41 pages • 1-hour read
The Origin of Others
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Themes
The Role of Literature in Conveying Ideas About Race
The central theme of The Origin of Others is the importance of literature in conveying ideas about race and Othering. In each chapter, as Morrison looks at different aspects of the process of Othering, she provides literary examples and analysis that show destructive and constructive uses of literature. Morrison has a sense of the tremendous influence that artistic media can have in promoting ideas about social constructs and what it means to be human. She writes in Chapter 2 that “routine media presentations deploy images and language that narrow our view of what humans look like (or ought to look like) and what in fact we are like (37). While language can have its estranging effects, she also notes that it “can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us” (35).
In The Origin of Others, Morrison provides examples of both uses of language: to estrange people from each other or to bring them closer. Her analysis of the works of white authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Albert Camus demonstrates the use of language to convey ideas about Others that reinforce the distance created by social and political systems that enshrine difference. She notes that African and African American writers have put language to a different use by encouraging identification with the Other, particularly because they write from the perspective of the exiled Other (99-100). She discusses her own work, Paradise and Beloved, in Chapters 4 and 5 as prime examples of this constructive use of language, as well as Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King in Chapter 6.
Morrison ultimately argues not simply that literature has a part to play in dismantling oppressive systems but rather that it is uniquely positioned to do so. This is because it allows us to empathize with the Other in a way that could jeopardize our well-being in real life; for those who “belong,” sympathizing with those who don’t can mean the loss of in-group privilege. Reading can therefore be a “risky” activity, as Morrison explains: “Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The Stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination" (91). The risk, then, is perhaps twofold: that sympathizing with the Other might lead to (or actually demand) a loss of status; and that given the cost, we might choose not to self-examine after all.
Self-Definition Through Othering
The relational aspect of Othering plays a prominent role in Morrison’s analysis. At the end of Chapter 1, as she considers questions regarding race and Othering, she writes, “My initial view leans toward the social/psychological need for a ‘stranger,’ an Other in order to define the estranged self” (15-16). That is, the process of Othering serves the purpose of clarifying one’s own self-definition by inventing an out-group. For the in-group to have a sense of belonging and power, it must not only identify this out-group but clarify the distinction between those who belong and those who do not.
Morrison discusses how this process of identification and differentiation takes place. In Chapters 1 and 4, she points to scientific racism and its role in identifying the Other. The theme is also present in Chapter 2, when she discusses slave narratives and what they reveal about the process of Othering. She says that “the sensibility of the slave owners is gothic. It’s as though they are shouting, ‘I am not a beast! I am not a beast! I torture the helpless to prove I am not weak’” (30). These “I am not” statements suggest that the self is defined in opposition to the Other rather than being defined on its own positive terms.
The discussion of borders and mass movement in Chapter 5 also highlights this relational aspect and the dependence of a sense of self on the existence of the Other. The anxieties around belonging and self-definition—or what Morrison calls “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging” (95)—intensify in the face of the movement and integration of various peoples, languages, and cultures across geographical borders, challenging the concept of home. Imagining “in-distinguishability” and speculating about the “alteration of major languages and cultures” prompts the attempted fortification of borders through the process of Othering (98). Without an Other against which to define oneself, there is no sense of self or where that self belongs.
The Fragility and Porousness of Borders
The fragility and porousness of borders (particularly racial borders) is an enduring theme in Morrison’s analysis. In Chapter 1, she quotes from The Romance of Race, demonstrating the ability of European immigrants to become white at the turn of the 20th century (16). She again notes this ability in Chapter 3 with the hypothetical Italian or Russian immigrant repudiating her ethnic heritage to become white and enjoy the privileges of whiteness (48-49). Although she notes that this process of becoming white is typically denied to Africans and their descendants (49), history shows that there have been light-skinned African Americans who have passed for white, sometimes being altogether absorbed into white society. As with European immigrants, that absorption involves repudiating any links or characteristics that might suggest difference. The fact that people can become white demonstrates that race is a fluid category and porous border.
Morrison elaborates on this point in Chapter 2 with her examination of the construct of “race.” Bruce Baum’s The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race points out the flux and usage of “Caucasian race” and the “Aryan race” myth to conclude that “[r]ace, in short, is an effect of power” (25). Noting the fragility of racial construction and the confused concepts of what it means to be a certain race, Morrison explains that she wrote Paradise with the intention to signal “how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was” (66). She returns to the idea of the porousness of borders in Chapter 6 with her discussion of globalization and mass movement. Borders signify “porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners” (94), suggesting that anxieties around belonging are rooted in the subconscious knowledge that social constructs, and therefore the distribution of power, are alterable.
However, while the porousness of boundaries may seem (and in some sense be) threatening to those in power, Morrison implies that it is also what makes meaningful human connection possible. It is only when we abandon attempts to deny our own Other-ness (and thus to separate ourselves from other people) that true belonging is possible. This is especially clear in Morrison’s discussion of The Radiance of the King: “When he finally sees the king, who is a mere boy laden with gold, the ‘terrifying void that is within [him],’ the void that he has been protecting from disclosure, opens to receive the royal gaze” (110).
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