[In the following essay, Hove provides an overview of elements of postmodernism in Morrison's fiction.]

Although she regards herself first and foremost as an African-American writer, Toni Morrison's work shares several features with a widespread tendency in postmodern fiction—shared by American writers as diverse as Leslie Marmon Silko, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon—to confront, question, and ultimately supplement dominant cultural narratives. Morrison's fictions repeatedly challenge cultural traditions defined by patriarchal, assimilationist, and totalizing standards. Ever since her first novel, The Bluest Eye, came out in 1969, she has set herself in opposition to the European American white mainstream by portraying and celebrating unique, powerful voices of marginalized women from American history and contemporary American life.

Formally, Morrison's impulse to supplement totalizing narratives is reflected in her characteristic fictional technique of letting a variety of voices from the African-American present and past offer their own accounts of themselves. This technique serves several important purposes: it resists the imperialistic impulses associated with the effort to formulate one and only one version of our world and the people in it, particularly with regard to America and African-Americans; it invites readers to participate in the construction of truth and meaning by learning a sympathetic tolerance for a variety of voices; and it highlights the fact that the protagonist throughout Morrison's fiction is not a single heroic figure but rather the collective, which in her work refers to all the members, past and present, of the African-American community. Morrison's humanitarian concerns are obviously much wider, but the African-American community remains her central focus because she wants to retrieve, celebrate, and preserve its accomplishments, values, and traditions in the face of global and mainstream American threats to its survival.

Against this racially charged social backdrop, Morrison's work can be read as a series of reactions against a patriarchal, ethnocentric white version of modernism and cultural politics. In her insistence on the centrality of African-American culture to her characters' lives, she challenges not only the values of the high modernist tradition but also its forms, especially its linguistic forms. In her article “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1989), for example, she comments on her deliberate attempts to give voice to certain forms of black speech that only African-American audiences would be familiar with. “Quiet as it's kept,” the first phrase of The Bluest Eye, inaugurates this tendency in her career. Another small but notable example of this tendency is her use of the sound-effect “sth” in both Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992). This small example also evokes Morrison's frequent attempts to translate linguistic forms from the oral to the written tradition without allowing the official forms of written convention to eradicate the forms and expressions characteristic of oral traditions.

As is commonplace in postmodern theory and fiction, Morrison emphasizes the centrality of language not only as a repository of culture but as the primary medium of social interaction. In both its form and content, her fiction dramatizes the importance of controlling language and using it as a resource for liberation, self-expression, recognition, and communion. At the same time, however, her fiction documents the various ways language can be misused for purposes of domination, oppression, dehumanization, and extermination. Morrison has commented most directly on these issues in her 1993 Nobel Lecture, in which she narrates the fable of a blind, black woman storyteller whose cultural authority is mockingly challenged by a group of youths from the dominant culture outside of which she lives. Initially, the woman puts the children off with an enigmatic response that challenges them to decide whether they wish to perpetuate humiliating social practices through language or instead use language as a medium for exchanges of love and respect. When she begins to see that the children have come to her not out of a cruel impulse to mock her with linguistic trickery but rather out of a genuine desire to learn from her, she invites them to join her in the communion of language. The fable ends on a note of hope that language, particularly in its narrative form, can bring people from hostile social backgrounds together in an act of shared creation. “Look,” the old woman says. “How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.” Examples of such cooperation and reconciliation via language abound throughout Morrison's fiction, usually when her characters realize that their shared language ought to work against the divisions and conflicts set in motion by competitive or oppressive forces in the white mainstream.

But in spite of these moments of cooperation and reconciliation, Morrison's fictional and nonfictional works carefully balance hope with an unflinching acknowledgment of the forces that can imprison language and misuse it as an instrument of predatory domination. The most obvious example of this misuse is the enterprise of classifying humans according to skin color and “race.” As with recent social-scientific and historiographic treatments of race, Morrison illustrates how such classificatory schemes have been used not only to justify inhumane practices like slavery but also to help perpetuate them by supplying bogus justifications for their continuance. This enterprise is most vividly portrayed through the figure known as “Schoolteacher” in Beloved, whose actions embody the connections between linguistic classification and dehumanizing social practices. The worst of these practices are, for obvious historical reasons, those inflicted by whites on blacks, for example the Biblical and pseudo-scientific classificatory schemes that were used to justify chattel slavery. Morrison also documents the self-destructive legacy of these schemes within the African-American community by showing the variety of ways her black characters mistreat one another on account of differences in shading. For example, the “8-rocks” of Paradise (1998), named after a particularly dark grade of coal, found the town of Ruby because whites, Indians, and lighter-skinned blacks have rejected them. But within their self-enclosed community, the dark-skinned 8-rocks come to regard themselves as an aristocracy, and some of them justify their abuses of power by appealing to the bogus criterion of skin color. In this instance and several others, Morrison suggests the need for more fluid views of social identity, an aim she shares with contemporary social scientists who have taken up arms against divisive social practices based on pseudo-biological classificatory schemes.

