15 April 1999, 840 words
After struggling through 139 pages of Beloved by Toni Morrison, I have decided to give up. I have no idea what the book is about, what the characters are like or even what the story really is. Given the many praises which have been heaped on this novel, I can only conclude that I am not competent enough intellectually to understand it. I'll try again in a few years, when my brain is a little more developed.
The attempt wasn't a total waste, though, because I had a rather interesting insight when I realized I wasn't going to make it through the book. It occurred to me that everyone who reads Morrison can have only two motives for doing so: pleasure or ego. After all, only a reader with a sophisticated literary intellect and highly developed sensibilities would be able to understand and appreciate Morrison. And a reader who already has such attributes can get no moral benefit, and probably very few useful insights, from Morrison. Thus, they must be reading her for pleasure. If not, then they must be reading her for egotistical reasons - i.e. to let other people know that they are superior enough to read and appreciate a difficult writer like Morrison.
V.S. Naipaul once remarked that he was "the kind of writer people think other people are reading." That motive, I suspect, is responsible for three-quarters of the sales of literary novels. It is only the tiny minority who read highly literary novels for pleasure. And such persons would rarely admit that pleasure is their sole motive. After all, the most scathing criticism literary critics level at popular novels, such as those of Stephen King or Sidney Sheldon or Barbara Taylor Bradford, is that people read such books "merely" for pleasure. And nobody would ever admit that they read certain authors in order to be fashionable (i.e. elitist.) But that is why the books which receive the highest praise from literary critics are usually books which are quite incomprehensible.
The novelist and critic Arnold Bennett, writing in the earlier half of this century, bluntly explained the reason for this: "Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he enjoyed by plain persons....he cannot possibly be worth reading."
The best argument I know to show up the fallacy of this kind of thinking is the man generally considered the greatest writer of all: old Willie Shakespeare himself. The Bard's works are now also elitist, but in his time he was actually the most popular playwright of his day (and was accordingly criticized for his sloppy technique, or just ignored, by the contemporary critics). Even more interestingly, Shakespeare's plays were often politically risky: dramas such as Henry IV, Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet dealt with questions of leadership in a time when absolute monarchy, although getting shaky, was still the rule. (Had the Trinidad Theatre Workshop taken a page out of Shakespeare, instead of just staging his works, they might not now be looking for a home.) Charles Dickens's novels, which were serialized in the newspapers, were so popular that people used to rush the docks when a new installment arrived (resulting in several drownings when people fell off.) Early American novelists were criticized for writing "children's tales" - among their number are Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe.
These great writers are not exceptions to the rule. History shows that the works of art which survive the test of time are, more often than not, works which were quite popular in their day. That is why I think few of the Caribbean novels now praised so highly will be read a hundred years from now: not The Dragon Can't Dance, not A Castle in My Skin, and certainly not Palace of the Peacock. The problem with our novelists is that, perhaps because of intellectual insecurity, nearly all of them have written books which catered to the elitist standards of the metropole. They felt, perhaps correctly, that this was the only way to win critical acclaim. Only three of our Golden Age writers - Michael Anthony, Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul - were able to combine literary excellence with the nuts-and-bolts of good story-telling and realistic characterisation (and Naipaul was already losing his story-telling gift in fiction by The Mimic Men.) The result was that West Indian novels have remained the purview of a small intellectual elite who, for the most part, have little social and no political clout. Thus, despite what our academics believe (or say they believe) the ideas of our novelists have had little effect on the psyche, the nous if you will, of the West Indian people. There are only two ways that will change: if the average reader becomes sophisticated enough to understand writers like Toni Morrison; or if our future novelists follow the example of Shakespeare and write well for the people in pit.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh