Main The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison
The Cambridge Introduction to Toni MorrisonTessa Roynon
Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media, and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage, to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison's other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics, and unpublished pieces for performance. Chapters also highlight the significance of Morrison's non-fiction, including her groundbreaking work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark, as well as her many essays, speeches, and interviews. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon's insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work.
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The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media, and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison’s other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics, and unpublished pieces for performance. Chapters also highlight the significance of Morrison’s nonfiction, including her groundbreaking work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark, as well as her many essays, speeches, and interviews. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon’s insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work. Tessa Roynon teaches American literature at the University of Oxford. Author of Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture (2013) and co-editor of African Athena: New Agendas (2011), she has published articles on Morrison widely, including in the Journal of American Studies and African American Review. The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison Tessa Roynon cam brid g e u n ive rsi t y pre s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521177221 © Tessa Roynon 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Roynon, Tessa. The Cambridge introduction to Toni Morrison / Tessa Roynon. p. cm. – (Cambridge introductions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-00391-0 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-17722-1 (pbk.) 1. Morrison, Toni – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Title: Toni Morrison. PS3563.O8749Z8448 2012 813′.54–dc23 2012029774 ISBN 978-1-107-00391-0 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-17722-1 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. For my parents, Gavin and Patsy Roynon, with grateful love Contents Preface List of Abbreviations page ix xi Chapter 1 Life 1 1931–1955 1955–1977 1977–1993 Since 1993 2 4 7 9 Chapter 2 Works 12 Introduction to the Fiction The Bluest Eye Sula Song of Solomon Tar Baby Beloved Jazz Paradise Love A Mercy Other Creative Work Nonfiction 12 16 22 28 37 45 55 64 73 79 86 91 Chapter 3 Contexts 99 Morrison and African-American History and Tradition Morrison and Dominant American Culture 99 104 vii viii Contents Morrison and African Cultures and Traditions Morrison, Transnational Perspectives, Modernism, and Postmodernism 107 Chapter 4 Reception 114 The Critical Field The Status and Reputation of “Toni Morrison” 114 125 Notes Guide to Further Reading Index 129 133 139 111 Preface In July 2008 I went to Charleston, South Carolina, for the conference of the Toni Morrison Society. The driver of my taxi from the airport erupted in enthusiasm when she heard where I was going. When she found out the program was to include Morrison reading from her not-yet-published novel A Mercy, she told me she would find a way to be in that theater herself. It is to state the obvious to say that not every Nobel Prize–winning author of complex, difficult novels, not every university professor who has produced critical work of broad and enduring intellectual significance, is held in this kind of esteem. There is something different about Toni Morrison. Author of ten novels to date, Morrison has been translated into twenty-six languages. She has been a Newsweek cover; she is an institution on “Oprah’s Book Club”; and she has honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford and the Sorbonne. Her unique, challenging, and passionately political depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, discussed by reading groups and debated in all media, and published on by scholars at an astounding rate. So much material and so much hype mean that to approach the world of Morrison for the first time is a little overwhelming. The aim of this book is to provide one way into and one path through that world. You will find here an overview of her life story, which emphasizes the experiences that have shaped her intellectually and politically. You will find detailed introductions to the first nine novels (Home, published in May 2012, postdates the submission of this manuscript), as well as consideration of her other creative work and nonfiction. There follows a discussion of the main contexts within which Morrison’s oeuvre operates: African-American history and tradition, dominant American culture, African traditions, and transnational culture. The fourth and final chapter addresses the reception of Morrison’s work: an overview of the critical field is followed by a brief discussion of her evolving status and reputation as a cultural icon. A Guide to Further Reading is at the end. It is a great privilege to write this book, but it is also a responsibility. Morrison is a writer of such sophistication and moral seriousness that to distill ix x Preface the richness of her work into an introductory overview is no small challenge. The scholars, teachers, students, friends, and family who have contributed to my journey this far are too numerous to name individually, but I am indebted to all of them. To those of you just setting out on a study of this demanding but rewarding author, meanwhile, my advice repeats the words with which Florens begins the story of her journey in A Mercy: “Don’t be afraid.” Abbreviations Quotations will be cited in parentheses in the text by page number. AM B BB BE BoN BTB CL DC GiA H J L NL P PiD A Mercy (2008) New York: Vintage, 2009. Beloved (1987) New York: Vintage, 2005. The Black Book. Ed. Middleton Harris et al. (1974). 35th Anniversary Edition. New York: Random House, 2009. The Bluest Eye (1970) New York: Vintage, 1999. Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. With Claudia Brodsky Lacour. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word. New York: Harper, 2009. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction.” Literature and the American Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jayne and Ann Chalmers Watts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981. 35–44. Toni Morrison: Conversations. Ed. Carolyn Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. “Ghosts in the Attic.” Hilton Als. New Yorker 27 Oct. 2003: 62–75. “Home.” The House That Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain. Ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon, 1997, 3–12. Jazz (1992) New York: Vintage, 2005. Love (2003) New York: Vintage, 2005. Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1993. New York: Knopf, 1994. Paradise (1998) New York: Vintage, 1999. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1992; London: Picador, 1993. xi xii R RJEP S SoS TB TG UTU WMM List of Abbreviations “Recitatif.” Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women. Ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka. New York: Morrow, 1983. 243–66. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Sula (1973) New York: Vintage, 2005. Song of Solomon (1977) New York: Vintage, 2005. Tar Baby (1981) New York: Vintage, 2004. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1–34. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Ed. Carolyn Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Chapter 1 Life Speaking after the Cincinnati premiere of the opera Margaret Garner in 2005, Morrison recounted being told that she had won the Nobel Prize. A colleague from Princeton had called her early in the morning with the news, which was broadcast on television before Morrison had even been told. That afternoon, the chair of the selection committee called her from Stockholm to confirm the award. “Could you put that in writing?” Morrison asked the judge, and it was not until the decision came through on the fax machine that she really believed it was true. “I mean, you know,” she told her Cincinnati audience, “I’m just a girl from Lorain.” So much you need to know about Toni Morrison is contained within that anecdote, not least her humorous-and-yet-dignified mode of self-presentation. To think of her as “just a girl from Lorain” is of course absurd – she could never be “just” anything – and yet her birthplace, which then became the setting for The Bluest Eye, is an unquantifiable part of who she is. And it is one of the paradoxes of her life story that, having risen to a position of huge success and wealth from humble origins and through gifts cultivated by immense hard work and sacrifice, her life story embodies the archetypal “American Dream” that her own novels subject to such skeptical scrutiny. There is to date no full-length authorized biography of Morrison to direct you to, no formal autobiography, and no published volumes of letters or diaries. There are, however, many wonderful interviews in which the author talks thoughtfully and in striking detail about her life and its relationship to her work. There are also the recent forewords to the Vintage editions of the novels, each of which gives a tantalizing glimpse of a different period in her life, and of its relationship to the novel being prefaced. Put together they do constitute life story of sorts. There already exist, as well, several biographical essays and chronologies of Morrison’s life and career; all of these have informed the account that I give here.1 The following sketch of Toni Morrison’s life is divided into four sections. The first is an account of her childhood and formal education, concluding with the completion of her master’s degree at Cornell University in 1955. The second examines her two decades of teaching, editing, writing, and mothering up to 1 2 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison the landmark success that greeted the publication of Song of Solomon in 1977. The third covers the period of consolidating literary and critical achievements, including the publication of Beloved in 1987 and Jazz and Playing in the Dark in 1992. These are her early years in an endowed chair at Princeton University, culminating in the winning of the Nobel Prize in 1993. The final section considers post-Nobel Toni Morrison, taking in the publication of Paradise (1998), Love (2003), and A Mercy (2008). While my account goes only as far as 2011, the year in which she turned eighty, it also looks forward to the publication of her tenth novel, Home, in May 2012. 