I'm currently teaching Toni Morrison's Beloved. Every time I teach it, something else about the book fascinates me, fixes me, vexes me. This year, there have been two things, in particular: 1. the dialogue that moves towards a target, but doesn't ever really hit it (how human!); 2. the ways that time functions in the book. Yet, calling it by its name, limits the breadth of what it is able to accomplish in the book: to grasp the metaphysical and the scientific through art.
While re-reading Beloved, I also like to reread two books of collected essays by Morrison: What Moves at the Margin (2008) and The Source of Self-Regard . The following is from The Source of Self-Regard, called "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations." The lecture was delivered in 1996 and it is as compelling now as I'm sure it was then. She begins with the claim that "Time, it seems, has no future." She continues to name our obsession with the past and its limiting force on the future. The following excerpt is about a 1/3 of the way into the lecture.
The fifties, the current favorite, has acquired a gloss of voluntary orderliness, of ethnic harmony, although it was a decade of outrageous political and ethnic persecution. And here one realizes that the dexterity of political language is stunning, stunning and shameless. It enshrines the fifties as a model decade peopled by model patriots while at the same time abandoning the patriots who lived through them to reduced, inferior or expensive healthcare; to gutted pensions; to choosing suicide or homelessness.
What will we think during these longer healthier lives? How successful we were in convincing our children that it doesn't matter that their comfort was wrested and withheld from other children? How adept we were in getting the elderly to agree to indignity and poverty as their reward for good citizenship?
In the realm of cultural analyses not only is there no notion of an extended future, history itself is over. Modern versions of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West are erupting all over the land. Minus, however, his conviction that the modern world contained an unsurpassable "will to the Future." The "landslide" began in 1973 according to Eric Hobsbawn. And that post-sixties date is more or less the agreed upon marker for the beginning of the end. Killing the sixties, turning that decade into an aberration, an exotic malady ripe with excess, drugs and disobedience is designed to bury its central features-emancipation, generosity, acute political awareness and a sense of shared and mutually responsible society. We are being persuaded that all current problems are the fault of the sixties. Thus contemporary American culture is marketed as being in such disrepair it needs all our energy to maintain its feeble life support system.
Seen through the selectively sifted grains of past time, the future thins out, is dumbed down, limited to the duration of a thirty-year Treasury bond. So we turn inward, clutching at a primer book dream of family, strong, ideal, protective. Small but blessed by law, and shored up by nineteenth century "great expectations." We turn to sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, pseudo enemies, demons, false "causes" that deflect and soothe anxieties about gates through which barbarians saunter; anxieties about language falling into the mouths of others. About authority shifting into the hands of strangers. Civilization is neutral, then grinding to a pitiful, impotent halt. The loudest voices are urging those already living in dread of the future to speak of culture in military terms-as a cause for and expression of war. We are being asked to reduce the creativity and complexity of our ordinary lives to cultural slaughter; we are being bullied into understanding the vital exchange of passionately held views as a collapse of intelligence and civility; we are being asked to regard public education with hysteria and dismantle rather than protect it; we are being seduced into accepting truncated, short term, CEO versions of our wholly human future. Our everyday lives may be laced with tragedy, glazed with frustration and want, but they are also capable of fierce resistance to the dehumanization and trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media depend upon.
We are worried, for example, into catalepsy or mania by violence-our own and our neighbors' disposition toward it. Whether that worry is exacerbated by violent images designed to entertain, or by scapegoating analyses of its presence, or by the fatal smile of a telegenic preacher, or by weapons manufacturers disguised as occupants of innocent duck blinds or bucolic hunting lodges, we are nevertheless becoming as imprisoned as the felons who feed the booming prison industry by the proliferation of a perfect product: guns. I say perfect because from the point of view of the weapons industry the marketing is for protection, virility, but the product's real value, whether it is a single bullet, a thousand tons of dynamite or a fleet of missiles, is that it annihilates itself immediately and creates, thereby, the instant need for more. That it also annihilates life is actually a by-product.
What will we think during these longer more comfortable lives? How we allowed resignation and testosteronic rationales to purloin the future and sentence us to the dead end that endorsed, glamorized, legitimated, commodified violence leads to? How we took our cue to solving social inequities from computer games? winning points or votes for how many of the vulnerable and unlucky we eliminated? winning seats in government riding on the blood lust of capital punishment? winning funding and attention by re-vamping 1910 sociology to credit "innate" violence and so make imprisonment possible at birth? No wonder our imagination stumbles beyond 2030- when we may be regarded as monsters to the generations that follow us.
If scientific language is about a longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few families against the catastrophic others; if religious language is discredited as contempt for the non-religious; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if market language is merely an excuse for inciting greed; if the future of knowledge is simply "upgrade," where also might we look for hope in time's own future?
I am not interested here in signs of progress, an idea whose time has come and gone-gone with the blasted future of the monolithic Communist state; gone also with the fallen mask of capitalism as free, unlimited and progressive; gone with the deliberate pauperization of peoples that capitalism requires; gone also with the credibility of phallocentric "nationalisms." But gone already by the time Germany fired its first deathchamber. Already gone by the time South Africa legalized Apartheid and gunned down children in dust too thin to absorb their blood. Gone, gone in the histories of so many nations mapping their geography with lines drawn through their neighbors' mass graves; fertilizing their lawns and meadows with the nutrients of their citizens' skeletons; supporting their architecture on the spines of women and children. No, it isn't progress that interests me. I am interested in the future of time.
You can read the transcript of the full text here.
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