On the creative rather than essayistic side of her challenges to hegemonic narratives and oppressive misuses of language, Morrison sets out to lend eloquent expression to the people, stories, voices, and forms of life that these narratives have typically disregarded, devalued, and silenced. Some examples of these traditionally neglected forms of life are the following: a rejected and sexually abused young girl (Pecola in The Bluest Eye); a radically independent social outcast (Sula from Sula [1973]); a folkloric family history initially lost to the vicissitudes of oral transmission and geographic displacement (Song of Solomon [1977]); people who do not fit existing racial identities (Jadine from Tar Baby [1981], Golden Gray from Jazz); two lonely orphans and a deaf-mute woman (Twyla, Roberta, and Maggie from “Recitatif”); a woman who is forced to kill to prevent her child from being seized by her former slaveowner (Sethe from Beloved); a teenaged girl murdered by her middle-aged lover (Dorcas from Jazz); a commune made up of outcast women (the Convent women from Paradise). Within the stories that focus on these marginalized figures, Morrison frequently alludes to actual historical incidents that have until only recently been left out of official historical records. This was one of the purposes of The Black Book, a documentary history she edited and which presents an extensive collage of African-American cultural documents. But her fiction, much like that of Ishmael Reed, incorporates a wide variety of scenes from African-American history that challenge triumphalist versions of mainstream American historiography: Margaret Garner's desperate infanticide (Beloved); the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis (Jazz); the neglect, mistreatment, and irrational hostility toward black veterans of the two world wars (Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise); the unpunished 1955 murder of Emmett Till (Song of Solomon); the 1963 bombing that killed four girls in a Birmingham church (Song of Solomon). Similarly, Morrison's only full-length work of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark (1992), calls attention to a hitherto suppressed “Africanist presence” in American literary history.

In keeping with her emphasis on communal concerns, Morrison's fictions work against the elitist high modernist ideal of the individual hero or genius who transcends the limitations of his or her community. Most of the time, Morrison debunks her characters when they pursue quests for solitary fulfillment and disregard collective concerns, as in her treatments of Milkman's quest for gold (Song of Solomon), Sethe's and Beloved's sadomasochistic relationship (Beloved), Joe Trace's yearning for lost youth (Jazz), and the 8-rocks' efforts to preserve their “pure” community from global forces of social change (Paradise). By contrast, when Morrison's initially self-centered figures display some form of altruistic or communal concern, it is a sign of their potential redemption, which most often lies in a closer state of communion with their geographic or ancestral African-American roots. If one follows this theme throughout her work, one can see why Morrison continually asserts her difference from the European-American modernist tradition. Instead of allowing herself to be inserted in that tradition, she claims that what she tries to do in fiction has more in common with jazz and with the African-American oral traditions in which she grew up. These inspirations for her fiction should constantly be kept in mind, for they remind those who want to assimilate her into traditional European-American cultural traditions that she considers her African-American cultural identity as the most important basis of her artistic endeavors.

Nevertheless, it is a logical consequence of literature's circulation in global society that Morrison's fictional technique can also be compared usefully with that of non-African-American writers, particularly because her narrative forms share many surface features with them even though their origins differ. For example, she has often been compared to Woolf and Faulkner, both of whom Morrison happened to study in graduate school. In addition, her work is permeated with many of the classic Hellenic and Hebraic themes and motifs from Western art and culture. Usually, however, when Morrison uses Western themes and motifs, she is trying to suggest that her characters are making the wrong moves, as when Milkman and Guitar's quest for gold echoes Jason and the Argonauts' morally dubious quest for the Golden Fleece. By contrast, Morrison's characters most often find authenticity, value, and redemption in African and African-American folk traditions. But Morrison does not simply replace one system of cultural authority with another, for she also subjects these folk traditions to critical scrutiny, especially when they manifest patriarchal values. The most memorable instance of such a use and critique of African and African-American folk traditions appears in Song of Solomon, where Solomon's flight to freedom from slavery is questioned by a woman who wonders how many family members he left behind in the thralls of slavery. This example illustrates what might be labeled a moral norm in Morrison's fiction: what's good is what's good for the community as a whole, not for some isolated member of it unaware of his or her ties and obligations to others.

Sometimes, Morrison's style achieves a modernist grandeur that threatens to swallow her fictions' social subject matter into itself. But her constant focus on the communal concerns and political survival of the African-American community, as well as her acknowledgment of the unique identities of individuals within that community, resist the modernist bent toward privileging aesthetic mastery over social engagement. The best illustration of her art acknowledging its limits occurs at the end of Jazz, where the narrator acknowledges her inability to fully define the people she is trying to imagine. This narrative move reflects a step back from the modernist tendency to allow the aesthetic to absorb the actual, as in the work of Henry James and Faulkner, whose characters often conspicuously think and speak according to the syntax, cadences, and vocabulary of their author's peculiar style.

