More Love

Love is easily the most empty cliche, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion--because hatred is involved in it too--Toni Morrison

The Beatles (below) sing that "all you need is love," which attests to the power of the emotion, but also to its tendency toward cliche. Naming her novel, Love, is risky for Toni Morrison because of this tendency. However, the novel moves so quickly into the territories of hate, vengefulness, and lust that the title seems almost immediately ironic, or at least complex rather than trite. Morrison's quote above explicitly states that hate is a part of love, something she seems comfortable exploring in this novel. Hate, like love, is passionate, heated. The opposite of love, I think, is indifference, an absence of feeling toward a person. What is so slippery in this novel, though is how easily love slips into hate and how often many other emotions are confused with love.

Junior is a character that in many ways baffles me in this regard. I see no love in Junior. Lust, self-absorption, survival skills, and some self-hatred, but not love. Interestingly though, she embodies the duality of love and hate and its mixed nature in her sexual preferences. She likes to be hurt and to hurt her lover, to come close to death even to experience the thrill of life again. But, it is the tender licking of her foot lollipop by Romen that touches her finally, too late. She has spent the entire novel obsessed with a phantom man, and performing for "his" benefit, rather than seeking love with Romen. Her character is the saddest to me; everything is too late for Junior. She's been indifferent too long.

Here is a list of words I found myself circling in the novel as they repeated themselves:

heart
lust
shame
romance
wicked females
good men
pleasure
afraid
appetite and food
hate
childish yearnings/girlish
apple
snake
trees of various sorts
slut
desire
craving
body
blood
passion

I found the word "love" on p. 194; was this the first and only time it appeared? Even L is never given a name, but she says she is named after the subject of I Corinthians 13, which is Love. I thought maybe Morrison never used the word, but there it is at the very end of the novel. Why there? And then again on p. 199, in L's italicized section. She says,

If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mis of surrender and mutiny they can never live without.

And this mix she labels, "a child's first chosen love."