• MORRISON’S LITERARY INFLUENCES
• MORRISON AND LITERARY CRITICISM
• THE TONI MORRISON SOCIETY
• NOTES

A writer’s place in history is determined more often by the amount and quality of the scholarship his or her work generates than by the number of literary prizes he or she receives. Even Nobel laureates in literature fall out of fashion. In the 1930s, two American novelists—Sinclair Lewis in 1930 and Pearl S. Buck in 1938—won the Nobel Prize in literature. Their novels are rarely included on the current reading lists of college courses in American literature.

Prior to the publication in 1977 of Song of Solomon, Morrison’s novels received little attention from literary scholars. The Bluest Eye (1970) was out of print by 1974, making it difficult for teachers to include it in their course requirements. Inclusion in such course requirements is an important first step in generating scholarly writing on a work. Although Sula (1973) was more widely reviewed, it was on the reading lists of only a handful of black and women’s studies courses. The earliest essays about The Bluest Eye and Sula were published in journals such as Studies in Black Literature and Black American Literature Forum. These journals were in their infancy during the 1970s and did not circulate widely. Joan Bischoff’s “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted Sensitivity,” was published in 1975 in Studies in Black Literature.¹ Similar to most of the essays on African American literature written prior to the more advanced theorizing of the 1980s, Bischoff’s approach is thematic. She discusses the themes of The Bluest Eye and Sula in relation to the development of the characters Pecola and Sula. She argues that both characters suffer from a “thwarted sensitivity” that causes them to retreat into solitude, the former through madness, the latter through her decision to face alone her illness and death. Phyllis R. Klotman’s 1979 article for Black American Literature Forum, “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye,” is also thematic.² Klotman analyzes the novel in terms of the Dick-and-Jane primer, and the image of the famous child star Shirley Temple. Her reading of the novel reveals the extent to which the characters are

affected—and in one case destroyed—by images that have nothing to do with the reality of their existence as black girls in the United States.

By 1980 the number of published essays had increased considerably, as had the different approaches to the study of Morrison’s fiction. The Modern Language Association International Bibliography includes ten essays for 1980 alone, a publication total that was more than the previous five years together. According to the 1983 bibliography, Morrison’s work had begun to receive much more attention in dissertations, book-length studies, and collections of essays about novelists in the Americas. The new scholarship also reflected a growing interest at the college and university level in the work of black women writers.

One of the most influential books on black women writers from that era is Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980).³ Christian wrote in her preface that the idea for Black Women Novelists came to her while she was working on curriculum development with the Berkeley, California, school district. As she was trying to devise a curriculum that would “engage black girls,” she realized that although she had read and studied African American literature, she was not familiar with literature by black women. In 1974, while developing a course on black women writers at the University of California at Berkeley, she began to notice certain recurring images in their writing. Further investigation showed that “little work had been done on the black woman in literature and that she seldom appeared in a focal position in the black novel.”⁴ Those positions generally were occupied by men. Christian’s research soon revealed that there were few novels written by black women. Of those who managed to get a novel published, even fewer published a second novel. Since she believed that novelists need to write at least two novels in order to clarify their vision and understand their craft, Christian chose three contemporary writers who had written more than one novel—Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—for what she admitted was the beginning of the documentation of a tradition of black women writers.

In the chapter on Morrison titled “The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison,” Christian shows how, in The Bluest Eye and Sula, Morrison works from relatively simple themes to explore the myths that structure the systems of belief governing the communities in which the characters struggle toward self-definition. In each novel the theme of black girls growing up in insular communities is what Christian calls a “chord” that is played and repeated with variations in tone and timbre, much like improvisations in jazz music. Christian pays special attention to the structure of each novel, describing in detail the aesthetic effects of Morrison’s nonlinear narratives. Although Morrison presents a chronological structure in terms of the way she divides Sula, the circularity of the narrative is similar to that of The Bluest Eye. Christian’s discussion of Morrison’s narrative techniques is similar to what Morrison later claimed she tried to achieve with her most experimental novel, Jazz (1992).

