Morrison's Work Research Articles

Beyond the "Literary Habit": Oral Tradition and Jazz in Beloved

The number and variety of responses to Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved are ample testimony to Morrison's ability to move her readers, to involve them and make them (as she claims) of the creative process (Bonetti). In re visioning slave history through the story of Sethe, a woman who is haunted both by her past as a slave and by the violence she is driven to as a result of that past, Morrison has created her most complex and (with perhaps the exception of Tar Baby) most controversial work to date. The controversy stems in part from the power of the subject matter and the frankness with which Morrison addresses it, in part from the mystery surrounding the title character--an example of the deliberate ambiguity that has delighted and frustrated Morrison's readers throughout her career. Perhaps even more powerful than the story Morrison tells, however (and more potentially disturbing, for some readers), is the way she tells it, the innovative choices she makes that have driven many critics to find a new generic or structural model for their interpretations. In a 1983 interview with Kay Bonetti, Morrison talks about her struggle to write a new kind of novel: I wanted...the books...to have an effortlessness and an artlessness, and a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound.... And the closest I came, I think, to finding it was in some books written by Africans, novels that were loose...the kind that people could call unstructured because they were circular, and because they sounded like somebody was telling you a story. Yet you knew it was nothing simple, as simple as that--it was intricate.... I wanted the sound to be something I felt was spoken and more oral and less print. In responding to the charges of ambiguity levelled against her work, Morrison aligns her fictional craft with that of the musician: I don't want them [the novels] to be unsatisfying, and some people do find it wholly unsatisfying, but I think that's the habit, the literary habit, of having certain kinds of endings. Although we don't expect a poem to end that way, you know, or even doesn't end that way, certain kinds of music. There's always something tasty in your mouth when you hear blues, there's always something left over with jazz, because it's on edge, and you're never satisfied, you're always a little hungry. (Bonetti) Morrison's equation of her art with both and storytelling suggests that, as critics, we must come to her work with a new set of assumptions, based not on what Morrison calls the traditional pyramid form (with rising action, climax, denouement, etc.) but on forms arising from the oral tradition, in which song and story intertwine and are often inseparable. Anthony J. Berret, in a far-ranging discussion of the earlier novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, asserts Morrison's dependence on music as a model for her writing (268), and suggests that jazz in particular is central to Morrison's work. Other critics and reviewers note the lyrical quality of Morrison's prose as well, and if we are to find a way to deal with those elements of Morrison's fiction viewed by some readers as critical problems (her ambiguity, her loose, even fragmented narrative structure, her endless repetition of themes, images, whole stories), it seems obvious that is an appropriate, if not the most appropriate, critical tool. While Judith Thurman's operatic perspective is a useful one, jazz is an even more revealing lens through which to view Beloved, in combination with the precepts of the oral tradition of performance from which jazz derives (see Stearns, among others). One element of Morrison's narrative style that may prove problematic for readers of Beloved is the way in which, while maintaining an omniscient point of view, Morrison shifts the narrative perspective from the consciousness of one character to that of another. …

Beloved: A Spiritual

The literary and linguistic devices which can facilitate the revision of the historical and cultural texts of black women's experiences have perhaps their most sustained illustration in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Here, narrative structures have been consciously manipulated through a complicated interplay between the implicit orature of recovered and (re)membered events and the explicit structures of literature. The reclamation and revision of history function as both a thematic emphasis and textual methodology. The persistence of this revision is the significant strategic device of the narrative structures of the novel. Myth dominates the text. Not only has Morrison's reclamation of this story from the scores of people who interviewed Margaret Garner shortly after she killed her child in 1855 constituted an act of recovery, it has accomplished a mythic revisioning as well. Morrison refused to do any further research on Margaret Garner beyond her reviewing of the magazine article that recounted the astonishment of the preachers and journalists who found her to be calm . .. very serene after murdering her child (Rothstein). The imagination that restructures the initial article Morrison read into her novel Beloved is the imagination of a myth-maker. The mythological dimensions of her story, those that recall her earlier texts, that rediscover the altered universe of the black diaspora, that challenge the Western valuations of time and event (place and space) are those that, in various quantities in other black women writers and in sustained quantities in Morrison's works, allow a critical theory of text to emerge.1 Morrison revisions a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged. It is in the coalescence of the known and unknown elements of slavery-the events, miniscule in significance to the captors but major disruptions of black folks' experience in nurturing and loving and being-where Morrison's reconstruction of the historical text of slavery occurs. Morrison's reformulation propels a backlog of memories headlong into a postemancipation community that has been nearly spiritually incapacitated by the trauma of slavery. For Morrison's novel, what complicates the physical and psychic anguish is the reality that slavery itself defies traditional historiography. The victim's own chronicles of these events were systematically submerged, ignored, mistrusted, or superceded by historians of the era. This novel positions the consequences of

"Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" The Politics of Form in "The Bluest Eye"

Deborah McDowell introduces her recent essay on Sula with the following quotation from Henry James: What shall we call our 'Self'? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us. My own epigraph-her concluding sentence in that same essay-reworks James's concern with self and overflow so as to highlight the mingled awe and anxiety which Toni Morrison's writing tends to elicit. McDowell's emphasis on the mediation of knowledge touches on what is at once inspirational and unsettling in Morrison's work: the verbal abundance in which this writing glories is tinged with scepticism. Its overflow touches off a feeling that meanings are unstable, at once elusive and in formation. In part, this effect concerns the readerly stance of Morrison's writing (in Barthes's sense), in that her self-reflexive narration refracts and defers meanings. In part it also concerns political issues-notably racial and sexual. In this respect, the issues of which McDowell identifies as operating in Sula are political, not just literary or personal. Difference, it turns out, is a site of struggle which involves the material as well as theoretical consequences of ideology. This converging of in its linguistic-philosophical sense (i.e. Derrida's endlessly displaced meanings) and difference as a political reading of abusively inegalitarian social institutions underlies the following discussion. On the one hand, Morrison's writing invokes a modernist concern with language, epistemology, and the constructed nature of art. In this respect, the ineffable quality Nelly McKay admires in her prose is not unrelated to the luminous evanescence that haunts the pages of Conrad and Faulkner, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. Morrison, like them, foregrounds narrative indirection, and for her, too, this is traceable to yearnings checked by prohibition and to a will to utter checked by doubt. At the same time, McKay is right to set Morrison apart from the modernist tradition. As she notes, the ineffable quality of Morrison's writing is politically and culturally inflected through a specifically Afro-American tradition. The yearnings Morrison articulates and the prohibitions she faces are inscribed racially, as are the expressive modes she adapts from Afro-American oral, narrative, and musical traditions, notably women's

The Crime of Innocence in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

THE CRIME OF INNOCENCE IN TONI MORRISON'S TAR BABY Terry Otten* In Toni Morrison's fictional world no greater crime exists than innocence, for she understands well what the romantics learned long ago, that in a culture run by an oppressive order not to sin perpetuates an immoral justice. In such a world innocence is itself a sign of guilt because it signals a degenerate acquiescence. Not to fall becomes more destructive than to fall. Morrison's novels are peopled with conventionally evil characters, outsiders in a decadent, white-dominated culture, Cains and Liliths in the guise of Cholly Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) or SuIa [SuIa) or Guitar {Song of Solomon) or Son (Tar Baby). Ambiguous figures—on one hand characters of extreme violence and cruelty and, on the other hand, rebels against a morally deficient system—each of these suggest that evil can be redemptive and that goodness can be enslaving. In the language5 of existential theology, those who sin against the flawed order become the agents of experience and so run the risk of freedom. Those who do not are often doomed to moral entropy. Morrison herself has remarked that "evil is as useful as good" and "sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good."1 Yet Morrison's fictions are not simplistic polemics on the viciousness generated by a white society, though to be sure she unreservedly indicts the materialistic white culture and severely judges those blacks who adopt its values. Morrison's work exceeds mere invective. At their most profound level, the novels penetrate the characters themselves, exposing their own capacity for cowardice. Rather than sympathetic victims, they become responsible for their own actions and inactions. In all her major novels the fall from innocence becomes a necessary gesture of freedom and a profound act of self-awareness. It assumes the nature of a potentially tragic action, a paradoxical victory and defeat. In one way or another each work describes a fall wrought with anguish and destructive power but morally superior to a prolonged state of self-ignorance and sterile accommodation. Of course, the theme of the Fall has been part of American literature from the Puritan age. As critics have long suggested, man's depraved spiritual condition has been an essential concern in writers from Na- *Terry Otten is Chairman of the Department of English at Wittenberg University. He is the author of The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth-Century England (1972), After Innocence: Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature (1982), and more than a score of articles in scholarly journals. He is currently working on a study of the relationship between tragedy and serious melodrama in post-Romantic literature. 154Terry Otten thaniel Hawthorne to Herman Melville to Edgar Allen Poe to Henry James, Eugene O'Neill, and James Dickey. Studies such as Robert Spiller 's The Cycle of American Literature (1955), R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam (1955), Sacvan Bercovitch's The Puritan Origins ofthe American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978), and, most recently, William Shurr's Rappiccini's Daughters (1981) have explored the persistence and variation of the Fall and related themes in recent as well as early literature. In adapting and modifying the traditional Fall pattern to fit her conception of the black experience in contemporary society, Morrison does not restrict so much as enlarge the scope of her vision, accommodating the particular features of American black culture while maintaining a universal mythic perspective. In particular, her novels mirror the realization R. W. B. Lewis attributes to Henry James, the recognition that Adam "had to fall, had to pass beyond childhood in an encounter with 'Evil,' had to mature by virtue of the destruction of his own egoism."2 Morrison applies this "fortunate fall" idea through characters who must violate the prescribed conditions of a white society, must destroy the false identity ascribed them as blacks in a spurious "garden" to achieve wholeness and self-consciousness. Those co-opted by the system, such as Pauline Breedlove or Helene Wright or Ruth Dead, or those victimized by it, such as Pecóla Breedlove, endure unredeemable defeat. Only those courageous and strong enough...