A more important line of comparison for Morrison herself, lies in her narrative technique's affinities with the call-and-response pattern of African oral storytelling. According to one current critical consensus, “non-Western” oral traditions invite a collaborative and democratic relation between storyteller, subjects, and audience. Morrison's recurring technique of moving from one narrative voice to another works against the model of narrative authority that allows one primary voice or style to absorb all other voices into its overarching, complex coherence. To a degree, Morrison's use of multiple points of view resembles Faulkner's attempt in Absalom, Absalom! to portray the same events from a variety of perspectives and according to a variety of interpretations. But while Faulkner's principal narrators Quentin and Shreve eventually seem to master the material they reconstruct by solving the mystery of the Sutpens' motivations, Morrison's narrators are more willing to acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge and to admit that human motivation poses mysteries that we will never fully be able to penetrate or define. This epistemological impasse is also reflected in Morrison's treatment of ethics. If the motivations of Morrison's characters are ultimately impenetrable, then ethical decisions and judgments must always be tentative, provisional, and based on varying degrees of uncertainty. Morrison brings out this ethical problem most vividly in Beloved, which avoids siding with only one of the variety of reactions to Sethe's attempts to kill her children rather than allow the slaveholders to abduct them back into slavery.

Morrison's characters remain mysteries also because their identities do not conform to traditional patriarchal or mainstream expectations. Her most interesting characters have decentered subjectivities, for both positive and negative reasons that lead to sometimes fulfilling, sometimes damaging consequences. Morrison's female protagonists are typically outcasts with no coherent sense of identity, and there are at least two causes for their lack of coherence. On the one hand, her strong females refuse to submit to the traditional roles available to them in their communities, usually because these roles have been imposed by either white or patriarchal interests. On the other hand, without any satisfactory social traditions to fall back on, or without any open-minded communities that will accept their unique identities, Morrison's women must strike out on their own and create new, nontraditional identities for themselves. Some of these women—Pecola from The Bluest Eye, Twyla and Roberta from “Recitatif,” Violet from Jazz, and the women who come to the Convent in Paradise—have no stable sense of identity because they are victims who have been rejected, neglected, or abused. Other women—Sula, Pilate from Song of Solomon, Jadine from Tar Baby, Sethe from Beloved, Dorcas from Jazz, and Connie from Paradise—willfully place themselves in opposition to the people and traditions that demand their conformity and threaten their quests for authenticity. Ultimately, both types of women must carry out improvisatory quests for identity, and they complete these quests with varying degrees of success.

Inevitably, these women's quests run parallel to their encounters with and navigations through racial politics. The two most interesting encounters with racial politics are the stories of Sula (Sula) and Jadine (Tar Baby). Morrison has described Sula as “quintessentially black, metaphysically black … new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female” (Morrison 1989: 25). Sula must resist the customs and gender roles expected of her in the traditional black community of Medallion. Jadine from Tar Baby, on the other hand, embodies Morrison's most extensive treatment of an African-American woman coming to terms not only with gender roles but with the problems and freedoms of racial indeterminacy. Although Jadine is light-skinned enough to be accepted by the white-dominated fashion industries of Paris and New York, she is haunted by ethnic inauthenticity and by a sense of having betrayed the African side of her ethnic heritage. Other characters who illustrate the cultural and personal problems associated with racial ambiguity are Maureen Peal (The Bluest Eye), Milkman's mother Ruth and her father Dr. Foster (Song of Solomon), Dorcas (Jazz), and Golden Gray (Jazz). The sociological significance of these stories lies in the variety of ways they challenge the simple-minded, oppressive American practice of defining “blackness” according to the “one-drop” rule, and of characterizing blackness as something to be reviled, a theme Morrison addresses from a literary-historical standpoint in Playing in the Dark.

In conjunction with her resistance to totalizing worldviews, all of Morrison's novels conclude in a semantically open-ended way. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola's identity disintegrates, and the consequences of her pregnancy are left shrouded in mystery. At the end of Song of Solomon, Guitar lunges murderously at Milkman, but Morrison never reveals whether the two men fall to their deaths or Milkman miraculously “rides the air.” Tar Baby concludes with Jadine disappearing, for better or worse, to Paris as her ex-lover, Son, embarks on an uncertain quest with supernatural overtones. “Recitatif” leaves its characters' racial identities, their attitudes toward each other, and their memories of cruelties both suffered and committed indeterminate. In the final chapter of Beloved, the narrator self-contradictorily claims, “This is not a story to pass on,” and Morrison never allows us to pin down who or what, exactly, Beloved is. At the end of Jazz, Joe and Violet Trace seem to have learned how to love each other, but the narrator expresses her uncertainty about understanding the true nature of their relationship. Finally, Paradise ends with the citizens of Ruby hushing up their slaughter of the Convent women, but there are signs that the community cannot ward off influences from the outside world forever. Such open-ended conclusions confirm that Morrison refuses to settle upon one worldview as definitive, or to leave her readers satisfied that everything coheres in a world riven by slavery and its legacies of oppression and racially based hostility. Nevertheless, Morrison invites her readers to build with her and her characters something out of this world's rubble that might be new and beautiful—as the storyteller of her Nobel Lecture says, “Together.”