The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

Abstract

ion from his material environment. The foods that baffle Margaret in this passage are the tropical fruits of the island and are thus aligned with the island’s flora and fauna closed out by Valerian’s greenhouse isolation. Eating is arguably the activity that puts us most intimately and elementally in touch with the concrete material world, as we take in and transmute into our own substance the fruits of nature. Eating is what Margaret cannot do. By the end of the breakfast, some ten pages later, she has managed to consume only one bite. In Tar Baby, the grotesque is thus associated most strongly with the abstraction of the capitalist characters. Their bizarre habits—Valerian’s self-incarceration in the greenhouse, Margaret’s inability to eat, and, I would add, Jadine’s insistence on wearing a fur coat in the heat of the tropics—enact maladjustment to the basic material conditions of life, expressing the depth of their alienation. From Colonial to Capitalist Exploitation Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein tells us, “is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital”; as a result of “its [own] internal logic,” a capitalist system “expand[s] its boundaries” (xiv). Morrison’s critique encompasses this expansionary drive, in particular the historical reach of capitalism into the Caribbean through the entwined trades of sugar and slavery; historical allusions to the European colonization of the islands cluster around the characters’ doings in the present, suggesting a continuity of exploitation from the colonial past to the capitalist present. Carruth’s astute essay on the geopolitics of food expresses this continuity in economic terms: Tar Baby, she says, mirrors the change “from a colonial to late capitalist economy—an economy in which an American-led paradigm of free trade carries on the imperial trade in cocoa, sugarcane, and other Caribbean commodities” (606). The candy millionaire Valerian represents the contemporary permutation of this trade in sugar and cocoa, as well as the expansionary reach of capital into the Caribbean. In a scene that exemplifies Morrison’s technique of superimposing shapes drawn from history onto the figures of her characters, Valerian and Son confront each other after their Christmas dinner dispute. Each finds support for his standpoint in the legendary horsemen who ride the island’s hills, ex-slaves who, as both the native islanders (8) and the omniscient narrator (152) tell us, swam ashore along with some horses when a slave ship foundered off the Isle des Chevaliers some three hundred years ago: Somewhere in the back of Valerian’s mind one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert but restful in the security of the Napoleonic Code. W y a t t