techniques tracked:
-interlinked use of names, food, clothes, and dialog
This holiday season, I found myself reading Toni Morrison’s novel Tar Baby (1981), a work that may not be as beloved as a certain Beloved (1987), but that is every bit as worthy of study on narrative, literary, and cultural levels. And it’s a Christmas novel to boot.
Note: We should all worship at the altar of Toni Morrison.
Summary:
The novel opens with a prologue of a nameless man jumping ship into the sea but the strong current prevents him from making it to shore, so he ends up pulling himself onto another boat with no idea where it’s going. Then chapter 1 starts on the Isle de Chevaliers, a private Caribbean island owned by Valerian Street, the Candy King (he owns a candy company we learn he inherited as the only male heir born in his family). The acute tension is that it’s almost Christmas and Valerian’s (younger) wife Margaret expects their son Michael to show up for it, though he often says he’ll come and then doesn’t. The chronic tension is that Margaret, once a beauty queen, feels imprisoned on the stifling island estate and Valerian keeps putting off a return to the States (he spends all of his time in a greenhouse he built as “a place of controlled ever-flowering life to greet death in”), and that Michael has grown up to be a socialist with no desire to run the candy company he would have inherited as Valerian himself did, and probably most importantly plot-wise, that Michael is almost thirty and for some reason has not been to the island estate since he was fourteen.
At present, the other people on the estate besides Valerian and Margaret are Valerian’s butler Sydney and Sydney’s wife Ondine, the cook; this couple has served the Streets for decades now. (Another thread of chronic tension is that Ondine seems to believe she loves Michael more than Margaret does and is generally discontent with the whims of her white employers. ) Their niece, Jadine, is also there; Valerian is Jadine’s patron, having paid to put her through school, and Jadine has been a model in NYC and Paris. Not technically living on the estate but working for it are two people who are considered lower class than Sydney and Ondine, a gardener referred to as “Yardman” and the woman who does the wash whose name they think is “Mary.”
Valerian is skeptical that Michael will come this time (though Margaret has tried to entice him by also inviting his mentor and teacher from college), and one night he goes on to Jadine about Margaret’s hot-and-cold relationship with Michael and how when Michael was little Valerian used to frequently find him hiding under the bathroom sink. Shortly after that Valerian is antagonizing Margaret at the dinner table (we see Margaret is experiencing intermittent/encroaching dementia) and when she leaves the table and goes up to her room she comes back down screaming claiming there’s a black man hiding in her closet. Valerian thinks it isn’t true until Sydney brings the man down at gunpoint; Valerian then reacts by inviting the man to sit down to dinner, outraging Margaret and Sydney alike and also inviting the man to stay in a guest room. The next day, the man enters Jadine’s room (we learn he’s been hiding in and around the house for some time and had been coming into her room to watch her sleep), and when she’s disdainful toward him he grabs her and presses himself onto her, but lets her go when she asks him to. We learn that Yardman and Mary, who are actually named Gideon and Thérése, had seen evidence the man was taking food and water and left the window of the wash shed open for him to help him keep doing so. They help clean him up; he showers and shaves his unruly dreadlocks, and his “beauty” after this disrupts Margaret’s and Jadine’s plans to leave ahead of Christmas if Valerian doesn’t kick him out. Margaret insists on cooking the Christmas dinner for Michael’s coming, which upsets Ondine, who sees the kitchen as her territory. The man, who has adopted many aliases in the past eight years as he’s found intermittent work on ships and docks, considers his true name “Son,” and he apologizes to Jadine for his behavior in her bedroom, saying she was so disdainful to him he wanted to do something to make her dirty like he was due to his shame. They go down to the beach together, where he requests permission to touch her foot, and she lets him. He reveals that he’s from a very small black-only town in Florida named Eloe, and that he had to leave after he caught his wife in bed with another man (who turned out to be a teenager), and in a rage he drove his car through the house, and the bed where they were caught fire; Son pulled them both out but his wife Cheyenne died, prompting him to flee Eloe after he was charged with her murder. On their way back up to the estate, they run out of gas in a smelly swampy area, and Son has to go back down to the docks to get some, leaving Jadine to wait in the Jeep; it gets hot enough that she eventually gets out to walk around, and ends up sinking into a dark jelly-like substance around a tree that she manages to cling to (she keeps thinking it wants to “dance” with her) until she finds a root foothold and manages to extract herself before Son gets back who finds her covered in sticky “pitch.”
