A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-11-11
ISBN: 0307264238
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: History Upended: Where America's head meets tail.
Summary: 4 Stars
Nascent to the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment, and integral to the emergence of a global market, bourgeoned American colonialism. Colonizing the Americas promised matchless lucre for the spent and rusted antiquities of Europe. "The warm gold of America's bays," and its vast supply of raw materials was like petrichor for Christendom's stale theocracies (12). Genocide, enthrallment, and ecological destruction in a land beyond feasibility were a trifle in the face of immense profits needed to fund sectarian wars at home. It was, however, this very character of the land with its untamed, untouched frontiers that supplied hope for de facto egalitarianism. The callous hegemony of absolute monarchy had rendered early modern Europe a macabre hold for its citizens. It was still the epoch of the King's divine right, of lawful lawlessness. Whether serf, zealot, or slave, ascertaining the discovery of a new world must have been like learning Zion was just across the sea. This transatlantic paradise was, however, more often a factory for disillusioning the credulous, than actuating an American dream. As the lives of these first emigrants demonstrate, "lawless law," the law of nature, can be an equally cruel magistrate (12).
America's promise of "easy profit," in the same breath as liberty has long since composed its central antinomy (12). From its establishment henceforth' from the Mayflower Compact, to the election of Barack Obama ' America has grappled with the reality that it is simultaneously a land of liberty and exploitation. Although it has allowed generations of oppressed peoples to aspire, America has consistently advantaged by the somnambulist's fiction. Settlers found themselves slaves to a wild, laissez-faire world "good for planters, better for merchants, best for brokers" (13). Early America capitalism, where "flesh is commodity," where "women who changed frocks ever day" "dressed their servants in sacking," and where an "empire" rested on the single arch of the aristocrat's eyebrow, acted qua Europe (23, 25, 27).
This "ad hoc territory" is the setting for Toni Morrison's latest novel (13). "A Mercy" continues Morrison's tradition of weaving intricate and often broken characters through a Faulkner-esque mindscape, but here ethos is shared with a sense of history. The careful construction of 17th century Virginia with dogmatic attention to detail establishes a zeitgeist of the everyday, more than a simple mis-en-scene. So now, twenty years after Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize, fifteen years after she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison has her most explicit coming-out as a cultural materialist. "A Mercy" yields an acute yet complex view of history, motivated by class conflict, and preoccupied with the sometimes tragic, often quotidian lives of common people.
The novel is split between to voices: the commodifying business speech of the "ratty orphan become landowner" Jacob Varrk, and the earthy fragmented pathos of the women (either chattel by law, or slaves by matrimony) surrounding him (13). Despite Jacob's centrality, he is invoked as narrator only once in the novel, predominately developed through the mouth's of others. In a manner now typical of Morrison's writing, the subjugated inherit the earth, and with symbolic contempt for the words of its Kings; "A Mercy" insists on shifting our focus from those in power, to those with none.
The slaves (Sorrow, Lina, and Florens), whose sentiments compose the bulk of the novel, are themselves ceaselessly historicizing. Beyond the sordid stories of their pasts, they habitually memorize a mundane present permeated with gloom. Memory is what they have, so it is by it that they live. Through the fragmented chattel's gaze, we piece together Jacob's financial success, resulting in increasingly obtuse and dehumanizing material fantasies. Where before he scoffed at the gentry's "unembarrassed" ability to turn "profit into useless baubles," he now attempts to build an inordinate and grandiose home (22). Tragedy, however, finishes the Varrk family before the house. Jacob's wife Rebekka loses all her children, the slaves are subjected to increasingly harsh conditions, and Jacob is stricken with fever. Rebekka is correspondingly devastated, and she ultimately succumbs to infirmity and madness. These hardships prove most difficult for the slaves, forced to float or drown with the fortunes of their masters. On a symbolic level, the narrative should make any successful businessman ill at ease.
While "A Mercy," therefore, acts like a leftist reframing of race, and gender history, it is more important to realize what Morrison is not saying. It is easy to come away from the novel thinking that the past does indeed seem considerably messy, that people today really mustn't use their fellow man, but it is fortunate so much has changed. After all, slavery's "dominion" is long gone (196). If "A Mercy" is instead meant to challenge the "dominion" of the market state, it does so without alternative, amounting to a silent recognition. Is this not precisely what Zizek calls "capitalism with a human face:" it's bad to take, but it's worse to loose, so let's try and do both nicely? No rape, or slavery, but maybe some low-stacks free-market profiteering? At this one can almost here Fukuyama in the background, pronouncing the end of history.
Morrison paints, especially in Varrk, the tragedies of early capitalism with idyll, renewing the dream in the very act of criticizing it: "Shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking. The lies of the Company about the easy profit awaiting all comers did not surprise or discourage him. In fact it was hardship adventure that attracted him" (12). We later see what becomes of Varrk's "adventure, " yet his corruption is principally given over to context. We are intended to look retrospectively, to see the effect poison slavery had on the ambitious, while simultaneously admiring the can-do spirit. It is then, no mistake that "A Mercy" appears on the eve of American financial collapse. The message is clear: back then the dream of the self-made man was too fraught with moral pitfalls, today the "wrong" still "wrest dominion," just look at Fannie May; but us Americans, we have the ability to invest with love for our fellow man, to be frontiersmen, rather than colonialist (196).
Morrison has once again delivered an exquisite piece of literature, worth the time, and pleasurable to boot. "A Mercy" has that wonderfully ability to give back what the reader puts in. It is nevertheless, disconcerting that a text overtly swiping at the superstition and elitism orbiting American history, finds it necessary to sacrifice these same free-market mythologies on the alter of "liberty."
Summary of A Mercy
A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize?winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in ?flesh,? he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, ?with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.? Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master?s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who?s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens? mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
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