1931–1955 Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, when Morrison was born to parents who had both migrated from the South as children, was a small, typical Rust Belt town. The author has often joked about being “a child of the Depression,” has talked about having to move at least six times in search of cheaper rent as a child, and has described her family as “very poor.” Her father, George Wofford, was from Georgia, and during Morrison’s childhood he held down several jobs consecutively, including working as a welder at the nearby U.S. Steel plant, in order to support his four children. Morrison’s mother, Ella Ramah Wofford (née Willis), had moved to Lorain with her own parents; they had come from Alabama via Kentucky. Morrison’s maternal grandparents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, were hugely influential figures in her life. The author has frequently referred, as well, to the fact that John’s mother (Morrison’s great-grandmother) was Native American. It is surely significant that minor characters in her fiction often share the first names of real relatives: in Beloved, for example, one of Baby Suggs’s lost children is called Ardelia. In Song of Solomon, meanwhile, Milkman discovers himself to be of mixed Native and African-American heritage. The novelist’s weaving of the details of her life into her art indicates her deeply held conviction that an individual’s experiences and the nation’s history, or the personal and the political, are inextricably bound. Morrison’s name at her birth was Chloe Ardelia Wofford. While “Morrison” became her surname at her marriage in 1958, there is no consensus about how she became known as “Toni.” According to the New Yorker journalist Hilton Als, when aged twelve she converted to Roman Catholicism and chose “Antony” as her baptismal name (GiA 67). She has told other sources, however, that “Toni” became her nickname when she was a young adult.2 Chloe was her parents’ second child and second daughter, to be followed by two brothers, and Morrison has often spoken of her close relationship with her elder sister, Lois. Her mother was an active member of the local African Methodist Episcopal Life 3 Church and its choir. “She sang, my mother, the way other people muse,” writes Morrison. “Ave Maria, gratia plena . . . I woke up this morning with an awful aching head / My new man has left me just a room and a bed . . . Precious Lord, lead me on” (J xiii). Meanwhile her grandfather played the violin, and all the adults in her life were avid storytellers and conversationalists. They “could move easily into the language of the King James Bible and then back to standard English, and then segue into language that we would call street,” Morrison recalled in 1996 (DC 131). This culturally rich environment – the music, the storytelling, the central place of the Bible, and the close-knit nature of her family – is an obvious and profound presence in Morrison’s work. The author was the only African-American student in her first grade class, and her neighborhood was anything but uniformly black. The town’s population was diverse due to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who also worked at U.S. Steel; Morrison says this made her “sensitive to languages very early” (DC 203, 131). Despite the mixed nature of her milieu, however, as Morrison has wryly observed, the adults who raised her held “widely disparate and sometimes conflicting views” about race. Her parents “differed about whether the moral fiber of white people would ever improve” (WMM 6). The author “grew up with a complicated notion of the South, neither sentimental nor wholly frightening”: her mother was “nostalgic” but never returned there; her father “recounted vividly the violence he had seen at first-hand from White southerners” but “went back to Georgia every year” (DC 178). Race relations in Lorain itself were no less complicated. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison describes the town and its Lake Erie shore as a “melting pot on the lip of America facing the cold but receptive Canada,” a town that “boasted an affinity with Oberlin,” the underground railroad station and site of the college to which Denver is heading at the end of Beloved (BE 91). Yet that first novel’s subject is the many-layered, deeply ingrained racist culture of the town in the very years of Morrison’s childhood. Her father maintained a lifelong suspicion of white people, and at least once she witnessed him attacking a white man whom he believed to be a threat to the children, whereas her mother judged every individual on his or her individual merits (WMM 6). These conflicting perspectives perhaps explain her acute authorial sensitivity to the complexities and ambiguities of racialized cultural formations and racist attitudes. Morrison was an outstanding student at school and has been an avid reader for as long as she can remember. She devoured canonical classics from a very young age; she has described books as a “driving thing” in her childhood and has made specific mention of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, and Theodore Dreiser, among others (DC 100). She came later to African-American and African literatures, which perhaps affected her all the more because she discovered them late. During her teenage years she worked as a helper at the 4 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison Lorain Public Library, a site of great importance to her, at which, in 1995, she opened the Toni Morrison Reading Room. She also began after-school domestic cleaning work from the age of “around thirteen” (DC 100). At Lorain High School she worked on the school newspaper and yearbook, graduating with honors and with ambitions to become a dancer.3 In her foreword to Love, Morrison reflects on the invaluable resources of her childhood – “a feisty mother, a supportive father, and insatiable reading habits” (L xii). When Morrison went to Howard University in 1949, she was the first member of her family to attend college. She majored in English and minored in Classics, studying with veteran intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance era such as Alain Locke and Sterling Brown. The Classics Department at this time was under the chairmanship of Frank Snowden Jr., whose lifelong scholarly interest was the role of Africans in ancient Greece and Rome. Morrison has, however, frequently remarked on her surprise at and discomfort with the conservative social and racial atmosphere she encountered at Howard. It was “middle class” and “upwardly mobile,” she observed in 1985; when she asked to write a paper on “Black Characters in Shakespeare,” the English Department were “very alarmed (TG 174–5),” and there was a pervasive culture of categorizing students according to the lightness or darkness of their skin. A highlight of her undergraduate years, on the other hand, was her involvement with the theater group, the Howard Players. Touring the Deep South with that group was one of the defining experiences of her life. The years during which Morrison studied for her master’s degree in English at Cornell –1953–5 – are ones she has spoken of very little. What we do know is about the thesis she wrote there: entitled “Virginia Woolf ’s and William Faulkner’s Treatment of the Alienated,” it discusses the representation of suicide by these authors with whom her own fictional style clearly has much in common, and to whom she is now frequently compared by critics. The thesis is also notable for its interest in the influence of Greek tragedy on Faulkner; in her own novels she went on to engage with those same conventions. When she completed her master’s degree she was still only twenty-four years old. But from 2245 Elyria Avenue, Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 to Graduation Day at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 1955 – that must have felt, already, like quite some journey to have made. 1955–1977 After graduating from Cornell, Morrison took the first of the many teaching posts she was to hold: at Texas Southern University. In 1957 she moved back to Life 5 Washington, D.C., and to Howard, this time as a teacher. Although she stayed there until 1964, she felt no less ambivalent about the culture there than she had a decade earlier. “Those were the pre–Civil Rights years,” she explained in 1985, “the years when the measure of excellence was to outstrip the white schools at one thing or another” (DC 32). In 1963 she joined a writing group at Howard, for which she began work on a short story that was to become the foundation of The Bluest Eye. Other members of the group included the writer Claude Brown (still a student at that time), the playwright and director Owen Dodson, and the painter Charles Sebree, whom Morrison remembers telling her, after reading her story, “You are a writer” (GiA 69). In 1958, Morrison (or Wofford, as she still was) had married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. Their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961, but the marriage was not a happy one. Morrison has spoken little of her ex-husband – “I can’t be honest without causing somebody pain, mostly my children,” she said in 1976 (DC 4) – and they divorced after traveling in Europe together in 1964. Morrison has said she was a “constant nuisance” during her marriage because she was not “subservient” (TG 51); “he knew better about his life but not about mine,” she said in 1992 (DC 72). After parting company from her husband she returned to her family in Lorain, Ohio, where her second son, Slade Kevin, was born. In 1965, against her parents’ wishes, she moved with her young boys to Syracuse, upstate New York, to take a job as a senior editor for the textbook publisher L. W. Singer, which was a subsidiary of Random House. With hindsight Morrison puts a positive gloss on this period of her life, but it was obviously a profoundly challenging one. In 1992, she reflected, “I had to stop and say, let me start again and see what it is like to be a grown up” (DC 72). During the bleak couple of years Morrison lived in Syracuse, she spent her evenings expanding her story into The Bluest Eye. After putting in full days at the office, and when her children were in bed, she “didn’t have anyone to talk to” so she “wrote it as a way to talk” (DC 7). This is also when she developed the habit of getting up to write before dawn, “to use the time before [the children] said “Mama” (DC 64). She states that she wrote the first book “because it wasn’t there”; it was the kind of book she wanted to read, and creating the first novel felt “like a very long, sustained, reading process” (DC 69, 46). After being rejected by numerous publishers, The Bluest Eye was published (in a small print run of 2,000 hardback copies) by Holt, Rinehart, Winston in 1970. By this time Morrison was working for Random House in New York City; she had moved there in 1968 to a job in the scholastic division and then became a senior trade editor working for Jason Epstein. Although she made little of her own writing to her editorial colleagues, Robert Gottlieb of Knopf (also 6 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison an imprint of Random House) became her own editor at this time and has worked with her on every novel except Jazz and Paradise since then. Morrison lived in Queens during the late 1960s and early 1970s, commuting daily to her Manhattan office, and also teaching in 1971–2 at SUNY Purchase. The picture she paints of this time (particularly in her foreword to Sula) is one of financial hardship and childcare difficulties, of a closely knit network of like-minded women friends, of joy in intellectual discovery (of many African authors, for example), of significant achievements in her editorial work, and of political engagement and “daring.” Sula was published in 1973, and throughout that decade, in a racial climate that was unreceptive, Morrison’s influence in the publication of black writing was unparalleled. The material she edited and publicized includes the fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Gayl Jones; the poetry of Lucille Clifton and June Jordan; and the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey Newton (B ix). She also published anthologies of little-known “third world” writing such as Contemporary African Literature in 1972 and Giant Talk in 1975.4 Perhaps the editorial project that has had the most profound influence on Morrison herself was The Black Book, published in 1974 with Middleton Harris as its lead editor. This is a documentary history of the African-American experience, consisting of newspaper articles, letters, speeches, photographs, folk songs, and other cultural memorabilia that span three hundred years. In her seminal article on the project, “Rediscovering Black History” (1974), Morrison describes it as “unconventional history told from the point of view of everyday people” and explains the motivation behind it as the attempt to recover some of the values lost through the civil rights movement: “those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity” (WMM 55, 42). As is now well known, it is here that Morrison first encountered the newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner, the historical forerunner to Sethe in Beloved. The author has written of the “despair” she felt while compiling the materials (which include two photos of her mother) – “it was like growing up black one more time” – and also of the “joy” (WMM 44; 49). In 2009, Random House reissued the book in a 35th Anniversary Edition. In September 1975, Morrison’s father died. She has described the period following as one of “unimaginable sadness” in which she struggled to accept not only the loss of him but “the loss of the person he thought [she] was” (SoS ix, x). In 1977, and frequently since, she has recalled the way he taught her to take pride in her work through the fact that he soldered his name, unseen by anyone else, on every “perfect seam” he welded on ships (DC 14). The positive outcome to the “big void” that he left was that she started writing “a book that Life 7 was about men” (WMM 80): the result, published in 1977 and dedicated to “Daddy,” was Song of Solomon. 