Valerian and Margaret receive word that Michael’s poet mentor can’t make it due to bad weather, but they have no word from Michael and aren’t able to reach him. Margaret starts cooking the Christmas dinner in the kitchen, but Ondine, much to Ondine’s chagrin, has to finish it. Since none of their anticipated guests have made it for Christmas dinner, Valerian invites everyone present to sit down for it, which makes their dinner party Valerian, Margaret, Sydney, Ondine, Jadine, and Son. When Son says it’s too bad that Gideon couldn’t make it, revealing to the family for the first time what Gideon’s and Thérése’s actual names are, Valerian reveals that he has fired them both for stealing some of the apples they managed to procure from the consulate in order for Margaret to use them in her conception of an “old-fashioned” Christmas dinner, even though apples are extremely hard to get out where they are. Son is extremely disturbed by the inequities this firing represents and calls Valerian out for it directly, prompting Valerian to order Son to leave, but Son refuses. Sydney and Ondine are also upset they weren’t told about this development, which incenses Valerian because it’s his house, but Ondine doesn’t back down, claiming that it’s Margaret’s fault for meddling in her (Ondine’s) kitchen and her (Ondine’s) help got fired for it; Ondine’s framing of her ownership this way further baffles Valerian. Ondine completely loses it at Margaret, claiming she’s no cook and no mother, and when Valerian tries to fire Ondine, she laughs at the idea of how he’s going to eat anything without her. At this, Margaret throws a glass, and Ondine jumps up and physically attacks her and they have to be forcibly separated by the men. Ondine then reveals that the real reason Margaret was so insistent on the “apple pie shit” for Michael is because she used to burn him with cigarettes and cut him when he was a baby. Jadine is so disturbed by the scene she insists that Son sleep in her bed with her that night, while also insisting they’re not going to have sex.
We cut to Son arriving in New York City and learn he got there using Gideon’s passport (Gideon having earlier revealed to Son that he never intended to return to the States, as it’s “a bad place to die in”) and has plans for Jadine to meet him there in a couple of days after she sees what Sydney and Ondine will do. She shows up as planned after it seems that Sydney and Ondine won’t be fired, and Son and Jadine enter a honeymoon period where they’re completely absorbed in each other. Back on the island, Valerian is stunned by Ondine’s revelation about what Margaret did to Michael and by his own ignorance of what was going on. He’s cold to Margaret, who tries to explain, in intervals (“she spooned it out to him”), that she does love Michael and couldn’t control her impulses back then. Valerian stops trying to control things and lets his greenhouse grow wild.
Jadine and Son leave NYC for Eloe, where Son reunites with his friends and father after eight years gone and learns that the one woman who cared about his wife’s death and had it out for him has since died. Jadine is completely out of place and finds Eloe stifling, even more so when Son conforms to his father’s wishes that he and Jadine not sleep under the same roof if they’re not married, and disturbed by one of Son’s friend’s revelations that, when it comes to women, Son “thinks with his dick.” (After this, she’s also severely disturbed by visions of “night women” in the room.) Son wants to stay in Eloe because one of his other friends that doesn’t live there anymore is coming to visit to see him, but Jadine insists she can’t take it anymore and that she’ll meet him back in NYC. Then Son doesn’t show up when he’s supposed to, and doesn’t call. When he does eventually return, he and Jadine fight, often physically, over ideological differences about taking Valerian’s money and her desire for him to educate himself and get a traditional job and leave the “medieval slave basket”; at one point in response he tries to tell her a story about a white farmer who makes a tar baby (“’He made it, you hear me? He made it!’”). After she gives him back his “original dime,” he leaves, and when he gets back she’s gone.
On leaving Son, Jadine returns to Isle de Chevaliers, where Ondine and Margaret have patched things up and returned to when they were “friends” at the outset of Margaret’s marriage to Valerian, when she did not yet understand that such a relationship between her and Ondine was considered improper. Valerian has deteriorated to the point that he can’t even feed himself, so Sydney has to, and when Valerian says he’s ready to return to Philadelphia, Sydney says no, everyone will stay on the island (this being his and Ondine’s preference), and Valerian is powerless to offer any resistance. Ondine tries to convince Jadine she has obligations, but Jadine picks up her sealskin fur coat given to her by a white man in Europe she considered marrying but now says she won’t. In the airport, about to leave for Paris, she’s recognized by a girl working there named Alma Estée (whose name Jadine doesn’t know) who knows Thérése. Son, thinking Jadine will come back, waits a week before he realizes she’s really left him and comes to the island to look for her, where Alma Estée tells him she saw Jadine about to leave for Paris with a white man (the latter part appearing to be untrue). Son insists that Gideon take him to L’Arbe de la Croix so he can try to get the address of where she was going, but Gideon refuses, and Therese offers to, which Son, unable to wait any longer, takes her up on even though she’s nearly blind. She ends up taking him by boat up to the back side of the estate still quite a distance from the house itself, and tells him he has a choice to make–he can go to the house or he can join the mythical horsemen who roam the hills and “get free of her” (meaning Jadine). Son leaves the boat and makes his way up the rocky shore and then runs. The End.
