These visions are traditional. I knew them by heart as did the rest of the congregation, but it was exciting to see how the converts would handle them. Some of them made up details. Some of them would forget a part and improvise clumsily or fill up the gap with shouting. The audience knew, but everybody acted as if every word of it was new.
– Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Every literary work faces outward away from itself, toward the listener-reader, and to a certain extent thus anticipates possible reactions to itself.
– Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
I have to provide the places and spaces so that the reader can participate.
– Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation”
In the introduction to one of Toni Morrison’s often-cited interviews, critic Claudia Tate observed that “while her stories seem to unfold with natural ease, the reader can discern the great care Morrison has taken in constructing them.”1 Over the span of nearly thirty years, from The Bluest Eye in 1970 to Paradise in 1998, the Nobel Laureate has not only continued to take great care in the construction of each novel, but she has also commented on the role of the reader in the construction of meaning. In fact, in one interview, Morrison says, “[t]o make the story appear oral, meandering, effortless, spoken – to have the reader feel the narrator without identifying that narrator, or hearing him or her knock about, and to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book – is what’s important. What is left out is as important as what is there.”2 Indeed, as readers have attempted to explicate, analyze, critique, and evaluate Toni Morrison’s writing, some have lamented about the challenges her novels pose for the reader, while others take pride in filling in the hermeneutic gaps with the historical, cultural, and political meanings they believe her stories invoke. To assess the significance of Morrison’s novels, it is critical to interrogate how her narrative aesthetic and cultural politics have shaped spaces for readers to enter her texts and how an even larger, diverse body of interpretations have emerged from the community of readers than she might have ever anticipated. An examination of the seven novels published between 1970 and 1998 reveals that the narrative and literal spaces of her texts are a window into her narrative poetics, her cultural politics, and many of her ideas on the meaning of life itself.
Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), actually focuses the reader on domestic space as represented in an elementary school primer. The meanings of house and home circulate throughout all of her novels, but in the first novel of her literary career, the house has some particular meanings that foreshadow the story inside the body of the novel. First, it frames the story of how racial difference affects the social dynamics of the community where the MacTeers and Breedloves live. Most readers recall Dick and Jane primers with pictures of blond-haired white people and no people of color whatsoever. The novel can be read as an exploration of the psychic consequences, particularly for black girls, of being marginalized, not only in the earliest textbooks used in elementary schools, but also in their everyday lives both in and outside school. The domestic space of their home, therefore, was a possible refuge, unless, of course, the inhabitants of the household had internalized the racial and racist views of the larger society, as the Breedloves did. Second, the references to house and home in the opening passage inscribe, through the literal spacing of words on the page, the ways in which language shapes, mirrors, and defies reality. Third, references to house and home in Morrison’s first novel focus on the space in which a black girl’s identity first comes into manifestation. Ironically, The Bluest Eye directs the reader’s attention to the act of reading itself; and the elementary primer suggests the schoolhouse as the space second to home where language takes on meaning, where a child must connect the signs and symbols with what they mean for her life. Thus, the movement from a perfectly grammatical passage, with appropriately placed spaces and punctuation, gives way to less space and appropriate punctuation, to no spaces between words. The order and apparent logic of the primer gives way to chaos, total disorder, and a loss of meaning that foreshadow Pecola Breedlove’s descent into madness after she endures incest, rape, pregnancy, and the illusion that blue eyes will make her beautiful.
