Toni Morrison's Fiction

Revised and Expanded Edition

Jan Furman, Linda Wagner-Martin

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611173673
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other.

As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination.

Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society.

In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Toni Morrison

In a writing life that spans more than four decades, Toni Morrison has produced ten novels, a significant book of literary criticism, two plays, two edited essay volumes on sociopolitical themes, a libretto, lyrics for two productions of song cycles performed by the American operatic soprano Jessye Norman and another song collection performed by the American soprano Kathleen Battle. She has coauthored nine children’s books, published numerous essays on literature and culture, and played an international role in supporting and encouraging art and artists. Morrison is also a poet and public intellectual.¹ Hers is the “dancing mind,” a term Morrison uses to describe “the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open mind . . . most often in the reading/writing world we live in.”²

The metaphor of an enlightened mind in dance form is taken from Morrison’s acceptance speech for the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 1996 National Book Awards. In her talk, Morrison recalled an encounter with a writer in Strasbourg, Germany, where they were both attending a meeting of the Parliament of Writers. At the end of one symposium, the writer approached Morrison with an impassioned plea for help. “They are shooting us [women writers] down in the street,” she said. “You must help. . . . There isn’t anybody else.”³ Morrison offered the story as a cautionary note for her audience and to insist in that particularly relevant setting that the writing/reading space must be free, “that no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency . . . [should] interfere with what gets written or published.”⁴ Language is agency for Morrison, and she champions its role in shaping creative possibilities.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931. The name Toni and its origin are the subject of some conjecture.⁵ Morrison has said she changed her name in college because people found Chloe difficult to pronounce; as a “nickname” she adopted a version of St. Anthony, her baptismal name. When her first book was published, Morrison notes that she “called the publisher to say I put the wrong name. But it was too late. [The book] had already gone to the Library of Congress.”⁶ She adds that “Chloe is my sister’s sister. She is my niece’s aunt. She is a girl I know and private. It pleases me to have these two names. . . . It’s useful for me. Toni Morrison is a kind of invention. A nice invention.”⁷

Morrison grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a Lake Erie town of about forty-five thousand people,⁸ with her parents, George and Ramah Wofford, an older sister, and two younger brothers. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University but revisits community as she experienced it growing up by locating many of her stories in Ohio and other parts of the Midwest. In 1953 she earned a B.A. in English at Howard and two years later an M.A. from Cornell University. After Cornell, Morrison went to Houston, where for two years she taught English at Texas Southern University before returning to Howard as an instructor (1957–64). During this seven-year interim she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican-born architect and fellow faculty member. They had two sons, Harold Ford and Kevin Slade, before the marriage ended in divorce, in 1964, and Morrison moved to New York.⁹ She worked there for a year as an editor at the textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse before going to its trade division in New York City, where she remained until 1983. As senior editor at Random House, Morrison nourished the careers of several writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas.

Morrison’s literary honors include both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon (1977). Beloved (1987) won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and in 2006 was selected by the New York Times Book Review as the best novel of the preceding twenty-five years. For her collective achievements Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. In its statement the Swedish Academy praised her as one who, “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”¹⁰ In 2012 President Barack Obama, celebrating Morrison as having “had an amazing impact on the world through her talent for writing books that touch us to our core,” awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Morrison has taught part-time at Yale University; the State University of New York, Purchase; Rutgers University; and Bard College. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York, Albany. And from 1989 to 2006 she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. A 1980 appointment to President Jimmy Carter’s National Council of the Arts was followed a year later by election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Morrison has served as the curator for art exhibitions in New York and Paris, and she has presented her ideas in a variety of lectureships, including the Robert C. Tanner Lecture series at the University of Michigan (1988); the Massey Lectures at Harvard University (1990); the Condorcet Lecture, College de France (1994); the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Jefferson Lectureship (1996); the United Nations Secretary-General’s Lecture Series (2002); and the Amnesty International Lecture series (2012).¹¹ In 1992 Morrison became a founding member (collaborating with nine other Nobel Prize winners in various categories from peace to medicine to literature) of the Académie Universelle des Cultures. Founded by François Mitterrand, then president of France, and chaired by Elie Wiesel, the academy was conceived as a continuing and highly visible colloquy on global matters of intellectual freedom.

These achievements notwithstanding, Morrison’s work has not always been received well by critics and readers. The Bluest Eye (1970), her first novel, was out of print by 1974, four years after its publication. (It has since been reprinted.) And before it won the Pulitzer, Beloved failed to win the National Book Award in 1987 as many expected. In protest forty-eight black writers published a letter in a New York Times advertisement suggesting that Morrison had been treated unjustly. Although her work has garnered praise in academic quarters, that praise has been qualified by those critics who have called her prose florid and self-indulgent¹² and by some readers who disparage a challenging style of narrative.

