Cultural Studies: Volume 9 Issue 2: Special issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum, edited by Warren Crichton and Cameron McCarthy

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 9 Number 2 May 1995 Special Issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum Edited by WARREN CRICHLOW ...

Author: L. Grossberg

62 downloads 1122 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

CULTURAL STUDIES Volume 9 Number 2 May 1995 Special Issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum Edited by

WARREN CRICHLOW and CAMERON McCARTHY

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Advertisements: Enquiries to Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription Rates (calendar year only): UK/EC individuals: £24; institutions £66; North America: individuals $40; institutions $65; rest of the world: individuals £26; institutions £72; all rates include postage. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. Single copies available on request. lSSN 0950-2386 © 1995 Routledge

ISBN 0-203-98841-8 Master e-book ISBN

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Cultural Studies seeks to foster more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It is devoted to understanding the specific ways cultural practices operate in everyday and social formations. But it is also devoted to intervening in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed. Although focused in some sense on culture, we understand the term inclusively rather than exclusively. We are interested in work that explores the relations between cultural practices and everyday life, economic relations, the material world, the State, and historical forces and contexts. The journal is not committed to any single theoretical or political position; rather, we assume that questions of power organized around differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, colonial relations, etc., are all necessary to an adequate analysis of the contemporary world. We assume as well that different questions, different contexts and different institutional positions may bring with them a wide range of critical practices and theoretical frameworks. ‘Cultural studies’ as a fluid set of critical practices has moved rapidly into the mainstream of contemporary intellectual and academic life in a variety of political, national and intellectual contexts. Those of us working in cultural studies find ourselves caught between the need to define and defend its specificity and the desire to resist closure of the ongoing history of cultural studies by any such act of definition. We would like to suggest that cultural studies is most vital politically and intellectually when it refuses to construct itself as a fixed or unified theoretical position that can move freely across historical and political contexts. Cultural studies is in fact constantly reconstructing itself in the light of changing historical projects and intellectual resources. It is propelled less by a theoretical agenda than by its desire to construct possibilities, both immediate and imaginary, out of historical circumstances; it seeks to give a better understanding of where we are so that we can create new historical contexts and formations which are based on more just principles of freedom, equality, and the distribution of wealth and power. But it is, at the same time, committed to the importance of the ‘detour through theory’ as the crucial moment of critical intellectual work. Moreover, cultural studies is

iv

always interdisciplinary; it does not seek to explain everything from a cultural point of view or to reduce reality to culture. Rather it attempts to explore the specific ef fects of cultural practices using whatever resources are intellectually and politically available and/or necessary. This is, of course, always partly determined by the form and place of its institutionalization. To this end, cultural studies is committed to the radically contextual, historically specific character not only of cultural practices but also of the production of knowledge within cultural studies itself. It assumes that history, including the history of critical thought, is never guaranteed in advance, that the relations and possibilities of social life and power are never necessarily stitched into place, once and for all. Recognizing that ‘people make history in conditions not of their own making’, it seeks to identify and examine those moments when people are manipulated and deceived as well as those moments when they are active, struggling and even resisting. In that sense cultural studies is committed to the popular as a cultural terrain and a political force. Cultural Studies will publish essays covering a wide range of topics and styles. We hope to encourage significant intellectual and political experimentation, intervention and dialogue. At least half the issues will focus on special topics, often not traditionally associated with cultural studies. Occasionally, we will make space to present a body of work representing a specific national, ethnic or social tradition. Whenever possible, we intend to represent the truly international nature of contemporary work, without ignoring the significant dif ferences that are the result of speaking f rom and to specific contexts. We invite articles, reviews, critiques, photographs and other forms of ‘artistic’ production, and suggestions for special issues. And we invite readers to comment on the strengths and weaknesses, not only of the project and progress of cultural studies, but of the project and progress of Cultural Studies as well. Larry Grossberg Janice Radway *** Contributions should be sent to Professor Lawrence Grossberg, Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 244 Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, Ill. 61801, USA. They should be in triplicate and should conform to the reference system set out in the Notes for Contributors, available from the Editors or Publishers. Submissions undergo blind peer review. The author’s name should not appear anywhere in the manuscript except on a detachable cover page along with an address and the title of the piece. Reviews, and books for review, should be sent to Tim O’Sullivan, School of Arts, de Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH; or to John Frow, Dept. of English, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia; or to Jennifer Daryl Slack, Dept. of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA.

CONTENTS

TONI MORRISON AND THE CURRICULUM Introduction: Toni Morrison and the curriculum Warren Crichlow and Cameron McCarthy

205

Politicizing the spirit: ‘American Africanisms’ and African ancestors in the essays of Toni Morrison Joy James

211

Postcolonial agency in teaching Toni Morrison Nandini Bhattacharya

227

The hypocrisy of completeness: Toni Morrison and the conception of the Other Cameron McCarthy, Stephen David, K.E.Supriya, Carrie Wilson-Brown, Alicia Rodriguez, and Heriberto Godina

249

Toni Morrison and the indivisibility of language David Bleich

258

Sula and the discourse of the folk in African American literature Phillip M.Richards

272

The jazz aesthetic in the novels of Toni Morrison Robin Small-McCarthy

296

Confronting the ‘master narrative’: The privilege of orality in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Joyce Irene Middleton

304

‘Out of the Kumbla’: Toni Morrison’s Jazz and pedagogical answerability Rinaldo Walcott

322

ARTICLES

vii

Re-membering the mother tongue(s): Toni Morrison, Julie Dash and the language of pedagogy Susan Huddleston Edgerton

343

‘You are your own best thing’: Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved using question-hypothesisquestions (QHQs) Mary Ann Doyle

370

‘Dreaming identities Sarah Markgraf

389

Producing culture: medieval and early modern texts Jenna Mead

393

Novel adultery? Heidi Kaye

399

The narrative construction of Australia Ian Saunders

403

Comic cuts Martin Barker

408

Notes on contributors

412

Other journals

413

REVIEWS

INTRODUCTION TONI MORRISON AND THE CURRICULUM WARREN CRICHLOW AND CAMERON McCARTHY1

On 17 December 1993, members of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm awarded Toni Morrison the prestigious Nobel Prize for literature. For more than twenty years, Morrison has been a significant figure in the national life of American letters. She has published six novels, including her most recent, Jazz. It has been noted that Morrison’s six novels have established her as one of the ‘few novelists whose work is both popular and critically acclaimed’ (Schappell, 1993:83). Indeed, Morrison’s example as a writer and mentor has inspired a younger generation, a literary movement, of formidable black women writers. Her path-breaking editorship at Random House (1965–77) helped to push forward the publication of new voices and imaginative visions. Moreover, she generated a large new public readership, linked by race and gender, eager for a deeper examination and fuller understanding of race and gender in shared human experience. It should not be surprising, then, that in conferring the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy rightly acknowledged Morrison as a writer ‘who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality’ (Morrison, 1994:6). Morrison’s work is particularly crucial because it brings together ‘literature’ and public culture in a politically conscious relationship. The articles collected in this special issue originated in a symposium entitled ‘Toni Morrison and the Curriculum,’ held at the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory in Dayton, Ohio in October 1991. The theme of this thirteenth conference was ‘Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice.’ Morrison’s rhythmic prose, extraordinary characters, elaborate symbolism, and her emotionally vivid stories and astute cultural criticism provided an occasion to simultaneously explore the problems and possibilities of curriculum as text and as context. The intent of the symposium was to investigate and highlight specific implications of Morrison’s work for practice in the classroom as well as for

Cultural Studies 9(2) 1995:205–209

© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

206 CULTURAL STUDIES

curriculum theorizing in general. As symposium organizers and editors of this special issue, our contention is that literature bears traces of alternative approaches to curricular development and pedagogy in general, and that such traces warrant ongoing exploration and analysis. We are, therefore, profoundly interested in the curricular implications to be gleaned from Toni Morrison’s work. Mikhail Bakhtin in his ‘Discourse in the Novel,’ asserts the following: Language…becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with her own intentionality, her own accent, when she appropriates the word, adapting it to her own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language…but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions. (Bakhtin, 1981:293–4) In a similar manner one could argue that the act of novel-making is an act of possession for both the writer and the reader. It is an act in which a certain reordering of the world and its intelligibility is achieved through the very particular process of appropriation and possession of language by writers and their communities. And so it is with the work of Toni Morrison. Language work, sublime ‘word-work’, the work of writing will sustain Morrison into the ‘company of Laureates yet to come’ (Morrison, 1994:32). But Morrison’s ‘wordwork’ is more than just that; it reveals her status as not only a quintessential story-teller but a public intellectual—among the most important in the twentieth century. As Morrison pointed out in her Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, ‘[n] arrative has never been merely entertainment…[rather it is] one of the principle ways in which we [the human community] absorb knowledge’ (Morrison, 1994: 7). Morrison’s cultural project and pedagogical outlook are centered in language, certainly written language as her texts will testify, but also oral language as her many interviews illustrate. Her fiction is at the center of a revolution—a revolution in the fabric of the novel and in novel-making as a collective activity. In the heat of revolution, as Chinua Achebe (1975) maintains, the novelist assumes the mantle of a postcolonial or subaltern pedagogue—a stance that exposes to rigorous interrogation the highly flammable encounters of Prospero and Caliban, of black and white, of Old World and New World, of women and men. It is this complexity in the treatment of fundamental struggles among these communities that are at the heart of Morrison’s novel-making and hold powerful implications for pedagogical practice. Morrison’s role in reshaping the literary canon—and hence the study of literature—has been much discussed by critical theorists (Gates and Appiah, 1993). The meaning of Morrison’s work for the cultural practice of teaching and curriculum development, however, has been less well explored. Known primarily as a novelist, Morrison is also a highly esteemed professor of literature, a

TONI MORRISON AND THE CURRICULUM 207

cultural critic,2 a literary mentor to young writers, and a parent. Her pedagogical contributions are most evident in her critical essays and oral interviews (Gates and Appiah, 1993; Schappell, 1993; Gilroy, 1988). For example, Morrison’s collection of William E.Massey Sr. lectures in the history of American civilization at Harvard, Playing in the Dark, examines the inner workings of literature and ‘standard’ English. This book constitutes her most explicit work on curriculum praxis. Less explicit, but no less important, are suggestions for curriculum praxis in her novels: The Bluest Eye, The Song of Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Indeed, of tremendous pedagogical significance are the intertextual readings among these novels, and among readers, critics, and other novelists. This special issue represents the work, struggle and consequent questions of authors considering Toni Morrison’s work as an exemplar of pedagogical imagination. Together, their contributions formulate a reflective effort in both theory and practice. These writers work through Morrison’s expansive metaphorical and metaphysical preoccupations toward the articulation of a possible communal dialogue and a set of strategies for pedagogical action. They signal a movement among cultural critics toward an engagement with education that leads to transformation of contemporary community life. Joy James, as if in continuation of Morrison’s call to move beyond the mere entertainment value of story, proposes the uncovering of discredited knowledge. She invokes an invitation to participate in a world of struggle, both spiritual and material. As several articles in this volume testify, Morrison’s positionality can be viewed as postcolonial and non-hegemonic. She writes to resist Eurocentric cultural domination and, by reinventing dominant language tropes, radically opens the literary canon to suppressed realms of social experience. In this way, as McCarthy et al. argue, the characters of Toni Morrison’s texts engage in the struggle for postcolonial independence. Morrison’s characters move within the past, the present and the future, confronting problems of race, gender and community in multivalent ways. Spirit, agency, completeness, and indivisibility are themes that explicate some of the underlying theoretical concerns in understanding Morrison: a language of hegemonic resistance; a nonsychronous hybridity which shapes the multicultural classroom and postcolonial identities; a silenced other; a disavowal of politicized oppositions; and so on. Phillip Richards provides an insightful study of how Morrison uses folk culture to shape the African American world view in order to carve a path away from the literary norms of the Western canonized tradition—a tradition that is typically forced on our students, thus denying them alternative ways of knowing. Robin Small-McCarthy and Rinaldo Walcott explain how, in Jazz, Morrison evokes the structural tropes of jazz as a valid logic for knowing which necessarily encompasses pluralistic and fluid subjectivities. The pedagogical implications are clearly identified in essays by Nandini Bhattacharya and David Bleich, respectively. They read Morrison through their experience and invite their students to do the same—although difficulties and


resistances often ensue from such an invitation. Joyce Irene Middleton gives a wonderful analysis of orality versus literacy and Morrison’s use of oral tropes in her written texts. Finally, this volume ends with some specific pedagogical practices and implications as Morrison is brought into the classroom. Ultimately, reading Toni Morrison is not an easy task, as demonstrated by Mary Ann Doyle’s case study of Morrison in the classroom. As Susan Edgerton argues, learning involves an act of violence, and the student must reach a personal crisis in order to learn. Crises caused by a Morrison text require both teacher and student to seek their personal involvement within the text and within hegemonic culture. Admitting to and then problematicizing one’s subjectivity, Edgerton suggests, allows the reader/ student/teacher to broaden his or her world view. The essays in this special edition demonstrate that literary discourse cannot be separated from material relations and social consequences. Indeed, given this country’s history of communicative distortion and suppression of modes of indigenous representation—written, visual, oral and aural, the act of subaltern writing must be seen in the context of strategies of subversion, transformation, recovery and renewal. This special issue on Toni Morrison, then, provides a forum for dialogue among Morrison scholars, curriculum theorists and teacher educators. It will be of value to those interested in expanding the theoretical and practical boundaries of literary and social analysis in the cultural study of alternative forms of teaching and of broad curricular change. Notes 1 Andrea Michaud and Margaret Murphy deserve special thanks for their superb editorial and research assistance. Lisa Cartwright and Patricia Irvine provided valuable comments and encouragement. We also acknowledge Stephen David, Shuaib Meachan, Heriberto Godina, Carrie Wilson-Brown, Alicia Rodriguez and K.E.Supriya, who reviewed first drafts of the articles and provided helpful comments to the authors. Useful external reviews were provided by Nancy DeJoy and P.Jane Splawn. 2 See, for example, Toni Morrison (1984a, 1984b, 1989, 1992a).

References Achebe, Chinua (1975) Morning on Creation Day: Essays, London: Heinemann Educational. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) ‘Discourse in the novel’, in C.Emerson (ed.) and M.Holquist (trans.) The Dialogic Imagination Austin: University of Texas Press: 293–4. Gates, H.L., Jr. and Appiah, K.A. (1993) editors, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, New York: Amistad. Gilroy, Paul (1988) ‘“Living Memory”: Toni Morrison talks to Paul Gilroy’, City Limits March 31–April 7:26–7.

TONI MORRISON AND THE CURRICULUM 209

Morrison, Toni (1984a) ‘Memory, creation, and writing’, Thought 59 (December): 385–90. —— (1984b) ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, in Mari Evans (ed.) Black Women Writers, 1950–1980 New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday: 339–45. —— (1989) ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review Winter 28:1–33. —— (1992a) ‘Introduction: Friday on the Potomac’, in Toni Morrison (ed.) Race-ing Justice En-gender-ing Power New York: Pantheon: vii–xxx. —— (1992b) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— (1994) The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schappell, Elissa (1993) ‘Toni Morrison: the art of fiction’, The Paris Review 128: 83–125.

ARTICLES

POLITICIZING THE SPIRIT: ‘AMERICAN AFRICANISMS’ AND AFRICAN ANCESTORS IN THE ESSAYS OF TONI MORRISON1 JOY JAMES

Within her non-fiction essays, Toni Morrison’s dissection of racist paradigms is framed by a world view that testifies to African American ancestral spirits, the centrality of transcendent community, as well as her faith in the abilities of African American intellectuals to critique and ‘civilize’ a racist society. Reading Morrison as a cultural observer-practitioner, I share her Weltanschauung which privileges community and ancestors while confronting dehumanizing cultural representations and practices. This reading of Morrison, which quotes extensively from her non-fiction, sketches a framework for viewing her observations on racist stereotypes and Black resistance. Even in its partiality, a sketch reveals clues for deciphering how Toni Morrison uncovers and recovers ground for ‘discredited knowledge’ in which ‘traditional’ and contemporary cultural beliefs held among African Americans are connected to political struggles. The following outline of a conceptual site or world view is not an argument for Black ‘essentialism’—recognizing the political place of African American cultural views, which manifest and mutate through time and locations, neither constructs these views as quintessential or universal to everyone of African descent. Likewise, a passionate interest in African American intellectual and political resistance to anti-Black racism is not a synonym for indifference to nonAfrican Americans or Black/non-Black accommodations to Eurocentrism and White supremacy. ‘American Africanisms’ My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an AfricanAmerican woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. (Morrison, 1993:4) Writers working in a highly racialized society often express an overt and covert fascination with Blackness. Morrison maintains that European Americans ‘choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence’ (Morrison, 1993: 17). This practice and its arsenal, which she labels ‘American Africanisms’, mirror (if not stem from) European Africanisms. The term ‘Africanism’ represents for Morrison: the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. (Morrison, 1993:6–7) As a literary and political tool and vehicle, the Africanism ‘provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom’ (Morrison, 1993:4). The distinctive difference of the New World, writes Morrison, is that its claim to freedom coexisted with ‘the presence of the unfree within the heart of the democratic experiment’ (Morrison, 1993:48). It is arguably still the same. Morrison advises that we investigate ‘the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler’ and the use of the ‘Africanist idiom’ to mark difference or the ‘hip, sophisticated, ultra-urbane’. Her own investigations inform us that within the ‘construction of blackness and enslavement’ existed: not only the not-free, but also with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an [European] American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. (Morrison, 1993:38) Newly constructed beings and inhumanities, such as the White male as both exalted demigod and brutish enslaver, were sanctioned by literature. Morrison

‘AMERICAN AFRICANISMS’ AND AFRICAN ANCESTORS 213

emphasizes the cultural aspects of dominance to critique the Euroamerican literary imagination: cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation’s literature… what seemed to be on the ‘mind’ of the literature of the United States was the self-conscious but highly problematic construction of the American as a new white man.2 (Morrison, 1993:39) In the formation of this ‘new American’ identity, Blackness embodied in the African was indispensable to elevating Whiteness. In this elevation of Whiteness, the Africanist other became the device for ‘thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; [and] provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression’ (Morrison, 1993:47–8). Within this framework, the boundaries of the conventional, literary imagination were set to ignore or rationalize enslavement and freedom-based-on-enslavement. Transgressing such boundaries is rarely encouraged. However, those determined to see themselves without mystification do transgress. According to Morrison, historically an exceptional few, exceptionally brave European American writers attempted to free themselves of entrapment in Whiteness. Describing the courage of Herman Melville’s tormented struggle to demystify ‘Whiteness’ in Moby Dick, she observes: [T]o question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to ‘pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,’ to drag the ‘judge himself to the bar,’—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now. (Morrison, 1988:18) Today, this ‘dangerous, solitary, radical work’ is discouraged by claims that ‘race’ or discussions of racism politicize and so pollute literary work: When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum—or a dismissal mandated by the label ‘political’. Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery. (Morrison, 1993:12)


This surgery is also selective, usually performed only upon those deviating from the dominant ideologies. Literary works derive their meaning from world views which intend political consequences. World views carry cultural values as well as political agendas. Only by replicating or naturalizing the dominant political ideologies, in effect reproducing the racialized hegemony, can writers claim to be apolitical. Morrison clearly identifies her work as a practical art with a political focus, writing in ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’: I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams — which is to say, yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That’s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s tainted. My feeling is just the opposite; if it has none, it is tainted. (Morrison, 1984:344–5) These writings enable critical discussions in a society guarded against analyses of White supremacy. Her critical thought, invigorating analyses despite increasing calls for the irrelevance of ‘race’, is particularly important in a society which routinely rejects such critiques as politically uncivil. Racial discourse seems directed or pulled by marionette strings working to curtail anti-racist critiques. As Morrison notes: For three hundred years black Americans insisted that ‘race’ was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries every academic discipline, including theology, history and natural science, insisted ‘race’ was the determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and that it had specific and revered difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as ‘race,’ biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it. In trying to come to some terms about ‘race’ and writing, I am tempted to throw my hands up. It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. But there is culture and both gender and ‘race’ inform and are informed by it. Afro-American culture exists and though it is clear (and becoming clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the instances where and means by which it has shaped Western culture are poorly recognized or understood. (Morrison, 1988:3) African American culture exists within the world views which shape and inform it. This culture and its traditional practices reappear in Morrison’s work. For


instance, typical of the African (American) call-and-response tradition, Toni Morrison receives the call to testify to world views greater than White myths and to demystify, and thereby resist, a Frankensteinian Blackness. Politicized by and politicizing the spirit, she issues her own charge to intellectuals and educators. The spirit which Morrison politicized is one of Black resistance to oppression, a resistance historically rooted in the African American community, elders and ancestors. The spirit she politicizes fuels current social debates. The world view that shapes her politics is rooted in traditional African culture. This world view coexists with and influences other world views within the dominant culture. Traditional world views [In Song of Solomon] I could blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other. It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world. We are very practical people, very down-to-earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was enhancing not limiting. And some of those things were ‘discredited knowledge’ that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited therefore what they knew was ‘discredited.’ And also because the push toward upward social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible. That kind of knowledge has a very strong place in my work. (Morrison, 1984:342) Distinguishing world view from superstition requires sketching the cosmology that grounds Toni Morrison’s work. What some call ‘superstition’ or ‘magic’, in Traditional African Religions and Philosophies John Mbiti describes as aspects of a cultural world view: Most [traditional] peoples…believe that the spirits are what remains of human beings when they die physically. This then becomes the ultimate status…the point of change or development beyond which [one] cannot go apart from a few national heroes who might become deified [Wo]Man does not, and need not, hope to become a spirit: [s]he is inevitably to become one, just as a child will automatically grow to become an adult. (Mbiti, 1969:79)


Mbiti notes that historically African world views maintain nonlinear time in which the past, present and future coexist and overlap (this view is also held in other cultures and in some scientific communities). Traditional African cosmology sees the non-duality of time (as past, present, and future) and space (Mbiti, 1969). Rather than suggest a monolithic Africa, Mbiti’s work describes the diversity of religions throughout the continent. Yet, he maintains, various organizing principles are prevalent despite ethnic and societal differences. The cosmology he documents rejects the socially constructed dichotomies between sacred and secular, spiritual and political, the individual and community characteristic of Western culture. This specific cosmology described by Mbiti reappears in African American culture. World views or values are not deterministic. One may choose. In fact, Mbiti, an African theologian trained in European universities, depicts Christianity as ‘superior’ to traditional African religions, religions which he notes share Christianity’s monotheism. One may elect to reject the traditional world views shaping African cultures, as Mbiti does, or s/he may reaffirm these values, as Morrison does. Stating that ‘discredited knowledge’ has ‘a very strong place’ in her work, Morrison refuses to distance herself from a traditional African/African American cultural world view, despite the fact that academic or social assimilation and advancement ‘would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible.’ Without considering the validity of this ‘discredited knowledge’ or academically marginalized belief system, some may perceive and portray Morrison’s work as romantic, ungrounded mysticism. Outside of a world view that recognizes the values mirrored in her work, it is difficult to perceive of Toni Morrison as something other than exotic. Morrison’s fiction is not mere phantasm. As her non-fiction essays explain, she writes within the framework of African American cultural values and political-spiritual perspectives. Morrison’s work clearly relies upon African-centered cultural paradigms, paradigms documented by academics, theologians, philosophers and sociologists. For centuries these paradigms have been derided by European colonization and Eurocentric thought, dismissed as primitive superstition. The dismissal of these values and their frameworks is traceable to European colonization on several continents for several centuries. Historically European racial mythology constructed people whose physiology and ancestry designated whether they create theory, philosophy and cosmology or merely ape superstition. Today, the dismissal of ‘discredited knowledge,’ held by not fully assimilated African Americans, branches from the historical disparagement of the African origins of these views. As Congolese philosopher K.Kia Fu-Kiau notes in The African Book Without Title: Africa was invaded…to civilize its people…[‘civilization’] having ‘accomplished’ her ‘noble’ mission African people are still known as people without logic, people without systems, people without concepts African wisdom hidden in proverbs, the old way of theorizing among


people of oral literature [cannot be] seen and understood in the way [the] western world sees and understands [a proverb] For us… proverbs are principles, theories, warehouses of knowledge…they have ‘force deloi,’ [the] force of law. (Fu-Kiau, 1980:62–3) A people whose traditional culture is ‘known’ to be illogical, without complex belief systems, are generally received in racialized societies as dubious contributors to intellectual life or theory. Spoken and unspoken debates about their epistemic ‘sub-culture’ range ideologically from reactionary conservatism to progressive radicalism. Toni Morrison’s writings are radical, precisely because (while cognizant of the value of aspects of European culture) they reject the Eurocentric mandated label of ‘primitive’ for traditional African cosmology and the epistemological aspects of African American culture. Critiquing the racial stereotypes of White supremacy, she asserts the presence of traditional, communal culture as connected to Black/African ancestors. Her words concerning community and ancestors reconstruct values distinct and distant from Eurocentric, academic paradigms. Challenging hegemonic paradigms, Morrison delineates and deconstructs the Euroamerican muse’s addiction to ethnic notions. She issues two complementary and intermingled calls that politicize the spirit: resist the racial mythology embodied in the White/ European American imagination; and reconnect and reconsider the values rooted in traditional African American culture. Of these values, the one that provides the foundation for her work is that of Afro-American community. In her writings, Morrison draws down the spirit to house it in community. The centrality of community Perhaps one of the most questioned or debated concepts is the viability or value of an autonomous Afro-American cultural community. Irrespective of the arguments seeking to discredit this concept, Morrison expresses a personal sense of responsibility and accountability to community, making community a cornerstone in her work. The individual’s salvation, her or his sanity, comes through relationship in community. This knowledge resonates in Morrison’s work. The value of community inspires and informs Toni Morrison’s political risk-taking and daring. The community she explores is neither a global nor nation-state community; yet, she does not deny the existence or significance of either. The community that engages her is the African American community. And it is its synthesis of seeming polarities, maleness and femaleness, ugliness and beauty, good and evil, the spiritual and the mundane, that intrigues her. In ‘Unspeakable things unspoken,’ Morrison’s analysis of her novels, particularly her comments on Beloved and the Song of Solomon, illustrates her emphasis on the centrality of community and the individual’s relationship to it.


In this essay, Morrison examines how language ‘activates’ and is activated by outlining the backdrop or context for the first sentences of each of her novels (FuKiau, 1980:62–3). She reminds us that this exploration into how she ‘practice[s] language’ seeks and presents a ‘position of vulnerability to those aspects of AfroAmerican culture’ shaping her novels (Fu-Kiau, 1980:33). Of those novels, Beloved is a striking example of Toni Morrison’s awareness of the destructive impact of unbalanced spiritual and political worlds on community. According to Morrison, Beloved’s haunting works in part ‘to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world’ (Morrison, 1993:32). The incredible political world in this novel is inspired by a specific historical tragedy, the story of an African American woman, Margaret Garner, fleeing slavery with her children in the nineteenth century.3 The context of community and resistance to oppression ground Garner’s story of the ‘unnatural’ mother who may or may not have demonstrated the fantastic depths of maternal love and political resistance, fictionalized in Beloved. In life and in death, individuals remain connected to and grow within the life of the community. This is true in Beloved as well as Song of Solomon, where the essentialness of community directs Morrison’s discussion of freedom and grace. Toni Morrison describes the insurance agent in Song of Solomon whose suicide fulfills his promise4 to fly from (no-)Mercy hospital: The agent’s flight, like that of the Solomon in the title, although toward asylum (Canada, or freedom, or home, or the company of the welcoming dead), and although it carries the possibility of failure and the certainty of danger, is toward change, an alternative way, a cessation of things-as-they-are. It should not be understood as a simple desperate act… but as obedience to a deeper contract with his people. (Morrison, 1988:28) Dangerous but not desperate, according to Morrison, the insurance agent’s act embraces rather than flees community. His notion of contract is tied to a cultural understanding of community as transcendent, while his flight transcends dualities which posit a divide between life and death. Morrison relates how the agent acknowledged and received his not fully comprehensible gift: It is his commitment to them, regardless of whether, in all its details, they understand it. There is, however, in their response to his action, a tenderness, some contrition and mounting respect (‘They didn’t know he had it in him.’) and an awareness that the gesture enclosed rather than repudiated themselves. The note he leaves asks for forgiveness…an almost Christian declaration of love as well as humility of one who was not able to do more. (Morrison, 1988:28)


Exploring the relationship between the community and the individual, Toni Morrison suggests that her novels involve the reader and narrator in communal ties. In the world view providing the meanings of her literature, knowledge and insight emerge from relationships to rather than alienation from community. Wisdom arises within community, in spite of the flawed character of its constituents: That egalitarianism which places us all (reader, the novel’s population, the narrator’s voice) on the same footing, reflected for me the force of light and mercy, and the precious, imaginative yet realistic gaze of black people who (at one time, anyway) did not mythologize what or whom it mythologized. The ‘song’ itself contains this unblinking evaluation of the miraculous and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an unblinking gaze which is lurking in the tender but amused choral-community response to the agent’s flight. (Morrison, 1988:29) Morrison’s own unblinking gaze fosters critical self-reflection in regards to African American communities. It would be simple and simplistic to idealize an African American community as a haven of safety and harmony against dehumanizing racism. Nowhere do Morrison’s essays argue for this perfected Black bliss. Everywhere in her literature there exists the reality of grim, bizarre and determined struggle in communities which embody both the rotting and purifying. Rather than succumb to romantic idealism, Morrison acknowledges: ‘My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it’ (Morrison, 1988:xi). Her deconstruction of Eurocentrism and Africanisms coexists with a critique of the limitations of Black community. Those limitations partly stem from African Americans’ stunted abilities to be in community, and our refusal to recognize or honor the ancestors and each other. For example, Morrison details how, in Song of Solomon, the ancestral figure represented by Solomon and who embodies the African ancestors’ flight towards freedom, is not readily recognized by community members. Morrison writes: ‘The African myth is also contaminated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self-born Pilate [the female protagonist] is unimpressed by Solomon’s flight’ (Morrison, 1988:29). Rejection, alienation and violence towards self, others or the ancestors, however, does not negate the reality of the ties. Relationships are determinant. One cannot erase community. One decides only how to relate to the community, which includes self, others, ancestors and future born. Morrison’s reviews of Beloved and Song of Solomon suggest that our ancestors are indispensable to community. Through them, the past sits in the present and future, guiding descendants. The writings suggest that to the extent that we recognize our ancestors, seeking their guidance and spiritual power, we deepen our ability to grow in community with them.


The role of African ancestors When you kill the ancestor you kill yourself…nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant. (Morrison, 1984:344) For some world views, the greatest spiritual development is tied to service to the community; in fact, in time through such service one will likely evolve into elder and later ancestor. Ancestors are communal members in these traditional world views.5 All collectively comprise ‘community’. Extending through time and space to include our predecessors, contemporaries, and future generations, community here is not bound by physical or temporal limits; its relationships are transcendent. This transcendence is marked by the presence of ancestors. Morrison uses the term ‘ancestor’ to refer to physically living elders and ancestral spirits (I reserve the term for ancestral figures). Arguing that ‘There is always an elder’ in Black literature, Morrison maintains that a distinctive characteristic of African American writing is its focus on the ancestors, writing: ‘these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom’ (Morrison, 1984:343). For Morrison, studying how African American writers relate to the ancestor(s) is revealing: Some of them, such as Richard Wright, had great difficulty with that ancestor. Some of them, like James Baldwin, were confounded and disturbed by the presence or absence of an ancestor. What struck me in looking at some contemporary fiction was that whether the novel took place in the city or in the country, the presence or absence of that figure determined the success or the happiness of the character. It was the absence of an ancestor that was frightening, that was threatening, and it caused huge destruction and disarray in the work itself. That the solace comes, not from the contemplation of serene nature as in a lot of mainstream white literature, nor from the regard in which the city was held as a kind of corrupt place to be. Whether the character was in Harlem or Arkansas, the point was there, this timelessness was there, this person who represented this ancestor. (Morrison, 1984:343) Speech about the ancestors not only enables critiques of historical oppression (such as the references to slavery made in Beloved and Song of Solomon), it also establishes communal realities to support and reflect political—spiritual, secular —sacred traditions. Within certain world views, ancestors illuminate an avenue for liberation: listen and one learns from them; acknowledge their contributions and legacies and one shares their power (which does not necessarily promise redemption.) In their physical lives, our predecessors, who attained the stature of


elders, helped others to develop as free human beings. As spiritual forces after death, in this belief system, they continue to guide human development. This is a world view where, according to Congolese philosophy, knowledge is ‘the experience of that deepest reality found between the spiritualized ancestors and the physically living thinkers’ (Fu-Kiau, 1980:62). As a living thinker, Toni Morrison is a mapper of recollection sites.6 Her writings present us with the knower who reaches beyond the strait-jacket of Africanisms into the past, which is the present and future, to pull out both the African presence and the Euroamerican imagining of that presence. Toni Morrison is only one of many African Americans following liberating traditions which acknowledge the ancestors as a spiritual— political place and practice. References or calls to the ancestral presence and the primacy of historical African American figures appear in African American religion, politics and art. This recognition appears in written or literary and oral culture. For instance, the African American women’s vocal group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, consistently honor the ancestors in song. Their ‘Ella’s Song,’ dedicated to civil rights activist Ella Josephine Baker, uses excerpts from Miss Baker’s speeches: ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest, until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons.’ Introducing the song ‘Fannie Lou Hamer,’ Sweet Honey founder, Bernice Johnson Reagon, former SNCC activist and current Smithsonian director of African American culture, in oral tradition explicates a world view: During the civil rights movement of the 1960s…Fannie Lou Hamer… became a symbol of the strength and power of resistance…. We call her name today in the tradition of African libation. By pouring libation we honor those who provide the ground we stand on. We acknowledge that we are here today because of something someone did before we came. (Sweet Honey in the Rock, 1977) In the academic works of African American intellectuals, the ancestral spirits also appear. Angela Davis speaks of the ancestors in The Autobiography of Angela Davis and Women, Race, and Class (Davis, 1981). Historian Vincent Harding pays tribute to the ancestors in There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Using ‘we’ throughout the text, Harding’s narrative history of African American resistance to enslavement over centuries merges past, present and future (Harding, 1986).7 Harding describes as ‘mentacide’ the ‘breaking in’ practices that turned Africans into slaves; to enslave a people, one must destroy their belief systems, their knowledge in themselves, and their understanding of both physical and metaphysical power. Morrison’s work is very familiar in the world view framing the vision of African American artists and writers who assert that invoking the spirit honors the memories of ancestors. Invoking also testifies to the prevailing wisdom that we, as a people, resist enslavement and genocide because of the spirits which


politicize our lives. Our ability, and perspectives as strangers in a strange land, to in turn politicize the spirit of our times, invigorates intellectual and moral life. African American intellectuals and academic questions The education of the next generation of black intellectuals is something that is terrifically important to me. But the questions black intellectuals put to themselves, and to African American students, are not limited and confined to our own community. For the major crises in politics, in government, in practically any social issue in this country, the axis turns on the issue of race. Is this country willing to sabotage its cities and school systems if they’re occupied mostly by black people? It seems so. When we take on these issues and problems as black intellectuals, what we are doing is not merely the primary work of enlightening and producing a generation of young black intellectuals. Whatever the flash points are, they frequently have to do with amelioration, enhancement or identification of the problems of the entire country. So this is not parochial; it is not marginal; it is not even primarily self-interest. (Morrison in Raboteau et al., 1993) In the interview ‘African American intellectual life at Princeton: a conversation,’ Toni Morrison explores the intellectual service of African American educators, which, like or unlike the flight of the insurance agent, humanizes both African American life and social life in general.8 If, as Morrison argues, the questions African American intellectuals raise for and among ourselves reverberate beyond our own communities, then it would be vital to explore a world view guiding our writings which presents service and community as indispensable; time and space as expansive; knowledge as intergenerational and responsive to the conditions of people; and community as a transcendent, shared and thorny tie (Christian, 1990). This world view frames our resistance to civilize American life and probes academic mindsets. Toni Morrison’s essays raise a number of questions about the possibilities for critiquing and developing curricular paradigms which acknowledge realities greater than those recognized by conventional academia. World views shape educators’s lives and determine how they develop curricula, pedagogy and scholarship to talk about, or silence talk about, racialized knowledge. To question academics’ relationships to the world view nurturing Morrison’s writings investigates the metaparadigms influencing academic work. It also raises questions of misuse and appropriation. For instance, teaching her writings without a critical discussion of racism and slavery is an incredible, but perhaps not uncommon, appropriative act that reproduces racial dominance. Toni Morrison’s integrity weaves the


demystification of racism and a deep commitment to the well-being of African Americans into art. Unraveling these ties depoliticizes the radical nature of her writings; in effect, re-politicizes the work as compatible with intellectual paradigms indifferent to the racist practices of American society destabilizing American life. In the classroom, expanding the intellectual canon to include Morrison, or other ‘Others,’—people of color, women, poor and working class, gay, lesbian and bisexual people—for more inclusive and representative curricula does not subvert racialized hierarchies. Additive curricula do not inherently democratize education:9 in integrative reforms the axis of the universe remains the same. At best, ‘additive’ curricula, that offer no critique of the dominating world view, ‘civilize’ racist practices; at worst, they function as decorative shields against critiques of Eurocentrism. Where analyses of Whiteness as metaparadigms are absent, critiques of racialized oppression are insufficient to create a learning environment in which teaching Morrison’s work maintains, rather than dismantles, her communal ties and subversive insights. Honest representation of the diversity of intellectual life and the work of transgressive African American intellectuals requires some context greater than the traditional academic paradigm. Perhaps the only way to attain this honesty is to stand on some terrain, within some world view, other than that legitimized by Eurocentric academe. Engaging in this ‘dangerous, solitary, radical work,’ we might finally confront the academic penchant for playing in the dark. Conclusion The ability to distinguish humanistic culture from dehumanizing, racialized myth presupposes critical thinking grounded someplace other than the conventional academic mind. Since critical race thinking is rarely encouraged in racialized settings, we rarely ask how a people, manufacturing and depending upon racist myths and ghosts in order to see their reflections in the world, lose more than they gain. It seems that hauntings cannot be restricted. Inevitably the racially privileged caste, and entourage, finds itself marked and demarcated, more obsessed and possessed than its demonized, Africanist ‘inferiors’. Morrison’s work clinically, coolly, dissects both production and possession. It brings witness to a literacy that predates and overcomes Africanism, individualism and materialism. With this literacy, we read of spirit and power through time and space. This knowledge is made meaningful, or meaningless, by the world views we embrace—world views which credit or discredit the questions raised by the non-fiction of Toni Morrison. All educators’ works reflect and articulate world views in which they reveal themselves as compromised or uncompromised knowers, reproducing or resisting dominance. (There seems at least three types of compromised knowers tied to academe—the unwittingly, the voluntarily, and the forcibly compromised.) Bernice Johnson Reagon maintains that the uncompromised


knower is the one who straddles (Reagon, 1991), standing with a foot in both worlds, unsplit by dualities and unhampered by a toxic imagination. As I straddle and sometime seem to fall from places in which an African American spirit world and European American racial myth converge, I marvel at Morrison’s grace, her ability to walk and call out both the reactionary—the Africanisms of the White mind, and the revolutionary— African ancestors and communal commitments.10 Those of us who straddle’ walk between worlds, in a space where insight and agency arise from community. Between, in, and within worlds, some intellectuals when called, in the tradition, respond. Morrison is such a traditionalist, an uncompromised knower, a straddler with deep communal ties. How else could she blend two worlds to stand, rooted as she is, politicized by and politicizing the spirit? and in that rootedness write: There must have been a time when an artist could be genuinely representative of the tribe and in it; when an artist could have a tribal or racial sensibility and an individual expression of it. There were spaces and places in which a single person could enter and behave as an individual within the context of the community. A small remnant of that you can see sometimes in Black churches where people shout. It is a very personal grief and a personal statement done among people you trust. Done within the context of the community, therefore safe. And while the shouter is performing some rite that is extremely subjective, the other people are performing as a community in protecting that person. (Morrison, 1984:339) Since cultural remnants are markers for realities denied or suppressed in a racialized society, African American subjective-and-communal rites determine and reveal the discernible and immeasurable distance between African Ancestors and European/American Africanisms. Through her essays, which are unique and representative, political and spirit-filled, Toni Morrison invites us to struggle with these distinctions and differences in a polarized world. Notes 1 Parts of this essay appear in James (1993). 2 David Roediger explores ‘naturalizing Whiteness’ and criticizes White Marxists who discuss class without analysing race and ethnicity. By ignoring race— ethnicity, he argues, they redouble the hegemony of ‘Whiteness’ or White supremacy by naturalizing it (Roediger, 1992). 3 The Garner story appears in Davis (1981). In a video-taped interview with the BBC, Morrison describes how her own ‘haunting’ by Margaret Garner’s life and death ended when she wrote Beloved. 4 ‘The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten his act. He promises, as though a contract is being executed faithfully between himself and others.


5

6

7

8

Promises broken, or kept; the difficulty of ferreting out loyalties and ties that bind or bruise wend their way throughout the action and the shifting relationships’ (Morrison, 1988:28). The practice of honoring or worshipping ancestors is prevalent worldwide. The symbols of Euroamerican cultural icons are both physical and literary. In Euroamerican culture, the ancestral spirits of Confederate soldiers and slaveholders, in the icon of statues in Memphis, Jackson or Birmingham parks, inspire devoted visitors, The fervor of canonical reverence in universities belies their disdain for ancestral worship. Popularized Euroamerican ancestors, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Elvis, evince complex relationships to and facile representations of White American freedom, civilization and culture dependent upon enslaved or exploited African Americans. Increasingly, since the civil rights movements, national American culture jumbles the contradictory values embodied in ancestors manifesting oppositional world views: holidays, coins and postage stamps pay tribute to Washington and Jefferson (John Brown is rarely memorialized), as well as Ida B.Wells Barnett and Martin Luther King, Jr. Instructional and often inspirational calls to expansive community come from various sites of recollection, which despite cultural variances, point to unifying elements or commonalities based on shared values. In my own recollection sites, I remember the values of family, peers and schooling. I also recall the political work in the 1980s of friends and co-activists working in the anti-apartheid movement and to counter US imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America where Nicaraguans and El Salvadorans, fighting US-funded contras or death squads, honored their dead by calling ‘Presente!’ after their names in roll calls. The teaching of activist elders and ancestors, the technique of seminary and the spirit of African-based religious houses in Brooklyn and the Bronx, all these experiences politicize, and remind me of the futility of travelling without faith, without ancestral hope, and the liabilities of academic training that blesses my ignorance of- and contempt for— non-elite, communal culture. Harding writes ‘we’ including himself in the historical telling of our liberation struggles. Finding the historical accounts of black radicalism in the US ‘too narrow, abstract, Eurocentric,’ Harding creates a ‘narrative, analytical, celebrative history’ of the African American freedom struggle in the US, using the metaphor of a river and the imagery of Langston Hughes’s poem. The role of the African philosopher as development within and through service is described by Tsenay Serequeberhan in African Philosophy: ‘The calling of the African philosopher…comes to us from a lived history whose endurance and sacrifice—against slavery and colonialism—has made our present and future existence in freedom possible. The reflective explorations of African philosophy are thus aimed at further enhancing and expanding this freedom (Serequeberhan, 1991:xxii). This ‘call’ of the African philosopher or theorist, shared by the African American intellectual, predates imperialism, enslavement, and Whiteness in the literary imagination. Responding to the call to be in community, African Americans may address spiritual and physical needs, with a critical thinking that transpires from the standpoint of the individual in relationship to community. Whether that relationship is shaded by objectification and rejection, or


ambivalence, or acceptance and service depends upon how we intervene in academic life. 9 bell hooks writes: ‘A white woman professor teaching a novel by a black woman writer (Toni Morrison’s Sula) who never acknowledges the ‘race’ of the characters is not including works by ‘different’ writers in a manner that challenges ways we have been traditionally taught as English majors to look at literature. The political standpoint of any professor engaged with the development of cultural studies will determine whether issues of difference and otherness will be discussed in new ways or in ways that reinforce domination’ (hooks, 1990:131). 10 Whether reactionary, reformist, or revolutionary, movement for curricular change entails a spirit of political struggle. These oppositional (and sometimes overlapping) tendencies manifest in: advocacy for an exclusive, romanticized past as intellectually superior; integrating hierarchical, hegemonic structures; visionary projections towards the unknowable known as the promise and risk of future justice.

References Allen, Paula Gunn (1986) Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine of American Indiation Traditions, Boston: Beacon Press. Christian, Barbara (1990) ‘The race for theory’, in Gloria Anzaldúa (ed.) Making Face, Making Soul=Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, San Francisco: Aunt Lute. Davis, Angela (1981) Women, Race, and Class, New York: Random House. Fu-Kiau, K.Kia Bunseki (1980) The African Book Without Title, Cambridge: Fu-Kiau. Harding, Vincent (1986) There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, New York: Random House. hooks, bell (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press. James, Joy (1993) ‘African philosophy, theory, and living thinkers’ and ‘Teaching theory, talking community’, in J.James and R.Farmer (eds) Spirit, Space and Survival: African American Women in (White) Academe, New York: Routledge. Mbiti, John (1969) Traditional African Religions and Philosophies, London: Heinemann. Morrison, Toni (1984) ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, in M.Evans (ed.), Black Women Writers, New York: Doubleday. —— (1988) ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the African American presence in American literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review Winter 28:1–33. —— (1993) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York: Vintage. Raboteau, Albert, Morrison, Toni, Lubiano, Wahneema and Simons, Ruth (1993) ‘African American intellectual life at Princeton: a conversation’, Princeton Today Summer. Reagon, Bernice Johnson (1991) ‘Nobody knows the trouble I see’ and ‘By and by I’m gonna lay down my heavy load’, Journal for American History Vol. 78, No. 1, June. Roediger, David (1992) Wages of Whiteness, New York: Routledge (Verso). Serequeberhan, Tsenay (1991) African Philosophy, New York: Paragon House. Sweet Honey in the Rock (1977) ‘B’lieve I’ll run on…, see what the end goona be’, Ukiah, California: Redwood Records.

POSTCOLONIAL AGENCY IN TEACHING TONI MORRISON NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

I was tempted to write this article as an open letter to Toni Morrison till the unabashed sentimentality of that idea overcame my enthusiasm. Instead, I have opted for a less personal but also self-revealing narrative form.1 Recently I experienced for the first time stressful ecstasy of inviting students at a whitedominated institution to undertake the hidden passage to cultural ‘otherness’ through their reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As I assisted with this ritual passage—though not every one made it through to the other end, and those who fell remain unidentified—I persistently questioned my particular agency in the multicultural classroom.2 Questions of power, identity, and multicultural pedagogy were in the forefront of my inquiry. Especially, I asked myself the following question: what pedagogical and cultural site do/ occupy in the current multicultural wilderness as third-world, but not African American, female teacher in the United States? What authorizes me to represent, interpret and exegesize—as I am supposed to for my students and for some of my employers—other ethnic cultures whose roots and contemporary reality are historically different than my own? As a diasporic, postcolonial female academic of middle-class Indian origin, I do not claim a history of racial oppression identical with that of African Americans.3 Postcolonials have a different historical and contemporary consciousness and experience of communal and individual exclusion or marginalization than American minority groups. If the dominant paradigm of social oppression is the condition of African Americanness, what is the nature of other postcolonial agents? Does that thereby place the postcolonial in the position of outsider and intruder, ‘bleach’ the other ‘person of color’? Particularly, are there ways in which the postcolonial middle classes—displaced to the metropole—are materially advantaged vis-à-vis indigenous minorities? What strategic implications flow from this? Those who are, so to speak, self-exiled (some diasporic postcolonial


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


intellectuals), sometimes enjoy certain critical material advantages over those whose displacement has been historically involuntary (African Americans). However, consider how far this experiential dissonance is exacerbated by the hegemonic institution’s mechanism of tokenization, which creates a black hole for all experiential specificities and legitimate divergences. This tokenization coexists with the paradigmatic hegemonic view of difference as homogeneous, undifferentiated, without further specificity determined by, for example, class and other social variables. This tokenization extends to the multicultural establishment. The marriage of tokenism and essentialism establishes all minority groups as identical, requires them to fit a uniform, utopic construct, and drives out the language of diversity and multi-vocality central to the conditions of being ‘third world’ or ‘minority’, in addition to being female and feminist, in America today. Tokenization and subtle rewarding of malleable minorities who willingly remodel themselves according to the hegemonic imperative creates tension that is very visible today in minority identity politics. My experience teaching Morrison’s Song of Solomon, however, came as a reminder that the particular force and strength of being a third-world feminist is the tactically fluid positionality and oppositional consciousness that one can wrest out of that identity, and the attention one can draw to a critical and cognitive revisionist historiography. The single manageable identity that bureaucracy constructs out of diverse alterities, and that the educational establishment is charged to disseminate, can only be combated by resolutely protean identities who refuse to allow hegemonies to essentialize and label human diversity. Resisting this homogenizing command can displace a specular, monolithic identity of learner and learning in favor of articulating the desire for passages into ‘otherness’, reading literature interactively and autobiographically, and thereby experiencing the pull and tug of identity and its forces at first hand. Theories of the postcolonial identity remain vulnerable to the possible malaises of essentialism, fundamentalism, nativism, or academic élitism. Sara Suleri cautions us against the last, the current ‘iconicity’ of the ‘postcolonial Woman’ (Suleri, 1992:758) and seeks to ‘dismantle the iconic status of postcolonial feminism’ (Suleri, 1992:759) by redirecting attention to the real subaltern contexts where non-metropolitan postcolonial women reside. Postcolonial identity within the metropolitan academic workplace, however, is not purely subcultural or solipsistic. I do agree with Suleri’s call for more ‘cultural thickness’ (1992:759) and contextual specificity regarding the questions of postcoloniality and feminism, but the metropolitan postcolonial woman’s specificity is an element of realpolitik. It must be dealt with. Some minority persons conceptualize identity as a changeless essence, while others argue that it is an entirely ideological construct. S.P. Mohanty has written on this conflict surrounding identity politics in a multicultural environment where the awkwardness and silence around identity solidifies into a discourse adopting either paradigm. To Mohanty, however, post-coloniality enables a

TEACHING SONG OF SOLOMON 229

genuinely revisionist and self-reflexive historiography (Mohanty, 1993:67). His interpretation recognizes the links between contexts, commitments, and a theorycognizant response to issues of contextual, communal identity. In discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the deployment of epistemology therein, Mohanty stresses the need to historicize the self through the community. He discusses the fallacies of both essentialism and postmodernism—that identities, because based on common experiences, are either completely rigid and unvarying, or that they are completely fabricated and have no experiential basis whatsoever (Mohanty, 1993:42)—and argues in favor of a ‘postpositivist notion of theory-mediated objectivity’ (Mohanty, 1993:50). Akeel Bilgrami has also examined the trade-off between ‘Fundamental Commitment’ and ‘Cultural Identity.’ He investigates whether it is possible to owe ‘fundamental commitments’ to a local context and yet to somehow be ‘more’ than a sum of one’s parts. In discussing the fundamental contexts of ‘Islamic absolutists’ (Bilgrami, 1992:824), Bilgrami concludes that locating identity in a communal context is highly essential (1992:822–3), but that identity is also highly negotiable (1992:823) and that making only one set of fundamental commitments equivalent to ‘authenticity’ bankrupts the radical negotiability of identity (1992:827). Bilgrami does not deny the role of religious tradition or spiritual commitment (1992:831), but warns against the excess or surplus of such an unalterable, non-negotiable sense of tradition or identity: That different fundamental commitments constitute different identities under different historical circumstances does not at all imply that there is an irreducible need for identity that is anyway there, and that needs to be fulfilled by some sense of identity or another The source of the commitment may lie in its historically local function, but the commitment then acquires a momentum of its own that may survive even after the function has elapsed. I will call this phenomenon the ‘surplus phenomenology of identity’. (Bilgrami, 1992:832–3) As Mohanty has written: If multiculturalism is to be a goal of educational and political institutions, we need a workable notion of how a social group is unified by a common culture, as well as the ability to identify genuine cultural differences (and similarities) across groups…who belongs where or with whom, who belongs and who doesn’t—are unavoidable the moment we translate our dreams of diversity into social visions and agendas A standpoint is thus ‘an achievement’ …both theoretical and political. The objectivity we achieve is a postpositivist one, since it is profoundly theory-dependent. It is based on our developing understanding of the various causes of distortion and mystification. (Mohanty, 1993:41, 54)