1977–1993 Song of Solomon was Morrison’s first major public success. Soon after its appearance it was chosen as a main selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club; it was the first African-American text to be recognized in this way since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. In 1978 it won both the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. At this time, Morrison found that publishing “became less interesting” to her as her hands-on editorial work diminished, and as the books she had brought out did not sell well (DC 204; TG 133). Devoting more time to her teaching (which now included visiting lectureships at Yale, at Rutgers, and – in 1986 – at Bard), and primarily to her writing, she began to go to the Random House office on only one day a week. She wrote the foreword to the Billops/ Dodson/Van der Zee collaboration The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978) at this time;5 one of the Van der Zee photographs and its backstory became the inspiration for Jazz (J ix). In 1988 Morrison reflected that after she wrote Solomon she “began to think of [herself] legally as a writer” (DC 46). After that novel’s commercial success, she bought the converted boathouse on the Hudson River, in Rockland County, New York, that has been her principal home ever since. In 1981 Morrison published her fourth novel, Tar Baby. The novel was inspired, she tells us in its foreword, by her grandmother, who “needed her dreams,” and for whom she used to make up stories (TB 14). By now honors were bestowed on an annual basis: this year she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (who had named her a “distinguished writer” in 1977), and in 1980 she had been appointed to the National Council of the Arts. In 1983 she published (in a collection edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka) her one and only short story, “Recitatif,” but continued to downplay her many activities and achievements. “I really only do two things” she told Nellie McKay in an interview that same year. “All my work has to do with books. I teach books, write books, edit books, or talk about books. . . . And the only other thing I do is raise my children” (TG 140). Nevertheless, by the end of 1983 she had resigned from her position at Random House. It was during the ensuing period of newly found freedom that she began work on her fifth and most famous novel: Beloved. As she explains, “A few days after my last day at work . . . I sat on the porch, 8 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison . . . looking at giant stones piled up to take the river’s occasional fist. . . . She walked up out of the water, climbed the rocks, and leaned against the gazebo. Nice hat” (B x–xii). In 1984, Morrison was named to the Alfred Schweitzer Professorship at SUNY Albany, which she held until 1986. While there she wrote and assisted in the production of the play Dreaming Emmett, which was staged in collaboration with the director Gilbert Moses in January 1986 (see Chapter 2, “Other Creative Work”). In its chorus-like collection of ghosts from Emmett Till’s past and its preoccupation with revenge, it anticipates the thematic concerns of Beloved. And that novel, published in 1987 and winning the Pulitzer in 1988, marks a watershed moment in Morrison’s life: it consolidated her success and won her international fame. From that point on, she became a key player on the global cultural stage. In 1985, Morrison had told Gloria Naylor, “I think . . . I won’t write anything after Beloved” (TG 212). In 1989, when appointed to the Robert Goheen Chair in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, she became the first African-American woman to hold an endowed chair at an Ivy League university. Her lecturing and publications continued apace: she delivered the Tanner Lecture at the University of Michigan in 1988 (published as “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 1989), the Massey Lectures at Harvard in 1990, and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the same year. Both the Harvard and Cambridge lectures were to become the groundbreaking work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark, published in 1992. In the same year Morrison published her sixth novel, Jazz, which she has often cited as her own favorite, and which became a New York Times best seller. She also formalized her role as a social commentator, editing the essay collection Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power (1992). Speaking about her writing habits in a 1992 interview, Morrison said, “I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark . . . and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. . . . This ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call non-secular” (DC 65). Such a routine was presumably a necessity given the achievements and demands of this period in her life, but its symbolism also sets a spiritual tenor that Morrison herself was to continue. On 7 October 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. According to the Washington Post, on that day she had unplugged the phone by 10:00 am and taught her Princeton class as normal. At the award ceremony in Stockholm, in December of the same year, after delivering her fabulous lecture, she closed her acceptance speech by asking us to share with her “a moment of grace” (NL 33). Life 9 Since 1993 Just weeks after the Nobel award ceremony, Morrison’s home on the Hudson River burned down. The fire broke out on the morning of Christmas Day, in 1993, and in September 1994 the author revealed to a New York Times interviewer that she might “not ever, ever, ever get over” the loss of her “photographs, . . . children’s report cards [and] manuscripts,” as well as treasured first editions of Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, and a second edition of Frederick Douglass published in England (DC 103; 153). Two months later, Morrison’s mother died. The author refused to perceive these “very serious devastations” as a manifestation of the so-called curse of the Nobel, however, preferring to identify the prize as the distinguishing positive event of this time (DC 103). In 1994 she founded a new performing arts seminar program, the Princeton Atelier, and at this time she herself was writing lyrics for works by the composers André Previn, Richard Danielpour, Max Roach, and Judith Weir, many of which were performed at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile her teaching at Princeton centered on her twelve-lecture course American Africanism, which she taught for six years, along with Creative Writing. In 1998, Morrison co-edited (with Claudia Brodsky Lacour) a collection of essays on the O. J. Simpson case entitled Birth of A Nation’hood. In her now-established role as a public intellectual or spokesperson for the Left, in the New Yorker she criticized the “raw comedy spiked with Cotton Mather homilies” that characterized the pursuit of President Clinton in 1998 (WMM 152) and helped to organize an intellectuals’ protest against his impeachment; was scathing in interviews some years later about the Bush administration’s response to the Al-Qaeda attacks, and gave speeches at Howard and Princeton on the future of university education. In 1998 Morrison published her seventh novel, Paradise, which completed the trilogy beginning with Beloved and Jazz. Between 2002 and 2003 she published (together with her son Slade) the three children’s books in the Who’s Got Game? series, a graphic-text-style revision of Aesop; and in 2003 she published her eighth novel, Love. Throughout this period she maintained an intense schedule of international book tours (speaking at the Oxford Union about Paradise in May 1998, for example), public readings, and media appearances. She has always been willing to engage with her readership, both general and scholarly, and is profoundly invested in the reception of her work. She has, for example, regularly attended the conferences of the Toni Morrison Society, which was founded by Carolyn Denard in 1993.6 At these events in Lorain, Ohio, in 2000; in Washington, D.C., in 2003; and in Cincinnati in 2005 10 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (which included the state premiere of the opera Margaret Garner, for which she had written the libretto), she both gave formal presentations and participated informally in scholarly panels. At the Paris conference in 2010, besides her scheduled appearances, she sat in for several hours on the roundtable discussion about the teaching of her work. Honors and tributes, both formal and informal, have accumulated rapidly since 1993 and the Nobel. In 1996 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; The Dancing Mind was her acceptance speech in November of that year. She received an honorary doctoral degree from the École Normale Supérieure in 2003; in 2005 from the University of Oxford; and in 2006 from the Sorbonne. At the same time, Oprah Winfrey’s nomination of four Morrison novels for her book club – Solomon in 1996, Paradise in 1998, The Bluest Eye in 2000, and Sula in 2002 – had a major impact on the author’s popularity and sales. Her seventieth birthday in 2001, and her seventy-fifth in 2006, were marked by celebrations at the New York Public Library and at the Lincoln Center, respectively. In June 2006 Morrison transferred her professorial status at Princeton to emerita, but in no sense of the word did she “retire” from the world of work. She spent the period from October of that year to January 2007 as guest curator at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, where she organized a series of events and curatorial processes that centered on the theme “Étranger Chez Soi,” or “The Foreigner’s Home,” while in March 2007, back in New York, she curated the “Art Is Otherwise” event at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. With hindsight, the year 2008 reads as one in which Morrison’s literary endeavors and political goals (a distinction she herself would never contemplate) complemented and fulfilled each other in striking ways. In January of that year, she wrote a public letter endorsing Barack Obama, who was competing against Hillary Clinton in the primaries. In July, Morrison attended the Toni Morrison Society Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, which included the ceremonial placing of a memorial “Bench by the Road” on Sullivan’s Island.7 Her ninth novel, A Mercy, was published in November of 2008, just days after the election of Obama to the presidency. In 2009 Morrison edited the PEN anti-censorship collection Burn this Book, to which she also contributed the introductory essay. On the opening day of the Toni Morrison Society Conference in Paris (4 November 2010), Morrison was presented with France’s Legion d’Honneur. The next day she presided at the placing of another “bench by the road,” and on the last day she read the opening passage from her then-unfinished novel, Home (May 2012), although she did not reveal its title as such until her reading (following the placing of a further bench) at George Washington University in September 2011. Just a Life 11 few weeks after the Paris conference, in December 2010, Morrison’s younger son, Slade, with whom she had collaborated on many children’s books, suddenly passed away. This tragedy did not prevent her going ahead, however, with her eightieth birthday celebration, held by the Toni Morrison Society at the Library of Congress, on 18 February 2011. This was attended by numerous people of significance in her personal and professional lives, both past and present. At the eightieth birthday event, Morrison was presented with a Festschrift, Memory and Meaning: Essays in Honour of Toni Morrison.8 The title of this work illuminates the importance of both cultural and individual memory in her work, recalling as it does her seminal essay “The Site of Memory” (1987). That essay’s testimony to Morrison’s own sense of the inextricability of her life, of her writing, and of the high-stake politics of both, was confirmed by the many memories, stories, and tributes that the eightieth birthday celebration involved. My own memory of Morrison on that occasion is a fitting way to close this unfinished story of her life. Clearly in a state of grief and not in the best physical health, she addressed the gathering from a wheelchair, talking about what the day meant to her. She spoke of Jessye Norman’s singing as “a great comfort,” of the “stunning” way that the scholarship on her work had changed since 1970, and of the fact that turning eighty was “really something.” “You know,” she said, “sixty? Yeah, that’s