Analysis:
I said at first that the novel’s acute tension is the impending Christmas dinner and the question of Michael’s arrival for it, but the novel’s primary thread of acute tension, as demonstrated by what the text presents in its prologue, is really Son’s arrival on the estate (which is officially named L’Arbe de la Croix), or rather, the discovery of his presence there. This disrupts…everything. The narrative climax is the Christmas dinner itself, at which the reason Michael does not show and has not shown in so long is revealed when Ondine reveals Margaret’s abuse of him as a child. Ondine’s revelation of this is her own chronic tension come to a head–she is driven to vent her decades-long resentment of Margaret on the basis of two intertwined reasons/threads: Margaret invading Ondine’s kitchen to make a special Christmas dinner for Michael, and the firing of “her” help for a reason that is directly related to the making of this “old-fashioned” Christmas dinner–the apples, which Gideon and Thérése covet for their rarity. (This renders the apples probably the most significant plot device.) The concrete reversal demonstrating that the acute tension has irrevocably changed the state of the chronic tension is manifest in at least one way via Valerian’s sense of “control”–his attitude toward his greenhouse, which he initially saw as a controlled environment (which would make it a microcosm of the estate itself) and which at the end he lets grow wild, which we also see occurs because of his confrontation with his own “innocence,” a product of how the acute-climax reveal of what Margaret did to Michael causes him to have to re-interpret why Michael was always hiding under the sink as a child. Valerian let the true reason for Michael’s hiding–Margaret’s abuse–remain hidden to himself until Ondine forces him to confront it decades later, and that he considers this his “innocence” rather than his “ignorance” casts him into the baby-like role Michael literally occupied, possessor of an innocence and dependence that we see “outraged” Margaret and drove her to want to “pierce” it. Valerian pretty much has literally become a baby by the end when we Sydney have to spoon-feed him.
Valerian’s reckoning with his ignorant culpability in his own son’s harm is symbolic, in a way, of his culpability in the harm his exploitation has caused on a much larger level through his candy company, which his literal occupation of and ownership of this Caribbean island renders manifestly that much more grotesque. The use of names is a significant plot device in so many ways it’s hard to even track, and it’s no coincidence that the acute-tension-driving character who’s a nameless man in the jump-starting ship-jumping prologue considers his true name “Son” but that we learn his given, legal name is “William Green.” Green. Greenhouse. Whose disruption of the larger estate house ultimately manifests in Valerian’s ceding of control over the greenhouse, which translates to the highly satisfying resolution of Sydney gaining true control over Valerian himself. “‘Something is happening here,'” Valerian says upon confronting Sydney’s gentle insistence that they won’t be returning to Philadelphia, after Sydney spoon-feeds him–literally, and after Margaret has been figuratively spoon-feeding him the true historical narrative he was ignorant of. (Consuming Narratives, indeed.)
According to an academic article from 1987, Morrison “merges the Genesis story with the tar baby folk tale that gives the novel its name,” while “[t]he version of the Genesis story she invokes most sharply is Milton’s” (365), i.e., John Milton’s famous epic poem Paradise Lost. This article points out some interesting iterations of Valerian’s name:
Jade is, at least in Son’s view, the “tar baby” of Valerian’s creation, and Morrison slyly lets us know that the candy magnate has appropriate credentials to undertake such an act of creation: ‘Valerians,’ the candy named for him… ‘made from the syrup sludge left over from their main confection’ — are tar babies, too.
“Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Tar Baby,” by Lauren Lepow, Contemporary Literature 28.3, 1987 (367)
This article also notes that Valerian is named for a Roman emperor who was “eventually surrounded and captured by enemy horsemen and held prisoner for the rest of his life” (368). This amounts to a metaphorical description of Valerian’s arc as we see he’ll remain on the island essentially as Sydney’s prisoner, and also connects to the mythical horsemen referred to at various points roaming Isle de Chevaliers–the ones Thérése tells Son at the end he can choose to join rather than choosing Jadine–and we also see there’s a swamp-like area that’s a product of unnatural man-made manipulations of a river, which is where the tar-like substance is that envelops Jadine and further highlights her as a “tar baby.” In the novel’s foreword, Morrison describes her grandmother telling her the tar baby folktale (perhaps most popularly disseminated/cannibalized in the controversial/notorious 1946 Disney movie Song of the South) and her own curiosity about the tale’s narrative need for tar:
Once upon a time there was this farmer. He planted himself a garden….
Very funny, then scary, then funny again. Yet puzzling. At some level the tar baby story begged and offered understanding beyond “outlaw peasant outwits inventive master with wit and cunning.” It’s clear why the rabbit ate as much lettuce and cabbage as he could. It’s clear why the farmer had to stop him. But why a tar figure? And why (in the version I was told) is it dressed as a female? Did the farmer understand the rabbit so well he could count on its curiosity? But the rabbit isn’t curious at all; he passes by the tar baby, casually acknowledging its presence with “Good morning.” It is his being ignored and her being ill-mannered that annoy, then infuriate him. He threatens, then strikes her. Now he is stupid; if one of his paws sticks, why try another? The inventive farmer has succeeded but gets involved in a form of punishment, and having understood motivation so well earlier, now misunderstands completely. Now the stupid rabbit becomes the clever one, pretending that the punishment he fears most is being returned to his own neighborhood. He knows the farmer would reckon this return to the ’hood as supreme torture, worse than death, so into the briar patch he is unceremoniously, gleefully thrown. The figure of tar, having done its work, falls out of the action of the tale, yet remains not only as its strange, silent center, but also as the sticky mediator between master and peasant, plantation owner and slave. Constructed by the farmer to foil and entrap, it moves beyond trickery to art. The principal relationship is not limited to the rabbit and the farmer; it is also between the rabbit and the tar figure. She snares him; he knows it, yet compounds his entanglement while demanding to be freed. A love story, then. Difficult, unresponsive, but seducing woman and clever, anarchic male, each with definitions of independence and domesticity, of safety and danger that clash.”
