Adapting the Sermon: The Anxieties of Literary Preaching in the Bluest Eye

Abstract

This essay argues that the oppositions that structure the first of Toni Morrison’s many scenes of literary preaching, Soaphead Church’s epistolary sermon, reveal Morrison’s ambivalence about the role that literary preaching might play in her fiction, what adapting the sermon suggests about her vocational identity, and the relationship of her narrative to this performance genre. The novel’s anxious engagement with literary preaching culminates with Morrison’s second adaptation of the sermon in the novel: Claudia MacTeer’s sermon, a sermon that simultaneously echoes and counters Church’s sermon. I argue that we should understand these interlocking performances as inaugural, trajectory-setting, and nettlesome engagements with the performance genre that Morrison identifies as one of the central cultural touchstones that resurfaces throughout her fiction. With her initial, anxiety-ridden foray into literary preaching, Morrison adapts and narrativizes the sermon, signifies on her literary predecessors’ engagements with literary preaching, and introduces a problematic relationship to a cultural form that shapes her oeuvre.