Yet we enter the novel through the narrative voice of Claudia MacTeer, and it is through this narrator and her retrospective reading of Pecola’s demise, and the community’s complicity in that demise, that the reader learns the layers of meaning inscribed in this novel. The narrator’s ability to assess the fate of Pecola and the community, to tell the story in all its complex beauty and tragic ugliness, creates a new space for her to go on with her own life based on her illumined perspective, in sharp contradistinction to Pecola, whose descent into madness represents a freedom in her own mind, but a tragic enclosure inside the narrow spaces of disconnection from community and the larger society forever. By the time readers finish the novel, they have ventured into domestic spaces where economic depravity dictates when and how people love, where taboos of rape and incest traumatize and sabotage black girlhood, where racism in the larger world shapes and constrains the options men and women have to imagine themselves as whole, acceptable human beings, and where people both in and outside the community exploit the most vulnerable. But Morrison’s readers are not permitted the luxury of venturing into Claudia and Pecola’s respective worlds unscathed, as disinterested spectators or as mere eavesdroppers on someone else’s tragic story. Morrison deftly creates an intimacy between the narrator and the reader that she then disrupts with the plural pronouns, “we” and “our.” Of course, Claudia understands, at the end of the narrative, how she and her community are implicated in what happened to Pecola, but the repetitious, insistent use of the plural pronoun in the final paragraphs of the novel suggest that the reader may too be implicated:
All our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.3
By the time the reader comes to the end of this passage, she discovers how she may also be complicit in the condemnation and demise of an innocent child who has internalized the racial gaze into what Morrison calls “racial self-loathing.”4 In many regards, the novel lulls the reader into Pecola’s story only to shift, in the final pages, into exposing how the familiar phenomenon of scapegoating operates in the society at large. In other words, the reader is not allowed to get off the hook as a mere voyeur. Instead, Morrison writes the conclusion of the novel in such a way as to invite the reader to come to terms with his or her own “complicity in the demonization process Pecola was subjected to.”5 Nevertheless, the beauty of the prose and the clarity of the narrator’s understanding in retrospect what she did not understand as a child, all point to Morrison’s ability, even in her first novel, to help readers discern how art could be both “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”6
In Morrison’s second novel, Sula (1973), she creates a different kind of time and space. She leaves the world of children, literacy, and the complications that racism and poverty create for young people and moves on to the adult world of female friendship. But even this novel begins with an aesthetically riveting description of a place called the Bottom and illustrates how space gets racialized and shapes our understanding of our identity and the options available to us. Even before the reader meets Nel and Sula, the two protagonists, she learns about the social space that has transformed a black neighborhood into an exclusive country club. In a passage that describes a familiar form of regentrification, in which less economically able citizens are displaced by those who can afford to buy the land and force those who once claimed it as their own to relocate, Morrison seems almost prophetic in anticipating how urban phenomena are changing public and private spaces. Indeed, the text mirrors how many communities have had to grapple with the implications of such relocations of people and the attendant redistribution of resources throughout much of the last three decades of the twentieth century and the early months of the twenty-first century as well. The novel introduces the “nigger joke,” and the black people who were the brunt of it, to provide a historical and geographical context for the narrative that will follow. Having established this racialized context, however, she writes that the people had little time to be preoccupied with the racism that contributed to their fate or their location. Instead:
[t]hey were mightily preoccupied with earthly things – and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom.7
With these words, Morrison creates two different spaces at once for her readers. On one hand, the readers get a window into how black people in Medallion were reading the text of their own lives; on the other hand, readers learn that the text of their lives is much more complex than any racialized reading of it could contain. Thus, as early as her second novel, Morrison was already creating a space for her readers to consider simultaneously how race does and does not matter for the stories she needs to tell.
Once she introduces her readers to Medallion and to Shadrack, its most eccentric citizen, a shell-shocked World War I veteran who, when he returns from war, institutes a National Suicide Day, she then introduces Nel Wright, the friend of the woman for whom the novel is named. Morrison organizes this novel, therefore, by gradually moving the reader in from the neighborhood and its history into the particular story of two households and the daughters that emerge from them respectively. The reader learns about Nel’s oppressive household through her mother, through the layers of meaning available in how Helene treats her daughter, teaches her to conform, and contains her emergent sense of her identity. Morrison introduces the Peace household as one that is the antithesis of the order and containment of the Wright home. Sula’s wild and chaotic household with its seemingly endless stream of boarders and male lovers taught her virtually nothing about intimacy and love, but a great deal about sex and using men for entertainment purposes. While Nel is described as a girl whose strict mother “drove her imagination underground,” Sula’s personality is best summed up in the following description:
In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.8
Each an only child, when Nel and Sula meet, they feel the “ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other ‘to grow on.’”9
At the center of the novel, of course, is the story of a friendship gone awry, of gender politics both in and out of marriage, and of the consequences of life decisions. In prose that is at times poetic and riveting, Morrison enables her readers to bear witness to how these two women have read the choices their culture and community made available to them. Inside the text of the novel, she reveals how familiar intimate spaces such as home, marriage, and even friendship can estrange one from oneself and from others. By rendering such familiar spaces unfamiliar through a pariah figure such as Sula, Morrison challenges the readers’ notions of right and wrong, good and evil, even love and hate. For example, on her deathbed, despite the fact that she has slept with Jude, her friend’s husband, and broken the connection that made them friends, Sula asks Nel to consider that maybe she, not Nel, is the good one. Like Nel after Sula’s death, Morrison’s readers are left to question their own values, their own choices, and how their reading of others reveals more about who they are than they might suspect.
Song of Solomon (1977), Morrison’s third novel, moves literally and metaphorically in and out of space and time. With the folktale of flying Africans and the history of one family’s connection to that folktale at the center of the novel, Morrison constructs several spaces for the reader to come into a narrative of African and African American history and culture. In a style that will characterize Morrison’s later novels, Song of Solomon begins in medias res, literally bringing the reader into a space with no points of reference for understanding what is happening. As a consequence, the reader, like the onlookers down below, bears witness to Mr. Robert Smith’s leap into space from the top of Mercy Hospital without having much of a context for understanding the how and the why of his actions. Unlike the onlookers, however, the reader does not have the benefit of “word of mouth news”10 to prepare them for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent’s decision to commit suicide. Yet, as with the first two novels, before Morrison introduces the reader to the male protagonist, Milkman Dead (Macon Dead, Jr.), she first establishes the hostile spaces to which black people had become accustomed. She also illustrates how they subverted the power of racist practices through the linguistic practices of renaming hostile spaces such as Doctor Street to Not Doctor Street and Mercy Hospital to No Mercy Hospital to document how they had been excluded. The reader also learns that it is the illiterate status of Milkman’s grandfather that accounts for the family surname. In other words, at the same time that the reader learns about the immature 32-year-old Milkman whose cultural illiteracy makes him unable to adapt to his own community or historical moment, the reader also learns that his grandfather was illiterate and did not know that a drunken agent at the freedman’s bureau had inscribed errors into the very papers that were supposed to declare his freedom from enslavement. Confusing the status of his father – dead – with the place of his birth – Macon – the history of Milkman Dead’s family is almost presented as yet another “nigger joke.” Morrison deftly weaves multiple stories into one grand narrative, moving in and out of the past and present, illustrating that a mature sense of identity requires an understanding of the interdependence of both.
As the novel unravels the story of Milkman Dead’s birth, the story of his family and the history of his ancestors, the reader is lulled into a story of how intimate spaces can contain names with history, lives full of secrets and misunderstandings, and communities replete with what Morrison refers to as “unspeakable things unspoken.”11 With references to the familiar forms of black vernacular, and even elements of classical mythology that resonate with many readers, Morrison brings the reader into intimate contact with strange people and unfamiliar events to reveal the various and sundry ways black people have survived oppressive spaces and unjust treatment through language, music, and cultural practices. Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, is represented as a griot figure without a navel, who Macon Dead, Sr. (Milkman’s father), considers strange, unkempt, and unworthy of his son’s love. Yet she is the very person who has the key to the mysteries of his family history and his identity in the present. Though she lives outside the town in a space that intensifies her pariah status, she teaches her nephew to defy time and space and that “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”12 In essence, it is Pilate who enables Milkman to undertake an initiation journey into his family history, into the history of black people, and into a mature knowledge of how the people and places of his past and present are interconnected.
When we turn to Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby (1981), we discover the author’s desire to take her readers to yet another understanding of space and time. Using a contemporary setting in the Caribbean with a young black woman with an almost postmodern sense of her racial identity, Morrison again disrupts familiar ideas about race, class, identity, and culture to provide some new ways of reading them. She begins in medias res once again and provides a view of a lush Caribbean setting into which a black male stowaway intrudes. But before Morrison elaborates on his intrusion, she delineates how colonial powers disrupted the serenity of this place by importing slaves, using them to clear the land and to reconstruct a man-made paradise. In language that is as lush as the landscape whose destruction she is describing, Morrison carefully reveals how this time it is the river, not a community of people, that is “evicted from the place where it had lived, and forced into unknown turf,”13 but it is not a stretch to suspect she is connecting this eviction to the kidnapping of African people throughout the diaspora and to the ways in which black bodies have been rendered into service for colonial powers. Having established the setting, the novel then moves into the intimate space of the island winter home on the Isle des Chevaliers, where Valerian and Margaret Street have established a luxurious, yet unfulfilling life for themselves. The novel focuses, however, not so much on this couple as on the relationship between the niece of their servants, Jadine, and the intruder, Son. In a novel that takes on the gender politics of the late 1970s, Morrison invites her reader to construct meaning from some disparate pieces of information about the Streets, who have a wayward son, whom Valerian describes as a “cultural orphan;”14 about Margaret, Valerian’s vacuous wife, whose secret crime of child abuse interrupts the larger narrative of Jadine and Son’s love affair; about the ongoing conflict between the indigenous peoples of the island and Sydney and Ondine; about the failed interracial love affair between Jadine and her white lover in Paris that precipitates Jadine’s return home to her benefactors; and about Jadine’s ultimate decision to return to Europe after she cannot resolve the conflict between herself and Son. Morrison once again uses familiar elements of house and home, but she demands that her reader read these spaces in ways they may not have anticipated. The novel requires a rethinking about black identity in nationalist terms when Son questions Jadine’s education at the Sorbonne, which was financed by the generosity and patronage of the Streets. It also requires a rethinking about Jadine’s claims for her European education and her enlightened sensibilities, which offer her no way of appreciating Son’s Southern roots or the Philadelphia roots of her aunt and uncle and other black people. The novel also invites readers to consider the claims of capitalism as it manifests itself in colonialist practices that keep the colonized in poverty even after the colonizers have departed. Readers cannot overlook the unpaid and poorly paid labor that has made the island paradise possible. Nor can they overlook how Morrison has lifted cultural dynamics from the familiar public and private spaces of her first three novels on the mainland of the United States and located them in the Caribbean to reveal how those dynamics might, in a different place, remain the same. Though the novel seems to anticipate easy readings of race, identity, and even class, Morrison complicates easy readings of all these terms as the assessment of Jadine and Son indicates near the end of the novel:
This rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him . . . He thought he was rescuing her . . . Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell – its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant to be or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands.15
Thus, Tar Baby ends with unresolved contentions and suggests that neither of these lovers has a monopoly on how to read culture, the text of Son’s own life, or the text of how Jadine’s life is connected to those of the community from which both have emerged. At a cultural moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s when questions of identity, multiculturalism, and diversity were beginning to be hotly contested, Morrison entered into the fray with a novel that took readers into familiar spaces of myth and folklore to ask more questions than it answered.
Toni Morrison’s last three novels have often been referred to as a trilogy about excesses of love. Beloved (1987), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a formerly enslaved woman’s attempt to kill all her children rather than see them enslaved in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law, was clearly about excesses of mother love. Some readers have chosen to read Sethe’s act as an act of revenge to deprive her slavemaster of his property. The second in the trilogy, Jazz (1992) – the story of Violet and Joe Trace, whose marriage crisis results in his affair, the murder of his teenage lover, and Violet’s attempt to deface the corpse of her husband’s lover at the funeral – is clearly about excesses of romantic love. Paradise (1998) represents the third novel in the trilogy, the story of an all-black town that attempts to murder the women who have turned to a convent outside town for solace and female community. Here is Morrison’s narrative about the excesses of religion or the love of God. The novels all move from the public sphere in which black people live, negotiate their lives with one another and with the larger white society, but each novel then moves inside to more intimate spaces. Each explores the ways in which black people’s lives are simultaneously about race and not about race. Beyond the constraints of enslavement in the public spaces of plantations that have devastated Baby Suggs, Sethe, and the Sweet Home men, is the reality that black people had interior spaces of thoughts and feelings that few novels had explored. Shifting the view from the slavemaster and his deeds to the interior life of enslaved people, Morrison offers readers a new way to read the slave narrative. Moving back and forth in time, narrating the novel through the aesthetics of memory rather than the chronology of linear time, the reader enters into the emotional past of slavery without denying the reality of its more familiar brutal dimensions. As a result, the novel enables readers to consider enslavement from a new perspective of how black people were able to endure, to survive, when they did not own their bodies, their children, or anything but their own minds. Ironically, though Baby Suggs suffered from the “sadness [that] was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home . . . never having had the map to discover what she was like”16 and though the same could be said for Beloved, the ghost who returns to haunt her mother and her house, Baby Suggs is also able to inspire the enslaved community with a psychic strategy for enduring a peculiar system that was designed to destroy them but did not: “You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.”17 Even after Baby Suggs dies, Sethe remembers her sermons in the clearing and tries to “listen to the spaces that the long-ago singing had left behind,”18 for some clue as to how she is to carry on without her mother-in-law’s sage wisdom and command that they sing healing into their circumstances.
By using an aesthetic narrative style that mirrors the improvisation of jazz, in the novel by that name, Morrison takes the reader away from the public spaces associated with the Harlem Renaissance with its literary salons, artistic productions, and white patronage to the private spaces of black folk trying to eke out a living after traveling from the South to the North. While they are lured into reading the City as a new, open space for their freedom to flourish, they are, nevertheless, torn between “when to love something and when to quit . . . Word was that underneath the good times and the easy money something evil ran the streets and nothing was safe – not even the dead.”19 So the novel explores through a very improvisational rendering of the multiple readings of what happened, not only from the characters themselves, but even from the narrator. In fact, the narrator’s distrust of her own reading of the events renders her unreliable and thus leaves the reader once again to fend for herself:
I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me: Busy, they were busy being original, complicated, changeable – human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered.20
By the time the reader finishes the novel, all she really knows is that a couple had a crisis, a young woman was married, the couple reconciled, and it all took place against the backdrop of one of America’s most exciting artistic and cultural moments.
The excesses of religious love produce another kind of arrogance in Paradise. Black people who had once been excluded from white towns move west and form all-black towns, only to give in to a form of exclusionary practice of their own on the basis of an intraracial color line. The novel exposes the various ways in which this all-black paradise unravels because of the ways in which their religious and gendered orthodoxies break down into violent arguments about everything from the history of the town, to the meaning of the oven, its central edifice, to the character of the women who seek refuge in the convent on the outskirts of town. Again exposing the ways in which communities create pariah figures and then denigrate them and the spaces in which they reside as inferior, Morrison brings to bear the history of the state and the church in a novel that exposes racial and intergenerational hostilities. Even the familiar space of the church with all its sacred meanings gets deconstructed in this novel for the ways in which it exposes the hypocrisies and secrets of domestic space. At the wedding of two of the main characters, one of the two ministers present realizes the problem with the town of Ruby is that there were
two editions of the official story: One that nine men had gone to talk to and persuade the Convent women to leave or mend their ways; there had been a fight; the women took other shapes and disappeared into thin air . . . Richard didn’t believe either of the stories rapidly becoming gospel . . . But because neither had decided on the meaning of the ending and, therefore, had not been able to formulate a credible, sermonizable account of it, they could not assuage Richard’s dissatisfaction . . . As for Lone, she became unhinged by the way the story was being retold; how people were changing it to make themselves look good.21
By the time the reader finishes this complex novel of racial history, a town’s history, and a community of women’s stories, there are more questions than the usual one of who is the woman referred to in the first line “They shoot the white girl first.”22 The reader realizes there are other larger questions such as what gave the men the right to believe they had read the lives of the women correctly, that the women were doing anything out at the convent besides listening to one another’s stories, singing, and offering a healing touch to those whose lives had been brutal, torn, tragic. The reader realizes that while each of the three religious denominations named thought it had a monopoly on truth, none did. All are therefore implicated in the demise of the paradise they had once enjoyed. And, as is the case at the end of Sula, the reader is left to ponder just where the source of good and evil really does lie.
More importantly, however, all of Morrison’s novels so far challenge the reader to move from familiar to unfamiliar interpretations of life and living. Rendering the novel through a lens of complex narrative aesthetics, she invites readers into the cultural politics of race, gender, class, age, and even religion to entertain new readings of the text of their own lives, the nation, and the global community. While the challenge of such complex renderings of relationships and history may be more than readers like or are accustomed to, the beauty with which Morrison pulls her readers into these spaces makes it all worthwhile and tempts them not to give up, but to “rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise.”23 Inside the space of her novels is a form of uneasy rest, therefore, encouraging readers to return to their lives with new ways of making meaning of them.
1. Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1984), p. 119. The first epigraphs at the beginning of this essay are from Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 220; Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse on the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 257; and Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), p. 341. The views I am expressing in this critical essay are adapted from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled, “Spaces for the Reader: Toni Morrison’s Narrative Poetics and Cultural Politics.”
2. Morrison, “Rootedness,” p. 341.
3. Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1970 rpt. 1994), p. 205.
4. Morrison, “Afterword,” The Bluest Eye, p. 210.
6. Morrison, “Rootedness,” p. 345.
7. Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), p. 5.
10. Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 3.
11. Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter 1989): 1–34.
12. Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 337.
13. Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Plume, 1981), p. 9.
16. Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1981), p. 140.
19. Morrison, Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 9.
21. Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 296–297.