Excerpt From: Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
A lot of critics have tried to correlate the folk tale to this novel’s narrative, with probably the most frequent reading being that Jadine is the titular tar baby, but even though Morrison does seem to be describing the “love story” between Jadine and Son in the above passage from her foreword, it’s not such an easy one-to-one correlation; we can already see how Valerian being rendered a baby by the end might make it possible to read him as a tar baby (especially if the candy named for him are also tar babies), though most tend to read him as the farmer who makes the tar baby–he “makes” Jadine through his patronage of her, educating her in the white western mode, which is what Son seems to be referring to when he tells his abbreviated version of the tale to Jadine with the climactic insistence “’He made him a tar baby. He made it, you hear me? He made it!’”
The use of food is prominent from the beginning as apples are established as a rarity since they are not native to the island and thus have to be shipped in from the States–but there’s a food that is native: pineapple. Early on at breakfast Margaret expresses her opinion of this fruit:
“She knows I hate fresh pineapple. The threads get in my teeth. I like canned. Is that so terrible?”
Excerpt From: Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
One academic article focuses specifically on “eating culture” in the novel:
The sheer quantity of Morrison’s inclusion of food and foodways in her text has been previously noted and examined. As Andrew Warnes points out in his book Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twentieth-Century African American Literature, “the ‘Tar Baby’ folktale” centers around “Brer Rabbit and Brer Eox’s fight for food” (124). Warnes contends that the novel echoes the African American’s struggle for food against the colonial master, demonstrating that black characters utilize new methods of cooking in order to survive in the colonial world.
“Three Meals: Eating Culture in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby” by Cecily E. Hill, The Midwest Quarterly 53(3), 2012 (287)
and
Examining her meal, Margaret observes “the pale wedges Sydney placed before her. Ondine had left the spiky skin on the underside deliberately—just to hurt and confuse her” (22-23). The pineapple is immediately offensive to Margaret—”pale” and “spiky,” the fruit is at once unattractive and violent. Though her reaction to the fruit is perhaps extreme, it nevertheless points to a prevailing issue in making food choices, that of the subjugation of land to master—and this particular island to a white master.
“Three Meals: Eating Culture in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby” by Cecily E. Hill, The Midwest Quarterly 53(3), 2012, (287)
The use of food is interlinked with the use of dialog, since the first interaction we see in the novel is a conversation that centers on food at the breakfast table. The dialog–which some might call “pitch perfect,” har har–saturates the narrative to such an extent–often without clear dialog tags–that for a long time in the novel’s first act, it was difficult for me to figure out who was who, especially with Jadine. This work that Morrison makes the reader do on this front is no accident, however, as Jadine’s status is the most intermediate between the older white couple and the older black couple, the ties that bind her to each different but essentially comparable. Yet John Irving complained about overreliance on dialog in his review of the novel when it came out, lauding Morrison’s “considerable gift for dialogue” but undercutting this compliment with “[l]ess tolerable, however, is her excessive use of dialogue: too much of the story is told through dialogue….” (Unclear why an American-Canadian novelist is using the British spelling of “dialogue” when writing about an American novel.) Irving also lodged a complaint about giving elements of the natural environment a point of view:
At times this effort to see the world from nature’s point of view seems precious, even cute (”Margaret was not dreaming nor was she quite asleep, although the moon looking at her face believed she was”), but the richness of the best of these passages (a description of the death of a river, for example) makes Miss Morrison’s excesses tolerable.
From here.
So glad this white man can “tolerate” Miss Morrison… This struck me as extremely condescending regarding a tactic that originates from modes of storytelling not in the imperialist Western tradition (that inherently holds that nature is something to be conquered)–the idea that nature could be sentient! That it might be “alive”! How cute!