I agree with the above writers, and will develop my definition of postcolonial oppositional mobility out of their analyses of identity. What relationships— based on communal memories as well as postpositivist cognizance of theory — are we postcolonials having with students in the American multicultural classroom? We seem to be dealing there with multiple identities—rigidly essentialized—in flux and counterpoint. It is through a deployment of identity as fluid that one can overcome the challenges posed to multicultural pedagogy by cultural essentialisms, the notion of culture as bourgeois property, and identities as essentially fixed. As a postcolonial, my relations of production within the academy are marked by the paradox of multiple essentialisms. Rey Chow describes one such essentialization of third-world identity as the site of production of the ‘surplus-value of spectacle’ (Chow, 1991:84). She states quite rightly, in my opinion, that: those who experience racial, class, or gendered dichotomies from the unprivileged side, are still within the power of dichotomization as an epistemological weapon This personal scenario brings to the fore the cultural predicament that faces all of those who have to negotiate their way into dominant channels of representation [W]hat is left out is precisely the material reality of a Westernized subjectivity that is indelibly present in the non-Western intellectual’s entrance into the world. (Chow, 1991:91) Thus, first the dominant representational mode problematizes my post-coloniality by questioning my ability to simultaneously occupy multiple cultural consciousnesses, western and non-western. But essentialization is not the only problem. Second, the dominant interpretation makes me an accomplice in the reproduction or specularization of dominant culture in the education of students who will be future citizens. Third, in the multicultural classroom, the establishment appears to want to embrace difference, but the idea of radical heterogeneity paralyses this generosity. For example, the recruitment of a postcolonial female to teach African American women’s writing can, under this model, proceed comfortably only through a homogenization of ethno-cultural difference that proclaims that all minorities are essentially the same, their concerns and their problems are interchangeable, or very nearly so. This perception is reflected among students, who appear to cope with multiculturalism, when not rejecting African American culture entirely, by sentimentalizing, romanticizing, exoticizing or simplifying it. I claim what Chela Sandoval calls oppositional mobility…a new subjectivity, a political revision that denies any one ideology as the final answer, while instead positing a tactical


subjectivity with the capacity to recenter depending upon the kinds of oppression to be confronted [endowed with] a consciousness ‘differential’ insofar as it enables movement ‘between and among’… modes of oppositional consciousness considered as variables, in order to disclose the distinctions among them. (Sandoval, 1991:14) By virtue of not being only one unchanging thing, the postcolonial automatically inhabits many different worlds at the same time. I can provide my students with a model for the plausibility of cultural fluidity as a valid praxis in multicultural education. A cautionary word: a model symbolizing fluidity is in danger, like any other visible symbol, of spectacularization and iconic deployment. This deployment happens particularly when teaching is perceived as a specular activity: the stage mirrors perceived reality. Multiculturalism in corporate America today particularly encourages a specularization of teaching. The actants in the multicultural environment sometimes operate indirectly, remotely, as is appropriate in an era and ethos of technological remote control and invisible harnessing. According to Michael Ryan, in today’s university hegemonic ideologies are enacted just as much inside as in the world outside of them (Ryan, 1982). In fact, Ryan wishes to deconstruct the inside-outside binarism infesting everyday rhetoric about the function of the university (and he does not just mean schools of business). In the context of decolonization, for example, Frederic Jameson asks how the hegemony of capitalism can be opposed within the cooptation imposed by twentieth-century post-modernity (Jameson, 1984). I am inclined to agree with Ryan about the condition of the university, though not with him and Jameson about the inevitable dystrophy of the intellectual’s and teacher’s resistant functions. I too believe in the idea that the university operates not as a bastion against outside state interests, but as a reflection of those interests that enable big business and corporate industry to see their own images and ideologies reflected in what Ryan calls ‘knowledge-gathering’, ‘integrity’, ‘proper conduct’, or ‘reasonableness’ (Ryan, 1982:48–9). The university thus performs a crucial mirroring function for hegemony; it gathers knowledge for the so-called ‘outside’, in whose name it controls and engineers the ‘inside’. It ensures the reflection of the identity, interests and zeitgeist of the capitalist state in a seamless continuum, in a thrilling union between academic organ and business organ. In that sense, the university’s use of multicultural faculty may also be compared to the ‘information retrieval’ situation that Gayatri Spivak points to (Spivak, 1990:77), and the purpose of such an employment is again a specular one, to reflect back to the hierarchical apex that things are indeed progressing without a hitch, whether in the area of multiculturalism, technological conquest of the environment, or something else. The dominant ethos of teaching in the classroom encourages the values of what Ryan calls ‘individualism, conservatism,


and presentism’ (Ryan, 1982:55). The dominant knowable fact remains that of progress. The university’s workers act as the medium for this specularization. Female pedagogical identity in the multicultural situation is intensely ‘feminized’ in its role as medium or speculum. As Irigaray develops the female specularization paradigm, discussing female identity as perceived in patriarchal society, masculinist desire for ‘origin’ is dominant in this conceptualization of femininity: [T]he desire for the same, for the self-identical, the self (as) same, and again of the similar, the alter ego and, to put it in a nutshell, the desire for the auto…the homo…the male, dominates the representational economy… the little man that the little girl is, must become a man minus certain attributes whose paradigm is morphological—attributes capable of determining, of assuring, the reproduction of the same. (Irigaray, 1985:26–7, emphasis added) Clearly, then, Irigaray’s trope of the speculum explains contemporary patriarchy’s appropriation of femininity as a purely maternal essence, wherein female reproductive functioning is reified into a duplicating machine for patriarchally defined identity. Irigaray writes: ‘It does not seem exaggerated, incidentally, to understand quite a few products, and notably cultural products, as a counterpart or a search for equivalents to woman’s function in maternity’ (Irigaray, 1985:23). Teachers who assist in the reproduction of dominant ideology perform both this reproductive and specular function, the problem being visibly intensified in the case of women. Their function is always already homologous to a maternal one: the cultural reproduction of western bourgeois subjects. Madeleine Grumet makes explicit the destabilizing analogy of teaching to treacherous mothering or nurture: ‘Bearing credentials of a profession that claimed the colors of motherhood and then systematically delivered the children over to the language, rules, and relations of the patriarchy, teachers understandably felt uneasy’ (Grumet, 1988:56). In this context, my position in the Morrison classroom, vis-à-vis the institution and the capitalist state, was particularly confusing and problematic for me because in addition to the above specularization as female and teacher, the postcolonial woman is also spectacularized as ethnic ‘other’. I was to be a mirror to a dominant culture as well as a spectacle of multiple homogenized essences of alterity as female, non-western, diasporic, etc. In the multicultural classroom this risk of the hegemony’s ‘safe’ reproduction or self-specularization is supposed to diminish; the establishment declares a desire to extend itself, to invite ‘other’ images to intervene, but much of this generosity is paralysed at the idea of genuine heterogeneity and real multiplicity and complexity. To take up again the notion of tokenization, institutions professedly committed to multiculturalism attempt to homogenize incoming ‘minorities’ quite blatantly, in ‘minority


orientation’ programs, for example. This homogenization is a lower-level staging of what Laura Perez defines in her essay as: ongoing, fundamentally racist and dehumanizing mythologies of identity and nationality that the dominant culture produces to ensure hierarchical power relations and its hegemony within them Historically crafted, this identity…[is] continually redrafted, modernized in subtle forms [M]inority status and the communality of minority experiences…[is] produced as much through ongoing social marginalization and exacerbated economic exploitation as by common cultural or ethnic traditions. (Perez, 1993:270–1) Consider, for example, the ways in which ‘minority’ or ‘at risk’ students are cordoned off from the rest of the incoming class every year in ‘minority orientations’ at certain institutions. Reflected in one another’s eyes, the students clearly see the homogeneous (and problematic) identity that the university uniformly thrusts on them. They also clearly see their status as ‘special’ and ‘inferior’ when they are taught basic life skills in classes in the face of their tired and repeated protests that nobody need be taught that they must get up, or that they must sleep. If this is not a sign that they are perceived as volatile and inadequate, one need only attend staff meetings where they are the objects of paternalistic, institutional concern as problematic or even pathological material. This is a form of ‘ghettoization’, a hegemonic attempt to construct a generic minority identity. The students realize very well that they have to put up with this if they are to enter the halls of academe, for as Susan Edgerton comments, minorities have long known that they must look as though it is the majority’s heart and anguish that is the discursive center, whether the discourse be education or social policy; they have always had to understand the majority in order to survive (Edgerton, 1991:81). The majority has always been ‘looked at’ while simultaneously appropriating the authority of the gaze, and it seldom understands the need to revert the paradigm and to look closely, instead, at the minority person as a fully individuated entity, and not an item in a box. In the absence of that process of exchange, the recruitment of a post-colonial female to teach African American women’s writing can proceed only through a homogenization of difference that proclaims that there are few differences between and within minority groups. I do not mean to imply, since I do not believe it, that the institution or the state are monolithic— hegemonic, yes; monolithic, no. Admittedly, liberals in multicultural education do not endorse many conservative elements on educational policy. But I am describing here a deeper cultural predilection: an innate specular paradigm operates in the conceptualization of pedagogy even in the multicultural environment. While the establishment wishes to extend itself to ‘difference’, its enthusiasm is considerably arrested and its ardor paralysed at the prospect of genuine alterity in all its differentiated dynamism and fluidity. Hence, too, a specular definition of


teachers themselves increases the possibility of spectacular performances by a ‘minority’ teacher: the end product of a multiculturalist’s pedagogy is expected to be a confirmation of essence as spectacle. The present multicultural establishment is allergic to the idea of diversity, fond of archivization and labeling. Essentially, education, multicultural or otherwise, is seen to lead toward homogenization and containment, and not toward the honoring of and engagement with diversity in all of its real, complex variegations. To be sure, postcolonial third-world agents fulfill a certain role of effecting a movement toward diversity at the institution, and act as representatives, spokespersons, cultural mediators and facilitators to the sometimes well-meaning institutions and persons that usually end up homogenizing diversity (Spivak, 1990:59–66). Spivak, however, debunks this ‘notion of authenticity’ (Spivak, 1990:59) as follows: ‘The question of “speaking as” involves a distancing from oneself There are many subject positions which one must inhabit; one is not just one thing [T]he cardcarrying listeners, the hegemonic people…cover over the fact of the ignorance that they are allowed to possess, into a kind of homogenization’ (Spivak, 1990:60). I would not go as far as Spivak to define this existence as ‘ghettoization’ (Spivak, 1990:61), but it certainly is an approximation of a migrant or refugee camp world that is cut off from the mainstream as a consolidated ‘other’ world, although in reality it is many communities in flux, in ferment, where the rules have not solidified, agendas are still a-setting, and priorities are still unfixed, where ‘what we do toward the texts of the oppressed is very much dependent upon where we are… [T]his question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem’ (Spivak, 1990:57–63). The homogenizing urge is endemic, in greater or lesser degree, to a large majority of American academic institutions grappling with the issues of multiculturalism. In fact, so fluid do the current minority demographics in academia appear to some that they elicit cynical observations such as Dinesh D’Souza’s that there appear to be no rules, only machiavellian expediencies, for these games. The existence of such beliefs explains the management of such fluidity by means of a spectacularization of imaginary essence that I have referred to above. Let me demonstrate this point about essentialistic racial thinking with what appeared to me a clear example of homogenizing diversity by the multicultural establishment. I recently attended a convention wherein the contribution of Afrocentrism to multiculturalism emerged powerfully as a topic of discussion. At this convention, unreflective claims seemed to be made about ‘minorities’ and, like my students, scholars, writers and thinkers upon multiculturalism rarely confronted the concept of divergence among minority groups. The aforementioned debate started on the question of the possible conflict between Afrocentrism and multiculturalism as curricular agendas. The names of Asante, Schlesinger, Bernal, and Gates were endlessly invoked, and the emotional pitch reached an angry sublime. Both Afrocentrists and liberal white speakers were overwhelmed as the concept of ‘center’ was rejected by some. It was argued by


the latter group that, in any kind of inversion of periphery into center, one had to remain particularly attentive to the crucial issue of epistemic power and epistemic violence to other ‘non-central’ structures and categories. Thus, to speak of centering Africa meant de-centering other cultural entities. Why not banish the discourse of centering and marginalizing altogether, it was asked. Besides, it was suggested, merely evoking the category of ‘Race’ did not sufficiently explain all the ills besetting the academic environment today. As Cameron McCarthy describes the phenomenon, this debate was an ‘essentialist approach to race [that] typically ignores or flattens out the differences within minority groups while at the same time insulating the problem of racial inequality from issues of class and sexual oppression’ (McCarthy, 1990:118, 120). Ethnic and cultural identities had proliferated and diverged until what one truly had was cultural variegation, where one specific subjectivity could be composed of multiple strains and notions of self. This variegation, in fact, is faithful to Cameron McCarthy’s concept of ‘non-synchrony’; not one member of the Institute had, arguably, anything other than a ‘nonsynchronous’ identity, whatever be their variables of race, class, gender, or any other. Such, in fact, was also the condition of the minority academic, it was argued. No consensus was reached. I came away from the Institute with deepened gloom, having left most of my questions about my Morrison classroom unanswered. It seemed that since ‘ethnicity’ appeared undifferentiated to a majority of the participants, or since ‘Afrocentrism’ seemed to be a single dominant paradigm of ‘ethnicity’ to some African American colleagues, ‘Afrocentrism’ or some other centric position remained the only possibility. Note that the stress upon ‘Afrocentrism’ was meant not to dispel the myth of dichotomous essences, but to retrench the dichotomy, to keep it alive and well. The implication of such centrist arguments for representation was that the relationship with difference and with hegemony had to be identical for all ‘ethnic’ members of the multicultural project. If indeed it appeared to ‘minority’ colleagues and other intellectuals that reading and discussing multicultural texts required ‘authenticating’ only one particular cultural specificity as central and predetermined, then of course I should not be representing Morrison’s world to students from another ‘minority’ perspective, while a majority subject may because he/she inhabits one of the poles of the innate binarism of such a definition of multiculturalism. My primary experience has been that of a non-African-American postcolonial third world subjectivity, and important questions and divergences in my history and that of black America are inalienable parts of my identity. I was not ‘authentic’ as a representative of any other ethnic culture, if understanding meant homogeneity with the subject of inquiry. In teaching African American literature to American students, was I then birthing yet another mutant of epistemic and cultural violence by mapping my specificity against a cultural idiom that is not mine by birth and to which I relate discontinuously? Had I been effectively tokenized, as Spivak says, ‘silenced in a certain way because…it [minority representation] has been covered, they needn’t


worry about it anymore, you salve their conscience’ (Spivak, 1990:61)? Had I reified the construct of the ‘minority’ by entering the undifferentiated discourse at the point earmarked for me? Was I thereby helping to silence the very real calls for effecting true cultural diversity and dispersal of deep-seated, apathetic ignorance? All of these possibilities seemed dreadfully present. In the classroom, this debate over agency and over the reality of difference had appeared in discussions of Morrison’s work. Students echoed this perception of ethnic ‘essence’ as well, appearing to cope with multiculturalism, when not rejecting African American culture entirely, by sentimentalizing, exoticizing and simplifying it. This perception, to me, was antithetical to what Edgerton describes in numerous ways as a difficult but crucial cultural epistemic mode, as ‘making the familiar strange,’ (Edgerton, 1991:79) as learning to look at minorities attentively and critically rather than being looked at by them (81), as handling what Marcuse calls ‘dangerous memory’ (Edgerton, 1991:85), and last but not least, learning to confess and to read ‘other’ confessions in a learning space cleared for that activity (79, 81–3). For these students, however, it was hard precisely to avoid the essentialist construction of African American culture and a centering of it as the definitive minority culture, and to make a passage from those certainties to a realm of uncertainty wherein perhaps answers were not quite so unequivocal and clear-cut. Most of my students came from white, middle-to-affluent class, liberal—conservative—neoconservative backgrounds. ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are insufficient labels, but I will use them as a convenience to describe my students cross-sectionally, staying alert to the inadequacies of such labels. The ‘liberal’ students were by and large more timid and cautious; the ‘conservatives’ tended to be more assertive and occasionally ebullient. The comments of my ‘liberal’ students about the ‘multicultural’ educational environment that they were inhabiting tended to be as follows: When I first came… I never really paid attention…[sic] the fact that someone was black/white/Asian, etc. After a year… I noticed that gradually I had created a horrible stereotype, one that I’m still working hard to get rid of… [T]here are many students here that are racist enough to not be admitted; they upset the ‘community’ and learning process. I think we need to forget color and background and get to know people for what they are. Conservative commentary tended to be far more detailed, insistent, specific, vociferous and aggressive: I personally could care less about multiculturalization and internationalization. I don’t feel that it should be such an overpowering and important topic…


Need to have more financial aid for middle class. Less emphasis on black culture—it promotes racism and shuts out white culture… [The institution] went overboard on multiculturalism. WE’RE ALL NOT RACIST!!! Why do…blacks expect to be treated special [sic]—after all, they want equality, yet they act like we should treat them superior. I think someone is misunderstanding the definition of equality… Admission should not be based on race! ! Drop the quota!4 Among the above, I was more perturbed by the frank expressions of antagonism, the veiled threats to what was perceived as curriculum subversion and reverse discrimination, but I could not fail to be equally stricken by the expectation of homogeneity among minorities. I will describe later how this imagination affected our pedagogical relationship. There was not a single African American student in my class—there was one Asian American student who appeared ‘westernized’, and there were about as many women as men. I was the only person of color in the room. Scholars declare the need to let minorities vocalize their real experiences in the literature classroom to avoid, as Houston Baker, Jr. has recently written, ‘a rhetoric of limits designed to standardize variations of “race, class, gender,” for normal multicultural classroom settings’ in the interests of perpetuating the norms of ‘polite, professional classroom discourse,’ and to allow otherwise privileged groups less access to speech so that the otherwise disenfranchised may speak, an attempt at correcting in the classroom the imbalance being created elsewhere (Baker, 1993:404–5). Whatever may be the efficacy of such corrective efforts, my classroom was not that ‘normal’ multicultural classroom that Baker alludes to above.5 As a diasporic female, I was the only marginal voice speaking in that room, and I was the voice of authority, the speculum—a strange paradox for all of us there. My ethnicity and political bias would have disenfranchised me in some other places, but I was to enable discourse, and to perpetuate ‘authentic’ perceptions in the multicultural classroom. The great problem with the perception of me as ‘teacher’ began when I voluntarily abdicated my position as one of ultimate authority on the question of alterity. I asked my students to critique the novel, to take it apart as they would their ‘own’ literature, and claim it through the signature of critic, not through my mediation, but through that of the text. I declared that I would do the same. I wanted to avoid offering myself as either exemplum or spectacle of authentic otherness, and at the same time to debunk notions of textual and pedagogical authority. Perhaps the problem was that while some of my students recognized this gesture as a Socratic convention, they thereby felt more compromised because what they could apply to this new script from their cultural memory was either non-existent or severely edited, and, therefore, Schank and Abelson’s (1977) ‘thinking-as-


remembering-scripts’ model was unlikely to be effective for them in this particular setting. The more conservative students were appalled at the magnitude of the effort required of them because to them, the culture described in the book was marginal, quite entirely inferior. The more liberal students—whom I will discuss at greater length in this essay—were aghast because one does not ‘critique’ any part of that which is ‘oppressed’. I was asking them to recognize the ‘nonsynchrony’ in Morrison’s novel, to examine and engage with the multiplicity of the strange and the different. I was asking them to be ‘explorers’ and not ‘hunters’ in the forest of ‘difference’, a more arduous task than the exoticization of difference as a value. Edmund W.Gordon and Maitreyee Bhattacharya write: Let us take as an illustration the differences between an explorer and a hunter in a forest. The hunter enters the forest in search of something very specific, usually an animal. Consequently…[h]unters are likely to look in those places animals are prone to inhabit. The explorer enters the forest in search of a better understanding of the forest. As such, he or she is more interested in seeing the whole of the forest and exploring its subtleties. The explorer is interested in finding paths that lead toward clearings because it is from the clearings that one gets broader and different perspectives than from down in the bush. Metaphorically, there are certainly many ‘paths’ to the ‘clearing’ of understanding. As such, when one clearing is found and appreciated, explorers still seek another and another In the pursuit of sense making, it is fallacious to try to find ‘the one truth’. (Gordon and Bhattacharya, 1992:411) Morrison also describes writing as the ability to ‘imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar’ (Morrison, 1992b:15). To be decipherable, the script of multiculturalism appears to require the same kind of quick critical imagination on the dominant subjectivity’s part. It demands an alert interaction with alterities, achieved through a serious questioning of communal and personal autobiography, of the wholeness of one’s cultural heritage. It was the multi-vocality of Morrison’s text, the presentation of plural subjectivities within the black community, divided within the same category of race by parallel vectors of class and gender, that baffled and arrested my liberal students, while the others simply dismissed this intricate fabric as culturally unacceptable. This multi-vocality returns us to the question of ‘nonsynchrony’ so compellingly posited by Cameron McCarthy. In McCarthy’s discussion, an understanding of ‘nonsynchrony’ involves an active consciousness of the differential identities within and among minority groups in schools. Such diff erentiation arises out of gender, class and other forms or combinations of social distinctions or origins (McCarthy, 1990:x). This concept is antithetical to my students’ understanding of social relations, by and large. Their views emerged to


some degree from their penchant to regard the culturally or ethnically ‘different’, when recognized as a legitimate entity, as somehow more whole, more authentic, and to regard themselves as more problematic and complex. This trend I will term ‘exoticism’ and it is alluded to by Spivak in ‘Questions of multiculturalism’, where she speaks on the one hand of the self-conscious cultural masochist who is over-determined in his or her self-condemnation as a historically positioned— and already helpless— non-agent (Spivak, 1990:63); read for this the liberal student of my class, who had abdicated the role and responsibility of critic, as an act of liberal expiation for ancestral guilt. These students were traumatized by the prospect of confronting endless evidence of their ancestral wrongs against ‘people of color’. Spivak accuses such students of not having done their homework. An example of such a student would be the curious student, who upon encounter with African American culture by means of an Indian female teacher, felt that it was a situation wherein only ‘the dominant self [her own] can be problematic; the self of the Other is authentic without a problem’ (Spivak, 1990:66). It was clear that this student was too engaged in self-flagellation to critique the novel, and the source of this problem lay in cultural guilt as well as an uncritical homogenization and collectivization of alterity. This student was too preoccupied with cultural restitution to assume an integral critical stance through an acknowledgement of the complexity of diversity. The representation of black society in Song of Solomon posited the idea of fragmentation and tantalizing gaps and cultural variegation within Morrison’s fictional universe, or in the universe that the students imagined real minority individuals to inhabit. Seeing differentiation within a community that is perceived as the quintessential ‘other’ of America was a problem further compounding the extant difficulty of conceptualizing difference as a seamless whole. To them it was not clear that, as Morrison writes, ‘black people [like all other people] think differently from one another…[and that] the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed’ (Morrison, 1992a:15). The division between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ views in the classroom was serious enough, but what was even more serious was the essentialistic, simplistic, and reductionist quality of most of these visions. My students upheld a few choice simple constructs of African-Americanness that are also rife in society at large. The ‘conservative’ group identified ‘true’ blackness with all the images of disorder and destruction in the book: Guitar’s violence, Pilate’s lifestyle, Hagar’s self-loathing and death, and so on. The more ‘liberal’ section felt sympathy for the imagined exotic in the novel, discarding as ‘inauthentic’ the community’s negations of itself, the multifarious imaginary relationships of the represented with their lived reality. Representational problems particularly knotted the tropes of violence, class and gender. There was enough divergence among characters in Morrison’s fictional community to problematize any essentialist construct of the community, good or bad, and this problematic quality was perceived as ‘inauthentic’, dubious.


Violence was the most powerfully convulsing trope in the classroom. As I have said before, many of my students had no direct political understanding of it. Violence did not inhabit their own social structures in any way of which they were cognizant. To them, it was a distant social evil that involved bloodshed and mess, poor people and blacks, never within the direct ambit of their lives in any sense. Moreover, violence seemed to the archconservatives to be the domain of blacks and other ‘minorities’ in an undifferentiated way. Within the realm of violence, no differentiation of function, purpose, interests or ideologies appeared when it was perceived as a pattern of the lives of ‘those people’. To the liberals on the other hand, violence seemed an inexplicable importation from outside, not an integral part of the black community, but an aberration to be disowned as not truly a characteristic of the redeemable ‘oppressed’, a finite legacy of history. Both groups therefore had problems understanding the friendship as well as the deadly struggle of Milkman and Guitar. The presence of ideological conflict in this regard is best exemplified in the exchanges—spoken and unspoken— between Milkman and Guitar. Guitar, the member of the Seven Days, a retaliatory group resisting the hegemony of white society, says to Milkman: ‘They want your life, man… Everybody wants the life of a black man’ (Morrison, 1977:224). Milkman responds cynically: ‘So everybody wants to kill us except black men, right?’ (Morrison, 1977:225) And Guitar confirms this assumption. In the end, however, the logic of violence transcends even this exception, this island of peace within the community, and Morrison’s treatment of this motif is one of her supreme achievements of magical realism in this novel. In conclusion: Milkman stopped waving and narrowed his eyes. He could just make out Guitar’s head and shoulders in the dark. ‘You want my life?’ Milkman was not shouting now. ‘You need it? Here.’ Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew [that]…[i]f you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. (Morrison, 1977:341) It appeared then that the violence that Guitar had before characterized as love (Morrison, 1977:160), is redirected by Milkman but in such a way that love and violence seem inextricably imbricated. If a revisionist force informs Morrison’s work as Michael Awkward claims, the climactic moment of Morrison’s work seems to capture this re-vision that violence and love do not have to be binary opposites. This sort of dualism can be re-envisioned as what appear to be diametric oppositions or heterogeneity functioning simultaneously. Students asked me to provide an analysis of the novel’s conclusion that would, once more, stabilize the course of conflicts, that would establish, once and for all, the ‘real meaning’ underlying this ambivalence. I responded that to me it appeared that the ambivalence was part and parcel of the representational realism.


For those seeking single, monolithic answers, this heterogeneity left unanswered the questions of what is ‘authentic’ about the black community—always in the singular, never a plural concept. The confession of indeterminacy and ambivalence on my part opened up the gates for massive cynicism, disenchantment with the multicultural project, which, after all, appeared not to ‘teach’ anything solid but to indicate the potential for epistemological dissolution. Ambivalence about the social organization and aspirations of the community formed another limb of this prevalent confusion over the ‘true’ nature of the community. Here again, the picture was not finite or stable; on the one hand, there was the materialistic hoarding of Macon Dead; on the other, there was the fine self-reliance, freedom and lightness of being signified by Pilate’s household, where the only significant belongings, ties and treasures were spiritual, affective, and heritable only through a denial of materialistic ambition. Macon Dead’s frenzy for possession of things can be traced back, of course, to the roots in the African American history of forced dispossession. Macon Dead’s powerful urge to grasp and hold on to material signifiers of his place in the universe is therefore, obviously, a compensatory effort to deny the experience of ephemerality and dispersal so familiar to ex-slaves—in his case, the death of his father and the loss of his patrimony. Hence, Macon Dead appropriates and internalizes the western logocentric assurance of permanence in the written word, the phallic inscription of the hand steady and powerful enough to hold the pen and write. Speaking of his dead father, Milkman Dead’s grandfather, the ‘tall, magnificent Macon Dead, whose death…was the beginning of their [his peers’] own dying’ (Morrison, 1977:237), the second Macon Dead ruminates: ‘Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read. Got his name messed up because he couldn’t read…Own things, and let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too’ (Morrison, 1977:55). Pilate’s household, while entirely antithetical to traditional concepts of ‘matrimony’ is, in contrast to Macon Dead’s marriage, a true ‘matrimony’. The Latin term ‘patrimony’ derives from the roots ‘father’ and ‘bulwarks’ or ‘dwelling’, and the Latin term ‘matrimony’ derives the roots from ‘mother’ and ‘dwelling’. Pilate’s ‘matrimonial’ preserve, while no paradigm for a conventional marriage in the eyes of society, and no domain of the letter of the social covenant, preserves the spirit, the essence of ‘dwelling’ that is intrinsic to ‘patrimony’ more ably and compassionately than does Macon Dead’s search for his ‘patrimony’. She is the witch-like black woman who lives a life of magical independence, Milkman’s ‘queer aunt…whom he hated…for her ugliness, her poverty, her dirt, and her wine Nor was she dirty; unkempt, yes, but not dirty. The whites of her fingernails were like ivory [T]his woman was definitely not drunk [S]he was anything but pretty, yet he knew he could have watched her all day She was as tall as his father’ (Morrison, 1977:37–8). Pilate, who is the antithesis of all the mean-spiritedness and unrelenting rapacity that Macon Dead lives by, is yet another logical offspring of the same Macon Dead the


grandfather, also an independent spirit, who made and cultivated things with the labor of his restless powerful hands, ‘the clever irrigator, the peach-tree grower, the hog slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time flat and sang like an angel while he did it’ (Morrison, 1977:237). It was the creative energy and the spirit of such a man that caused white men to blow him off his fence, his own piece of earth, and that energy resurfaces in dynamic divergence in his businessman son and in his daughter whose determination to be in the world is such that she pushes her way out of her dead mother’s womb unaided. The energy of the black ancestor thus splits and goes in two different directions in the two children, and in Milkman Dead that fracturing and fragmentation is peculiarly manifest as endemic to his constitution. On the one hand, Milkman destroys the ‘irrational’ loving of Hagar and loathes the ‘irrational’ loving of his mother; on the other hand, he was the little boy who, upon the discovery that ‘only birds and airplanes could fly…lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft’ (Morrison, 1977:9). As a consequence of this premonition, he develops the habit of looking backwards, ‘as though there was no future to be had’ (35), a prophecy fulfilled in the novel’s climactic plateau. In capturing and combining in himself destructive and creative urges, rapacity and generosity, apathy and passion, anger and compassion, Milkman develops into an embodiment of the fragmentation of Macon Dead the grandfather’s seed, the collective communal psyche, of the powerful vectors playing upon it simultaneously. This same play of differences vexes the representations of gender and gender relations in the novel. In apparent contrast with the magical independence of Pilate, but in some possibly remotely linked way, women like Ruth and Hagar have the capacity for totally irrational and consuming loves. The connection with Pilate, however, may be more real than tenuous. Pilate’s refusal of the dominant ethos of ‘rational’ society originates in a magical strength of love, a truly ‘matrimonial’ alternative to ‘patrimonial’ instinct, which metamorphoses into a similarly irrational but destructive urge in Hagar. To me, it appeared to be a mistake to rank these characters as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ models of black womanhood, or of womanhood in general. It seemed more reasonable to see them as powerful but contrasting urges underlying the operations of human love. My feminist students, however, found Ruth and Hagar to be ‘weak’; it reminded me, in some ways, of what Fox-Genovese says of the construction of the ‘strong’ slave woman by male historians: she should be a cross between middle-class domesticity and the virtuous woman of Proverbs (Fox-Genovese, 1988:48). The representation of the African-American woman in Morrison’s novel certainly embodies some significant co-ordinates of both femininity and AfricanAmerican heritage, but the familiarity of these co-ordinates is also defamiliarized by the representation that does not attempt neatly to codify and homogenize diverse specificities, or to fit them to a disembodied ideal of ‘blackwomanhood’, but realistically represents them as heterogenous, fluid.


I cannot define this phenomenon any better than Morrison herself, who writes: In a society with a history of trying to accommodate both slavery and freedom, and a present that wishes both to exploit and deny the pervasiveness of racism, black people are rarely individualized… Without individuation, without nonracial perception, black people as a group are used to signify the polar opposites of love and repulsion. On the one hand, they signify benevolence, harmless and servile guardianship, and endless love. On the other hand, they have come to represent insanity, illicit sexuality and chaos. (Morrison, 1992a:xv) In my classroom, clearly, this sort of polarization was at work among students of every politico-cultural persuasion. Within such a universe of liberal self-reproach versus unrelenting conservatism, however, the liberal student’s Byronic abandonment of the project of cultural understanding left me most paralysed. Unsure what role to play in this sort of ‘multicultural’ classroom, I resorted sometimes to a kind of impatience, an aggression intended to compensate for the discursive imbalance. Challenged to demonstrate more authority, I capitulated at first; I allowed the students and myself to ignore the reality and depth of our ignorance, to tell ourselves that yes, indeed, we could be mastering, entering into ownership of difference in the classroom, and that our identities would still remain inviolate and unchanged. I did make one attempt at meeting the craving for authenticity; I had an African American colleague come in for an informal discussion on the novel. The results were withering to my pedagogical ego—the students were inattentive, impatient and uncomfortable. The speaker confirmed some of the impressions of plurality given by the text in speaking of African American society and culture. The importation of a complex outside that was not theirs or that of the hegemonic institution, the interruption of academic pursuit by a real person, generated visible panic and anguish among some students. There were no questions, not even about the conflicted representations, and the speaker left, obviously puzzled by the response of indifference and inertia that masked the fear and the unease. I hung my head as some of my students left muttering ‘that was not very helpful at all…’. Once again, the specular-spectacular schema broke down, and I had to attempt the genesis of a truly collaborative schema wherein we would not have to forge our identities as ‘individuals, conservative, presentists,’ but could forge ahead as a community wherein what Susan Edgerton calls ‘teaching the interminable’ could go on. How to teach a text that speaks out for communal richness but against authorization, authentication and appropriation? How to be a co-learner of a text that allows us to read one another and ourselves through the text? Above all, how to avoid commodifying and spectacularizing whatever model of pedagogy were to be adopted? Analogous to the concept of the transferable and duplicable identity in pedagogical production and reproduction seems to be the notion of


knowledge as heritable and transferable property of the subject. Thus, one way of transmitting cultural heritage is by using the teacher as a speculum; another way requires the teacher to be a legitimate and trusted executor of cultural legacies.6 How to be the teacher in a classroom where the subject is meant to be destined intellectual property and the teacher is intended to be a leader, and both seem alien and strange to the students? How to persuade the students of the validity of an alternative pedagogical venture upon a multicultural text that was not posited as the pedagogue’s intellectual property or cultural heritage, was not handed down to students as a legacy or duplication of an essence (a speculum?), and that was actually open to communal hermeneutics, to be handled, reshaped, reforged, rethought interactively? Only by discarding the tropes of the specular and spectacular teacher, and of the students as the rightful proprietor(s) of learning-as-a-thing-to-be-possessed, could I solve the difficulty of learning Morrison’s text interactively and autobiographically. I also had to make a confession of my own radical alterities from the text, and to turn that confession of alienation into pedagogical praxis. Looking again at Edgerton’s article entitled Toni Morrison teaching the interminable’ (1993) and at Shoshana Felman’s ‘Psychoanalysis and education: teaching terminable and interminable’ (1982), among others, offered me, however, some fresh insights and hope about my classroom, about multicultural learning. Shoshana Felman asks of herself the following question: ‘What can the impossibility of teaching teach us?’ (Felman, 1982:22) Like Ryan, Felman’s analysis and methodology point toward a collapsing of the artificial radical disjunction of inside and outside, center and periphery, self and other. It tells us that the ‘ignorance’ that is shared by student and teacher at the outset of the impossible activity of teaching, is not simply opposed to knowledge: it is itself a radical condition, an integral part of the very structure of knowledge… Ignorance…is not a passive state of absence—a simple lack of information: it is an active dynamic of negation, an active refusal of information… Teaching…has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge… [I] t [ignorance] is not a simple lack of information but the incapacity—or the refusal—to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information. (Felman, 1982:29–30) In other words, I found both my students and myself engaged in passionately adoring the simultaneous refusal of knowledge and denial of ignorance of both ourselves and others that Felman draws attention to; overcoming and refusing that instinct to refuse would have to form the cornerstone of any edifice strong enough to withstand the constant pressure from the outside/ inside insistently demanding a certain academic and cultural production and reproduction. There is, within the current establishment, a strong drive to fabricate a harmonized, synthesized, regularized whole based on the paradigm of cultural


production as reproduction. Monoglossia achieves the state of blissful ignorance that allows one to remain absorbed contemplating imaginary essence. Polysemic cultural representation disallows the stance of hermeneutic neutrality. Such neutrality enables the maintenance of a comfortable epistemic distance that arises, once again, from perceiving the ‘other’ as whole, unified or undifferentiated, from making the dreamer the subject of the dream of learning. There is no difference between this epistemic distance and that of early western anthropology, where the real subject of inquiry and sphere of endeavor was always the subjectivity of the western ethnographer, because the time and space of the other were changeless, eternal. In such a situation, the force of S.P.Mohanty’s comments, once again, becomes particularly clear: ‘The search for a genuinely postcolonial moral and cultural identity depends on a revisionary historiography’ (Mohanty, 1993:67). Above all, such historiography reminds all subjects of the danger of getting frozen into positions that offer the seeming comfort of stability (Mohanty, 1993:69). When such post-colonial revision attempts to shatter these concepts of unchanging and fossilized time and space, contemporary hegemony distances such realization of life in the picture by homogenizing and essentializing. No such distance is desirable or possible, because the articulation of restless epistemic desire to understand the other and the desire to represent the other can alone shatter the placid mirror of cultural representation. I myself had to let go, to perform the same ‘hidden’ passage into dynamic uncertainty that I was encouraging my students to undertake, to boldly confess my representational status and authority as conflicted, controverted and problematic, as it must be for any good pedagogy, and thus to thwart the pressures to create utopic fictions or to remain beyond the discourse. Utopias are neat and manageable, reality is wayward and animate. I could only try to actualize the conditions which make possible ‘the knowledge which is not entirely in mastery—in possession—of itself’ (Felman, 1982:43), an appreciation of the position of alterity that is indispensable for knowledge (Felman, 1982:33). Abandoning the concept of intellectual property and questioning the wholeness of one’s communal heritage can be liberating for those of all colors and ethnicities. Inhabiting more than one identity or acknowledging simultaneous identities can allow one to transcend the boundaries of a narrow identity politics. Abandoning the quest for an authentic wholeness either in the perceived self or in the perceived ‘other’ can enable an interactive, autobiographical understanding of radical heterogeneity. It can also lead to the defeat of hegemonic directives to multiculturalism to appropriate and contain the heterogeneity of ‘difference’ into manageable ‘essence’. It is not only the ‘other’ whose voice is muffled and endangered in the welter of multicultural battling; all essentialist identities are equally threatened and, in some cases, damaged. The concept of the elevation of ‘one true meaning’ over all others is, to some extent, endemic to a certain age of learners, but particularly to the ‘rationalism’ of technological state capitalism which must foreground unitariness and efficiency over all other values. In the interest of producing this ‘one-dimensionality’, this


system must of necessity discourage the ‘explorer’ and subsidize and sponsor the ‘hunter’. The consequences of this uniformity are particularly disastrous for the multicultural academy, because there it is the precise nature of the quest to seek equity and understanding by multiple means, not a single monolithic one. There are, indeed, many paths to the clearing. Some of them are erratic or curvilinear, and some lie outside of the family estate. Notes 1 I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the comments and critical insights of Michael Caldwell, Warren Crichlow and Cameron McCarthy for their careful reading and editing of the first drafts of this essay. 2 I want to clarify that within my definition, a ‘multicultural establishment’ includes what Cameron McCarthy has rightly termed regulatory as well as liberatory discourses. Critics will, therefore, sometimes find themselves synchronous with the establishment. My intention is to provide an immanent and not transcendent critique of the establishment, since the establishment partially accommodates liberatory discourses. 3 However, I cannot forget that my entry into the western academy is a cultural product of colonization, and that my identity in the academic workplace as a product of decolonization and as a migrant into the metropolitan work force is partly an institutional construct, a matter of perceptions already in place. My minority ontology has also undergone hegemonic construction and requires ceaseless, daily negotiation and de-mystification on my part. 4 I have selected these comments from an official survey of student responses to issues of multiculturalism and diversity on my campus. 5 My students did not bring to the classroom an acknowledgement of other kinds of social oppression such as domestic violence or gender inequity. It has been suggested to me that the debate over race may have been illumined by discussions of other forms of institutionalized and partly sanctioned violence such as gender and domestic conflicts. The students in my classroom had difficulty inhering around such ideas; conflict, or institutionalized oppression in general, appeared a difficult idea for my students to acknowledge or discuss. 6 The Latin root of the word ‘education’ is ‘ducere’, meaning ‘to lead’. The concepts of trusteeship and mirroring I see as related in the following way: the trustee maintains and transfers what the mirror reflects and reproduces. The functions are also simultaneous in many ways because they both involve conservation and transmittal.

References Asante, M. (1988) Afrocentricity, Trenton; N.J.: Africa World Press. Awkward, Michael (1989) Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels, New York: Columbia University Press.


Baker, Houston A., Jr. (1993) ‘Local pedagogy; or, how I redeemed my spring semester’, Presidential Address, 1992, PMLA 108(3):400–9. Bernal, Milton (1987, 1991) Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (2 vols), New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Bilgrami, Akeel (1992) ‘What is a Muslim? Fundamental commitment and cultural identity’, Critical Inquiry 18:820–42. Cannon, Lynn Weber (1990) ‘Fostering positive race, class, and gender dynamics in the classroom’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 1 & 2:127–34. Chow, Rey (1991) ‘Violence in the other country: China as crisis, spectacle, and woman’, in C.T.Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 81–100. D’Souza, Dinesh (1991) Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, New York: Free Press. Edgerton, Susan H. (1991) ‘Particularities of “Otherness”: autobiography, Maya Angelou and me’, in J.Kincheloe and W.F.Pinar (eds) Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: The Significance of Place, New York: SUNY Press: 77–97. —— (1993) ‘Toni Morrison teaching the interminable’, in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds) Race, Identity and Representation in Education, New York & London: Routledge: 220–35. Felman, Shoshana (1982) ‘Psychoanalysis and education: teaching terminable and interminable’, Yale French Studies, 63:21–45. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth (1988) Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill. London: University of North Carolina Press. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1991) ‘Beware the new pharaohs’, Newsweek 47 (September). Gordon, Edmund W. and M.Bhattacharya (1992) ‘Human diversity, cultural hegemony, and the integrity of the academic canon’, Journal of Negro Education 61(3):405–18. Grumet, Madeleine (1988) Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hirsch, E.D. (1987) Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Irigaray, Luce (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jameson, Frederic (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review 146:59–92. McCarthy, Cameron (1990) Race and Curriculum: Social Inequality and the Theories and Politics of Difference in Contemporary Research on Schooling, London: Falmer. Mohanty, S.P. (1993) ‘The epistemic status of cultural identity: on Beloved and the postcolonial condition’, Cultural Critique 24:81–97. Morrison, Toni (1977) Song of Solomon, New York: NAL. —— (1992a) ‘Introduction: Friday on the Potomac’, in T.Morrison (ed.) Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, New York: Pantheon Books. —— (1992b) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Perez, Laura Elisa (1993) ‘Opposition and the education of Chicana/os’, in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds) Race, Identity, and Representation in Education, New York: Routledge: 268–79.


Ryan, Michael (1982) ‘Deconstruction and radical teaching’, Yale French Studies 63: 45–58. Sandoval, Chela (1991) ‘US Third World feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world’, Genders 10:1–24. Schank, Roger and Abelson, R. (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding, Hillsdale; N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schlesinger, Arthur (1992) The Disuniting of America, Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct Books. Spivak, Gayatri C. (1990) The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, S.Harasym, (ed.) London; New York: Routledge. Suleri, Sara (1992) ‘Woman skin deep: feminism and the postcolonial condition’, Critical Inquiry 18:756–69.

THE HYPOCRISY OF COMPLETENESS: TONI MORRISON AND THE CONCEPTION OF THE OTHER CAMERON McCARTHY, STEPHEN DAVID, K.E.SUPRIYA, CARRIE WILSON-BROWN, ALICIA RODRIGUEZ, AND HERIBERTO GODINA There is a scene in the cultural writings of English colonialism which repeats so insistently after the early nineteenth century—and, through that repetition, so triumphantly inaugurates a literature of empire—that I am bound to repeat it once more. It is the scenario, played out in the wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the Caribbean, of the sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book. (Bhabha, 1986:163) Proof like Doubt must seek the hidden wound in orders of complacency that mask opportunist codes of hollow survival. (Harris, 1960:7) Many critics writing on the work of Toni Morrison continue to locate her work within a constricted frame of reference and place, that is, largely within the boundaries of the United States and specifically as speaking only to the existential realities of the African American community. These symbolic moves when initiated by radical critics are most likely informed by a desire to identify and accentuate the specificity and autonomy of black aesthetics (see, e.g., Ogunyemi, 1992). On the other hand, conservative critics deploy these territorial strategies in an effort to contain and bottle up Morrison’s muse, less its energies spill over the social fire-walls that divide racial groups in this society (see, e.g. Blackburn, 1973). While there is no doubt that Morrison is deeply concerned with the contradictions of existence of black—white relations in the US, and with the elaboration of African American aesthetic form, it also true that her work


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


registers a deep affinity with a larger global community of postcolonial writers now engaged in a project of deconstructing colonizing Western master narratives. One of the principal preoccupations of these writers is with the theme of hybridity or radical contradiction and ambivalence toward received tradition, values and identity. Morrison’s work, like that of postcolonial writers, is counterhegemonic. Her writing is a performative act of resistance challenging the stability of the classical realism of the nineteenth-century novel, the ‘English book’, as it is reproduced and extended in the works of Euroamerican writers such as Henry James, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway and so forth. But Morrison’s fictive world is not a Manichean systems of signs. Performative acts of resistance are nearly always contradictory, both deconstructing and re-inscribing the hierarchical world of center and periphery. Morrison really wants to alert us to far more complex worlds than the ones accentuated by the now well-worn oppositions of the West versus the non-West. She is as concerned with the differences within as she is concerned with the differences without. In this essay we would like to pursue the topic of hybridity as it is articulated in her work. We will, where appropriate, draw attention to connections between Morrison’s work and that of African, Caribbean, and Latin American modernist and post-modernist writers, many of whom, like Wilson Harris of Guyana or Bessie Head of South Africa, see themselves as writing one book—the book of counter-memory and its reply to the ‘English Book’, the book of authorial plenitude and completeness. Hybridity Homi Bhabha (1986) theorizes the discourse of colonialism as a site of hybridization. In his view, hybridization offers a resistance along surfaces that are different from the Hegelian dialectic of master—slave or the phenomenological other. Here the resistance is mounted not from marginal or exclusionary positions but from within hegemonic discourses themselves. It is waged from the interstices of an unstable boundary that desires to discriminate the subject from the non-subject. Most centrally, a hybrid space unsettles the authority and power of the hegemonic language as a symbolic sign of full presence or plenitude. Bhabha argues that the repressive deployment of the sign of hegemonic language in othered spaces is vastly different from its coercive function in the European space. It is primarily this difference that provides the basis for the colonial presence being always ambivalent because it is suspended between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation in the colonial discourse as repetition and difference. For the hegemonic sign to realize its power in the colonized space it must compromise its claim of purity through consensus, and resort to an undemocratic dictatorship in the articulation of the other while concealing its repressive actions. It is forced to include the discriminated in the very act of discrimination. The power of the sign depends not on its essential symbolicism but on the spaces

THE CONCEPTION OF THE OTHER 251

of difference it organizes and controls according to an arbitrary hierarchy. The effect of this paradox is to render the sign highly ambivalent and dynamic. According to Bhabha, it is ‘less than one’, a full presence, and ‘double’, as it has no choice in its exercise of power but to include that which it discriminates against. It is along the surface of this ambivalence that the hybrid situates itself to return the gaze of the colonizer and launch resistances that disrupt both colonial and national essentialisms. Morrison and her postcolonial counterparts find the realist novel’s claims to authority and completeness of knowledge, reason and ethics insufferable. It is in the text of the English Book that the non-West is marginalized, black people are denigrated, and women are consigned to traditional roles of reproduction and domesticity. In response to the received tradition of the Western novel, the hybridizing process in postcolonial fiction involves the following three dynamics. First, there is a reflexive and self-conscious attitude toward the use of language and its imbrication in narrative omniscience and surveillance. An additional concern here is the role of language in the elaboration of unequal identities. Secondly, there is a deliberate deflation of characterization and the installation of anti-heroic, flawed, or broken personas at the epicenter of the novel’s discursive field (McCarthy, 1994). It is in this movement from the margins to the center that the Empire’s ragged and tagged strike back. Thirdly, the subject matter explored in these novels tends to have a socio-political resonance that takes us beyond the nexus of individual adventure, fate and fortune, and toward an exploration of problems associated with the relationship of the individual to community. In each of these areas, postcolonial writers do not make a clean break with the inherited or imposed traditions that they seek to deconstruct or replace. As Octavio Paz reminds us in his essay, ‘In search of the present’ (1990), postcolonial literatures are engaged in a deconstructive ‘reply’ to Western canonical texts. But let us look at specific situatedness of the postcolonial fiction and Morrison’s affiliation to it. Postcolonial connections In the introduction to The Palace of the Peacock, the Guyanese philosophical novelist Wilson Harris maintains that his novels depart ‘in peculiar degrees’ from the ‘canons’ of realist fiction (Harris, 1960:7). By the classical realist novel, Harris is talking about a body of writing canonized in English Studies at the university and in the various language arts programs at the primary and secondary school levels, namely, the fiction of writers such as Jane Austen (Emma, Mansfield Park), Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness), Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) and so forth. Ian Watt (1957) has argued that this body of writing emerged and reached a point of consolidation with the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, Edward Said (1993) has expanded the field of reference mapped by Watt. He maintains that the novel is implicated in the project of empire and the


demarcation of the post-Renaissance world into the geographical and imaginary spheres of center and periphery. The structure of the novel and its contents therefore cultivate and sustain a system of values, attitudes, and reference that place the metropolitan, white European author/reader at ‘the eye of power’—at the center of an ethnographic and imperial gaze that freezes subordinate groups into the role of ‘other’.1 Said discusses the realist novel this way: The novel is an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form. Packed into it are both a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power. The novelistic hero and heroine exhibit the restlessness and energy characteristic of the enterprising bourgeoisie, and they are permitted adventures in which their experiences reveal to them the limits of what they can aspire to, where they can go, what they can become. Novels therefore end either with the death of a hero or heroine (Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Bazarov, Jude the Obscure) who by virtue of overflowing energy does not fit into the orderly scheme of things, or with protagonists’ accession to stability (usually in the form of marriage or confirmed identity, as is the case with the novels of Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot). (Said, 1993:71) For the past three decades now, postcolonial writers have been writing fiction and non-fiction that deconstructs the happy anthropological familiarities of form and theme in this inherited tradition of novel-writing in the West. Like writers such as Harris, Morrison seeks to rewrite the novel, seeks to ransack its visible structures and latent myths to activate new memories, new personas, new possibilities, and to put into play the concerns and dilemmas of those displaced to the outer limits of Eurocentric letters. This project, however, is neither straightforward nor monolithic. The position of oppositionality of the subaltern writer is fraught with nonsynchronous or contradictory interests, needs, and desires arising from dominant and subordinate communities that encroach on her passions, sensibilities and commitments. For as modernist and postmodernist African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ayi Armah, and Yambo Ouologuem maintain, the location of the subaltern writer, the minority writer, the postcolonial writer, is always already an ambivalent one (McGee, 1991, 1993). This ambivalence is especially apparent if, in addition to belonging to a marginalized group, one writes in a dominant language that historically has served to prosecute the hegemonic imperatives of a majority in an unequal society suffused by the constant play of power (Ngugi, 1986). One of the persistent difficulties faced by the subaltern cultural worker, then, is the problem of where to position oneself when the very logics of intellectual agency seem to catapult one out of familiar spheres of group intimacy and leaves one between spheres with no place to call home. The ambivalence in such a situation is marked on the very bodies


of the cultural worker who, through her or his class position and cultural and educational experience, represents a hybrid identity that is an amalgam of a multiplicity of cultural positions without fixed or settled parameters. Ambivalence here is not simply the result of unyielding antagonisms or contradictions produced from the tensions between two spheres, as, say, in the opposition of a dominant constructed world and a subordinate ‘other’ world. Instead, ambivalence also involves the contradictory pressures generated within the cultural workers themselves, and between those cultural workers and their solidarity life worlds.2 In her essay, the ‘Site of Memory’, Morrison, African American, middle class, woman, writer, reflects on the contradictory tensions and commitments that inform her work; for example, the tension between socialhistorical disclosure of atrocities visited upon marginalized black people in the US and the commitment to the imagination of the fantastical. Her commitment to the allegorical exceeds any simple role of social documentation or commentary. It is a commitment to the relative autonomy of art that conflicts with her role as a keeper of the African American historical record: For me—a writer in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman… My job becomes how to rip the veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’ The exercise is also critical for a person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were the topic … [But] fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with ‘what really happened’… [So] along with personal recollection the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in and complement slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. (Morrison, 1990:302, 305) In this agonistic disclosure one begins to get a hint of the multifarious commitments working through Morrison’s fiction. This agonistic space, transacted in a world of texts, precipitates Morrison’s rich, metonymic, exploration of language. It is in language—naming and renaming—that the struggle over postcolonial minority identities and representation is engaged and fought out. Language, identity, and the hypocrisy of completeness [It] was…Adam’s task of giving things their names. (Carpentier, 1979:33)


I envied them, silent decipherers of sacred texts. (Walcott, 1982:42) Contemporary poststructural and postcolonial theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Henry Louis Gates and Homi Bhabha have deconstructed the authority of the sign by drawing its veil and revealing the hollowness of its claim to absolute presence. Morrison, in like fashion, in her novels such as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Jazz, and in her non-fiction work such as the intriguing Playing in the Dark, deconstructs the trestle of signification that provides the matrix of a purported white American cultural autonomy registered in Euroamerican fiction. She challenges the language of self-referentiality that has been used to support the idea of a free-standing, self-forming white male identity and authority. As Morrison argues, the ‘new man’ that is supposed to be distinct from the European Subject is predicated not on any fundamental essence of whiteness but on the repressive relations it inscribes and imposes on the African body. Yet Morrison, in almost all her novels, is also engaged in the transformative task of identity construction that directly parallels and responds to the identity projects of the white writers she criticizes. This process of identity construction emphasizes nuance, contradiction and variability within the subaltern black community. This hybridity is evident, for example in the novel Sula, where the two main protagonists, Nell and Sula, are what Phillip Richards [in this issue] calls a ‘folk double’. They are illustrative of a certain frustrated bourgeois wishfulfillment that exists within the black community residing in the ‘Bottom’ of Medallion City in Ohio—the location of this spell-binding novel. That is to say, for example, that Nell’s moral and social conventionality (as indicated, for instance, in her marriage to Jude Green), is ultimately a desire for a middle-class life—a middle-class life that is frustrated by an interventionist racial order that constrains the material and symbolic movement of black people. Conversely, Sula’s sexual license and seeming amorality represents a compensatory desire for the radical alterity of the folk—a wish-fulfilling desire for a line of escape from the social density of external, self-imposing and ruling constraints of a racial order that represses the active material and spiritual fantasies of black people. In this staging of the opposition of self and other —racial affiliation divided within itself—one is reminded of Stuart Hall’s contention that ‘identity is a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself (Hall, 1988:27). In this sense, Morrison’s work can be read as proffering the very constructedness of the subaltern identity of African American people. This identity is always a hybrid identity. Nell and Sula of Sula, along with Milkman and Guitar of Song of Solomon, and Jadine and Son of Tar Baby can be read as a series of tropes that Morrison organizes in her strategy of problematizing the Manichean oppositions of mind/body, private/public, Mother/Sensuous Other, order/chaos, and upper/lower class. Sula, then, is a near-


philosophical elegy to the loss of an essential African American identity— Morrison’s rigorous encoding of the post-civil rights black community, now splintered into the nonsynchronous subcultures of the ‘hood’ versus the ‘burbs’. Conclusion Ultimately then, Morrison’s writing, like that of postcolonial writers such as Wilson Harris, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid and Bessie Head, is a writing situated in the crucible of cultural modernization in the West. As such, it seeks to put into the light of day the play of tensions and contradictions of the worlding of the other—half-made, flawed, subaltern subjectivities in a process of becoming. Morrison’s characters and their subject matter are the products of a decentered world in which the hegemonic sign of the English book has been deeply invaded. As Homi Bhabha might say: ‘not yet one, but double’. The circuit of cultural reproduction or cultural imagination for Toni Morrison, as it is for Homi Bhabha, as it is f or Wilson Harris, as it is for Bessie Head, is an infinite rehearsal…mimicry leads to parody…and parody to satire. Resistance is always already implicated in the hypocrisy of full presence… The process of cultural reproduction is never complete. And the circle is broken…. Notes 1 See Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the ‘other’ in her essay, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In this essay, Spivak offers a detailed examination of the conflictual selfother economy. Specifically, she presents a searing critique of Western processes of self-production which complicate the space in which the subaltern can speak. Spivak makes a general claim that colonialism is to be understood as a process of ‘epistemic violence’ which is itself defined as a ‘remotely orchestrated, far-flung and heterogenous project to constitute the colonial subject as “other”’ (Spivak, 1988:281–2). Within a larger investigation of the constuction of an other that consolidates the self, Spivak begins to examine the construction of an other that oppositionally consolidates the self. For example, she notes that the construction of the Sati (widow burning) as victim oppositionally consolidates the ‘self’ of the West as a savior. Spivak’s pithy ‘counter-sentence’, ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak, 1988:297) serves to mimic and parody this construction of the self through its opposition to the other. In a similar manner, Abdul JanMohamed has formally and ideologically examined colonial power relations in terms of the ‘Manichean opposition’ between the ‘putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native’ (Jan-Mohamed, 1986: 82). He further characterizes this ‘Manichean allegory’ as ‘a field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and other, subject and object’ (Jan-Mohamed, 1986:82). Both Spivak and JanMohamed suggest that the self constructs itself through the fear or derision of the other along an ideological order of differentiation and


hierarchicalization. The English book therefore constructs the colonized as a ‘population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origins, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’ (Bhabha, 1990: 75). 2 See Gilroy’s article, ‘It’s a family affair’, in which he discusses the ambivalent relationship of writers such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes to the Harlem Renaissance and the contradictory reception of these leaders of this literary and artistic movement within the black community. For instance, Gilroy makes the point that much of the literature on the Harlem Renaissance suppresses the fact that both of these writers were gay (Gilroy, 1992:303–16).

References Bhabha, H. (1986) ‘Signs taken for wonders: questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi’, in Gates (1986):163–84. —— (1990) ‘The Other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, in R.Fergusson, M.Gever, T.T.Minh-ha and C.West (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art: 71–88. Blackburn, S. (1973) ‘Book review of Sula’, in The New York Times Book Review 30 December: 3. Carpentier, A. (1979) The Lost Steps, Trans. H.de Onis, New York: Longman. Gates, H.L. (1986) editor, ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, Chicago: Chicago University. Gilroy, P. (1992) ‘It’s a family affair’, in G.Dent (ed.) Black Popular Culture, Seattle: Bay Press: 303–16. Hall, S. (1988) ‘New Ethnicities’, in K.Mercer (ed.) Black Film, British Cinema, London: ICA: 7, 27–31. Harris, W. (1960) The Palace of the Peacock, London: Faber. JanMohamed, A. (1986) ‘The economy of Manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literature’, in Gates (1986) 78–106. McCarthy, C. (1994) The Palace of the Peacock: Wilson Harris and the Curriculum in Troubled Times, unpublished paper presented at AERA, New Orleans, April 1994. McGee, P. (1991) Postcolonial, Postmodern: African Fiction as Political Allegory, unpublished manuscript, Louisiana State University, English Department. McGee, P. (1993) ‘Decolonization and the curriculum of English’, in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow (eds) Race, Identity and Representation in Education, New York: Routledge: 280–8. Morrison, T. (1970) The Bluest Eye, New York: Washington Square Press. —— (1973) Sula, New York: Plume. —— (1977) Song of Solomon, New York: Signet. —— (1981) Tar Baby, New York: Plume. —— (1990) ‘The site of memory’, in R.Fergusson, M.Gever, T.T.Minh-ha and C. West (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art: 299–305. —— (1992a) Jazz, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. —— (1992b) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard.


Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: James Currey. Ogunyemi, C.O. (1992) ‘Order and disorder in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’, Contemporary Literary Criticism 10:354–5. Paz, O. (1990) In Search of the Present, New York: Harcourt Brace. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Spivak, G. (1988) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C.Nelson and L.Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press: 271–316. Walcott, D. (1982) Another Life, Washington, D.C: Three Continents. Watt, I. (1957) The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley: University of California.

TONI MORRISON AND THE INDIVISIBILITY OF LANGUAGE DAVID BLEICH

Reading the various works of Toni Morrison urges the thought that it is not enough just to change the curriculum, or the classroom, or even the university. While we, as members of the various academic interests and constituencies, will continue to work for change in these local senses, unless we seek change in society, the local changes will start to lose their orientation, and they won’t make sense to their main beneficiaries: the generations now starting school and being born. Toni Morrison’s identity as an important voice of American society is familiar to many, yet different from that of anyone preceding her in what less and less often is called the ‘world of letters’. She holds a place similar to that of Adrienne Rich, but Morrison’s literature has had a greater role in popular culture than Rich’s poetry has had; generally, Morrison is listened to with less anxiety (though not necessarily with more receptivity) among the majority than Rich is. This situation, which emerged for me through discussions with students who responded to the literature and essays of both authors, is related to the political orientation of the two authors: students are more ready to discuss social change through race than through homophobia. A more significant contrast to be considered is between Morrison andT. S.Eliot, one of the last canonical American writers to have gained pre-eminence as both a literary artist and a literary and social critic—one whose views on literature, criticism, and culture were respected. The fact that this American from St Louis finally settled in England and adopted its majority religion is perhaps something to bear in mind during our considering the difference between him and Morrison. I will return to Eliot’s expatriate status briefly at the end of this essay. Since part of the present concern is curriculum, we should recall that Eliot is a key member of the ‘canon’ club, and was one in the late fifties and early sixties when I was first learning about the club members. He was held up regularly by teachers, partly because his work style lent itself readily to its being identified in classrooms as having been produced by a ‘man of letters’. He fit, almost ideally,


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

THE INDIVISIBILITY OF LANGUAGE 259

into the sense of ‘high culture’ that then comprised, in high schools and colleges, the curriculum for those seeking to call themselves educated. He was a decisive inspiration to those in the academy who viewed that institution as a way of separating themselves (as the intelligentsia of Europe routinely do) from the ‘ignorant’ majority of ‘peasants’ and workers. His perspective also helped those who sought to establish ‘high’ status even if their families, if white, were not rich. Those of my generation expected that we would not be well paid, but we also thought that we would be quite respectable as professionals. White immigrants to America did ‘get ahead’ by going to college and graduate school, where they ‘were exposed to’—who knows how many actually ‘learned’?— Eliot’s poetry and criticism. As a spokesman for high culture, Eliot, and his friend (the sometime fascist) Ezra Pound, criticized the rest of culture and very often its commercial basis, which they imagined was secretly run by Jews. Some of my teachers, who were Jews like me, championed these two poets regardless of their bigotry and presented them to me as models of cultural leadership, and (according to them) without question among the greatest poets the world has ever known. It has taken me until well into my professional life to find the appropriate contexts and vocabulary to revoke both the action of my former teachers and the cultural authority of Eliot. In spite of Eliot’s command of different registers of language, as well as his apparent self-revelations (accompanied by critical disclaimers invoking the separateness of literature from life) in his poetry and plays, Eliot’s life-themes are consistent and stable throughout his life: early on, love is gone and culture is spiritually empty; later, religion (actually, Christianity) is the answer because it restores (individual) love and cultural fullness. As Eliot’s personal prestige grew, this is what he wrote: It is now the opinion of some of the most advanced minds that some qualitative differences between individuals must still be recognized, and that the superior individuals must be formed into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honors. Those groups, formed of individuals apt for powers of government and administration, will direct the public life of the nation; the individuals composing them will be spoken of as ‘leaders’. There will be groups concerned with science, and groups concerned with philosophy, as well as groups consisting of men of action; and these groups are what we call élites. (Eliot, 1949/77:108) The primary channel of the transmission of culture is the family: no man wholly escapes from the kind, or wholly surpasses the degree, of culture which he acquired from his early environment. (Eliot, 1949/77:115)


The academic advocates of Eliot and Pound are the élite who will, they hoped, overcome being ‘a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, and become ‘leaders’ of culture. Eliot, however, was the last voice of its kind: the academic’s poet whose ways of life was a role model for the white masculine academy: both his passions and contempts (for women, Jews and Irish, for example) as they appeared in his poems, and his aspirations for culture and family (as they appeared in his literary tastes and his ‘new’ criticisms) were the ideal curriculum for the constituents of the American academy for four to five decades. Strangely enough, Toni Morrison can (has?) replace(d) Eliot by achieving just what Eliot failed to achieve: a voice not burdened by self-hatred and that can be endorsed by all zones in society, not just by its élite. This literary voice, in contrast to Eliot’s that reported anxieties in the context of mythology, reports feelings in the context of history and actually articulates something few white Americans know: the history of slavery. When I was a child, school taught about ‘prejudice’, a term one still hears among young people when they consider their relation to African Americans today. Later, in the sixties perhaps, schools taught about ‘racism’ which added a degree of urgency to mere prejudice. However, these are just the residues of history, the originating ground of which, the history of slavery, is still not widely disclosed in the curriculum. In her work, Toni Morrison has tried to include this history, announce the culture of the once enslaved population, and mobilize the freedom to retell the histories of this society. This curriculum is different from that inspired by T.S.Eliot. In the classroom, students find it easy to oppose prejudice and racism. But they don’t have the affective or linguistic vocabularies to cope with slavery nor to identify its results in today’s styles of social life. To some, to suggest that slavery still exists will be met with incredulous expressions as well as other forms of disbelief. In this discussion, I will try to give a taste of how Morrison’s writing is changing the role of the literary artist in our society by (1) offering to our curricula a history that society has heretofore concealed; (2) by providing the tropes in ‘fictional’ form of how people’s daily lives actually feel the pain of the history of slavery in America; and (3) by beginning the literary criticism of works by classical white writers that discloses their inner consciousness of the foundation of slavery and exploitation in white societies. I will then consider how these three items represent a revolutionary change in the role of writers in our society. Here is a passage from Beloved that answers the historical question, ‘What is slavery?’ ‘It’s time to nurse your youngest,’ she [Baby Suggs] said. Sethe reached up for the baby without letting the dead one go.


Baby Suggs shook her head. ‘One at a time,’ she said and traded the living for the dead, which she carried into the keeping room. When she came back, Sethe was aiming a bloody nipple into the baby’s mouth. Baby Suggs slammed her fist on the table and shouted, ‘Clean up! Clean yourself up! They fought then. Like rivals over the heart of the loved, they fought. Each struggling for the nursing child. Baby Suggs lost when she slipped in a red puddle and fell. So Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister. (Morrison, 1987:152) Slavery is having to swallow the blood of your sister with the milk of your mother. In the novel this is not exactly so: it is what ‘freedom’ is for this family. Slavery is, rather, what will goad you to kill your child in order to avoid it. This is not how slavery is presented in history books. Reading this passage, I, not having been a slave, may begin to entertain how it feels to be a slave and thus, what it ‘meant’. Because how it felt is as much part of history as how it was. Dispassionate description of, for example, slaves on the auction block, can recreate how it felt and how deeply it was loathed; this is what this novel does. However, Morrison’s material changes the ‘reading list’ of history, and gives a credible way of recognizing the historical accuracy of literature. Although history has always been part of the novel, schools have studiously sought to separate the ‘fictional’ from the ‘real’ and in this way to keep the writer more or less insignificant as a speaker for the culture. Because of its traditional, even ideological, separation of feeling from fact in almost every part of our lives, our society has had no means to render the historical truth of literature as part of the curriculum. In consequence, even the popularity of Beloved alone cannot now teach us the significance of what Sethe did to avoid the return to slavery. But even if the magnitude of this loathing were suddenly taught in the curriculum as a way to recognize the heinousness of slavery, that too would not be enough. Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Old Woman Magoun (in the short story of that name) lets her granddaughter (Lily, age fourteen) eat deadly nightshade rather than be given by her father to his friend as a sexual possession. After Lily dies, society returns to ‘normal’. When that normalcy comes into doubt—and it still has not— Morrison’s history of slavery, as given in her novels, can be understood as history. Changing the curriculum may help change our sense of normalcy. Revising normalcy involves teaching students to feel the historicity of what Morrison is presenting, to feel the actual condition in some ways, lived in today’s life and society, different, of course, from the actual events depicted by Morrison, yet related, ultimately, to the total experience of slavery and its aftermaths. In an essay I wrote some time back (Bleich, 1989) I discussed how, through readers’ responses to The Bluest Eye, one can show some senses in which racist feelings derive from sexist feelings. In addition to my reflections on my own responses (which were not enough to teach me the wider picture), Ms


L’s response seemed especially to help me say how Morrison’s story portrays the special combination of these two forms of collective domination. A key moment in this novel is Cholly Breedlove’s rape of his eleven-year-old daughter, Pecola. In her response, Ms L, a white woman who grew up close to African Americans in the South, felt she needed to learn how racism lived within her and how it may have been configured. In her response essay, she described how she was raped by a black man who made a point of the fact that she was white. Ms L reported feeling racially antagonistic to black men after that, but that those feelings were not the strong ones. Rather, it was her father’s tendency to violence in the service of his racism that scared her the most. Ms L wrote: When I did finally talk to my parents about the experience, my f ather still wanted to grab a shotgun and get his redneck brothers and go Black bars and kill ‘niggers’. He and his friends both told me that if they had known at the time, that’s how they would have reacted. (Bleich, 1989:9) In addition to fear of her father’s violent behavior, there was her resentment of how his violent feelings prevented him from being the needed parent to her: Your stupid racist thinking cost me the support that I needed from you at the time I was raped… If you weren’t such a goddam racist then you could have been there when I needed you. (Bleich, 1989:9) There is an important parallel between Ms L’s feeling most strongly against her father rather than against the rapist, and Morrison’s almost sympathetic description of Cholly Breedlove’s assault on his daughter. Cholly’s sexual identity had been perverted, in part, by the white men’s humiliation of him during his early sexual encounter with Darlene. They were interrupted by two white men with guns, and Cholly was ordered to continue making love to Darlene. Twice, Morrison describes how Cholly felt; first: Cholly, moving fast, looked at Darlene. He hated her. He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much. (Morrison, 1985:2150) And then, a few pages later: Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene. Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up… He


was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight … The loathing that galloped through him made him tremble. (Morrison, 1985:2152) The rendition of Cholly’s rape of his daughter comes only a few pages after this description of his feelings toward Darlene and the description of how he met Pauline Williams, Pecola’s mother. Cholly and Ms L have something in common: their greatest fear (and antagonism) was of (for) the white men with guns. Ms L’s main hatred was not of the black rapist but of what he, as a man, had in common with her father and his ‘redneck’ brothers. Similarly, Cholly primarily did not hate Darlene or Pecola. Rather, in his reduced state he felt a ‘tenderness, a protectiveness’ (Morrison, 1985:2159) toward Pecola and the unfocused temptation to do a ‘wild and forbidden thing’ (2159). Afterward, Cholly felt a ‘hatred mixed with tenderness’ (2159). Cholly’s psychology poses no mysteries: to fight the white man would destroy him, while to hate/love his daughter was something he could not control, and was in a sense, the only space left for his turbulent passions. As for Ms L, the desire for survival for Cholly seems to be the primary feeling. That Cholly’s violent feelings should come out in a sexual way is a reflection of how the white men’s sexual feeling came out in a violent way in his own life. In the case of both the white and black men, sex and violence are so close to one another that they pervert their lives in general and victimize women in that cause. This is how Ms L’s ‘reading’ of the novel helps to teach, helps to show as a factor in history, what is held in common between white and black, male and female. But these categories are mixed and particularized by each reader, while all readers in one way or another participate in the history of slavery, racism, and sexism. Ms L is indirectly the victim of her father in ways analogous to how Pecola is directly the victim of hers, while both and Cholly are victims of white men with guns. Morrison’s novel presents tropes of feeling and domination new to the curriculum and to the public. As society is now, however, that this novel is well-received ensures little: it is still being received into a readership that does not respond to the novel as Ms L did; rather, audiences praised it. Whether the audience that applauds the novel will let it into the curriculum in order to teach living history remains to be seen. The same might be said about the response of Ms S to Beloved, a response I discussed at some length in another essay (Bleich, 1992). The issue in this response, as in the novel, is slavery more directly, but slavery as related to sexism. Ms S wrote:


Even though Beloved is set a century ago, in a culture that outwardly seems totally alien to anything I know—I found myself being reminded by pieces of me and my life as I read. Unfortunately for my mom, Sethe and she have a lot in common… Women have carried what seems like the guilt of the world on their shoulders for so long—as bearers of humankind they are tied to a yoke of guilt and unfulfillment. In a sense, all women who are solely homemakers are slaves… My mom, like Sethe, when we all grew up and left, felt like she had nothing… she had denied selfhood in order to be a ‘good’ mother… I feel for Sethe and my mom, and all the women like them who give and give and give and in the end they find themselves old, lonely, and staring into a mirror where they can’t even see their own reflections. (Bleich, 1992:31–2) This reading, less directly responsive to racial slavery, brings out another element in history usually suppressed in society, but nevertheless a part of this novel: motherhood as an enslaving institution in white society. White people who may be attentive to the history of black slavery in America are not inclined to think of housewives as being enslaved in any similar way. The respondent, Ms S, not herself a mother at the moment of the response, separates herself from her mother by understanding how her mother had been a ‘slave’ but that she (Ms S) is not. Ms S’s responses suggest that the issue of slavery is not ultimately confined, even in this society, to the history of African Americans here. Nevertheless, Ms S’s point is as historically based as Morrison’s, and for similar reasons: female domestic slavery is a heritage that is related to other forms of slaveholding by men. The point of Ms S’s classroom remarks is that they too provide a new curriculum element expressed by Morrison’s literature. Moreover, this element is derived through the response process, and appears in the first instance as a feeling that is related to a historically regenerated set of social relations, in which people living today can be understood to participate in the past situation. As is the case with Ms L, Ms S’s insight and its unorthodox form of presentation will remain isolated in the traditional classroom structures of authority and the traditional handling of new curriculum elements by school and university systems. For this new curriculum element to be validated as such, it has to appear in, or be directed toward, larger changes in society’s ways of functioning. In a recent short essay, T.Walter Herbert, a Hawthorne scholar thinking about how to reconsider canonical works with due respect to the changing public consciousness, observes that ‘Hawthorne’s art is radioactive, with energies drawn from the instability of the nuclear family’ (Herbert, 1993). Herbert, aware of the tensions in his own family due to having children and a spouse of independent means, became alert to an informal principle of criticism (passed along to me by Ralph Cohen some years back) which holds that individual works have no inherent ideology; they are necessarily part of the various ideological


fabrics of their times, and can be ideologically reconceived in different historical periods. Thus, any novel (for example), once ideologically identified by its membership in a canon, actually expresses thoughts suppressed in its own society, but later evinced through new social values as expressed in new ways of reading. This procedure is what Herbert ‘discovered’, relative to, say, ‘family values’ in The Scarlet Letter. While one cannot predict that this move will ‘break the deadlock at the heart of literary studies’, we can understand it as an instance of a principle given by Toni Morrison some years earlier with regard to reading ‘canonical’ literature. In a 1989 essay,1 Morrison discussed the historical rereading of Melville with our attention on his awareness of the black and multiracial population in America (Morrison, 1989). Before considering this essay’s thoughts, however, something Morrison wrote in Playing in the Dark (1992b) helps to understand better the critical perspective of the earlier essay. The topic of the later work is similar to that of the essay, but it takes a more comprehensive view of American literature. Morrison describes how she came to the view that American writers cannot possibly have avoided including consciousness of the Africanist persona in their literature: she shifted from thinking as a reader to thinking as a writer: As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this… I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of the Africanist presence. (Morrison, 1992b:17) Two parts of Morrison’s perspective are: first, the sense in which all novels are projections of the novelist, and second, that literature represents how a people chooses to talk about itself. While these points of view have appeared in criticism and theory in the past, they have not appeared as statements of a principle of reading in a political scene; rather the principle has always been given under an individualist assumption, or, reading in a private scene. By changing to a political or public scene of reading, Morrison also changes the traditional Freudian meaning of ‘dream’. In his 1908 essay, ‘The relation of the poet to daydreaming’, Freud considered the ‘narcissistic’ elements of fantasy to be


‘disguised’ so as to make the fantasy socially acceptable. This sense of the translation of private fantasy into public story retains the dichotomy of the private individual donating his/her passions to an ‘other’ society and thus having to conceal something true about the fantasy. Morrison’s change suggests that the public document is also the dream, disguised not by the dreamer but by the culture which reads it. Thus, by taking a writerly perspective, one can give more credit to the literature by assuming it includes reference to the total society, and thus better understand the historical relationship of the past literature to our present understanding of the history of society. While I will return to Morrison’s critical view later, consider now her earlier application of her critical approach to Melville: A complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text is Moby Dick, and among its several meanings it seems to me this ‘unspeakable’ one has remained the ‘hidden course’, the ‘truth in the Face of Falsehood.’ To this day no novelist has so wrestled with its subject. (Morrison, 1989:18) Part of this truth, for Morrison, is the theme of the ‘whiteness of the whale’. With regard to the chapter of the foregoing title, Morrison notes Melville’s private struggle ‘to explain myself here…explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught’ (Morrison, 1989:17). The whiteness, Melville continues in Morrison’s citation, carries the ‘profoundest idealized significance’. From this Morrison infers that Melville is not exploring white people but whiteness idealized. Then, after informing the reader of his ‘hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden course we seek,’ he tries to nail it. To provide the key to the ‘hidden course’. His struggle to do so is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. (Morrison, 1989:17) Morrison insists that Melville’s desperate isolated passion is not merely due to abolitionist feelings or opposition to capitalist failures of humanity. The passion of his literature is due, rather, to his ‘hidden’ questioning of ‘the very notions of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as a privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority’ (Morrison, 1989:18). This level of questioning, Morrison observes, ‘was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now’ (Morrison, 1989). Morrison’s discussion helps to account for the cultural machinery of suppressing the philosophy of racial superiority. She reasons: we must be able to find in Melville’s literature the level of feeling that corresponds to the suppression of the ultimate shame— the inner but collectively shared belief in the superiority of white people. This


level of inner depravity in individuals and in the society is then symbolized by the bizarre whiteness of the whale, while the battle against it is located in this one figure, Ahab, whose personality is at least obsessed but also may be bordering on the psychotic. He tries to find justice by stabbing from ‘hell’s heart’ at this whiteness that reduced his own body (took his leg) and overtook his mind. In other words, Morrison suggests, the strange character of this novel corresponds to the strange, but deeply hidden collective beliefs in the racial superiority of white people and the inability to exorcize these beliefs. In view of Melville’s story of Benito Cereno, it is hard not to adopt this view of Melville. The story is actually about how an American cannot comprehend the meaning of slavery, and particularly, its effects on the slaveholder, represented in the story by Benito Cereno, the captain on whose ship the slaves have taken over. When the American Captain Amasa Delano ‘rescues’ Benito Cereno’s ship, Delano cannot understand why Cereno does not feel ‘saved’. Throughout the novel, the mutual degradation of slaveholder and slave had been portrayed, the diseased character of the total situation in which slaves are being transported on a ship under the rule of a European. As he does in Moby Dick, Melville isolates American society on a ship, ‘foreign’ in this case, and then shows its depravity. The actual American sees only the need to ‘correct’ the power inversion, and has no sense of the social and human devastation wrought by the slavery as a total institution. While I won’t discuss it at length, one might well read Billy Budd as a similar allegory of the human degradation wrought by military (that is, naval, in this case) psychology and wartime law. Related to this as well as to his earlier works is the fact that the ‘society’ represented is all male, which, on the one hand, makes a statement about which people are ‘really’ citizens, and, on the other, introduces homoerotic feelings and consciousness that are violently suppressed in American society. In any event, Morrison’s approach to Melville by seeing through ‘the writer’s’ perspective may be adapted by many readers starting in a variety of socially and politically informed contexts. Given the kinds of social changes imminent in our society, the latter stipulation is particularly contemporary, as is suggested by this next instance from Morrison’s criticism. Consider now Morrison’s recent essay, ‘Friday on the Potomac’. It is not assumed to be literary criticism when Morrison presents her partial reading of Robinson Crusoe in trying to find the right way to describe Clarence Thomas without saying too much directly about him. Nevertheless her discussion says clearly that Thomas fits into the white man’s narrative. It looks at first as if the analogy between Thomas and Friday is meant to say that there was, for Thomas, no choice: the only way toward prosperity, the choice he took instead of vengeance was by volunteering to become a servant again, and to place the foot of the master on his head; prosperity was a better choice than vengeance. Morrison means, however, to describe only what Thomas thought he did. Thomas actually gave up his own language, Morrison suggests, because it was


necessary, given the false choice of prosperity versus vengeance he set up for himself: One is obliged to cooperate in the misuse of figurative language, in the reinforcement of cliche, the erasure of difference, the jargon of justice, the evasion of logic, the denial of history, the crowning of patriarchy, the inscription of hegemony; to be complicit in the vandalizing, sentimentalizing and trivialization of the torture black people have suffered. Such rhetorical strategies become necessary because, without one’s own idiom, there is no other language to speak. Both Friday and Clarence Thomas accompany their rescuers into the world of power and salvation. But the problem of rescue still exists: both men, black but unrecognizable at home or away, are condemned first to mimic, then to internalize and adore, but never to utter one single sentence understood to be beneficial to their original culture, whether the people of their culture are those who wanted to hurt them or those who loved them to death. (Morrison, 1992b:xxviii–ix) Earlier in the discussion, Morrison characterized this ‘problem of rescue’ faced by Friday and by Thomas as: ‘If the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full…full payment, forever. Because the rescuer wants to hear his name, not mimicked but adored’ (Morrison, 1992b:xxv–vi). At this point in the reading, Morrison does not need to say that Thomas wanted to be ‘rescued’ from home. Instead the Enlightenment imperialist’s novel speaks. Morrison calls the book a ‘success story’, because the white man successfully converted the black man to his culture and his religion while still preserving the difference between white and black required by the white man. This difference, Morrison’s essay says strongly, is a difference in language. Which in both Friday’s and Thomas’s situation, has become a site of violence—‘jargon, evasion, denial’, and so on. Here is where Morrison brings us up to date, so to speak, noting in the most decisive ways how this history of the dereliction of language carried slavery forward: a dereliction that accounts, in part, for slavery’s incredible power to remain in human society. Through the reading of the canonical narrative, Morrison places a new identity and a new worth on this highly regarded work, this mainstay of the curriculum. She has not censored or criticized Defoe’s narrative, but has added something to it—the story of Clarence Thomas, a story that is as certainly a part of the literary curriculum as Robinson Crusoe is part of the history curriculum. As Herbert did with Hawthorne and Morrison did earlier with Melville and the several writers in Playing in the Dark, her readings amount to the enlargement of pertinent factors that lend meaning to the ‘new critical’ details and ironies that heretofore would have been read only with respect to other details given by the text itself and


never with regard to a living human, social, political, or cultural context. Although Morrison is not the first critic to understand a work of literature as a cultural document, she departs from earlier critics by teaching the principle of reading literature as culturally heterogeneous, as comprehensive in its perception of its own society and in its potential application to our societies. With these principles in mind, compare Eliot’s aims in his poetry and his discussions of culture later on. The heterogeneity of The Waste Land’ was perceived only in terms of its many historical and mythological references, but not in terms of how it framed otherness as they appeared through Eliot’s bigotries. Criticism (my Jewish and other teachers in graduate school) did not ‘notice’ Eliot’s references to the various ‘others’ that appeared in his work. Similarly, his later discussions of culture do announce his advocacy of a uniform Christian culture led by white men, but these discussions were not ‘read’, that is, not included in the ‘Eliot’ reading lists in the curriculum. Eliot’s own readings of literature, present in his own criticism, make choices that maintain a stable set of artifacts, and tries to rearrange those artifacts in an accepted hierarchy of cultural and literary values, but these actions were also not noted by the criticism which established the curricula. And why, finally, should we not ‘read’ Eliot’s expatriation to England and his adoption of the Church of England as his own as an instance, like that of Friday and Thomas, of being ‘rescued’ from his own home, whose problems he chose not to face? Didn’t Eliot really choose the ‘master’ and its language by moving to England? And might not his later prose writings, which were produced during his expatriate life, be as complicit in the misuse of language as Thomas’s formulations were? Morrison’s ‘readings in’ to the works and to the curriculum, however, change the meaning of literature. Her readings require us to orient our perception of individual works, of authors’ total oeuvres, and of a culture’s collected works toward shared dreams and fantasies, toward public, historical reference. Her criticism, like her novels, is meant not for canonization or for a reading-list curriculum, but for active use, for overtaking common language and using it for new common purposes, converting received language, if appropriate, to the language of others and inserting it into the cultures of others. How shall we consider, furthermore, the discoveries Morrison announced in Playing in the Dark? We might first think about why Morrison, long since an established writer, only now discovered that she should read canonical American literature through, perhaps, her own ‘generic’ writer’s eyes. What delayed her perception that she should read as a writer? One answer might be this: our system of education, with its emphasis on literate psychology and culture, relies on the separation of reading and writing, teaches them separately, and, in the academy, has established different professional institutions to study reading and writing. Perhaps the subject of English is meant to unify reading and writing, but as most of us members of this profession know, there is a fundamental split, even within the profession of English, between teachers and scholars of ‘literature’ and teachers and scholars of ‘writing’. There is even a third group, off by


themselves often enough, called ‘creative writers’. Toni Morrison, educated in America, was subject to this same fragmentation of attention, and only now during the moments of her appearances in the larger scenes of our collective lives, did she announce her discovery of something original in all of our lives: the indivisibility of language: reading, writing, speaking, and hearing; the indivisibility of orality and literacy. This is not, however, a new piece of abstract knowledge, but a practical demonstration of what ‘seeing as a writer’ may mean for students and for the teaching of writing. Morrison’s understanding can show students that they may have been inhibited about writing because of the division between reading and writing, literature and composition, represented in schools. But also, their own thinking may have been prevented from reaching substantive insight by the professionalized division of subjects motivated by ideologies we reject. By seeing as a writer, one thinks more comprehensively, Morrison’s insight suggests. Furthermore, she describes a moment of self-recognition: while discovering thinking-as-a-writer, she is also recognizing thinking-as-oneself. Being a writer is the identity through which she reached us, the public. Morrison therefore reports recognizing that she may use the identity through which she came into the public for a new purpose: criticism, in this case, converting a narrowly conceived canon into a group of works whose meaning is available to all members of society. Her use of her writerly identity, in addition to proposing new ways of teaching writing and thinking, also teaches us to bring together the cultures of slaves, exslaves, and children of slaves with the cultures of slaveholders and exslaveholders; it teaches how to join black and white, male and female, gay and straight, not in a blend of indistinguishable identities, but in a collective of differences poised to interact and to re-stabilize society on a basis more honest and just than that on to which we came. This is a project—the reaffirmation of the indivisibility of language—for us teachers of language, literature, history, and culture, indeed, for any teachers who want to join this project. Morrison has combined her writing and reading selves in such a way as to render the literature that has heretofore existed only as texts on which we are to be tested, into documents that we must learn to speak out loud, read to one another, and intermingle our written and spoken words in the process of bringing our historically separated and segregated identities into ordinary social, decent proximity common to citizens of the same civilization. When I read Eliot in graduate school, my Jewish professors were inviting me to place Eliot’s foot on my head when they said I should overlook the ‘Chicago Semite Viennese’ in his poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar’. They invited me to confine Eliot’s words to the text, since if they or I actually spoke them in public and meant them, my head would indeed be under someone’s foot in a more ominous sense. That I accepted their invitation then disturbs me now. However, it was then considered by Jews that to speak our culture was ‘bad form’, because its result would have disclosed in public what


my Jewish teachers were worried about: the fear that the then-current collective Jewish action of securing a place in the academy would fail; the academy was still (to Jews) a less-than-welcoming institution in an otherwise generous host American culture. Toni Morrison’s fiction and criticism helps us to speak and to create the new languages to identify, even to the very young student, just when our language is unwelcome in the public discourse. She is helping us to transform our sense of curriculum from lists of books and ways of writing to the collection of everchanging and unruly issues that face individuals as members and prospective members of specific societies and specific parts of the larger society. Her voice, in its many forms and multiplicity of sounds and moves, is a voice for many people, a voice that takes literally the meaning of ‘all’ in the count of just which people are ‘created equal’. This is what we should be doing in school, I think: making sure our words are working honestly with everything else we do. Notes 1 The essay is ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature’ (1989). Thanks to Joyce Middleton for showing me this essay, as well as for urging me to include Playing in the Dark in the present discussion.

References Bleich, David (1989) ‘Racism and sexism in literary responses to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’, Iowa English Bulletin, Vol. 37:1–14. —— (1992) ‘Reading from inside and outside one’s community: reading and teaching Franz Kafka and Toni Morrison’, in David Dowing (ed.) Practicing Theory, Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English: 1–14. Cohen, Ralph (1984) Personal communication. Eliot, T.S. (1949/77) Christianity and Culture [‘The Idea of a Christian Society’ and ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture’], New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Herbert, T. Walter (1993) ‘Breaking the deadlock at the heart of literary studies’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 March: A52. Morrison, Toni (1985) The Bluest Eye, in Sandra M.Gilbert and Susan Gubar (eds) The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, New York: Norton. —— (1987) Beloved, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. —— (1989) ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review 28, Winter: 1–33. —— (1992a) ‘Introduction: Friday on the Potomac’, in Toni Morrison (ed.) Raceing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, New York: Pantheon Books. —— (1992b) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York: Random.

SULA AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE FOLK IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE PHILLIP M.RICHARDS

Whether or not Toni Morrison had encountered semiotics before writing Sula, the novel reveals the persistence of the cultural codes that shape our understanding of the social world and underlie the production of literary meaning. She grasps the endurance of black middle-class culture and its semantics far better than the myriad critics who consistently discover reversals of bourgeois social, political and economic codes in her work. It is now commonplace to say that we best value Sula by appreciating the way in which the author inverts genres and expectations created by middle-class American ideology. In this critical climate, Morrison’s book and her corpus make much of their striking impression. Her allegedly subversive literary discourse extends a late twentieth-century tradition which represents authentic blackness as a figurative process: the deferral, revision, or undoing of the established social and cultural codes of white Western civilization. Figuration of this sort makes Sula part of feminist literary canons that define their members by subversive literary strategies. From a conventionally modernist point of view, Sula exemplifies the dérèglement of Western conceptions of the self, of patriarchal social arrangements, or of bourgeois American culture itself. These critiques, however, are marked by the writers’ recoil from some of Sula’s assaults on bourgeois norms.1 And that recoil illustrates the irony which this paper explores. Morrison’s attack on the limits of middle-class life is framed in such a way that the text reinstates those limits in the minds of readers who affirm its subversive tendencies. The contradictory critical gesture I describe is one indication that we too easily appropriate Sula into now conventional categories. Our understanding of Sula too often repeats uncritically the text’s illusions instead of uncovering their ideological roots. Morrison’s texts represent the folk as a wishfulfilling fulfillment to a thwarted bourgeois African American desire for full selfhood. In another sense, the text represents the folk as an entity distanced from middle-


© 1995 Routledge 0950–23 86

SULA AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE FOLK 273

class life by the very economic realities that shape the black bourgeois ethos. In either case, Morrison’s representations of the folk are shaped by a firm sense of the economic, social and cultural realities of a black Protestant social ideology that extends back to the eighteenth century. And in its own way Morrison’s novel is an ironic text of that tradition. Although the novel represses its bourgeois ideological roots, Sula functions in a middle-class, black tradition centered around the reproduction of a bourgeois evangelical social order. This nineteenth-century black middle-class culture, most recently described by Wilson J.Moses, Dickson J.Bruce and Hazel V.Carby, articulated patterns of personal conduct, family, community organization, and congregation.2 Black literary Protestantism, like its seventeenth-century Puritan ancestor, inevitably set forth a form of socialization linking piety to the internalization of cultural norms, and ultimately the reproduction of community. The poetic and narrative voices of writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass illustrate a complex and self-contradictory literary subjectivity that emerged as these acculturated slaves internalized Protestant social norms from patrons and kind masters. The culture in which these writers achieved literacy posed impediments to the dramatization of full selfhood (as it was conceived in evangelical and romantic terms) as well as to black uplift.3 The quest to achieve autonomy in a world of patrons, to escape inferior caste status in an egalitarian democracy, or to overcome psychological distance from the unlettered black masses with whom one claimed solidarity constituted serious contradictions that often over-determined black expression, and shaped its representations of African American folk culture. In its crucial late-nineteenth-century phase, African American literature is characterized by an intense psychological introspection into the cultural contradictions that impeded selfhood and full racial self-consciousness. An important figure of this moment, Charles Chesnutt, often dramatized the folk as a wishfulfilling response to the contradictions of literary Americanization in particular and Black Americanization in general. His representations of the folk in fictions, such as The wife of his youth’, consolidated a literary discourse that sought therapeutic or psychological resolution of these dislocations. Other works by DuBois, James Weldon Johnson and Booker T.Washington, with a yet unexamined psychological insight, dramatize the folk as an other whose alienation from a cultivated observer is implicitly determined by bourgeois norms. This paradigm of psychological resolution gave new literary depth to black writing in the period. And, with notable exceptions, it appears to be a male tradition, a tradition which features the provocative confrontation between psychologically complex cultivated blacks and the seeming simplicities of folk life. Such confrontations mark the paradigm’s beginning in the early works The Souls of Black Folk (Dubois, 1903/69), Up From Slavery (Washington, 1901/ 69), and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (Johnson, 1912/69)—texts


that alerted later writers such as Jean Toomer, Fenton Johnson, and Langston Hughes to use folk representations as a means of implicitly exploring the psychology of middle-class life. The Harlem Renaissance and its immediate aftermath in the thirties saw the apotheosis of this theme in works such as Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930/40), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937/91), and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom (1933/70). This psychologized cultivated discourse of the folk remained influential in the work of Ralph Ellison, and it plays, as I argue here, a special role in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Within this tradition, subversions of bourgeois convention by folk figures such as Bita, Teacake and Trueblood become means for exploring the deepest wishes and fears of middle-class figures such as Janie and the invisible narrator. The psychology of such a middle-class figure has been formed by teachers or parents (often possessing roots in late-nineteenth-century black culture) who embody the evangelical piety or the values of black uplift—either as conceived by white abolitionists or black proponents of racial progress. In the course of the text’s narrative, the middle-class naif confronts cultural contradictions that block the fulfillments of selfhood demanded by Protestantism and Romanticism. A conspicuous folk double who often overshadows the black middle-class subject results from the initiated bourgeois figure’s wishfulf illing f antasy of freedom from the inhibitions to an emerging selfhood. Through the development of the folk double, the reader engages a complex account of the cultivated character’s full psychology. One cannot stress too highly the roots of the cultivated character’s quest for selfhood in narrowly American and broadly Western economic and cultural ideologies. The complicated self-hoods of Bita in McKay’s Banana Bottom, Janie in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Tempy in Hughes’s Not Without Laughter are represented as emerging, however indirectly, out of the leisure and experience made possible by surpluses of bourgeois prosperity. These characters have the entitlements of security and spare time necessary to avail themselves of the expanding world of print. Their relative prosperity makes the middle-class capitalist ethos of the expanding American and English empire plausible to them as cultivated blacks. By paternalist white connections— reading, intellectual activity, and condition of life—these blacks are linked to the cosmopolitan centers of Europe and America. And, to a large extent, these ties yield the contradictions of autonomy, psychological identification, and frustrated quests for belonging to a racially exclusive white American society. That the cultivated blacks’ selfhood depends upon the energies that distance them from the masses, makes implausible their caste status, and ties them to patrons who exemplify independence. This dilemma only complicates their involvement in what the late George Kent has movingly called the ‘adventure of Western culture’. To be tied to Western conceptions of the self in this way is of course to be unable to give oneself up to the wishfulfilling freedom of one’s folk double or to


its otherness, no matter how seductive the opportunity for abandonment. Teacake in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jubban in Banana Bottom, and Sula herself represent the means to the fulfillment of possibilities that their cultivated counterparts Janie, Bita and Nel desire. Critics of these texts have necessarily focused on the ambivalence with which the psychologically weighted visions of the folk are drawn.4 Significantly, however, the text cannot fully repress the persisting contradictions that impede the cultivated character’s gratifications. The concern of Janie’s grandmother for her charge’s security returns vehemently when Janie shoots Teacake. The dreamwork of freedom can never produce the bourgeois character’s desire for security and freedom from violation. The persistent need for economic and personal safety produces the morally and psychologically equivocal character of Janie’s dream of freedom.5 It is a concern for middle-class dignity and propriety that makes Nel, the invisible narrator, and I suspect many readers, recoil at the excesses of Sula and Trueblood, not to mention Eva and Bledsoe. The resolution of McKay’s Banana Bottom is not satisfactory, precisely because we do not understand how the impulse to possess a folk homeland represented by Jubban can satisfy the intellectual drives that separate Bita from her culture.6 Late in the evening, after Jubban has finished work, what precisely does this couple have to discuss? Ultimately, the middle-class discourse of the folk only reinstates the distance created by the culture of literacy between the cultivated blacks and the folk. The romance of the folk repeats and at times seems to celebrate the central truth of Americanization: that the mechanics of literacy and socialization drive a cultural wedge between a lettered, socially mobile black elite and the black masses. The frustrated energies of cultivated blacks are directed towards resolution in sometimes improbable marriages and affairs. The introspective focus of the folk discourse is implicit in the novels’ general indifference to the concrete issues of family formation that the genre of romance inevitably implies. Inevitably, the wishfulfilling imagery of the folk only implies the true distance of the bourgeois from the masses. However, the culture of the folk masses at the end of Not Without Laughter, Sula and Invisible Man (Ellison, 1952) is redefined as an ‘other’ more impenetrable and more distant than before: the women who clamor for Janie’s death at the trial, the rioters in the Harlem disturbances of Ellison’s novel, and the sensual whores and street-dwellers in Morrison’s lost Medallion of the twenties and thirties—all of these represent a reality of the folk apart from the desires of the bourgeois. A digression on Langston Hughes The most self-conscious exemplar of the bourgeois discourse of the folk and its dialectics is Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes, as Arnold Rampersad’s biography explicitly shows, belongs to an early twentieth-century cohort of bohemian middle-class intellectuals able to avail themselves of the leisure and introspection necessary for significant literary experimentation. Hughes’s father


(a light-skinned man who hated other blacks) was a successful engineer and landowner who sent his son to Columbia University. Langston attended Central High School in Cleveland where he was taught by Helen Chesnutt, the Smitheducated daughter of the distinguished novelist. In New York he became friends with Countee Cullen, the foster son of a successful Harlem minister. Hughes’s experience was broadly shared by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown and Arna Bontemps who received educations from the black middle-class intelligentsia or came from middle-class backgrounds which extended back to the late-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.7 I draw on Hughes largely because he is so open in confessing the bourgeois ideology of the folk, its strategies, its psychology, its pathos, and its reactive energies. In his literary manifesto, The Negro artist and the racial mountain’ (1926/76) and in his underrated first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930/40), Hughes develops the middle-class discourse of the folk to evoke himself as a cultivated middle-class black confronting the contradictions of middle-class life, seeking a wishfulfilling folk vision, and acknowledging the pathos of the failed projection. These works are significant not only because they suggest the pervasiveness of this early twentieth-century folk ideology which migrated from autobiography to literary politics, and eventually to criticism in our own time. Hughes’s early work explicitly sets forth the ideological dynamics of Hughes’s and Hurston’s own literary production. Hughes’s The Negro artist and the racial mountain’ is a response to George Schuyler’s attack on the conception of black art: ‘The Negro art hokum’ which is a tract that represented African American life as wholly American. It is useful to think of this debate as a controversy about the ease with which the early twentieth-century black middle class had accomplished the task of Americanization. Hughes’s call for an authentic black folk art barely masks his sense of the profound cultural, psychological, and social costs of Americanization for middle-class blacks in American life. Hughes draws explicitly upon a wishfulfilling conception of the folk to articulate a psychology that would become pervasive in some of the most important black writing of the late twenties and thirties. In this myth the folk emerges as a set of wishfulfilling evasions and revisions of those aspects of black middle-class culture that keeps a young artist from greatness. These inhibiting elements of black bourgeois culture become the uncritical imagination of ‘white’ middle-class culture, class consciousness, intraracial color lines, materialism, and an aesthetic based on ‘white’ European values. To be sure, the art to which the artist aspires is a Romanticism that is as American, European and ‘white’ as anything listed in the passage. The speaker of the text has had the leisure and cultivation to absorb an Emersonian and Whitmanian vision mediated through Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay. This cultural nationalistic impulse to discover himself and his people represents the American romanticism acquired by a bohemian black intellectual at his leisure. Acquisition is a central theme in the writer’s discourse here. Middle-class life (like the


artist’s life) is presented as the painstaking appropriation of a culture with which one is ultimately ill at ease. Black bourgeois life is (as it would become in the work of E. Franklin Frazier), an agon of a kind of spurious economic rationality, social selectivity, and cultural mimicry that yields not sophistication but instead an ‘aping’ suggestive of social (and biological) regression rather than advance. For racial culture the home of a self-styled ‘high-class’ Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will be more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attends a fashionable church where few really coloured faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North, they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and a house ‘like white folks’. Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people. (Hughes, 1926/76:306) Lower-class black ‘folk culture’ allows the poet to imagine a self that follows the imperatives of a Romantic discourse while denying association with the profoundly Western ethos which includes the Romanticism and individualism that infuses the artist’s language. The inversions of black middle-class materialism, class consciousness, and postponement of gratification suggest a black authenticity and represses hints of the speaker’s real Emersonianism. Significantly in the passage above and elsewhere, the speaker’s point of view depends upon a concrete specificity in middle-class black life that suggests intimacy with the realities of his subject: the writer’s sense of the black bourgeoisie’s professions, conjugal choice, and language are the knowing observations of an insider. Whatever the problems of the black bourgeoisie, their world is the world of a concrete, economic reality; it is a world that exists, and, in some sense intimidates the narrator. The writer’s desire for a fulfilling world of the folk lacks this sense of concreteness: that grid of economic and social realities that impose a cost on human gratifications. And the manifesto’s speaker is not sure that this world can be brought into being. But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy Their religion soars to a


shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the Negro what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him —if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question. (Hughes, 1926/76:306) The excerpt above pointedly lacks the specificity of the earlier insider’s view of black middle-class culture. The passage’s lack of specificity, its blurriness, its metaphorical aspect, its sense of an orgasmic lower-class black spontaneity all point to its wishfulfilling character as a dream. The speaker’s anticipation of the great black artist coming from the folk is a hope that ‘perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro Artist.’ As part of the American tradition of wishfulfilling dreams to which this passage eminently belongs, hope resolves the problem of imitativeness and evasiveness of self, so deadly to the Emersonian ideal that the writer covertly espouses. The great Negro folk artist will be ‘the one who is not afraid to be himself, a Romantic black intellectual who defines the self as an Emersonian aspiration blocked by the contradictions—the spiritual impediments—of black middle-class life. Hughes’s specific but generic account of bourgeois negro life echoes formulations already developed by Chesnutt, Jean Toomer and James Weldon Johnson (authors whom the manifesto’s author pointedly mentions). These formulations seek to recreate the psychology of young black artists who, like Hughes, were descendants of a cultivated nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Hughes’s hope for a great black folk artist is an attempt to impose a wishfulfilling resolution of the conflict between inherited romantic literary influences and the social inhibitions of his social class as he saw it in the early twentieth century. This inner struggle, and he specifically defines it as such, spoke deeply to his early twentieth-century cohort of bohemian black writers and also their spiritual descendants in the sixties. Hughes employed and extended this bourgeois psychology to frame his firstperson, autobiographical fiction, Not Without Laughter (1940). The novel explicitly shows the way in which the bourgeois standards that can inhibit artistry also provide the environment for reading and reflection that were the basis for the artistic stance that Hughes had assumed a few years earlier in his manifesto, ‘The Negro artist and the racial mountain’. Sandy, the book’s main character, aspires to a nineteenth-century standard of cultivation and race leadership embodied by Booker T.Washington andW. E.B.DuBois. His early


readings of Up From Slavery (Washington, 1969) as well as The Souls of Black Folk (Dubois, 1969) represent his acquisition of the evangelical, romantic and bourgeois strands of late-nineteenth-century middle-class black culture. This perusal of important texts in the stable domestic worlds, first of Aunt Hagar and later of Aunt Tempy, lays the basis for the sensitivity that underlies his role as the book’s cultural and moral consciousness. Hughes’s portrait of Aunt Tempy is a probing look at a number of tensions of black acculturation that he would attempt to resolve through wishfulfilling fantasy. A society woman married to a successful middle-class post-office worker, Tempy embodies the black assimilation of evangelical and romantic impulses in late-nineteenth-century America. Her relationship with her abolitionist mentor implicitly evokes the patronage relationships which bound William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, Lydia Child and Harriet Jacobs, General Armstrong and Booker T.Washington, and more generally many black intellectuals and the group of white abolitionists who came South after the Civil War to found many Southern black colleges. As a genteel, light-skinned social bluestocking, Aunt Tempy echoes the charming Charlotte Forten Grimke of the diary; the light-skinned, well-married heroine of Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892/1988), and the women of Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900/ 88). Like them, Tempy enjoys the leisure and relative influence of black bourgeois status to advocate racial uplift, culture, and the improvement of her family. In doing so, she represents the polite black assimilation of upper-class New England values of evangelism and romantic reform into black uplift. In Hughes’s interpretation, however, Tempy faces a typical black bourgeois predicament. Her promotion of uplift and culture are blocked by the contradictions her New England values acquire in the context of black life. There, her chastity becomes sexual repressiveness; her quest for social mobility appears to be ruthless status-seeking; her frugality is parsimony, and her piety, empty ritual. Her identif ication with the abolitionist mentor leads to self-hatred. Consequently, her deepest New England urges to uplift are blocked. In her desire to improve the lot of the masses, she paradoxically alienates herself from those whom she would help. Tempy’s complexities reflect those of Nella Larsen’s heroines, Helga Crane and Anne Gray in Quicksand (1928/71); and only Hughes’s propensity to caricature deflects the reader’s attention from this fact. Harriet, Tempy’s younger sister, embodies, I think, Hughes’s deep wish to overcome Tempy’s contradictions while continuing her racial idealism. Harriet’s status as a version of Tempy’s aspirations and desires is implicit in Harriet’s characterization as someone who defines her identity as a correction of her older sister’s mistakes. Harriet has learned from her sister’s experience of acculturation, and been partly acculturated herself. Harriet’s freedom is expressed as a result of a traumatic encounter with the deepest contradictions of acculturation.


‘No, you aren’t asking her, mama, but you’re always talking about her being so respectable… Well I don’t want to be respectable if I have to be stuck up and dicty like Tempy is… She’s colored and I’m colored and I haven’t seen her since before Easter It’s not being black that matters with her though, it’s being poor, and that’s what we are, you and me and Annjee, working for white folks and washing clothes and going in back doors, and taking tips and insults. I’m tired of it, mama! I want to have a good time once in a while.’ That’s ‘bout all you does have is a good time,’ Hagar said, ‘An’ it ain’t right, an’ it ain’t Christian, that’s what it ain’t Christian, that’s what it ain’t Christian, that’s what it ain’t! An’ de Lawd takin’ notes on you!’ The old woman picked up the heavy iron skillet and began to wash it inside and out. ‘Aw, the church has made a lot of you old Negroes act like Salvation Army people,’ the girl returned, throwing the dried knives and forks on the table. ‘Afraid to even laugh on Sundays, afraid for a girl and boy to look at one another, or for people to go to dances. Your old Jesus is white, I guess, that’s why! He’s white and stiff and don’t like Niggers!’ Hagar gasped while Harriett went on excitedly, disregarding her mother’s pain: ‘Look at Tempy, the highest-class Christian in the family— Episcopal, and so holy she can’t even visit her own mother. Seems like all the good-time people are bad, and all the old Uncle Toms and mean, driedup, long-faced niggers fill the churches. I don’t never intend to join a church if I can help it.’ Harriet, her brow wrinkled in a steady frown, put the dishes away, wiped the table, and emptied the water with a splash through the kitchen door. Then she went into the bedroom that she shared with her mother, and began to undress. Sandy saw, beneath her thin white underclothes, the skin of her shapely young body. (Hughes, 1926/40:45–6) Harriet’s spontaneity and her soi-disant blackness emerge from a calculated assessment of the contradictions of Tempy’s socialization into middle-class life: the older sister’s distance from the masses, and the impediments that bourgeois propriety impose upon bourgeois values of family. The calculation of her speech might be more expected of Tempy than Harriet herself. Indeed, the younger sister’s speech seems to represent the kind of introspection which Hughes never allows Tempy. Harriet is in many ways a dream-like extension of Tempy’s psychology, a resolution of the older sister’s dilemmas. Harriet’s values, which in some sense invert Tempy’s, more crucially constitute the older sister’s bourgeois aims freed of their inhibitions. Sterling Brown was right sixty years ago to point to Tempy’s potential complexity.8 She is psychologically speaking the richest figure in the book. Her middle-class orientation, education and economic advantages allow her to


actually test possibilities for cultivated life that Sandy can only imagine. Her life teaches the profound difficulty of the autonomous selfhood needed to join cultural sophistication and sympathy for the masses of black people. Tempy embodies the complications of Sandy’s desires, and no reader can miss this despite the unattractiveness of her characterization; indeed, her unattractiveness derives from the grossest qualities of bourgeois life, the unadmitted ethos of authoritarianism and restrictiveness which give the stereotypical Romantic view of the black middle-class its general credibility. And in some sense, Hughes’s caricature represses the complexity of the economic and social realities which inevitably shape his vision of the folk. Harriet, who receives a less concrete development than Tempy, is a prima facie more attractive figure because she seems to fulfill Tempy’s promise for an independent selfhood sensitive to the problems of the race. However, her final portrait suggests how dangerous and unruly the untrammeled drive to personal and cultural autonomy can be in economic and material terms. At the book’s end, her hard-won career as a successful blues singer and her promiscuity have physically destroyed her. She is outright hostile to the principles of order in Aunt Hagar’s house, principles that make Sandy’s literacy and sensitivity possible. If, however, Tempy is bound by the economic constrictions of black bourgeois life, then Harriet’s life—like Jim-Boy’s—suggest the impossibility of transcending those restrictions. Taken together, the two characters suggest the economic and cultural limitations of the dream of unlimited selfhood, a selfhood that Harriet as a kind of bohemian folk artist of the blues inevitably embodies. Hughes’s book, written in the late twenties, suggests an emerging sense of the deeper social realities that the literary strategy of the folk might reveal. The presentation of Harriet raises questions about whether the romance dream of the folk can deliver the therapeutic gratifications needed to resolve the traumas of black social aspiration. By the end of the novel Harriet, who encourages Sandy’s education and offers him money to continue, has implicitly revealed herself as a version of Tempy’s most attractive impulses. However, it is significant that her rebellions against the nineteenth century norms of bourgeois black economic frugality and chastity have made her a symbol of sexual corruption and exhaustion. Without Tempy’s limitations of propriety and economic rationality, it is clear that none of the family will survive. The novel’s sense that it is impossible to repress Tempy’s flaws, or the economic realities of class, creates the tragic quality of Hughes celebration of the folk. Harriett in the back yard under the apple-tree eagle-rocking in the summer evenings to tunes of the guitar; Jimboy singing… But was that why Negroes were poor… The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget… It’s more like that, thought Sandy. (Hughes, 1930/40:313)


Sandy’s celebration of the folk turns upon the literary strategy’s most pessimistic insight: the notion that the dreamwork which produces the therapeutic double signifies the cultivated character’s impotence before the economic realities of black life. The dream of art, moreover, cannot change the reality of the folk singer’s impotence. Although the economic suffering stimulates Jim-Boy’s, art is powerless to change suffering. Although the sensuality of Harriet’s voice or body may spur her art, it can never suppress her pain. Given the pessimism of this passage, it is significant that its narration assumes the tone and some of the language of Sandy’s post-office employee brother-inlaw, Tempy’s husband, Mr Siles, who holds the masses in contempt. This is an important moment in Hughes’s fiction in which Sandy embraces the economic ideology of the black bourgeois family whom he has left for its restrictiveness. This moment is also important for its suggestion that the masses’ lives are dominated by economic laws that place them apart from the middle-class bohemian artists who would appropriate them. These are fierce economic realities which give the lives of the masses a distinct configuration. Even the best art will do the lower classes little material or sustained psychological good. Implicit in the final vision of Not Without Laughter is the development of Hughes’s art in the thirties and forties. On the one hand, the short stories in Ways of White Folks (n.d.) would offer a much more astringent treatment of the themes of black bourgeois life: the implications of its dependence upon white patronage, its psychological distance from the folk, and the contradictions of its aspirations to art. Secondly, Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) offers a view of the Northern urban folk life, a vision of an autonomous folk world defined by the economic realities that could not be repressed in Not Without Laughter. Independent of the traumas of middle-class figures, this book seeks to define the psychological costs of the economic irrationality, nihilism and spontaneity of ghetto life. The title, Shakespeare in Harlem, suggests the fullness and variety of ghetto life; however, the poem makes clear that the aesthetic fulfillments of this life exist in a narrow space. To put it another way, the world of the folk assumes a self-conscious autonomy in Hughes’s later work. And Hughes’s future writing would move with a shrewd sense of the distance between the masses and the bourgeois. Sula and the folk paradigm of wishfulfillment For Toni Morrison in Sula the literary paradigm of wishfulfillment appears with a fullness that recalls the ideological dialectics of the folk in Hughes’s career. She too draws from the black middle-class ideology of the folk: a literary rhetoric in which a bourgeois character confronts the contradictions of intraracial divisions, confusions of identity, and crises of identification. As a wishfulfillment fantasy, Sula ultimately provides a therapeutic relief to Nel’s deepest blocked self-fulfillment. Read in this way, Sula repeats and continues a narrative of bourgeois black life dedicated to the reproduction of bourgeois order from


generation to generation. This narrative, grounded in the struggles for domestic order by Helene, her grandmother, and Nel, implies a way of reading Sula and Nel’s friendship which is broken by Sula’s adultery. In this context the broken friendship is the tragedy of a black bourgeois world that cannot achieve its most desired fulfillments. At the same time, Morrison is also deeply aware of the Sulas’ and the Peaces’ lives, as part of an autonomous world (like that of Shakespeare in Harlem) and as an entity defined by the same economic realities that confine bourgeois life. Within this world, the Peaces’ do not struggle to reproduce a bourgeois domestic order, but rather live to experience life in its fullness by the moment. To see the character Sula from this perspective is to see her as the product of a folk way of life that lacks the middle-class teleologies of providence and progress. In this world, the self and its goals are less important than the self s momentary experience. Sula’s aspiring self does not come into being with the sharp definition that defines Nel and her mother, Helene Wright. Self in the world of Sula and the Peaces is established through continuities of experience shared by Eva, Hannah and Sula. Life is not lived for the achievement of delayed gratifications, but rather from the enjoyment of the moments that have shaped other lives. And this vision, as I will suggest, represents a way of reading Sula and Nel’s disrupted friendship as Nel’s failure of empathy —her temporary misunderstanding of the richness of meanings available in Black life. Morrison’s wonderfully told story alternates between these two points of view. That alternation, as I will finally argue, is grounded in the bourgeois discourse of the folk. Sula turns upon the theme of blocked middle-class aspirations to romantic selfhood. Like Bita of Banana Bottom and Janie of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Nel seeks a fulfillment from which she is blocked by the contradictions of middle-class life. However, here as in the other books discussed, the quest for fulfillment is grounded in the labors by which stable middle-class life is established by Helene and her grandmother, as surely as such bourgeois life is established by Janie’s grandmother.9 Sula, as a wishfulfilling fantasy, emerges out of Nel’s deepest self: a subjectivity which is nourished and blocked by a domestic middle-class life familiar to us from Hughes’s Not Without Laughter and Hurston’s Eyes. It is a world of order, economic stability, filial relationships, and relative leisure required for reflection and ultimately self-consciousness. It is a world that allows for the development of the ‘inside’ of reflection and thoughtfulness that a recent critic has discerned in Hurston’s work (Johnson, 1987:155–71). Helene’s grandmother has taken her grandchild north in order to establish a solid bourgeois life for her, in much the same way that Janie’s grandmother has sought stability for her charge. In Morrison’s text, this stable social order is consolidated by families created through Helene’s marriage to Wiley Wright and Nel’s marriage to Jude Greene. This social world allows for the day-dreaming on the train and in the home, day-dreaming by which Nel discerns her own specialness, day-dreaming that repeats and reinterprets her past experience.


For days afterward she imagined other trips she would take, alone though, to faraway places. Contemplating them was delicious. Leaving Medallion would be her goal. But that was before she met Sula, the girl she had seen for five years at Garfield Primary but never played with, never knew, because her mother said that Sula’s mother was sooty. The trip, perhaps, or her new found me-ness, gave her the strength to cultivate a friend in spite of her mother. (Morrison, 1982:29) Morrison’s narration brilliantly captures the central truth of the folk discourse, that the middle-class life impedes the selfhood which it cultivates. And as this passage so beautifully and subtly suggests, the folk other met by the bourgeois self is simply another version of the middle class ‘me’. Nel’s world is a world in which impediments to bourgeois order are carefully rooted out. The mother who provides Nel a home in which to day-dream, also demands that the young girl pull her flat nose into shape. Nel’s sense of self drives her to find another self in the world of the folk, a ‘sooty’ black world that her mother abhors. It is significant that Sula only appears after the impediments to Nel’s blocked selfhood have been fully explored in the text. Sula necessarily is the projection of the flowering of Nel’s imagination after the trip South. Sula seems to embody the specialness and potential for selfhood that Nel anticipates for herself during the trip. Significantly, in the course of the book, Sula will engage in the travelling, sexual experience and education implied in Nel’s wishes. In particular Sula shows the way in which selfhood requires the willingness to risk the self’s limits and definitions. Unconcerned with the self’s boundaries, Sula sometimes appears, as many critics have remarked, to have no ego (for example, McDowell, 1988:81). As a young girl, Sula risks herself to defend Nel’s selfhood in a way that the proper Nel never could. Although it paradoxically represents an act of self-defense, Sula’s public removal of her finger tip anticipates a selfdestructiveness that she will display elsewhere in the novel. As a wishfulfilling figure, Sula will subvert (even as she fulfills) middle-class norms of selfhood that inhibit Nel. But this subversion that follows from affirmations of selfhood quickly opens her up to condemnation and ultimately makes her a threat to Nel herself. Sula is condemned from the point of view of the middle-class world which in one sense gave her birth. Within this bourgeois vision, Sula’s self-destructive selfhood is too unstable for viability: and she becomes an image of those ultimate limitations that block true bourgeois fulfillment. The emptiness of the sexual experiences by which she attempts to achieve a selfhood makes her travels abroad a failure. The moments of fulfillment that Sula achieves signals the self’s achievement of sublimity, but also presages its dissolution. This dialectic of fulfillment and loss appears movingly and evocatively in the alternating ebb and flow of Sula’s ‘sooty’ self in lovemaking.


Lovemaking seemed to her, at first, the creation of a special kind of joy. She thought she liked the sootiness of sex and its comedy; she laughed a great deal during the raucous beginnings, and rejected those lovers who regarded sex as healthy or beautiful. Sexual aesthetics bored her. Although she did not regard sex as ugly (ugliness was boring also), she liked to think of it as wicked. But as her experiences multiplied she realized that not only was it not wicked, it was not necessary for her to conjure up the idea of wickedness in order to participate fully. During the lovemaking she found and needed to find the cutting edge. When she left off cooperating with her body and began to assert herself in the act, particles of strength gathered in her like steel shavings drawn to a spacious magnetic center, forming a tight cluster that nothing, it seemed, could break. And there was utmost irony and outrage in lying under someone, in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power. But the cluster did break, fall apart, and in her panic to hold it together she leaped from the edge into soundlessness and went down howling, howling, in a stinging awareness of the endings of things: an eye of sorrow in the midst of all that hurricane rage of joy. There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice. (Morrison, 1982:122–3) The cornish hens, rings and prom photographs return to mock Sula at the very moment in which she seems to have transcended the constrictions of domestic female life. Morrison allusively draws out the further literary implications of this return of repressed daily existence. The expansive self’s break with the world of society as Emerson and Whitman well knew only led finally to a deep awareness of that world’s most negligible material detritus. The Emersonian moments of the self’s fulfillment marked by the loss of temporal sense and profound sense of loneliness are taken from the central sublime moment of ‘Circles’ even as the imagery of the self’s gradual dissolution becomes the erosion of self in Whitman’s ‘As I ebbed with the Ocean of Life’. Morrison’s allusiveness, so pointed in this paragraph, itself alludes to Ellison’s equally pointed evocations of Whitmanian expansiveness in the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man. The domestic mockery of Sula’s apotheosis is a symbol of the conventionality of the wishfulfilling experience that she represents. Sula in all her rebellion is herself a literary convention that can only be appropriated by a conventional American literary bourgeois education, the kind of college education Sula herself has possibly had but never fully appropriated. As an impossible wishfulfilling self, Sula is a self-consciously literary gesture.


Morrison’s sense of Sula as a literary gesture repeats the novel’s inescapable theme. The value of Sula’s anti-middle-class experience inheres in its appreciation by a sensitive, literally educated audience. The bohemian Sula needs the bourgeois Nel, the thoughtful observer formed in the stability of domestic order, in order for her worth to be fully realized. Sula’s death scene is thus significantly introduced by Nel’s visit. This scene is the book’s greatest account of a triumphant selfhood, a selfhood that transcends its material limits while inevitably invoking the bourgeois reality that it seems to flaunt. While in this state of weary anticipation, she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead. Sula felt her face smiling. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she thought, ‘it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel’. (Morrison, 1982:149) In this heightened moment of sublime consciousness, where feeling becomes conscious of not-feeling, where life becomes aware of its own demise, Sula’s awareness is not enough but must be supplemented by Nel’s stable bourgeois —perhaps Christian—being. Sula’s moment of transcendence is most amazingly seen from Nel’s thoroughly conventional point of view, a view on which Morrison’s little joke about hell and damnation depends. This demand consolidates the fundamental principle underlying Morrison’s appropriation of the myth of folk romance. Sula’s final recognition of her role as an extension of Nel’s consciousness implicitly celebrates the powers and security of the middleclass world that gives that consciousness birth. The folk in-and-of-itself Much of the literary power of Sula stems from Morrison’s ability to project the other dimension of the folk discourse: the alterity of the folk as autonomous other, a distinctive world formed by harsh economic laws which the masses negotiate in their distinctive ways. Like Hughes and Hurston, Morrison balances a conception of the folk as middle-class wishfulfillment with a conception of the folk as a world determined by its own economies, separate from the realities of bourgeois life. Within Sula, the alterity of folk as other represents a particularly astringent vision that alternates with that of the earlier described bourgeois vision. Morrison’s vision of the folk as autonomous culture stems from her understanding of the way in which the black lower class adapted to the urban ghetto. The middle-class ideology that undergirds their conception of the world


has disappeared, while harsh economic realities which the bourgeois world view addresses have remained. The fictional setting of Sula is the black urban ghetto world of a Northern Ohio community from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book’s inhabitants are Southern migrants and their children who have adjusted to the ghetto’s fierce restrictions upon social, economic and political mobility. It is in these accommodations that they have dissociated themselves from latenineteenth-century capitalist ideologies in ways that Hughes might not himself have imagined in the twenties. The fictional world of Sula reproduces E.Franklin Frazier’s ‘cities of destruction’ that swallowed the Southern migrants during the Great Migration. Here families, headed by females as domestics or servants, were profoundly marginal to the powers of capitalism and the ethos of middle-class life. Morrison’s fictional world offers an interpretation of this world as a necessary matriarchy.10 Relegated to the most menial service jobs, the few working adult males have become economically impotent in a way that renders them irrelevant even to the women. Men rarely function in the book’s world as workers who sustain the home through wages earned in a larger economic world outside of the domestic sphere. The ones who do, such as Wiley Wright and Jude are associated with Helene and Nel, the novel’s marginal bourgeoises. And even these male figures are peripheral. Wiley Wright is symbolically absent from home most of the time. Most of the adult men in the folk world of the Peaces’ are, like Ajax and Tar Baby, unemployed or, like Jude, engaged in menial labor that can barely support Nel. Given their unimportance, none of the visible men is a devoted husband. No young man treated in the novel grows up to be a physically or mentally full-fledged man. The Deweys are of course the book’s most important case in point. Aware of the utter insignificance of men in their world, the women of the Peace family embody a ghetto culture which, unlike the world of the Wrights, is unconcerned with its own reproduction. The women in Sula’s world symbolically act out their sense of the utter unimportance of men as male reproductive partners. Sula will accidentally kill Chicken Little in an incident that (given the novel’s symbolic treatment of men) inevitably echoes Eva’s murder of her son Plum. Indeed, Eva must kill her son so that he will die like a man, something he could never do as a fully adult male in Medallion. There is no sign that the death permanently traumatizes Sula as it might in real life because men are expendable in the novel’s fictional world. Given this radical devaluation of men, the institution of marriage loses much of the legitimacy that it otherwise might have. Helene Wright’s life is clearly devoted to the preparation of Nel for marriage. And Nel’s marriage to Jude represents—in its rich full ceremony—the culmination of Helene Wright’s life. But seen from the point of view of the autonomous folk world, this marriage is not the reproduction of Helene’s world but a sign of its fraudulence, its lack of contact with the central economic realities of lower-class black life. Jude’s decision to marry Nel is part of a quest for easy gratification. Jude wants not only


an image of manhood as a substitute for a job, but also, quite contradictorily, a mother figure. So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man’s role anyhow that made him press Nel about settling down. He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. Deep enough to hold him, deep enough to rock him, deep enough to ask, ‘How you feel? You all right? Want some coffee?’ And if he were to be a man, that someone could no longer be his mother. He chose the girl who had always been kind, who had never seemed hell-bent to marry, who made the whole venture seem like his idea his conquest. (Morrison, 1982:82–3) His desires make him a potential burden, not a partner, for his wife. Indeed, Jude’s desire for a mother makes him the kind of burden that Plum has become for Sula’s grandmother Eva. Moreover, Jude’s desires for momentary gratifications, in contrast to the long-term gratifications of middle-class marriage, point to the central assumptions about time in the autonomous folk world. In a world where the fulfillments of children, financial reward, or professional life never come about, momentary exertions and perceptions are the only possible gratifications. In such a world, wishfulfilling visions of nature inevitably become important. Consequently, Jude has substituted aesthetic goals for economic ones. Jude himself longed more than anybody else to be taken. Not just for the good money, more for the work itself. He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with string or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for something heavier than trays, for something dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes, not the thin-soled black shoes that the hotel required. More than anything he wanted the camaraderie of the road men: the lunch buckets, the hollering, the body movement that in the end produced something real, something he could point to. ‘I built that road,’ he could say. How much better sundown would be than the end of a day in the restaurant. (Morrison, 1982:81–2) The final reward of pay and the completed road are not ends for which Jude has sacrificed but a means of justifying physical and aesthetic experience: ‘the hollering, the body movement’, and the ‘sundown’. He does not delay his gratifications for a future economic fulfillment; instead he seeks the aesthetic pleasure of significant individual moments. The folk world of Sula is a world in which conventional conceptions of the self that aspire to clear goals are never realized. Morrison, like Virginia Woolf,


creates characters like Jude and Sula who define themselves through the experience of momentary perception. In doing so, Morrison implicitly uses perspectives of empiricism, skepticism and aestheticism to define this selfhood grounded in perception. For Sula, in Medallion, aesthetic self-definition is an important means of self-creation, where blacks are entirely cut off from the significant means of production. This voice echoes the aestheticized vision of a character such as Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1955). The leisure from which the character of Sula views the world is not the leisure of wealth which characterizes the literary worlds in which Virginia Woolf employs a similar fictional strategy. Morrison’s appropriates Virginia Woolf s aestheticism to articulate patterns of identity and experience which emerges in the dislocations of her Northern ghetto world, especially as it is experienced by Eva, Hannah, and Sula Peace. However, this appropriation raises important distinctions between Morrison and Woolf. Momentary aesthetic perception allows Mrs Ramsay to live in intellectual autonomy, an intellectual autonomy from which she questions the ethos of her patriarchal society. One might say that Mrs Ramsay’s aesthetic vision represents a feminized counterpart to Mr Ramsay’s professional concerns in seventeenthand eighteenth-century philosophy. Characterizing Mrs Ramsay through her sensory apprehension of the world, Woolf shows the way in which her concerns with perception, identity, subject and object as well as existence appropriate the intellectual questions confronted by Mr Ramsay into her feminized intellectual world. Virginia Woolf s Mrs Ramsay casts a cold eye upon an upper-class academic world in a way which illuminates the psychological costs of a male dominated university existence, the compensatory possibilities of this world for a brilliant woman, and the enduring spiritual possibilities of the natural world. The main action of this world, the contemplation and accomplishment of a trip ‘to the lighthouse’, seems to indicate the trivial importance of the summer-house world dominated by Mrs Ramsay. However, at the same time, the image of the trip signals the resources of surplus wealth that provide the education, leisure, intellectual community and academic family life that make Mrs Ramsay’s perceptual vision of the world a possibility. The leisure of Morrison’s characters, however, is the leisure of unemployed poverty; it is not a therapeutic resource but a desperately chosen attempt to constitute the self from the slender resources availed by a black urban nothingness. And Morrison’s fictional world pointedly shows the nihilistic ethos of this aesthetic. Sula as an artist without tools is afflicted by an especially bleak imaginative poverty, a poverty far bleaker than the personae of Wallace Stevens’ poems empowered by a reflective leisure made possible by surpluses of wealth. Sula’s and the narrator’s fictions of selfhood emerge from the powerlessness of economic depravity. The selfhoods of Morrison’s ghetto world, selves such as Sula and Jude, represent a rhapsodic, discontinuous identity created by momentary aesthetic insights. And, significantly, this rhapsodic identity is


periodically claimed by the book’s central narrative voice. The book introduces this claim early on. There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it wasn’t a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to business up in those hills—collecting rent or insurance payments—he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of ‘messing around’ to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve. He’d have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew’s and let the tenor’s voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain. (Morrison, 1982:4) The narrator here defines herself through her momentary aperçus of pain in the texture of clothing or body movements, perceptions of sensual pleasure embodied in silk or the touch of flesh. As such an aesthetic, they constitute a representation of the sensibility of an inchoate, discontinuous personality shaped by social dislocations. One recognizes that the contradictory aesthetic of pain and sensual pleasure is in many ways a blues aesthetic, which values experience not for a coherent ideological purpose but rather for its own ebb and flow. This incoherent yet compelling mimesis of moment-by-moment human identity represents an even more diminished selfhood than what Nel imagines in Sula. This diminished self without the interiority, the ‘inside’ needed for full projection, is the selfhood of Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem. Contradictions in Morrison’s fictional world The conflict between the two conceptions of selfhood and of the world define the book’s central issue: the test of Nel and Sula’s friendship in Sula’s adulterous relationship with Nel’s husband. It comes as no surprise that in a folk discourse that turns on the issue of the reproduction of society, Sula’s uncontained sexuality should disrupt the two women’s friendship. Whereas, from one point of view Nel’s marriage with Jude represents Helene Wright’s triumph, a triumph celebrated by the community as a whole; on the other it represents a sacrifice of


the possibilities of momentary experience, possibilities central to life’s meaning in the ghetto world. Sula states this view explicitly when she excoriates the marriages which she finds in Medallion upon returning to the town.11 When she had come back home, social conversation was impossible for her because she could not lie. She could not say to those old acquaintances, ‘Hey, girl, you looking good,’ when she saw how the years had dusted their bronze with ash, the eyes that had once opened wide to the moon bent into grimy sickles of concern. The narrower their lives, the wider their hips. Those with husbands had folded themselves into starched coffins, their sides bursting with other people’s skinned dreams and bony regrets. Those without men were like sour-tipped needles featuring one constant empty eye. Those with men had the sweetness sucked from their breath by ovens and steam kettles. Their children were like distant but exposed wounds whose aches were no less intimate because separate from their flesh. They had looked at the world and back at their children, back at the world and back at their children, and Sula knew that one clear young eye was all that kept the knife away from the throat’s curve. (Morrison, 1982:121–2) Seen from the bourgeois point of view, these are the limitations that mock Sula’s apotheosis of selfhood in her own lovemaking. But from the folk masses’ point of view, these limitations constitute the most damning vision of middle-class domestic life possible. Given this point of view, Sula’s relationship with Jude represents a revision of those erotic possibilities that are so central to Sula’s and to Jude’s earlier life, and somewhat to Nel’s life. It is easy to forget that Nel herself has a playful sexual relationship with Jude, and in some sense Sula is only extending that playfulness one step further, albeit in a typically selfdestructive relationship. The book’s two points of view dictate the reader’s ambiguous stance toward’s the text’s central crisis. On the other hand, sympathy for Nel’s disapproval of Sula emerges from the bourgeois point of view that stresses those gratifications of marriage that Nel expresses after losing Jude. Our sense of Nel’s loss of interest in her family emerges out of an assumption that her role as mother has been more than momentary and aesthetic, and that role has been an important part of family building and accomplished through great sacrifice. Nel’s sexual pleasures indeed gain their force in the context of that sacrifice as some of the book’s commentators seem to forget. Finally, Nel’s capacity to revalue her relationship with Sula at the book’s end indicates a consciousness that has learned from experience to weigh and distinguish human relationships. Without the frame of stability inculcated in bourgeois relationships, Sula’s rebellion loses much of its value as an exploration of consciousness. And it may be argued that the book ultimately ends with the truth that Sula’s ‘subversiveness’ gains its full force within Nel’s conception of order. Nel survives as the person of sensibility needed


to tell Sula’s story. However, Nel ends by celebrating those moments of aesthetic joy that she experienced as a girl with Sula. In a deeply Wordsworthian gesture, Nel reaches back to recover the spots of time that marked the girlhood pleasures that Sula brought her. CONTRADICTORY VISIONS Much is inevitably made of Morrison’s shifting narrative vision. Much of the book’s changing points of view stem from Morrison’s use of a narrative discourse which allows her to move from a central narrative voice to other characters’ points of view. This motion inevitably takes her between the two differing visions of the folk. I want to conclude by arguing that Morrison’s shifting perspectives on the folk not only have an intense aesthetic significance, like that of Woolf’s in To the Lighthouse, but also a political importance. The ambivalence Morrison’s narrative voice displays between the two differing bourgeois views of the folk ultimately points to a representation of a central ambivalence within black middle-class life itself. Written in the early seventies, Sula represents a bourgeois point of view reacting to the stresses of the movement of black middle-class Americans from the isolations of black ghetto life to the tensions of integrated existence in the corporations, publishing houses, universities and suburbs. As William Julius Wilson has cogently argued, class became more important than race for many blacks in obtaining the central economic gratifications of American capitalist life.12 Yet, although a black bourgeoisie was torn from its roots in the tensions of ghetto life (tensions that would grow in the period), it was again forced to define the meaning of its cultural and ethnic blackness in the context of a larger white world. To a certain extent, this middle class saw itself displaced from a larger black world yet forced to define itself as black. If, on one hand, the whores and young black men to whom Nel nostalgically looks back at the book’s end, represent a nostalgia for a wishfulfilling past, the Dewey-like clerks in the integrated stores represent the fear of a lost selfhood in the future. The question of whether to identify with the ghetto as the fantasized fulfillment of self that cannot be had in the integrated world, or as a disruptive world of lower class disorganization, is the central ambiguity played out in the shifting point of views of Morrison’s Sula. Whether the middle-class person is to see the black masses as an extension, the fulfillment, of his complicated psychological needs, or as an other, is a question that writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston asked as they watched the great migration North or went South to collect folklore.13 Defending feminist writers against the charge of attacking the family, writers such as Deborah McDowell have stressed that William Julius Wilson and other sociologists have shown a nostalgia for the ‘nuclear, “intact” family’ (see McDowell, 1989:75–97 and Spillers, 1989:127–49). However, as I have been trying to show, the dialectic between ‘intact’ and ‘disorganized’ families is


deeply built into the imaginative ideology of the folk by which some black writers have constructed personality. To valorize either side of the coin of black family life is simply to lift one part of a complex dialectic of the social knowledge of black life out of a by-now well-established literary discourse. This valorization also tends to forget the ultimate roots of this discourse in the quite understandable anxieties of the middle class. Morrison’s shifting point of view points to a deep ambivalence about the possibilities of African American culture and its discontents in one of her most distinguished novels. Notes 1 This approach is now commonplace. For examples of ‘subversive’ readings of Sula, see McDowell (1988:77–90); Grant (1988:90–103); Spillers (1990:27– 54); Davis (1990:7–26); and Byerman (1990:55–85). 2 On the nineteenth-century, middle-class world of black life see, Moses (1990: esp. 201–81); Bruce (1989) and Carby (1987: esp. 163–75). 3 I have begun working out this argument in a number of essays including Richards (1990:123–48), and (1992:163–91). 4 Ambivalence about Sula inhabits a long line of criticism which evaluates some of the more outrageous cultivated/folk pairings in African American literary tradition. See, for instance, George Kent’s comments on the marriages and relations betweens the cultivated and the folk in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Banana Bottom in Bell (1979); Kent (1972:50); Spillers (1990:39–40). Similar concerns about plausibility and characterization in the folk novel are voiced in Davis (1974: 116–17). 5 This discussion is deeply indebted to Barbara Johnson’s discussion of metaphor and metonymy in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The development of self-division—an awareness of the world of outside as opposed to a reflective world of inside—is central to the development of middle-class reflectiveness that I discuss in this paper. Johnson’s discussion, moreover, links Hurston’s works to the central themes of American Romanticism. Increased interiority is a central aspect of the stable, introspective, middle-class world I describe. See Johnson (1987: 155–71). 6 A concern with the narrative implausibilities and discontinuities of the ‘folk’ novel and short story has been a staple of African American criticism for at least three generations. The sense of the discontinuities of the folk world has been best expressed by the late George Kent in Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (1972: esp. 49–51; 54, 55, 56–7, 62–4, 74–5), a text that is in the background of much of this essay’s argument. 7 See Rampersad (1986: passim, but especially 1–138). 8 ‘The type [Tempy] deserves contempt looked at in one way, certainly; looked at in another it might deserve pity’ (Brown, 1931:280). 9 My argument here has been anticipated by Karen Stein (1984). 10 A number of writers have treated Sula as a woman’s world; see for instance, Gillespie and Kubitschek (1990).


11 The view of the marriage and its ‘ties’ as the central crisis in Sula is ably articulated in Bogus (1989). 12 See Wilson (1978:2). 13 Hazel Carby has suggestively raised this question. See Carby (1987:163–75) and (1990:71–93).

References Bell, Roseanne P. (1979) ‘Substance George Kent’, in Roseanne P.Bell et. al. (eds) Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, New York: Anchor Books: 244. Bloom, Harold (1990) editor, Toni Morrison, New york: Chelsea House Printers. Bogus, S.Diane (1989) ‘An authorial tie-up: the wedding of symbol and point of view in Toni Morrison’s Sula’, in College Language Association Journal, 33:73–80. Brown, Sterling (1931) ‘Not without laughter’, in Opportunity, 8 (September): 280. Bruce, Dickson J. (1989) Black American Writing From the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition: 1877–1915, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Byerman, Keith (1990) ‘Beyond realism: the fictions of Toni Morrison’, in Bloom (1990): 55–85. Carby, Hazel (1987) Reconstructing Womanhood, New York: Oxford University Press. —— (1990) ‘The politics of fiction, anthropology, and the folk: Zora Neale Hurston’, in Michael Awkward (ed.) New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, New York: Cambridge University Press: 71–93. Chesnutt, Charles (1967) ‘The wife of his youth’, in The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories, Ridgewood, New Jersey: Gregg Press. Davis, Arthur P. (1974) From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. Davis, Cynthia A. (1990) ‘Self, society, and myth in Toni Morrison’s fiction’, in Bloom (1990):7–26. DuBois, W.E.B. (1903/69) The Souls of Black Folk, New York: New American Library. Ellison, Ralph (1952) Invisible Man, New York: Random House. Franklin, John Hope (1969) editor, Three Negro Classics, New York: Avon Books. Gillespie, Diane and Kubitschek, Missy Dehn (1990) ‘Who cares? Women-centered psychology in Sula’, in Black American Literature Forum, 24 (Spring): 21–48. Grant, Robert (1988) ‘Absence into presence: the thematics of memory and “missing” subjects in Toni Morrison’s Sula’, in McKay (1988):90–103. Harper, Francis (1892/1988) Iola Leroy, New York: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Pauline (1900/88) Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, New York: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Langston (1930/40) Not Without Laughter, New York: Albert A. Knopf. —— (1942) Shakespeare in Harlem, New York: Albert A. Knopf. —— (1926/76) ‘The Negro artist and the racial mountain’, in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, New York: Oxford University Press: 306. (no date) Ways of White Folks. Hurston, Zora Neale (1937/91) Their Eyes Were Watching God, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.


Johnson, Barbara (1987) ‘Metaphor, metonymy, and voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God’, in A World of Difference, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 155–71. Johnson, James W. (1912/69) The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, in Franklin (1969). Kent, George (1972) Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture, Chicago: Third World Press. Larsen, Nella (1928/71) Quicksand, New York: Collier Books. McDowell, Deborah E. (1988) ‘“The Self and the Other”: reading Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Black female text’, in McKay (1988):70–90. —— (1989) ‘Reading family matters’, in Wall (1989):75–97. McKay, Claude (1933/70) Banana Bottom, Chatham: Chatham Bookseller. McKay, Nellie Y. (1988) editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, Boston: Hall. Morrison, Toni (1982) Sula, New York: Plume/Penguin Group. Moses, Wilson J. (1990) The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African American Life and Letters, Ames: Iowa State University Press. Rampersad, Arnold (1986) The Life of Langston Hughes, New York: Oxford University Press. Richards, Phillip (1990) ‘Nationalist themes in the preaching of Jupiter Hammon’, in Early American Literature, Vol. 25:123–48. —— (1992) ‘Phillis Wheatley and literary Americanization’, in American Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2:163–91. Spillers, Hortense (1989) ‘The permanent obliquity of an in(pha)llibly straight: in the time of the daughters and the fathers’, in Wall (1989):127–49. —— (1990) ‘A hateful passion, a lost love’, in Bloom (1990):27–54. Stein, Karen (1984) ‘Toni Morrison’s Sula: a Black woman’s epic’, in Black American Literature Forum, 18 (Winter): 146–50). Wall, Cheryl A. (1989) editor, Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Washington, Booker T. (1901/69) ‘Up from slavery’, in Franklin (1969). Wilson, William Julius (1978) The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia (1955) To the Lighthouse, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

THE JAZZ AESTHETIC IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON ROBIN SMALL-McCARTHY

Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines jazz as ‘American music developed esp. from ragtime and blues and characterized by propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre’ (1988:647). This definition appears to be a relatively straightforward entry until one examines the second definition: ‘empty talk: HUMBUG’. Empty talk? Humbug? To whom? Perhaps, the very act of writing a dictionary is in itself a conserving strategy. Indeed, the writers of this entry expose their own reactionary biases by synonymizing jazz with emptiness or humbug and, moreover, bebop with jive or ‘glib, deceptive, or foolish talk’ (1988:650). This pseudo-scholarly reduction of the significance of jazz and the language of bebop is perhaps a more facile task than to wade through the seeming obscurity of an aesthetic created by an ‘other’. Readers or critics of this same ilk might just as easily dismiss Toni Morrison’s literary jazz as foolishness, given the difficulties a reader or critic might have expecting the linear, cause-and-effect patterns common to western literary practice. In Jazz, for instance, meaning is not to be found in time-ordered or causal sequencing. The structure is episodic, with happenings woven together through the commonality of theme. Readers are, in a sense, asked to relinquish conventional thought patterns, to participate in the creation of the text by pulling together the seemingly disconnected or random threads of the story, and to go with the flow that may eventually lead to catharsis—a mindset (or mindfreedom) similar to that which is asked of us when we listen to jazz improvisation. While perhaps most fully realized in Jazz, Morrison has used selected aspects of the jazz aesthetic—e.g. polyrhythmic structures, dissonance, harmony, bebop lyricism, and improvisation—in most, if not all, of her works, from The Bluest Eye to Jazz. Morrison’s use of these discursive strategies is arguably a radical


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

JAZZ AESTHETIC 297

mode of expression rooted in ancestral wisdom (Benston, 1976). She resurrects the literary jazz stylings of authors such as Amiri Baraka and Ralph Ellison to provide a framework for her stories of African Americans as individuals in relationship and community. Toni Morrison’s literary jazz is thus an expression of the dynamic tension that exists between individual black people in black communities who, like jazz improvisatores, ‘exercise personal freedom within the framework of the group’ (Bigsby, 1987:177). In this essay, I will analyse Morrison’s discursive strategies, not as an exhaustive treatment, but rather, as a cumulative representation of the jazz aesthetic. The predominantly phallocentric plotlines of the classically rendered ‘great works’ of the western canon usually depend on a cause-and-effect sequencing of events. These events are often initiated by a central character who strives to overcome all obstacles that stand in the way of his objective, and to impose logic on to what is presumed to be an otherwise chaotic world (Showalter, 1985). On the other hand, the writings of women and other presumably subaltern groups tend not to claim a static invincibility on the part of the central character. In many of the works of Toni Morrison, more specifically, the central character operates in relation to others so that the narrative gives rise to a spirit of community. The focus alternates from character to character, and the story is shared by the many. Aspects of the story are told and retold so that there can be no one, correct perspective of an ultimate, overriding truth. In Jazz, an unnamed narrator, alternately characterized as a neighborhood gossip, a jazz balladeer, and a New World griot, weaves together in a polyrhythmic pattern, several seemingly disconnected plot lines into a whole. At the outset of the novel the narrator sings, in a sense, the song of Violet Trace. Violet, we learn, has tried to disfigure the corpse of Dorcas, the young woman with whom Violet’s husband, Joe Trace, had an affair. Later, we hear Joe’s side of the story, which turns out to be more of a song of loss and the need to belong to somebody than the typical song of a man who is simply cheating on his wife. These two threads are layered with stories of Violet, Joe, and Dorcas’s pasts—all woven together in a polyrhythmic structure that eventually explains how Violet and Joe came together, fell apart, and then came back together again. Morrison also uses a polyrhythmic structure in Beloved, but the multiple streams of consciousness are tied together, not by a univocal narration, but by the dynamics of memory and rememory. This novel is a story of motherhood and of ‘individuation and subject-formation’ (Hirsch, 1990:428) disrupted by the abuses of slavery. This story is ‘Sethe’s story— her life under slavery, the conception and care of her children in the most dire conditions, her escape and liberation, and her desperately violent and loving act of infanticide’ (Hirsch, 1990:428). Sethe’s story is layered with the stories of Beloved, Paul D, and Denver, whose presences, both in body and spirit, are conjured by the process of (re) memory that Sethe undertakes in an attempt to come to terms with her past. The


focus alternates from the haunting of 124 by the infant ghost of Beloved, to the reunion of Sethe and Paul D, to Sethe and Paul D’s escape from slavery, to Denver’s coming of age, and eventually to the exorcism of Beloved. The narrative shifts abruptly from the present to the past and back to the present again, each return to the past triggered by contact with sights, sounds, and sensations that remind Sethe of scenes from her past. As Morrison describes it: Nothing else would be in her mind… Then something. The splash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes. (Morrison, 1987:6) In style and subject matter, Morrison heeds her own call to a literary practice grounded in African—American history and culture. Her literary jazz is indeed an aesthetic legitimized by its own cultural origins (Morrison, 1989). ‘Scholars and musicians have long accepted the notion that jazz [and its polyrhythmic and antiphonal structures] is a direct descendant of African and African-American music which dates back to the seventeenth century’ (Kroger, 1989:104). In her consistent use of selected conventions of the jazz aesthetic, and in concert with our African ancestors, Morrison seems to sing out that ‘The [holy] spirit will not descend without song’ (Kroger, 1989:41). And in Song of Solomon, Morrison improvises on the theme and seems to say, likewise, that the human spirit will not ascend without song. In Song of Solomon, Morrison evokes images of flight with songs that hearken back to the days of slavery—flight having been a motif in many spirituals and slavesongs which provided a ‘symbolic opportunity for slaves to free themselves spiritually from the shackles of slavery’ (Holloway, 1987:102). Through her characterization of Solomon as a descendant of the tribe of flying Africans who liberated themselves from bondage, Morrison also re-visions and re-shapes the myth of the flying Africans. The multilayered semiotics operating in the novel posit the phenomenon of flying as spiritual release, political resistance, escape, and to an extent desertion. So, in harmony Reba and Pilate sing: O Sugarman don’t leave me here Cotton balls to choke me O Sugarman don’t leave me here Buckra’s arms to yoke me. (Morrison, 1977:49) And Hagar joins in:

JAZZ AESTHETIC 299

Sugarman done fly away Sugarman done gone Sugarman cut across the sky Sugarman gone home. (Morrison, 1977:49) One might say that Morrison’s use of harmony and antiphony (call-andresponse) here, as well as her reinterpretations of song and myth, expresses an African world view. Morrison, in other words, places music, not in the margins of life as mere entertainment or art for art’s sake, but rather as a spiritual and political force woven throughout day-to-day existence. In representing shifts between the past, the present and, implicitly, the future, Morrison also adheres to the Yoruban world view which holds that ‘everything is mediated between three realms: the living, the ancestors, and the unborn’ (Kroger, 1989:99). From this perspective, the lives of Morrison’s characters can be seen as antiphonal relationships between members of these three realms. The antiphony in Beloved, for instance, reaches its peak when Sethe acknowledges that Beloved is her child. She sings the call of rapturous motherhood: BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick… But my love was tough and she back now. (Morrison, 1987:200) And Beloved sings the response: I AM BELOVED and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket… I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her … her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead. (Morrison, 1987:210) Both make the claim of mutual ownership, but Beloved’s response takes us back as far as the slaveship, where many lives were lost on the middle passage from Africa to the Americas. Morrison’s allusion to the loss of multitudes on the slaveship frames Sethe’s loss of Beloved as an instance where the personal is political—i.e., only one representation of a larger, historical problem.


In Jazz, Morrison shapes the narrative through call-and-response. Here the antiphony takes place between the narrator and the other characters. The unnamed narrator, a soloist, calls, and the other players respond. The text is interspersed with duets—short pieces of dialogue or relationships—at times harmonious and at times dissonant. Violet and Alice, for example, are like two musicians who must struggle to create harmony. To Violet, Alice is the aunt of the woman who she blames for the break-up of her marriage. To Alice, Violet is the crazy woman who tried to deface her niece’s corpse. When they begin to listen to each other and to try to understand each other on new terms they succeed in harmonizing, or bringing together their disparate personalities and lives. Harsh minglings of clashing sounds, dissonant chords, are struck when one grasps the irony of a man named Joe who kills the woman he loves in order to keep the feeling going. Dissonant chords are struck when one grasps the irony of a woman named Violet who becomes Violent and tries to destroy the corpse of a woman who is already dead. Dissonant chords are struck in the voice of the unnamed narrator who, in bebop stylings, describes the city streets down below her apartment as a ‘shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep’ (Morrison, 1992:7). And dissonant chords are struck when one considers, in the overall picture, this strange place and time —the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, when black people were idolized as musicians and at the same time denied the full exercise of our humanity. Morrison handles the issue of harmony in women’s relationships more extensively in her earlier work, Sula, where she characterizes Nel and Sula as a collective representation of the madonna/whore polarity (Demetrakopoulos, 1987:53). The harmony in their relationship develops when they bond together in girlhood—each finding in the other the missing part of herself. They ‘was girls together’ (Morrison, 1973:174), but as women they fall apart when Sula betrays Nel by sleeping with Jude. Harmony bleeds into dissonance when one begins to understand that while Sula’s betrayal may have been wrong, it was inevitable. Sula does not understand why Nel’s husband should be off limits to her, believing, moreover, that Jude should be the least of all the things they will or will not share. Sula is hurt by Nel’s inability to value the primacy of their friendship as well as Nel’s inability to understand Sula. Nel, at the very least, could have allayed much of her self-inflicted pain if she had realized that Sula’s betrayal had little to do with Nel. The truth, from this alternate perspective, is that at the time of the betrayal Sula was caught up in a web of sexual freedom ‘maintained by her usually callous denial of needs other than her own’ (Demetrakopoulos, 1987:59). She denied herself no man and no pleasure, and having already gained the status of community pariah indeed she had little to lose. Morrison’s characterization of Sula is developed through a systematic rendering of images that change depending on the alternate perspectives

JAZZ AESTHETIC 301

improvising on the theme. Sula’s birthmark, in this respect, becomes a site of representation—not of the actual nature of her character but of the impressions others have of Sula. To Jude, amidst discussion of the white race’s fixation on the black male penis and Jude’s nascent interest in Sula, the birthmark is a copperhead or a rattlesnake—sexual imagery dating back to the Garden of Eden. To Nel, amidst the pain and upheaval of Sula’s betrayal, her (re)memory of Sula’s birthmark as it was being kissed by Jude is that of a black rose—a revisioning of conventional romantic imagery. So, in the minds of Jude and Nel, Sula’s image alternates between that of a seductress and that of a woman who plays the game of romance by her own rules. Note here that both images depend not on any overriding or objective truth, but on Jude and Nel’s subjective experiences with and impressions of Sula. In Sula, Beloved and Jazz, strands of Morrison’s stories are told and retold, remembered and rememoried, sung and resung, envisioned and re-visioned. All the players get a turn in the spotlight, a turn to sing his or her own version of the tale by overlaying the original with new melodic variations, new facts, and new understandings. These strands of improvisation seem to arise out of a spontaneity that depends on Morrison’s understanding of each strand of the story as seen from the perspective of individual characters as well as an understanding of how each strand is related. In Jazz, for instance, we learn that despite prior characterizations of Dorcas as simply a homewrecker and a two-timer, she did, in her own way, love Joe Trace. As she lay dying in the blood lost from the gunshot wound that Joe inflicts, Dorcas sings her deathbed song, through which we learn that she felt she had nearly suffocated in Joe’s love too freely given. Dorcas was, like the great jazzman Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, a bird in a gilded cage who wanted out and who died in the struggle. Dorcas was, like the legendary jazzwoman Billie Holiday, a thornbird who sang most sweetly and poignantly during her last few moments before death. In the end, when Dorcas is out of the spotlight, the loose strands of Violet and Joe Trace’s lives, the good and the bad, blend harmoniously, and they finally learn to make music together. Jazz improvisation, or the repetition of the structure of the original material overlayed with new variations, is dependent on shared or communal knowledge. Kroger asserts: [i]mprovisation is at the core of jazz; its essence is the spontaneous composition of its players. The ability to improvise successfully rests on the musicians’ familiarity with the traditions of African American music, his or her knowledge of music theory, and an indefinable “feel” for the music’. (Kroger, 1989:109) In this vein, Morrison’s literary improvisation is a reflection of her ability to improvise successfully on the works and themes of the canonical texts of writers


such as Homer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Samuel Clemens (Morrison, 1990). Her use of the jazz aesthetic depends simultaneously on her familiarity with these texts and her familiarity with the texts and aesthetics of African American literature and life. Much like John Coltrane’s improvisation of Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘My Favorite Things’, Morrison’s literary improvisation is often a form of signifyin’, or the turning of the original version on its head such that its vapidity or ridiculousness is exposed. Morrison, for example, prefaces The Bluest Eye with a triple improvisation of the Dick and Jane reading primer. The first version, although grammatically ‘correct’, tells the story of a lonely Jane whose Mother laughs when Jane asks her to play, and whose Father smiles when asked the same. This passage foreshadows the tragic story of Pecola, whose mother has little time for her, and whose father in a fit of rage and frustration commits an act of incest and impregnates her. Subsequent improvisations of the passage parallel the progressive breakdown of Pecola and her family under the weight of a system of racist, sexist and classist ideology with the progressive breakdown of grammatical structure. Morrison takes her readers from Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. (Morrison, 1970:7) to Here is the house it is green and white it has a red door. (7) and finally to Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddoor. (8) Morrison moves from a conventionally punctuated text to finally an accelerated, claustrophobic, chaotic text which may force some readers to struggle for meaning by mentally imposing punctuation and others to replace or combine their intellectual reasoning with intuitive or affective processing. In either case, Morrison’s use of the jazz aesthetic requires her readers to be more than passive recipients of text, for jazz is a communal art form. Morrison’s literary jazz makes no claims of unilateral truth or objectivity, and so it enlarges readers’ perceptions by tying together music with literature, and black aesthetics with womanist praxis. Her reading audiences, like jazz audiences, become participants in a communal process that (re)creates the text—a process that can provide a release for those who will allow their intellects to operate in concert with their intuitions and their own (re)memories. Bird lives.

JAZZ AESTHETIC 303

References Awkward, M. (1989) Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels, New York: Columbia University. Benston, K.W. (1976) Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, New Haven: Yale University Press. Bebop (1988) Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Berret, A. (1989) ‘Toni Morrison’s literary jazz’, CLA Journal 32:267–83. Bigsby, C.W.E. (1987) ‘Improvising America: Ralph Ellison and the paradox of form’, in K.W.Benston (ed.) Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, Washington, D.C.: Howard University: 173–83. Demetrakopoulos, S.A. (1987) ‘Sula and the primacy of woman-to-woman bonds’, in Demetrakopoulos and Holloway (1987):51–66. Demetrakopoulos, S.A. and Holloway, K.F.C. (1987) editors, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison, New York: Greenwood. Ellison, R. (1967) Shadow and Act, London: Secker & Warburg. Gates, H.L. Jr. (1990) editor, Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, New York: Meridian. Gossett, H., and Johnson, C. (1980) ‘Jazzwomen: they’re mostly singers and piano players: only a horn player or two: hardly any drummers’, Heresies, 3:65–9. Hirsch, M. (1990) ‘Maternal narratives: “Cruel enough to stop the blood”’, in Gates (1990: 413–30). Holloway, K.F.C. (1987) ‘The lyrics of salvation’, in Demetrakopoulos and Holloway (1987):101–14. Jazz (1988) Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Kroger, A.K. (1989) ‘Jazz form and Jazz function: an analysis of unfinished “Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage”’, MELUS, 16:99–111. Morrison, T. (1970) The Bluest Eye, New York: Pocket Books. —— (1973) Sula, New York: Plume. —— (1977) Song of Solomon, New York: Signet. —— (1984) ‘Memory, creation, and writing’, Thought, 59:385–90. —— (1987) Beloved, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. —— (1989) ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 28(Winter): 1–33. —— (1990) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University. —— (1992) Jazz, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Naylor, G. and Morrison, T. (1985)‘A Conversation’, Southern Review, 21(3):567– 93. Sale, M. (1992) ‘Call and response as critical method: African American oral traditions and Beloved’, African American Review, 28:41–50. Showalter, E. (1985) editor, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, New York: Pantheon. Williams, S.A. (1990) ‘Some implications of womanist theory’, in Gates (1990:68– 75).

CONFRONTING THE ‘MASTER NARRATIVE’: THE PRIVILEGE OF ORALITY IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE JOYCE IRENE MIDDLETON

While reading contemporary discussions about orality and literacy in various disciplinary communities—education, linguistics, classical (Homeric studies), and rhetoric—I was constantly reminded of work that I have read by women of color—Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Trinh Minh Ha, Barbara Christian, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, or Zora Neale Hurston—whose voices continue to be marginalized in relation to academic mainstream discussions about schooling and literacy. Yet views expressed by these women help teachers to identify and unlearn the Western processes of schooling, reading, and writing, that dominate intellectual inquiry, silence students, and perpetuate twentiethcentury problems of teaching literacy into the twenty-first century. This essay explores the significance of how black feminists and black women writers—especially fiction writers—talk about literacy, and how these discussions help scholars, teachers, and students to interrogate mainstream conceptions of literacy and language use. The feminist and gender issues that are implicit in this discussion reveal black women writers’ strategies of resistance to assimilation to the ‘master narrative’, or, the dominant Western, white, patriarchal literate conventions. With a precise interest in pedagogical issues, I have explored the intersections between the recent varied, but familiar, mainstream arguments about orality, literacy, and teaching (for example, Bleich, Havelock, Goody, Olson, Ong, Rose, Swearingen, and Welch) and the less familiar issues that black women writers have addressed in both fiction and scholarly writing (for example, Brown, Christian, Collins, hooks, Hurston, Marshall, and Morrison). Part of a larger project on black women writers and literacy, this discussion on cultural conflicts will focus on two issues about orality and literacy in Ong and Havelock and will show how black women writers view these Western, patriarchal issues. After articulating some of the cultural conflicts between Western language use and African American


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

THE BLUEST EYE 305

expression, I will discuss how some of these conflicts are represented in The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970). In the final section, I will discuss Morrison’s language issues as pedagogical issues and the implications for teaching language and literature. Orality and literacy: a brief overview of cultural conflicts Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato and Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy have produced historical work that epitomizes classic thinking about Western, patriarchal traditions of literacy. Their history of literacy illustrates the basic premises of Western schooling and privilege. Some writers criticize Ong’s Orality and Literacy for its generalizing claims about cognition and for creating a false dichotomy between orality and literacy (see, for example, Bleich and Rose). But these works offer historical research and analytical categories that help to articulate cultural conflicts between Western and non-Western language use. These cultural conflicts should be viewed as Western versus non-Western differences in language use and not as purely racial, i.e., white versus non-white differences. In addition, the term orality does not mean speech, dialect, Black English, folklore, or even oral tradition (although these subjects are included in discussions of orality). Orality is a conceptual theory of language that many scholars are using to describe, characterize, and analyse the significance of ‘orally based thought and expression’ (Ong, 1982:36). Two examples will help to illustrate these cultural conflicts. Observing the evolution of Western literacy, for example—a language tradition that shifts its bias from poetry to prose—Ong and Havelock declare that the invention of the Greek alphabet was a momentous, historical event, in effect, a literate revolution. While acknowledging the historical fifth-century heated debates against writing in Greek culture, both of these white men praise the virtues of alphabetic literacy for its democratizing effect. Ong states, for example, that the ‘Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. It was also internationalizing in that it provided a way of processing even foreign tongues’ (Ong, 1982:90). Yet now more than 2,000 years later, shall we call this alphabet democratizing or colonizing? In effect, the widespread use of Western literacy has served to marginalize the cultural production, literate production, and language use of non-Western cultures. As the cultural mother tongue becomes displaced or even lost, the Western stepmother tongue becomes internalized or ‘interiorized’, as Ong describes this literate process (Ong, 1982:81). Toni Morrison’s analysis of Clarence Thomas’s predicament in her introduction to Race-ing Justice En-gender-ing Power, ‘Friday on the Potomac’, not only illustrates the Western/non-Western cultural conflicts involved in this psychological process of internalizing, but also articulates its complex political and racial implications. Morrison also observes these conflicts as a writer. Her statements about writing in a racialized society


(see Playing in the Dark, for example), point to the linguistic struggle of writers to confront a’racially inflected language’ that is inextricably linked to a writer’s imagination (Morrison, 1992b: 13). Historically, in American writing, white male writers have used literacy to emphatically separate the written voices of whitepeople from the written voices of blackpeople. In another example, Ong and Havelock claim that orality which is characterized by ‘situational’, ‘empathetic’, ‘close to the human lifeworld’ expression inevitably yields to the ‘abstract’, ‘objectively distanced’, logical thinking that alphabetic literacy engenders (Ong, 1982:31–77). This conceptualizing ability—a major premise of their writing and research—is, they argue, an evolutionary feature of Western literacy. In fact, Havelock is so deeply persuaded by this feature that he wrote an article called ‘Orality, literacy, and Star Wars’ to teachers of writing and literacy urging them to reform the language curriculum so that it would include orality. Havelock argues that the Western academic tradition has abandoned its oral roots which, in effect, weakens the cultural uses of literacy and schooling. But in ‘Characteristics of Negro expression’, Zora Neale Hurston shows, in contrast to this mainstream, Western view of literacy, that the African American speaker will convert the abstract expression of the Western speaker into a concrete or ‘close to the human lifeworld’ (Hurston, 1981:42) expression. Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s literary biographer, says that Hurston’s essay aimed to distinguish black cultural expression from dominant white standards for literate expression. He observes that: ‘In an assimilationist era, when black intellectuals stressed the similarities between the races, Hurston proudly affirmed the cultural differences’ (Hemenway, 1977:162). Hurston lists contrastive features in her essay that are implicitly linked to cultural differences between oral and written expression. Describing European expression, for example, Hurston writes, ‘the people with highly developed languages have words for detached ideas. That is legal tender. “That-which-we-squat-on” has become “chair.”… Perhaps we might say that Paradise Lost and Sartor Resartus are written in cheque words’ (Hurston, 1981: 49). As a trained observer of language use, Hurston observes the tendencies toward abstraction that Ong and Havelock link to literacy. But she shows what the black speaker does with abstract language: Primitive man exchanges descriptive words. His words are all close fitting. Frequently the Negro, even with detached words in his vocabulary—not evolved in him but transplanted on his tongue by contact—must add action to it to make it do. So we have ‘chop-axe,’ ‘sitting-chair,’ ‘cook-pot’ and the like because the speaker has in his mind the picture of the object in use. Action. Everything illustrated. (Hurston, 1981:49–50, emphasis added) This particular description of ‘close fitting’ words and ‘cheque words’ reflects one of Morrison’s statements about black language use and her own writerly

THE BLUEST EYE 307

choices. In an interview with Bessie Jones, she says, ‘I think the language of Black people is just so full of metaphor and imagery—the way they talk is very concrete…in addition to its sound, it has its sight—those two things’ (Jones, 1985:140). Morrison illustrates her idea with an example that appears in Song of Solomon: if somebody says, ‘Oh what harm did I ever do you on my knees?’ The ‘on my knees’ is the picture. She could have been content with just saying ‘pray for you,’ but that was not enough. She wants to impress upon him how it looks to be on her knees praying, you see. (Jones, 1985:140) On the basis of ‘Characteristics of Negro of expression’, an essay published in the early 1920s, Hurston was one of the earliest American writers who tried to list contrastive categories of cultural orality and Western literate expression. Concluding her discussion on drama with a statement that captures the cultural conflicts, she observes: ‘the white man thinks in written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics’ (Hurston, 1981:50). In ‘The race for theory’, Barbara Christian elaborates on issues of abstract thinking and logic, and confronts the privileged status of these Western academic premises, stating: People of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity? (Christian, 1988:68) Thus where Havelock argues that Western conceptual values for language use depend upon prose and stasis (Havelock, 1991:25), Christian argues that conceptualizing or theorizing in African American expression is tenaciously linked to cultural orality. African American feminists writing from the ‘so-called margins’ write to preserve and protect the mother tongue —its stores of cultural knowledge and its cultural transmission. These black feminists also show the ways in which the mother tongue has been the means of personal and selfempowerment to black women. Their work reveals unexplored issues of orality in relation to literacy, such as oral memory, listening, ritual and language, body language or gestures—especially agonistic gesturing, the spoken word, reading aloud, the reader as co-creator of the text, gossip, music, song, hieroglyphs or speaking pictures; this general privileging of orality becomes useful for discussions, research, writing assignments, and teaching. Although these issues of language are not commonly addressed in classroom discussions about literacy,


some recent works in literacy and pedagogy studies offer analyses and tools for further critical investigations on these language issues addressed by black women writers (on oral and written memory, see: Butler, 1989; Goody, 1987; Reynolds, 1993; on rereadings of the history of rhetoric and literacy, see Swearingen, 1991; Welch, 1990; on black feminist pedagogy, see Brown, 1988; Collins, 1990; Olson, 1994; on oral and written language and pedagogy, see Bleich, 1988). In ‘From the poets in the kitchen’, Paule Marshall discusses the significance of the mother tongue to the women in her community—being black, female, and foreign—a ‘triple invisibility’ (Marshall, 1983:7): [These black women] really didn’t count in American society except as a source of cheap labor. But given the kind of women they were, they couldn’t tolerate the fact of their invisibility, their powerlessness. And they fought back, using the only weapon at their command: the spoken word. (Marshall, 1983:7) Acknowledging her rootedness in this community, Marshall praises, first, her poetic foremothers who ‘passed on’ to her a gift for language that motivates her as a writer. As she praises these women as poets, she also signifies the tradition of the oral poet, an elevated and political status in any oral culture. Concluding her essay about the language use of these black women, Marshall states: [These black women] taught me my first lessons in the narrative art. They trained my ear. They set a standard of excellence. This is why the best of my work must be attributed to them: it stands as a testimony to the rich legacy of language and culture they so freely passed on to me in the wordshop of the kitchen. (Marshall, 1983:12) But needless to say, these features of language that many readers enjoy in the 1990s were not immediately welcomed by the publishing industries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Circulating her manuscript for The Bluest Eye, Morrison received many letters of rejection from publishers prior to its acceptance. In a conversation with Gloria Naylor, Morrison briefly discussed the publishing industry’s response to her first novel: They wrote me nice letters. ‘This book has no beginning, no middle, and no end’; or, ‘your writing is wonderful, but…’ I wasn’t going to change it for that. I assumed there would be some writing skills that I did not have. But that’s not what they were talking about. They thought something was wrong with it or it wasn’t marketable. (Naylor and Morrison, 1985:577)

THE BLUEST EYE 309

Even today, as evidenced by reviews of writers such as Alice Walker or Leslie Marmon Silko or Toni Morrison, readers continue to hear criticisms that draw on Western patriarchal literary values and arts of literacy. It seems, then, that a question to consider is to what extent do we continue to privilege these topics for academic literacy and its uses, and in doing so, silence or subordinate nonWestern and feminist interests in orality and literacy. A brief textual analysis from The Bluest Eye will illustrate these new language issues that Morrison represents in her work. Orality and literacy in The Bluest Eye From its first appearance in 1970, in the midst of the new ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye stimulated new critical discussions about racism and sexism. The majority of these responses centered on the black victim. Morrison’s indelible images of black life—its horror and its beauty— create powerful memories of pleasure and pain for her readers. Equally memorable about Morrison’s new venture as a writer is the language of her novel. In her many interviews and essays, Morrison speaks repeatedly about the aesthetics of black art and the character of black language that she wants her readers to hear in her novel. Language is the distinguishing feature in the work of any story-teller: ‘Anybody can think up a story. But trying to breathe life into characters, allow them space, make them people whom I care about is hard. I only have twenty-six letters of the alphabet; I don’t have color or music. I must use my craft to make the reader see the colors and hear the sounds’ (Tate, 1983:120). With the Dick and Jane excerpts that frame The Bluest Eye, issues of literacy and schooling, language and racist ideology, are commonly discussed. Implicitly through her reference to this primer, Morrison criticizes what she calls the ‘master narrative, …the white, male life’, she says, ‘an ideological script imposed on everybody else’s life…you know, this is beautiful, this is lovely, and you’re not it’ (Moyers, 1990: interview). Strategically, through the stories of the MacTeer family, Morrison subverts the power of the master narrative with the historical African American oral tradition, the media of cultural survival for the black community. The black oral tradition in Morrison’s novel advances the use of this aesthetic in the cultural production of African American writing. Familiar features of folklore such as heroes, stock characters, songs, etc. (which many other black writers have done, e.g., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) appear in her work (see Harris, 1991 and Jones, 1985). But more importantly, Morrison also shares more of the psychology of the oral tradition with her readers, uses of orality, and more of the nonverbal communication that is unique to the black community or the ‘village’ as she describes this consciousness (LeClair, 1993: 370). The Bluest Eye opens with the voice of a child, a narrator who effectively disarms the reader’s sense of oral-literate conflicts. The story also opens with


strong reflections on black women and the oral arts of survival or, more specifically, on these women as carriers of the feelings and wisdom that enable the black family to survive racism, sexism, and white political oppression. Only briefly do we hear men’s voices (Claudia’s father, Cholly Breedlove, and Mr Henry), for in this opening chapter—unframed by an excerpt from the school primer—the women’s voices predominate, through conversations or through the voice of the narrator. An early scene in Mrs MacTeer’s kitchen shows black women in the community gathered together for conversation and gossip. The little narrator’s response to this scene is reminiscent of Paule Marshall’s description of the black women in the formative years of her life, the ‘poets in the kitchen’. Of these housewives and mothers, Marshall tells us that: The talk that filled the kitchen those afternoons was highly functional. It was therapy… But more than therapy, that freewheeling, wide-ranging, exuberant talk functioned as an outlet for the tremendous creative energy they possessed. They were women in whom the need for self-expression was strong, and since language was the only vehicle readily available to them they made of it an art form that—in keeping with the African tradition in which art and life are one—was an integral part of their lives. (Marshall, 1983:6) As Morrison sketches her own kitchen scene, her readers who are also listening overhear the dialogues of these women in the kitchen. Recalling her girlhood feelings, Claudia tells us what these speech events mean, commenting on the verbal and body language: ‘Frieda and I are washing Mason jars. We do not hear their words, but with grown-ups we listen to and watch out for their voices’ (Morrison, 1970:15). Marshall describes language as art in her kitchen. Morrison puts this art of language in motion: Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre. (Morrison, 1970:16) Morrison’s metaphor of the dance for language is one of the most often cited images in discussions about orality and literacy in this novel. The movement of this indelible image focuses on language as power, active, and alive (as Hurston

THE BLUEST EYE 311

describes black expression) rather than as passive or static (as Havelock describes Western prose). Through the ears and eyes of a child, Morrison’s readers are reacquainted with the subtle nuances, the subliminal meanings, and processes of oral expression. Words in an oral culture, ‘acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs’ (Ong, 1982:47). A little later, and still in the kitchen, Claudia recalls her responses to her mother’s ‘fussing soliloquies’ (Morrison, 1970:23), a scene that communicates more of the psychology of the oral tradition in the MacTeer family home. Morrison’s ironic use of a formal, Western literary term, soliloquy (easily associated with Shakespeare), to name a very familiar oral performance by many black mothers, creates humor for her readers. In class discussions, black women students easily recognize the tone and meaning of Mrs MacTeer’s voice. Claudia tells us that this oral ritual was ‘irritating’, ‘depressing’, ‘interminable’, ‘insulting’, and ‘extremely painful’, as she remembers it then (23). But as a survival ritual this performance is also formulaic, anticipatory, and predictable. This particular soliloquy—Mrs MacTeer’s response to Pecola’s consumption of the milk—spans six pages (22–8) and reveals an African American oral traditional formulaic structure into which new stories or situations could be added easily. The children, who know that they are to be seen and not heard, listen for the underlying lessons of survival that animate this ritual. Their responses show that they hear the formulas. Both the form and the topics are predictable (‘We wanted to miss the part about Roosevelt and the CCC camps’ (24)). Claudia tells us: She would go on like that for hours, connecting one offense to another until all of the things that chagrined her were spewed out. Then, having told everybody and everything off, she would burst into song and sing the rest of the day. But it was such a long time before the singing part came. In the meantime, our stomachs jellying and our necks burning, we listened, avoided each other’s eyes, and picked toe jam or whatever. (Morrison, 1970:22–3) Reading the fussing soliloquy aloud, Morrison’s readers feel, with Claudia, the painful, irritating emotions that she remembers. We also feel the humor, love, and sweetness that Claudia feels, reflecting, as an adult. Reading aloud also brings out laughter from students who listen to the double-voiced nature of this episode—Mama’s high-pitched, emotionally charged, fussing, and Claudia’s calm, reflective, sobering commentary as she narrates the children’s responses. Another feature of orality that reveals the psychology of the oral tradition in these fussing soliloquies is that they are indirect—Mama doesn’t attack her own children (in contrast to Mrs Breedlove’s accusatory tone to Pecola (Morrison,


1970:87)). Claudia tells us that ‘Mama never named anybody— just talked about folks and some people’ (23). On the contrary, the tone, form, song, and structure of the soliloquy actually nurtures the characters of these girls. In the MacTeer family home, the oral tradition is a personally empowering tradition. Claudia and Frieda, their memories engaged, inherit this tradition and look forward to passing it on. Moved by her mother’s singing, Claudia responds in a highly rhythmic, aural passage that begs to be read aloud: Her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without ‘a thin di-i-ime to my name.’ I looked forward to the delicious time when ‘my man’ would leave me, when I would ‘hate to see that evening sun go down…’’cause then I would know ‘my man has left this town’. (Morrison, 1970:24) Even as this episode moves along and Pecola discovers that she’s having her first menstrual cycle, Mama’s fussing continues. But then, as if to underscore the meaning of this experience for the MacTeer girls, this first chapter concludes on a note of humor—the music of Mrs MacTeer’s laughter—and a proverbial expression offered earlier in the story seems to share Claudia’s growing sensibility about her black family life: that ‘pain was not only endurable, it was sweet’ (24). Nine-year-old Claudia learns how to listen for the subtle nuances, music, and meaning in spoken language. In a clear structural contrast to the survival rituals of the MacTeer family, the Breedlove family does not ‘pass on’ the communal memory of the African American oral tradition in their home. No music, laughter, gossip, and most of all no life-sustaining or celebratory rituals are represented in their family’s story. One of their few rituals performed in their home is self-destructive: a dance of horror between Cholly and Pauline which is terrifying, spontaneous, anticipatory, and predictable. Pecola does not want to witness yet another fight, thinking and feeling, quietly and fearfully, ‘Don’t Mrs Breedlove, Don’t’ (38). This agonistic struggle between the parents becomes a too familiar scene for the Breedlove children, and the pain is not ‘endurable or sweet’. Instead, Sammy and Pecola respond to this ritual with a desire to escape the home, or for Pecola, a desire to die. Meanwhile, Pecola’s schooling serves to reinforce the self-negating impulse that she learns at home: for a full year she has prayed for blue eyes. Privileging orality, the story-teller spends much time to show that both Pauline and Cholly were immersed in cultural oral traditional communal structures in the South before their urban migration. Their oral memories hold treasured stories, experiences, and feelings which they do not pass on to their children. In the Spring section, Cholly’s story includes his memory of a man he loved named Blue, a nice old man who used to

THE BLUEST EYE 313

tell him old-timey stories about how it was when the Emancipation Proclamation came. How the black people hollered, cried, and sang. And ghost stories…and how he talked his way out of getting lynched once, and how others hadn’t. (Morrison, 1970:106) In this same recollection, Cholly recalls his participation in a black cultural ritual during a July 4th celebration—how ‘to break open a watermelon’ (106). The Southern setting and ritual reveal the communal bonding that Cholly enjoyed as a young boy. The beautiful poetic, visual, and sensual details of this scene create the empathetic, participatory nature of black cultural orality and story-telling. Cholly’s oral memory also reveals black women in his life, like Aunt Jimmy and M’Dear, who passed on the oral tradition—including healing arts—during his youthful, formative years. Cholly’s oral memory shows how this oral tradition was a survival media in the midst of Southern racial oppression. Pauline’s oral memory of her life in the South and her early experiences in the North—Morrison distinguishes her voice and inner psychology with italicized print—reveals the soul of a visual artist. As a child at school, the narrator tells us, ‘She missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons’ (89). Consistently, the story-teller represents Pauline’s oral memory, especially her love for Cholly, with a simple, natural vision for beauty, in rich sensual imagery and color: When I [Pauline] first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil’ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that streak of green them june bugs made on the trees the night we left from down home. All of them colors was in me. Just sitting there. So when Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them berries, that lemonade, them streaks of green the june bugs made, all come together. (Morrison, 1970:91–2) But after Pauline moves to the North, her imagination deteriorates from color, her own, to black and white, literally that of the Western film media of the 1930s, and metaphorically, that of the implicit racist ideology of that media. Submitting to the master narrative, Pauline finds a new ‘education in the movies’ (97), unlearning her past and replacing her own values with the white, patriarchal aesthetic for beauty. Her new schooling in the movies is the revised or new version of the Dick and Jane myth that appears thematically in this novel.


According to Ong’s description of secondary orality, the movie replicates the experience of the ‘talking book’ (Ong, 1982:136). Like the school text excerpts that frame this novel, the film stories are similarly abstract and objectively distanced. But Pauline really believes in this new Dick and Jane myth: The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture show. Every time I got, I went. I’d go early, before the show started. They’d cut off the lights, and everything be black. Then the screen would light up, and I’d move right on in them pictures… Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and looking at Cholly hard. (Morrison, 1970:97, emphasis added) Internalizing the processes of this new schooling, Pauline’s oral memory is increasingly displaced until her reflections on her past are almost entirely repressed. It was only sometimes, sometimes, and then rarely, that she thought about the old days, or what her life had turned to. They were musings, idle thoughts, full sometimes of the old dreaminess, but not the kind of thing she cared to dwell on. (Morrison, 1970:102) Pauline and Cholly do not pass on these oral memories to their children, but Pecola finds communal bonding, music and intimacy outside of her home among the ‘whores’. From these discredited, ‘ruined’ women, she participates in black oral language arts: oral story-telling, gesturing, laughter, and complete sensual (close to the human lifeworld) engagement. Just as Claudia and Frieda listened for ‘truth in timbre’ in their earlier kitchen scene, Pecola watches and responds to the subtle nuances of nonverbal communication in a parallel domestic scene with the whores. Miss Marie tells a story about an old lover, Dewey Prince, and Pecola asks her whether they had any children. As Miss Marie answers the child’s questions, Pecola listens, watches, and interprets her movements: ‘“Yeah. Yeah. We had some.” Marie fidgeted. She pulled a bobby pin from her hair and began to pick her teeth’ (48). ‘That meant,’ Pecola understood, ‘she didn’t want to talk anymore.’ (48). This simple image of listening and gesturing illustrates the drama of black expression that Hurston describes, ‘and no one ever mistakes the meaning’ (Hurston, 1981:50). In telling the story about Soaphead Church, Morrison shifts her critical focus from the influence of the Dick and Jane primer or that of the education in the movies—secondary orality—to the influence of the Western, British literate tradition on a ‘cinnamon-eyed West Indian with lightly browned skin’ (132), a black man who migrates and settles in Lorain, Ohio. Soaphead, as the community names him, is a black preacher with a British accent. Most discussions about literacy in The Bluest Eye provide only brief analyses about

THE BLUEST EYE 315

Soaphead, despite the fact that the metaphors of literacy associated with his character are so numerous. His cultural immersion in British reading— Shakespeare, Dante, Gibbon, the Holy Grail—dominates his inner thoughts and speech. In fact, while listening to his inner dialogue with God and to his conversation with Pecola, readers can almost hear him speaking with an articulate, emphatic British accent and idiom: It was in fact a pity that the Maker had not sought his counsel. (Morrison, 1970:136) What can I do for you, my child? (137) Make sure he [the dog] eats it. And mark well how he behaves. (138) Courage. Courage, my child. These things are not granted to faint hearts. (138) But in addition to the strong literate content—and more importantly—the voice of the narrator who tells Soaphead’s story also takes on a strong literate tone. This voice is not the empathetic, participatory story-teller that makes our hearts bleed for Pecola or that gives us Cholly’s boyhood memories. Rather, the narrator’s distant voice provides a family genealogy that reads like a Western chronicle. Although the first line of the story, ‘Once there was an old man who loved things’ (130), seems to voice the intimate, familiar narrative voice that we have heard before in the novel, this first line establishes the tone and frame of a satire. As a satire, Soaphead’s story mocks the white culture that invented racist ideology and teaches its master narrative through its literature. Soaphead’s story is a parody on his Anglophilia (132), ‘like a good Victorian parody’ (132). With a strong satiric tone, the narrator examines Soaphead’s deeprooted beliefs in the superiority of whiteness, as exemplified specifically in the story-teller’s reference to de Gobineau’s hypothesis, ‘that “all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it”’ (133). The Count de Gobineau, nineteenth-century French diplomat, ethnologist, fiction writer—the ‘father of racism’—enjoyed a considerable historical influence for his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (Gibson, 1993:159). With the effects of racist ideology as its subject, Morrison’s potent irony in this brief chronicle of the colonizing of Elihue Micah Whitcomb, called Soaphead, is as biting and bitter as that in a notable Western, British satire. The narrator calls Soaphead a theologian, and not a preacher, which emphasizes both his distance from the African American community and his superior sense of his analytical, dialectical, disputative, Western religious


background. A motherless child, and his father’s experiment, Soaphead holds no value for oral, aural expression—his mind is a ‘soundless cave’ (134). His confessional letter to God, with an enclosed professional card, is written, not oral, and is not dialogical though it claims to be (that is, through his use of the form of questions and answers). But despite his extensive academic background, racism limits Soaphead Church’s opportunity for employment. Thus he settles in Lorain, Ohio, ‘palming himself off as a minister, and inspiring awe with the way he spoke English’ (135). The satire also examines Soaphead’s exploitation of the black community and its oral tradition which supports his power of deception. Behind his preacherly mask, he clearly feels superior to the people who live in this community. Even his business or advertising card that Pecola hands over to him reveals his art of deception. It is indeed humorous that in contrast to his spoken voice in British English, the written voice on his professional card mimics the spoken idiom of a black preacher: If you are overcome with trouble and conditions that are not natural, I can remove them; Overcome Spells, Bad Luck, and Evil Influences… If you are unhappy, discouraged, or distressed, I can help you… If you are sick, I can show you the way to health. I locate lost and stolen articles. Satisfaction guaranteed. (Morrison, 1970:137) Soaphead’s deception also manifests itself in his own self-hatred. With a focus on the early origins of racism, Soaphead’s story reveals the subliminal processes of a colonized mind that internalizes the belief that whiteness is superior. In this story, then, it is appropriate that Soaphead is the character who fulfills Pecola’s wish for blue eyes. Transforming Morrison’s language issues into teaching issues When I teach African American writers, especially Toni Morrison’s work, I introduce students to orality, literacy, and the African American oral tradition, and the cultural conflicts that black women writers address. This pedagogical strategy empowers students to examine cultural biases about orality and literacy, to explore uses of orality in their own lives, and to explore relationships between orality and literacy. The interest in student self-empowerment is not a simple, predictable, formulaic academic exercise. The classroom becomes the setting for experiencing the range of love and passion that black people have for spoken language and for analysing how Morrison negotiates the values of orality and literacy in her own writing. In an early interview, Morrison describes this love:

THE BLUEST EYE 317

[Language] is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion… The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to that language. (LeClair, 1993:373) Morrison does not talk about teaching. But her awareness of cultural conflicts in language, her repeated discussion of these issues in interviews and articles, and her representation of these issues in her fiction (thematically focused in Song of Solomon; see Middleton, 1993a and 1993b), encourage teachers and literary critics to explore the implications of her interests to current critical inquiry about teaching. Morrison introduces students to language issues that modern Western traditions of schooling do not address. In discussions about orality and literacy, for example, most students do not realize that for African American slaves, learning to read and write in this country were forbidden, illegal activities. Thus, in contrast to the white American community for which literacy was a privilege, the black community’s orientation to literacy was to ‘steal’ it—and there are several historical accounts of African American slaves who stole literacy as a means to freedom (see Douglass, 1987, for example; also see Cornelius, 1983). But despite these courageous efforts, for the majority of African Americans it was the oral tradition and not writing that was the medium for preserving black culture. Historically, then, the bias of literacy in schools rendered black voices and black arts of language invisible in the West. Since Western schooling privileges literate values over oral ones (how many college students take required speech classes today?), cultural knowledge preserved through an oral tradition is marginalized in relation to knowledge that can be researched through writing (see Goody, 1987). By privileging orality so that the traditions of both orality and literacy might be equally heard—that is, so that the literate tradition does not silence or discredit the knowledge and voices of the oral tradition—Morrison enables her readers to feel the integrity of cultural oral tradition and to understand the social and psychological problems that are linked to oral-literate conflicts. As a writer and teacher, Morrison transforms these conflicts from the ‘either/or’ dichotomy that characterizes the work of Ong and Havelock into a ‘both/and’ language paradigm. She observes: I remember myself as surrounded by extraordinary adults who were smarter than me. I was better educated, but I always thought that they had true wisdom and I had merely book learning. It was only when I began to write that I was able to marry those two things: wisdom and education. (Lanker, 1989:32)


In her interviews and essays, Morrison describes language issues that help to formulate a ‘both/and’ language paradigm for teaching. For example, in ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, Morrison elaborates on her efforts to incorporate major characteristics of black art into her fiction (Morrison, 1984b: 341). She names at least five interrelated features that motivate teaching and theoretical interests: 1 Her novel must have ‘the ability to be both print and oral literature’ (341). 2 Her fiction encourages reader participation: ‘Because it is the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance’ (341). Thus the reader is both the audience and the co-creator of the text. 3 The chorus or the choral community in her stories is important to her storytelling. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s narrator is both the ‘“I” narrator’ and the chorus (341). 4 Her art aims to get a ‘visceral, emotional response as well as an intellectual response’ from her readers (343). 5 Unlike Western art, black art is both ‘unquestionably political’ and ‘irrevocably beautiful’ at the same time (345). This essay concludes with voices of a few students in my classes who have shared their thoughts and feelings about Morrison’s language and teaching issues. For example, responding to Morrison’s issues about black cultural expression, one black woman writes: Prior to entering English 226 I would never have described the everyday language or common speech of African Americans as beautiful and poetic. I never dreamt that the language in itself was a part of ‘our’ culture. I never thought of it as the sole means that a group of indigenous people used to preserve as much of their folklore and culture as was possible, and I definitely would not have thought that the ability to implement everyday speech in one’s stories is a measure to judge great authors by… African American writers are no longer afraid of claiming the powers that their everyday speech has. They are resisting the tradition that standard English is the only acceptable language of writers, and most importantly, they are acknowledging the high regard that their communities give to their story-telling tradition. A white woman from the same class summarizes her ideas in a final writing assignment. Sharing some of her emotional responses to her involvement with Morrison’s language, this student shows how the readings motivated her to think about her own personal language history:

THE BLUEST EYE 319

To me this [importance of orality within writing and literature] is quite a realization… To think in pictures. To write as you speak. To write as you think. To write from experience… This is not the writing I have been taught… I didn’t understand what ‘the oral tradition in literature’ was, and now I know, and I am very glad I do. It really is the lifeline of literature. After completing a summer seminar on Toni Morrison, a white male student shared his reflections on these language issues, expressing his new insight about Morrison’s language and his involvement: I don’t know, maybe it is the uncharted concepts you introduced us to, or the insights you divulged, which transformed previously read books from ones I merely liked to ones I now cherish. Either way, I do know that the issues you have opened my eyes to, and the subsequent knowledge from contemplating them, will undoubtedly seep into many facets of my life both implicitly and explicitly. I now have an understanding and appreciation for the spoken and written word completely new to me. Related to Morrison’s issue of participation, a black woman student talks about how she developed her views on listening in a literature class that stresses teaching orality and literacy together: Listening has definitely meant a great deal to me during this class. I have always had a strong voice when it came to expressing a view that I felt really strongly about. However, I must admit that I did not really listen. The only listening I did was to decipher whether or not the speaker agreed with my views—which they usually didn’t. When I began to really listen, I started to understand what people were saying and understand although not always conform to their point of view (you see it is very hard for me to change my mind). Through listening, I have started to have respect for certain people’s ideas, and less for others, but I really was challenged on an intellectual level because both participants came out of the conversation a little more learned… Listening is so important in learning and teaching and it is only now that I have begun to scratch the surface of its importance. These student comments suggest the ways in which Morrison’s language issues— language as adventure—may be effectively presented as an explicit teaching agenda. The class aims to broaden our students’ range of listening and to explore new thinking about relationships between speaking, writing, reading, and listening.


References Bleich, David (1988) The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Elsa Barkley (1988) ‘African-American women’s quilting: a framework for conceptualizing and teaching African-American women’s history’, in M.R. Malson, E.Mudimbe-Boyi, J.F.O’Barr and Mary Wyer, Mary (eds) Black Women in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 9–18. Butler, Thomas (1989) ‘Memory: a mixed blessing’, in Thomas Butler (ed.) Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, New York: Blackwell: 1–31. Christian, Barbara (1988) The race for theory’, in Feminist Studies, 14:1, 67–79. Collins, Patricia Hill (1990) Black Feminist Thought, Boston: Unwin Hyman Press. Cornelius, Janet (1983) ‘“We slipped and learned to read:” slave accounts of the literacy process, 1830–1865’, Phylon, 44:171–85. Douglass, Frederick (1987) ‘Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1987) editor, The Classic Slave Narratives, New York: New American Library: 244–331. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Appiah, K.A. (1993) editors, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, New York: Amistad Press, Inc. Gibson, Donald B. (1993) ‘Text and countertext in The Bluest Eye’, in Gates (1993): 159–74. Goody, Jack (1987) The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, New York: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Trudier (1991) Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Havelock, Eric (1963) Preface to Plato, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— (1978) The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (1986) ‘Orality, literacy, and Star Wars’, Pre/Text, 7:3, 123–32. —— (1991) ‘The oral-literate equation: a formula for the modern mind’, in David Olson and Nancy Torrence (eds) Literacy and Orality, New York: Cambridge University Press: 11–27. Hemenway, Robert (1977) Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hurston, Zora Neale (1981) ‘Characteristics of Negro expression’, in The Sanctified Church, Berkeley: Turtle Press: 49–68. Jones, Bessie (1985) The World of Toni Morrison, Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Press. Jones, Gayl (1991) Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lanker, Brian (1989) I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America: Photographs and Interviews by Brian Lanker, Barbara Summers (ed.) New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang. LeClair, Thomas (1993) ‘“The language must not sweat”: a conversation with Toni Morrison’, in Gates (1993):369–77.

THE BLUEST EYE 321

Marshall, Paule (1983) ‘From the poets in the kitchen’, in Merle, a Novella, and Other Stories, New York: Feminist Press: 3–12. Middleton, Joyce (1993a) ‘Oral memory and the teaching of literacy: some implications from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon’, in Reynolds, Fred (ed.) Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Press. —— (1993b) ‘Orality, literacy, and memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,’ in College English, 55(1):64–75. Morrison, Toni (1970) The Bluest Eye, New York: Washington Square Press. —— (1977) Song of Solomon, New York: Signet. —— (1984a) ‘Memory, creation, and writing’, Thought, 59 (December): 385–90. —— (1984b) ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, in Mari Evans (ed.) Black Women Writers, 1950–1980, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday: 339–45. —— (1992a) ‘Introduction: Friday on the Potomac’, in Toni Morrison (ed.) Race-ing Justice En-gender-ing Power, New York: Pantheon: vii-xxx. —— (1992b) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moyers, Bill (1990) ‘Interview with Toni Morrison’, New York: Public Affairs Television, Inc. Naylor, Gloria and Morrison, Toni (1985) ‘A conversation’, Southern Review, Vol. 21(3): 567–92. Olson, David and Torrance, Nancy (1991) editors, Literacy and Orality, New York: Cambridge University Press. Olson, Gary (1994) ‘bell hooks and the politics of literacy: a conversation’, in Gary Olson (ed.) Philosophy, Rhetoric, Literary Criticism: (Inter)views, Carbondale: Southern Illinois, University Press. Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and Literacy, New York: Methuen. Reynolds, Fred (1993) editor, Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Rose, Mike (1988) ‘Narrowing the mind and page: remedial writers and cognitive reductionism’, in College Composition and Communication, 39(3):267–302. Swearingen, C. Jan (1991) Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies, New York: Oxford University Press. Tate, Claudia (1983) editor, Black Women Writers at Work, New York: Continuum Press. Welch, Kathleen E. (1990) The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Press.

‘OUT OF THE KUMBLA’: TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ AND PEDAGOGICAL ANSWERABILITY RINALDO WALCOTT

For it is certainly easier to create without answering for life, and easier to live without consideration for art. Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability. (Bakhtin, 1990:2) There is something fundamentally scary about pedagogy because pedagogy references the unknown. Despite our best authorial intentions, no guarantees mediate our private lesson plans or the public effects of the pedagogical encounter… In fact, what seems certain is that after the pedagogical encounter we must return to our plans, rethink our expectations, and theorize the tensions of multiple performances that compete for our attention. (Britzman, 1991:60) ‘Go een a kumbla’ This paper attempts not to ‘jazz up’ pedagogy and cultural theory but, rather, to do something ‘jazzy’ to and with pedagogy and cultural theory. Jazz, as a creative musical practice, is both a trope and a means for the type of pedagogy that I propose in this essay. Pedagogy is much like entering an unknown place and being unsure whether one will be protected or find danger there. However, there are places that offer both protection and sustenance, and to enter these places is to find oneself at a decisive moment of knowing when to leave. If the turf that is being entered is yours, ‘you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

JAZZ AND PEDAGOGICAL ANSWERABILITY 323

quit’ (Morrison, 1993:9). The advice is pedagogical suggesting at once the problem of answerability, noted above by Bakhtin, and unknowability unleashed in the pedagogical encounter. Such advice is significantly offered by black women’s writing. In order to attempt to understand the various ways an African American experience1 is interpellated, pedagogy and cultural theory need to enter the communities that black women’s writing have created, exposed and fostered. This entry, however, must not be simply celebratory, but a healthy dose of skepticism should greet its entry into this world that Erna Brodber has named the kumbla.2 The emergence of minoritized literatures3 have not merely challenged and exploded the canon(s), rather, these literatures have imploded the canon(s). Implosion seems the applicable word here, if we take seriously Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s argument that ‘black women writers [are] generated less by neurotic anxiety or dis-ease than by an emancipatory impulse which freely engages both hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse’ (Henderson, 1989:138). Black women’s writings have disrupted and reshaped what is thinkable in novelistic and poetic forms. Henderson’s statement places the writings of black women in a unique place of offering perspectives on sites of privilege and ‘disprivilege’. From such a site, my attempt is to read black women’s writings in order to raise two questions: What does Toni Morrison have to offer cultural and educational theorists? What can happen with Morrison’s work in classrooms? Using her most recent novel, Jazz, the earlier Tar Baby, and her critical writings, I wonder what it might mean for cultural and educational theorists to begin to work more actively through the polyvalent voices of black women writers in an effort to do something different to the theory and practice of education.4 In this essay, I want to hold on to and discuss three related but tension-filled antagonistic categories. Pedagogy, education and nation all produce the foundations upon which we might build a project of possibility in classrooms. These three elements also are the major preoccupations of the project of schooling. Using the work of Toni Morrison as an important philosophical and structural example of how to discuss these elements, it might be possible to learn how to shift the present confines of pedagogy, education and nation as we know them. My interest in shifting the confines of educational and cultural discourse is not to attempt a simple reversal. For pedagogues working at the interstices of cultural studies and educational theories and practices, questions arise in which evocations of mere complicity are no longer enough. The complex ways that all of us who engage in the project of education are positioned in discourses of power, as lived in the institutions that condition our occasional meetings dif ferently, no longer fit the tidy categories of blame or of heroism. I am more interested in the Bakhtinian notion of ‘answerability’. I prefer to speak in terms of answerability rather than ‘accountability’, because the latter implies a closing down of debate in a regulatory, disciplinary manner that renders impossible the recuperation of pedagogical moments. Answerability suggests a much more


open-ended process, wherein moments of contestation are not foreclosed by some ultimate accountability to an overarching, but nebulous, political project. In working through the notion of answerability, Bakhtin raises the issue of ‘guilt or the liability to blame’ (Bakhtin, 1990:1). Bakhtin is not suggesting some simple notion of blame wherein individuals or groups of people can be singled out and lined up for judgement. Rather, his concern is with ‘mutual liability to blame’ (Bakhtin, 1990:1). In this regard notions of sentimentality and the purity of position are no longer possible. In fact, in this dangerous scenario we all stand responsible, implicated within both the given reproduction of the various discourses of subordination and exploitation that regulate and govern our lives, and the possible production of something quite otherwise. Within this frame of mutual liability, Morrison in Playing in the Dark takes on the task of (re)assessing the American white literary imagination. She argues that it is impossible to conceive of an American literary imagination that does not, from its inception, operate from a construct of blackness to fulfill its notion of self. Morrison is pointing to the complexity of issues and debates that center on the constructedness of race, and in doing so she places the social and cultural constructedness of race at the center of literary, educational, and cultural debates. The questions that Morrison sets out to investigate in Playing in the Dark have the characteristics of answerability entwined. In the last part of the preface, one of the questions that Morrison is also interested in is: ‘When does racial “unconsciousness” or awareness of race enrich interpretative language, and when does it impoverish it?’ (Morrison, 1992:xii). This question, one of many, is just an example of the kind of unsentimentality that answerability suggests. Bakhtin’s challenge of answerability simultaneously poses the question of responsibility. In the case of taking minoritized literatures into the classroom, the issue of answerability and responsibility lies in the effort to produce those literatures as the everyday and not ‘special effects’ for students. Taking these literatures into the classroom must produce what Toni Morrison has termed a ‘critical geography…as space for discovery… without conquest’ (Morrison, 1992:3). Thus pedagogues are forced to encounter their own ‘unity of answerability,’ but not as some sacred valorization of the text. Rather the project is doubled to consider the relations between and within the motives that produce the text as meaningful and instructive, and the ways teachers can rethink complex relations of power, desire and politics. It is in the attempt to come to terms with the pedagogue’s desires as they are projected into or through the text that moments of discovery devoid of conquest offer political hope, democratic possibilities and a process of becoming. A blues book most excellent Blues and jazz (and music in general) have come to mark some of the underlying metaphors of African American existence. While there is still debate about when


a specific form of the blues became a distinct music called jazz, the relationship between the two forms remains very clear. Leroi Jones defines jazz as ‘purely instrumental blues’ (Jones, 1963:70). By evoking Morrison’s Jazz, as ‘a blues book most excellent’, I mean to signal the various threads that conspire to retain the ties between jazz and the blues.5 Morrison’s Jazz is a blues book most excellent because of its protagonist’s improvised life. Dorcas’s death provides the ‘riff’ that makes Violet’s life livable through the banalities of daily existence. The complexity of the blues or jazz is such that the interplay between the lyrics and the rhythms often suggest opposite meanings (for example, sad lyrics/upbeat tempos). Dorcas’s death works in a similar way: male violence takes her life, and her death offers Violet a different way to live her life. Jazz or blues as underlying motifs and metaphors of the novel clearly gesture towards an America whose central organizing principle might be ‘race’ (given that powerful ingredient in the creation of blues and jazz), but whose constitution is infinitely more complex and layered. In the first few pages of the novel the seemingly simple plot is told. Joe Trace, who is fifty, has an affair with an eighteen-year-old-girl, Dorcas, and kills her in a fit of jealousy. During Dorcas’s funeral, his wife Violet angrily attempts to slash the dead girl’s face. Jealousy, which is a theme of many blues songs, is fundamental to the relation that both Violet and Joe have with Dorcas. Violet is jealous of the younger woman, and Joe is jealous of the younger man, Acton, for whom Dorcas eventually abandons him. Morrison’s title, Jazz, suggests the complexities of being African American. For example, Violet’s references to having to fight with light-skinned black folks to live in a particular neighborhood, chart the complexity of some of the paths that Jones constructs of the movement from creole marching bands to jazz music (Jones, 1963:73–80). In its opening sentences, Jazz captures the orality and lyricism of African American speech patterns. ‘Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and so happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going’. (Morrison, 1993:1) The specificity of the word ‘Sth’ maps at the same time as it un-maps that lyricism, immediately signalling a compendium of meanings that open up the many oral intonations of African American culture. Morrison’s use of what we might describe as speechless sound that carries important meaning rethinks the relation of articulateness to knowledge production. The idea that wordless sounds carried little meaning was one of the ways that a colonizing Europe justified its claim to cultural superiority over Africans.6 ‘Sth’ opens up questions about what constitutes language. There is a challenge to notions of imitation,


opening up the possibility to think of the multiple ways that blacks have made English theirs (Smitherman, 1977:1– 15). It is no coincidence that those silent birds in Jazz are parrots, usually capable of imitative speech, also supposed as intelligent. What is interesting in the first two sentences of Jazz is the connection that one can make between orality and residence, and their relationship to the blues (jazz). In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Houston Baker suggests that the living conditions of African Americans and the blues are closely linked. Baker maps what he believes to be a link between the blues and the economic and material aspects of African American lives (Baker, 1984:26– 31).7 Morrison, in the first two sentences of Jazz, maps the relation between. residence and the blues, invoking the musicality, the tonality and the rifts of the situation. The narrator situates Violet in Harlem (Lenox Ave.), signalling the urbanicity of the novelistic world. More importantly, Joe and Violet have migrated North and this, as a practice, conditions the importance of place/ residence and its relationship to the metanarrative of the novel’s structuring of the movement from blues to jazz, yet retaining the obvious link between the two (North/South, blues/jazz). In the first few sentences, Morrison signals to some of the primary metaphors (rails?) of the blues: sadness and happiness. This coupling of emotions works one of the most pervasive metaphors of African American consciousness— double vision. Her description of Joe creates a number of doubles that simultaneously locates him as a personification of death and/a sample-case man (Morrison, 1993:73). This double vision, double consciousness, double voicing, the interplay between a hegemonic and nonhegemonic culture is fundamental to African American aesthetics. Such a practice has consequences for other doublings and inversions that occur as structural and thematic elements of Morrison’s texts. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson states that Morrison ‘both historicizes fiction and fictionalizes history’ (1991:64). Henderson then goes on to quote two passages that Morrison had cited as influences in her writing of Beloved. The second of those passages is the one that I want to concentrate on here because it holds the key to understanding how Morrison’s work might operate in pedagogical situations. The new question becomes how it might be possible to occupy the gaps between the real and the not real and still remain tied to a sense of the political. In one picture, there was a young girl lying in a coffin and he says that she was eighteen years old and she had gone to a party and that she was dancing and suddenly she slumped and they noticed there was blood on her and they said, ‘what happened to you?’ And she said, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’ll tell you tomorrow…’ That’s all she would say. And apparently her ex-boyfriend or somebody who was jealous had come to the party with a gun and a silencer and shot her. And she kept saying, ‘I’ll tell


you tomorrow’ because she wanted him to get away. And he did, I guess; anyway she died. (Henderson, 1991:65)8 This passage from Henderson’s discussion is instrumental to the writing of Beloved and to the plot of Jazz. Morrison seems intent on creating a ‘unity of answerability’ in her work. Her interplays between history and fiction are attempts to create a fictive world in which questions of the ‘real’ can be addressed without either a dismissal of art or life and without diminishing the imaginary and its materiality. Jazz and her other works force us to consider the art of living African American and woman. The refusal to separate art and life means that Morrison’s work cannot be read as a sociological treatise on African Americans. This insistence on the stability of the real has been the failing of much pedagogy and cultural criticism in its attempts to read black writers as merely mirroring something already out there and thus dismissing the interplay between the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’ in the analysis and teaching of the texts. Where texts are read solely within the confines of realism and protest, little attention can be given over to the performative qualities of the work. Morrison’s pedagogical advice of when to love and when to quit might help in mediating reading practices of texts. As Winston Smith states in his reading of jazz poet and writer Nathaniel Mackey: ‘in stepping away from the self one must seek a route home, even if it’s through another body, a host of sorts’ (Smith, 1990:76).9 Dorcas’s pictured death (described in the above quote) becomes the host that takes Violet and Joe home (with all the problematics that home invokes). We might read the relationship between Joe and Dorcas and its eventual resolve as constituting the dangers that we live with at home, and Dorcas’s death as signalling the actions or routes that we can sometimes take to get to this home that might or might not offer solace. It is in (re)writing the history of ‘home’ for African Americans that Morrison is most successful in articulating the lack and the imaginings of possibilities for black people. Her work is, however, no treatise on victimology; rather it asserts the legitimacy of a proliferation of contradictory and complementary histories. Morrison’s work becomes a means for understanding the desires that generate the pedagogical choices that those of us who teach make about the materials we take into classrooms. What spaces does Morrison offer in Jazz for us to begin to (re)write histories? What motivates the desires of pedagogues taking her work into classrooms? Finally, how do pedagogues working at the interstices of fictions and the ‘real’ make this work matter? It is these questions that the next section of this paper attempts to answer.


How do you like your pedagogy?: Blackened! For three hundred years black Americans insisted that ‘race’ was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During those same three centuries every academic discipline, including theology, history, and natural science, insisted ‘race’ was the determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered they had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and that it had specific and revered difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as ‘race,’ biological or cultural, that matters and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it… It has always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’ when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. But there is culture and both gender and ‘race’ inform and are informed by it. Afro-American culture exists and though it is clear (and becoming clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the instances where and means by which it has shaped Western culture are poorly recognized or understood. (Morrison, 1989:3) Morrison explains the importance of the first sentence in her novels, stating that ‘I hope the simplicity was not simple-minded, but devious, even loaded’ (Morrison, 1989:20). Earlier in the same essay she states that there is a flight from blackness in Afro-American literature, asking: ‘Other than my own ethnicity —what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American?’ (19) Jazz begins with the sentence ‘Sth, I know that woman.’ Enfolded in this seemingly simple sentence are the multiplicities of African American expressive and performative culture.10 The initial musicality of the sentence might appear to be a simple signal of the title—Jazz—but I would suggest that the signal is much broader, more encompassing than first meets the eye. Although I focus on musicality here, I would like to point out that musicality needs to be problematicized. Blues and jazz as music(s) were originally considered by white critics to be untuned, noise to the ears and hence as social disorder itself—much as some conservative critics write of rap today. However, it should be pointed out that these musical forms (blues, jazz and rap) interrogate intertextually the notion of musicality. They do this not only by the nature of their intertextual construction, but in their pleasurable appeal to large numbers of people. Morrison’s use of jazz for a title signifies on the changing same relations of being African American, as well as questioning notions of creativity, art and performance. Her naming of the novel Jazz gestures to the hybridity of the novelistic form. Morrison’s appropriation of the novel as a metatheory11 in which she begins to rethink the grounds of creativity, and to unwrite embedded notions that blacks


lack creative genius is important for understanding the use of ‘Sth’. ‘Sth’ signals a musicality of the ‘black Atlantic’ (Gilroy, 1992, 1993) that is at once a moment of improvisation, attention, intimacy, and a moment of specificity that opens up a space for story-telling that might very much be a critique. For the time being I will focus on the improvised musicality of ‘Sth’, because I believe that its sign tells of the unfolding of the possibilities that exist in African American culture that can inaugurate a pedagogy of improvisation. By a pedagogy of improvisation, I mean to signal a set of circumstances in pedagogical situations that do not lend themselves to neat categories of explanation and analysis, but rather disrupt the normatives that schooling seeks to (re)produce. I mean to signal moments of knowledge in crisis12 in which pedagogue, as well as students, is unmasked and made vulnerable. What does reading Morrison have to do with pedagogy? Much like jazz, critical pedagogy should be open to the surprises and detours of the chaotic and to the negotiations necessary to play with meanings. The player/pedagogue might lead and take shifts, riffs, and risks, but must also remain a part of the band/class, in terms of responsibility and in terms of thinking how to lead, follow and move to the front or side. Despite all other appearances, in the final analysis, the player/pedagogue must remain a part of the band/class project. These relations are contestatory where power circulates but in ways that act upon the teacher’s actions to push students places they might not want to go. Negotiated power makes visible the multiple and conflictive subject positions in the classroom. These pedagogical insights are based in the understanding that it would be very difficult to take Jazz into any North American classroom without precipitating a crisis in knowledge, and by extension, a crisis in identities. This crisis that Morrison’s work invokes, or of which it is a staging element, would leave no one outside its boundaries. The text’s engagement with both ‘hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse’ creates the positionality of ‘mutual liability’ that Bakhtin asserts. It is within a crisis of knowledge and identity that the desires and political work of the pedagogue produces moments—but not without argument—that lend themselves to the ‘architectonics’ of answerability. It is within the title and all that it signifies,13 in the African American sense as well as the semiotics of jazz, that Morrison’s book offers fertile pedagogical ground. In an interview with Salman Rushdie, Morrison states that she was fortunate to have a working title that could stay with the final project (Rushdie, 1992). In rewriting the Jazz Age from the standpoint of ‘ordinary people’, not ‘Gatsbyites’, she signifies on an American history that seeks to produce that era (the Jazz Age) as a time of joyous, happy and free Americans.14 Part of the project here is to bring out how the category ‘Jazz Age’ works for, pre-empts and (re)produces or silences various histories. The teleology of the term ‘Jazz Age’ does not allow for an analysis of history that opens the space for bringing together various historical and contemporary positions. Morrison surfaces the


Africanist presence in the Jazz Age in order to force us to encounter more of black people than musicians and performers. How do African Americans figure in the Jazz Age? Are they ‘the Other’ against which whiteness is lived out? Do they embody the sexual abandon and lively opposite of whiteness that needs libidinal release? Does jazz as musical stand-in for blackness act as psychosocial transgression for whiteness? To work with Jazz means having to work with race. All of Morrison’s fiction has worked with race, sexuality and sex.15 The configurations of sex that take place in Jazz are such that sex is not only of the flesh but also of the mind. This becomes the case with Violet, who places a borrowed picture of Dorcas on her mantel in order to bring serenity and peace back into her and Joe’s life. And a dead girl’s face has become a necessary thing for their nights. They each take turns to throw off the bedcovers, rise up from the sagging mattress and tiptoe over cold linoleum into the parlor to gaze at what seems like the only living presence in the house: the photograph of a bold, unsmiling girl staring from the mantel piece. (Morrison, 1993:11–2) As Deborah McDowell points out in her review of Jazz: But paradoxically, this living presence is a dead presence—doubly so… the ‘thing’ ineradicably there in every photograph is the return of the dead, even when the subject is yet alive. The photograph immortalizes the ‘missing being’ at the same time that it serves as emblem and allegory of desire. (McDowell, 1992:4) Just like in Sula and Beloved, the return of the dead can be witnessed in more ways than one. It is in life and death that Morrison resurrects bodies in history, and thus reconfigures histories by giving life to the ‘dead’.16 In Talkin and Testifyin, Geneva Smitherman states that the word ‘jazz’ probably comes from the Mandingo word Jasi, which means ‘to act out of the ordinary’. She adds that jazz referred to sexual activity, as well (Smitherman, 1977), and the long association of jazz and blues with ragtime and houses of ‘illrepute’ is well documented by African American blues artists but often in signifying modes (see Billie Holiday’s as told to autobiography as an example). It is in the reconfiguration of histories and black sexualities that Morrison’s project becomes pedagogical. Using Morrison’s work in the classroom creates a public place for the potential discussion of various invisibilities of African American culture. Cornel West writes that ‘behind closed doors, the dirty, disgusting, and funky sex associated with black people is often perceived to be more intriguing and interesting, while in public spaces talk about black sexuality is virtually taboo’ (West, 1993:83). As West asserts, social scientists (and I


would add literary critics)17 have been silent on sexuality (West, 1993), even though it is almost impossible to discuss questions of ‘race’ without discussing how sexuality is always already a part in its construction.18 It is in bringing the sexual histories of black people into classrooms in ways that do not only produce victim-hood nor exotica that we begin to show how certain ‘discredited knowledge’19 can begin to reshape what it is we presume to know and think we know about the Other. Such a practice calls for a pedagogy that sits outside the easy and dangerous categories of regulation and discipline. Like jazz, this pedagogy requires that those involved are open to producing positions (a product) that they did not imagine possible in the beginning. It is in the pedagogue’s ability ‘to act out of the ordinary’ that something different might happen to (all) people engaged in the project of education. Placing the ‘funky sex’ of black people in classrooms explicitly provokes a pedagogical moment that opens up the space for rethinking practices and histories. To suggest that Morrison’s project has something to contribute to educational and cultural theory is to ask the question, wherein lies the ‘Africanist presence’ in educational and cultural theory? By Africanist presence I wonder, along with Morrison, how discourses of blackness have influenced what we understand by education in North America, and how a particular knowledge has been constructed that pays little or no attention to the questions of how heavily the educational system is marked and indeed founded upon a terrorism that suppressed and excluded African participation. The consequences of this terrorism becomes clear in Tar Baby when Jadine’s education situates her outside of the ability to reclaim and act through the ‘discredited knowledge’ that Ondine and Sydney had made available to her. As Carolyn Cooper writes, ‘Jadine is adopted by whites and educated out of her skin’ (Cooper, 1991:77). Cooper is not forwarding some essential biologism; rather, she is gesturing, along with Morrison, to the failure of education to be the necessary ‘uplift’ technology that it sometimes can be. In particular, I am interested in how, why and what is the ‘Africanist presence’ that pervades North American schooling and its education system. In this regard, reading the slave narratives offers a way to reconceptualize education and the will to knowledge. Slave owners used various methods to prevent enslaved Africans from learning to read and write, to the extent that laws were passed to prohibit such actions. Frederick Douglass’s narrative is one of the most explicit in this sense. He wrote: My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else. (Douglass, 1982:81) Douglass had to develop a strategy to come to knowledge, and that knowledge would eventually aid in his quest for freedom.


The plan I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these I could I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. (Douglass, 1982:82) What Douglass’s narrative evokes is how education ‘grows up’ in the Americas. Because schooling was constructed around the exclusion of Africans, their presence prevailed in it. Keeping out and foreclosing the possibility of other stories constituted the project called schooling. As historical and contemporary methodology Morrison’s task in unearthing the Africanist presence in American literature lends itself easily to making evident the Africanist presence that remains suppressed in education and cultural theory (Morrison, 1992b).20 To uncover an Africanist presence, pedagogy must reflect the interplays among what can be taken as the real, the fictional, the historical, and what these mean in terms of contemporary positions and practices. One must look in unlikely places for manifestations of these interplays. In 1991, one of Public Enemy’s biggest hits was ‘911 is a joke’. The song and its accompanying video lampooned and virulently criticized social institutions like policing and ambulance services for their inattention to the needs of black communities.21 In a novel set approximately some seventy years earlier, Morrison writes of those social institutions: But I did it. Called the ambulance, I mean; but it didn’t come until morning after I had called twice. The ice, they said, but really because it was colored people calling. (Morrison, 1993:210) And The dead girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything. (Morrison, 1993:4) It is the mapping of a specific history of relations and circumstances that produces a tension-filled relationship between P.E.’s music and Morrison’s fiction. It is at these moments that the relationships between fiction, history, music—life and art and the art of living—become sites for pedagogical inquiry if taken up in educational practice and discourse. The purpose is not to map some homogenous African American experience; rather it is the coming together of various ‘trends’ and coincidences that open up the space to think about African American positionalities in the ‘nation’. As Bakhtin suggests, writers are not outside of their contemporary situation, and that situation has historical


echoes that impact on the art. It is in recognizing these complexities that the pedagogue can use Morrison’s work to engage the contemporary situation of African Americans living in cities like New York, Detroit, Miami, and elsewhere and make the historical links that are necessary for provoking, producing, participating in or activating transformation or the rethinking of the nation. In rethinking the nation, particularly the postcolonial nation, Homi Bhabha offers an insight that is also applicable to the African American situation. He suggests that migrant and/or post-colonial communities might hold the opportunity for rethinking the basis on which we might come together in new interpretive communities—communities that are not based upon multiple modes of essences, but rather communities created out of an ethical practice that repudiates all forms of domination (Bhabha, 1991:63). The history of blacks in American cities is the history of migration. The transition from blues to jazz might be mapped through that migration. In Jazz, Morrison maps the migration of Joe and Violet from Virginia to Harlem and chronicles their battles to find rest, peace, and freedom. In so doing, she puts into public space the opportunity for pedagogues to take up Bhabha’s project of re-articulating interpretive communities. In the process they may participate in the ‘cultural conversation’ that would form a metropolis that is truly equal (Bhabha, 1991:63). In Jazz the possibility of interpretative communities is formulated via the improvisatory art of living that is made possible for Violet through her hairdressing with the prostitutes. Violet and those women constitute a community that is based upon an ethic of care that refuses individualism but cherish difference. In reconstituting history and thus the ‘nation’, Morrison does not plot a narrow African American presence. Earlier I referred to and used Gilroy’s term ‘the black Atlantic’ in my effort to signal the broadness of ‘Sth’. Throughout Jazz, Morrison references the importance of the African diaspora to 1920s Harlem. The waves of African—Caribbean immigration to Harlem in the 1920s is well documented. From passing references to Barbados, to debates about the SS Ethiopia, and to UNIA and such organizations, a ‘diaspora literacy’22 is produced in Morrison’s work that further opens up American history and its silences on other histories within it. The sense of diaspora that holds the novel together, opens up the possibility for discussions to take place around some of the silences that also exist in African American histories. Gilroy (1992) argues that contemporary African American cultural critics have side-stepped important evidence of the fluidity of black cultural exchanges, practices and conversations in an attempt to produce discreet categories of knowledge that pertain to only themselves. Excavating these histories can begin to open up the place of hybridity that Jazz as a title suggests. And consequently the place of hybridity that African American and American is.23 In putting these histories/narratives ‘out there’, in the context of classrooms, the pedagogue confronts the question of their answerability for taking up and using these texts. In the name of what, does one put those things ‘out there’? If pedagogy is to understand postmodern blackness, migrants, refugees, and exiles,


then it becomes imperative that history neither hide nor elide the participation of any group from the telling of its narrative. To work against the easy construction of total narratives that attempt to solidify numerous histories/migrations does not mean that one gets lost in fragmentation. Particularity does not make history less important for diaspora discussions. Disrupting African American histories by importing black Atlantic exchanges is not to suggest demobilizing the former. It is rather an attempt to avoid repeating a past fraught with the easy binaries of us/ them and the numerous silences constituted by these hierarchial terms. It is in this regard that Gilroy’s project of mapping the fluidity of a black Atlantic becomes important in any pedagogical project that takes up Morrison’s work and in particular the novels Jazz and Tar Baby (Gilroy, 1992 and 1993).24 As Gilroy points out, the traditions and practices of resistance that African Americans have articulated demonstrates the cross-cultural sharing of Atlantic blacks, and therefore it becomes problematic to produce those traditions as discrete American categories. I would like to suggest that when we begin to look at the primary sources of black women’s literature in America, a space to develop a thesis of hybridity is opened.25 Gilroy’s project begs us to consider the Caribbean parentage of June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Paule Marshall (the latter thanks the poets in the kitchen—immigrant Caribbean women—for her gift of the word and thus writing); as well as writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Michele Cliff who have a more immediate relationship to the Caribbean. In Jazz Morrison opens up the space for a number of representations to become a part of a (re) vitalized African American history and, by extension, an American history. It is in surfacing these representations, what I earlier referred to as the archaeology of the pedagogy, that questions of pedagogical answerability come to the fore. ‘Out of the kumbla’ Your kumbla is a parachute. You, only you, pull the cord to rip its seams. From the inside. For you. Your kumbla is a helicopter, a transparent umbrella, a glassy marble, a comic strip space ship. You can see both in and out. You hear them. They can hear you. They can touch you. You can touch them. But they cannot handle you. And inside is soft carpeted foam, like the womb and with an oxygen tent. Safe, protective time capsule. (Brodber, 1980:123) In Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, the central metaphor is the kumbla (calabash). Brodber offers many definitions of the kumbla, one in particular being its protective qualities for women. However, she demonstrates the need to eventually come out of the kumbla and play a part in (re)constituting the society. By coming out of the kumbla, black women’s literature has placed on the agenda a multiplicity of issues. One of these issues is the role of critical


pedagogy. How can the import of black women’s work into classrooms produce an invitation to engage in a rethinking of the grounds of intelligibility ? To question the structures of intelligibility is to question what constitutes knowledge and knowing. How do we engage in a project that seeks to surface the unthought, and at the same time attempt to understand how structures of intelligibility make the lives of some peoples’ everyday dreadfully unlivable? By viewing our practices as inherently political ones when we teach, the everyday becomes a site for interrogation. In Jazz, Morrison chose to work with ordinary people (hairdresser, salesman, student)26 as a way of interrogating what can sometimes seem like the ‘larger history’ of which ‘the everyday’ is only a small part. The atmosphere and texture of Jazz, however, are such that the everyday and the ordinary are rendered the space from which our interrogations of the ‘larger history’ might start. It should be the project of critical pedagogy not to only overturn the grand narratives of history but also to relate those narratives to the everyday, so that we no longer see them as ‘out there’ but rather as a part of the script through which we live our lives. It is in this endeavor that Morrison’s work has much to offer critical, cultural and educational workers. It is the responsibility of pedagogues who teach from explicitly political places in the hope of extending possibilities that Bakhtin’s answerability once again surfaces. He writes, ‘I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have understood and experienced would not remain ineffectual in my life’ (Bakhtin, 1990:1). Such is the task of critical pedagogues and students engaged in the work of transformation. Making the everyday matter beyond its apparent banal experience is what Morrison offers us in Jazz and what we need to take account of. In 1963 James Baldwin, in a talk to teachers stated: ‘One of the paradoxes of education was that at precisely the point at when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society’ (Baldwin, 1963/88: 11). Baldwin is clear that education for critical consciousness would create a society that is fluid in terms of change and social justice. Morrison’s fiction and critical work provide the resources to wage a war of possibility and hope in the event of articulating a project that seeks to construct the rails upon which social justice might travel. Cultural and educational theory and practice needs to do more than simply come along for a ride. This is a ride that requires the riders to know when to love and when to quit. Notes Rinaldo Walcott is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, writing a thesis on black Atlantic cultural identities as expressed through Hip Hop cultural practices. I wish to thank the editors of this issue, Warren Crichlow and Cameron McCarthy, as well as Alicia Rodriguez, Winston


Smith, Deborah Britzman and Kasia Rukszto for offering helpful critical comments and questions on and about this paper. 1 In this essay the phrase ‘African American experience’ appears a number of times. This is neither to singularize the multiple experiences of African Americans nor to suggest that the issues raised here have no currency for other subaltern diaspora groups. It is important to understand that positions of doubleness are not unique to African Americans but rather that inside/outside positions are operative in all societies that are governed and regulated through relations of dominance. While in this paper I focus on African Americans, it would be useful to look at: Maxine Hong Kingston’s fictional work on Chinese Americans, The Woman Warrior; Rey Chow’s collected essays, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, and the essay by Elaine H.Kim, ‘Defining Asian American realities through literature’ in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse and ‘Home is where the Han is: a Korean American perspective on the Los Angeles upheavals’ in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, for analyses of how other subaltern groups live their own unique forms of doubleness. We must take care, however, not to create simple theoretical or methodological positions that operate as blank space which can be used to simply fill in the name of the particular group that we seek to discuss. The discourses and material positionalities of all these groups are complex and need to be addressed by drawing upon various historical specificities. This is an argument for historical specificity and not ethnic absolutism. 2 Carolyn Cooper, ‘“Something ancestral recaptured”: spirit possession as trope in selected feminist fictions of the African diaspora’, has defined the use of the kumbla in Brodber as ‘an image of entrapment in subterfuge’ (1991:86). Carole Boyce-Davies and Elaine Fido also write that: “‘Out of the Kumbla” [their book] then signifies for us movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, process. As process, it allows for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated… It further signifies the taking of control and above all locating ourselves at a different vantage point from which to view the landscape’ (1990:19). Pedagogy and cultural theory need to engage in more direct ways the knowledges of various subaltern groups as a way of beginning to rethink the question of the ethics of education from a different place(s). 3 I use minoritized literatures here in the same sense that JanMohamed and Lloyd use the term minority discourse—to reference and ‘to describe and link the common denominators that link various minority groups [and their] shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture, which seeks to marginalize them all’ (1990b:1). Such a position implies the complex duality of resisting the practices that produce marginality; at the same time, the site of marginality is claimed and used as a place from which critique and disruption can take place in the name of a progressive politics. 4 In this essay I use the novel Jazz as central to my analysis because jazz as an art form references and is founded upon the elements that constitute my discussion here —hybridity, cultural fluidity and an intertextuality that is not unconscious. Tar Baby and Morrison’s critical writings work to add a much more complex analysis to the issues I address in this paper.


5 Clearly, in the contemporary music business, jazz and blues are produced, marketed and consumed as distinct art forms and products. However, those distinctions might actually tell us more about late capitalist organization than about the music[s]. 6 Those sentiments, that the colonized and the enslaved could not produce any important contributions in the fields of the arts, were used as part of the justification for their enslavement. Missionaries were often dispatched to Christianize, and thus, civilize the ‘natives’ so that they might acquire some measure of civility. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in ‘Writing “race”, and the difference it makes’ states: ‘Blacks and other people of color could not write. Writing, many Europeans argued, stood alone among the fine arts as the most salient repository of ‘genius’, the visible sign of reason itself’ (1985:9). By using ‘Sth’ to begin/open a novel today, Morrison has signified on a discourse that sought to make African speech patterns useless in the world of art. 7 It should be pointed out that Jones (Amiri Baraka) makes a similar point in Blues People from a more sociological position. H.A. Baker pushes the point further by invoking the X factor (crossroads, rail roads) and thus developing the trope of migration as an integral part of how the blues should be understood in the African American literary context. What is interesting to note also is that Ralph Ellison in Shadow and Act in the essay ‘Blues People’ states that Jones’s over-attentiveness to the sociology of the blues could ‘give even the blues the blues’ (Ellison, 1964:249) —a great signifying moment. Handel Wright in ‘Your borderland is my minefield: abandoning borderlands for the crossroads in (re)conceptualizing alliances in cultural politics’ has argued for what he calls ‘crossroads’ pedagogy in contradistinction to what Henry Giroux has termed ‘border crossing’. In keeping with an analysis that is aware of the blues and the material and ideological restrictions placed on the marginalized, Wright has called for and invoked the crossroads as a site in which powerful things might and could happen (Wright, 1993). Crossroads pedagogy is dependent upon an African cosmological aesthetic that makes great use of the god Esu. 8 Although quoted in Henderson, the photograph appears in The Harlem Book of the Dead by James Van Der Zee, Owen Dobson and Camille Billops, to which Morrison writes the Foreward. On page 84 in the description of the plates, there is a telling of what happened which is similar to the scene where Dorcas dies. Morrison blurs the categories of the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’ in her intertextual cultural referencing of Van Der Zee’s art. Such a practice suggests the importance of realism to Morrison’s work but at the same time does not lend itself to collapsing fictions into the too easy confines of reality. 9 Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook is an excellent development of a jazz aesthetics in literature. The letter writing of N., the protagonist in the ‘novel’, structures a number of intertextual performances. 10 For a development of performative culture see what Diawara calls ‘performance studies’ in ‘Black Studies, Cultural Studies performative acts’, where he makes a distinction between ‘oppression studies’ which are concerned with relaying the stories of how blacks have been excluded from many spheres of life and ‘performance studies’ which mean the study of the ways in which black people, through communicative action, created and continue to create themselves within the American experience (1992). This distinction is not an abandonment of a


11

12

13

14

15

16

discussion of exclusion from the nation’s institutions. Diawara points out ‘much still needs to be said’ about the need for oppression studies. It seems to me that Morrison’s work can be located between the thin line of performance studies and oppression studies. While Jazz is plotted within the black world of Harlem, the pervading specter of white America seems to operate as an undercurrent that has organized in part this location for the living out of blackness. Barbara Christian in the essay ‘The race for theory’ posits that black women’s ways of living in the world have often been theoretical. She writes: ‘Certainly our literature is an indication of the ways in which our theorizing, of necessity, is based on our multiplicity of experiences’ (1990:46). Morrison uses her fictive worlds to theorize how it is that we might begin to rethink the relations that produce the lives we lead. By knowledge in crisis, I mean the calling into question of what we presume to know about others and ourselves. In particular, I am interested in how possible it might be to use what we teach as a means to rethink and, possibly, refashion the self in ways we thought unimaginable. See in particular Gates (1987); as well see the folklore and anthropological writings of Zora Neale Hurston, in particular Hurston (1963) for the specificity of African American signifying practices. In Tar Baby Morrison’s critique of class mobility is constructed through Jadine. Carolyn Cooper writes of the novel: ‘Morrison’s retelling of “The Wonderful TarBaby Story” exposes the paradoxes of “success” for blacks in America’ (1991:78). Morrison critically signifies on those who see class mobility as the solution to the problems of the subaltern. In Tar Baby Jadine’s eventual displacement from family and thus community is indicative of the power of education to create fractures that are not necessarily curative. Thus Morrison’s focus on ‘ordinary’ people in Jazz is in some senses an attempt at (re)capturing the ‘discredited knowledge’ of the subaltern and a signification on certain black middle-class values. In Jazz the relationship that Violet has with Dorcas is in some senses a very erotic one, much like (but different from) Sula’s and Nel’s in Sula. In this regard it is not surprising to find that Morrison is the editor of the collection, Race-ing Justice Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Social Construction of Reality, for this follows through with her interests of gender and sexual relations in black communities. However, it should be pointed out that Morrison’s ability to construct intimate relationships between women has not had the same success with male characters. Charles I. Nero, in ‘Toward a Black gay aesthetic: signifying in contemporary Black gay literature’, criticizes Morrison’s portrayals of non-heterosexual manhood as caricatured. While Nero’s criticism is quite warranted, he proceeds to read Morrison’s ‘fictive’ world as constituting the ‘real’ and to prove her characterizations inaccurate by drawing on and producing documentary evidence that is to stand in as correction. The difficult negotiation of the interplay between ‘fiction’ and the ‘real’ is played out in Nero’s essay. See Christian (1993) for a discussion of Morrison’s work (in particular Beloved) as working within an African cosmological frame that seeks to connect with African living-dead as a way of remembering the trauma of the middle passage. Christian argues that such a connection has become difficult since diaspora Africans have no way of naming/identifying those who died.


17 Hazel Carby (1990) makes a very specific case of this dilemma of cutting black female sexualities out of feminist literary criticism. 18 The emergence of Queer theory has placed an analysis of sex as one of the primary elements of understanding social and historical relations. 19 As Carolyn Cooper cites Morrison: ‘and some of those things were “discredited knowledge” that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited therefore what they knew was “discredited”’ (Cooper, 1991, emphasis in the original). I would like to point out that Morrison’s use of rootedness as part of the title is suggestive of an acknowledgement of ‘diaspora literacy’, for the ‘roots’ story exists throughout the Americas from North to South as an important trope for history that works to create cosmological unity among blacks in the Americas (see also Christian (1993) for a discussion of African and diaspora cosmological possibilities in Morrison’s work). 20 For a discussion of these questions, in regard to cultural studies, see Gilroy (1991), in particular his criticism of Raymond Williams and E.P.Thompson; as well see the essays of Gilroy and Kobena Mercer in Cultural Studies. While both ask different kinds of questions the essays begin to uncover what might be characterized as the ethnocentric construction of contemporary cultural studies. 21 The song is from Fear of a Black Planet (Def Jam Recordings, Columbia, 1990). It is interesting to point out that while P.E.’s lyrics and Morrison’s plot are closely related, their projects obviously differ. On the compact disc cover of P.E.’s album, nine black males gaze on a globe of the world as though they are its protectors or are in the process of becoming its protectors. P.E.’s project does not envision black women as an integral part of the decision-making process of their nationalist project. In many respects this album cover visualizes narrow black nationalist ideas from the sixties and seventies that sought to prescribe the ways in which black women could be a part of nation-building. 22 My suggestion that Morrison’s work imbibes a ‘diaspora literacy’ or a ‘black Atlantic’ paradigm is by no means a new one. The Carolyn Cooper essay quoted in this article makes a similar case for Tar Baby. It is my argument that what appear to be passing references to the Caribbean in Jazz and the setting of Tar Baby on a Caribbean island are not merely passing but that these references suggest, and indeed organize, a deeper sense of self that operates beyond the confines of the nation-state. If one looks at the use of spirit life or Voodoo/ hoodoo in Morrison’s work, the modes of expression and structuring become parallel to those of the works by Erna Brodber. In particular the coupling of Beloved with Brodber’s Myal would make for interested diaspora textual dialogue. Thus, I am not only interested in arguing for Morrison’s work being doubled in relationship to white supremacy in America, but my positionality, as a Caribbean reader in Canada, produces other points of entry and interests that organize what it is I see and find important in her work. 23 Jadine, in Tar Baby, can be read as a hybridized ‘failed’ subject occupied with and consumed by the ravages of American materialism. Jadine’s character is a picture of the various ways that hybridity is produced for blacks through class position, education, gender and so on. Hybridity does not function as a thing that is always about extending possibilities. 24 Yardman’s experiences in America and eventual return to the island become symbolic of one leg of the black Atlantic cultural exchange that informs the deeper


structures of the novel. His position refashions the need for hearing clearly the ‘truths’ of discredited knowledge. 25 I would like to point out that the contemporary fluidity of writers is not a new occurrence. Claude McKay, a major player in the Harlem Renaissance, was from Jamaica originally, and Nella Larson’s father was from the Dutch Antilles. As well much of Zora Neal Hurston’s folklore and anthropological work was done in the Caribbean, and this work influenced her creative processes. 26 While here I denote Violet as an ordinary person in terms of her occupation, a much more complex reading can be offered that sees her as once again being the embodiment of genius. In particular see Mercer (1990) for the myriad of ways that creativity and political comment play themselves out in black people’s hairstyles. As well see Walker (1974) for an analysis of the different ways that black women express their creativity; as well see hooks (1992) for a complex reading of how black males use their bodies as artistic canvases. hooks’s argument can well be extended using the work of Mercer and Walker to make a case for black women’s use of the body, in particular hairstyles, as a creative practice. Morrison is well aware of the importance of hairdressers in black communities, and naming Violet such could once again be a gesture towards a critique of art, creativity and genius, but as well an illustration of where one is likely to find repressed or marginalized art.

References Baker, H.A. (1984) Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, M. (1990) ‘Art and answerability’, in Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (eds) Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Baldwin, J. (1963/88) ‘A talk to teachers’, in R.Simonson and S.Walker (eds) MultiCultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind, Saint Paul: The GrayWolf Press. Bhabha, H. (1991) ‘Caliban speaks to Prospero:’ cultural identity and the crisis of representation’, in Philomena Marini (ed.) Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, Seattle: Bay Press. Boyce-Davies, C. and Fido, E. (1990) ‘Introduction: Women and literature in the Caribbean: an overview’, in C.Boyce-Davies and E.Fido (eds) Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, New Jersey: Africa World Press. Britzman, D. (1991) ‘Decentering discourses in teacher education or the unleashing of unpopular things’, Journal of Education, Vol. 173, No.3. Brodber, Erna (1980) Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, London: New Beacon Books. Carby, Hazel (1990) ‘“It just be’s dat way sometime”: The sexual politics of women’s blues’, in Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki L.Ruiz (eds) Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, New York: Routledge. Christian, B. (1990) ‘The race for theory’, in JanMohamed and Lloyd (1990). —— (1993) ‘Fixing methodologies: Beloved’ Cultural Critique, Spring, 5–15. Cooper, C. (1991) ‘“Something ancestral recaptured”: spirit possession as trope in selected feminist fictions of the African diaspora’, in Susheila Nasta (ed.)


Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, London: The Women’s Press. Diawara, M. (1992) ‘Black Studies, Cultural Studies performative acts’, AfterImage, October. Douglass, F. (1982) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave, New York: Penguin Books. Ellison, R. (1964) Shadow and Act, New York: Random House. Gates, H.L. (1985) ‘Introduction: Writing “race” and the difference it makes’, in H.L.Gates (ed.) ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1987) ‘The Blackness of Blackness: a critique of the sign and the signifying monkey’, in H.L.Gates Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self, New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (1991) ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1992) ‘Ethnic absolutism’, in Grossberg et al. (1992). —— (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (1992) editors, Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Henderson, M. (1989) ‘Speaking in tongues: dialogics, dialectics, and the Black women writer’s literary tradition’, in Cheryl Wall (ed.) Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. —— (1991) ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: re-membering the body as historical text’, in Hortense J.Spillers (ed.) Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, New York: Routledge. hooks, bell (1992) ‘MY “style” ain’t no fashion’, Z Magazine, Boston; Institute for Social and Cultural Communications. Hurston, Zora Neale (1963) Mules and Men, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. JanMohamed, A. and Lloyd, D. (1990a) editors, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press. —— (1990b) ‘Introduction: Toward a theory of minority discourse: what is to be done’, in JanMohamed and Lloyd. Jones, L. (1963) Blues People: Negro Music in White America, New York: Morrow Quilt Paperbacks. MacDowell, D. (1992) ‘Harlem nocturne’, The Women’s Review of Books IX(9). Mercer, K. (1990) ‘Black hair/style politics’, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T.Minh-ha and Cornel West (eds) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. —— (1992) ‘“1968”: Periodizing postmodern politics and identity’, in Grossberg et al. (1992). Morrison, T. (1981) Tar Baby, New York: Plume Contemporary Fiction. —— (1989) ‘Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 28 (Winter): 1–33. —— (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— (1993) Jazz, New York: Plume Books, Penguin Books.


Nero, C. (1991) ‘Toward a Black gay aesthetic: signifying in contemporary Black gay literature’, in Essex Hemphill (ed.) Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, Boston: Alyson Press. Public Enemy (1990) ‘911 is a joke’, Fear of a Black Planet, Def American Songs Inc, Columbia. Rushdie, S. (1992) ‘An interview with Toni Morrison’, Linda Spalding (ed.) Brick: A Literary Journal Summer: 44. Smith, W. (1990) ‘Let’s call this: race, writing and difference in Jazz’, in M. de Guerre and J.Marchessault (eds) Public: 4–5. Smitherman, G. (1977) Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Walker, Alice (1974) ‘In search of our mothers’ gardens’, in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. West, C. (1993) ‘Black sexuality: the taboo subject’, Race Matters, Boston: Beacon Press. Wright, H.K. (1993) ‘Your borderland is my minefield: abandoning borderlands for the crossroads in (re)conceptualizing alliances in cultural politics’, paper presented at Canadian Critical Pedagogy Network Pre-Conference, Ottawa.

RE-MEMBERING THE MOTHER TONGUE (S): TONI MORRISON, JULIE DASH AND THE LANGUAGE OF PEDAGOGY1 * SUSAN HUDDLESTON EDGERTON

Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who used different words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now…. What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message— that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. (Morrison, 1987:62) Literature as a resource for education research, as a source for examining perspectives of schools and schooling, and for pedagogical use beyond the literature class has become familiar to many in curriculum studies (see, e.g., Barone, 1988; Brunner, 1994; Greene, 1988; Pagano, 1990, Pinar, 1992). For some, film serves similar purposes. This work benefits from those traditions. It differs, perhaps, in that my focus is on what particular works of literature and film themselves have taught me, and continue to teach me, about language and memory. And those lessons are, in part, about my own classroom practice, making this venture something of an autobiographical one. While hoping to avoid imposing my own autobiography on to and into my theoretical and literary readings, I also strive not to avoid my own autobiographical implication in those readings. Resisting the over-determination and imposition of theory and literature in my own autobiography is likewise my goal. Still, I believe with Shoshana Felman that one reads/writes one’s autobiography only through others, and through ‘theory’:


© 1995 Routledge 0950–23 86


Reading autobiographically…is utilizing theory, in other words, as selfresistance. It is engaging in a paradoxical attempt of reading literature and one’s own life with the tools—and through the resources—of theory but, at the same time, reading literature and one’s own life as precisely, a resistance to theory: using one’s autobiography as a resistance to theory but, at the same time, just as crucially, using theory and literature as precisely, a resistance to autobiography. (Felman, 1993:133) And just as my own theoretical positioning, and thus autobiographical reading and writing, emerge from encounters among particular traditions, so do my readings, which follow, of Toni Morrison’s latest two novels, Beloved and Jazz, and Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust. Likewise, while I am proposing that these works offered to me ‘something new’ for my thinking about teaching, it is clear that certain literary and cinematic traditions are in play for Morrison and Dash as well. My hope is that the reading and writing I do and describe in this work offer the reader glimpses into ways in which traditions are ‘translated’ through new encounters among literary works, readers, theories, autobiographies, and histories, and that the translations offer revisionary ways of telling stories that can better affirm life in the midst of what is often a terrorizing and traumatizing world. Why focus on trauma and terror, and testimony to it? From the earliest philosophical writings perhaps the most frequent and difficult lines of inquiry have been about ‘the other’. How do we recognize an other ? How should we? Such is the basis of the study of ethics which, with Levinas, I believe should supplant a ‘western’ preoccupation with questions of being (ontology) as the foundation of all philosophical inquiry—the ‘first philosophy’. This is the question of the meaning of being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question par excellence or the question of philosophy. Not ‘Why being rather than nothing?’, but how being justifies itself. (Levinas, 1989:86) I teach courses on autobiography and cultural studies in education, multicultural education, and social studies and literature methods for elementary education. In all of these classes the most difficult and uncomfortable discussions center around versions of history, memory and forgetting—that is, on various orders of trauma. And yet these are clearly the most important issues for future teachers, and for all citizens, to grapple with. So classrooms themselves become sites of

RE-MEMBERING THE MOTHER TONGUE(S): 345

crisis. And I suspect all learning involves a kind of crisis of meaning (more about that later). Is this a contradiction for me? Am I suggesting that students must be traumatized in some way in order to challenge human violence in the world? I think there is a significant qualitative difference between crises of meaning in a good classroom and worldly (public and private) trauma and terror that I wish to counter. I can only ask that you read on and judge for yourself. A classroom should be a place that counters terror and trauma. Too often the reverse is true as student-bodies are systematically denied, dismissed and disposed of (see, e.g., Fine, 1991). A classroom can become the sort of violent place I decry. Can we, with the most typical of classroom tools— language, story, scene—bear witness to the world of terror and trauma in ways that offer real challenges to those manifestations of human hatred and death-dealings by, in some senses, creating crises of meaning and identity for our students? Newly born(e) languages Particular ways in which language, story, and scene are presented in Jazz, Beloved, and Daughters of the Dust involve the use of symbol, metaphor, and myth that are somehow literalized, not in the sense of fact but of the material body. Jean Wyatt named this process for me: For instance [in Beloved], a figure of speech in which weight usually means ‘responsibility’ turns out to describe only the physical weight of Sethe’s breasts ([Morrison, 1987:] 18). A similar ‘literalization’ of spatial metaphors mimics the materializations in the haunted house: the phrase ‘she moved him’ indicates not that Beloved stirred Paul D’s emotions but that she physically moved him, from one location to another ([Morrison, 1987:114]). (Wyatt, 1993:475) Dash accomplishes something akin to this cinematically. Elder Nana Peazant carries with her ‘scraps of memories’ which literally take the place of words, as do symbols such as the bottle tree where each bottle represents a different ancestor, each a different color. We see them in the film and are made to know that they have profound (i.e., symbolic=linguistic) significance though we aren’t told outright what that significance is. Written words, recorded histories, genealogies were not options for the ancestors of these characters. So history was ‘written’ and recorded in memories through generations as visual, tangible, material images. Such usage differs from the distancing through abstraction that characterizes much fictional, and certainly non-fictional, writing and even cinema. Works of Morrison and Dash become material witnesses giving testimony that brings the past to bear on the present in uniquely pedagogical ways. Yet, the works in


question are neither preachy nor didactic. A language of translation is at work here that is not distinct from, though it may be different from, dialogue, conversation, communication. Nor is this linguistic performance distinct from the common sense of translation—as in ‘from one language to another’—though it is not only that. Finally, what I’m saying is that my effort will be to explore these works through, and alongside, these particular tangents of translation and testimony that call attention to the word in the body and vice versa. This is accomplished in these works through a maternal function or maternal symbolic mode—feminist psychoanalytic notions (Kristeva cited in Oliver, 1993; Wyatt, 1993; and cf. Grumet, 1988) which strike me as also appropriate to thinking about pedagogy—an oft ‘feminized’, if not female, arena. Narrators for both authors frequently use fragmented, withholding language, offering readers the story only bit by bit, tantalizing with insufficient information just as they seem to hold insufficient information themselves. For instance, in Jazz the narrator self-consciously admits to not being the one presumed to know; at the same time, she freely speculates on the motives and contexts for each character. Both authors also write via a kind of assault on conventional chronology, circling counter-clockwise. There seems always to be a struggle with repressed memories in play, be it of any character or narrator, indeed, of the authors themselves. In Beloved and Jazz my curiosity is constantly piqued; I am challenged, confused, titillated, flirted with, teased, assaulted by hints dropped, then really dropped…for a while. I find myself working to pull the pieces together before Morrison does. She reveals the treasures partially, and little by little, so that I finally learn answers to my questions about, for example, characters’ family structure and relationships as well as less content-oriented questions. This technique functions for me by creating frustrations demanding that I make constructions which are subsequently corrected, or altered, by the new knowledge and new languages Morrison allows. She and Dash both place the reader (the White reader? only the non-Black reader? the male reader?) in a position approximating a child learning language. The reader is immersed and must learn to translate or lose the text. I find I am learning to read anew. Daughters of the Dust is spoken in a new language for most readers, literally — Gullah (an African-English specific to the Georgia and Carolina Sea Islands). But the film registers a new form too—beautiful and innovative cinematography that privileges African American women, and a script that does the same through multiple narrators. As reader, I hope to remain a happy ‘child’, wide-awake and curious. Many influences throughout my life have shaped my approaches to reading life. Nevertheless, I insist on keeping a faith that the body-text (i.e., the good novel, film, classroom, teacher) itself can help determine/develop that open reader, the one who chooses to pursue what could be a frustrating task with a kind of engagement that signals joy rather than mere frustration, and that drives one to finish the book or film or project, even to reread and then to read another and another, to be committed to life-long learning, living, loving, searching. But


what is it about a text that invites such reading? Why do I, or does anyone, bother to do the difficult work of translation and re-creation? I read and write now in order to think, to learn new languages, to discover why. Looking back at what I just wrote about the works in question, and about my proposal to engage psychoanalytic criticism and its analogy to the pedagogical situation, I am driven to first pose the questions who, here, is teacher and who is student?; who is analyst and who analysand? When I read ‘sympathetically,’ as a ‘child learning language’, it seems clear that I read as a student, and perhaps an analysand. But as I begin the process of criticism or interpretation that apparent polarity (teacher/student, analyst/ analysand) is disrupted. The uncertainty, even reversibility in some senses, of the analytic situation, of the transference therein, is precisely the insight Lacan offers as a challenge to Freud who posed the analyst as ‘the one presumed to know’. For Lacan the analyst is the one who listens, who offers a’pure mirror of an unruffled surface’ of neutrality (Gallop, 1985:61–2), of ‘ignorance’ (Felman, 1987:68–97), to the analysand who knows but does not know what/that she knows. But the analyst also offers, eventually, interpretation—a reading. That is, the analyst is ‘a mirror but not a mirror image’ (Gallop, 1985:61). Such an analytic situation (with blurred boundaries in many, but not all, senses) is precisely analogous to the pedagogical situation I want to describe, that I think I find in my reading here, and that Felman seems to recognize in her article ‘Psychoanalysis and education: teaching terminable and interminable’ (Felman, 1987; see also Edgerton, 1993b). Translating the (body) memory Memory involves a kind of translation, an ongoing reinterpretation of events, thoughts, feelings, and sensations past. Remembering is translation within a body, though it is mediated by a community of listeners, or imagined listeners, and by time. Its utterance sometimes emerges as testimony, sometimes confession, revelation, complaint, nostalgia, or ordinary conversation. Translating memory to language can be rich or poor, revisionary or compulsive. A poor translation of memory is easily read as neurosis, self-denigration, selfpity, obsession, lying. Such translation produces trivial testimony, compulsive confession, inaccurate information, malicious manipulation, or is just plain dull. Rich, revisionary translation of memory to language, however, moves us to laughter and/or tears, convinces us, compels us, teaches us, engenders our empathy. It enters our bodies and changes us. Testimony born of rich translation sometimes takes the form of literature, of ‘fiction’ that functions as ‘equipment for living’ (Burke, 1957). I’ve set up strategic, but of course artificial poles of a binary (‘good’ versus ‘bad’) translation. Translation, memory, testimony surely operate somewhere in between.2 Memory can be, and often has been, retooled by the spin doctors of collective memory—that is, creators of ‘official stories’ of the past that can come to be common wisdom. Milan Kundera talks about variations of holocausts being


perpetrated in the Soviet Union as Czechoslovakian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian cultures were systematically dismantled and forgotten like half-extinct tribes relegated to gulags and the remote reservations of elusive memoirs. Political resistance to historical study, the plain and painful fact of everyday forgetting, and the absence of informal testimony can only accelerate the dissolution of cultural heritage in which national and personal identity are being swallowed by the monsters of totalitarian mythology and ideology sweeping through large parts of the world. ‘Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life’ (Kundera, 1980:235). ‘Organized forgetting’—‘the state’s’ methodical erasing of the past through the overt rewriting of history, the demolition of monuments and other physical landmarks, and more subtle political means of ‘airbrushing’ away the past—works alongside the more ‘ordinary metaphysical problem of forgetting that we face all the time, every day, without paying attention’ (Kundera, 1980:235).3 Bearing witness or testimony that is ‘true’ in every sense is, of course, impossible. There is a difference, however, between bearing false witness, giving false testimony and becoming a witness, or giving testimony in the sense I understand these terms with my reading of Felman. The effort to distinguish between false testimony and testimony might be akin to crossing a creek on stepping stones that are sometimes loose (false) and sometimes not. But the necessarily qualitative difference between using ‘memory’ to consciously and maliciously manipulate (to ‘rewrite history’) and speaking one’s memory in order to emotionally survive (which often translates to literally survive), to better promote criticism writ large, to, perhaps, save another life, seems an important difference indeed. I’m suggesting that the latter sort of memory and testimony involves translation that is of the body— speaks the body-memory. Translation, as an idea beyond the usual linguistic sense and including words in the body and the body in words, words across discourses or disciplines, across cultural and historical experience, has increasingly attracted my attention for its implications for learning and teaching. Translation in this writing emerges as a composite notion from my readings through several authors (e.g., Derrida, 1985; Rajchmann, 1991; Murray, 1991; Niranjana, 1992; and Serres, 1982). For some such authors, translation includes but goes beyond the purely linguistic categories set forth by Roman Jakobsen. Those are: intralingual translation, or paraphrase; interlingual translation, or translation in the most common sense; and intersemiotic translation, in which for example, verbal signs are re-encoded in nonverbal sign systems (cited in Derrida, 1985:95). Translation is not reducible to communication. We do it when we are ‘alone’ with our memories. The term communication also carries the weight of implying a kind of transparency of meaning exchanges across difference that translation does not. One does not expect a translation to be complete or perfect. Indeed, it is, and has historically meant (since the sixteenth century), transformation (Makaryk, 1993:216). Communication, or some degree of transmission of meaning, creation of meaning, is a vital part of the chain of translation. The final


arbiter of the quality of a translation is located in its reception as meaning, and in its consequences. This is not to say that all memories, all human translations, must be articulated as speech or writing to be received or to have consequences. The work of memory and translation within a single person is received, in a sense, by those who witness something of that person’s life—the way one lives a life. Felman links an approach to thinking about testimony and witnessing of histories of trauma to translations (of all sorts) found in literature, psychoanalysis, and historical writings—translations of time, culture, language, and bodily experience. That is, writings or testimonies are performed in an effort to transform temporal, cultural, linguistic, and experiential differences to contemporary and present languages while continuing to honor the originals.4 As such, testimony and translation are necessarily partial—unreliable in many senses. None the less, such unreliable processes are inevitably implicated in the process of writing history. In Felman’s words: Translation is thus necessarily a critical activity, a mode of deconstruction, that is, the undoing of an illusory historical perception or understanding by bearing witness to what the ‘perception’ or the ‘understanding’ precisely fails to see or fails to witness…The way in which the translator can bear witness to what actually happens in the original is, however, paradoxically, not by imitation but only by a new creation, a creation that, although it insures the literal survival of the original, is itself only the testimony of an afterlife. (Felman and Laub, 1992:160, final emphasis added)5 With Kali Tal (who wrote of literature by survivors of the Vietnam War), I do understand that reading about bleeding and terror is a different order of experience than bleeding and being terrorized—a difference that surely gives rise to different orders of understanding. But it should be noted that testimonies are, for Felman, not only given by original ‘victims’ or even ‘original’ witnesses, but also by those who somehow become witnesses (more about this later). After all, neither Morrison nor Dash can be said to be original victims or witnesses to the time periods about which they write. They are, however, providing new testimony through their ‘witness’. (And becoming a witness is inseparable from becoming educated.) Translating and testifying through literature Felman works through inquiries into testimony and translation with a primary focus on the Holocaust. My sense, however, is her theoretical journeys are particularly pertinent to the works of Morrison and Dash. Morrison claims, in writing Beloved, for instance, to be ‘wishing to forget and remember at the same time’ (cited in Rushdy, 1992:569). Rushdy writes:


Speaking about the writing of Beloved, she declares her wish to invoke all those people who are ‘unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried,’ and go about ‘properly, artistically, burying them.’ This burial’s purpose, it would appear, is to bring them back into ‘living life.’ This tension between needing to bury the past as well as needing to revive it, between a necessary remembering and an equally necessary forgetting, exists in both the author and her narrative. (Rushdy, 1992:569) And the inspiration for both Beloved and Jazz came from unspoken stories of the dead. The seed for Morrison’s Beloved is the story of Margaret Garner who killed her daughter and attempted to kill her other children and herself rather than return or turn them over to slavery. Margaret Garner’s story had been told, in fact, by many in different ways, used at the time as testimony to the brutality of slavery by white abolitionists. But these stories did not honor an interior life for either Margaret Garner or, of course, for her baby, nor for those the baby represented. So the story of Beloved, the baby, becomes the novel even as Beloved is much more than the baby, and the novel is not only her story. A photograph from James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead of a young girl who’d been shot and was reported to have withheld the offender’s name as she bled to death (‘I’ll tell you tomorrow’, she said) became the impetus for Jazz.6 These two stories were also connected for Morrison through the idea that: ‘A woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself’ (cited in Rushdy, 1992:570). As such, both are not only testimonies for the ‘unburied’ dead, but also for unsung and misunderstood women, for woman-love, and mother-love. Julie Dash writes of Daughters of the Dust and the process of memory and forgetting: The stories from my own family sparked the idea of Daughters and formed the basis for some of the characters. But when I probed my relatives for information about the family history in South Carolina, or about our migration north to New York, they were often reluctant to discuss it. When things got too personal, too close to memories they didn’t want to reveal, they would close up, push me away, tell me to go ask someone else. I knew then that the images I wanted to show, the story I wanted to tell, had to touch an audience the way it touched my family. It had to take them back, take them inside their family memories, inside our collective memories. (Dash, 1992:5) Dash exhibits the re-creation and translation Felman claims is inherent to historywriting by calling upon multiple readings of the myth of the Ibo, and by subverting conventional chronology. The myth of the Ibo concerns Africans who


were said to have arrived on the islands in chains, gotten off the boat, looked around, saw what was in store for them, and simply walked back into the water en masse. Some said they walked on the water, back to Africa, in the manner that Dash’s character Eli demonstrates at one point. Some said they flew back. Some said they drowned themselves in refusal. As such, the Unborn Child (another mythical creation), speaks of ‘those who chose to survive’ when referring to those who were there ‘now’, at the turn of the century. It’s because that message is so strong, so powerful, so sustaining to the tradition of resistance, by any means possible, that every Gullah community embraces this myth. So I learned that myth is very important in the struggle to maintain a sense of self and to move forward into the future. (Dash, 1992:30) Dash plays with conventional chronology by, for example, placing a Muslim character found in her research on the Sea Islands out of his true temporal context, and by calling upon an unborn child to do much of the narrating. She also speculates that the practicing Muslim she found in her research who lived many years earlier than the film’s setting could reasonably have had counterparts at the turn of the century. And for Dash, like Morrison, this is a story for Black women. It is narrated through a maternal line including great-grandmother Nana Peazant, primary living connection to the Ancestors, and the newest Peazant, not-yet-born girl but present none the less, Unborn Child of Eli and Eula Peazant. So history, for Dash, becomes pointedly metaphoric rather than pretense to literal recasting; it becomes testimony to a sensibility. To that idea one can add, with Felman: Translation thus itself becomes a metaphor for history, not only in that it demands the rigor of a history devoid of pathos, but in that it opens up the question of how to continue when the past, precisely, is not allowed any continuance. Translation is the metaphor of a new relation to the past, a relation that cannot resemble, furthermore, any past relation to the past but that consists, essentially, in the historical performance of a radical discontinuity. (Felman and Laub, 1992:162) And for both Morrison and Dash this translation which is also testimony performs a kind of healing, not by telling ‘the truth’, but by creating spaces for truthfulness, honesty, and empathy to emerge. But what is the nature of the knowledge we glean from this ‘mytho-biographical’ (Dash, 1992:28) approach to the past?


Giving (and taking) testimony to histories of trauma As teachers and/or writers we would all perhaps like to be able to say to our students and readers, as from the witness stand, ‘I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ But if we say this, we must confess, we will already have perjured ourselves. Can a reliable witness become a ‘living’ presence in our private rooms? How can we, in our roles as teachers or authors, transform a text into a presence in the classroom or the hands of a reader? This immediacy and presence, I believe, is precisely the sort of testimony and witness being offered in the language of Morrison’s novels (and essays and interviews) as well as the language and cinematography of Dash’s film. Another question: do we become, or can we become, witnesses by reading such literature and/or by participation in a classroom that focuses on such experiences? Can we discover a degree of empathy toward another’s trauma or experience that was unimaginable before reading or going to class? Can we be ‘traumatized’, disrupted or at least disabused of our own ‘abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack [of the phonograph]’ (Morrison, 1992:220) by such activity? In the efforts of trauma survivors to remember and to articulate what they have experienced, sorting out and evaluating ‘degrees of authenticity’ presents a wide array of problems. Of course, such problems seem more evident when writers and readers who did not participate in a major traumatic event (such as a holocaust) attempt to interpret that event. If Felman, however, is right to say that all writing of history and all testimony is translation of events past and passed, calling upon necessarily ‘unreliable’ memories and possibilities for multiple perspectives, the problems of accuracy, the possibilities for empathy and education are multiplied. Considering such problems, Felman considers ‘literature as [one] testimonial breakthrough’ (Felman, 1992:105). The authors, Morrison and Dash, are not actual immediate victimsurvivors of slavery, nor of turn-of-the-century or depression-era wretched racism and poverty. Both are representing the events as ‘outsiders’ of a sort, as the ‘untraumatized’ like me. Yet these works left their marks on me. How did they do it? Listen to Felman on literary testimony that ‘bears witness to the body’: The specific task of the literary testimony is, in other words, to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability for perceiving history—what is happening to the other—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement. (Felman and Laub, 1992:108, emphasis added) I rush to add that while neither Morrison nor Dash are themselves direct victims or witnesses of the events and times they fictionalize and historicize, they retain a position that I do not. That is, they are African American, and I am not. Their


own ancestors may well have been the characters they write. More to the point, as the authors so aptly demonstrate, the past lives in the present. Bodies of those before us inhabit our own in various ways, and institutions such as the institution of slavery continue to mark Black bodies in particular ways across generations. In other words, racism doggedly persists. It seems the specter of slavery is simply rearticulated into the present, a kind of shape-shifter or shadow-monster that can transform itself, or be transformed, to best activate the particular (especially white) fears of the day. It is a collective memory that is too often poorly translated by those who most seem to benefit from poor translation. Morrison and Dash, therefore, are witnesses in a way I, as a white reader, cannot be. But what kind of a witness can I, have I, become? Crises of reading; crisis in the classroom While literary and cinematic works such as these might not be direct witnesses or representations by actual trauma victim-survivors, they are stories about, and, to varying degrees, stories directly from those who experienced terror first hand. As such, these works are testimonies. And, as Felman demonstrated in her own classroom and subsequently reported, such testimony can provoke in readers a crisis. I would venture to propose, today, that teaching in itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught: it has perhaps passed on some facts, passed on some information and some documents, with which the students or the audience—the recipients—can for instance do what people during the occurrence of the Holocaust precisely did with information that kept coming forth but that no one could recognize, and that no one could therefore truly learn, read or put to use. Looking back at the experience of that class, I therefore think that my job as teacher, paradoxical as it may sound, was that of creating in the class the highest state of crisis that it could withstand, without ‘driving the students crazy’—without compromising the students’ bounds. (Felman, 1992:53) What about my own ‘crises in reading’? I first watched Daughters of the Dust in the Fine Arts Theater in downtown Chicago with a pair of friends and colleagues who are likewise interested in deepening and teaching through an awareness of the implications of racial dif ference and formation. We emerged from the theater in awe of the spectacular images to which we had been treated but unsure of exactly what we had heard or seen. I recognized icons from my childhood in the Deep South (Louisiana), the bottle tree in particular, which I had never


associated with any meaning except to assume it was an odd habit of decoration shared by a few scattered country folk. I still did not understand, at this point, the meaning of the bottle tree—only that it held a significance beyond my earlier assumptions. Recognition of my own blindness—the fact that I grew up in the midst of so much mystery without curiosity or even the compassion I’d assumed I always had—has certainly been at the center of a personal crisis that began some time before now, well before these readings. But this film (and these novels) served as yet another prod along that route, with a necessarily new twist. Only after viewing the film twice more (on video), and after reading a book, which later came out, including notes by various writers, by Dash, an interview with Dash, and the script, did I come to understand that the bottle tree signifies remembrance of the ancestors. The film spoke to me, in part, therefore, because it spoke as an ‘intervention…received by the subject [me?] in terms of his [her] structure [experience of language/experience, that is]’ (Lacan cited in Felman, 1987:120). The bottle tree revelation is but one instance of the way the film served as a kind of analyst for me when the analyst is analogous to the teacher. The stake of analysis is precisely to identify the symbolic structure in whose terms the interpretations are received, that is, to identify the structure into which the gift of language is translated, to identify the question in whose terms the reply is sought and heard. (Felman, 1987:120) Why did I return to the film? It spoke to my Southern experience through image; it spoke to my aesthetic desire through image; as a lover of words and a Southerner in crisis, I wanted to get the language that accompanied those powerful images. Does it do this for others? Not all, no doubt. But apparently, given its success, it has done something powerful for many. Throughout my readings here described, I began again and again to hear histories that had been all around me but never before explained to me— never addressed—as a child and younger adult. And I began, as I’ve begun many times over, to sense my own places in these histories. The small northern Louisiana town in which I grew up is beautiful—lush, rolling hills, many bodies of water, and lovely large trees. I recall vaguely being told of a lynching in that lovely little town. The spot was pointed out to me by other children. No adult ever mentioned it. Lovely large trees, indeed. Morrison’s writing evokes beautiful images alongside horrors, as well. Sweet Home…rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too… Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise [she remembered only trees]… and she could not forgive her memory for that.


(Morrison, 1987:6) Such imagery provoked me in many ways, only one of which was to find written verification for the lynching in my home town. There is more, of course. Always. Jazz spoke to my own migration from the south to the north in some ways. And Morrison’s vivid cityscapes provided for me new ways of naming both my positive and negative images of Chicago. Superficial as these connections are, I cannot deny the significance they hold for initially drawing me into the text (knowing and loving Morrison’s other works, notwithstanding). I share those thoughts to recall the ‘childlike’ reading I suggested Morrison allows initially, and that I mentioned a few pages back. But the crisis follows. Part of the crisis for me in Jazz comes from the ways Morrison demonstrates what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’ (Arendt, 1964). In the first page, we learn of an apparently ‘older’ married man who shot his eighteen-year-old lover, and of his wife who came to the girl’s funeral with a knife to disfigure the corpse. All three characters might well elicit the ‘tsk, tsk’ of judgment from a reader of a newspaper account. But that response is not to be our course as readers. We come, through Morrison’s language, to understand these characters in some way, and maybe even to love them in many ways. Indeed, these characters are not the ‘truly evil’ ones. They are ‘we’, and ‘we’ are the ones who have likewise hurt them. As reader, I learn that evil comes from all quarters as does, sometimes, hope. I won’t deny my autobiographical implication in the ‘banality of evil’, but neither will I/can I share it with you here. Instead I’ll leave you with the suggestion that for me, it is significant and crisis-provoking, and my sense from discussion with some others is that this crisis is not only mine. The shock is recognition of one’s self, not so much in an other as near an other—a nearness with consequences. ‘The maternal metaphor’7 Sethe’s ruminating8 about trees in the preceding section is the rumination of a mother—one who has lost two boys, a husband, a baby girl, and much more. It is perhaps no coincidence that all three works examined here work through mothers. Neither has the fact gone unnoticed by me that so much student autobiographical work I’ve read has been stunningly fixated on mothers and mothering. If language is the ‘Law of the Father’ why is so much of it provoked by Mother? The relationship between testimony and translation points also toward what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘maternal function’ and/or ‘semiotic chora’ (Oliver, 1993), and what Jean Wyatt calls the ‘maternal symbolic’. Such notions of the maternal play heavily in the works of Morrison and Dash as they challenge conceptions of a body-less Symbolic order and a wordless (maternal or feminine) body. In the maternal function and the maternal symbolic lie testimonies to histories of entire communities as well as individuals—


testimonies that rely on a kind of translation, thus relying on an ‘unreliable’ resource for their power and authority.9 Valorized and vilified, romanticized and chastised across many cultures and for many generations, Mother is a primary target, a key, for psychoanalytic theorizing, and for many discourses calling for both victims and victimizers (Mother is both).10 The relationship between Mother and Child cannot help, it would seem, but be a dramatic one given the manner of reproduction and the (bodily) relationship that it necessitates. But the language of Motherhood reproduces this reproductive relationship even when Mother is not the biological one. Language, then, (I’ll say it again) is in our bodies as well as of it. When he writes Lacan understands this embodiment, ‘Speech is in effect a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is’ (cited in Felman, 1987:120). His sense of our entry into language, the Symbolic, nevertheless takes us little further than the despair of the neurotic, ‘split’ subject. Kristeva challenges both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories in their insistence that human beings become full subjects only after the moment they enter language, or the Symbolic Order, which is a specifically paternal or phallic function (as such language derives from religious and other proclamation such as ‘the Name of the Father’; the Law; ‘In the beginning was the Word’). In traditional psychoanalysis, this entrance into language marks the point at which the child becomes aware of itself as a subject separate from others and from objects, particularly the mother with whom it had heretofore identified completely. Kristeva disputes the absolute separation of signification from the presymbolic, maternal function. She calls this already-signifying space of the mother the ‘semiotic chora’, which is also ‘the place of the maternal law before the Law’ (Oliver, 1993:46). ‘Before it enters the Symbolic and encounters the No/Name of the Father, the infant has already lived with maternal regulation, the mother’s “no”’ (Oliver, 1993:46). That is, the mother has already been regulating the child’s body with her own. She gives and takes away her breast and ‘oversees what goes into, and what comes out of, the infant’s body’ (Oliver, 1993:46) such that the child has already learned signifying patterns, though unconsciously— patterns that reflect paternal law as well, but which come from uniquely maternal relationships. The bond that occurs between mother and child is, then, both a bodily one (whose body is it anyway, if mother’s milk goes into baby’s body, baby’s body was once ‘in’ mother’s womb, shared mother’s blood?) and a Symbolic or linguistic one (mother is also a subject in the Symbolic order and makes judgments affecting baby accordingly). But there is a difference in this maternal signification, or semiotic chora, from signification that is purely of the Symbolic order (were such purity possible)—a difference but, Kristeva argues, not a distinction. The semiotic and the Symbolic are in a particular (Kristevan) dialectical relationship to one another. Maternal signification is chaotic, fluid, involving sound as echolalia, a kind of music between mother and child (cf. Kristeva, 1982 and 1987). This unique mother— child relationship is a bond of love in the sense of ‘in love “I” has been an other’


(Kristeva, 1987:4). It threatens the Symbolic order by threatening to do away with difference. The one becomes the other and the word becomes the thing. Unlike Lacan, Kristeva rejoices both because the paternal prohibition is prefigured by, and dependent on, maternal regulation and because the paternal prohibition will never completely succeed since the semiotic makes its way into signification. She rejoices because the semiotic chora is both the space that supports the Symbolic and an essential element of signification. (Oliver, 1993:47)11 Mother ‘knows’ something unknown within the paternal Symbolic: she knows from that experience of a difference within, of sharing a body with another. And it is a threat not only to the Symbolic order which depends for its existence on the difference between the word and the thing, but also to the child who must become an autonomous being, different from the mother/ other (and a threat to the mother herself, for that matter, as Morrison’s Sethe aptly demonstrates). Should the mother choose to remain only or primarily within this knowledge, should the mother choose to ‘smother’, the child cannot enter the Symbolic. Such a child becomes psychotic. This is why even if the Symbolic order denies the existence of the mother [her full subjectivity], she cannot, for the sake of her child, deny the existence of the Symbolic. She must wean the child. She must instigate the breakup of their primary symbiosis. She must be silent about what she ‘knows’ because she knows better. (Oliver, 1993:68) These myths that I’ve just retold are not to be taken as templates on to which every experience can be mapped. I don’t read them as literal in that sense. After all, not every woman is a mother, and not every mother has the same relationship to her children, or the same concept of self and other, and not every man is only ‘man’, or every woman only ‘woman’. Furthermore, men can and often do perform some ‘maternal’ functions. My rationale for sharing these myths is to suggest that they might be openings for language that authorizes the body, making it present for testimony and witness, facilitating translation, even in a text or a classroom. And another point of my passing on these myths is that they provide an interesting (to me) frame against which to read and to compare Morrison’s and Dash’s works—works which have functioned symbiotically for me as a teacher in ways I am struggling to articulate to myself and to you. For Wyatt, Morrison’s Beloved claims a linguistic space she calls the ‘maternal symbolic’ (Wyatt, 1993:475). This idea resembles, but is not identical to, Kristeva’s notion of a dialectic between the semiotic (including the semiotic chora) and the symbolic, implying, as does Wyatt, that there’s a way in which


language is embodied both prior to and after one’s entrance into the Symbolic, or ‘language proper’. Both Wyatt and Kristeva produce a similar critique of this aspect of Lacanian theory, As Wyatt explains: Describing a child’s entry into language as a move from maternal bodily connection to a register of abstract signifiers, Lacan inadvertently sums up the psychological prerequisites for belonging to a patriarchal symbolic order. I invoke his paradigm to point out Morrison’s deviations from dominant language practices and from the psychological premises that underlie them; I use the term maternal symbolic to discuss not only an alternative language incorporating maternal and material values but also a system that, like Lacan’s symbolic, locates subjects in relation to other subjects. (Wyatt, 1993:475) As mentioned earlier, and as Wyatt helped me to see, metaphor becomes literalized in Beloved. Morrison’s language in Beloved doesn’t eliminate the difference between the word and the thing. Such language would be nonsense (and writing it impossible). In Kristeva’s schema such language (eliminating difference) would be totally in/of the semiotic and thus non-social and untranslatable perhaps to anyone not within that narrowest circle, ‘mother and child’. But by literalizing metaphors Morrison effectively reduces the difference between the word as ordinarily used and the material thing to which it refers, or at least her language provides that illusion. This literalization is (or represents) a language-world for Sethe that prevents her full participation in language so that she may avoid telling her story by avoiding knowledge of it, avoiding the differentiation between words and things, herself and Beloved, that would allow her to know and to become a full subject. This is an example of language within the maternal symbolic, but also signals, for Sethe, a dangerous ignor-ance of a separate self, and an inability to articulate a future or love. As Wyatt reminds us, Denver shares in this ignor-ance of language for a time, but does so by becoming mute and deaf in a perhaps unconscious effort to distance herself from the story of her sister’s murder. It is Denver, however, who finally emerges into a full participation in a language which does not ignore the body, the maternal connection, but allows her to become a functioning subject. As such, her use of language is more inclusive than Sethe’s, including a maternal symbolic as well as a linguistic space for separation. Words become, for her, like food, nurturing her, teaching ‘her that caring is “what language was made for”’ (Wyatt, 1993:475). Sethe was unable to articulate her story of Beloved because to do so would be to admit the separation, to admit that Beloved was gone, was not her, not an extension of her womb, her breast, to admit that she was ‘beloved who was not beloved’ (Morrison, 1987: second epigraph).


‘Oh, Mama’ In Morrison’s works, daughters come to be, or to represent, mothers (mothers of their mothers), whether they are biological or surrogate. For Sethe, Beloved becomes the lost African mother who crossed in the Middle Passage. When Beloved disappears at the end, Sethe mourns ‘She left me’ (Morrison, 1987:272) at the same time she recalls her mother’s leaving her. For Dash, Nana Peazant’s narration merges into that of Unborn Child (‘The ancestors and the womb are one’ [Dash, 1992:95]) who proclaims that her own mother, Eula, told her that she had been sent by the Old Souls (she was an old soul). Violet (of Jazz) is never a mother, but has both longed to be and denied her longing. She suffered two miscarriages and once tried to steal a baby that had been left in her care for a few minutes. Dorcas/Felice (Felice is Dorcas’s surviving friend who reminds Violet and Joe of Dorcas) is Violet’s lost daughter. Violet was drowning in it, deep-dreaming. Just when her breasts were finally flat enough not to need the binders the young women wore to sport the chest of a soft boy, just when her nipples had lost their point, motherhunger had hit her like a hammer. Knocked her down and out. When she woke up, her husband had shot a girl young enough to be that daughter whose hair she had dressed to kill. Who lay there asleep in that coffin?… Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? (Morrison, 1992:168–9) Alice is another surrogate mother after Dorcas’s biological parents were killed in an East St Louis riot. And then she becomes a kind of surrogate mother for Violet, as Violet seeks her out in order to understand what’s gone wrong in her own life, and what it was that Dorcas ‘had’. ‘We born around the same time, me and you,’ said Violet. ‘We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want…well, I didn’t always…now I want. I want some fat in this life.’ ‘Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.’ ‘You don’t know either, do you?’ ‘I know enough to know how to behave.’ ‘Is that it? Is that all it is?’ ‘Is that all what is?’ ‘Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?’ ‘Oh, Mama.’ Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know


you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking? (Morrison, 1992:110)12 Joe searches for his lost (to him) ‘crazy’ mother, Wild, a search that ends, the narrator implies, only in New York with his murder of Dorcas as child/lover/ mother. Violet’s own mother, Rose Dear, plunges herself into a well after having lived a life in a well of despair, and her grandmother, True Belle (a surrogate mother) favors Golden Gray, a product of miscegenation (he’s golden-skinned, golden-haired, and has gray eyes) who saves Wild as she’s giving birth to Joe, and who Wild also valorizes in her way (she keeps Golden’s coat and other items on display in her cave which Joe sees when she’s away). Malvonne covers over her surrogate son Sweetness’s theft of mail by going through the mail, sometimes re-sealing it and doing whatever else it takes that’s in her power to repair damages, including changing the content of the mail where necessary. In this act she lives her life vicariously through the others whose intimate lives she knows. Sweetness, after having been ‘the perfect nephew’ (raised by Malvonne as her own son) enters adulthood as a hood, devastating Malvonne who can’t understand what went wrong except to blame it on her working hours. Sweetness’s given name was William Younger, but he changed it to Little Caesar. Younger is reminiscent of Cato the Younger, who along with Cicero was a Roman senator who fled from Julius Caesar. Caesar is also root for the word ‘caesarian’. Indeed ‘Little Caesar’ ‘split’ his mother/aunt apart by his behavior, and left the womb/ home to go to ‘Chicago, or was it San Diego, or some other city ending with O’(Morrison, 1992:41). In Jazz Sethe’s obsession with Beloved is replaced by the narrator’s obsession for her characters. She’s the mother of them all, after all. She’s the ‘author’. She is sometimes Malvonne, the eternal busy-body whom we come to understand as that, and more. This narrator entices the reader to care as much about the characters as does she, and she cares for them with an almost unconditional love, a mother love. She proclaims herself ‘unreliable’: ‘I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am’ (Morrison, 1992:160). At the same time she casts a detailed and loving net of stories over her characters, ‘her’ creations. And in the end, the narrator expresses a wish to be Wild (Dorcas?)—Joe’s mother, Joe’s lover, Joe’s beloved, he is her beloved. Why else might Joe have chosen Malvonne’s apartment as the place for his secret liaisons with Dorcas, Malvonne being known as the supreme gossip in the building? The narrator’s calling attention to her own unreliability is also a device used by Morrison to call attention to the work of texts. Forgotten languages reborn(e) In my focus on the maternal function implicit in these works many different kinds of ground have been glossed, I realize. The stories about maternal relations,


daughters and mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers, involving primarily African Americans are rarely explored in film and literature as they are in the works examined here. That alone is significant. But I also emphasize the maternal symbolic as a new kind of language that is not new, but ignored, lost.13 It may be a language that facilitates translation because it opens spaces for experimentation, reader-response, listening to readers and listening by readers. As such it is a language about everyone and for everyone. Mother is a strong symbol for most, I’ll venture to say. Though she is significant, no doubt, in different ways for different groups and individuals, there is perhaps a base-line of ‘common sense’, or common sensibility, that she has the power to evoke. I’m suggesting she provides the common ground for many that allows the translation to begin. Toward the end of Beloved, the community of women gathers to pray (another kind of language that is beyond words in a sense14) on Sethe’s behalf, but then [t]hey stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like. (Morrison, 1987:259) As Sethe stood on the porch holding the hand of the pregnant Beloved, their prayer sounds moved and merged into a great maternal cry of anguish signaling the anguish/joy, the jouissance, of childbirth (cf. Kubitschek, 1991:174). For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (Morrison, 1987:261, emphasis added) Breaking the back of words, taking back our bodies from the Law of the Father, the abstracted, split and neurotic, subject of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, offers the possibility for new kinds of reading and theorizing and teaching. I’m supposing that these works in particular (the works of Morrison and Dash) have set out on an adventurer’s exploration of ‘new’ territories of language that have been lost to us, ‘forgotten’. With Marianne Hirsch, I’ll assert: Further consistent exploration of maternal discourse—whether in theoretical, fictional, or autobiographical writing—would reveal, I believe, notions of identity and subjectivity that correspond neither to the unified ego of ego-psychology, nor to the fluid boundaries of object-relations theory, nor to a subjectivity split against itself, as outlined by Lacanian


psychoanalysis. What model or definition of subjectivity might be derived from a theory that begins with mothers rather than with children? Can we conceive of development as other than a process of separation from a neutral, either nurturing or hostile, but ultimately self-effacing ‘holding’ background? I would suggest that if we start our study of the subject with mothers rather than with children, a different conception of subjectivity might emerge. Although it might be difficult to define, we might try to envision a culturally variable form of interconnection between one body and another, one person and another, existing as social and legal as well as psychological subjects. Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores just such a maternal voice. (Hirsch, 1990:427–8) Beloved ‘leaves’. A related moment occurs in Daughters when Unborn Child is shown running into and entering Eula’s womb as the culmination of the child’s efforts to interpret and explain the situation for her parents. (Eula had been raped, it is implied, by a white man, and Eli is distressed over his lack of control, lack of knowledge of paternity, and as a consequence is more predisposed to leaving for the mainland, throwing out any connection to old traditions.) Now Unborn Child can be born just as Beloved ‘goes back into’ Sethe. ‘You your own best thing, Sethe. You are,’ says Paul D. ‘Me? Me?,’ Sethe answers (Morrison, 1987). And Unborn Child’s reentry into the womb in Daughters precipitates the scene where Eula admonishes all the women of the community who have been fighting one another and themselves over the significance of tradition for them, their own morality and mortality, their own places in the world: If you love yourselves, then love Yellow Mary, because she’s a part of you. Just like we’re a part of our mothers. A lot of us are going through things we feel we can’t handle all alone… Do you…you understand…who we are, and what we have become? We’re the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can… We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. We wear our scars like armor,…for protection. Our mother’s scars, our sister’s scars, our daughter’s scars… Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds. (Dash, 1992:157) Like Eula, Yellow Mary has been raped. It happened to Yellow Mary, however, after she’d left for the mainland earlier, seeking independence or just seeking work. She’d always, it was implied, been a source of jealousy among some of the women. (Viola, the mainland-made evangelist, remarks, ‘All that yellow wasted.’) Yellow Mary has become a prostitute to support herself on the mainland. The consternation of some island women is compounded further when she brings back with her to the island her lesbian lover, Trula. The maternal


symbolic enters the story here with Eula’s speech, and also with Yellow Mary’s story of her own lost child (and lost childhood) which becomes the connection to the scene of her rape. With milk in her breasts still, she became nanny to a wealthy family and was raped by the man. A scene in which milk ‘tears’ are ‘wept’, representing the loss of so many children for so many African and African American mothers, was planned for Daughters but had to be cut due to time and budget constraints (Dash, 1992:34). Breast milk takes on similar significance in Beloved as Sethe’s milk is stolen by slave master, ‘Schoolteacher’s’ nephews under his direction propelling her to run to where her baby daughter already is waiting for that milk. It is the desire to get the milk to her baby, Beloved, and to avoid being a ‘crawling graveyard for a six-month baby’s [Denver’s] last hours’ (Morrison, 1987:34) that provides Sethe the will to survive the ordeal of her wounded crossing to freedom. (Un)common sense in common This extra-symbolic space of the maternal symbolic, a Symbolic that includes (but is not exclusively) closeness to the sensual characterizing Kristeva’s semiotic, or semiotic chora, is alluded to, I believe, by the narrator in Jazz as well: I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure I don’t believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out. (Morrison, 1992:227–8) Is it this ‘something else’ that binds us, that we hold in common enough to begin the process of learning to translate for and with one another? Something unspeakable? Morrison and Dash also refuse ‘the final solution’, the unambiguous resolution, in favor of the open ending. They demonstrate how the past is active in the present, even as it undergoes constant revision. In Daughters of the Dust, great-grandmother Nana Peazant, elder and connection to the Ancestors, renews the family in transition by revising tradition, translating between the old and the new. Dramatically, she binds together her ‘scraps of memories’ from Africa and her earlier American past, her ‘conjure bag’ containing hair from her mother’s and her own heads, with one daughter’s Bible and another’s St Christopher charm. She does this in order to enact a final ritual involving all family members before many migrate from the Carolina Sea Island, Gullah culture, to the US urban north mainland at the turn of the century. Morrison also demonstrates how the past is active in the present, though in a different manner. In Beloved, for example, mother of protagonist Sethe went through the Middle Passage,


abandoned Sethe (so Sethe felt), apparently spoke another (African) language— one that Sethe could not now comprehend—and, according to Sethe’s grandmother Nan, committed infanticide against her ‘white babies’. Most of these events are prior to Sethe’s own experience in many senses, but clearly still very much a part of her life, her psyche. She too commits infanticide, though for different reasons, but reasons still connected to the legacy of slavery. The impact of this past, Sethe’s perception of the maternal, is made accessible to the reader, even if the reader is not really sure of details of the implications. We struggle to understand together, just as Denver finally realizes another, more inclusive, facet of the maternal—the communal maternal (Wyatt, 1993)— which nurtures conditions allowing articulation of a self without sacrificing connection. It is a connection and a process of articulation (the communal maternal) which does not pose or impose anyone ‘presumed to know’. Also striking is Morrison’s lack of didacticism in the face of such emotionally and politically laden content. John Leonard notes the same when he writes of her works in general: Such overt political action as occurs (a protest march in Sula, assassins in Song of Solomon, the mournful drums in Jazz) seems always peripheral to some other drama of baffled hopes, family wounds, confused paternity, broken connection or historical amnesia, in a separate republic of dreams. But inside this republic, what goes on is identity-making. And if we don’t understand that identity is political, we don’t understand anything at all. (Leonard, 1992:706–7) Morrison says she writes to learn what she doesn’t already know (Morrison, 1983)—to learn deeply about people, groups and individuals. She writes about listening, yes, but not merely hearing. This listening involves response. Her narrators respond to what they work hard to hear. The reader who engages with her texts, who is seduced by them perhaps, as I am, can’t help but respond to them as well. As readers, we must always write part of the story for ourselves. In that way Morrison provides a text that listens, and listening is love. We love to hear/tell stories about ourselves. But simply telling, or mostly telling, or often telling, is not teaching. Nor is it caring. It is, however, telling. A student learns much more about the teacher who merely tells than a student learns from or with that teacher. And little about anything else. I echo Felman in saying, ‘the position of the teacher is itself the position of the one who learns, of the one who teaches nothing other than the way he learns’ (Felman, 1987:88). As one who is here attempting to ‘tell my story’ at the same time I try to listen to the stories of others, to read and reread, to write and rewrite, I am, in fact, trying to learn, precisely, the way I learn, so that I might better teach. Translation, as I have begun to suggest, as a theoretical and practical construct and study might shed light on the question of ownership in a classroom. Translation creates a new text out of two (or more) different ones. But in order


for translation, of any kind, to be possible there must be something in common. How might one find those commonalities without (mis)appropriating another’s words and worlds? Perhaps I worry too much, but my teaching experience seems to tell me otherwise. Often, people don’t seem to want the work of constructing communal, yet personal, worlds. And sometimes we don’t seem to mind claiming another’s pain as our own rather than doing the difficult work of learning empathy, translating. But then, Grumet reminds me: If reading [translation] is a passage between public and private worlds, the journey is fraught with danger. To give oneself up to the text is to relinquish the world in order to have the world, it is a birth and a death. And so it should not surprise us to find a child [student, anyone] wary of reading, reluctant to follow that line across the page without knowing where it leads. (Grumet, 1988:136) And a good reading does precisely that, presses on without insisting on knowing in advance where it will lead. Is there a teacher in this text? The works of Morrison and Dash use language and story that teach me, in part, by allowing me to read perhaps poorly at first, then prodding me to dig deeper, to reread and rewrite. At the same time the works demonstrate how that language teaches, or doesn’t teach at times, within the works, within the lives of characters. They have invited and allowed me to translate, introduced me to new parts of myself and others, taught me to read differently, and better, more carefully. I can now hear Grumet when she writes: Our responsibility as educators is not to be caught in an understanding of symbol systems that reduces them to elegies for lost worlds. Language can lead us somewhere else, to the place where we live, to the world, and to the world as it might be, and bodyreading may be seen not as a nostalgic fantasy, but as a practical necessity, the exploration of a world where we can live. (Grumet, 1988:132) So, what does it mean in my classroom to find and use this new language, or more accurately, this forgotten language? For me it means reading and writing, and not merely talking about what I write, but talking and doing what I write as best I can. My effort is to show more than to tell, to openly question my own desire and its origins—not as confession but, I hope, as a kind of testimony and a kind of ongoing inquiry. This does not mean relinquishing all authority. To the contrary. When I am at my best as a teacher in a difficult classroom situation is


when I’m able to listen both dispassionately and passionately at the same time— dispassionately in that I’m not so over-invested in my own position or agenda as to perceive a student’s complaint or question as an attack, a battle to be fought and won in order to ‘save face’; passionately, however, in the way that I listen to hear with an ear that desires new knowledge, that desires confrontation of my own ignor-ance, and that respects difference while still expecting a certain coherence and rigor. Such listening means speaking often. Real listening involves response. These qualities—qualities difficult to cultivate, and qualities that must be remembered every class period and every day—are the sorts I believe I recognize in the language in Beloved, Jazz, and Daughters of the Dust. As a student and interpreter of Morrison and Dash, I find myself both challenged and invited in, listened to and witnessed to. And through their testimony I, too, become a witness. Notes * This essay is dedicated to the memory of my friend, John Nicholls, who, along with his wife, Terri Thorkieldsen, were the friends who first accompanied me to Dash’s film. John died in October 1994 leaving many in mourning, myself included. 1 I want to thank Rick Moreland for dialogue that helped me through this work. Rick is also responsible for my initial interest in reading and writing about Toni Morrison, and much more. Thanks, Rick! 2 Also see Gallop (1985:60–1) on the imaginary and imagos as chichés or unconscious images which shape one’s understanding of other people. Translating through one’s imaginary unaided by the symbolic—an area of perhaps ‘metacognition’—produces interpretation that is made up only of projections. ‘In the symbolic register, the subject understands these imagoes as structuring projections.’ On to p. 67: ‘we are perhaps brought to the realization that we must inevitably deal with “bad translations”’. In other words, the imaginary will always block us from apprehending the real (the original text). But at least we can try to catch the functioning distortions of translation as translation (not the real, but the symbolic).’ 3 Thanks to Bob Hinkel for recalling for me the Kundera words we’d shared earlier. 4 I do not mean to evade the issue of unequal power relations in situations of translation and have, indeed, written about ‘translation without a master’ elsewhere (Edgerton, 1992; 1993a and 1993b). See also Niranjana (1992); Rajchmann (1991); Murray (1991); and Young (1990) for rich discussion of this issue. 5 Also see Derrida (1985:123): What one must try to do is to reconstitute a sumbolon, a symbolic alliance or wedding ring between languages, but reconstitute it is such a way that the whole of the symbolon will be greater than the original itself and, of course, than the translation itself. However, this simple growth of languages, which aims to complete and extend each language, supposes its own limit: the sacred text.


This impossible possibility nevertheless holds out the promise of the reconciliation of tongues. Hence the messianic character of translation… [A] good translation is one that enacts that performative called a promise with the result that throught the translation one sees the coming shape of a possible reconciliation among languages. It is then that one has the sense or the presentiment of what language itself is. 6 A number of articles report both of these inspirations, but I’m currently looking at Rushdy’s 1992 piece. 7 This phrase was the title for a presentation by Madeleine Grumet and Gail Griffin in Chicago, October 1993, at Loyola University. I was unable to go but enjoyed a brief though intense exchange about the title on an electronic network on teaching and classroom dynamics at my university. 8 Madeleine Grumet reminds us that ‘when we consult the etymology of the word “read,” we find that “read” is lodged in the very guts of the word “ruminate,” which means “to think things over”’ (Grumet, 1988:132). 9 See Cixous and Clement (1986: chapter 1) for an account of how repressed collective histories are exhibited (historically and contemporarily (through the figures of women ‘sorceresses’ and ‘hysterics’. 10 An especially interesting and disturbing compilation of these characteristics attributed to ‘mother’ can be found in Sandi Castle’s poem ‘Mother’s Day’. 11 In this sense I read Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories of language as offering a more optimistic possibility for a self within language that resists the neurosis that Lacan sees as necessary to normalized speech, language, and civilization. This is not to say that Kristeva is ‘returning to Freud’ even more than did Lacan, given that this Lacanian thought ‘turns Freud on his head’ as Freud believed in the necessity for coming to language and civilization (a kind of repression) for becoming sane. I think Kristeva may be surpassing both in her optimism—an admittedly idiosyncratic reading of Kristeva, the one who writes so much about melancholy, horror, abjection! 12 Derrida writes: I’ll begin by the freest association on the subject of what you said about an eventual deconstitution or a regression of psychoanalytic discourse toward a kind of aphasia, according to the well-known motif of regression: pathology as regression that reverses the order of acquisition and ends up at the mere proffering of ‘mama’, the word that in some way would be at once the first to be acquired and the last in the regression. In the Joyce text I made allusion to here earlier, there is a long sequence of two very rich pages where, at the end of the terrible story of Babel, the last word is something like ‘mummummum…’ It means mama, mutism, the murmur that will not come out, the minimum of vocalization. And, obviously, it confronts the other counterpart in the paternal war. One has both the structuring of language, beginning with the father’s name, and then the final, apahsic regression or the first word ‘mummum…’ This is a free


association on Finnegan’s Wake. It may be that the worldwide psychoanalytic establishment is on its way toward ‘mummum…’. (Derrida, 1985:133–4) 13 See also, for comparison, Pinar (1992). 14 This parenthetical allusion is to a sermon I heard by Presbyterian minister Marty Jacobsen in Ruston, Louisiana, Summer 1993.

References Arendt, H. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Books. Barone, T.E. (1988) ‘Curriculum platforms and literature’, in L.E.Beyer and M.W. Apple (eds) The Curriculum: Problems, Politics, and Possibilities, New York: SUNY: 140– 65. Brunner, D.D. (1994) Creating the Reflective Practitioner: A Role for Literature and the Arts in Teacher Education, New York: SUNY. Burke, K. (1957) ‘Literature as equipment for living’, The Philosophy of Literary Form, New York: Vintage Books: 253–62. Castle, S. (1988) Audiotape, The Catholics Are Coming, ‘Mother’s Day’, produced and recorded by T.D’Antoni. Baltimore, MD. Cixous, H. and Clement, C. (1986) The Newly Born Woman, trans. B.Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dash, J. (1992) Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film, New York: The New Press. Derrida, J. (1985) The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, translation Trans P.Kamuf; and Otobiographies: The Teachings of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name Trans A.Ronell; C.V.McDonald (ed.) New York: Schocken Books. Edgerton, Susan H. (1992) Cultural Studies and the Multicultural Curriculum, Louisiana State University, unpublished dissertation. —— (1993a) ‘Love in the margins: notes toward a curriculum of marginality in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved’ in L.Castenell and W.Pinar (eds) Understanding Curriculum as a Racial Text: Representations of Identity and Difference in Education, Albany: SUNY Press: 55–82. —— (1993b) ‘Toni Morrison teaching the interminable’, in C.McCarthy and W. Crichlow (eds) Race Identity and Representation in Education, New York: Routledge: 220–35. Felman, S. (1987) Jacques Lacan, The Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1993) What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Fine, M. (1991) Framing Dropouts: Notes on the Politics of an Urban Public High School, Albany: SUNY Press. Gallop, J. (1985) Reading Lacan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greene, M. (1988) The Dialectic of Freedom, New York: Teachers College Press.


Grumet, M. (1988) Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hirsch, M. (1990) ‘Maternal narratives: “Cruel enough to stop the blood”’, in H. Gates (ed.) Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, New York: Meridian: 415–30. Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Trans. T.Gora, A.Jardine, and L.Roudiez; L.Roudiez (ed.) New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. L.S.Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1987) Tales of Love, Trans. L.S.Roudiez; New York: Columbia University Press. Kubitschek, M.D. (1991) Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Kundera, M. (1980) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, New York: Penguin Books. Leonard, J. (1992) ‘Her soul’d high song’, The Nation, 25 May: 706–18. Levinas, E. (1989) The Levinas Reader, S.Hand, (ed.) Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Makaryk, I. (1993) editor, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morrison, T. (1983) Interview conducted by K.Benetti for the American Audio Prose Library. New York, May. —— (1987) Beloved, New York: Alfred A.Knopf. —— (1992) Jazz, New York: Alfred A.Knopf. Murray, D. (1991) Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Niranjana, T. (1992) Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley: University of California Press. Oliver, K. (1993) Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pagano, J.A. (1990) Exiles and Communities: Teaching in the Patriarchal Wilderness, New York: SUNY. Pinar, W.F. (1992) ‘The lost language of cranes: windows and mirrors in the regressive phase of Currere’, paper presented to the Bergamo conference for curriculum theory. Dayton, Ohio. Rajchmann, J. (1991) Philosophical Events: Essays of the 80s, New York: Columbia University Press. Rushdy, A.H. A. (1992) ‘Daughters signifyin(g) history: the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, American Literature, 64:567–97. Serres, M. (1982) ‘Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy’ in J.V.Harrari and D. F.Bell (eds) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tal, Kali (1991) ‘Speaking the language of pain: Vietnam war literature in the context of a literature of trauma’, in P.Jason (ed.) Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Wyatt, J. (1993). ‘Giving body to the word: the maternal symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’ PMLA, 108:474–88. Young, R. (1990) White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, New York: Routledge,

‘YOU ARE YOUR OWN BEST THING’: TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED USING QUESTION-HYPOTHESISQUESTIONS (QHQS) MARY ANN DOYLE

In recent years the debates about the literary canon have intensified over questions about which works ought to make up the ‘new’ canon, the relationship between literature and literacies, and how curricular efforts to address reading (and teaching) literature ought to proceed. Well-intentioned policy-makers and educators have often assumed that by including newly recognized and ‘representative’ works of literature in compulsory education, students might be persuaded to develop a more pluralistic and multicultural vision of the nation, its history, and its people (Banks, 1994). As Britzman, Santiago-Valles, JimenezMunoz, and Lamash have reported, however, educational programs developed from these assumptions have failed, for the most part, to anticipate the contestations which arise among school actors when issues of race, gender, sexuality and so on are raised for consideration (Britzman et al., 1993). The ‘polyspatial’ and conflictual terrains of power (Grossberg, 1993:102) which characterize the production of personal and cultural knowledge have been undertheorized in curricular projects to construct a more just society. Such projects demand that we look more closely at classrooms as sites of contestations where knowledge is often politically charged and ignorance is as much an effect of knowledge as it is a void. In studying the use of literature, we must consider how teachers and students deal with their own ambiguous, competing and contradictory interests and relations, and those represented in canonical and counter-canonical works, particularly when these seriously challenge assumptions held about identities represented as culturally different. This paper is based on a study which examined the pedagogical practices of a university professor reading and teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved.1 Ben Trevard2 and his students engage with Beloved, Morrison and those events created by their own interactions through a pedagogical device designed by Trevard which will be described in this paper.


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386

USING QUESTION-HYPOTHESIS-QUESTIONS 371

A more difficult but no less important aspect of this study will be to address the question of how Beloved and its author, Toni Morrison, may be understood in terms of their importance to the study of literature in the US. The analyses will proceed from a description of Trevard’s practices and the silences which attend the class’s interactions. We will consider how we might generalize from this study in order to contribute to educational practices which could help readers account for both personal and cultural histories. The teacher, the class, and the question-hypothesisquestions (qhqs) Ben Trevard, a teacher in the English Department at a large research university, selects both canonical and counter-canonical texts for his class readings. Trevard has been credited by his students with having changed the way they read, write and think. He approaches student and literary writing self-consciously, focusing on the interactions between the two and attending to the ways his students situate themselves as gendered and racialized subjects in reference to cultural texts.3 The interpretive process associated with his practice is supported by a mapping strategy of his own design, question-hypothesis-question or qhq. The qhq requires students to have second-thoughts, to think-again about questions which arise during their readings and to write about questions which are meaningful to them. Students begin their qhq writing by formulating a question they have about some aspect of the reading. This first question in the qhq device may be one sentence or longer, but its function is to frame the qhq writing. A student might begin her qhq by writing the question: Why is the house in this reading haunted? Or, What makes me suspect that the murdered child has come back to life? A student might even ask: Why am I having so much trouble understanding this story? Students then focus on a close reading of the text(s), which may include other cultural texts in addition to the novel, in search of ‘hypotheses’ about their first question. The hypothesis section constitutes the body of the qhq writing. If the student had asked about the haunted house, she might write about all the passages which make reference to a haunted house, comparing and contrasting these to other accounts of hauntings with which she is familiar. If she had asked about the murdered child, she might reconsider the passages which make connections between the dead child and the one who suddenly appears out of nowhere. Or finally, a student might write about and explore those passages which were confusing to her, relating these to other experiences, novels, or cultural texts. After writing a few pages, students raise a final question, represented by the final ‘q’ in the qhq sequence. The student who questioned why the house was haunted may end her exploration with a final question: Well, if it’s true that the house is haunted, what will become of the people who live there? The final question is left unanswered, but since the qhqs are read aloud in class, the class

372 CULURAL STUDIES

may take up the last question, attempting to work through it the way the individual writer worked through her first question. By reading aloud, students position themselves publicly in relation to the texts, to their own questions, and to the specific historical context of their lives. This process challenges them to attend to how they negotiate the meanings they construct in response to their own and others’ questions. Each class begins with a call for second-thoughts or questions about the discussion held during the previous class. Sometimes the class will write briefly about these before getting underway with the current set of qhqs, or Trevard might call for such writing during class. Groups identified on the syllabus as responsible for readings of their qhqs for that day begin telling briefly about their writing while Trevard notes their names and their topics in the corner of the board. Each student then reads her qhq to the class while Trevard maps the key terms in relation to each other on the board. Class discussion attends each qhq and the mappings, and successive readings are worked ‘into’ other mappings which have preceded them that day, illustrating the process of negotiation and the ways students have positioned themselves differently with comparative or contrasting perspectives. Because the mappings remain on the board for the class period, the questions which have been raised at some point are available for re-thinking, for second-thoughts, within the context of successive readings. Believing that writing helps people learn in better ways, Trevard explains that his goal is to provide a different kind of writing practice for his students’ experience of literature. Citing White and Epston in their work Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Trevard writes: They talk interestingly about staying ‘behind’ the person, identifying w/ [sic] where they were, so that the person (student, in my translation) can ‘catch you off guard’ instead of always following and failing to catch up with you… I think my preparation time is spent in noticing and summarizing and highlighting how far we’ve come [since] the time before. (Trevard, personal correspondence) In this approach the teacher is ‘caught off guard’ and subject to the kind of rethinking and re-seeing in which students are also engaged. Each pays attention to how meaning is constructed, how one learns, and how the process of change (of mind) actually occurs in our lives. Rather than realizing much later that one’s position on certain issues has been altered over the course of time, the process wherein we construct and/or change our thinking is itself subject to scrutiny. Such a practice positions the teacher as one who learns with the students. Trevard suggests that Gregory Jay’s (1990) perspective reflects his own: Our difficulties in teaching ourselves or our students to think consciously often stem from a failure to engage and verbalize the unconscious social


grammars of which we, and our students, are the subjects. These grammars, in turn, compose the structures of life we inhabit, our historical positions, so that self-critical discourse means a soliciting and mapping of the locations from which we speak and the effect those locations have on what we can articulate. (Trevard, personal correspondence) In his pedagogical practice, Trevard attempts to support these kinds of selfreflective and reflexive practices in terms of his students’ and his own reading, writing, thinking, and talking about the novels they read. As we shall see, however, these efforts are not without difficulties. Situating Beloved in the class In this upper level class of twenty-two students, the numbers of men and women are evenly distributed. There are many white students but only a few African American students. More than half of the students are English majors, while several members of the class have never taken an upper level English course before. The detailed transcriptions below document the first classes on Beloved. They are included to represent fully the interactions which resulted from seemingly simple initial questions. Trevard begins the class handing back midterm exams and saying the following: I have given some second-thoughts to the discussion the class had in the previous session which considered how we might understand how characters move through their lives in search of ways to ‘fit in’ in society. Some characters reject positions they find themselves in and simply move, finding themselves suddenly in new positions. Other characters combine choices, selectively negotiating their positions so they take some things which work in present situations and combine them in new ways or with new choices in order to create better situations as they move on. It seems the mapping of the qhqs tries to capture that very same kind of negotiating. We think about what others have said and add to their mapping, moving on, changing our positions or views when they seem no longer to ‘fit’ the class’s readings. Sometimes questions and hypotheses which have been forgotten (rejected?) are picked up again later, and reentered into the discussion, the way a person might return to a way of thinking about something but seeing it in a new light altogether… In these exam writings students tended to ask questions such as: Is there another position for me to take here on a comparison between, say, this character, and that one? Can I make this interpretation, about how these characters act in similar or different ways, work toward a different understanding, one which doesn’t reject what I think is valuable here, even if it doesn’t at first

374 CULURAL STUDIES

seem directly related to this other character’s situation? Can I work out, think through other ways of seeing their similarities, their differences, their difficulties? That kind of exam writing seems like it would make good qhq writing on an individual basis too. Does anyone else have any secondthoughts about this or another matter? There is a long pause at this point, the kind that often generates discussion after someone has begun class with some second-thoughts, but today no one adds any comments. Trevard invites qhq readers to begin: Ron: Why does the baby’s spiri t haunt the house at 124? Kris: What is the similarity between Beloved and a newborn baby? Kathleen: Is the wet woman the baby girl ? Rob: Is there manipulation of spirits in Beloved like in Bless Me, Ultima? Randy: Why does Denver choose Beloved’s side rather than Paul D’s? Kelly: Why didn’t Denver want her mother to tell stories about Beloved? As the last of the questions is read, Trevard asks the class where they would like to begin. Ron begins with his qhq. Ron: It seems clear in this first section that the baby girl who haunts the house at 124 was loved when she was alive, and that she is still loved. So my question is, why does she haunt the house at 124? Sethe’s baby girl died before she was even two years old. Sethe said that she loved this baby. She gave her body to the engraver in exchange for the seven letters on the headstone, and even wonders if she could have gotten more letters for the stone if she had subjected herself to even more humiliation in this way. It’s clear that having sex with this man on the gravestone was a painful experience for Sethe, but one she agreed to because she loved the baby girl and wanted to set something right by having an engraved headstone placed on the grave. When Sethe thinks of the headstone, however, she cannot escape remembering her own humiliation, and maybe the baby is angry about what Sethe has done with the engraver. By not forgetting the baby girl, who is caught in the past, she must also remember the pain and humiliation she has endured. I think there are reasons to believe the baby girl was loved by Sethe when she was alive. Why else would she be called her beloved baby girl? But of all the children Sethe has had, only her baby girl died, and there seems to be some rage associated with this baby being in the grave. Sethe seems to be paying for something in the way she endures the haunting too. She lives a very solitary life, never forgetting her beloved for even a moment. This costs her dearly in the way she has lost two sons because of the rage the baby acts out against the people at 124. The baby spirit seems to rage against any happiness in this house. She acts up and shakes the house violently when Paul D embraces Sethe before the stone, and again when Paul D visits Sethe and Denver inside the house. Maybe


her haunting of 124 is a kind of revenge she is taking on the family because Sethe had sent her baby girl and her other children on to Baby Suggs while she remained at Sweet Home. Though the spirit is strong enough to nearly shake the house off its foundation, she is driven off by Paul D. Up until Paul D’s arrival, the spirit has been successful at keeping happiness out of the house altogether. Sethe has lived a very lonely life because she is caught up in not forgetting her past, and because of this the townspeople have refused to visit with her. This may be part of what the baby girl wants. She may want Sethe all to herself, but to suffer for something at the same time. My last question is: Why would the baby want to take revenge on a woman who loved her, who still loved her, and if it is revenge, what kind of revenge is it and is the woman Beloved the baby girl returned to life? At end of the reading, Trevard concludes his mapping on the board and asks whether his sketch has captured the gist of the qhq. Both agree there seem to be three aspects to Ron’s qhq, represented by Trevard as three clusters: Sethe’s perspective of the haunting, the use of the name ‘Beloved’ for both the baby girl and the wet woman who has come to the house, and the baby’s perspective on the haunting. Kathleen joins the discussion. Kathleen: Even though the two clusters may seem different in that they describe the differences between Sethe and the baby on this haunting experience, it’s important to see that Sethe submits to the haunting just like the baby does. Maybe she can’t see a way out of it anymore than the baby can. Maybe she feels trapped and just lives by keeping on. Sethe may not be participating in this haunting because she wants to, but she may have brought it on by having sex with the engraver, and maybe she believes she can’t escape this. This seems to be a struggle between two people which is so immense that it makes everyone around these people pay dearly. Ron: Remember though, Baby Suggs tells Sethe she may as well just stay in the house because all the houses of black folks are haunted. This may be just a particular example of a much more general experience. Sethe is a mother who has a mother’s relationship to this baby girl she calls Beloved, but the name of her baby could also be a signifier for some other issues here. Trevard agrees with Ron and notes that the passage he has referred to is interesting because as the novel progresses, they will see how extraordinarily different this house is from so many other houses, and yet that passage remains to remind us that perhaps this haunting is a particular example of a pervasive experience which is a problem related to much more than this one baby.

376 CULURAL STUDIES

Kathleen: I wondered whether this woman who comes out of the water, this wet woman, is really the baby girl come back in the form of a young woman the age the baby girl would have been had she lived? As a reader I am not prepared to believe that a baby girl who has been haunting her mother’s house would come back to life in the form of a woman of the appropriate age had she lived. But the story has already raised other troubling issues in the way the haunting takes place. Sethe’s experiences when she meets Beloved make me wonder if this is indeed her daughter. Suddenly upon seeing Beloved, Sethe is bombarded with a couple of emotions which provide interesting clues about this young woman’s identity. She has to run and pee with little warning, and though this seems strange it is stranger still when she remembers that the only other times she has experienced this is when she remembers seeing her own mother for the first time and when her waters flooded while she gave birth to her daughter Denver. A very maternal image is created here. Beloved’s appearance reminded Sethe of her baby girl but immediately brought to mind as well what it was like finding out who her own mother was. She re-experiences birthing, and maternal connections, and even if this isn’t her own daughter reborn, it is a powerful experience of mother and daughter relations. After Beloved has been there a while the truth about Paul D’s and Sethe’s past lives comes out a lot easier. Since Beloved belongs to the past, she thrives on bringing it back to life. She says the past can come back and perhaps she has come back to right the past, and perhaps to ease the pain her mother endures. Beloved’s presence in 124 pulls everything together, but it pulls everything together around a kind of web of opposition with her in the center. Sethe has a weak guest (a child?) to take care of; Denver has a confidant like she has never had before; and Paul D has found himself wanting to be someplace rather than moving on. Even though the haunting seems to have become quiet, Beloved’s presence plays against Sethe, Denver, and Paul D in very different ways. My follow-up question is: what kind of spirit is Denver going to turn out to be ? On the board Trevard has added to the first sketch which was mapped when Ron read his qhq. Kathleen adds that she has begun to wonder whether Sethe was the one who killed her baby girl. Maybe she wasn’t still at Sweet Home when the baby was killed. Others join in, voicing their concerns. In all, ten different students engage in a tightly knitted discussion about how to interpret what seem to be ambiguous passages about the baby’s death and the identity of the wet woman. Kathleen: On page 5 and on page 35 it seems there are correlations between Denver’s birth and the baby’s death, and we don’t hear from the sons after they are gone, but we hear that Sethe’s mother had killed all her


Rob: Kris:

BT: Pete:

Anna: Ken: Karen:

Cathy: BT:

Dan:

other children but Sethe. So, are Denver and Beloved related in some way which calls up Sethe’s mother, and Sethe as a mother, and the whole relationship between mothers and daughters? This is still unresolved to the point in the novel where we have read so we can’t answer this for sure, but there’s a lot here to think about. Maybe the baby is angry because although Sethe was worried about getting her milk to her baby girl when she was trying to escape from Sweet Home, it seems someone fed the baby something else, sugar water or something like that. Now Beloved loves everything sweet and this is a big issue for both of them. 4 We need to pay close attention to the little things in this novel because some of them keep coming up even though we don’t know what to do with them yet. There seems to be a lot which suggests that this Beloved is the baby girl come back to life. It seems that Denver prefers this kind of haunting, where the baby girl asserts her presence physically. And it seems that Beloved behaves as we would expect the baby girl to behave, to crave hearing the stories about herself, and to have little patience for stories which don’t tell about her, just like how Denver only wants to hear the stories about her and not about Sweet Home or anyone else. Sethe seems filled up with Beloved’s presence in the house too. She becomes absorbed in having her there. When Paul D stomps his feet he forces the issue of the haunting, and then he seems to be the one who is the least comfortable with Beloved’s presence. Even the dog is faced with a dilemma about Beloved’s presence, since Here Boy hasn’t been seen since Beloved appeared at the house. He had stayed out of the house when the haunting was going on, but once Beloved came, he can’t even be found outside the house. It seems from the dog’s perspective at least, Beloved is the same kind of presence as the spirit which caused the haunting. And there are those passages about the beautiful analogy between Beloved and a new born baby, we could map those in the lower cluster. Supposedly Beloved has skin that’s new, like the fresh skin of a baby. So, there seems to be some support developing for a view of the haunting and Beloved’s appearance as a kind of revenge. Kathleen has argued that it may in fact be a kind of double revenge; a baby spirit’s revenge for having been killed by someone and then beat up by Paul D. If it’s revenge though, it’s revenge because of the hurt it has suffered. There’s more hurt than mean revenge here, the kind of rage and striking back a child might do when it has suffered but doesn’t understand why.

378 CULURAL STUDIES

Kurt:

Isn’t that the price one pays for living? Life is hurtful, and maybe this baby spirit hasn’t learned that yet. Randy: Well maybe Denver hasn’t learned that yet either, because she sides with Beloved rather than Paul D. That’s my qhq. I think it fits in here: As both Paul D and Beloved are new members of the household, why is it that Denver has taken more strongly to Beloved than she has to Paul D? First there is the initial bonding. When Paul D came upon the house it was Sethe who first saw him and introduced him into the household. Denver and Paul D came upon Beloved at the same time after the carnival, but Denver’s was the quickest reaction, giving water to Beloved. This tendency created a form of doctor/patient relationship between Denver and Beloved and gave Denver a caring outlet which could be all her own. There had been a one-to-one relationship with her mother before Paul D’s arrival but that had changed. Beloved was a relief from the loneliness Denver had fallen into. She seemingly made her choice overtly when she sided with Beloved over Paul D as to whether or not Beloved was strong enough to get around, picking up the rocking chair. Denver does not like stories her mother tells which do not concern her. They seemed to describe a ‘gleaming powerful world made more so by Denver’s absence from it. Not being in it, she hated it and wanted Beloved to hate it too.’ But it was Beloved who delighted in asking about these stories, confounding somewhat Denver’s planned partnership. This leaves the final hierarchy of relationships between Denver, Beloved, Sethe, and Paul D wide open and my final question concerns where they may clash. Trevard has mapped Randy’s reading into the left space of the mapping, and Randy says it matches what he had sketched on his qhq but had not told the class about before his reading. He says he had tried to locate all the ways the use of power was expressed in these relationships. Rob enters the discussion wondering whether Paul D’s interference with the baby’s spirit is a kind of manipulation. He argues that there is always a price to be paid when manipulation takes place. He, Trevard, and Thomas enter into an exchange: BT: Well we’ve heard that there’s a lot of pain associated with this haunting. It seems that the pain won’t just go away. Maybe it was because the pain needs to be dealt with that the spirit began the haunting in the first place. And for this pain to lead to some kind of renewed life there is something to be gained in remembering the past, for the baby and for Sethe. [A character from another novel] was able to put spirits to rest because she provided proper burials for them. Rob: But didn’t we learn as well that there is a lesson to be learned in not manipulating spirits?


BT:

Or, maybe, [others have] learned how to manipulate the spirits by addressing real needs and attending appropriately to these needs, even though one has to be willing to face the consequences later. Rob: I couldn’t tie [another] burial to Beloved just right, but it seems there’s a connection there. BT: Maybe the tie of prostitution on Sethe’s part in order to provide the baby girl with some kind of proper burial suggests something is seriously wrong. Thomas: I think that’s an interesting question about what makes a proper burial, and what just makes a burial somehow wrong. There are a lot of passages in this book which could be read as referring to slave ships, the middle passage, the underground railroad escape routes, and there were a lot of people who didn’t make it through these passages. Some jumped overboard or committed suicide in other ways, and you hear people saying ‘Those weren’t my ancestors who committed suicide.’ Nobody wants to claim people who somehow got an improper burial. It’s like it’s unfinished business of the worst kind. BT: So these issues raise other issues like slavery, suicide, claiming ancestry, endurance, spirit haunts, the bond between mothers and daughters. In some ways, reading the beginning of this novel may be something like the experience of being jerked from one place to another, just starting to understand something then finding yourself faced with a whole new set of difficulties. Maybe that’s an important part of the reading in itself. People who were enslaved certainly must have felt jerked from one place to another. How about if we stop for about five minutes and write about things we’ve noticed, things we’ve learned, and things we wonder about. The entire class, including Trevard, engages in writing. At the end of five minutes Trevard calls for some of their responses: Anna: It seems the haunting has stopped, but I wonder if the revenge is over. BT: What about your ‘learned’ entry? Anna: I learned what Denver is thinking from hearing what people say; I learned to understand manipulation of spirits a little better. Kathleen: There’s a kind of maternal language which calls up past memories and maternal experiences. This reappears in Sethe. BT: Others? Noelle: Sethe and Denver both tend to draw back into their own haunted spaces. Ed: Sethe’s emotional and personal relationships are caught up in the ‘slavery’ issue. This issue is the ground of all this. BT: I notice that issues of power and control come up early but not out of possibilities for women to negotiate. Burial becomes a way to put to rest a relationship, but where is the mourning, the negotiation of pain,

380 CULURAL STUDIES

the positive experiences which come from healing from pain. Where are these? Readings in three sessions In the qhqs and discussion which follow in the three future classes, students raise questions about many topics. Thomas draws attention to the phrase ‘Sweet Home’ as an ironic use of the term. There is a kind of bitterness associated with this name because ‘Sweet Home’ was never sweet, and in spite of the beautiful connotations associated with the word home, ‘Sweet Home’ was never home. He recalls that Paul D laughs about Sweet Home in a particular way. It is a laughter which doesn’t mean to imply that something is funny. It suggests that something is bewildering. ‘It’s where we were’, Thomas reads aloud. Everything at Sweet Home was ‘eked out’ if you were a slave, even motherhood. And how people survived can’t be said. Trevard makes a comparison between Paul D’s way of talking about Sweet Home and the kind of bewilderment they are experiencing as readers of Beloved: ‘We find ourselves talking about a haunting, about a dead baby girl returned to life, with a kind of bewildering disbelief—yet, we read on.’ Thomas returns to the conversation to point out that by following Morrison further into the novel we are entering with her into the ‘folk-oral tradition’. We are following the lead of the story-teller who seems in no hurry to alleviate the reader/listener’s sense of confusion. ‘There’s more to be told before the reader will be let loose.’ Anna indulges her curiosity about the subtle ref erences to color throughout the novel, something which she first noticed as a small thing, but which then became immense when given second thought. She reports in her qhq about the gender differences associated with color. Morrison has given the women muted skin color while the men’s color is described vididly; Sixo is indigo with a flaming red tongue, and Paul D has hazelnut skin. Sethe’s relationship to color is so repressed she has no memory or notice of color for many years in her life, whereas it is the love of colors which signals Baby Suggs’s dying. When Trevard has finished mapping Anna’s qhq, three clusters of color associations are organized on the board. Morrison’s use of blues and greens seems to suggest an openness to possibilities; in some scenes the absence of color is significant, and the characters associated with this lack are caught in some way. In the use of reds and pinks, strong emotions such as passion, violence, or revenge are also implied. As Anna reads her qhq there is a low chorus of ‘Oh Yeah!’ and ‘I hadn’t thought of that’ from around the room. Other students pick up her references and build on them, some searching through the novel while others nod or call out references to other novels or cultural usages we associate with colors. ‘Sethe lives


on Bluestone Road’, someone remembers. ‘Is Morrison making a connection here to the blues?’ Another student observes that Sethe was unable to see colors only during the time when she was caught in the haunting, in the memory of the murdered child. For Sethe to get colors back, she has to make some sense of the greens, blues, muted colors, lack of colors, black as a color, and white as a color. Morrison’s use of colors, then, is somehow related to the experience of life as gendered and racialized. She seems to be telling us that some of what we can see or can’t see has to do with the ways we are positioned in the world. ‘But, we don’t have to be stuck there,’ Anna concludes. The class agrees with Anna’s hypothesis that Morrison has used colors to say what language cannot say well. Keat then offers a qhq which ties the grief of Beloved to the grief of characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. We can’t shut ourselves off from the ‘violent imposition of memory’, Keat observes. Thomas adds that sometimes the injuries we suffer are so great that we try to flee from life. We do what Morrison calls ‘the serious work of beating back the past’. Thomas interjects, we may ‘get seduced by life without warning’. Paul D insists there’s no way he’s ever going to open up his heart again, and then, right away, his heart starts opening up, and he has to choose again between escape and commitment. David’s mapping of his own qhq worked as a gyre, illustrating that ‘all responses are kinds of rehearsals’ for remaining within or revising patterns of thinking about and living in the world. His gyre becomes a tool which students use when thinking through the pattern of responses characters act out in difficult times. When they run away from difficulties they may find temporary safety in isolation, but eventually their isolation breaks down and new difficulties appear. At one point Kathleen calls out, ‘This is the human condition. Fight or flight.’ Keat raises the question of flight again, and observes that certain strategies mask this problem. Stamp Paid, for example, admits at one point that he was tempted to break his wife’s neck to protect her from being abused by the master’s son. Once he is away from the situation, however, he doesn’t remember his own desperation. He is quick to judge Sethe, and that masks his own close call with murder. This is another example of how ‘matters left unsettled or repressed return in their own time’, Thomas observes. Discussion turns to a consideration of what characters do when they choose not to flee the difficulties of the human condition. Students find evidence in several novels that characters can create possibilities for themselves, even when it seems their situations are hopeless. Thomas remembers that Schoolteacher once denied Sixo the right to use language to define his own life. However, as he is being beaten, after attempting his escape from Sweet Home, Sixo announces that his wife, Thirty-Mile Woman, is carrying their child as she escapes to the North. He does this by calling out ‘Seven-O’ and laughing the only laugh he ever let loose at Sweet Home. In the very last session of the semester, students once again address the issues related to breaking out of the pattern of running from life’s

382 CULURAL STUDIES

difficulties. The discussion focuses on questions about building a sense of community. The challenge for each of the characters for keeping some love and hope in their lives seems to depend upon their ‘going beyond their best thing’. Morrison provides examples of how characters might change habits of thinking about life, but these are examples which raise many questions about the conflict positions in which people find themselves. Sethe’s ‘best thing’ for a long time had been her isolation, because in her isolation she remained close to her baby girl. She had to learn to go beyond this, however, in order to grieve, and heal, and live again. Paul D tells her not to go to bed and contemplate colors as Baby Suggs had done before she died. He tells her she has to learn that she is her own best thing. He calls to her to reach for him and to rejoin the community which she has rejected and which has rejected her in return. In his plea to Sethe, Paul D begins his own healing. He turns away from his habit of always moving on, and makes a commitment to Sethe. When asked how he felt about the end of the reading of Beloved, Ron, a knowledgeable young African American student who hopes to teach literature and coach high-school sports, suggests that the group construction of the exam questions and the writing of the exams are the summary process for the class: ‘It’s just another kind of qhq like we had in class. Every question raised and addressed about literature raises still another question, and another, and more after that.’ Analysis of Trevard’s class In Trevard’s class, there is a direct relationship between the students’ readings of Morrison’s Beloved and the issues which make up class discussion. A conscientious use of the qhq device by the students and Trevard provides this framework while also allowing for a great deal of variability. Trevard’s pedagogical use of the qhq to shape his own pattern of interactions with the class may be seen in the way he opens up his students’ hypotheses by paying attention to how hypotheses fail to account for all aspects of any question. He offers students regular practice in identifying this failure by requiring that they find a way out of their written hypotheses with a final question for the qhqs, but he also models this practice in class discussions as well. If one considers class discussion as a kind of hypothesizing process, it becomes evident that Trevard teaches his students to do in their thinking and talking about the novels just what he has taught them to do in their writing.5 This pattern of weaving students’ questions and writings back into secondthoughts about their readings illustrates a kind of pedagogical practice of rehearsal. Students engage in self-reflective and reflexive processes in the class because that is how the interactions are framed by the qhq device and Trevard. This relationship between the students’ questions and Beloved illustrates the kinds of issues which are compelling in our time, and a review of contemporary literary criticism published about Beloved reveals that the questions asked in


Trevard’s class are often the same or similar to those asked and written about by professional critics. In fact, of the twenty-seven most recent articles, books, and interviews listed as titles in a November 1993 MLA reference search, fifteen were treated at length as topics of qhqs and class discussion in Trevard’s class. This supports Trevard’s argument that students who read carefully ought to think of themselves as competent critics of literary texts and competent writers about literary/cultural issues. I suggest that Trevard’s use of the qhq leads his students to practice a rejection of knowledge that promises closure. By grounding knowledge in historical and political relations of power, Trevard’s qhq strategies advocate for a theory of knowledge which has been traditionally excluded from the university. In this advocacy, Trevard’s practice explores how ‘language is a site of struggle where subjectivity and consciousness are produced’ (Orner, 1992:80). Morrison plays with this view as well, in that Beloved leads students to notice and wonder about ‘what is sayable and doable’ in particular contexts (Orner, 1992:81) and at what costs such questions are decided. As the semester ran out of time and the class realized the last readings of Beloved would not be presented fully, some students wanted Trevard to summarize the meanings of Beloved, even though they had spent weeks negotiating how every hypothesis led eventually to more questions. Some, however, argued that the contingency of each meaning made all interpretations equally unreliable. Trevard explained that he would have liked an additional session to consider the final qhqs and this issue of closure in more depth: I don’t want to avoid closure or taking positions or putting thoughts together (that seems ironical and detached, ultimately suicidal); I just want to learn to take a position and still be able to negotiate between positions and maybe move to new positions. I don’t think one can really avoid taking a position. Irony is a position, often tempting for me but not a position I want to get stuck in or to teach. (Trevard, personal correspondence) While the qhq provides a pattern of thinking and writing about their readings, the depth and breadth of students’ writing is also shaped by what is ‘sayable’ from their own particular positions within the class. Trevard’s class, as all classes, is constituted as a site of power relations, and neither Trevard nor his students can read, speak, or write about Beloved except from racialized and gendered subject positions. The description in the preceding pages represents only one level of interaction in the class. At many other levels the teacher, students and I, in my role as researcher, kept silent about some issues and offered writings and discussions meant to conceal as much as reveal.

384 CULURAL STUDIES

Conflictual alliances As outspoken men in the class, Keat, Robert, and Thomas participated often in class discussions, appearing in the transcriptions as key players in the group. In the culturally dominant position of white males, Keat and Robert remained allied with one another on most occasions, even during times when their behavior was characterized by the women as ‘immature and rakish’. As outspoken white women in the class, Anna, Noelle, Kathleen and Paula might have been expected to share an alliance of gender with one another, but their relationships were actually constructed in deference to other relations of power in the class, such as whether or not one was an English major. As a graduate student and an African American man, Thomas offered evidence of his critical expertise when he contributed to the class. Though at times he spoke at length and about other texts which supported his hypothesizing, Thomas did not incur the anger of Anna, Kathleen, and Noelle. His position as an older, serious student studying at an advanced level with literary expertise strengthened by his African American perspective positively affected the way he was viewed by them. His ability to distance himself from Keat and Robert at particular moments may have significantly contributed to the women’s acceptance of him. Randy, a male who identified himself as a ‘cajun’, and Marta, the only African American woman in the class, remained quiet most of the time. Randy said he’s quiet because he ‘likes to listen’. Perhaps, like Randy, Marta remains quiet in the class most of the time because she ‘likes to listen’. Perhaps, however, there are reasons why she chooses to remain quiet which would be difficult to say and just as difficult for us to hear. Trevard’s students, like the characters in Beloved, had difficulty applying the insights they derived from their readings to their own lives. Though many students had some understanding of the particular difficulties other students in the class faced in terms of power they believed they could exercise, no one spoke of these directly during class discussions. Throughout this research we do hear from Thomas and Ron—two articulate African American men in the class—but it seems particularly noteworthy that this university English class’s reading of Beloved should have so little to offer from the perspective of African American women. Though we might argue that Trevard’s class engages in a compelling reading of Beloved at some levels, it is also true that much of what Morrison and Beloved might teach us remains unexplored in this class. That is also one of the consequences of accepting that knowledge is always partial and always contingent upon historical particularities. Trevard’s teaching ‘proceeds through a listening, a non-telling, a non-mastery’ of the text,6 but it is subject to all which the class resists knowing, deems unspeakable, or cannot even glimpse as possible.


Morrison’s contributions to pedagogy I believe Morrison has presented us with some ways of reading relations of power, particularly in the ways she explores, through her language choices, what is sayable and what is dif ficult to say in particular contexts. She leads us to consider, for example, how we look out for our own interests when we align ourselves with people, but how we also sometimes misunderstand what might be in our best interest in these alliances. The relationship between the students’ questions and Morrison’s writing is also similar, I would argue, in the way some questions are difficult to articulate, if not unspeakable altogether. Trevard’s class succeeds and fails to make sense of Morrison’s Beloved in much the same way as the nation succeeds and fails in its reading of the African American presence in its history. Morrison tells us that the ‘houses of black people are haunted’ as Trevard’s student, Ron, reminds us, but the novel also illustrates how the house of the nation itself is haunted. And like the characters in Beloved and the readers of the novel, the larger community of the US has trouble with that truth. The US seems to be a nation bewildered by the questions raised about its own history of injustice. Much hypothesizing about solutions attempts to locate the ‘problem’ of this haunting in the South, or in certain people among us, at a distance from our own positions. As Morrison illustrates, however, to engage in such powerful acts of denial is to engage in the serious business of beating back the past and making oneself vulnerable to ruin. Morrison’s writing and Trevard’s pedagogy challenge readers to interrogate their own and the nation’s racialized and gendered inclination to deny what is painful to know by leading us to re-read and rethink those experiences which constitute our lives and our national character. Notes 1 Some familiarity with Morrison’s novel will be helpful to readers of this paper. Susan Edgerton has offered a brief retelling which identifies many of the issues and events to be addressed by the writers in this class: At a slave-holding antebellum plantation in Kentucky, ‘Sweet Home,’…the ‘good-hearted’ master has died and been replaced by a man who is a former teacher with an interest in science and a propensity for sadism—Schoolteacher, he is called. Schoolteacher [performs] one of his experiments; it is unclear to what end. Sethe, the victim and narrator…escapes to Ohio, pregnant, close to delivering, and injured by the beating she has received just prior to leaving. Her other three children have been sent ahead of her to her freed motherin-law, Baby Suggs. Sethe’s husband, who may have left before her, is never heard from. Sethe delivers her fourth child en route with the help of a runaway poor white girl, Amy Denver. Sethe makes it to Sugg’s house with her new baby girl, Denver.

386 CULURAL STUDIES

After some time, Schoolteacher shows up (there was no legal protection for escaped slaves in Ohio) with the intent to take Sethe and her children back to Kentucky. Seeing him, Sethe commits an incredible act. She begins systematically murdering her children. She succeeds with the older girl-child but is stopped before she can kill her two boys and her new baby girl. She explains, ‘I took and put my babies where they’d be safe’ (Morrison, 1987: 164). The white slave master is stunned into retreat. Sethe spends some time in a local jail and later returns to Baby Suggs and Denver and her two sons. The ghost of the dead child, Beloved, is everpresent in the house. The two sons, who are old enough to know why the ghost is there and who are, as a consequence of that knowledge, [afraid] of Sethe, run away never to be heard from. One day another former slave from ‘Sweet Home,’ Paul D, shows up at Sethe’s doorstep. He and Sethe begin an attempt at love together—an attempt that is interrupted by the fleshly appearance of the ghost Beloved. Paul D, Sethe, and Denver, Sethe’s only remaining child, must deal with the ghost before their relationship can become something for them all to count on. Dealing with Beloved means unearthing a repressed past for all three of them. (Edgerton, 1993:225) 2 All proper nouns related to the report of research are pseudonyms. 3 See Graff (1987:33) for a discussion of the importance of the receiving context in terms of pedagogical practice. 4 BT represents Ben Trevard. 5 For more about what students report about their studies with Trevard, see Doyle (1992). 6 Felman (1989) and Edgerton (1993) write at length about this option of teaching as proceeding through a listening, and a non-mastery of the text.

References Banks, J. (1994) Multiethnic Education, Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Britzman, D., Santiago-Valles, K., Jimenez-Munoz, G. and Lamash, L. (1993) ‘Slips that show and tell’, in McCarthy and Crichlow (1993). Doyle, M. (1992) Re-thinking Readings and Writing in the Study of Literature, Dissertation Louisiana State University. Edgerton, S. (1993) ‘Toni Morrison teaching the interminable’, in McCarthy and Crichlow (1993). Felman, S. (1989) ‘Psychoanalysis and education’, in R.Davis and R.Schleifer (eds) Contemporary Literary Criticism, White Plains, NY: Longman, Inc. Graff, G. (1987) Professing Literature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Grossberg, L. (1993) ‘Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds’, in McCarthy and Crichlow (1993). Jay, G. (1990) America the Scrivener, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McCarthy, C. (1993) ‘After the canon: knowledge and ideological representation in the multicultural discourse on curriculum reform’, in McCarthy and Crichlow (1993).


Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved, New York: Alfred A.Knopf. Orner, M. (1992) ‘Interrupting the calls for student voice in “liberatory” education: a feminist poststructuralist perspective’, in McCarthy and Crichlow (1993). White, M. and Epston, D. (1990) Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, New York: Norton.

REVIEWS

‘DREAMING IDENTITIES’ SARAH MARKGRAF

■ Elizabeth G.Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) 207pp. For their new ‘Cultural Studies’ series, editors Janice Radway (Duke University) and Richard Johnson (University of Birmingham) have already promised us a good deal. A book on Madonna and ‘representational politics’, one on the ‘functions of imagery’, another on ‘complexity and politics in cultural studies’, and an ‘introduction to media studies’ are forthcoming (p. viii). Two works have been published in the series so far, one of which is Elizabeth Traube’s Dreaming Identities, described in a jacket blurb by Nancy Armstrong (Brown University) as ‘a breakthrough book’. If Traube’s book indicates what this series will bring, readers can expect responsible, valuable scholarship in cultural studies, with few theoretical and stylistic surprises. In the account of Traube, an anthropology professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the first chapter of Dreaming Identities grew out of an all-night conversation between her and her friends in a Chicago bar about their ‘frustration’ and ‘intense displeasure’ (p. 1) in response to the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Traube recalls her naivete about cultural studies at the time: ‘“cinematic apparatus” was not a term in our theoretical vocabulary, and we never thought movies had unconditional capacities to control the subjectivity of their audiences’ (p. 1). Dreaming Identities, the book that grew out of the chapter that grew out of the conversation, is a far-from-naive discussion of the ideologies reinforced and produced by Hollywood movies in the 1980s, a time Traube equates with ‘the Reagan era’ (p. 3). Traube understands ideology in a combination of Marxist and anthropological lights: ‘cultural narratives [refer] to other social practices and to


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


the ideological matrices out of which meaningful practices are generated’, Traube writes, and ‘ideological discourses [are] dimensions of wider social struggles’ (p. 2). Ideology, for Traube, is thus curiously both complicated and straightforward at once. While it refers to many aspects of ‘cultural narrative’— from gender and class relations to structures of domination and visions of transcendence—it also, according to Traube, is f airly easily uncovered and exposed in its role behind the scenes of mass cultural rhetoric. Such ideological uncovering is in fact Traube’s general task in this book; her specific task is to expose how certain Hollywood movies of the Reagan era ‘pointed toward contradictory tendencies in the larger society.’ She shows how these movies ‘proposed to restore an idealized past, when authority was securely vested in white, male, middle-class Americans’, yet also how ‘at the same time, a contending vision struggled for expression, a vision of a world free of gender domination, a world in which fear of otherness would be transcended’ (p. 3). In Chapter 1, ‘The return of the repressed: Lucas and Spielberg’s “Temple of Doom”’, Traube sees just this kind of ideological tension. Through careful consideration of scenes from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, she contends that ‘Lucas and Spielberg have magnified and given new power to two major themes of earlier mass culture, namely, imperialist domination and patriarchal domination’ (p. 29). For Traube, their interests are linked simultaneously with ‘a fantasy of female sexuality as an evil, destructive, archaic power of death’, such that ‘the subordination of this power then becomes the precondition of civilization’ (p. 29). Traube asserts, however, that because the structures of domination (imperialism, sexism, racism) in the movie ‘require the quasi-violent psychic repression of newer possibilities and sensibilities’, they also project a ‘latent alternate resolution’ to the film (p. 38). That is, the movie, while it ‘presents as its resolution… the reinstitution of the phallocentric Law of the Father, gaily packaged as kid stuff’ (p. 37), it also unconsciously presents a less predictable resolution through ‘a small but critical gap in the plot’, in which the main character approaches, but doesn’t quite realize, a ‘radically new masculinity’ (p. 38). Films with loose links to real historical events present a different kind of case study for Traube. In Chapter 2, ‘Redeeming images: the wild man comes home’, she compares the plot structures of three movies about the rescue and homecoming of Vietnam War MIAs—Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood, Part Two (1985)—in order to claim that there are particular ‘tensions latent in the process of ideology and production’ (p. 39) in these films. For Traube, these MIA movies suggest that ‘the metaphor for the state of the country in the aftermath of the war is captivity’ (p. 40), and that ‘the restoration of the patriarchal family’ in their plots serves as ‘the metaphor for the redemption of the country’ (p. 55). Traube rightly points out the fatuity of this cinematic genre, which often uses renegade protagonists to pose as ‘a critique of a market society’ and authoritarian structures, when in fact they may support a political and economic American status quo.

1980S HOLLYWOOD MOVIES 391

Even in corporate society, according to Traube, ‘rebellion…becomes a form of accommodation to corporate society’ (p. 104). In ‘Secrets of success in postmodern society’, Chapter 3, Traube aims once again ‘to abstract a certain ideological pattern’, this time from ‘four unabashedly minor Hollywood films of the Reagan era (p. 67). Through astute analyses of All the Right Moves (1984), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Nothing in Common (1986), and The Secret of My Success (1987), Traube notes that all are about ‘individual mobility and success, as achieved in high school…or in the corporate workplace’ (p. 67). The four films, in her view, serve a larger cultural function: ‘the making of the new middle classes’ of ‘young managers and professionals’ in the 1980s (p. 68) by providing viewers with role models. Traube adopts a ‘cultural circuit’ approach to cultural production, a ‘Janus-faced’ approach that ‘explores the interactions between the commercial production of culture and cultural creation in everyday life’ (p. 70). In such a model is the assumption that ‘answers lie outside of texts themselves, in the social and historical conditions of their production and use’ (p. 70–1), and yet, that such ‘social and historical conditions’ are simultaneously affected by the human activity of creating such texts. This credible, if familiar, theoretical set-up is particularly evident in Traube’s final two chapters, one about what she calls ‘The demonization of women’ in Hollywood movies of the 1980s, and the other asking ‘Who will do the caring? Domestic men and independent women in the movies’. Traube claims that beneath the surfaces of movies about working women, ‘the danger of the early Mother’ requires ‘the Law of the Father…as the necessary and legitimate resolution’ (p. 113); that women are punished for using their legitimately attained power; and that women who are threatening are ‘demonized’ and invalidated. These claims are not new. The fact that they are not, however, does not mean they are not worth repeating. Traube’s examination of how a cultural question of the 1980s—who will care for children with two working parents—is carried into popular culture is less familiar, while the theoretical bent is the same. Traube examines ‘how the mainstream Hollywood cinema participated in the family and gender politics of the 1980s’, and how ‘we need to see the culture industries as active participants in ongoing social struggles over representation’ (p. 125). Thus, according to Traube, just as movies both reflect and influence their audience, movies reflect and influence the larger workings of cultural institutions. Traube’s seemingly balanced theoretical approach in Dreaming Identities may remind us of the inverse relation between originality and balance. The more responsible, careful, and balanced a scholarly work is, the more helpful it is, but the less likely it is to be startlingly original. Traube, in fostering ‘a nonreductive way of connecting psychic regimes to sociohistorical processes’ (p. 12) and in analysing ‘desire’ such that it ‘takes its meanings from the multiple social forces that pattern it, which extend beyond the family to other social relations of power and subordination’ (p. 12), chooses pluralism over perversity. The most productive positions’, for Traube, ‘are those… that avoid polarizing the psychic


and the social dimensions of cultural production, so as to confront instead the project of their integration’ (p. 12). Traube’s work, however, may not be as balanced as it purports to be. At its worst—and this isn’t often—Traube’s pluralistic approach is part of a tiresome and predictable liberal style that can entertain all views except ones that are not pluralistic in the acceptable fashion; and that promotes the sense that Hollywood, the 1980s, and the corporate world are uncomplicatedly aligned with the forces of domination and repression. ‘The Reagan era’, Traube writes somewhat simplistically, ‘promised abundance to the privileged and showed contempt for those in need’ (p. 129). She contends elsewhere that certain male characters of this era are even ‘distantly related to the martial men of Fascist ideologies’ (p. 20). Her implication that the Hollywood movies of the 1970s were much more liberal than those of the 1980s ‘authoritarian backlash’ (p. 137) is similarly one-sided. The 1970s was a decade which did, after all, produce as some of its most popular movies The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Towering Inferno (1974), movies that largely linked disasters with femininity, and that joined salvation with the arm of the law. In her prose, Traube occasionally employs, in Douglas Coupland’s words, ‘knee-jerk irony’, a smart-sounding yet ultimately pointless irony such as the following: ‘According to the experts’, Traube writes about fathers of the 1980s, ‘Dad had two main functions to perform’ (p. 140). She also has a certain love of and complacency with jargon. ‘Her transformation into the pre-oedipal phallic mother is complete’, Traube writes about Sigourney Weaver’s character in Working Girl (1988). Or, in another chapter, ‘In the movie, feasts, masks, and other festively transgressive rites of carnival are muted or avoided, and the charivari is the ritual model for Buck’s action’ (p. 149), she writes about the character John Candy plays in Uncle Buck (1989). I doubt Dreaming Identities will be the ‘breakthrough book’ for scholars that Armstrong claims it is. The book is, like many others classified as ‘cultural studies’, an often difficult synthesis of an unwieldy amount of cultural information. But Traube’s book, unlike the best examples of ‘cultural studies’, produces in a reader—despite its often inflammatory rhetoric—a certain neutrality towards seeking out the primary cinematic texts that ground the inquiry.

PRODUCING CULTURE: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTS JENNA MEAD

■ Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). ■ David Englander, Diana Norman, Rosemary O’Day and W.R. Owens (eds), Culture and Belief in Europe 1450–1600 An Anthology of Sources (Oxford: Basil Blackwell with The Open University, 1990) 475pp., $A130.00 Hbk, $A29.95/£9.95 Pbk. These two books claim to be situated within specific discursive formations—in Peggy Knapp’s case this means within current debates about relations between literary text, social context and historicist projects of recovery. Culture and Belief in Europe ‘is an interdisciplinary anthology’ where the disciplines brought into play are essentially, and essentialist versions of, history and literature represented by ‘drama, letters, diaries, parliamentary statutes, works of philosophy and theology, fiction, autobiography, travel literature, poetry and literary criticism.’ Each of these books has a stake in the study of culture. The project they share is that of contextualizing medieval and early modern texts within cultural, rather than simply historical, formations. So these books need to be positioned, as Knapp acknowledges, in relation to cultural studies. It’s this positioning that makes these texts contentious: if cultural studies privileges, among other effects, that of institutional politics and the specificity of cultural situatedness then how do these books read in the context of Australian academic study? Chaucer and the Social Context is a critical study of social structures and rhetoric in Geoffrey Chaucer’s long poem The Canterbury Tales. The book is conventionally set out with a theoretical introduction and then divides into three parts dealing with the three social estates, the discourses which speak those estates and the politics of language and social order. In Knapp’s reading, The


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


Canterbury Tales is all about social conflicts experienced by and played out among individuals within specific cultural formations. Chaucer’s text is fiction but its language repeats, frequently to subversive or critical effect, the interactions between dominant, hegemonic discourses and subjugated knowledges. She draws on Foucault’s Power/Knowledge to identify the latter paradigm of discourse and knowledge and Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination to ground a notion of how language operates as ideology within discourse and to analyse how voice sounds experience in fiction through character. Jauss’s Toward an Aesthetic of Reception provides Knapp with a theory of genre that points in two directions— towards a formalist hermeneutic and, less clearly, an ‘aesthetic sense’ that acknowledges the location of literary texts within social life. Knapp uses these theoretical works lightly in order to engage, not with the function of theory in either the disciplinary formation of Chaucer studies or the textualities she reads but instead, with the necessity of locating The Canterbury Tales somewhere. She describes her project in this way: ‘I want to describe the institutions and practices of late fourteenth-century life which account for the emergence of these diverse voices and the resistance they offer to be nullified by the steamroller of dominant discourse.’ And to this end she draws on Raymond Williams’s perception that ‘[w]orks of art, by their substantial and general character, are often especially important sources of this complex evidence.’ This allusion to Williams allows Knapp to locate her formalist analyses of both Chaucerian and other, primarily, religious texts within a critical field that is, at least implicitly, (British) cultural materialism. Here Knapp is herself opposing a hegemonic discourse: the patristic exegesis developed by D.W.Robertson Jnr which dominated the historical understanding of medieval literature in the US academy until seriously critiqued by feminist, materialist and postmodern critical practices. But this use of Williams, and then the work of David Aers, is a complex political and cultural strategy for Knapp’s investment in the British leftist intellectual traditions and produces a criticism marked by anxieties distinctive to medieval studies in the US academy. Knapp’s problem is, first, that the theoretical analyses of discourse (Foucault), the novel (Bakhtin) and language (de Man, Peirce), which she uses as an oppositional analytics do not produce the oppositional politics that Williams and Aers are all about. For example, Knapp wants to argue that the radically opposed but logically coherent readings of The Canterbury Tales offered by critics ‘cannot be settled by closer textual analysis or further historical documentation; it depends instead on the ideological stance we adopt as readers.’ She critiques the opposing versions of the Knight—as idealized stereotype or simple mercenary and his tale as thus either a plea for right order or a discourse on tyranny—and then points to the need for ‘an adequate theory of cultural formations.’ But her own reading offers this view instead:

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTS 395

The Knight’s Tale is the product of a hope that there lives a benign stability at the centre of the world, a hope likely to have been felt by many who would never rule. Yet such a vision is always fragile, vulnerable to the perils of its own retelling, which threaten to disclose the struggles raging just beneath the calm surface of a seemingly authorized text. (p. 31) This is neither cultural materialism nor Marxist analysis; it’s humanism of a fairly recuperative kind. There’s nothing new in this kind of conservatism; the question is why does it happen and this is Knapp’s second problem. Knapp wants to oppose the hegemonic force of patristic exegesis which she is dead accurate in describing as patriarchal. D.W.Robertson Jnr stands over Knapp’s version of medieval studies as R.G.Menzies stands over current versions of Australian politics. The achievement of patristic exegesis is that it gave authority to the study of medieval texts as practised in the US. While the young men (rarely women) from the Ivy League schools could not claim the authenticity of owning a medieval past, their work was authorized by the brilliance of their scholarship that offered a serious challenge to the scholarly work undertaken at Oxford and Cambridge. Robertson’s pioneering work was based on an assumption of the complete recoverability of the past. The key was the allegorical interpretation that characterized medieval theology and, by extension, medieval culture elucidated by a scholarship that was daunting. No one knew Augustine quite like Robertson. Robertson’s work also positioned itself strategically and unambiguously within European, not British, philosophical and historical traditions. One effect was to lock the reading of medieval texts into a totalized discourse that reproduced scholarship as scholastic mastery. Another effect, evident in the reading of Robertson’s favourite author Chaucer, was to colonize the Father of English Poetry for America. If the name of the game was patristic exegesis then what was crucial was, not the authenticity of your claim to the culture but your expertise in what operated as a global knowledge. And in the early 1960s the globe centred on America. Chaucer finally became a US citizen in the following decade when Oedipal opposition to Robertson produced Chaucer the Man in the finely nuanced readings of the New Critics for whom the verbal icon remained a safeguard against the proprietorial claims of a new crop of British scholars and gentlemen. In this cultural context, Knapp’s combination of a discrete reading of European theorists, an allegiance to the realism and optimism of the Canterbury Tales, and the humanity of a man called Geoffrey Chaucer, marks her position within the mainstream of American liberalism. Her gestures towards British leftism, which I read as absolutely genuine, are a kind of nervous tick as the formation of Chaucer studies in the US shifts into defensive mode in the face of institutional attacks on the grounds of relevance, declining student interest, decreasing career opportunities and inherent conservatism. This reading of British materialist criticism is symptomatic of a desire somehow to associate


Chaucer criticism with an intellectual tradition that combines a political commitment to the social contest with a methodology that privileges the ready recoverability of history. But this move fails not only because the political culture that underpins British leftism does not migrate successfully to the US academy but also because Knapp is unable or unwilling to revise the ideology that produces her own position as reader within a specific cultural formation. Culture and Belief in Europe 1450–1600 is gripping. The ‘Introduction’ reveals an extraordinary tale of cultural blindness and scholarly anxiety. This book is ‘an anthology of sources’, a ‘rich selection of texts’, that started life as a course at the Open University—an institution which I learned ‘has been one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary study in the arts’. There is nothing wrong either with free advertising or the Open University cutting edges in distance education but this kind of claim to transnational, transhistorical, transpolitical status is just embarrassing—and not only because it sounds like some kind of consolation. The question here is what motivates this kind of rhetorical move? Read on, for the ‘Introduction’ to this collection takes on the task of putting down various insurgencies. The editors open their position statement with a fact: ‘[t]he sixteenth century has long been regarded as a watershed in modern European culture, celebrated as the period of the Renaissance’ and so on. This is hegemonic discourse speaking. This is followed by a concession: ‘[i]n the past two decades or so, some changes in the scholarly attitude to the sixteenth century, as to past cultures in general, have become apparent.’ An enemy is discovered. ‘Scholars are attempting to discover why contemporaries thought, felt and expressed themselves as they did, and are finding the answer in indepth study of “histoire totale”, even “culture totale”, as well as of texts and artefacts themselves.’ Cordoned off by quotation marks and italic type, transposed in a foreign language that resists the mastery of English, we see the culprits. But hang on because the Open University has come to the rescue. The aim of the course,’ for which this book is a resource, ‘is to achieve a truly integrated study of sixteenth-century Europe, and in so doing to enable students to examine “evidence” of sixteenth-century culture and belief and to advance hypotheses about it [sic] themselves.’ This is interesting: what is an untruly integrated study? Or even a truly disintegrated study ? But there is more. ‘It is a much more complex society which today’s scholar perceives, and it is a much more complex understanding of its changing nature for which the scholar strives.’ The patronage being practised here encodes an assertion of authority by teacher over student through power over knowledge that traditionally grounds institutional hierarchies—especially those of higher education. This reinscription of authority makes visible the political/cultural project of knowledge formations already critiqued in cultural materialist, post-colonial and feminist accounts of discursive formations, such as those produced about English studies. What’s being produced in this version of the ‘scholar’ who, once properly schooled, can ‘advance hypotheses’ is a hegemonic formation of the

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTS 397

discipline of history that the editors clearly think should still be in place. The ‘Introduction’ thus documents the anxiety of a cultural formation under threat and the aim of this collection turns out to be recuperation. The strategy is not especially subtle: a 475-page anthology divided into eight thematic sections that comprise a plethora of complex (and fascinating) documents before which The Student, as opposed to The Scholar, could only fall blind, prostrate and grateful. The sections are titled ‘Humanism, popular culture and belief’, ‘Civic pride and civic patronage: Venice and Antwerp’, ‘Reformation’, ‘Religious reform and cultural change: Spain and England’, ‘Europe and the wider world’, ‘Print culture’, ‘The crisis of authority: France’, and ‘Church, State and literature in Britain’. This is called covering the ground; all the available space is devoted to traditional topics. And so ‘[e]ach section has a [very] brief introduction, and each individual document has a[n even briefer] headnote which gives [almost no] details of the source as well as [barely any] contextual information.’ But the desire to reappropriate the sixteenth century for the Open University, according to strictly positivist principles, produces a problematic methodology. There is no indication of any of the debates surrounding even the most familiar of these documents; there is no mention of any secondary material at all. Hence, of course, there is no bibliography. These sources are ‘evidence’—whatever culture totale might say. This is questionable pedagogical practice. And then there is the cliché that ‘little literary evidence survives’ about the activities of women. So Heather Dubrow, Margaret Ferguson, Joan Ferrante, Mary Beth Rose, Nancy Vickers, Marguerite Waller, Constance Jordan and all those feminist Renaissance historians and literary critics in the US are working on very little. This is either a ludicrous act of resistance to the globalization of the US academy or else evidence of a new dark age that threatens to engulf British scholars and their students. For this experience of reading the sixteenth century the wanna-be Scholar, ‘other students of the period’ or even the ‘general reader’ pays £9.95 or $A29.95 (hardback $A130). But, for anyone working in Australia, the most compelling failure of these texts is that culture operates as an entirely reified construct: inadequately theorized by Knapp and oppressed out of existence by the editors of Culture and Belief. There is no sense that the texts being read here offer what Le Roy Ladurie called, in 1978, a ‘detailed and vivid picture of everyday life’. A reading of cultural practice is not produced by simply offering up a snippet from ‘The Spicers’ Play’ or quoting Castiglione on The attributes of a Lady Courtier’. The tactics mobilized in cultural studies by the desire to develop what Meaghan Morris describes as ‘a critical social practice’ depend, at least, upon a discursive formation that is able to theorize and articulate the practices that produce culture rather than merely identifying culture as a notional entity or a buzzword to sell a new collection of documents. Anyone reading medieval and early modern texts here in Australia can’t afford to perpetuate either the nostalgia of liberal humanism or the imperialism of positivist scholarship; these texts need to be part


of a discursive formation that identifies its subject ‘culture’ as the intersection of ideology and critique in the everyday practices of both reader and text.

NOVEL ADULTERY? HEIDI KAYE

■ Naomi Segal, The Adulteress’s Child: Authorship and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: Polity, 1992). The author stands as parent to the text which is the child of his own imagination, as the traditional metaphor would have it. Such a birth is parthenogenic; in contrast to human reproduction, cultural production requires only the one authority for the creative act. The male pronoun in my first sentence is intentional; as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have shown, the authorial role has generally been gendered male, a fathering of the text (1979: ch. 1). Margaret Homans in Bearing the Word (1986) reverses the traditional metaphor by investigating images of mothering both literal and figurative in women’s fiction and finds new representations of women’s desire inscribed in these texts. The textual dynamics of desire have long been of interest to psychoanalytic and deconstructionist critics, both feminist and non-feminist. Peter Brooks presents a masculine viewpoint in Reading for the Plot (1984), seeing the reader’s relationship with the text as gendered male in its single desire for origins and ends; Jean Wyatt in Reconstructing Desire (1990) takes a feminist approach in exploring the possibilities that women writers’ evocation of pre-Oedipal, and therefore prepatriarchal, states of mind can offer for changing the reader and her unconscious desires. Naomi Segal seems to be working in the space between the patriarchal and the feminist approaches, and her book divides itself into two distinct parts. She makes use of feminist and Lacanian psychoanalytic models to question a tradition which denies the mother any desire of her own and yet in recapitulating the masculine reading of the texts she studies, she eliminates the mother as subject once again. Segal argues that the mother in fiction, psychoanalysis and

Cultural Studies (92) 1995:390–393

© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


sociology has been seen as the object rather than the subject of the mother/child pair. The mother has no desire, for she has the child; it is the child’s desire for the mother that is explored. Yet even her title, The Adulteress’s Child, would seem to indicate Segal’s own demotion of the woman from subject to object status; it is the child not the mother in whom we should be interested in this study of novels by Flaubert, Fontane, Hawthorne, Maupassant and Tolstoy. The sexual politics of the novel of adultery would seem to be rather simple: what is at issue is property, specifically, the Name of the Father. This simple model, however, erases the woman at the centre of the story, turning it into an exchange between men: husband and lover, father and son. Indeed, the model silently assumes the fact that the novel of adultery is always the novel of female adultery; male adultery does not threaten the patriarchal line of exchange of power as women’s adultery does. The adulteress’s story also assumes the possibility of illegitimate children who are the external sign of her transgression, being outside the Law of the Father. The patriarchal concern with adultery does not take into account the woman’s relationship with her child, legitimate or illegitimate. As a relationship in which woman is not the object of exchange between men but actually the subject of a relationship with her child, it remains unexamined. This is where Segal’s work on the politics of desire seeks to focus, on the mother’s role in this pair within the novel of adultery. To do so she examines the male author’s representation of his own desire through the story of adulterous motherhood. She sees the male author’s desires for self-reproduction in these texts as primary and tending to control and conflict with the adulteress’s desires as mother. The actual author projects himself into not only an ‘implied author’ and male ‘intended reader’, but also into his male protagonists. Segal argues that authorship is his form of self-reproduction, a passing on of the phallus. Authorship becomes a substitute for maternity, but the author is still caught up in his Oedipal past, seeing the mother as desired Other. Therefore by creating sonfigures in the protagonists and the intended reader and portraying the punishment of adulteresses he vents his guilt about his desires for the mother and his resentment of her abandonment of him. Thus Segal seeks the author’s desire rather than the mother’s. Beginning with a series of confessional récits, Segal explores the implied homosocial bond between author, protagonist and reader. Woman here is but a link in the patriarchal chain, and masculine maturity demands the sacrificial killing of a woman as retribution for the loss of the mother. Segal’s central contention in the book is that patrilinear mothers, who bear sons, are rewarded for playing their role as links in the chain, while matrilinear mothers, who bear daughters, are denied satisfaction as a punishment for their self-reproduction of a worthless being. The good, patrilinear mother is still denied any desire of her own except being a link in a chain, but that absence of desire marks her as a good mother. The sons are of course usually legitimate, to mark their rightful place in the world. The sickly son can be either a barrier to or excuse for the lover’s

NOVEL ADULTERY? 401

access to the mother’s body, thus keeping her within a male/male exchange mechanism. Once mothers become adulteresses, they express a desire and are therefore bad mothers. Matriarchal mothers have daughters (usually illegitimate) because they were bad; the daughter acts as the sign of their transgression in having a desire of their own: The horror of reproduction is directed [by Flaubert] quite explicitly at a same-sex generation. To make another himself would necessarily be to make a son; this ‘transmission’ is not conceivable across gender boundaries. (p. 120) Adulteresses’ husbands often reclaim and rename these daughters, even those that are not their own, breaking up the female/female relationship and reappropriating them for the patriarchal order by giving them the Name of the Father. This line of argument works well with the novels Segal studies: Anna Karenina has her much-loved legitimate son and neglected illegitimate daughter who is reclaimed by her husband; Emma Bovary expresses her disappointment at the birth of her daughter; Hester Prynne’s Pearl is her mark of shame as much as her scarlet letter and Chillingworth ultimately makes her his heir. The main chapters of the book provide provocative yet convincing readings and make some strong connections between the texts without straining the reader’s credibility. However, while examining the way male authors have eclipsed women’s desire as by definition transgressive and substituted their male ‘desire for the same’ (to use Luce Irigaray’s [1982] formulation), Segal reproduces that same desire. In her reading of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, while suitably stressing Pearl’s urge to re-establish the patriarchal chain (‘“Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”’), she refuses to see Hester Prynne portrayed as a strong and independent heroine who succeeds precisely because she remains outside the patriarchal rules and does so by subverting them: her decorated scarlet letter becomes a trophy rather than a brand. Segal wants so much to make this text fit her model whereby women can only be reduced to links in the father/son chain that she excludes other reading possibilities: ‘The book has nothing to say about either love or desire. It is entirely about the genealogical relationship, and men’s and women’s place in it’ (p. 147). The larger failing of the book lies not in what it does but in what it fails to do. By focusing only on male-authored fiction, Segal does not consider whether women writers’ treatment of adultery fits her model. Novels such as George Sand’s Indiana (1832) or Lélia (1833) or Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) might be included to test her theory about the exclusion of the mother’s desire. By juxtaposing novels from France, Russia, and America written across three centuries, Segal makes no mention of historical or cultural context. She groups her novels by theme and structure without any discussion of class, politics or historical difference through the period of the 1730s to the 1930s. Segal gives no


defence of her choice of these specific canonical texts or this subject matter as representative of patriarchal literature as a whole. In contrast, Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), links the development of the novel form itself with the development of ideologies about desire, gender and subjectivity over the same period. The division of the book itself, mentioned earlier, is disconcerting. The introduction and conclusion separate themselves from the three main chapters of literary studies by being more informal, even conversational and anecdotal, in style. Here Segal develops her theoretical base and offers a more directly political argument about motherhood in patriarchal society. Yet the discussions of men’s fear of women’s power of maternity and of the patriarchal economy of scarcity do not inform her earlier readings of male-authored fiction. This is a shame, for these notions could have taken Segal a step further. Instead, she has played it safe in the main body and uses the auxiliary chapters to indulge in less restrained speculation. Perhaps had she not written off Irigaray and Hélène Cixous so fast, as she does in the conclusion, she would have been able to make use of their insights, which are largely compatible with her own, to apply her more daring critiques to the novels themselves. For all its virtues as a study of nineteenthcentury fiction, and they are many, we are left after reading this book much as Segal begins, with the feeling that The power of motherhood, its dual function as knowledge and as desire, is as yet largely unwritten’ (p. 9). References Armstrong, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Peter (1984) Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Homans, Margaret (1986) Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-century Women’s Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irigaray, Luce (1982) Speculum of the Other Woman, (trans. Gillian C.Gill), Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wyatt, Jean (1990) Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women’s Reading and Writing, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF AUSTRALIA IAN SAUNDERS

■ Ross Gibson, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). Of the many successes in critical and cultural theory of the two decades leading up to (say) the Gulf War, none perhaps was as absolute as the rout of essentialism. One by one the touchstones of essential identity gave away as the author was killed, the subject interpellated, and the world itself reissued in the form of the hyper-real. It was a glittering victory, one quickly institutionalized within the humanities departments of progressive universities where constructionism became (not without irony) the a priori order of the day. All triumph suffers reversal, of course, and for many Western, male intellectuals the Gulf War was the sticking point; here, striking evidence of the extent to which the real had indeed found a kind of sublimation in something like an arcade video game, complete with ‘smart’ weapons, high-tech control and CAD visuals, was slowly and confusedly undone by the more sombre evidence of the uncomfortably low-tech outcomes of good old-fashioned dumb weapons, brutal ethnic violence, and massive environmental destruction. Touted as the first media war, a kind of ethereal, electronic conflict, it turned out in the end to be as solidly corporeal as any other war, and that in turn was read as cause enough to abandon the postmodern, video-crazed epistemic laissez-faire in favour of the virtues of sober realism, together with the essentialism thought to be thereby entailed. The difficulty in this reversal, quite apart from the way it so readily becomes available for appropriation by the champions of a conservative cultural politics that rejects ‘theory’ as self-evidently malign, is that in recognizing—or


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


recollecting—that life has irreducibly material dimensions which cannot without distortion be rendered as an effect of the discursive economy, we too easily forget the real formative and disciplinary power that none the less resides in the discursive. The Gulf War was material enough, but the passion to engage in it, directly or vicariously, was fuelled by the very stuff of discourse, a heady mix of national honour, religious identity and suppressed guilt. The danger of not seeing the material at all, that is to say, has been displaced by the danger of seeing nothing else. The salient virtue of Ross Gibson’s ambitious South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia is that in intent it is alert to both dangers. It refuses any notion of authentic national identity, insisting instead on the range of ways in which ‘Australia’ has been discursively constructed, but simultaneously remains alert to the importance of seeing the nexus between such constructions and the material dimensions of the social and environmental. Gibson introduces his material with the broad thesis that we are entering a third phase in the imagining of Australia. The first phase, the picture current before Western settlement, was that of the unspoilt paradise, an Eden marvellously exempt from the misfortunes of the West. Settlement brought disappointment; to cope the second phase introduced a revised picture, the ‘Australian sublime’, and with it ‘a collection of tales about mysteries that defeat yet ennoble the reader’: Voss’s ironic apotheosis, Pine Gap’s inscrutability, innumerable lost children haunting the Outback of legend, Azaria Chamberlain’s unaccountability, Lassiter’s chimeric reef, and Leichhardt’s bleaching bones. (p. 17) Gibson sees evidence that we have moved beyond this negative, and essentially disabling vision, and suggests we now think of the landscape ‘not as something unapproachably sublime, but as something to be learned from, something respectable rather than awesome.’ It is an appealing schema, and one could only wish that it was one the text was able to substantiate. Gibson’s compositional strategy is to range over an eclectic collection of cultural texts and text-types: from Thomas Watling’s Letters from an Exile at Botany Bay to the films of Chris Marker, from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. The putative guiding constraint is that of the book’s title: these are all Western texts that in some way construct Australia or, at least, construct a land of the South. If the result is an unusually varied selection, it is also, I would have to say, a less than compelling one. Gibson may well have some interesting things to say about Chris Marker or Poe, but it is far from easy to see how they could add to a study which claims as a subtitle ‘Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia’, and in any case there is little attempt to make a case. The section on Marker follows

THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF AUSTRALIA 405

that on Watling’s Botany Bay letters. By way of a link Gibson writes, not uncharacteristically: In the weeks before drafting this essay before you, I’ve been immersed in the commentary on Letters from an Exile, although at the time I did not know that the Marker material would demand to be allied to Watling. Let me give a new and brief account of Watling’s writing. The reiteration does have a purpose—so bear with me, please, as we tarry a little. (p. 43) I wish I could report the tarrying a fruitful exercise, or that ‘a purpose’ was duly revealed, but for all my efforts the only ‘demand’ on evidence was the tacit one, to get the material in, come what may. One remains unenlightened as to what the French film-maker’s work has to say to the transported Englishman, or indeed to the ‘South’ at all. It is not that one can’t compare the two; after all, anything can be compared with everything else, and to insist doggedly on taxonomic propriety is inevitably stultifying. None the less (or, hence), that one can make a comparison does not in itself render it persuasive. That remains the task at hand. Gibson’s writing, unfortunately, tends to assume the reverse. The operative rule seems to be that if a connection can be imagined, one is probably justified in making it. Thus, for example: ‘Given Chris Marker’s predilection for the exotic, the paradoxical, and the doubtful, it is clear that his lineage must be traced back to Montaigne’ (p. 51). ‘Clear’…or simply possible? Why not the sophists? The surrealists? The templars, the rosicrucians? Why not any group interested in the occult, the non-natural, the foreign? Indeed, if this is all it takes to establish ‘lineage’, why not just about anyone at all? The ‘tracing’ Gibson offers seems drastically under-determined, and badly needing the argued evidence that might make it compelling, just as there seems little convincing reason to support that Marker ‘demanded’ Watling, or that (to take a later example), Mad Max III demands to be read in terms of the Baroque. In a like way, Poe’s ‘A Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ is ‘about’ going South, to be sure, so there seems at least an initial plausibility in supposing it to be about or exemplifying the West’s construction of the ‘South’. That is, until one remembers another Poe tale, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, set on the coast of Norway, but telling a strikingly similar story. Taken together, it would appear that both are but superficially about specific locations: ‘A Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ is no more about Australia than ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ is about Norway. Rather, their motivating impulse seems the psychic ground they hold in common. (That they have little to do with actual places is arguably confirmed by the way they recently have been recycled in the children’s computer quest game King’s Quest VI, which is about nowhere at all.) The most astounding example of faith in the principle that if you can say it, it’s so, is the discussion of archival photographs of Kanakas. Gibson reproduces three, prefaced with the question, ‘How am I to account for the transfixing quality I find in so many of the Kanaka photos from the minimally catalogued


photo collection of the John Oxley Library in Brisbane?’ (p. 128). This soon becomes rewritten pragmatist/postmodern style: ‘How could I dream up plausible stories to explain why these particular images catch me so piquantly in the context of my reading and viewing in South West Pacific history?’ (p. 131). One of the photos depicts three Kanaka men, another a man and a woman. Gibson relates the history of another Kanaka couple, Luke and Orrani Lugomier, who both died in 1919 in the influenza epidemic. There is a terrible sense of irony in Orrani and Luke’s death,’ Gibson writes; ‘after surviving one viral incursion of the West into South Pacific life, these “model” immigrants succumbed to a rheum brought back, let’s say, by a foot soldier son of a pastoralist from Rockhampton who himself survived a battle fought, in another hemisphere, over issues of national expediency, bearing no specific relation to the South Pacific region’ (p. 132). It is a story well told, and the invented detail a nice flourish, but do we really need the speculation that the photo of the anonymous couple ‘could just possibly be Orrani and Luke, healthy some time before 1919’? After all, it most likely is not. Or that the three men in the other photo may well be suffering the onset of the epidemic that Luke survived in 1884, prompting us to ‘wonder about advising the John Oxley librarians to estimate the dating of the picture as ca. 1884?’ (p. 133). Gibson does not reveal whether or not he tendered this ‘advice’, and one can’t but wonder how it might be received as evidence of the outcome of public funds invested in university research; disturbingly, though, the point of the chapter seems to be to make just these fanciful identifications. That one can do so is not at issue; the question is, what is achieved? How can making a claim that is almost certainly untrue tell us anything? Towards the end of the book, Gibson begins a new section with a quotation from a poem by Frank O’Hara, which he follows with the plaintive question: ‘Why is it that each time I try to make a start about Australian culture, I come up with a quote from a dead American poet?’ (p. 198). For once, though, I would have to say I am wholly persuaded by the answer provided. Part of it is that, for us, American culture is the dominant mass. But that is not all. In addition: ‘Part of the answer must lie in the way you get used to commandeering whatever drifts through your ambit when there is no singular, exclusive institution or epistemology ruling your musing.’ Or, as Richard Rorty puts it, for the pragmatist, what we choose to call intellectual ‘enlightenment’ is simply the contingent result ‘of encounters with various books which happen to fall into one’s hands’ (1992:92). Maybe so; the outcome in this case, though, does nothing to justify Gibson’s initial claim that we are entering a new phase in our understanding of nation and environment, nothing to clarify the difficulties that beset the attempt to understand the interactive relation between discursive practices and material circumstance. Rather we get, inevitably, something like a bibliographical autobiography, an album of ‘musing’ prompted by a miscellany of texts that have drifted past. The result is not without interest, but the questions posed at the outset remain undisturbed. In fact the critical issue is not why


Gibson finds himself coming up with a ‘dead American poet’ every time he tries ‘to make a start about Australian culture’, it is whether the recognition that there is ‘no singular, exclusive institution or epistemology’ with absolute authority is necessarily as disabling as it appears to have been here. In short, is epistemological pragmatism as bad as all that? But that is a question with which this text, despite its insistent reflexivity, is not interested. References Rorty, Richard (1992) ‘The pragmatist’s progress’, in Umberto Eco Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge University Press.

COMIC CUTS MARTIN BARKER

■ Greg McCue with Clive Bloom, Dark Knights: the New Comics in Context (London: Pluto Press, 1993) ISBN 0 7453 0662 4, £30.00 Hbk; ISBN 0 7453 0663 2, £9.95 Pbk, 154pp. ■ Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993) ISBN 0 415 0441 89, £35.00 Hbk, ISBN 0 415 0441 97, £9.99 Pbk, 321pp. Here are two almost simultaneous books, each offering to give an introduction to, and set an agenda for thinking about, the transformation of a medium: from comics (meaning: funny, childish, low-grade ‘entertainment’) to graphic novels (meaning: serious, dark, complex, adult ‘cultural meanings’). Two books which manage to have almost nothing in common, in materials covered, in style, in conceptualization and in arguments. As more people try to come to terms with this increasingly visible sector of cultural production, what’s to choose between them? Cards on the table at the beginning: without a shade of reservation, I recommend Sabin every time. If we treat the books as a pair, it is almost as if McCue produces a series of overexcited juvenile judgements, for Sabin to reduce them judiciously to rubble; Sabin’s book stands as a gentle admonition to McCue’s, which is dreadfully flatulent. The contrast really couldn’t be greater, and it begins with the definition of what has to be studied. According to Bloom, introducing and hyping McCue, ‘It is a truism, perhaps now forgotten, that comic books are especially “American”, even if not created by American artists’ (p. xii). McCue himself asserts that ‘comic books owe their genesis to the New York newspapers of the 1890s’ (p. 8). Now this is just sheer bad scholarship, apart from anything else, showing McCue’s weak dependence on a few fan-directed histories of American comics, histories that are not a little involved in the American comics industry’s own self-inflation.


© 1995 Routledge 0950–2386


It is also risky politics. That kind of self-inflation is connected to a very selfjustificatory style in many American popular cultural studies. Such studies began earlier in America than in Britain, and in quite a different context. There, they formed the counterpoint to McCarthyism; if communism was that alien ideology, imposed by deception, lying and propaganda, then American popular culture, embodying everything from songs, grave-markings and quilts to comic books, was rich, diverse and wholesome. It actually isn’t possible to understand a number of curious incidents in comics’ history if this point is not taken seriously: the virtual refusal of all the campaigners against the ‘crime and horror comics’ to indict the publishers as communists, even though the campaign took place at the height of McCarthyism; yet the space existed for one of the publishers, EC’s Bill Gaines, jokingly to accuse the campaigners of being ‘Red Dupes’ because they were attacking ‘American culture’. Sabin tells quite a different story. Drawing (among other things) on the superb work of David Kunzle (The Early History of the Comic Strip, vols I & II), he shows the origin of comics in a nineteenth-century international culture of satire, which spawned the Paris Charivari, and the London Punch for instance as well as producing a rich publication tradition from artists such as Rudolph Topfler and Gustav Dore. For complicated reasons, at the end of the last century, the international tradition shattered into a series of separate national traditions, at the same time (in most countries) being turned into a children’s medium. Not only most of the European countries, but Australia, a number of Latin and South American countries developed strong and quite different local traditions. (The Japanese ‘manga’ tradition developed later, but also quite independently.) In some cases (notably Australia) that early industry was effectively killed by, among other things, American exports. In other cases, it proceeded quite independently, and is now being recognized by many American writers and artists as a major new source of inspiration. Sabin, to his considerable credit, not only avoids the standard story, but provides an effective critique of it. He traces the diverse histories of a number of different countries, including Britain’s (though that is better known than a number of others). He does not, it is true, explore the significance of the national separation of traditions—a point I shall come back to later. The aim of his story is the recovery of the ‘lost history’ of adult comics. Again, the contrast could hardly be sharper. McCue’s general picture is of America’s rich culture originating the comics, but first just in limited forms for its children. Now, in the last twenty years, the industry has unprecedentedly grown up and ‘the creators have taken over’: Comic books are no longer restrained by any rules other than those generated by the medium. There are only the relationships between words and pictures and artists and audiences. The evolution of comic books from a stunted, retarded medium with only one genre, only one physical form and audience of perpetual children to one in which a full range of readers


from children to adults can enjoy graphic works which are both mature and intellectually satisfying has opened new directions for the comic books of the 1990s and beyond. (McCue, p. 66) This kind of self-indulgent celebration simply does not know its history, that there have been important waves of adult comics and adult readers of comics from the birth of this mass medium. Sabin gives detailed and in some cases new information on all these. Just as importantly, McCue does not seem to be at all aware of the political economy of modern comics. So, he does not notice the crude forms of market domination indulged in by Marvel and DC, does not see the power relations in the ‘celebration of the creators’ now endemic in the industry, is not at all aware of the sharp debates in the industry itself about the often sadistic imaging of women in these ‘adult’ works. In other words, McCue seems to be so caught up in the industry’s selfcelebrations, he is quite incapable of questioning anything about the mode of production of comics, or the power relations of the industry. Some simple examples of the things that have passed him by, because of his involvement in fan perspectives: he does not know of Thomas Andrae’s work on the early history of Superman, showing that DC deliberately stripped the character of his early New Deal radicalism. He does not even acknowledge the existence of the Underground Comix of the late 1960s, which had major effects on the whole comics industry, not least in that they introduced the idea of creator-owned characters. Everything for him is moving in a happy teleology to the creation of the new adult superheroes—as if there are no questions to be asked about their vigilantism, their flirting with right-wing politics. Sabin, on the other hand, takes us beyond the hype, to look at the ways in which the whole rhetoric of ‘new adult comics’ served as an industry marketing ploy: In 1986–7 the term ‘graphic novel’ entered common parlance with the success of the album versions of Dark Knight, Watchmen and Maus. Since then, it has become emblematic of the comics renaissance generally, and the ‘adult revolution’ in particular. Overnight, it was claimed, comics had developed from cheap throwaway children’s fare to expensive album-form novels for adults to keep on bookshelves. But of course the story was not that simple. On one level, as a piece of marketing hype, the idea of an evolution from ‘comics’ to ‘graphic novels’ had a specific purpose—to add prestige to the form and thus to sell more product…. But on another level, the graphic novel is a definable category of comic that can be said to have a history of its own. Just as comics did not ‘grow up’ in the 1980s, so too the graphic novel has a much longer history. (Sabin, p. 235) What is so excellent with Sabin, and not just by comparison with McCue, is the careful awareness that everything about comics is particularly subject to cultural


predefinitions: the histories we are told, the definitions of the medium, the criteria for good and bad product, and so on. If I have a complaint about Sabin’s book, it is that it is too judicious. It is so thorough in its coverage, so careful in its judgements, that it can be quite hard to see what are the questions we need to ask next. It can feel as if the introduction has become the full work. Yet there are a host of important questions that can be raised on the back of Sabin’s work. For example, as I noted earlier, it seems to me that there is an important question to be asked about that period after the separation into national traditions, what role comics played in the (re-)formation of national sensibilities. This is especially important since comics in that period operated with and through archetypical characters, simple psychological stickfigures who could encapsulate ‘national types’. Sabin, for example, reminds us of a figure who is surprisingly missing from Raphael Samuel’s gallery of English national types, in his introduction (‘Exciting to be English’) to one of the volumes of Patriotism: Ally Sloper. Sabin recalls just how long this figure of the bone-headed, drunk but loyal Englishman survived, and how large an industry of merchandising and memorabilia he generated. From time to time, comics—because of their cultural placement— seem to have been in a position to produce characters who can ‘speak’ the ideological requirements of their time. One of the curious things about the inflated ‘renaissance’ of comics now is that comics seem to be losing this place and this capacity. Speaking now much more to an obsessively in-turned fanaudience, they radiate less into the rest of their culture than ever before. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but it certainly was productive. Again, Sabin judiciously introduces us to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, one of the most unusual of the new wave of comics in being a study of his father’s survival of the concentration camps. Spiegelman has caused some ripples of debate by his representation of the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, and the Poles as pigs. What Sabin does not give us is any sense of where to go next in exploring this brilliant story. To do so, we would need to bring in, for example, the insights of Steve Baker’s Picturing the Beast, which explores the use of animal imagery in Maus. To do so, would, I suspect, add a new dimension to Sabin’s argument, for we would see that Spiegelman could only have produced this story from within a comic-book tradition, in which anthropomorphic animals have been able to ‘stand in’ for human characteristics with ease. These are just two of a host of examples where Sabin could provide a springboard to some rich investigations. To make best use of his book therefore we need to develop a critical perspective that can take us beyond his excellent introduction. But what we get from him, is a rich, full and textured argument that does us a great service. What we get from the other is a con.

Notes on Contributors

MARTIN BARKER teaches in the Department of Humanities, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK… NANDINI BHATTACHARYA is an Assistant Professor, Valpariso University… DAVID BLEICH is a Professor in the Department of English, University of Rochester… WARREN CRICHLOW is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, Teaching and Curriculum, University of Rochester… STEPHEN DAVID is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana… MARY ANN DOYLE is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education, University of Wisconsin at Stout… SUSAN HUDDLESTON EDGERTON is an Assistant Professor in Teaching Curriculum and Evaluation, University of Illinois at Chicago… HERIBERTO GODINA is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Urbana… JOY JAMES is in the Women’s Studies Department, University of Massachusetts at Amherst… HEIDI KAYE lectures in the Department of English, Media and Cultural Studies at DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK… CAMERON McCARTHY is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Urbana… SARA MARKGRAF writes about film and teaches at Barnard College, New York, USA… JENNA MEAD teaches at the Department of English, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia… JOYCE IRENE MIDDLETON is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Rochester… PHILLIP M. RICHARDS is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… ALICIA RODRIGUEZ is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana… IAN SAUNDERS teaches at the Department of English at the University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Australia… ROBIN SMALL-McCARTHY is in the Department of Theater, Syracuse University… K.E.SUPRIYA is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana… RINALDO WALCOTT is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education… CARRIE WILSON-BROWN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute for Communication Research, University of Illinois at Urbana…

Other journals in the field of cultural studies

There has been a rapid increase in the number of journals operating both in the field of cultural studies and in overlapping areas of interest. Cultural Studies wants to keep its readers informed of the work being done by these journals. After all, cultural studies is a collective project. JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION (JIC) Naren Chitty PhD. Managing Editor. The Journal of International Communication, c/o International Communication Program, Mass Communication Department, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia). Issue 1(1) 1994, Gulf & beyond: broadcasting international crises Contents: Introduction: Naren Chitty. Features: Hamid Mowlana Shapes of the Future: International Communication in the Twenty-first Century; Roland Robertson Globalisation or Glocalisation?; Irving Goldstein Broadcasting International Crises: retrospect and prospect; McKenzie Wark Vectoral Perception and Cultural Studies: essaying the gulf in global media perception; Brian M.Murphy Addressing Crises Through New Channels in the Post-NWICO Era: alternative news agencies, and the computer networks of non-governmental organizations; Eric Louw South African Television Experiences of the Barcelona Olympics: distortion of an international communication event by local crises. Review: Gina Bailey Revolution Through Narrative. COLLEGE LITERATURE Special issue 21(3) October 1994: The Politics of Teaching Literature 2 Contents: Symposium: the Subject of Pedagogical Politics/the Politics of Publication: Jerry McGuire Introduction: Wagging the Dog: Mas’ud Zavarzadeh The Pedagogy of Pleasure 2: The Me-in-Crisis; Paul Maltby, Mike Hill, Michael Bernard-Donals, Alan France, Four Readers’ Reports; Mas’ud Zavarzadeh Reading My Readers; Paul Maltby Muting the Countervoices: Zavarzadeh’s Pedagogy of Critique; Mike Hill Being Red and Misread…; Michael BernardDonals Reading ‘Reading My Readers’: An Oppositional Response; Alan France Response to ‘Reading My Readers’; Patrick Colm Hogan Why We Should Not Set Out to Politicize the Classroom: An Anarchist Response to the Debate over Pleasure and Critique; Holly Laird Reviewing Reviewing; Kathleen McCormick Determination/Agency, Critique/Legitimation: Difference and


Dialogue in Classroom Practice, or, What’s Left When the Lefter-Than-ThouSpeak Stops?; Ronald Strickland The Autonomous Individual and the Anonymous Referee; Jeffrey Williams Where Do We Go from Here? A Question of the Left; Mas’ud Zavarzadeh ‘The Stupidity that Consumption is Just as Productive as Production’: In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left; Works Cited in the Symposium. Essays: Brook Thomas Teaching the Conflicts in the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine; Jody Norton Guerilla Pedagogy: Conflicting Authority and Interpretation in the Classroom; Daniel Bonevac What Multiculturalism Should Not Be; Christopher Wise The Case for Jameson, or, Towards a Marxian Pedagogy of World Literature. Notes and comments: Catherine R.Stimpson Can Things Ever Be Perfectly Correct?; Graham Huggan V.S.Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate. Review Essays: Kathryn Murphy Anderson Recent Conversations with Paulo Freire. Review of Miguel Escobar et al., Paulo Freire on Higher Education: A Dialogue at the National University of Mexico; and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the City; Sam B.Girgus Representative Men: Unfreezing the Male Gaze. Review of Pam Cook and Philip Dodd, eds., Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader; Stephen Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema\ Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production; and Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins. Book Reviews: James R.Bennett Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War, Jennifer M.Cotter Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter; J.Randolph Cox and Brian Kenknight Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction, Laura Lambdin James Moffett, Harmonic Learning: Keynoting School Reform; Patrick McHugh Peter N. Stearns, Meaning over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History; Madhava Prasad Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. SOCIAL IDENTITIES A Journal on Race, Nation, and Culture Call for Papers Contributions are invited for submissions that fall within the scope of this new international journal (two issues per year, first issue January 1995). Please submit either Abebe Zegeye, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, 21 Winchester Road, Oxford OX2 6NA, UK, or David Theo Goldberg, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287–0403, USA. Recent years have witnessed considerable worldwide changes concerning social identities like race, nation, and ethnicity, as well as the emergence of new forms of racism and nationalism as discriminatory exclusions. Attendant to these changes is a new body of academic work appearing in a wide range of journals. The aim of Social Identities is to furnish an interdisciplinary and international focal point for theorizing issues at the interface of social identities. The journal is

OTHER JOURNALS 415

especially concerned to address these issues in the context of the transforming political economies and cultures of post-modern and postcolonial conditions. The journal is intended as a forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities like race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and class, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power, as well as the political and cultural possibilities these identifications open up. The journal will include a Current Debate section involving concise critical contributions on controversial issues concerning social identities. Submissions to this section are welcome also. Books for review should be directed either to Nahum Chandler, Department of English, Duke University, Durham NC 27708, USA or to Julia Maxted, Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Institutional subscriptions are US $98 (£58) per year. Regular individual subscriptions are $44 (£25) per year. Postage is free. Orders for Members of Association members: Subscriptions for individuals who are members of the ASA are $20 (£12) per year. Associational members should make their subscriptions payable to Carfax Publishing Co. and mail it to Professor David Goldberg, School of Justice Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287–0403. Orders for Non-Association members: By mail: Carfax Publishing Company, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 3UE, UK or Carfax Publishing Company, PO Box 2025, Dunnellon, Florida 34430– 2025 USA. By fax: UK: +44 (0) 235 553559 US and Canada: +1 904 489 6996 By telephone: Britain: +44 (0) 235 521154 (worldwide, 24 hours, 7 days per week) Conferences The Australian National University Humanities Research Centre Visiting Research Fellowships 1996: Further Particulars Culture and Science The main theme for the HRC during 1996 will be ‘Culture and Science’, exploring dialogues between various strands of the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences in both western and non-western social contexts. Early in July the Humanities Research Centre will host and co-sponsor the Tenth David Nicol Smith Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies, convened by Dr Gillian Russell and Dr Ian Higgins of the English Department, Faculty of Arts, ANU. The theme ‘Margins and Metropolis: Literature, Culture and Science, 1660–1830’ takes its inspiration from John Brewer’s recent contention that whilst


the effects of the core on the periphery or of metropole on empire are much discussed, we know little of how imperial and other cultural ‘margins’ influenced ‘the formation of identities and the ways in which the national, regional, linguistic, ethnic and religious allegiances came to clash or converge.’ Science, as well as literature, was a key site of this cultural interaction. This will be followed later in July by a conference in honour of Bernard Smith, Australia’s most distinguished art critic and theorist, whose work has been fundamentally concerned with the dialogue between art and anthropology, particularly in relation to Antipodean settler colonialism and the history of representations of non-European peoples in the Pacific. Entitled ‘Beyond colonialism: a seminar on art history and anthropology in honour of Bernard Smith’, this conference will focus on ideas, representations and traditions of art and anthropology in colonial, postcolonial (especially southeast Asian and Pacific) and indigenous Pacific contexts. The conference will work in cooperation with the National Gallery of Australia and will be convened by Dr Nicholas Thomas, Anthropology, ANU. In late August/early September a third conference entitled ‘Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Traditions’ will be held jointly with James Cook University and Deakin University’s Sciences in Society Centre. This conference (which also incorporates the Sixth Comparative Scientific Traditions Conference), will be based at the Cairns Campus of James Cook University; it aims to bring together scholars in the humanities and custodians/practitioners/ analysts of indigenous sciences to reflect upon relations between indigenous and western cognitive traditions. Its themes will include the fortunes of indigenous knowledges and technologies in the wake of southern hemisphere colonialism (in the Antipodes, the Pacific, Africa and Asia) and the ways in which these knowledges have influenced western intellectual products and practices since the seventeenth century. The conveners are particularly interested in papers which address the uses and understandings of flora, fauna, land, intellectual and cultural property and bio-technologies. It is anticipated that experts in traditional knowledges from northern Aboriginal and Islander communities will be participating. Dr Paul Turnbull, History, James Cook University, Townsville, Ms Henrietta Fourmile, Aboriginal Studies, James Cook University, Cairns, and Dr David Turnbull, Sciences in Society Centre, Deakin University, will convene the conference. Our final conference, The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences’, will be held at the HRC in Canberra around mid-September. Here the focus is on the connections, conflicts and/or interactions between natural and social knowledges, cosmologies and belief systems. The conveners, Professor Roy Porter of the Wellcome Institute for the Study of Medicine and Dr Dorothy Porter of Birkbeck College, London, envisage a broad and inclusive definition of social sciences so as to encompass scholars working on such subjects as the relations between science and religion, science and gender, and science and history.

OTHER JOURNALS 417

Further enquiries about Visiting Fellowships, and about the year as a whole, should be made to the Director or Associate Director, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia, Fax +61 6 2480054. Trajectories II A New Internationalist Cultural Studies Conference Nationalism, Transnationalism, Neo-Colonialism and Post-nation-state Imaginary in the Age of Global Capital—The Transformation of Cultural Power in Taiwan, the ‘Third World’ and the Asia-Pacific Date and Place: January 9–24, 1995, Yue-han Lecture Hall, National Tsing Hua University Taipei/Hsinchu, Taiwan Sponsors: Center for Cultural Studies/Institute of Literature National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan Co-sponsor: Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies Participants: Keynote Speaker: Professor Renato Constantino, Philippine Meaghan Morris (Sydney) Ashis Nandy (New Dehli) Kinhide Mushakoji (Yokohama) Chua Beng Huat (Singapore) Ariel Herayonto (Indonesia) Cindy Patton (Philadelphia) Hanno Hardt (Iowa city) Eric Louw (South Africa) Marshall Johnson (Wisconsin) Stephen Muecke (Sydney) Kogawa Tetsuo (Tokyo) Lii Ding-Tzann (Hsinchu) Yu-tien Shin (British Columbia) Stephen Chan (Hong Kong) Briankle Chang (Amherst) Annie Goldson (New Zealand) Colin Mercer (Brisbane) Chin-chuan Lee (Minneapolis) David Morley (London) Andre Frankovits (Sydney) Muto Ichiyo (Tokyo) Chu, Wan-wen (Taipei) Wang, Jenn-Hwan (Taichung) Huang Yu-siao (Taipei) Lu Cheng-hui (Hsinchu) Lucie Chen (Taipei) Chih-chung Yu (Hsinchu)

Obi Igwara (London) Masao Miyoshi (San Diego, CA) Ghassan Hage (Sydney) Edward Chien (Hong Kong) Surichai WunGaeo (Thailand) Martin Allor (Montreal) Yung-ho Im (Korea) Kenneth Dean (Montreal) Colleen Lye (Berkeley) Paul Willemen (London) Law Weng-seng (Hong Kong) Fred Y.L.Chiu (Hong Kong) Hsu Da-Nan (Chicago) Sandra Buckley (Brisbane) Chris Berry (Melbourne) Brian Massumi (Brisbane/Montreal) Naoki Sakai (Ithaca) Leonard Chu (Hong Kong) Tani Barlow (Seattle) Kin-chi Lau (Hong Kong) Eduardo Tadem (Manila/HongKong) Wu Chuan-Yuan (Hsinchu) Hsieh Kuo-hsung (Taipei) Chao Gun (Taichung) Sechin Y.S.Chien (Taipei) Naifei Ding (Chungli) Tsun-shing Chen (Hsinchu)


Jeng Tsuen-chyi (Taipei)

Hsia Chu-joe (Taipei) and Others

Correspondence: Kuan-Hsing Chen, Center for Cultural Studies and Institute of Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan; fax: 886–35–723– 692; e-mail: [email protected]

420

421

Editorial Board

EDITORS Lawrence Grossberg Janice Radway

University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill Duke University

USA USA

ASSISTANT EDITORS Stephen Crofts Wiley Mark J.Olson

University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

USA USA

BOOK REVIEW EDITORS John Frow Tim O’Sullivan Jennifer Daryi Slack

University of Queensland de Montfort University Michigan Technological University

Australia UK USA

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Charles Acland Martin Allor Ien Ang Tony Bennett Jody Berland Georgina Born Hazel V.Carby Angie Chabram-Dernersesian Dipesh Chakrabarty Iain Chambers Kuan-Hsing Chen John Clarke James Clifford Jennifer Craik

Queen’s University Concordia University Murdoch, University Griffith University York University Goldsmiths’ College Yale University University of California-Davis University of Melbourne Istituto Universitario Orientale National Tsing Hua University The Open University University of California-Santa Cruz Griffith University

Canada Canada Australia Australia Canada UK USA USA Australia Italy Taiwan UK USA Australia

EDITORIAL BOARD 423

Lidia Curti Richard Dyer Katarina Eskola Jane Feuer John Fiske Keya Ganguly Paul Gilroy Henry A.Giroux Andrew Goodwin Herman Gray John Hartley Sut Jhally Lata Mani Angela McRobbie Dave Morley Meaghan Morris Stephen Muecke Elspeth Probyn Andrew Ross Bill Schwarz Will Straw Andrew Tolson Graeme Turner Gail Valaskakis Michele Wallace Peter Wicke Janet Wolff

Istituto Universitario Orientale Warwick University University of Jyvaskyla Universityof Pittsburgh University of Wisconsin-Madison Carnegie Mellon University Goldsmiths’ College Penn State University University of San Francisco University of California-Santa Cruz Murdoch University University of Massachusetts University of California-Davis Ealing College Goldsmiths’ College (Independent) University of Technology University of Montreal New York University Polytechnic of East London Carleton University Queen Margaret College University of Queensland Concordia University The City College of New York Humboldt University University of Rochester

Italy UK Finland USA USA USA UK USA USA USA Australia USA USA UK UK Australia Australia Canada USA UK Canada UK Australia Canada USA Germany USA

Cultural Studies: Volume 9 Issue 2: Special issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum, edited by Warren Crichton and Cameron McCarthy

Cultural Studies: Volume 3, Issue 2 (Cultural Studies Journal)

Cultural Studies: Volume 4, Issue 1

Textual Practice: Volume 9 Issue 2

Cultural Studies: Volume 3, Issue 1 (Cultural Studies Journal)

Cultural Studies V2 Issue 1

The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia

Education After 9 11: A Special Issue of educational Studies

Tiger I (2): Ground Power Special Issue

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

Water Research Volume 45 Issue 9

Connections and Symbols (Cognition Special Issue)

Connections and Symbols (Cognition Special Issue)

Management Decision - Volume 43 Issue 4 (2005) - Special Issue: Chinese management: reflections, trends and opportunities

Star Quack Issue 2

Groundings, issue 2, 2008

Biblický slovník issue 2

Applied Linguistics, volume 31, issue 2 , 2010

OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2010 Issue 2

Spatial Economic Analysis - Volume 1, Issue 2

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Issue 2

Germ Wars (Scientific American Special Online Issue No. 9)

The Classroom Facilitator: Special Issue Questions

Grey Room 7, Spring 2002, Special issue on 9 11

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 32, Issue 2, April 2009

Development and Reasoning: A Special Issue of Thinking & Reasoning (Thinking & Reasoning, Volume 10, Issue 2, May 2004)

Library Management - Volume 26 Issue 4 5 2005: Special issue on the Semantic Web

Energy Prices and Taxes, Volume 2011 Issue 2

Alcohol And the Gastrointestinal Tract: Special Issue: Digestive Diseases 2005

The Muslim World: A Special Issue on Islam and Buddhism

Cultural Studies: Volume 9 Issue 2: Special issue: Toni Morrison and the Curriculum, edited by Warren Crichton and Cameron McCarthy

Cultural Studies: Volume 3, Issue 2 (Cultural Studies Journal)

Cultural Studies: Volume 4, Issue 1

Textual Practice: Volume 9 Issue 2

Cultural Studies: Volume 3, Issue 1 (Cultural Studies Journal)

Cultural Studies V2 Issue 1

The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia

Education After 9 11: A Special Issue of educational Studies

Tiger I (2): Ground Power Special Issue

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

Water Research Volume 45 Issue 9

Connections and Symbols (Cognition Special Issue)

Connections and Symbols (Cognition Special Issue)

Management Decision - Volume 43 Issue 4 (2005) - Special Issue: Chinese management: reflections, trends and opportunities

Star Quack Issue 2

Groundings, issue 2, 2008

Biblický slovník issue 2

Applied Linguistics, volume 31, issue 2 , 2010

OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2010 Issue 2

Spatial Economic Analysis - Volume 1, Issue 2

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Issue 2

Germ Wars (Scientific American Special Online Issue No. 9)

The Classroom Facilitator: Special Issue Questions

Grey Room 7, Spring 2002, Special issue on 9 11

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 32, Issue 2, April 2009

Development and Reasoning: A Special Issue of Thinking & Reasoning (Thinking & Reasoning, Volume 10, Issue 2, May 2004)

Library Management - Volume 26 Issue 4 5 2005: Special issue on the Semantic Web

Energy Prices and Taxes, Volume 2011 Issue 2

Alcohol And the Gastrointestinal Tract: Special Issue: Digestive Diseases 2005

The Muslim World: A Special Issue on Islam and Buddhism

Recommend Documents