OK. Seventy? Hmmm, that’s all right. But eighty? That’s, well, that’s . . . pow!” And she punched the air. Chapter 2 Works Introduction to the Fiction One of Morrison’s favorite metaphors to describe her fictional project is that of the house and home. “If I had to live in a racial house,” she wrote in the landmark essay “Home” (1997), “it was important . . . to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, . . . but rather an open house” (H 4). In this image, the “house” in need of rebuilding stands for many things at once: for mainstream American ideology, for the national literary canon, for the genre of the novel, and even for language itself. The challenge Morrison sets herself is to transform these flawed but powerful structures, and to create a better version of reality that she conceives of as “home.” The title of her most recent novel, Home, therefore comes as no surprise. From the very beginning of her writing career, from the early 1960s when she was working on the short story that was to become The Bluest Eye, she set out quite deliberately and self-consciously to create literature that was different from what had gone before. Morrison writes slowly, with great forethought and deliberation. She reworks her drafts until she is completely satisfied, and until the writing appears “effortless” (TG 123). The result is a dense, allusive prose that demands to be read aloud and that richly repays rereading and close analysis. Paradoxically, it is the complex layeredness of her writing that, on the one hand, makes her an obvious comparison with other innovators such as Joyce, Woolf, Ellison, Faulkner, and Bambara, and that, on the other, ensures the uniqueness of her vision and of her voice. In her foreword to Sula, Morrison describes her “sensibility” as “highly political and passionately aesthetic” (S xi). As far as she is concerned, aesthetic integrity and political effectiveness are inseparable, and to try to distinguish the way something is written from the influence it has is nonsensical and futile. When setting out on a study of this author, it is essential always to bear in mind that the unifying impulse in her work – that of perpetually taking preexisting cultural structures apart and revising, rewriting, reenvisioning, or rebuilding them into new and better forms – is always and already both an artistic and a political process. 12 Works 13 To state the obvious, Morrison’s subject is the African-American experience. Put together chronologically (by subject matter rather than in order of publication), her ten novels examine key moments of American history. While centering on late twentieth-century life, Love and Tar Baby also play with ideas of the continent’s discovery and colonization; A Mercy opens up new perspectives on late seventeenth-century New England; Beloved has come to be seen as the defining literary treatment of slavery; Jazz deals with Reconstruction, black migration, and urbanization; and Paradise is simultaneously about the early twentieth-century phenomenon of the all-black town and the founding of the United States itself. The Bluest Eye and Sula epitomize small-town life in the depressed decades in which they are set (the 1930s and 1940s), while the action of Home and Song of Solomon is rooted in the fraught battles over racial and sexual equality that characterized the American 1950s–60s. But despite the primacy of history in these works, and the vital energy imbued by Morrison’s commitment to the disruption of white patriarchal “History,” the books are anything but conventionally understood “historical novels.” Morrison has written of “the personal that is always embedded in the public” (H 12), and her way into political conflict and debate is always through the inner struggles of fully realized individual characters. The author once said that though she could not change the future, she knew she could change the past. The way she does this is to approach that past through the personal lives of those whom the dominant culture has silenced, erased, or forgotten: an ugly black schoolgirl in The Bluest Eye, the servants in a millionaire’s mansion in Tar Baby, a formerly enslaved mother in Beloved, women abused as children in Love. It may surprise some readers to learn that the extent to which it is possible, or even useful, to categorize Morrison as a feminist writer is a matter of ongoing critical controversy. Despite the fact that girls and women, and their relationships with each other, are so consistently at the center of the author’s imagined worlds, she herself has often rejected the label of “feminist.” She has frequently expressed her sense of the “problematic” nature of “white feminist views,” in that they ignore (and even exploit) the specific needs of black women, and has observed that “the enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy” (DC 34). She “would never write any . . . ‘ist’ novels,” she says, because she “can’t take positions that are closed” (DC 141). While passionately committed to exploring the experience of girlhood or motherhood, or women’s vulnerability to sexual violence, or the specific educational and employment problems faced by black women, she maintains that to substitute matriarchy for patriarchy is no solution. In my discussion of the contexts of her work in the third chapter of this book, therefore, I have not treated “feminism” as a distinct section. The Morrisonian worldview resists and counteracts any compartmentalization of 14 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison women’s experience, despite (or, as she would argue, because of) the authorial investment in it. It is Morrison’s attention to the voices of the marginalized, of the “disremembered and unaccounted for,” that gives rise to the narrative structures of her novels (B 323). Rather than presenting a conventional chronological version of events told from a single standpoint, she combines multiple viewpoints or voices with disrupted chronologies and strategic withholding of information so that the picture is always evolving, always revealing something new. Sometimes a voice in the first person opens a novel (for example, in Jazz or A Mercy). Other times an apparently authoritative third-person beginning lulls the reader into a false sense of security (for example, in the openings of Song of Solomon or Paradise). The author has said many times that “the meaning of a novel is in its structure” (DC 218). Her overt rationale behind her technique is to achieve a new kind of realism – to represent experience as we actually perceive it. But there is surely more at stake in her novelistic form than this. “I knew from the beginning that I could not, would not, reproduce the master’s voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father,” she has said (H 4). Her dismantling of conventional narrative chronology and viewpoint is one of the crucial means by which she dismantles “the master’s voice.” A third effect of Morrison’s polyphonic, nonlinear methods is that they demand readers’ participation in the creation of meaning. I would urge you not to read her recent forewords to the novels before you have read the novels themselves, because to some extent they tell you what to think about the novels, and they diminish her prior insistence on active reading that is part of her political strategy. To be participatory readers creates us as a community of readers, implicates us in event, and also places Morrison’s work firmly within the African-American tradition of “call and response.” Morrison has spoken of her aim to create an author/reader relationship analogous to the protagonist/ chorus relationship in Greek tragedy, to the preacher/congregation relationship in church, and to the soloist/group relationship in jazz (TG 176). The analogy between Morrison’s literary technique and jazz is by now well worn, not least because she has made it so frequently herself, but it is no less compelling for that. It is important to recognize, as well, that this is a comparison that has many elements to it and that each one clarifies a different aspect of Morrisonian style. Writing about her mother, in 2004, the author recalls, “Like the music that came to be known as Jazz, she took from everywhere, knew everything – gospel, classic, blues, hymns – and made it her own” (J xiii). This would be an equally valid comment on the author’s own approach to life and art; her novels are remarkable for the sheer breadth of literatures, traditions, Works 15 mythologies, and other cultural resources on which they draw. Some critics have tended to polarize their interpretations of her allusiveness. For example, it is not unusual to claim that the influences on her writing are somehow either “African” or “European” but not both, or that one cultural influence is more significant than the other. To adhere to such binary division, however; to insist that Morrison and her readers must make “either/or” choices, is simply to falsify the fiction. Morrison herself has spoken of the limits of the “dichotomous double consciousness,” and of the attractions of a “concrete thrill of borderlessness,” and of “difference that is prized but unprivileged” (H 9, 11). African, American, African-American, Native American, and European traditions are all synthesized, made her own, in her hands. A third level on which the jazz analogy works is in terms of audience and appeal. In a 1994 interview, Morrison pointed out that jazz music was at once “very complicated, very sophisticated, . . . very difficult” and “also very popular.” She strives for her own fiction to encompass this duality: to “be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz” (DC106). This is something that in many ways she has achieved; in America she is a household name, and yet she writes some of the most demanding literature on the market. Ten novels on, is it possible to trace development in the progress of the oeuvre, or commonalities between the works? Morrison’s subjects are trauma, violence, pain, and loss. Yet there is clearly a move away from the unrelenting bleakness of the end of The Bluest Eye, or the “circles and circles of sorrow” that bring Sula to a close (S 174). In the trilogy, after the indeterminate endings of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, there is a repeated emphasis on survival, and on the “some kind of tomorrow” for which Paul D and Sethe long (B 322). And there is also humor. It may sound odd to say that Morrison, whose subject matter is so serious, is a profoundly humorous and witty writer, but it is true. Through irony, parody, pastiche, and characters’ sense of the comic, the author suggests that humor is what makes endurance and survival possible, but that it does not trivialize its subject. “Laughter is serious,” realizes Violet in Jazz, “more complicated, more serious than tears” (113). So, if you are just setting out on a study of Morrison’s novels, you can expect to find great riches. There are heroic, resilient characters who face extreme historically influenced circumstances; psychological insights and knowledge of the human heart that will make you nod in recognition; worlds in which myth and magic, spiritual faith and the forces of the irrational, are respected; close attention to the physical pleasures of life such as food and sex; language that is strange and compelling, that is “speakerly, aural, colloquial” and beautiful (BE 172); imagery that is new and surprising but always apt; a cultural allusiveness 16 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison that is dazzling in its scope; and a metafictional, postmodern quality in which the nature of a story’s telling is always part of its subject. Morrison is of course not a perfect writer. There are passages that are overwritten, there are moments of cliché, there is withholding of information that is occasionally just frustrating, and there are occasional flashes of didacticism. But her triumph is in the fact that her vision of the political realities of African-American life is simultaneously a vision of all humanity. She makes the specific universal, without ever diminishing the political force of her specificity. Her fiction is a place where “race both matters and is rendered impotent,” and as a result she has achieved what she set out to do: “to transform this house completely” (H 4). The Bluest Eye (1970) Morrison’s first novel tells the agonizing life story of Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl from a poor and dysfunctional family who is eleven years old when the action of the book begins. The setting is Lorain, Ohio (Morrison’s own birthplace), and the key events – Pecola’s being bullied at school, despised by the community, rejected by her mother, raped by her father, and manipulated by a quack healer – take place between 1940 and 1941. The principal narrator is Pecola’s school friend Claudia MacTeer, whose voice alternates between her adult perspective, looking back at the past, and a version of her perspective as a child, encountering each moment as it occurs. First and foremost, this is a book about racism, about what it is like to grow up in a racist culture, and about what Morrison terms the “racial self-loathing” that such a culture engenders (BE foreword np). It is a book primarily about the causes and devastating consequences of intraracial racism, of the ways in which some Americans of African descent grow to look down on and despise others in accordance with an insidious, destructive value system in which categorization and discrimination (strategies learned from whites’ oppression of blacks) are the key weapons. Pecola’s profound sense of worthlessness develops in response to dominant cultural notions of “romantic love” and “physical beauty,” which Morrison describes as “probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” (BE 95). The townsfolk’s conception of “beauty” is shaped by popular culture’s privileging of the conventional traits of white glamour – blonde hair and blue eyes – exemplified by the white goddesses of the silver screen whom this depression era community wish to emulate. The novel’s title refers to the fact that in the last stages of her sanity, or the beginning stages of her insanity, Pecola pays a visit to the healer Soaphead Church and begs him to give her blue eyes. The penultimate section of the Works 17 book depicts the girl’s consciousness split into two voices that discuss the prettiness of the new eyes she believes she has acquired, interwoven with fractured allusions to the traumatic experiences she has undergone. As with every Morrisonian title, The Bluest Eye is one that works on several levels. While blue eyes function as a synecdoche for a value system that shores up white superiority and power, the pun on “blue” in the sense of sadness is obvious, linking to a similar pun on “tear” in Claudia’s surname, “MacTeer.” The “bluest” also connotes the blues, an original African-American musical form that expresses both suffering and survival at its core. The blues migrated from the rural South to the urban North along with the many thousands of black people who are the historical counterparts to Pecola’s parents, Cholly and Pauline (born in Georgia and Alabama, respectively), who met in Kentucky, and who moved together to Ohio. The “eye” of the book’s title not only expresses its thematic preoccupation with ways of seeing, but also puns on “I,” suggesting Pecola’s eroded sense of self and complete lack of self-esteem. The disintegration of herself, of the “I,” works in direct counterpoint to mainstream American ideologies of individualism and empowered selfhood. The novel’s structure is complex; it is initially baffling, and deliberately so. The experimental narrative technique and the book’s disjointed form are key to Morrison’s concern with the ways racial and racist codes are embedded in the narratives and the language that we create, and that we are at the same time created by. Besides the shifting perspectives of Claudia, there is an omniscient third-person narrative voice that relates the life histories of Pecola’s impoverished and downtrodden parents, of Soaphead Church, and of Geraldine, the upwardly mobile woman who calls Pecola “a nasty little black bitch” as she expels her from her house (BE 72). But the work’s innovative beginning is a parodic quotation from one of the so-called Dick and Jane readers. These were a series of elementary school books, devised by Zerna Sharp and William Gray and published by Foreman and Co., which from 1930 onward were widely used to teach American children to read. The passage Morrison quotes begins as follows: Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. (BE 1) In The Bluest Eye, this passage – which prefaces (in excerpted form) each section describing the Breedloves’ lives – stands as the ur-text of the ideology that has come to be called “whiteness.” It epitomizes the mythological perfect home and family to which all Americans are supposed to aspire and yet that many are prevented from achieving by the very same system that promotes the 18 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison myth. Morrison reveals the extent to which children were brainwashed, in that as they learned to read they also absorbed the message that middle-class white culture was the only valuable and desirable standard. The voice following the initial “Dick and Jane” quotation is that of Claudia’s adulthood, which begins the first of the novel’s four structuring seasons, “Autumn.” “Quiet as it’s kept,” she confides in us, “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow” (BE 4). Morrison has said more about these two sentences, in public appearances and in her essays, than she has of any other lines in her oeuvre. In the afterword to the novel, for example, she analyzes the “conspiratorial” nature of “quiet as it’s kept” and argues that the second sentence, in making the flowers more important than the incest, reveals the narrator to be a child (BE 169–70). The immediate announcement of the terrible fate of Pecola, the revelation of the plot’s denouement at the novel’s opening, is a deliberate disruption of conventional narrative technique. Claudia goes on to tell us, in this same opening passage, that “Since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how” (3). The result of her opening disclosure is that when we finally arrive at the detailed description of Cholly’s rape of his daughter, our focus is not on “what” happened but on “how” the assault came about, both physically and emotionally. This technique enables a second favorite Morrisonian narrative strategy: the depiction of multiple and conflicting perspectives on any one event. Like the Breedloves, the MacTeers are materially poor, but unlike the Breedloves, they are emotionally rich. Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer, Claudia’s parents, are loving, strict, in control, and protective of the narrator and her elder sister, Frieda. While Pecola is staying temporarily housed with MacTeers, she makes an impression on the two sisters, first, because she is transfixed by the blonde and blue-eyed Shirley Temple, and, second, because during her stay she has her first menstrual period. This moment symbolizes the transitional phase of the girls’ lives, the beginning of adolescence and sexual awareness, and the end of their childhood innocence. Claudia recalls that at this point she herself “had not yet arrived at the turning point in the development of [her] psyche that would allow [her] to love” Shirley Temple (13). In other words, she had not yet been brainwashed: she preferred the dark-haired actress Jane Withers, who in the 1934 film Bright Eyes threatens to attack Shirley Temple’s doll. Claudia presumably identifies with Withers because she herself “destroyed white baby dolls” (BE 12). Given a “big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” for Christmas every year, instead of loving them she used to dismember each one, “to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty” (14). These details not only symbolize the novel’s Works 19 dismemberment of the ideology of whiteness, but also allude to the groundbreaking “doll tests” carried out in the 1940s by the psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark. The tests were designed to ascertain the psychological effects of segregation on black children, and in the “doll test” children were asked to identify the race of four dolls ranging in color from pale to dark, and to express a preference for one of them. The majority of children chose the white doll as their favorite, proving their perception of their own inferiority, and the Clarks’ findings, published in a paper of 1950, were specifically quoted by the Supreme Court in their 1954 landmark decision about school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education). The Bluest Eye is set in the very decade in which these tests were carried out, and the despised and self-hating Pecola would undoubtedly have selected the whitest doll. In the “Winter” section, Morrison sets the scene of the Breedlove family’s unhomelike home: the squalid storefront in which Pauline and Cholly endlessly fight, and in which the stove (in contrast to the roaring hearth in the MacTeers’ house) never properly burns. Against this miserable, ugly backdrop, the author stages what she calls “a series of rejections” of Pecola: “some routine, some exceptional, some monstrous” (BE foreword np). First, in the grocery store, when Mr. Yacobowksi tries to take her money without touching her hand, the “inexplicable shame” she feels at his “distaste for her blackness” is erased only by the soothing picture of clean, blonde Mary Jane on the candy wrappers (BE 36–8). A few days later, when Frieda and Claudia rescue Pecola from a ring of schoolboy bullies, the unexpected attentions of the glamorous, pale-skinned classmate Maureen Peal temporarily mollify Pecola, but Maureen goes on to insult her new “friend” about her “old black daddy” (56). The next character to exacerbate Pecola’s sense of worthlessness and concomitant yearning for blue eyes is “sugar-brown” Geraldine (64), the socially aspirational mother of another classmate. According to the novel’s anonymous, omniscient narrative voice, Geraldine is typical of a certain class of pale-skinned young African-American women who expend all their energy trying to eradicate “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature” (64). She exemplifies intraracial discrimination at its most insidious. Because Pecola seems to represent all the dirt, poverty, and blackness from which Geraldine has spent her entire life running, Geraldine throws her out of her house with a racist insult while showing great concern for the injured cat. Toward the start of the novel’s longest section, “Spring,” comes Pauline’s rejection of her daughter – an act of breathtaking treachery. When Pecola upsets the piping hot cobbler, Pauline’s only concern is for the floor she has just cleaned and for her employer’s “pink-and-yellow” daughter (BE 85). As Pecola and the MacTeers are sent packing, the words “crazy fool . . . my floor 20 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison . . . my floor” burn “hotter and darker than the smoking berries” (85). Though Morrison does devote pages to explaining the struggles and disappointments of Pauline’s life – her deformed foot from a childhood injury, a youth filled with housekeeping and child care responsibilities, her initial excitement on marrying Cholly, and their migration to Lorain followed by the demise of their relationship – readers commonly struggle to sympathize with her. Her infatuation with the myths of white beauty and happiness that is nurtured by the movies finds expression in her utter devotion to her white employer and to her domestic responsibilities in that comfortable home. It is here that “she found beauty, order, cleanliness and praise”; hence “more and more she neglected her house, her children, her man” (99). While we understand the causes of Pauline’s confused priorities, her contemptuous treatment of her daughter may affect us no less powerfully than does Cholly’s physical assault. And her later refusal to believe Pecola about the rape (together with her failure to prevent its recurrence) arguably puts both parents on a similar moral footing. Morrison has written of The Bluest Eye that she “did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to her collapse” (foreword np). In the section focusing on Cholly’s life and culminating in the rape, she constructs this character as a kind of unconventional tragic hero, as someone with whom we engage sympathetically without ever condoning. We learn that he was “abandoned on a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father” (BE 126), and that in his youth he was subjected to a grotesque ordeal by a group of white men who, stumbling on him in the midst of his first sexual encounter, with a local girl, Darlene, force him to continue it under their gaze. Given that this voyeurism is itself a kind of violation, the author sets Cholly’s rape of his own daughter in a wider political context, insisting on the inevitable relatedness of