In this sense, Irving is kind of like Margaret hating the native pineapple, betraying her own imperialist biases. Which might make the apple representative of the Western imperialist narrative tradition, and the pineapple representative of the “native” narrative traditions of conquered cultures. (Margaret’s comment about the pineapple reminds us that it contains “threads,” as do narratives…) What affronts Irving in Morrison’s craft–ie “excesses” in dialog and nature’s perspective–is akin to the spikes on the underside of the pineapple–like Ondine, Morrison left the spikes “deliberately” and by them the white reader finds himself “hurt and confuse[d],” with the nonwestern narrative tactics lodged (like a complaint) uncomfortably in his teeth…
A big part of Lauren Lepow’s analysis in her “Dualism and Edenic Myth” article is that Tar Baby rejects Dualism, critiquing this type of thinking as a mode of oppression–our way is the right way, so “other” ways are wrong. That type of thinking underlies Irving’s craft complaints, revealing that the different narrative modes symbolized by apple and pineapple must necessarily be pitted against each other…
The native pineapple and the function of the exotic apples implicitly invokes the tar motif again–“pine” being the verbal distinction between these two very different fruits, and “pitch” being inherently associated with the concept of pine (though there are no literal pine trees on this island, of course). Apples become ultimately more plot-relevant than pineapples, but the pineapples contrast the apples’ exotic nature and thus gain a certain plot (rather than just imperialist-thematic) importance.
I was reminded by the use of the pineapple and by the plot’s climax being a Christmas dinner of my favorite novel, The Corrections (2001); another similarity is multiple meals providing narrative structure–Margaret’s (imperialist) preference for canned pineapple come near the beginning during an extensive discussion about breakfast, and in the center of The Corrections is what the matriarch character Enid dubs “The Dinner of Revenge.” At this center, which is a flashback, an event occurs that affects the family’s trajectory when the patriarch Alfred gives insider information about his company to a neighbor that the neighbor uses to make a lucrative investment while Alfred refuses to do the same himself, despite Enid’s pushing him to. Enid gets wind of what Alfred has done when the neighbor calls to confirm the information during the Dinner of Revenge, interrupting a mini-argument they’re having about whether pineapple qualifies as a dessert for their meal:
“There’s the phone. Gary, you may answer it.”
Excerpt From: Jonathan Franzen. “The Corrections.” Apple Books.
“What’s for dessert?” Chipper said.
“I have some nice fresh pineapple.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Enid—”
“What?” She blinked innocently or faux-innocently.
“You can at least give him a cookie, or an Eskimo Pie, if he eats his dinner—”
“It’s such sweet pineapple. It melts in your mouth.”
“Dad, it’s Mr. Meisner.”
And after Alfred returns from the neighbor’s phone call:
“I guess you don’t want pineapple,” Enid said. “I guess you’re buying your own dessert.”
Excerpt From: Jonathan Franzen. “The Corrections.” Apple Books.
“Enid, drop it. I wish once in your life you would let something drop.”
Cradling the pineapple, she asked why Chuck had called.
The pineapple here functions as an objective correlative for what the characters are “really” fighting over; Enid will not let what Alfred has told their neighbor “drop” but will essentially nurse this grievance–“cradling the pineapple”–for the rest of their lives. A baby without the tar…
But Morrison’s use of the pineapple does double duty (at least) while Franzen’s only does single, as the aforementioned “Eating Culture” article attests to–not only does her pineapple conflict illuminate the emotional individual grievances of the characters, it connects that individual conflict to a global one:
…between 1880 and 1930 the United States colonized or invaded Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Nicaragua. Each was strategically valuable for its plantation crops…. Bananas, sugar, coffee, pineapples—each had become an international commodity that Americans, too, were willing to kill for. (124)
“Three Meals: Eating Culture in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby” by Cecily E. Hill, quoting Cynthia Enloe, Midwest Quarterly 53(3), 2012 (289) (bf mine)
It shouldn’t really be surprising that the white man’s novel invoking the pineapple is only doing so to prop up the white characters’ emotions without managing to reference any larger sense of history (though Franzen is hardly a stranger to using his fiction to critique globalization), while the black woman’s invocation of the pineapple is dripping with it (not so dissimilar from the references to bananas in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that I discussed here). Franzen does a lot more with food in The Corrections, considering that one of the main characters is a professional chef, and his sprawling narrative does invoke the imperialist implications of food (if not directly in the pineapple use) by linking the consumption of food to the consumption of consumer goods to the consumption of narratives–this last most prominently in a course that one of the main characters, a college professor, teaches called “Consuming Narratives”–the layered meanings of which are echoed in Hill’s article’s “Eating Culture” title.
I seem to be encountering the imperialist implications of pineapples a lot lately. My wife and I concluded a recent visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee, in the “Jungle Room” bar, featuring this decor that fetishizes certain commodities:
…it was here we watched footage from Elvis’s 1973 concert “Aloha from Hawaii,” the first concert to be transmitted worldwide via satellite (or the first “globalized” concert).