Another point Christian deals with in her discussion of Sula is the extent to which Morrison’s representations of black women disrupt familiar stereotypes. Women such as Eva, Hannah, and Sula Peace never before had been portrayed in African American fiction. They are different. Christian’s explication of the two novels is a good starting point for readers unfamiliar with Morrison’s narrative structures and with the importance of popular folklore and myth for the development of her characters and their fictional lives.

Whereas Christian refrains from imposing an extraliterary framework onto her readings in order to more fully illuminate the artistry of the writers under consideration, Karla E C. Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos approach their topic from a feminist perspective in New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (1987) a book-length study of Morrison’s first four novels. The study reveals as much about them—the nature of a friendship between a black woman and a white woman, and the impact Morrison’s novels have had on their lives and their developing feminist consciousness—as it does about the novels.⁵ The authors are at times extremely self-reflective as they enter into a dialogue with each other about their different responses to Morrison’s fiction. In some instances, their commentaries are so personal that readers may feel as if they are eavesdropping on a private conversation. In the concluding chapter, “Life is Art is Culture: The Politics of Collaboration,” Holloway comments about the problems and rewards of cowriting a study such as this one, especially with a friend from a different racial background. She writes that as their readings and interpretations grew farther apart, they often wondered if one of them was wrong, and if, in the process of writing about such racially specific fiction as Morrison’s, they were not risking their friendship. They seemed to have agreed when the project was completed that, although it was not always the most comfortable collaboration, it was personally and professionally enriching.⁶

Among the things they learned, however, is that such a collaboration can be a risky professional undertaking. Holloway and Demetrakopoulos were “consistently denied financial support” for their project.⁷ Holloway writes that readers not only questioned the validity of the project as the co-authors conceived it—a collaborative study focusing on the social and political aspects of Morrison’s novels—but that readers wondered if Morrison was worth the attention of a book-length study. According to Holloway, the more their requests for financial support were denied, the more fiercely loyal they became to their project, to each other, and to the women’s groups that supported their work.

We learned to hold very dear the wonderfully supportive and encouraging responses of the women’s groups who listened, sometimes with tears, to the readings we gave during the book’s development. We learned to understand the many kinds of cultures that provoked certain responses to our text. The cultures of sexism, racism, literary snobbishness, and ignorance generated a whole host of reactions to our study. What but male insecurity, we decided, would question the validity of feminist scholarship? What but racial insensitivity would deny that there was any significant enough difference between Blacks and whites to deeply influence literary investigation? We were denying the “human community,” we were told. What other than racism, ignorance, and incredible shortsightedness could fail to recognize the stature of an author like Toni Morrison? Questions like these gave us the energy to pursue our project when common sense might have called for its conclusion.⁸

Holloway concludes the study with her reflections on the importance of collaboration as a “source of creative power” and as an important feature of feminist studies. Many feminists believe that through collaboration with other feminists scholars and critics they will make meaningful changes in the male-dominated literary canon.

That kind of collaboration frequently came in the form of edited work, such as Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, the 1988 collection of essays on Morrison edited by Nellie Y. McKay. According to McKay, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison was the first volume of its kind on Morrison.⁹ It includes previously published reviews of Morrison’s first four novels and new essays, written specifically for the volume, that show a range of interests and critical approaches to Morrison’s work. Notable among them is Deborah E. McDowell’s essay, “’The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Black Female Text.”¹⁰ McDowell begins her essay with an overview of critical commentaries about African American literature such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1921 Crisis magazine article, “Negro Art,” Addison Gayle’s 1977 “Blue-print for Black Criticism,” and reviews in the 1980s that share similar concerns about the negative portrayals of fictional characters in the works of black women writers. She argues that although new developments in critical theory offer opportunities to broaden the theoretical framework of Afro-American literary studies, resistance from mainly male critics and debates about the negative images of male characters in black women’s fiction threaten to reduce that fiction to merely “racial representations.”¹¹ McDowell argues for, and tries to demonstrate in her reading of Sula, the necessity of moving beyond “an almost exclusive focus on race in Afro-American literary discourse, which is often tantamount to a focus on maleness,” to a feminist criticism that would “lead us beyond the descriptions that keep us locked in opposition and antagonism” toward reading strategies that encourage the imaginary transcending of boundaries that have held the idea of a black self in check.¹²

