The Voices Oftoni Morrison

The Voices ofToni Morrison The Voices of Tom Morrison Barbara Hill Rigney Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1991 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rigney, Barbara Hill, 1938 The voices of Toni Morrison / Barbara Hill Rigney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0555-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Morrison, Toni—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. Afro-American women in literature. I. Title. PS3563.08749Z84 1991 813'.54—dc20 91-16092 CIP Text design by Hunter Graphics. Cover design by Donna Hartwick. Cover illustration: Aminah Robinson, "Woman Resting," Sapelo Island Series, 1985. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Esther Saks Gallery. Type set in ITC Galliard by G8cS Typesetters, Austin, TX. Printed by Bookcrafters, Chelsea, MI. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Printed in the U.S.A. 98765432 For Kim, Julie, Kris, Sky, and Papa I gratefully acknowledge the time and the encouragement pro vided by the College of Humanities and the Department of En glish at The Ohio State University, the support of my editor, Charlotte Dihoff, and the invaluable assistance and advice of both colleagues and students, most particularly Murray Beja, Erika Bourguignon, Grace Epstein, Michael Hitt, Sebastian Knowles, Marlene Longenecker, and James Phelan. Contents Introduction 1 1 Breaking the Back of Words: Language and Signification 7 2 Hagar's Mirror: Self and Identity 35 3 "The Disremembered and Unaccounted For": History, Myth, and Magic 61 4 Rainbows and Brown Sugar: Desire and the Erotic 83 Afterword 105 Notes 109 Bibliography 115 Index 125 Introduction . what is important is to disconcert the staging of represen tation according to exclusively "masculine" parameters, that is, according to phallocratic order. It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it—that amounts to the same thing in the end—but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an "outside" that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law. —Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One From her vantage at the intersection of race and gender, Toni Morrison represents an exemption from "phallocratic law"; her own language and her theory of language, as she has demon strated in her five novels and explained in a number of essays and interviews, reflect a consciousness that she writes both from and about a zone that is "outside" of literary convention, that disrupts traditional Western ideological confines and modifies patriarchal inscriptions. While no American writer, regardless of race or gen der, can be considered as totally outside of the dominant signify ing structure, there is nonetheless an area on the periphery, a zone both chosen and allocated, which represents a way of seeing and of knowing that disconcerts and finally discounts the very struc ture which excludes it. Mapping that zone as Morrison delineates it most radically—through language, through a rendering of his tory, through a reinscription of identity, and through the articu lation of female desire—is the concern of the following study, which seeks to place Morrison's works within the context of a black feminine/feminist aesthetic and to define that aesthetic in terms of contemporary feminist and African American critical theory. According to French feminist theorists Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement in The Newly Born Woman: "It is impossible to define a feminist practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.... It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, 1 2 Introduction by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate" (313). Morrison is surely one of these "peripheral figures" in terms of the dominant culture, central though she is to the contemporary literary scene. For Morrison—as is also true for many other contemporary African American women writers, including Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor, to name three— gender is not separate or separable from racial identity; while their arguments are for liberation from racial and gender oppression, both race and gender themselves are always seen as liberating points from which to construct a language or to create a literature that is political in form as well as in subject matter. As Morrison consciously writes the black text, so she also defines herself as ccvaluable as a writer because I am a woman, because women, it seems to me, have some special knowledge about certain things. [It comes from] the ways in which they view the world and from women's imagination. Once it is unruly and let loose it can bring things to the surface that men—trained to be men in a certain way—have difficulty getting access to" (Lester, 54). In Morrison's texts, to be "other," i.e., black and female, is to have privileged insights, access to that "special knowledge" she both inscribes and describes repeatedly in her novels. In keeping with the paradox that is also herfictional text, Morrison celebrates "otherness" but simultaneously also resists participation in what art sections of the popular press are currently calling "artistic trib alism" and "the cult of otherness." Morrison has said of African Americans: ccWe are not, in fact, 'other.' We are choices. And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to exam ine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the 'raceless' one with which we are, all of us, most familiar" (1990, 208). She writes, finally, she says, about that which "has something to do with life and being human in the world" (Tate 1989, 121). Perhaps, as Morrison illustrates, it is possible to be both "other" and "human in the world" with out, at the same time, serving the gods of traditional Western humanism. For Morrison's fictions do represent otherness, in which fact lies their great strength, for from her very marginality she pre sents a mirror to the larger culture as well as to the African American culture, and the image contained there is often a reve lation. For Morrison, to recognize the other as one's "self," to Introduction 3 come to terms with one's own otherness, to enter willingly the forbidden zones of consciousness (and unconsciousness) that lie through and beyond the mirror of gender and race, is to become more fully human, more moral, and more sane. Often Morrison presents this psychic zone in terms that emphasize rather than minimize its cultural otherness, for she guides her reader through metaphoric jungles, through representations of the conjure world,1 and through images of an Africa of the mind that is repressed but never totally lost or forgotten, a part of the unconscious which surfaces in racial memory, particularly for African Americans. Perhaps Elaine Showalter is generally correct in her argument that the anthropologically defined "wild zone"2 of female space within the literary text is, at least for most women writers, a "play ful abstraction: in the reality to which we must address ourselves as critics, women's writing is a cdouble-voiced discourse' that al ways embodies the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant" (1985, 263). But Morrison invites her own inclusion into a very much less abstract and not always so playful wild zone, a place where women's imagination is "un ruly and let loose," as she herself describes it, and where language is subversive, where the female body claims the power to articu late itself, where silence speaks and the unconscious becomes the conscious. Largely outside the myth of American homogeneity, freer than most American theorists of the thumbprint of patriarchal discourse in spite of their acknowledged debts to such theorists as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, the French feminist theorists are those who most pointedly seek to investigate the feminine language, who have begun to map the ccwild zone," and who might provide a metaphoric structure by which to approach the nature of Morrison's marginality and her difference. For Morri son does write what the French call difference^ that feminine style that opens the closure of binary oppositions and thus subverts many of the basic assumptions of Western humanistic thought. The important metaphor that pervades the works of such theo rists as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, Marguerite Duras, and Monique Wittig, is in fact that of marginality, of blackness as symbolic of radical dissidence and linguistic revolution. Duras, for example, defines feminine writ ing as "an organic translated writing . translated from black 4 Introduction ness, from darkness . from the unknown, like a new way of communicating rather than an already formed language" (quoted by Marks, 174). Cixous, too, in "The Laugh of the Medusa," aligns herself with all women, whom she perceives as victimized by but victorious over white patriarchy: "We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces .. we are black and we are beautiful" (310). Women, write Cixous and Clement in The Newly Born Woman^ are "the Dark Continent" (68). "Blackness" as metaphor, for Morrison as well as for these French theorists, embraces racial identity and a state of female consciousness, or even unconscious ness, that zone beyond the laws of white patriarchy in which fe male art is conceived and produced. Ann Rosalind Jones sees many aspects of French feminisms as limited in political application, the constitution of "an energiz ing myth" (372) rather than an agenda for change, but she also defends the works of French feminists as "an island of hope in the void left by the deconstruction of humanism"; they represent "a powerful alternative discourse .

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