I understood the prominence of pineapples more after watching the movie Blue Hawaii (1961), in which Elvis plays a guy named Chad Gates who’s returned from the army to his family’s Hawaiian estate, which they’ve gotten because they run a pineapple business there, referred to as a “plant” in the industrial factory sense. Chad is expected to fall in line and enter the family business–officially the “Great Southern Hawaiian Fruit Company”–but Chad would rather surf and play music with his local friends, whom his over-the-top Southern belle mother is disdainful toward, to say the least (“‘You mean those native boys?'”). What struck me about the conflict driving this narrative is how it promotes individualism–Chad’s family wants him to work for the family business, to do what they want, but he wants to “make it” on his own. To this end, he gets his own job (if you consider getting his girlfriend’s boss to hire him getting his “own” job) as a tour guide, apparently being as intimately familiar with the Hawaiian islands as any native. On his first job, Chad takes a group of teenaged girls and their teacher out to a pineapple plantation, where he explains the fruit is best picked by hand rather than machine…and one of the girls complains that a pineapple “bites” her. (Gotta watch out for those spikes!) Viewers consuming this narrative of individualism are really consuming a narrative about consumption itself… to promote individual identity is to promote the expression of this individual identity by way of consumer products. This is capitalist rhetoric at work. Aka drinking the capitalist consuming narrative kool-aid…
Which brings us back to Morrison’s imperialist-capitalist critique through food. If the spikiness of the pineapples is emphasized during the novel’s opening breakfast conversation, the plot-pivotal apples are emphasized during the climactic dinner and during its lead-up, where we see Valerian’s disdain on “pitch-perfect” display in his dialog (“his masterful discourse”) directly connected to food, in a showcase of the tagless dialog exchanges and of how the food is connected to the plot, i.e. its climax, i.e. Christmas dinner:
“We can’t serve doughnuts at dinner, Valerian.”
“It’s not for dinner, it’s for afterward. With brandy and coffee.”
“This is going to be hard enough without ollieballen.”
“Then let’s forget the whole thing.”
“No. I said I’d do it and I’m going to. Michael will get a kick out of it.”
“So will Ondine.”
“Maybe. I’ve never seen her eat anything.”
“Nobody ever sees a cook eat anything. Let’s go over the menu again. Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans—what else?”
“The lemon whip and this ollieballen thing.”
“You can use the apples in it. It’s easier than pie and it’s traditional in our family—or it was. What about something to start? Soup or fish?”
“Valerian.”
“Something simple. You can handle it.”
“You’ll help?”
“I’ll be entertaining the guests. I can’t do both. And that’s not what you said. You said you’d do the whole dinner for everybody.”
“So how many is that? Six?”
“Seven. It’ll be fun. You’ll enjoy it. Don’t forget it was your suggestion.”
Excerpt From: Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
It’s interesting that the apples are going to be wrapped in bread, part of this ollieballen thing Valerian insists on (a power move), reinforced again when it’s officially revealed Thérése and Gideon have been fired for taking some of the apples:
“We got them back,” she said. “I made the ollieballen with them.”
Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
(As I was writing this I overheard my in-laws talking about making ollieballen, which never had I ever in my life heard of before reading Tar Baby, to be sure.)
To read this in terms of the Genesis story, which I’ve discussed before here as embodying both the narrative use of food and clothes, apples are often symbolic of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, more specifically the fruit that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat, which would make Thérése and Gideon symbolic of Eve and Adam, since they’re cast out for eating/taking the fruit as Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden. But also, this fruit confers knowledge, knowledge of the sort that Valerian discovers himself “innocent” of by the end, and in a larger imperialist context, knowledge that the “paradise” of luxury comforts can’t exist without an underclass of people very much not living in a paradise–more like its opposite–to maintain it. Hill analyzes “three meals” in Tar Baby, which are the opening breakfast with the pineapple, the climactic Christmas dinner, and in the middle, a meal Son has with Gideon and Thérése which they go out of their way to serve him–Son’s enjoyment of the status this confers him creates definite parallels between himself and Valerian.
Thérése consistently refers to Son as the “chocolate eater” because he was stealing chocolate to eat before his presence was discovered. Chocolate is a luxury item and also highlights the exploitation of such islands as the one Valerian has literally purchased for the cacao and sugar that fuels his candy business. This chocolate-related designation for Son (one of his many names) recalled another concept to me as well, a problematic tendency of white writers to describe characters of color by comparing their skin tone to food:
never use the words ‘chocolate’ or ‘coffee’ or any other food related word to describe someone’s skin color, especially someone of color. i wrote a whole paper about how referring to darker skin tones as specifically chocolate was about aggression and appropriation and has links to colonialism. think about it, what is the best way to show dominance? by eating someone – like in the animal kingdom. it’s a disgusting practice, so please watch yourself while writing biographies and replying to people, or even in your short stories/novels.
From here.
and
One Word: Slavery.
Get this. Cocoa. Coffee. They drove the slave trade. They still drive the slave trade. So comparing your Black character to these foodstuffs? You can see why it’s cause for offense. It’s especially harmful to compare those of the African Diaspora to chocolate and coffee, but for the reasons above, I think all People of Color deserve more than these comparisons, again and again.
From here.
(A humorous Buzzfeed piece that helps drive this point home is here.)
The excesses of consumer culture are on full display (often through foodstuffs) during the holiday season and I personally experienced many parallels (in addition to the aforementioned ollieballen). I discovered I was reading the part that took place on December 22 on December 22, and I ended up reading the Christmas dinner climax on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, some relatives showed up and shared a story they’d made up to entertain themselves in the car on the drive up, prefacing the story with a definition of “tree wells,” which is a real thing that exists that I’d never heard of since I’m not from the region where they’re prominent and where we were, the Pacific Northwest. The story was about a little boy of nameless provenance–it might have been Timmy, or Tommy, or Jimmy, our relative-narrators claimed, and by the end the boy was referred to as “Timmy-Jimmy-Tommy”–who sneaks off to ski down a black diamond slope and keeps hearing a mysterious sound behind him: crunch-crunch-crunch…jingle jingle. Eventually he falls into a tree well and is consumed by the snow, hearing the sound yet again in it with him and turning finally to see a pair of yellow eyes. Eventually his clothes and gear are found in the tree well, but nothing else. We couldn’t decide if the creature should be called the “treewell demon” or the “treewell dweller” or if there was a better name still… The next time I picked up Tar Baby after hearing this story, I was at the part where Jadine is sucked into the tar pit around the tree in gross tropical humid weather, and it struck me that this was a complete inverse of the description of the boy in the tree well–in one, a little white boy trapped in white snow, in the other, a young black woman trapped in black tar. The little white boy is blotted out by whiteness! (And lest you think the tree well itself is a myth, another skier just died in one on the only mountain I’ve ever skied on.)
Another academic article that explores the trend of fetishizing commodities in Tar Baby focuses a lot on a major item of clothing in the novel, a sealskin fur coat given to Jadine by a rich white European man she’s considering marrying, a coat Jadine blatantly eroticizes. A more detailed analysis of the significance of Jadine’s relationship to clothes in Julia Emberley’s 1999 article which connects two characterizing details from Jadine’s backstory:
…the character of Jadine Childs in Tar Baby, a Parisian fashion model with a degree in Art History from the Sorbonne. Jadine’s dream of large hats demystifies the artifice of fashion, its deception, its dissimulation, its irrationality; and yet, the artifice of fashion becomes the very possibility for demystifying subjective authenticity. The large hats on the bodies of large, beautiful white women such as Mae West signify a material abundance disguised as sexual extravagance that Jadine rejects because they make her feel ashamed. Juxtaposed to this dream is Jadine’s memory of a surreal encounter at a supermarket in Paris with an African woman who materializes, like a vision, in a yellow dress. The materiality of “the woman in yellow who had run her out of Paris” (Morrison 48) is one of black African authenticity: “the skin like tar against the canary yellow dress” (45). Fashion functions as a signifier of bourgeois white femininity, and the black skin of the African woman signifies an African authenticity–both subject Jadine to social regulation and the policing of identity and disguise. In her encounter with the African woman in the supermarket, racial identity also functions as a form of artifice, its meanings produced and projected onto the body. Jadine’s focus is on the yellow dress, thus making the constructedness of racial identity the issue and not a biologically-based essence. Morrison restores the dialectical potential in fashion to unmask the very process of masking while simultaneously deploying fashion’s ideological power to create women as middle-class objects-of-desire. (404-405)
Julia Emberley – “A Historical Transposition: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Fanon’s Post-Enlightenment Phantasms” – Modern Fiction Studies 45:2
That Jadine associates skin associated with “African authenticity” as “tar” signifies a projected artifice that Morrison seems to use to highlight the racial underpinnings of the titular term; if Jadine conceives of authentic African skin as tar-like and then tar sucks her into a pit at the base of a tree, then really it’s her shame bound up with her conceptions of racial authenticity that threaten to suck her under, while the night women conceive of this tar as binding rather than threatening/entrapping. (It’s also no coincidence that Jadine encounters this woman who challenges/shames her notions of African authenticity in the supermarket.) Jadine’s own skin is likened on two occasions to “honey,” which might well fall into the category of a commodified foodstuff:
She just lay there, stroking her raw silk thighs the color of natural honey. There was sealskin in her eyes and the ladies minding the pie table vanished like shadows under a noon gold sun.
Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
and
…Son saw it too: the mink-dark eyes staring greedily into blue ones, another hand on the inside of her raw silk knee the color of honey.
Toni Morrison. “Tar Baby.” Apple Books.
The first is juxtaposed with the sealskin, that prominent fetishized commodity (skin!), thus calling attention to this honey comparison as also commodifying in the slavery-related vein (“raw silk” not a food but with strong clothing commodification associations via the Silk Road) and intentionally so on Morrison’s part–we see frequently how Jadine participates in the commodification of herself, in these passages being commodified in terms of both food and clothes. The second comparison does basically the same thing from Son’s perspective using some of the exact same words, with his frequent invocation of Jadine’s “mink-dark eyes” strongly recalling the sealskin fur coat.
