Toni Morrison: Critical Perspective Past And Present

by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah (Editor)

Toni Morrison has been described by the New York Times as "the closest thing the country has to a national writer." Her third novel, Song of Solomon, earned her the National Book Critics Circle and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awards, and was the first novel written by an African-American writer to be selected for the Book-of-the-Month club since Richard Wright's Native Son. With six published novels, two anthologies, a volume of literary criticism, plays, and other published works behind her, she is one of the most celebrated American writers of her time. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes in the preface of Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, coedited with K. A. Appiah, that "Morrison's greatest capacities as a writer are her ability to create a densely lyrical narrative texture that is instantly recognizable as her own, and to make of the particularity of the African-American 'experience' the basis for a representation of humanity tout court." These critical perspectives are reviews from the popular press, essays - by such noted scholars and authors as Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Workings of the Spirits, and Roberta Rubenstein, author of Boundaries of the Self - and interviews with Morrison that present her own perspective. This unique and revealing collection, which also includes a chronology of her life and career, offers insight and information useful to academic and lay readers alike. The critical essays explain how Morrison's work is influenced by writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Faulkner, and James Baldwin; by Biblical scripture; and by Black music and speech rituals. They examine why Morrison's writing is "at once difficult and popular," says Gates. When Sara Blackburn reviewed Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, for the New York Times, she wrote that the novelist "reaped the benefits of a growing middle-class women's movement that was just beginning to acknowledge the reality of its blac

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Woop woop! Took me a good 9 months to get through this dense collection of literary criticism but it was worth it. Reading these essays from various literary critics helped me see different aspects of Morrison's work. I especially appreciate the section about Sula, since it's the one book I struggled with the most.

However, there were too many run-of-the-mill essays in here to warrant a higher rating. In parts, the language was also too hard to grasp. I understand that most of these texts were written in an academic context, however, some were nearly incomprehensible. In general, it took me an hour (!) to read 20 pages in this book because everyone was expressing themselves in the most holier-than-thou manner. The section of interviews with Morrison was super cool, her responses were clear and insightful. So I'm definitely keeping my eye out on more nonfiction by Miss Mama herself. She knew how to make herself understood.

If you have any other recommendations for secondary reading on Morrison's work, feel free to share them with me. I'm definitely open to reading more. Her works are so multi-faceted and layered, I love reading other people's takes!

General analysis/facts
● her writing is at once difficult and popular
● Morrison's characters aren't victims, they have choices, resources, styles and survival skills, and their own business to get on with, inside the white whale that swallowed them.
● back in 1970, she'd wanted to call herself by her given name (Chloe Anthony Wofford) but failed to persuade her publishers in time
● the temporal focus of each of Morrison's novels pinpoints strategic moments in Black American history during which social and cultural forms underwent disruption and transformation

The Bluest Eye
● Pecola is the passive center of the novel, the one to whom things happen and whose only action, her prayer for and receipt of blue eyes, renders her tragic.
● on Cholly: the most perverse act of his life, the rape of Pecola, is a product of hsi confusion of violence and love => I personally still struggle with understanding Cholly's motivations, his characterisation remains inconsistent to me
● people hate and fear Pecola as a symbol of what they might become themselves and therefore cannot dare to pity

Sula
● the freedom that Sula achieves is as much a prison as it is a liberation. Totally free, she becomes obsessed with herself, unable to love, uncontained by the normal rules and boundaries we have come to associate with human beings.
● death occurs in each chapter and is the beginning of, or climax of, the experience in that particular section of the novel.
● the trip South is significant, hence the marking of the year, for it is the first and last time Nel will leave Medallion.
● Sula wants to make herself rather than others (in contrast to Nel who is her husband's "helpmate") => human beings have to demand more from life than mere survival
● Sula is radically free in the sense that Cholly Breedlove is: she has nothing to lose.
● the novel's focus is a friendship between women, something Morrison herself rarely saw in fiction
● Sula is anticipated by a figure four decades removed from Morrison's symbol smasher: Janie Starks (from Their Eyes Were Watching God) => in both novels only the adventurous, deracinated personality is heroic
● Shadrack is an unequivocal public wrong against which the Bottom defines its right => has a similar function to Sula in the novel
● as in Cane, there is from the outset of Sula a strong sense that an era and its kinship and expressive structures are in decline
● Morrison describes Sula as an artist without a medium, and hence, a dangerous figure
● Sula never competed, she simply helped others define themselves => for all her efforts to transcend the community, Sula remains an integral part of it
● in the economy of this text, Sula's rejection of maternity means an assumption of male freedom
● what happens when a woman enters into traditionally masculine territory? The answer appears to be that she suffers repercussions, some form of defeat.
● Morrison: "There was a little bit of both in each of those two women [Nel and Sula], and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvellous person But each one lacked something that the other one had."