As black feminists during the 1980s publicly defended Morrison, Alice Walker, and other black women writers from claims of “male-bashing” and negative representations, Morrison rejected the category “feminist” for her work. She told Rosemarie K. Lester during a 1983 interview that she writes “without gender focus” and out of the “sensibility” of being a black woman. But she denies writing “women’s literature as such,” an idea she finds “confining.” She explained, “I don’t dislike the writing of women who write for women and about women exclusively, because some of it is quite powerful and quite beautiful. I just don’t do it myself because it is a narrowing. It’s like putting blinders on. When I write I want to feel as though all things are available to me.”¹³ Morrison has little control, however, over the way her work is read and interpreted. The 1990 Modern Language Association International Bibliography includes twenty-seven scholarly works on Morrison. Most of them are feminist readings of her texts. Feminist readings of her novels have contributed enormously to Morrison’s success.

MORRISON’S LITERARY INFLUENCES

Even more telling of the extent to which novelists—and artists in general—have litde or no control over interpretation of their work is the interest among scholars and critics in the literary relations between Morrison, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and particularly William Faulkner, who, along with Woolf, was the subject of Morrison’s M.A. thesis. Morrison would rather not be compared to them. She told McKay in a 1983 interview, “I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense. I do not have objections to being compared to such extraordinarily gifted and facile writers, but it does leave me sort of hanging there when I know that my effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music, or in some other culture-gen that survives almost in isolation because the community manages to hold on to it.”¹⁴ Morrison’s objections probably have to do with her reaction to the tendency of white critics to impose on African American literature standards that have little or nothing to do with the cultural milieu from which that literature derives and with her desire to be read on her own terms and not as a by-product of white male writers. Still, it is difficult for careful readers of Morrison and Faulkner not to see connections between the two writers and their works.

The tension between the cultural specificity Morrison insists is crucial to her work and the often inevitable and unaccountable influences from other writers and traditions is evident in a 1997 collection of essays titled Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned.¹⁵ The editors write in their introduction that the idea for the collection came out of a 1991 classroom experience during which two of them team-taught an undergraduate course that paired works by Morrison and Faulkner. From their description of it, the class was intense for students and teachers alike, as issues of race and gender were discussed:

nowhere had they (or we) been prepared for the explosive discussions of race that followed our readings of the paired Faulkner and Morrison texts. Students wept openly; one ran out of the room. White students felt threatened; black students felt threatened; we felt threatened; but we kept returning to our discussion from different angles, brought back by Morrison’s and Faulkner’s own refusal to look away, to let us fall back on easy stereotypes or conventional plot structures.”¹⁶

The editors decided to put together their collection after students tried but failed to find articles in the library dealing with both Morrison and Faulkner. Each of the fifteen essayists addresses the tension generated by Morrison’s insistence on being not like Faulkner and on the problem of influence studies. In the opening essay, “Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence,” John N. Duvall states the problem succinctly:

Any discussion of Toni Morrison’s work in relation to modernism (or post-modernism) in general or to William Faulkner in particular is fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding. To speak of a possible Faulknerian influence on Morrison’s work runs the risk of calling up memories of racial and sexual abuse in the American past. Does not positing such an influence imply that, without a white Southern man’s seminal texts, those of the African-American woman would never have come to fruition? But arguing for an intertextual relationship between Morrison’s and Faulkner’s fiction does not require granting Faulkner’s the status of master text. In fact, my purpose here is less a discussion of Faulkner’s influence on Morrison than it is an examination of Morrison’s apparent anxiety that Faulkner may have influenced her writing.¹⁷

Intertextuality, as Duvall and others in Unflinching Gaze discuss it, assumes that writers engage with other writers by virtue of the acts of reading and writing. That does not mean that their work is directly influenced by a particular writer. For example, some critics have found similarities between Morrison’s early novels and those of Zora Neale Hurston, whom Morrison had not read when she began writing. Yet, they share an intertextual relationship through their depictions of small African American communities and unconventional heroines. Likewise, the incest scene with Jim Trueblood in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) shares an intertextual relationship with Cholly Breedlove’s incestuous act in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, although Ellison and Trueblood might not have been at the forefront of her consciousness when she wrote that scene.