That Jadine associates skin color with “tar” and “honey” in different contexts is also interesting in light of a change made on the Disney Splash Mountain ride that is based on Song of the South (which uses the tar baby folktale):
The Disneyland attraction Splash Mountain (opened in 1989) is based on the film’s cartoon, not live-action, narrative of Brer Rabbit’s capture and eventual escape from Brer Fox. However, this time instead of the rabbit being caught by the tar baby as in the film, the rabbit is ensnared by a honey pot in the theme park attraction. Sperb presents this ensnarement swap as evidence that Disney is consciously aware of the film’s racist connotations, but at the same time also knows the property is too valuable to completely ignore in its vault.
review of Disney’s Most Notorious Film: race, convergence, and the hidden histories of Song of the South by Jason Sperb (2012), review by Wil McCarthy in Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television (p160) (bf mine)
But this “swap” would seem to evidence that Disney doesn’t read any problematic commodification implications into “honey”…
Being the most likely candidate for Morrison’s titular tar baby, it’s also no coincidence that Jadine’s last name is Childs…
The tar baby story and the myth of Eden are both stories of creation, the creation of human beings, or what passes for them, from such unpromising material as clay or tar.
“Paradise Lost and Found: Dualism and Edenic Myth in Tar Baby,” by Lauren Lepow, Contemporary Literature 28.3, 1987 (365)
What Morrison’s use of the tar baby folktale ultimately seems to highlight is the nature of racial blackness as a construction–a theme also dramatized in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, which I discussed here. This is further underscored by Morrison’s link between the image of the tar and how it “led me to African masks” …
Emberley reads Tar Baby through the lens of Frantz Fanon‘s Black Skin, White Masks (1952):
Whereas the enlightened mind makes subjective and historical knowledge of Self and Other for itself, it denies consciousness–memory, desire, dreams–to those it represents as women, colonial subjects, and people of color. In establishing the civilized mind, the uncivilized body is constructed–a body reduced, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms, to a chromatism (the color of skin) (“Questions” 60), and/or, in Fanon’s terms, a genitalism (that is, a biologically sexed-based essentialism [165]).
Julia Emberley – “A Historical Transposition: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and Fanon’s Post-Enlightenment Phantasms” – Modern Fiction Studies 45:2
That is, you can’t have the apple without its “spiky underside” counterpart–the pineapple. Race and gender are entangled here as they are in Morrison’s guiding question in the novel’s foreword–why is the entrapping figure tar, and why is it female? As Irving puts it:
”Tar Baby” is, of course, a black novel, a novel deeply perceptive of the black’s desire to create a mythology of his own to replace the stereotypes and myths the white man has constructed for him. It is also a book about a woman’s anger at – and her denial of – her need for an impossible man, and in this regard it is a woman’s novel too.
From here.
I would say Irving rightfully concludes that Morrison “has succeeded in writing about race and women symbolically”–but it’s also telling he has to categorize this as a “black novel” (has any novel had to be designated a “white novel” or a “man’s novel”?) “Morrison’s Black Fable” is the title of Irving’s review, which seems in keeping with Morrison describing the novel’s characters as “African masks” in the novel’s foreword, but while Irving connects the novel’s treatment of race to its treatment of femininity, he does so in a way that still hints these categories are distinct rather than overlapping. But it’s one of the natural-perspective sequences that Irving might find “precious” and that I found nothing short of stunning that shows how these categories overlap near the end, as Jadine is leaving for Paris with her fur coat getting its own seat next to her as if it were itself a person, and Morrison segues into an extended description of an ant queen positioned to be symbolic of Jadine:
Indeed, if, as Malin Walther Pereira suggests, the ant queen sequence can be read as Morrison’s revision of Sylvia Plath’s bee queen sequence in Ariel that treats the theme of female identity, the female self that emerges in Morrison’s rereading proves to be “a white self, constructed in part by the fear and repression of blackness” (Pereira 527).
“Sealskins and Original Dimes: Exploitation, Class, and Commodity Fetishism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” John Lutz, Critique, 54:56–69, 2013 (p66)
Lutz further notes:
Even New York provides no safe haven where the night women that haunt her dreams can be “reduced to shadows and confined to the brier patch where they belonged” (Morrison 288). For Jadine, rather than freedom, the brier patch signifies a place to discard the frightening racial identifications that call her to account. The brier patch represents a fearful wilderness of racial and sexual entanglements better left repressed, so she embraces a familiar world she can control.
“Sealskins and Original Dimes: Exploitation, Class, and Commodity Fetishism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,” John Lutz, Critique, 54:56–69, 2013 (p66)
These “night women” represent an element of Jadine’s African heritage; they are present, but unbeknownst to Jadine, when she “dances” with the tree in the tar pit, and she becomes aware of their presence in the suffocating room in Son’s suffocating hometown of Eloe, which can be read as a version of a briar/brier patch (that Morrison spells it “briar” in the foreword but “brier” in the text of the novel itself seems to underscore the variability of this particular “location”; fantasy writer N.K. Jemisin also played with the briar patch concept in her Broken Earth trilogy).
The novel concludes with both Jadine and Son in states of ambiguous transit, which, in a sense, means they’re in the same place even if they’re headed to different literal places…
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 