racially and sexually motivated abuses of power. Morrison reinforces this point through the later account of Soaphead Church, whose inherited horror of “all that suggested Africa” translates into “a patronage of little girls”; paradoxically enough, his pedophilic tendencies are “associated in his own mind with cleanliness” and “smacked of innocence” (BE 132). By charting these men’s passage through the corrupt and destructive cultures into which they are born, Morrison forces us to recognize that the ethics of sexual violence are both simple and complicated at once. By describing the changing, contradictory emotions that Pecola’s downtrodden demeanor provokes in Cholly, and by explaining that “the clear statement of her misery was an accusation” about his own unworthiness and shortcomings, the author puts us in the unsettling position of understanding a father’s point of view as he rapes his own daughter (BE 127). We are made to see, despite our profound discomfort, that this character destroys Pecola at least in Works 21 part out of his love for her. To acknowledge this point diminishes neither the enormity of Cholly’s crime nor the extent of Pecola’s suffering; it exemplifies the complexity of outrageous actions that all Morrison’s novels explore. The final and shortest section of the novel is “Summer.” Besides the depiction of the two-voiced, psychotic Pecola, it comprises Claudia’s account of the community’s gossip about her friend, of the marigolds’ failure to grow, of Cholly’s death in the workhouse, and of Pecola’s crazed ramblings around “that little brown house she and her mother moved to on the edge of town” (BE 162). A final quotation from the “Dick and Jane” reader, incomplete and without spacing or punctuation, precedes the dialogue between the bifurcated parts of Pecola’s former self: “LOOKLOOKHERECOMESAFRIENDTHEFRIENDWILLPLAYWITHJANETHEY WILLPLAYAGOODGAMEPLAYJANEPLA.” (153) This descent into disordered nonsense both anticipates Pecola’s psychosis and represents the dismantling of the damaging value system that the novel sets out to subvert. Morrison has written of her self-conscious attempt to “hold the despising glance while sabotaging it”; she wants to depict racist narratives while depriving them of their power (BE foreword np). The Dick and Jane reader quite literally frames the story but is also quite literally broken up by it. In the novel’s closing pages, the tone becomes elegiac, and the mood unremittingly bleak: Pecola “spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear” (BE 162). The adult Claudia realizes that the community’s abnegation of their responsibilities to this peripheral child and their deterministic acceptance of her fate were “wrong,” but that “among the garbage and the sunflowers of [her] town, it’s much, much, much too late” (164). Morrison’s phrase “my town” perhaps engages with the affirmative vision at the end of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Our Town. First performed in 1938, the piece depicts white American family life in New Hampshire, a purportedly universal representation that has little in common with black life in Lorain in the 1940s. Critics are divided about just how negative the ending of this novel is. Pecola is unequivocally destroyed; as Claudia says, “The damage done was total” (BE 162). And, aside from the experiences of the central victim, the presence of characters such as Mr. Henry (the MacTeers’ lodger, who molests Frieda) creates a picture of a threatening world in which all children are vulnerable to sexual and other violence. It is true that there is a spiritedness about Claudia that is never quashed despite all that she has witnessed, and that gives 22 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison an enduring energy to her account. Moreover, in Morrison’s depiction of the three prostitutes’ kindness to Pecola, or in Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer’s brusque but unconditional care for their daughters, the author affirms the values of love and protection. But the end of Claudia’s prologue foreshadows the mood of the end of the novel itself: “Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seeds shrivelled and died; her baby too” (3). Morrison’s first novel is very possibly her least optimistic in its closing vision. Writing in 1993, Morrison observed that “the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread” (BE afterword 172). Speaking in Charleston in 2008 she said that in the late 1960s the novel was rejected twelve times before being accepted by a press. It is now, however, widely taught (often causing controversy) in schools and colleges across the world. Critics are in agreement about the depth and the sophistication of this short work and have explored many themes there is no space to expand on here, such as the resonances of World War II, the meaning of “home” in AfricanAmerican experience, the ease with which a community scapegoats vulnerable individuals, or the strategic engagement with the classical myths of Demeter and Persephone, and of Tereus and Procne. Perhaps the greatest tribute to this novel, however, occurred in 2006. In Austria, in November of that year, the city of Vienna elected to distribute 100,000 free copies of The Bluest Eye (Sehr Blauen Augen) in its annual “One Town, One Book” event. Morrison was so gratified by the significance of this occasion, occurring sixty-one years after the death of Adolf Hitler, that she made sure she was present at its launch. Sula (1973) Sula is a spare, strange masterpiece. It focuses on a black community who live in “the Bottom,” the hills above a fictional midwestern town called Medallion, through which the Ohio River runs. The action primarily takes place between 1919 and 1941 – from the end of World War I to the year of the U.S. entry into World War II. The final chapter is set in 1965 and depicts one of the two central protagonists, Nel, who is now aged fifty-five, reflecting with nostalgic grief on the past and on the nature and the loss of her friendship with the eponymous character, Sula. Morrison’s choice of Sula as title misleads the unsuspecting reader to brilliant effect. It plays on the expectation that those versed in a European literary tradition bring to the novel: that Sula must be the central character in a bildungsroman named for its primary focus on her. The author subverts this preconception by depicting a network of characters who all play key roles in the Works 23 life of the Bottom: the shellshocked Shadrack; Eva and Hannah Peace (Sula’s grandmother and mother); Nel Greene, her husband, Jude, and her mother, Helene Wright; Mr. Buckland Reed; the alcoholic Tar Baby; the mysterious trio of Deweys; and Sula’s onetime lover, Ajax. While the book is certainly concerned with Sula’s quest for fulfillment, this is by no means its only preoccupation. Through the counterpoint between the title’s implications and the narrative that unfolds, Morrison enacts the complex relationship between individualism and communality that is one of her central concerns. The immediate challenge to European aesthetic convention is also very much to the point: the novel is replete with allusions to traditional West African culture and beliefs. In a 2002 interview Morrison stated that Sula “talks about friendship between women at a time – I was writing it in 1969 – when women and women’s subjects weren’t considered worthy subjects for fiction” (DC 204). In the foreword she reiterates this primary theme, “What is friendship between women when unmediated by men?” (S xi), and explicitly connects the story with her own friendships with other women while living in New York City in 1969, a time of “snatching liberty” (S xiii, xv). But the novel treats countless other themes as well: motherhood; marriage and monogamy; female sexuality; self-knowledge, self-realization, and self-destruction; the relationship between the rational and the irrational, or order and disorder, or purity and impurity; the sterility of binary oppositions; the dangerous and paradoxical nature of freedom; the illogic inherent in the ideology of the American Dream; the ease with which a group scapegoats vulnerable individuals; the decline of community life in black neighborhoods; the persistence of pre- or counter-Enlightenment modes of thought and belief in African-American culture; the continued economic disenfranchisement of black people as the twentieth century progressed – these are just some of the issues that Sula explores. The plot in itself involves an unexplained amputation, a mother’s killing her son through burning him, her daughter’s self-immolation, the drowning of a child, adultery, abandonment, and death by unexplained illness. Yet all is told in prose that is quiet, distilled, uncannily calm and poised. With the exception of one notable passage, Sula is related by a third-person fully omniscient narrative voice that recounts a broadly chronological sequence of events. This relatively simple narrative technique might lead you to expect a novel that is less complex than The Bluest Eye. Do not be deceived. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison performs an illuminating close reading of Sula’s opening section. She highlights the significance of the opposition between the blackberries and the nightshade, of her attempt to encompass “the nostalgia, the history, the nostalgia for the history; the violence done to it and the consequences of that violence” (UTU 25).1 “In that 24 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison place,” the novel begins, “. . . there was once a neighborhood” (S 3): here are conflict, change, and loss. Appropriating the elegiac tone we might associate with novelists such as Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather, Morrison depicts the ravaging effects of “progress” on a pastoral idyll in which lively children used to sit amid pear blossoms and on a vibrant cultural cohesiveness that is symbolized by the pool hall, the beauty parlor, and so on. The folkloric account of the origins of the Bottom – a white farmer’s trick on his freed slave that the black community had turned to the good – itself exemplifies the kind of collective knowledge that would be decimated over time. In 1974, writing about The Black Book, Morrison articulates a perspective on retrospection that is highly relevant to Sula: “The point is not to soak in some warm bath of nostalgia about the good old days – there were none! – but to recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us” (WMM 42; original italics). The prologue to Sula recognizes both those qualities and their loss, while the novel as a whole enacts a rescue of sorts. The book’s first of its eleven dated sections, “1919,” explains how and why Shadrack has come to institute the bizarre and yet logical ritual of National Suicide Day. After his experience of World War I’s trench warfare in France, his posttraumatic stress leaves him first straitjacketed in a psychiatric institution, and then discharged in a state defined by the absences or negatives that Morrison adeptly chronicles throughout her work: “no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock,” and so on (S 12). Detained overnight in a police cell he experiences an unglamorous but pivotal epiphany: he is reassured of his own reality, filled with joy by the “indisputable presence” of “blackness” when he confronts his own “grave black face” reflected in the toilet bowl (S 13). On his return to the Bottom Shadrack assumes the role of neighborhood “crazy,” simultaneously shunned and tolerated. Both the Suicide Day rite that he initiates (to make “a place for fear by controlling it”) and the fact that the townsfolk come to “understand the boundaries and the nature of his madness” indicate a communal acceptance of the irrational that is antithetical to the rationalizing intolerance of Puritan-derived dominant American culture (S 14, 15). Shadrack implicitly functions as a West African priest figure or medicine man, and he and his ritual can be identified with specific divinities and traits in Vodun and Voudoun belief systems and practices.2 His name, meanwhile, may allude to the Biblical Shadrach in Daniel (3.13–30), who refuses to worship a golden image set up by Nebuchadnezzar, is not burned by the flames of the furnace to which he is condemned, and so achieves a respect for his nonconformity and for the god to whom he has remained faithful. Morrison Works 25 has described Shadrack (and his “organized, public madness”) as a “disruptive remembering presence which helps . . . to cement the community, until Sula