what's her type?
toni morrison
what's her type?
SEI? IEI?
Beloved seems almost entirely a work of a very strong introverted irrationality. Malevolent social forces become demons ghosts and specters that haunt the family.
Beloved is actually pretty Fe-oriented in its goal ...mainly a political one of reconnecting with and assimilating the traumatic history of a collective. The ethnic component is more important than the classic narrative of the "haunting".
but well, she's such a talented writer that an implicit political value doesn't undermine the purely aesthetic one.
bump
“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
“And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing.”
“Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."
“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.”
I attended one of her readings (with Q & A) once and she has an incredible presence. Spontaneously I would say EIE.
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin
I would guess SEE-Fi
That photo reminded me of one of dolphin's pictures by a similar smile, and the broad open look seems irrational over rational. I'm not too familiar with her works though, mostly going by VI.Originally Posted by Person
Her style is very much Beta NF. Too metaphoric (or generally figurative sometimes) for SEE. As cynical as it may sound for someone like her ... Beta values overall. Fe community orientation over Fi, Ni future-and-past perspective over Sensing. There is almost always some polarity between individual and community at play (beyond racial issues). It's most prominent in novels such as Home, Paradise, Sula, or The Bluest Eye.
Definitely Negativist (a passion for elaborate contrasts and paradox which structure many of her novels). Easily observable Dialectical-Algor. cognition. She approaches the heaviest taboos out there (rape, incest, murder and many others) and she has a generally tragically-tinged take on things. Absolutely not a Positivist type.
As I said, I found her pegged as E8 (which I can see ... 8w9 only).
Maybe that explains why she vibes much more Se in interviews/pics. If you read her books, it's Ni that stands out, not Se. I could never associate her style with someone like Bukowski (and they're both Sx types). TM is far more collective-oriented.
e.g. of FeNi plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_(novel)
Beginning and ending with a massacre—with a famous first sentence ("They shoot the white girl first. . . ")--the novel tells the story of the tension between the men of Ruby, Oklahoma, (an all-black town[2] founded in 1950) and a group of women who lived in a former convent seventeen miles away. After an opening chapter "Ruby", named after the town, the other chapters are named after some of the female characters, but they are not simply about the women. Each chapter includes flashbacks to crucial events from the town's history in addition to the backstory of the titular character. The women in the Convent are Connie (Consolata), Mavis, Gigi (Grace), Seneca, and Pallas (Divine). These women all receive chapters. The townswomen who receive chapters are Pat (Patricia), Lone, and Save-Marie. The focus on the women characters highlights the ways the novel portrays the gender differences between the patriarchal rigidity of the townsmen and the clandestine connections between the townswomen and the women at the Convent. The narration serves as an alternative voice to the actions in which the townsmen provide. Though the novel has chapters named after specific women, it focuses on the people in the town and different hardships they have faced. The story also shows a divide between the younger generation and the older, about change and the refusal to understand for the sake of the past.The novel is complex and layered, flashing back and forth between times and places. It paints a picture of the "Old Fathers," who had first established the town of Haven, and the "New Fathers," their children, who established Ruby in an effort to escape what they perceive as the ills of society. Seeking to isolate themselves in a kind of new garden of Eden, the novel uncovers the various ways that the new perfect society destroys itself. Seeing the Convent outside its borders as a threat to its existence, the townsmen of Ruby destroy it and what they do not understand.
Morrison has said in an interview on PBS that she started with race ("They shoot the white girl. . . ") and then erased it by never revealing who the white girl is.
Last edited by Amber; 04-21-2015 at 12:32 PM.
„All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health (…) we honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
(The Bluest Eye) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bluest_Eye
- the novel is about a young black girl who absorbs images of beauty constructed by white people and longs to have different looks. Besides she is raped by her father (a human wreck) and she goes insane. At the same time due to her defenselessness and weirdness she becomes a scapegoat for the members of her small community who project their flaws and frustrations on her instead of protecting her.
The theme of collective projection is very strong in Toni Morrison's writings, both essays and novels ...and ofc it reflects her attempt to shatter race as a socio-cultural construct. One of her essays is entitled Romancing the Shadow and can be found in the collection Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
No way that's SEE or SEI. Looks totally EIE-on-a-mission-to-change.
