Freedom is Slavery

[Terrance]

P and M should probably stick top writing great fiction. 
Politics is personal and personal politics is best left to 
journalists. 




According to Morrison, Jim can' t be freed at the end, because Huck's
freedom depends on Jim's continuing enslavement: "Neither Huck nor Twain
can tolerate, in
imaginative terms, Jim freed. That would blast the predilection from its
mooring [sic]" (56). Would it be too literal-minded to observe that
Huck's freedom has absolutely nothing to do with Jim's enslavement?
Jim in fact is free at the end, with no noticeable loss to Huck's
autonomy. Morrison's cynical reading of Huck's will to power over
Jim ignores Huck's empathetic "They're after us! ", with which he
rouses Jim to begin their flight from Jim's would-be captors.
The                   threat to Huck's freedom comes not from the
emancipation of slaves, but
from conformity to the ideology that enslaved them in the first place.
Morrison's claim is absolutely correct as an expression of identity
politics; the only problem is that it has nothing to do with the novel. 

Morrison grudgingly concedes that "[i]n [one] sense, the book may be
'great' because . . . it simulates and describes the parasitical nature
of
white freedom" (57), that is, it allows a critic to score the correct
political points of the day. Scare quotes around "great" further
minimize her concession. Any fiction writer who so fastidiously avoids
over-praising one of the comic masterpieces of American literature
had better be sure that she can offer something of equal worth as an
alternative. And a reader too sophisticated to fall into the "greatness"
trap will not be likely ever to abandon himself to the power of great
books. Morrison and the critics she imitates undoubtedly see
themselves as returning a moral, or at the least political, dimension to
literary criticism. But the ironic detachment signaled by this
bracketing
of "great" insulates the critic from a personal involvement with
literature, which is the precondition of an authentically moral voice. 

When literature becomes a mere springboard for a political agenda, all
texts look the same.

http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/decon/toni-morrison.html