Remembering Our Foremother:

In this essay we examine the significance and meaning of novelist Toni Morrison's works in terms of American culture, literary originality, Black faminism and women's spirituality. Our essay also exemplifies and examines some differences between a white female's and a Black female's response to specific patterns in Morrison's novels. We especially examine portraits of old Black women and their spiritual/political significance as foremothers whose survival ensured ours, brought us into being, and gives us strategy. We examine the meaning of these portraits of old Black women to both white and Black women. We use several critical frameworks: biographical, sociological, mythological, archetypal and finally theories from Afro-American studies and from women's studies. We also reflect on how Morrison's women have stirred and awakened our own memories of older women in our lives.

African and Afro-American Roots in Contemporary Afro-American Literature: The Difficult Search for Family Origins

AFRICAN AND AFRO-AMERICAN ROOTS IN CONTEMPORARY AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE: THE DIFFICULT SEARCH FOR FAMILY ORIGINS Elizabeth Schultz* In the spirituals, black Americans first started to sing of their feeling of homelessness; in the blues, they continued to sing it. This yearning for a home, the loss of a place and a people, and the consequences of dislocation and disinheritance have also been pervasive in much of the literature written by black Americans. Abraham Chapman perceives this feeling as being a formative factor in Afro-American history and literature: The Negro in America has been denied a proper location and place, has been in perpetual motion searching for a proper place he could call home. During slavery, the flight to freedom was the goal—the search for a home, a haven, the search for a possibility of secure belonging. After the Civil War, and to this day, this historical reality has expressed itself in the great migration from the South to the North and the patterns of flight and migration which are inherent in the spatial and plot movements in the novels of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. This . . . reality, of the uprooting and dislocation, gave the Negro writer ... a focus of denial of a place.1 Such rootlessness led Richard Wright in his autobiography, Black Boy (1937), to brood on "the cultural barrenness of black life" and to wonder if "clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another."2 In 1976 and 1977, however, two fictionalized accounts of the black American family—Alex Haley's Roots and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon—were published, revealing a reality radically different from that described by Wright. Giving emotional life to much of the data in two socio-historical works published in the same years—Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976) and Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)—Haley's and Morrison's works demonstrate the 'Elizabeth Schultz is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She has published widely on black American literature in Black American Literature Forum, American Studies, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a comparative study of Henry James and the Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki. 128Elizabeth Schultz continuity of traditions within black American families. Stanley Elkins, commenting on the shift in emphasis in recent scholarship away from the consequences of oppression, dislocation, and disinheritance, notes that although these new works "involve "a search for culture ... by now there is very little in any of it about damage."3 Haley's fictionalized family history and Morrison's novel, in addition to a body of other black novels and family chronicles, reflect not only the damage done by the system of slavery, defacto and de jure, but also the culture achieved in spite of such damage; they imply that in the AfroAmerican family, the roots of culture have at times become gnarled and obscure, but their transmission, re-creation, and discovery has been more joyous than anguished. Both Haley's and Morrison's works demonstrate the difficult necessity for the past to illuminate the present as well as the future and for the individual to attain freedom within the embrace of the family; they insist upon the fact of a proud sense of familial and racial identity, based on the memories of an African past and constantly shaped by an American present. Song of Solomon goes on to insist that the identity cannot be merely assumed; it must be "fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual" by each generation anew. The condition of homelessness and rootlessness, of dislocation and disinheritance, was determined for the Afro-American by the historical facts of his removal from Africa to America and by the denial of the rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" under the terms of the peculiar institution. For the black American, this absence of roots, synonymous with the absence of a culture, a family, and a historical and personal past...