Morrison admits that she reads reviews of her books, but she says they do not determine the direction of her work, which is informed only by her experience as a woman and African American and by the ancient stories of African American community. Unfavorable commentary on her novels often, Morrison asserts, “evolve[s] out of [a lack of understanding] of the culture, the world, the given quality out of which I write.”¹³ Morrison measures success not by the estimates of her critics but rather by how well her books evoke the rhythms and cosmology of her people. “If anything I do,” she says, “in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything.”¹⁴

Most of Morrison’s readers seem to agree; her book sales have been in the millions, aided, no doubt, by Oprah Winfrey’s selection of The Bluest Eye, Sula (1975), Song of Solomon, and Paradise (1998) for her book club. In this and other populist cultural formats, Morrison’s historical narratives have spawned a complex and, often, thoughtful national conversation about the black experience of humanity in America. And, in a different, haute aesthetic forum, her fiction and literary criticism have contributed to an expansion and redefinition of the American literary canon. At work on her eleventh novel, Toni Morrison lives in Grand View-on-Hudson in Rockland County, New York.

Morrison’s fiction is both historical and timeless: settings and plots evoke periods of American history, collectively unfolding over decades as the eloquent, coherent rendering of an African American epic. The ten novels, although not consecutively, span three centuries, beginning with the back story of seventeenth-century pre-Enlightenment colonization and settlement and ending during the mid-1990s in postintegration America. In between, Morrison examines the black experience during slavery and Reconstruction, through modernity and the Jazz Age, at midcentury and in the Jim Crow period, and the two decades of civil protest that followed. Individually, however, Morrison’s books derive their power and meaning from particular stories of human obsession and survival. Characters, while contextualized by historical settings and plots, develop from the perverse conditions of their archetypal humanness. For these characters, Morrison is especially interested in the life-defining journey, the coming-of-age enterprise as men and women inhabit a conventional social space within community but also the outlaw space beyond.

Morrison has said that she writes the kind of books she wants to read, suggesting that she chooses subjects that interest her and not necessarily subjects that are popular with readers and publishers. Sociology, polemics, explanation, faddish themes do not concern Morrison, who is aiming to express a cultural legacy. She wants her novels to have an oral, effortless quality, evoking the tribal storytelling tradition of the African griot, who recites the legendary events of generations. Her characters, too, should have a special essence: they should be ancestral and enduring. In pursuing this personal, artistic vision, Morrison creates extraordinary tales of human experience that a less independent writer would perhaps not attempt. This is not to suggest that the only impetus for Morrison’s fiction is self-gratification. Such an assertion would ignore a vital dimension of her accomplishment: enlightening her readers about themselves. In this context, Morrison’s novels are not just art for art’s sake; they are political as well. In fact, “the best art is political,” she says, not in the pejorative meaning of political as haranguing, but as deliberately provocative.¹⁵ Morrison rejects the dichotomy between art and politics, insisting that art can be “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”¹⁶ She is careful to say that “I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams.”¹⁷ Instead, her novels are instruments for transmitting cultural knowledge, filling a void once occupied by storytelling. They replace “those classical, mythological, archetypal stories that we heard years ago.”¹⁸ She believes in the artist’s measure of responsibility for engendering cultural coherence and cohesion by retrieving and interpreting the past—what she calls “bear[ing] witness.”¹⁹ That responsibility largely informs her literary aesthetic.

Morrison’s chief strategy for achieving this goal is to integrate life and art by anchoring her fiction in the folkways that echo the rhythms of African American communal life. Her women get together in kitchens to talk about husbands and children. They do each other’s hair, and they exorcise each other’s demons. Her men walk the streets of Michigan and New York, congregate in pool halls, argue in barber shops, hunt possum in rural Virginia. Her stories encode myths about flying Africans and tales of tar babies. As Trudier Harris demonstrates in a classic study, Morrison thoroughly integrates folk patterns into her fiction. “Instead of simply including isolated items of folklore, she manages to simulate the ethos of folk communities, to saturate her novels with a folk aura intrinsic to the texturing of the whole.”²⁰ This pervasive incorporation of folk materials explains why Morrison strums such deeply satisfying chords of familiarity for many readers. Indeed, Morrison’s work is “genuinely” representative of the folk. She shuns what she labels “the separate, isolated ivory tower voice” of the artist.²¹ The (black) artist, for Morrison, “is not a solitary person who has no responsibility to the community.”²²

Morrison identifies with her readers and labors to achieve intimacy with them. She invites readers to share in the creative process, to work with her in constructing meaning in her books. She is the black preacher who, as she puts it, “requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify.”²³ And, like black music her stories should, Morrison continues, solicit a dynamic response. By avoiding defining adverbs and by allowing the reader to interpret character and incident, Morrison encourages participatory reading. There are, for example, no explicitly detailed sexual scenes in her work. As she says, she aims “to describe sexual scenes in such a way that they are not clinical, not even explicit—so that the reader brings his own sexuality to the scene and thereby participates in it in a very personal way. And owns it.”²⁴

This approach, of course, reflects any good writer’s understanding of the necessary subtlety of imaginative writing and the reader’s work of interpreting meaning. But Morrison’s studied effort to elicit the reader’s participation suggests a not-so-subtle emphasis upon the special relationship she shares with her audience. As storyteller she is bound to authentically represent experience as readers know it and to encourage their confirmation of and involvement in that representation.

As satisfying as this collaboration may be for the reader, it is just as challenging, because Morrison’s work is not predictable. While her language, metaphors, settings, and themes evoke the familiar and the timeless, her characters seldom reinforce the reader’s expectations—not because they are unrealistic but because they often depict a reality that is too distressing to consider. Morrison’s characters (and her readers with them) are brought to the edge of endurance and then asked to endure more; sometimes they crack. Under these conditio...