PARTISAN
REVIEW
389
a little arbitrary as they freeze into their final tableaux, but three or
four of the stories are first-rate, especially "Of Cabbages and Kings"
and "All the Lonely People," where McPherson shows
his
facility at
choreographing his characters almost diagrammatically around the
uncertain figure at the center. Best of all is "Hue and Cry," a 45-page
tour de force and surely one of the best stories of the sixties. There
the main character is a woman, sensitive, intelligent, full of possi–
bility. She
is
dragged down in a terrible round robin of mistakes and
misfortunes in love, described in tones of sardonic understatement
and controlled irony or pathos that are virtually unique in black
writing.
Toni Morrison shares McPherson's emotional intelligence and
some of his irony as well, particularly when she writes of the black
middle class. The first third of her novel is shaky, but when she un–
dertakes, quite tangentially, a sketch of a certain type of Negro wo–
man, destructive, respectable, unfunky, self-hating - a "plain brown
girl" who "will build her nest stick by stick, make it her own in–
violable world" - the whole novel comes alive and stays that way.
Morrison values all the "funkiness" that this girl tries to extirpate,
using that word to signify not only physicality but feeling, "the dread–
ful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the
wide range of human emotions." Clearly black anger is not the pro–
vince of the black man alone; and like Cleaver, Morrison
is
as much
distressed by a sexual model as a racial one. But finally as a novelist
it is a human model that she satirizes or embraces, all in rich if not
loving detail.
At the other end of this spectrum are writers whose deepest
commitment is to ideology rather than to literature, even as they in-:–
sist they are really creating a new black aesthetic.
This
is
the position
of Larry Neal, a disciple of LeRoi Jones, in a 1968 manifesto called
"The Black Arts Movement." According to Neal, "the Western
aesthetic has run its course: it
is
impossible to create anything mean–
ingful within its decaying structure." Going one up on the Baldwin–
Wright controversy, he condemns all black literature that is not es–
sentially ethnic, that uses established forms and techniques, that does
not speak exclusively to black people, as " 'protest' literature ... an
appeal to white morality." Poetry must
be
the handmaiden of Black
