Literature Reads Theory: Remarks on Teaching with Toni Morrison

Abstract

Teaching and writing about fiction often involve looking for the right theoretical work to juxtapose with and clarify the literary text. When I first began to work on Toni Morrison's novels, I was motivated, and often frustrated, by the question of which theoretical approach would do justice to Morrison's texts. Beloved's representation of what was both underrepresented and ultimately unrepresentable in the not-yet-verbal child's story and in the story of mother and child together seemed to call upon the feminist revisions of psychoanalytic narratives and categories that I was theoretically drawn towards. Yet Morrison's 'subject' (both in the sense of subject matter and in reference to Beloved herself) was also decidedly historical, even as this historicity paradoxically refused to be assigned to the past: it demanded a place; it could occupy no one place, as it happened again and again; this was history as trauma. Certainly the specificity of this story could not or should not take second place. I have now had the opportunity to teach Morrison's work in a range of contexts: in contemporary American literature courses, in American survey courses, in courses on women writers, and in a course on the African- American novel. Every context works surprisingly well, although Morri- son's writing always seems to call for more or other contexts, and I frequently find myself invoking precisely the context that does not frame the course I'm presently engaged in teaching. But what has surprised me the most is how often I turn to Morrison's writing when it is not even on the syllabus. And that is what I want to address in the following pages. By examining how Toni Morrison's work can be used in teaching literary and psychoanalytic theory, I propose to turn the relation between enigmatic text and theoretical elucidation on its head. I want to look at how Morri- son's texts (particularly 'Recitatif,' Sula, and Beloved) can complicate and enrich classroom discussion of (among others) Ferdinand de Saussure, the Russian Formalists, Louis Althusser, Freud, and Lacan. From the logic of signification to the formation and fragmentation of the subject to the enigmas of traumatic repetition, Morrison's fictions both 'know' and challenge what literary theory has to offer us. Beginning a course on contemporary literary theory, my students read (not surprisingly) selections from Saussure's Course on General Linguistics. We discuss, among other things, how a Saussurean account of language differs from a model of language as Adamic naming. Saussure suggests