Last edited by Amber; 04-21-2015 at 12:26 PM.
An extremely obvious NF. EIE is the only type that makes sense for her.
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin
Ni-EIE
4w3-5w6-8w7
I see DA cog more than VS cog so maybe she's SEI or EIE instead of SEI or IEI.
Her works are often about dialectics, like blackness/lightness. There is a certain focus in her work about child rearing, and child raising as well, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, God Help the Child.
Honestly do people really see SEI writing about Frank Money, an American soldier during the Korean War who shoots a young girl crawling next to his feet to grab an orange from a pile of garbage? He doesn't shoot her in the head coz she was "the enemy", but out of a fit of anger and (self-)-hatred coz he felt aroused by the child's hunger and thought about a blow job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_%28Morrison_novel%29
... or writing about a strange black woman called Sula who disrupts her best friend's marriage when she sleeps with her husband and then is ostracized by her community coz she starts fucking around with other women's guys with no remorse. It was mere desire to experiment and a form of existential loneliness that could never be appeased by sex alone ...but she kept searching for some "twin figure".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sula_(novel)
Meanwhile, the families of the children Nel and Sula are contrasted. Nel is the product of a family that believes deeply in social conventions; hers is a stable home, though some might characterize it as rigid. Nel is uncertain of the conventional life her mother Helene wants for her; these doubts are hammered home when she meets Rochelle, her grandmother and a former prostitute, who is the only unconventional woman in her family line. Sula's family is very different: she lives with her grandmother Eva and her mother Hannah both of whom are seen by the town as eccentric and loose. Their house also serves as a home for three informally adopted boys and a steady stream of boarders.Despite their differences, Sula and Nel become fiercely attached to each other during adolescence. However, a traumatic accident changes everything. One day, Sula playfully swings a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, around by his hands. When she loses her grip, the boy falls into a nearby river and drowns. They never tell anyone about the accident even though they did not intend to harm the boy. The two girls begin to grow apart. One day Sula's mother's dress catches fire and she dies of the burns. Eva, her mother, sees her from the window and jumps out into the garden.
After high school, Nel chooses to marry and settles into the conventional role of wife and mother. Sula follows a wildly divergent path and lives a life of fierce independence and total disregard for social conventions. Shortly after Nel's wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom for a period of 10 years. She has many affairs, some, it is rumored, with white men. However, she finds people following the same boring routines elsewhere, so she returns to the Bottom and to Nel.
Upon her return, the town regards Sula as the very personification of evil for her blatant disregard of social conventions. Their hatred in part rests upon Sula's interracial relationships, but is crystallized when Sula has an affair with Nel's husband, Jude, who subsequently abandons Nel. Ironically, the community's labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives. Her presence in the community gives them the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. Nel breaks off her friendship with Sula. Just before Sula dies in 1940, they achieve a half-hearted reconciliation. With Sula's death, the harmony that had reigned in the town quickly dissolves.
(once again you see pure Negativism and Fe group focus)
For some reason such somewhat harsh and shock-value themes ring Se-valuing > Si ...and the overall darker and violent tone of TM's novels evokes Beta > Alpha (Fe in ego is all too obvious ... and in Alpha Fe means a maximization of lighter, nicer, softer, and more socially-pleasing emotionality or values).
Last edited by Amber; 04-23-2015 at 10:36 PM.
I didn't mean she has to be EIE coz she's a committed&uncompromising activist or that only NFs strive for social change - absolutely not. I was stressing the fact that she's an EIE "on-the-good-side" of the type spectrum who fights for very liberal&admirable values and is not out there "in the game" for personal power or to get lots of fans. It's well-known that EIEs can be very manipulative and even destructive, too ...depending on their goal. ****** was the same type as Toni Morrison imo. (and Malcolm X, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. etc.). ****** used binary oppositions and groupthink for we-know-what -- Toni Morrison struggles to dismantle that in everything she writes. But a keen awareness of such things and the ability to effectively operate with them is quite visible in the program&writings of both of them.
Last edited by Amber; 04-23-2015 at 10:28 PM.
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