Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt Milo Obourn (bio) Jean Wyatt. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels. U of Georgia P, 2017. xii+, 248 pp. ISBN: 978-08-20-35060-8 (HB); ISBN: 978-08-20-35059-2 (epub). $74.95 "In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change." Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" (53) Although not referenced directly, I could not help thinking of Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" while reading Jean Wyatt's Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, a book of insightful literary criticism that reads Toni Morrison's narrative choices as a set of ethics in relation to the concept of love–or, as Lorde might put it, a politics of the erotic. Wyatt's book interweaves close readings of Morrison's narrative style with arguments about race, gender, power, narrative form, psychoanalysis, authorial ethics, contemporary modes of accessing the traumas of US slavery, reader responsibility, and Morrison's personal growth as a widely influential writer and thinker. Following Wyatt's lead, we might come to understand one of Morrison's central creative projects as examining the ways in which our world can be truly different by reclaiming and reinventing a love that has been taken from African American people through a traumatic history of slavery and its systemic repercussions. As Lorde states, the "word erotic comes from the Greek eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony" (55). When Wyatt puts love at the center of her reading of Morrison's narrative ethics, she highlights that in order to love well, to love ethically, to love without recreating the cycle of trauma, one must love creatively and without a fixed idea of what love is. Wyatt shows how Morrison draws the reader into this understanding of love through experimental stylistic techniques that engage "reader[s] in a [End Page 132] dialogue between [their] ethical convictions and the structures of the text that call them into question" (16). Wyatt provides us with a timeline that contextualizes her focus on Morrison's later novels, claiming that, "Beloved represents a radical shift to more experimental narrative forms" (7). These forms are not experimental simply for the sake of newness; rather, they carry an ethical weight. Wyatt defines her use of "ethical" here as a way to "evoke the narrative techniques through which these later texts implicate the reader, often by drawing out a reader's preconceptions about love, race, and gender—and then inducing their reader to rethink and reevaluate those ideas" (2). This ethics creates not only a certain kind of reader response but what I would call a reader responsibility, in which readers are co-creators in the meaning of the narrative and thus their belief systems are implicated in constructing the text and also challenged by the texts' multiple perspectives and challenges to any one way of knowing. Love appears, in Wyatt's readings of Morrison, as the thematic glue that connects Morrison's treatment of race and gender across her work. In its most radical form, it becomes a kind of ethics that keeps one in a constant mode of creativity, forever rethinking dominant narratives and reinventing places for oneself in which one can not only survive historical and personal traumas, but also discover rich interpersonal and communal ways of thriving. Wyatt posits that love in Morrison can reflect the cycle of trauma—that is, one can love unethically or violently. However, she also suggests that love in Morrison can take on the role of challenging the cultural effects of shared traumas to African American bodyminds and can offer ways to play outside of or in creative relation to the dissonance created by the shared traumas that have stunted understandings of love and reproduced violent power dynamics. Wyatt deftly employs a psychoanalytic lens to draw connections between love and narrative form. Psychoanalysis is an appropriate tool given its concerns with...