A Tale for Children

An angel, or at least a man with wings, appears on Earth but not as a sign of anything in particular. He has little to offer. He receives a great deal of attention, at first. People flock, trying to discern reasons for his being there. With time, he is integrated into the town at large, as well as the house that takes him in, and he becomes a more or less neutral presence. In the end, he manages to feebly fly away. That's A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings in a nutshell, as far as I can tell.

The language of the story has a direct and rapid-fire kind of energy that I liked. A few of my favorite passages:

 "sea and sky were a single ashgray thing," (269) 

"[part of a list of disabled persons who came to see him:] "a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him," (271)

"they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive's future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant on earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe." (270)

He is not able or willing to fulfill any of those hopes. The most he does is perform a variety of "miracles," none of which are particularly helpful: he gives a blind man three new teeth but not sight, and he makes a paralytic almost win the lottery but doesn't give him the ability to walk. 

If the old man's strange appearance is a sign, that sign can't be a good one. He's first found lying face-down in the mud. He eats nothing but eggplant mush. He rants and sings sea chanteys to himself. The old man is portrayed in A Very Old Man as human, and humanness, in turn, is portrayed as destitution, both physical and spiritual destitution.

The narrator writes in a detached sort of way, as if disaffected. This may be due to a peculiarity in the way I read the story, but there seemed to be more to the narrator to me. Behind the detachment, he (the narrator just seems like a "he" to me) seems to be reacting to the story he tells. Perhaps it's the fast-paced style I mentioned earlier that lends this impression. The quickness of the language seems to betray a kind of breathlessness, which in turn betrays emotional involvement. And it's good, I suppose, to have this to turn to, a sympathetic narrator, in an otherwise sort of dire story--but one I had fun reading nonetheless. 

About Recitatif

For her short story Recitatif, Toni Morrison apparently intended for the reader to be in the dark about the racial identities of Twyla and Roberta. Without racial reference points to go to, the reader is supposed to engage with Twyla and Roberta at a deeper level, to study them in their complexity.

Toni Morrison

The story's characters are in the same boat as its readers; Twyla and Roberta, too, lack stable reference points in each other. They keep changing as they grow older, but they aren't involved in each other's lives for any extended period of time, so it's like they're meeting each other over and over again. They constantly surprise each other with their changes: Roberta is to Twyla friendly then dismissive then friendly again; once intimate, later they find themselves protesters behind opposite battle lines. It's surprising for people to change so radically, but one expects what one understands as the basic facts of the past to be consistent. Yet each time they recall Maggie, the deaf girl from their childhood in the shelter, Twyla is forced to alter her picture of her, as a new impression of her comes to the surface, displacing details from the old one. Was she black or white? Did Twyla participate in her subjugation or not? Neither her nor the reader come to a final verdict on these questions.  

Which made for a somewhat disorienting reading experience. In Recitatif, there isn't an emphasis on character development, which, I guess, is perhaps true for most short stories. But the characters don't develop, in the sense of changing gradually, evolutionarily. Rather, they jump around, and they oscillate. Without constant identities, Twyla and Roberta are hard to pigeonhole or stereotype; but for the same reason, they're hard to get a hold of at all.

It's an interesting experiment that Morrison created.