Hemming In The Great White Ways

[terrance fitzgerald]

In  "Blackness Matters", Morrison argues that the influence of 400 odd years of African-American presense on American Fiction, be it given a presense in said fiction in the form of characters, narrators, etc., or not, has been overlooked by literary critics. She explains why she thinks this is the case and she argus that a discovery of the African American influence on US Fiction is needed. In "Romancing the Shadow" she takes on Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym. Pym, as Dave Monroe has pointed out,  here, is one of the stories Pynchon alludes to in his first novel, V.. In any event, in the last essay in the book, "Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks",  Morrison goes after Hemingway. I guess Moby-Dick and Cockoo Nest were too kind and disturbing to address. She does mention Melville's Blackness (never mentions Hawthorne). 
   
  I find it kinda odd that Pynchon never really credits the Black authors he is so obviously indebted to. yeah, in GR he tells "every-one" to read Ishmael Reed and he talks about Jazz,  but in his prose he never gives credit to Black authors as he does White authors. Maybe it's anxiety and maybe it's influence? 
   
   
     

jd <wescac at gmail.com> wrote:
   I don't blame a white
writer for writing only white characters any more than I blame a black
writer for writing only black... Or a man for only writing men, women
only women... you can't deny what you are and its natural to think of
people in relation to yourself... now, I think Hemingway was
certainly a bit intentionally stereotypical of Jewish people there in
his first book, but generally I'd say that a white man only mentioning
white men, or a man only mentioning men, or a woman women, in their
respective books, is not some ingrained and intentional racism /
sexism... if anything, judging from what I've read of Morrison and
the interviews I've had shown to me in class... she's somewhat, uh,
tapped, and can find racism anywheres so long as it crosses her
conscious radar for period long enough... not to say it doesn't
happen but whenever Morrison talks it feels like I'm supposed to be
sorry that I'm white... all I'm sorry for is that what happened in
the past did, in fact, happen... I find that she generalizes about
white people quite a bit and I'm of the opinion that generalization
towards any race, gender, etc is part of the problem.

Hemingway may have been guilty of not being able to see past the times
to the humanity itself but I don't particularly find Pynchon guilty of
the same...


 		
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