The relationship between Morrison’s work and Faulkner’s is more complicated because Morrison studied his novels for her thesis and continued to read his works. As a modernist, her novels bear the mark, if not the influence, of the modernist writers who preceded her, many of whom in turn were influenced by one of the hallmarks of modernism—jazz music. Morrison’s comments on literature in her interviews and her critical analyses on American literature reveal the vastness of Morrison’s intertextual field. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. remarks in the preface to Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), “Toni Morrison may well be the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African American literature.”¹⁸ As such, she invites the kinds of comparisons she decries. Her work traditionally has been considered

along with those of a few prominent African American women writers such as Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and Gloria Naylor. By the end of the 1990s, the scope of scholarship on Morrison had broadened significantly. Works such as Julia Eichelberger’s Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty (1999) and Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (2001) place her novels within the context of those by Ellison, Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Pynchon.¹⁹

MORRISON AND LITERARY CRITICISM

On 7 October 1988 Morrison presented the University of Michigan Tanner Lecture on Human Values. She titled her lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.”²⁰ It has since become a major work of literary criticism. Morrison called for a reexamination of the American literary canon in order to reveal the presence of Afro-American culture that remains unspoken. She stated, “I want to address ways in which the presence of Afro-American literature and the awareness of its culture both resuscitate the study of literature in the United States and raise that study’s standards. In pursuit of that goal, it will suit my purposes to contextualize the route canon debates have taken in Western literary criticism.”²¹ In doing so, she proved herself to be an outstanding literary scholar, something few novelists achieve. Literary scholarship and creative writing often are not compatible modes of writing.

Morrison summarizes debates over canon formation in terms of what has been omitted—the implications of the concept of race for white writers writing at a time when the real presence of Afro-American literature in the United States was a subject of much debate. She argues that nineteenth-century American writers and critics of Afro-American literature must have had to perform “intellectual feats” in order to effect the erasure of the Afro-American presence in American literature.²² Her challenge to students of literature is threefold: to develop a theory of literature for Afro-American literature “based on its culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to negotiate the world it inhabits”; to reinterpret the nineteenth-century founding works of the American canon “for the ’unspeakable things unspoken’; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature”; to undertake a similar study for contemporary literature with emphasis on the role language plays in defining a literary work as “Black.”²³ She reiterates many of these ideas in her 1992 collection of essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.²⁴

“Unspeakable things Unspoken” and Playing in the Dark had a strong impact on American literary studies during the mid 1990s. As critic Dana D. Nelson put it after hearing a 14 February 1989 lecture Morrison gave at Princeton University on race and American culture, “’We’ have always been absolved of looking to ourselves in this matter, which is precisely the challenge Morrison offered to her Princeton audience.”²⁵ Nelson responded to Morrison’s challenge with a provocative study of American literature, The Word in Black and White: Reading ’Race’ in American Literature 1638-1867 (1992). Another work that responds to Morrison’s challenge to rethink the American literary canon is Henry B. Wonham’s collection of essays, Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (1996).²⁶ The first essay in the collection is Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” The essayists in the collection take up where Morrison left off and offer new interpretations of American literature and American literary history that take into account issues of race and racism. On the basis of these and other critical studies that rely on “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” and Playing in the Dark, Morrison has helped to change the way American literature will be read and taught in the future. Her critical essays also have generated even more scholarship about her own fiction. Another event that helped to promote scholarship about Morrison internationally was the founding in 1993 of the Toni Morrison Society.

THE TONI MORRISON SOCIETY

On 28 May 1993, during the annual meeting of the American Literature Association, Carolyn Dehard, then an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, convened a meeting of scholars interested in establishing the Toni Morrison Society. At this organizing meeting, Denard presented a draft of the Society’s bylaws, which stated its purpose: “to initiate, sponsor, and encourage critical dialogue, scholarly publications, conferences, programs, and projects devoted to the study of the works of Toni Morrison.” Membership was opened to “all persons who have a genuine interest in increasing public awareness and perpetuating the study and appreciation of the writings, career, and life of Toni Morrison.”²⁷ The bylaws were adopted after a few additions and revisions, and the Toni Morrison Society was formally founded as an “official author society of the American Literature Association.” It is the third such society for an African American writer, after the Langston Hughes Society and the Richard Wright Circle, to come under the auspices of the Association.²⁸ Five months later, in October 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The awarding of the prize dispelled any doubt about the timeliness of such a learned society. In just one year the membership of the society more than doubled and included scholars from around the world. Founding members began planning conferences and symposiums devoted entirely to Morrison. The society held its first American Literature Association conference session in 1994, in San Diego, California. In November 1994 Marilyn Sanders Mobley organized a two-day symposium, “Toni Morrison and the Politics of Word-Work,” at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. It was the first such symposium to be held in the United States. In April 1995, Celeste Nichols, a professor in the English department at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, served as chairperson at a three-day conference on Morrison, during which students had an opportunity to work closely with established scholars of English and African American literature in a “supportive environment.”²⁹ Other founding and charter members of the Society have organized conferences, conference panels, and edited special editions of scholarly journals on Morrison.

On 24 April 1995 the Toni Morrison Society held a formal chartering ceremony at Georgia State University, with Morrison as the “honored witness to the chartering.”³⁰ During that event Morrison spoke with the advisory committee of the society about their programming agenda and suggested that they put together an international annotated bibliography. Morrison’s suggestion was a timely one. Morrison’s novels have been translated into many languages, including Persian. Increasingly, international scholars are publishing in their native languages rather than in English, thereby advancing knowledge about Morrison and African American literature worldwide.

Another important activity is the Biennial Toni Morrison Society Conference. This conference is held in a location that is important to Morrison’s life and work. The first Biennial Conference, “Toni Morrison and the American South,” was held in 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia. It included a trip to Cartersville, Georgia, the birthplace of Morrison’s father. Morrison attended the conference and visited the house in which her father was raised. The second Biennial Conference, “Toni Morrison and the Meanings of Home,” was held in Lorain, Ohio, at the Lorain County Community College. These and other society activities are securing a visible and permanent place in American literary history for Toni Morrison.

NOTES

1. Joan Bischoff, “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted Sensitivity,” Studies in Black Literature, 6 (Fall 1975): 21-23.

2. Phyllis R. Klotman, “Dick-And-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye,” Black American Literature Forum, 13 (Winter 1979): 123-125.

3. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

4. lbid., ix.

5. Karla E C. Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

6. Ibid., pp. 166-170.

7. Ibid., p. 168.

8. Ibid., p. 169.

9. Nellie Y. McKay, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (Boston: Hall, 1988). McKay admits in an endnote that in 1985 Bessie W. Watson and Audrey L. Vinson published a collection of essays that they wrote in The World of Toni Morrison. The difference, according to McKay, is that their essays are “intended as a teaching tool for Morrison’s novels.” See p. 15, n. 32.

10. Deborah E. McDowell, “’The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Black Female Text,” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, pp. 77-90.

11. Ibid., p. 78.

12. Ibid., p. 79.

13. Rosemarie K. Lester, “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 54.

14. McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 152.

15. Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg, eds., Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).

16. Ibid.

17. John N. Duvall, “Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence,” in Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, p. 3.

18. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds., Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New York: Amistad, 1993), p. ix.

19. Cyrus R. K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Julia Eichelberger, Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).

20. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 28 (Winter 1989): 1-34.

21. Ibid., p. 3.

22. Ibid., p. 12.

23. Ibid., p. 11.

24. Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

25. Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading ’Race’ in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xii.

26. Henry B. Wonham, ed., Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

27. Word-Work: Toni Morrison Society Newsletter, 1 (January 1994): 2.

28. Ibid.

29. Word-Work: Toni Morrison Society Newsletter, 2 (July 1995): 4.

30. Ibid., p. 2.