minds of black writers and it may be this feeling for village values as opposed to gopher prairie despair that causes what i believe to be an enormous amount of misadventure in white criticism of black writers such critics tend not to trust or respect a hero who prefers the village and its tribal values to heroic loneliness and alienation when a character defies a village law or shows contempt for its values it may be seen as a triumph to white writers a triumph of individual life personal fulfillment over the moorings and the anchors of small town life but while a black reader may view that entirely different as an outrage what is missing in city fiction and present in most of the village fiction is something that i call the ancestor the advising benevolent protective wise black ancestor is imagined more often as surviving in the village but not in the city the general hostility to the city is not the result of the disappearance of grandeur or the absence of freedom and idealization of the country is not a pastoral delight in things being right with god writer after writer after writer concedes explicitly or implicitly that the ancestor is the matrix of his yearnings contemporary black writers seem to view urban life as desirable explicitly only when the ancestor is there the worst thing that can happen in the city is when the ancestor becomes merely parent or an adult and is thereby seen as a betrayer one who has abandoned his traditional role of advisor with a strong connection to the past tony cade bambara has written two collections of short stories in a novel now she's a new yorker she's born and educated in that city has a rather intimate and fearless knowledge of it and although the tone of most of her stories is celebratory full of bravura joyfully survivalist the principal fear and grief of her characters is the betrayal of an adult who has abandoned not the role of providing for but the role of ancestor advisor and competent protector in virtually every one of the 16 stories in gorilla my love only two cannot fit that description and one of those two the survivor describes a city girl going to the country for help soccer and regeneration at the hands of an elderly aunt who lives up to the demands of an ancestor exactly the fiction of james allen mcpherson leon forest albert paul and marsha arfi so many of those writers becomes doubly fascinating when examined from this point of view and since the attitudes expressed toward the city and the village does not stem from reactions to post-industrialism horror of mechanization or the comfort of an urban intellectual society the fulfillment or even the promise of a better economic life i think it is possible to get a deeper and more profound perception of what cities have to offer writers and their impact of the city and village from the work of these black writers this love of ancestors should not be confused with some simple-minded can't about black families and broken families or history-lessness and so on dumas does not seek the history he describes it right does not miss a past he merely hates it and what beguiles me is the way in which the absence or presence of the ancestor determines the success of the protagonist for the ancestor is not only wise he or she values a racial connection racial memory over individual fulfillment fighting the ancestor frequently occurs but the devastation of the protagonist never occurs unless he ignores or annihilates the ancestor like baldwin these writers have seen the slippery bottomless well to be found in the cr in a city at its best its most beautiful and ideal but that is not what impales them and that is not what gashes their life it is the absence of the ancestor who cannot thrive easily in the dungeon of the city for the true ancestor is frequently a social or secret outlaw like ellison's grandfather on his deathbed saying i never told you but our life is a war and i have been a traitor all my born days a spy in the enemy's country they provide alternate wisdom they suggest we be cautious of chart they establish and maintain and sustain generations in a hostile land huckleberry finn lights out to the territory as escape and the fulfillment of a personal free life jim is hiding there but his wish is to go home to the village without that presence and recognition there is no life and it is for this reason i believe that among black riders the city has huge limits and the village has profound values thank you i was born

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Keywords: Rutgers, University, Newark, Dana, Library, John, Cotton, Toni Morrison, 1980

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Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020