Vernacular Traditions: the Use of Music in the Novels of Toni Morrison
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Universität Trier Fachbereich II – Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft Vernacular Traditions: The Use of Music in the Novels of Toni Morrison Schriftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde vorgelegt von Christine Spies 1. Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Klooß 2. Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Gerd Hurm Table of Contents I Introduction 1 II Musical Performers and Listeners 13 1 Mediator of Cultural Legacies: The Blues 13 2 The Dirge of a Choir and three Soloists 19 3 The Griot’s Song of Flying 27 4 The Music of Artificiality and Nature 33 5 The Music of Memory, Resistance, and Survival 39 6 “The Music’s Secret Drive”: Protest, Temptation, and Reconciliation 48 7 Dead Music and the Music of Survival 54 8 “Then the music started, convincing them they could manage it all and last” 60 III Transfer of Musical Properties 65 1 Structure 65 1.1 Call and Response as an Element of Structure 65 1.2 Call and Response as a Device of Analysis 69 1.2.1 Sula’s Call for Definition 69 1.2.2 Call and Response as a Reflection on Life and Death 77 1.2.3 Milkman’s Journey to Responsibility 79 1.2.4 Blind Horsemen and the Napoleonic Code 82 1.2.5 “Unspeakable Thoughts, Unspoken” 89 1.2.6 “The Furrow of His Brow” – Nailing Down Meaning 92 1.2.7 Love: A Place the Streets do not Go 101 1.3 Rhythmical Language 105 1.4 Improvisation 111 1.5 Themes, Variations, Recurrent Riffs 114 2 Content 121 2.1 “What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue?” 121 2.2 Beloved: A Spiritual 124 2.3 Romantic Love and Forbidden Fruit 129 IV Music and Vernacular Traditions 132 1 Storytelling 132 2 Folktale 144 2.1 “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” 144 2.2 “Tar Baby” 147 3 Testifying: Affirmation and Bearing Witness 161 4 Signifying: “To Rename is to Revise, and to Revise is to Signify” 172 4.1 Names 172 4.2 Tricksters 193 4.3 Intertextuality 206 4.4 Epigraphs 223 V Evaluation and Conclusion 228 VI Bibliography 238 VII Appendix 255 VIII Zusammenfassung 267 I Introduction “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”1 This exceedingly applies to the novels of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who considers music “an art form that opens doors, rather than closes them, where there are more possibilities, not fewer.”2 Her effort is to make “aural literature”3 which “has to read in silence [...] but it also has to sound.”4 To achieve this quality, Morrison makes ample use of musical properties and elements of African American vernacular in her novels. The vernacular, deriving from Latin vernaculus (“native”) which is taken from verna (“slave born in his master’s house”),5 describes something “native or peculiar to a particular country”6 in the context of arts. African American vernacular comprises linguistic elements as well as musical genres.7 Within language, the oral traditions of storytelling, the originally West African concept of the power of naming nommo, testifying, and Signifying8, constitute important parts of the vernacular. In music, forms such as hollers, work songs, ring shouts, spirituals, blues and jazz, as well as contemporary rap, are indigenous to African Americans, although nowadays some are equally performed by members of different ethnicities. The storytelling of the black community has its roots in West African griots bearing the traditions, religious beliefs, history, and folklore of their people in stories, rituals, myths, and songs. African American folktales often contain supernatural elements.9 Time in West African worldview is cyclical,10 and so are numerous 1 Cf.Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. London: Macmillan 1914. 135. Emphasis original. 2 Cf. Robert Stepto, “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison. 1976.” In: Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 10-29. 28. 3 Cf. Christina Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison. 1986.” In: Taylor-Guthrie, 223-233. 230. 4 Ibid., 230. Emphasis original. 5 Cf. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 6. 6 Cf. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. A Vernacular Theory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 2. 7 Cf. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , Nellie Y. McKay (eds.), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton 1997. 1. 8 “Signifying” within the African American vernacular is often written in upper-case, in order not to be confused with the use and meaning of its Standard English homonym. This practice will also be followed in this paper, whereas the spelling will remain the same although some scholars leave out the final g or put it in brackets to distinguish the words even more. 9 Cf. Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows. Westport: 1976. 10 Cf. Susan Bowers, “Beloved and the New Apocalypse.” In: David Middleton (ed. ), Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Contemporary Criticism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 209-230. 212. 1 folktales.11 The stories are transmitted orally, they are being told, memorised, and retold, thereby undergoing changes at times.12 Frequently, these tales are open-ended, containing a message or a moral at the same time as a deliberate ambiguity.13 “[I]t’s an ongoing thing and the reader or the listener is in it and you have to THINK.”14 Audience participation is an important feature, which manifests itself in call and response patterns.15 Morrison is very much aware of this property and makes ample use of it: “The reader supplies the emotions. The reader supplies even some of the color, some of the sound. My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it.”16 “Then we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book.”17 Nommo, the power inherent in language with the potential of shaping reality, even taken for “the force of life itself,”18 is strongly connected to these antiphonal (call and response) patterns. In West Africa, religious and magical rituals were said to be performed with the help of nommo. It was also vital to accomplish an understanding of the universe and its development.19 To name something was to establish magical control over it.20 Naming is still important for African Americans. It includes the traditional choosing of names out of the Bible at random, as well as naming and renaming oneself, and the significance of nicknames. Therefore, it is seen as a serious insult to call somebody out of one’s name. Naming what you see and what you experience, thereby preserving it and making it known, is called testifying. Naming and testifying are assigned healing and transforming powers; they are a means of claiming and shaping African American culture and heritage.21 Throughout the centuries, African Americans have been 11 Cf. LeRoi Jones, Blues People. Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963. 51969. 31. 12 Cf. Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison. 1983.” In: Taylor-Guthrie, 138-155. 152p. 13 Cf. Davis in Taylor-Guthrie, 232. 14 Ibid. Emphasis original. 15 Cf. Alma Jean Billingslea Brown, Crossing Borders Through Folklore. Columbia: University of Missoury Press, 1999. 85. 16 Cf. Claudia Tate, “Toni Morrison. 1983.” In: Taylor-Guthrie, 156-170. 164. 17 Ibid., 84. 18 Cf. Brian Dorsey, Spirituality, Sensuality, Literality. Blues, Jazz and Rap as Music and Poetry. Austrian Studies in English 86. Wien: Braunmüller, 2000. 12. 19 Cf. Johanna X. K. Garvey, “That Old Black Magic? Gender and Music in Ann Petry’s Fiction.” In: Saadi A. Simawe, Black Orpheus. Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000. 119-151. 134. 20 Ibid., 147. 21 Garvey, 132p. 2 testifying to their history, their sufferings, and their circumstances in songs, stories, and for a long time, in slave narratives22. Alongside testifying, Signifying is another important element of the African American vernacular. It embraces many different features and can be traced back to the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara, which is succeeded in the New World by the Signifying Monkey. Esu-Elegbara,23 who is endowed with a special talent for language and rhetorics, stands for the use of formal language and its interpretation as well as for double-voiced utterances24 through his mediating role as the only messenger of the gods.25 He interprets their will to Man and transmits Man’s longings to the gods. “Esu is the guardian of the crossroads, master of style and of stylus, the phallic god of generation. [...] [L]inguistically Esu is the ultimate copula, connecting truth with understanding, the sacred with the profane, text with interpretation, the word [...] that links a subject with its predicate,”26 since his name is the Yoruba equivalent of the verb “to be,” he “connects the grammar of divination with its rhetorical structures.”27 In the myth about Esu, he is summoned to the gods, because they did not receive enough offerings from Man. Now Esu has to obtain a kind of oracle consisting of sixteen palm- nuts, which he is given by monkeys. His task is to go to sixteen special places of the world in order to inquire about the meaning of the nuts. Having learnt that, he must report it to the gods and afterwards to Mankind. When the humans receive this divine message, they prepare offerings again.28 Without the help of the monkeys, Esu would not have been able to fulfil his task, so their role in the myth is crucial.