Song of Solomon
● is really about naming, especially the ghosts (= ancestors, roots etc.) => the quest is explicitly rather than implicitly for a name => to succeed his quest, Milkman must undergo rituals that will strip him of his false culture and prepare him for authentic knowledge
● Milkman is a hero who achieves manhood by assimilating a traditionally female moral perspective into his previously limited vision
● Morrison: "I chose the man to make that journey because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have."
● Milkman appears to be doomed to a life of alienation from himself and from others because, like his parents, he adheres to excessively rigid, materialistic, Western values and an attendant linear conception of time. During a trip to his ancestral home, however, Milkman discovers his own capacity for emotional expansiveness and learns to perceive the passage of time as a cyclical process. When he incorporates both his familial and his personal history into his sense of the present, he repairs his feelings of fragmentation and comprehends for the first time the coherence of his own life.
● Pilate's vision of time is cyclical and expansive: instead of repressing the past, she carries it with her in the form of her songs, her stories and her bag of bones.
● Pilate's freedom, which makes her different from everybody else, has a very curious explanation: namely, the lack of a navel. (= having no past and no place) => In many ways Cholly Breedlove is Pilate's antithesis, his freedom being a barrier rather than a bridge to others (Cholly can neither communicate nor share his freedom)
● on the flying myth in the novel: "If it means Icarus to some readers, fine. But my meaning is specific: it is about Black people who could fly. That was always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts. I don't care how silly it may seem."

Tar Baby
● Jadine fails to see that her current life is as much a prostitution of her womanhood (relying on Valerian's money) as the role of Son's wife might be
● Jadine is a cultural orphan who lacks a clear model for either her female sexuality or her cultural history
● Morrison has explained the figure of the woman in the yellow dress (= Jadine's alter ego) as "the original self – the self that we betray when we lie, the one that is always there... one measures one's other self against it."
● Son cites the folktale to illustrate his contention that women like Jadine are tar babies – ensnarers of Black men
● through Jadine, Morrison points out "the dangers that can happen ot the totally self-reliant if there is no historical connection" => thus Tar Baby can be interpreted as a modern cautionary tale in which Morrison draws on the Afro-American oral narrative tradition to expose the pitfalls of white middle-class aspirations for the Black woman and to illustrate the consequences of her social and cultural "misbehavior".
● the central reasons for Jadine's divided consciousness have to do with her rejection of the cultural construction of race and mothering that are part of her Afro-American heritage
● the women of Eloe represent her familial past, while the women in the trees represent historical tradition. All these women symbolise Jadine's refusal to define herself in terms of familial past, historical tradition and cultural heritage. In rejecting these women, she rejects the very sources that could teach and nourish her. => because she only sees mutually exclusive choices, she does not realise that it is possible to nurture and to build.
● Morrison: "For me, the tar baby came to mean the Black woman who can hold things together."

Beloved
● the epigraph is from the Bible, Romans 9:25: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved." The passage proclaims, not rejection, but reconciliation and hope. It continues: "And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God."
● Morrison on Sethe's murder of her own child: "She did the right thing, but the had no right to do it."
● Stamp Paid (the freed slave who helps smuggle other enslaved people into freedom) stands in the long line of Morrison's character who achieved (or tried to achieve) true freedom: Cholly Breedlove, Sula Peace and Guitar Bains.
● to the extent that characters feel suffering through their bodies they are healed physically, and psychically, through the body as well. Sethe is three times cured by healing hands: first Amy Denver's, then Baby Sugg's, and finally Paul D's (=> "You you're best thing...").
● in the final section of the novel, the sentence "It was not a story to pass on" (and not: "This is not a story to pass on) re-emphasises the unspeakability of the subject => this is not a story either to retell or to fail to retell.
● the novel dramatises the complex relationship between history and memory by shifting from lived experience (= the real murder the book is based on) to remembered experience as represented in the novel
● through Beloved, Morrison invites Black readers to return to the very part of our past that many have repressed, forgotten or ignored. She said she attempted to leave "spaces so the reader can come into it."

Quotes from Interviews
● "After my first novel, writing became a way to be coherent in the world."
● "I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe."
● "The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat."
● "People tend to think that the whole literary thing is a kind of pyramid that somebody is on top, which is total anathema to me. There is enormous space!"
● "I could write a book in which all the women were brave and wonderful, but it would bore me to death, and I think it would bore everyone else to death. Some women are weak and frail and hopeless, and some women are not. I write about both kinds, so one should not be more disturbing than the other."

[Thom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will purchase