challenges them” (UTU 27). In the sections of the novel dated “1920” and “1921,” Morrison creates the absolute juxtaposition between the Wright and Peace households, in the context of which the schoolgirls Nel and Sula become best friends. Helene Wright runs an immaculate home, and in the orderliness she imposes on Nel (which includes the pulling of her nose in order to “improve” it) she disowns the “funkiness” of her own childhood in New Orleans, where she was raised by her Catholic Creole grandmother, Cecile, while her mother, Rochelle, worked as a prostitute. The one-legged but magisterial Eva Peace, meanwhile, presides over an expansive “house of many rooms” (S 30), in which Hannah enjoys sex on a daily basis with various menfolk of the Bottom, and that provides a sanctuary for lost souls such as Tar Baby and the three Deweys. We learn of Helene and Nel’s brief reverse migration from Ohio to New Orleans on the death of Cecile, a journey that the former finds deeply traumatic but that initiates the latter’s realization of her own selfhood. We learn of Eva’s abandonment by BoyBoy, and of her struggle and self-sacrifice (even of her own leg) to raise her children in the face of extreme poverty. Her later immolation of the drug-addicted Plum is the first of many outrageous acts in this novel that Morrison describes in minute detail but without explicit moral judgment, thereby challenging dominant conceptions of good and evil. “1922” begins with a wonderful evocation of the burgeoning sexuality of Nel and Sula, now twelve years old. In the quiet but intense small-town atmosphere, walking to buy ice cream or back and forth from school, the girls notice and are noticed by the young (and underemployed) men, “the beautiful, beautiful boys” of the Bottom (S 56). Of their friendship, Morrison writes that “in the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perception of things” (55). While many critics have emphasized the polar opposition of the two characters, Morrison’s own comparison (in an interview) of the pair to a “a Janus’ head” is important because it illuminates their complementariness, their power and completeness as a pair, as well as the conflict to which their different outlooks later give rise (TG 62). Their silent, companionate riverside play, in which their innocence is embodied in the purificatory burial of “small defiling things” (S 59), contrasts sharply with their undisclosed guilt about the accidental drowning of Chicken Little, who (witnessed only by Shadrack) slips out of Sula’s arms as she spins him around. The fact that Sula walks right into Shadrack’s shack, together with his vowing to keep her secret, establishes a connection between this pair. They share a lack of conformity to societal 26 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison norms and are strongly identified with the nonrational, other-worldly occurrences in the neighborhood. Morrison’s detailed account of the restorative ecstatic grieving that Chicken Little’s funeral involves is just one of the ways in which this novel works to counter a repressed and repressive version of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Christianity. The year 1923 is one of troubling omens, painful conversations, and the dramatic denouement of Hannah’s suicide by self-immolation, an act observed but not intervened in by Sula. Unlike the graphically described appearance of Hannah’s burned body, the reason for her self-destruction is never made explicit. It is in this section, however, that we encounter the tripartite matriarchal household of Eva-Hannah-Sula at its most dysfunctional. Echoing the trio of prostitutes in The Bluest Eye and anticipating similar paradigms in Song of Solomon and Beloved, it illustrates the danger of what Morrison has called “the absence of a constructive male presence” (DC 15). While Nel and Jude’s lavish wedding at the end of part I suggests Nel’s own desire for exactly that presence, her emasculated husband’s expectation that “the two of them together would make one Jude” does not bode well for her future (S 83). Sula leaves town in the very middle of the book and on the very evening that Nel’s marriage begins. Part II begins ten years later, in 1937, with Sula’s return to the Bottom. It is significant that we learn neither about the community during her absence, nor anything about her own experiences except that she had been “in college” and had had relationships with various men (S 99; 120). Nel is revitalized by her friend’s return and rejoices in their shared laughter. Her subsequent devastation at finding Sula and Jude having sex, a double betrayal, strikes home because at this moment the narrative voice becomes a first-person monologue, addressed by Nel directly to Jude. Perhaps swayed by this emotive narrative form, readers of Sula commonly express their struggle to identify with Sula when she sleeps with Jude and are dismayed that Morrison’s portrayal of her central character as a promiscuous woman appears to bolster rather than subvert a certain stereotype of black female sexuality. Arguably Sula’s own rationale, that she and Nel “had always shared the affection of other people” (S 119), is not persuasive; for many there is a sharp disparity here between Morrison’s stated intentions and her narrative’s effect. In 1976 Morrison spoke of her wish to make Nel a “warm, conventional woman” whose commitment to her quotidian duties makes her “magnificent” (TG 12–13), yet at this point in the novel she is indubitably more victim than hero. The epigraph to the novel, moreover, which is taken from Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (1951), a comic play about the sexually uninhibited nature of characters in a Gulf Coast Sicilian community, implies a humorous perspective on the female sexual appetite that is entirely missing from Sula. Yet the profoundly unsettling, unacceptable Works 27 nature of Sula’s behavior is surely exactly the author’s point about her “outlaw” status, and about how she is judged by the communities both within and outside the text (DC 230). Morrison introduces the section “1939” with an account of the ways in which the people of the Bottom demonize Sula. They treat her as a defiling presence, blame her for their misfortunes, and alienate her as some kind of witch (without actively persecuting her). Sula purportedly embodies evil when she puts Eva in an old people’s home, sleeps with other women’s husbands, or (“the unforgivable thing”) sleeps with white men (S 112). In a non-European way of managing evil, however, the community “looked at [it] stony-eyed and let it run” (113). Sula’s role – part witch, part scapegoat – paradoxically benefits the community, enabling them to “band together against the devil in their midst” (117–18). This irony reaches its logical conclusion in 1941, when the optimistic community, perceiving Sula’s death to be good news, go on to experience freakish bad weather, a return to their old conflict-ridden ways, and the catastrophe of the collapsing tunnel. Morrison’s depiction of that year’s National Suicide Day march, one of miasmatic “curious disorder” of the “pied piper” parade (S 160; 158), contains elements both of carnival and of a frenzied ritual that is Dionysiac in its part-cathartic and part-destructive nature. Shadrack, unmoored by the death of Sula, presages with his bell the imminent doom of World War II and the Bottom’s ensuing demise. Between the parentheses of the community’s judgments, Morrison presents an alternative view of Sula in a free indirect discourse in which the protagonist is closest to speaking for herself. Morrison develops a character who resists any unified, coherent trajectory and who lives an “experimental life” (S 118). Exposing the aporia at the heart of the American Dream, the author demonstrates that complete freedom such as Sula’s involves freedom from ambition and from responsibility. Whether the character is commendably assertive and self-possessed or regrettably selfish and self-obsessed is a question that remains unanswered. “I want to make myself,” Sula tells Eva (92); “I got my mind,” she tells Nel; “I got me” (143). Desiring neither a family of her own nor economic self-sufficiency, she rejects both of the conventionally accepted routes available to women and yet fails to overcome the final cultural constraint of her gender, race, and class: that of artistic expression and fulfillment. “Like any artist with no art form,” writes Morrison, “she became dangerous” (S 121). The author depicts her temporary sexual satisfaction with another free spirit, Ajax, and his departure, which is precipitated by her own uncharacteristic conversion to marriagelike behavior. Just as there is no single interpretation of the name “Sula,”3 and just as the mark above her eye is variously perceived to be a “stemmed rose” and a “tadpole” (52; 59), the character encompasses a 28 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison multiplicity that Morrison has described as a “complex, contradictory, evasive, independent, liquid modernity” (UTU 26). While Sula presents a challenge to readers, she also challenges Nel. At their sickbed encounter of 1940 there is no tearful reconciliation. Instead, Sula asks Nel a question: “About who was good. How you know it was you?” (146). Rooted in the instability of the distinction between good and evil, and in the fraughtness of making moral judgments, this is a dilemma that Morrison’s novels repeatedly pose. But it is not until 1965, when Eva challenges her about her role in the death of Chicken Little, that Nel allows herself to recollect Sula’s death and lonely burial. The novel ends with her final realization that when she thought she had been missing Jude, she had really been missing her best friend. While some critics interpret her sorrowful cry, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (174), as an expression of unfulfilled lesbian desire, the more commonly held view is that it articulates her pain at realizing the true value of a friendship destroyed so long ago. At its ending, therefore, Sula anticipates Love in its identification between nostalgia for the innocent intimacies of girlhood friendship and a complex sense of the losses that racial integration entailed for black Americans, alongside the gains. Song of Solomon (1977) In October 2008, shortly before being elected president, Barack Obama told a CBS News anchor that Song of Solomon was “one of [his] favorite books.”4 Obama is anything but alone in his admiration for this text: Solomon was published in 1977 to instant critical acclaim. The numerous awards and honors bestowed upon it both at that time and subsequently have established and maintained the stellar reputation of its creator. In its focus on the life stories of a family named Dead, the novel functions on numerous levels simultaneously. It is the narrative of an individual’s self-discovery, an examination of the way gender and class have shaped different versions of African-American experience, a rewriting of American history, and a dialogue with literary and cultural genealogies of American, African, and European provenance. Primarily spanning the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s, its action begins in a fictional lakeside city in Michigan, which makes it the third Morrisonian novel set in the Midwest. But its protagonist, the young man Milkman Dead (officially Macon Dead III), on whom the narrative predominantly focuses, sets out from his birthplace on a quest to find ancestral riches. As his search takes him first to rural Pennsylvania and then to rural Virginia, so the novel becomes at once epic and mock-epic in scope. Works 29 This is a novel about the black struggles for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and about the violence and the intra- as well as interracial conflicts that those processes entailed. Its cinematic sweep also takes in the depression, black migration, the abuses of the Reconstruction era, and slavery itself. Defining both the work’s historical reach and Milkman’s quest is the folk memory of Solomon (also known as Shalimar), Milkman’s great-grandfather, who flew back to Africa and gains legendary status in the children’s rhyme to which the novel’s title alludes. The quasi-myth of Solomon is just one example of the importance of African cultural practices, beliefs, and ways of knowing; this inheritance is also embodied in the character of Pilate, the sister (and antithesis) of Milkman’s father, Macon Dead II. Milkman’s discoveries about his father (a ruthless landlord, abusive husband, and authoritarian