"the somebody in everybody"
a paean to Recitatif
[Image: Detail of “Portrait of a black woman, public art” by Wonderlane on Flickr, used under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license.]
Welcome, new subscribers (hey, I see there are quite a few of you!). By the time this post goes up, I’ll be on my way to read at the Doherty Library of the University of St. Thomas—Houston, a scary story for the season entitled “Omnes Habitantes in Hoc Habitaculo.” Angels, demons, & exorcisms, oh my. Will you be anywhere near Montrose at 1 p.m. Central? Please come around if you can.
One feature of contemplative realism is its insistence on what I want to call the anti-ideological vision of life. Not all anti-ideological art is necessarily contemplative-realist, but all contemplative realism is anti-ideological.
Thus my personal enchantment with Toni Morrison’s Recitatif, an anti-ideological work of art if ever there was one. Recitatif is (as far as we know) the only short story Morrison ever wrote, the only time her genius seems to have had need of the form. Even so it’s really more of a novella, with multiple acts rather than the short story’s usual single dramatic arc: and as the title suggests, it is scored into movements almost as a piece of music might be scored, the better to feature its polyphony of voices.
If we are of the mourning-the-library-of-Alexandria cast of mind we might be tempted to grieve its singularity in her oeuvre—why only one? But the wiser thing here, I believe, is to trust Morrison’s artistic wisdom. A prolific and dazzling novelist, she knew she only needed the short form once. She therefore knew best; we can simply be grateful for what she left us.
And there is much to celebrate, and there is much to unfold.
For readers not yet familiar, the story follows Roberta and Twlya, two girls who meet as eight-year-olds while temporarily living at an orphanage. From the story’s first sentence—“My mother danced all night, and Roberta’s was sick”—Morrison dares, and defies, the reader to guess which of these girls has white skin and which black: a fact that in the story’s setting, the upstate New York prior to widespread integration, might be supposed not to be quite so socially determinative as in the South of that same era but which becomes ever more determinative, more isolating, more divisive, the less it is discussable.
By means of the names the other children call the girls—“salt and pepper”—and the fact they are nevertheless always together, Morrison establishes that their race will have some relevance to the unfolding of events. Yet we are to be made to discern for ourselves exactly what that relevance is. We cannot reach for the easy explanation. Morrison’s art forbids it. And yet we must seek some explanation: Morrison’s art raises this “reality-hunger” on purpose and thwarts it on purpose, perhaps so that we will begin to hunger after some truth that is greater, deeper, higher.
Meanwhile the eventual loss of closeness between the two girls, who begin as friends but are fractured from each other first by circumstance and then by factors both chosen and not, has its source precisely in what cannot be said between them. And what cannot be said is given presence in the story by the character of Maggie, the woman of indeterminate race who cleans and cooks for the orphanage.
Maggie herself cannot speak. Whether her condition is the result of some violence she has endured or a limitation since birth, the girls do not know, and the reader is never told. The mystery is only deepened, not resolved, as the question of how the girls once treated Maggie, and why they did (or did not) do what they did, becomes a more and more urgent symbol for what voices are not being heard, why they are not being heard, and what stands between these voices and the reader’s ear.
If you’ve been with me here for a while, you know well my obsession with characters who, in Henry James’ phrase, “insist on mattering.” Morrison’s Maggie, without a voice of her own, silently insists on mattering. What we need to ask is how, and why.
No commentator on Recitatif can improve on Zadie Smith’s long essay introducing the 2022 stand-alone edition. In that essay, Smith unfolds the way Morrison reveals the Rorschach-blot dynamic of a previous era’s associations with small details that, depending on how they are received by the reader, may or may not be thought to signal racial group belonging. (One of the things Morrison seems to want to reveal here, Smith suggests, is the sheer absurdity of social conditioning that suggests such strict airtight compartmentalizations on the basis of such minor and superficial signals.) From here Smith takes us deep into the conversations she and her students have had about Twyla and Roberta, about how we might tell which character is which race, whether or how this influences various readings of the text, and what the deeper stakes of those readings may be.
And in the end Smith takes us to the kind of resolution that it pains me to rush but which I hope you will want to experience for yourself, so that I offer here not its distillation or summary exactly but rather one of its core points:
Othering whoever has othered us … is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.
“The recognition of somebody in everybody” is precisely what ideology forbids and clear vision promotes; the “demonization and deification”1 of persons on the basis of group belonging is a feature of ideological thinking, which if it steals the surface trappings of religious language does so in bad faith and as a violation of self-evident truth.
For the radical equal worth and dignity of every soul before God and the resulting instinct to defend the most vulnerable are foundationally spiritual and religious insights, rooted in the understanding of a non-competitive Trinitarian God and in a corresponding theological anthropology. To the degree a society has lost its grasp on faith and reason, to that same degree a society will also find human dignity sliding through its fingers.
This is true no matter how loudly that same society may say “Lord, Lord.” The socially acceptable utterance is not the thing worth having. The thing worth having is a state of heart, a state of soul.
So Smith in her essay sees through to the “heart of the ceremony” in Morrison’s story: the revelation that neither Roberta nor Twyla, for all their mother-wounded vulnerability, is the most vulnerable figure in their undeniably precarious childhood. That position belongs to Maggie, who for most of the passage of narrative time is more or less invisible even to Roberta and Twyla.
Smith rightly notes (though in other words, which I strongly hope you’ll read) that the moral force of Recitatif demands we honor and try to rescue the world’s Maggies even while we acknowledge that we ourselves are limited beings, working to heal wounds of our own, and incapable of solving every problem on earth even if we were to labor in concert toward solutions all our lives. In truth our very incapacity, to extend Morrison’s ideas in the speech Smith quotes, is to some extent a mercy. For the desire for “solutions” can sometimes mask a temptation toward extremisms and violences, which are then euphemized for our comfort or to make us feel we are doing right the whole time we do wrong.
So we must take care. We must not indulge in self-deception, whataboutism, or mutual cycles of blame. If we once begin to write off somebody’s human dignity for any reason—on account of our own inability or refusal to see what we cannot wholly ensure will be honored; out of fear of being judged for what we could not control; out of a sense that we have the one systematic “solution” which will forestall all future suffering—we will soon be willing to write off anybody’s human dignity, purely as a way of saving face for ourselves, to scapegoat and inflict and minimize suffering all while believing we are deflecting, preventing, or circumventing it.
Even while we are only wishing what is eminently, humanly reasonable to wish for—to do just what little good we can, and otherwise to be left alone—we can far too easily be lured, Smith warns, into “complicity, silence, prejudice, and the desire not to be made uncomfortable by the sufferings of others.”
In my own story, “Battleground States,” which is part homage to Recitatif, the person placed in the role of Maggie is not who you might expect. Yet her marginalization—and what seeing it will do to our understanding of what a human is and how and when a human therefore has dignity—is not to be ignored, either.
Amid the world’s polyphony of voices, Morrison insists that we ask, and I therefore take up the theme: Which of “the least of these” are denied the chance to speak or be heard at all? How? And why? What has happened to them before our very eyes, all the while we were blind to it? And how do we escape our boxed-and-labeled categories of thought, so as to see the multivalent reality afresh and speak of it from the heart?
This is a phrase from a 1995 speech of Morrison’s, which Smith quotes in her essay.