Home > The Source of Self-Regard(63)

The Source of Self-Regard(63)
Author: Toni Morrison

       Eternity, since it avoids the pain of dying again, and, in its rejection of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest appeal. And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life, and fitter life, remind us that the desire is for earthbound eternity, rather than eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is. Thus, paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to a heavenly one, has serious intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me or us forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.

   But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes. There are many reasons why the images of the horrors of hell were meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times, with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a loss of shame in contemporary life.

   One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the numbness toward the decidedly anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is understood, justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its awe-fullness. It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why are we not so frightened by its possibilities that we turn in panic toward good? Is afterlife of any sort too simple for our complex, sophisticated modern intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise, evil needs costumes, constantly refurbished and replenished? Literary? Hell has always lent itself to glamour, headlines, a tuxedo, cunning, a gruesome mask or a seductive one. Maybe it needs blood, slime, roaring simply to get our attention, to tickle us, draw from us our wit, our imagination, our energy, our heights of performance. After which paradise is simply its absence, an edgeless and therefore unavailing lack full of an already perceived, already recognizable landscape: great trees for shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious metals, jewelry, animal husbandry. Outside fighting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do. A nonexclusionary, unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis, is no paradise at all.

       Under these circumstances, then, the literary problem is harnessing contemporary language to reveal not only the intellectual complexity of paradise, but language that seizes the imagination not as an amicus brief to a naïve or psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent life itself. If I am to do justice to, bear witness to the deeply religious population of this project and render their profoundly held moral system affective in these alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired times—where religion is understood to run the gamut from scorned, unintelligible fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I have serious problems.

   Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance, seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the apt rhetorical flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing traditional language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and proselytize a population indifferent or unresponsive to the language that moved our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a constituency whose discourse has been shaped by the language of media and commerce and whose expectation of correlating images to accompany and clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears reasonable to accommodate altering circumstances with alternate modes of discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such efforts, I suspect the “modernization” of God’s language has been rewarding—otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.

       Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it sacrifices ambiguity, depth, and moral authority, but also because its techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.

   I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons, powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums, or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction. Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. Two examples of fiction that deliberately and successfully merge modern and biblical language are Leon Forrest’s novels and Reynolds Price’s short narratives.

   The questions I put to myself are: Is it possible to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language? Is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on?

   I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with nonmarket vocabulary (or its insistence on refueling itself with marketing vocabulary), its substitution of the terminology of popular psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal triumphalism, its morally opinionated dictatorial praxis, the unearned pleasure it takes in performability for its miracle rather than content; its low opinion of itself.

   How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved, limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke paradise in an age of theme parks?

       The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot.

   I have chosen in the meantime something else, some other strategy to concretize these informing, old-fashioned passions and conflicts. Not to use paeanistic, rapturous, large words, etc., but to reveal their consequences.

   Here I would like to do what I have always done when the questions becomes answerable only in the act of storytelling. Begin the story.

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