parent), his aunt (an unmaterialistic, infinitely loving woman endowed with special powers), and his ancestry as a whole, become a parable of sorts: about self-awareness and homecoming, and about the importance of African-Americans’ uncovering and laying claim to their past. Morrison consistently subverts her own parable-like narrative through her focus on the many failings and all-too-realistic foibles of her central characters. Demonstrating once again the inseparability of the personal and the political through the tyrannical Macon, the self-centered Milkman, and his sometime companion, the radical Guitar, Morrison explores patriarchy, the nature of male friendship, and the viability of a nonpatriarchal black masculinity in the struggle for civil rights. At the same time through Ruth Dead (Milkman’s mother); I Corinthians and Magdalena (Milkman’s sisters); Pilate’s daughter, Reba; and Reba’s daughter, Hagar, the author examines motherhood, siblinghood, and the nature of unfulfilled female ambition and sexual desire. Milkman’s flight at the novel’s ending – indeterminate in mood and ambiguous in meaning – epitomizes the unresolved tensions that its author begins to dramatize on its very first page. Morrison explores the relationship between heroism and antiheroism, between the tragic and the comic, between myth and reality (or legend and history), between prophetic vision and the often-unpalatable wisdom of hindsight, and between triumph and defeat. Michigan The first and longer of Song of Solomon’s two parts opens with the somewhat mysterious account of a promise by one Robert Smith that, on an appointed day and time, he will “fly away on [his] own wings” (3). Smith’s attempt at flight ends in a very public suicide, and its possible motive is not revealed until we learn from Guitar that this man was an erstwhile member of the violent 30 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison activist group the Seven Days, who perpetrate retributive attacks in the name of “justice” against white murderers of blacks. It cannot be a coincidence, however, that the date of this character’s ill-fated flight – “18th of February, 1931” [sic] is the birth date of Morrison herself (3). The fact that Milkman is born one day later, therefore, means that his age in relation to the historical events contextualizing his life exactly mirrors Morrison’s own. Equally significant in terms of the author’s personal relationship to this novel must be its first dedication, “Daddy” (v), and her explicit assertion that this novel’s “radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one” is attributable to the ways she was affected by the loss of her father, who died in 1975 (SoS x). “I can’t tell you how I felt when my father died,” she writes in “The Site of Memory” (1987), “but I was able to write Song of Solomon and imagine, not him, and not his specific interior life, but the world that he inhabited and the private or interior life of the people in it” (WMM 73). You may recall that the author’s maternal grandfather (with whom she shared her childhood home) was named John Solomon Willis; this side of the family not only had Native American ancestry but were also subjected to unscrupulous dispossession from land in Alabama, in 1910.5 Song of Solomon, then, exemplifies Morrison’s own assertion that “the act of imagination is bound up with memory,” but that at the same time “only the act of the imagination” can provide “total access to the unwritten interior life of these people” (WMM 71; 77). From the outset, this novel draws our attention to its striking names, obliging us to decode and /or appreciate their significance. We encounter “Mercy” (a hospital as well as a recurring theme, for example, in Pilate’s refrain at Hagar’s funeral that anticipates A Mercy), “Not Doctor Street” (the black community’s subversive label for Mains Avenue), and “Guitar” (which might as well be “Welsh” to the officious nurse who hears it (7)). Before we learn Milkman’s official name (Macon Dead III), we discover that “Milkman” is a nickname given by the janitor, Freddie, who espies Ruth nursing him well past babyhood. By the end of the first chapter we are apprised of the invested nature of the naming process in the Dead family: Macon I was renamed thus by a “drunken Yankee” soldier who messed up his Freedman’s Bureau registration form, while Pilate’s “Christ-killing” name was chosen from the Bible by his father, who was illiterate but saw something “princely but protective” in those letters (18–19). While Macon II perceives a “monumental foolishness” in the way his family is named (15), Pilate carries the written form of her much-valued name in a box hanging from her ear. The narrative sympathy in the novel as a whole endorses this character’s belief in the importance of the act or the process of naming. In a world where “white people name Negroes like race horses” (243), as Guitar explains, Works 31 “Niggers get their names the way they get everything else – the best way they can” (88). Toward Solomon’s end, through Milkman’s musings on the Greyhound bus, Morrison riffs fabulously on the storied and powerful nature of African-American names. She compiles an exuberant list of “names . . . got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weakness. Names that bore witness” (331). As it was for Adam in the book of Genesis, to name something is to exert authority over it. The act of naming, therefore, is of supreme importance in the context of the African-American struggle for a viable identity, for power and rights that equal those of whites, and for the effective articulation of those struggles. In the yearning of Milkman’s father, Macon, for “some ancestor . . . who had a name that was real” (SoS 17) lies a yearning for a heroic past or pedigree. As he grows into manhood Milkman looks for the same and seeks a heroic future for himself as well. Many critics have discussed Morrison’s subversion of the conventions of both the bildungsroman and the epic genre through her protagonist’s faltering and error-strewn search for identity and fulfilment. Her foreword is illuminating here: though she charts a conventional chronology in this book (following the story of Milkman’s life from his birth to his death, sketching out the past only through characters’ recollections rather than through direct depictions of different periods), the novel is “old-school heroic, but with other meanings” (SoS x). As numerous critics have observed, Morrison positions Milkman in a contrapuntal relationship to a range of archetypal heroes: the African-American escaped slave (who either flies back to Africa or creates a successful life in the free North), the American self-made hero epitomized in the novels of Horatio Alger, the wandering Homeric Odysseus or Ulysses (and all his subsequent literary configurations), the biblical Moses, and the tragic Oedipus, whose realizations about the truth of his life lead to his blindness and exile. Milkman’s path to enlightenment is not a process of steadily increasing revelation and self-knowledge, but rather a series of fits and starts, lapses and epiphanies. Each of his attempts to secure wealth and personal advancement results in a humiliating setback – he is arrested in his hometown, he ruins his clothes in the cave outside Danville, he is attacked in Shalimar – and his self-centered quest comes at an irreparable cost to his sisters, to Hagar, and to Pilate. In configuring this blundering, self-important but self-unseeing character, Morrison often deploys a free indirect discourse that gives us insights into the workings of his mind in a tone characterized by ironic, critical detachment. This contributes to readers’ struggle to like or identify with Milkman, and in a further irony the glamorous and worldly-wise Guitar holds a much more instant appeal despite the violent crimes that he perpetrates. Morrison’s ambivalent 32 The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison casting of her protagonist questions the nature of black masculinity, the relevance of the Western heroic tradition to the specificity of African-American experience, and dominant conceptions of heroism itself. Morrison declared in a 1992 interview that in the scene where Milkman walks alone against the flow of the crowd she “used an Edvard Munch painting almost literally” (WMM 84). This painting is presumably Evening on Karl Johan Street of 1892, which in its juxtaposition of an isolated individual walking against a ghostlike crowd epitomizes a modernist sense of isolation and alienation. But Morrison is skeptical both about the ideology of individualism, a sacred tenet of dominant American culture, and about modernism’s preoccupation with the angst-ridden self. Milkman’s unforgettable line to Guitar after news of the death of Emmett Till (in 1955; see Chapter 2, “Other Creative Work”), “Fuck Till, I’m the one in trouble” (88), positions his existential angst in ironic relation to the political realities of the moment. The men’s conversations in Tommy’s Barbershop bear witness to decades of black exploitation and oppression – in both world wars, in the South, and ongoing in the North – about which Milkman is unashamedly unexercised. The author suggests that the protagonist’s indifference to the nature of America’s past and present is allied to his ignorance about his ancestry, and his political education begins with his piecemeal discoveries about the past experiences of Macon and Pilate. Through the backstories of Milkman’s father and aunt, Morrison testifies to the necessity of what she calls, in her memorably entitled essay on the subject, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984). It is hard for both Milkman and readers to believe that his outwardly successful, materially obsessed father is the brother of Pilate, whom the boy has been taught to regard as “ugly, dirty, poor, drunk” (SoS 36). In the second chapter, Milkman is privy to these characters’ contrasting perspectives on a shared past, and on the contrasting trajectories to which that past has given rise. Macon’s ruthlessness is partly explained by his experiences of working his father’s land since he was “four or five,” of witnessing both his father’s self-made agricultural success and his murder at the hands of land-stealing whites (51). Pilate, by contrast, focuses on the people in her past: she recollects her mother, who died bearing her; her father, whose violent death she recalls in graphic detail; and Macon, who used to be the model of protective fraternal concern. The early scene in which the now-contemptuous Macon peers voyeuristically through the window at Pilate, Reba, and Hagar – at their singing, the atmosphere of spontaneity in their household, and Pilate’s wine making – clarifies his role as the embodiment of a repressive rationality and his sister’s as the embodiment of a nonrational, pre-Enlightenment spirituality. Mysteriously born with no navel, Pilate has a strikingly “African” face (54), Works 33 is a “natural healer” (150), and practices traditional magic. She is receptive to beneficent visits by the spirit of her father, and as herself an ancestor figure she is fiercely protective of her family, even when this involves a performance of shape-shifting obsequiousness in order to secure the release from police custody of the treacherous Milkman and Guitar. Pilate also functions as a foil to Milkman: Morrison configures the account of her past with a notable absence of ironic detachment or authorial critical distance. Her wanderings and migrant labors with her geography book, told as one uninterrupted narrative, testify to her wit and resilience. The story of her life functions as the true heroic odyssey in the novel, against which Milkman and his deeply flawed stumblings are measured and fall almost comically short. Morrison also devotes considerable attention to the lives of numerous other women in the text. Through Ruth Dead – devout daughter, unloved and oppressed wife, unrespected mother – the novel explores a simultaneous complicity in and resistance to abuse at male hands. Through Corinthians and Magdalena, meanwhile, Morrison dramatizes the economic reality that domestic work remained the only viable form of employment opportunity for many woman of color in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the promises that upward mobility and college education appeared to hold out. Milkman’s unfounded contempt for the women in his family is trumped only by his shoddy treatment of his cousin and erstwhile-lover, Hagar. Through this young woman’s crazed and violent response