Living Language, Living Memory: Essays on the Works of Toni Morrison, 2014
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Living Language Memory In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee described her work as “characterized by visionary force and poetic import [that] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Twenty years later, a group of scholars met in Stockholm to commemorate and celebrate Morrison’s award, and just as importantly, Living Language to critically engage the wealth of scholarship that has sprung up around Morrison’s work—both the six novels recognized by the Nobel Living Memory committee and those works of fiction and criticism published in the two decades afterwards. Essays on the Works of The essays in this collection implicitly and explicitly take up Morrison’s clarion call to vivify language. They engage her words by Toni Morrison elaborating on their meaning, offering readings of her literary texts that highlight their intertextuality, their proliferating conversations with other texts and contexts, and even other languages. In some, Morrison’s words give life to authors no longer with us, in others we are encouraged to resituate her writing in unfamiliar contexts in order & Grillo Mikrut Shands to highlight the multiplicity of meanings generated by her work. The essays offer rich testimony to the life-giving properties of Morrison’s language and seek to contribute to the ongoing afterlife of her work by adding to the scholarly conversations animated by her extraordinary literary career. Edited by Kerstin W Shands ENGLISH STUDIES Giulia Grillo Mikrut Distribution: ENGLISH STUDIES 4 Södertörns högskola Library www.sh.se/publications SE-141 89 Huddinge [email protected] 4 Living Language Living Memory Essays on the Works of Toni Morrison Edited by Kerstin W Shands Giulia Grillo Mikrut ENGLISH STUDIES 4 Södertörns högskola 2014 © 2014 Kerstin W. Shands and Södertörns högskola. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Cover photo: Hobcaw Barony, South Carolina, by Kerstin W. Shands Cover design: Jonathan Robson Layout: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson First published in 2014 Printed in Sweden by Elanders English Studies 4 ISSN: 1651-4165 ISBN: 978-91-86069-95-7 Contents Introduction 5 Andrea Sillis Forms of Time and Typologies of Culture: Language, Time, and Identity in the Work of Toni Morrison 15 Lynn Penrod Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: Lost and Found in Translation 33 Sangita Rayamajhi Teaching Toni Morrison to a Culturally Diverse Class: Experiences from Bangladesh 45 Anna Iatsenko Bodies, Music, and Embodied Cognition in Toni Morrison’s Fictional Works 55 Giulia Grillo Mikrut “You your best thing, Sethe. You are”: African American Maternal Experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 67 Lucy Buzacott The Black Mother as Murderess: William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and Toni Morrison’s Beloved 85 Hilary Emmett A Valediction Forbidding Mo’nin?: Beloved Revisited 95 Tuire Valkeakari After Eden: Constructs of Home, House, and Racial Difference in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy 107 Aoi Mori Rethinking Race Matters 127 Laura Castor “This house is strange”: Digging for American Memory of Trauma, or Healing the “Social” in Toni Morrison’s Home 139 Notes on Contributors 151 Introduction In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On awarding the prize the Nobel committee described her work as “charac- terized by visionary force and poetic import [that] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality” (Nobel website). Twenty years later, in October 2013, a group of scholars met in Stockholm to commemorate and celebrate Morrison’s award, and just as importantly, to critically engage the wealth of scholarship that has sprung up around Morrison’s work—both the six novels recognized by the Nobel committee and those works of fiction and criticism published in the two decades afterwards. The papers delivered at this symposium revealed certainly the ongoing “poetic import” of Morrison’s work, yet what they illustrated most compel- lingly was that there is no one “essential aspect of American reality” to which Morrison’s words give voice. Her novels engage contexts and ques- tions ranging from the nature of servitude in the colonial period to the poetics and politics of Harlem in the Jazz Age, from explorations of the class differences that cut across relations between African American individuals and communities to the physical and psychological violence that consti- tuted segregation and Jim Crow. Indeed, it is difficult to identify an “American reality” into which Morrison has not made an exact and searing intervention; even as her novels focus intimately on the lives of African Americans, white Americans are interpellated equally by the ways in which her explorations reveal the operations of whiteness—the disavowals of equality and the miscarriages of justice that went into its creation and main- tenance. Moreover, as the international perspective of many of the parti- cipants in the symposium demonstrated, Morrison’s account of the history of “race” is not even limited to American realities. At the heart of Morrison’s project lies the conviction that acts of language constitute lived realities and thus that language can shape and change these realities as a force of both healing and harm. The lecture she 5 LIVING LANGUAGE, LIVING MEMORY gave on accepting the Nobel Prize takes language as its subject in order to offer a compelling indictment of “dead” language that disables and censors, maintains an unjust status quo and, worse, the vampiric languages of sexism, racism, and “theism” that exploit vulnerability and foster division. Such language euphemizes state-sanctioned violence, silences dissent, and rationalizes dominion of one group over another. Evoking the polyphony of language that came about as a result of the collapse of the Tower of Babel, she goes on to celebrate the limitless reaching of language towards the ineffable—language constantly expands the boundaries of what is possible and imaginable. But in the same vein, language can never fully encapsulate the collective trauma of slavery or genocide, nor can it ever totalize indi- vidual experiences of violence or loss and it should not aspire to. Yet the striving after such expression can bring about the confrontation with the ineffable necessary for our own comprehension of the nature of trauma. Language, then, for Morrison must be dynamic, must evolve. Narrative, she declaims, must radically bring new subjectivities into being, even in the very moment of its own creation. In short, language must live. Taking Morrison’s Nobel lecture as a point of departure, Andrea Sillis’ essay, “Forms of Time and Typologies of Culture in the Work of Toni Morrison,” argues that Morrison’s conceptualization of language itself, and her ideas about the politics of identity formation, are organized by means of a complex network of temporal oppositions. Through close analysis of Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture,” Sillis demonstrates that language is a medium that is naturally oriented towards the future through both its epistemo- logical function and the creativity of the linguistic imagination. Moreover, this connection between language and the future is inherently politicized since Morrison clearly identifies the open-ended temporality of creative language with freedom of expression. Conversely, she correlates any form of censorship, dogma or political oppression with the temporality of closure, stasis and stagnation, and explicitly locates racism within the retrograde temporal framework she associates with oppressive forms of language. Moving outwards from the lecture, Sillis goes on to propose that Morrison resists the idea that white America’s historical involvement in slavery was a temporary ethical aberration. She suggests rather that its will to dominance stems from a presumption of cultural supremacy that is firmly rooted in Western models of epistemology. This negative assessment is diametrically opposed to Morrison’s valorization of the epistemological foundations of black language and culture, which is clearly identified with an interlocative model of African American language and aesthetics, informed, in turn, by 6 INTRODUCTION their origins in oral traditions. Morrison expressly describes this model as incorporating folk-cultural attitudes towards knowledge and identity, which naturally accommodate ambiguity and tolerate difference. In view of this celebration of the linguistic dynamism of orality, Sillis proposes that Morrison draws on insights provided by the implicit temporal ordering of her philosophy of language to pinpoint the critical sources of disparities between “black” and “white” language practices, and their associated perceptions of identity. For Morrison, African American discourse “lives” because of its ability to adapt and accommodate difference. Chapter two turns to French-language versions of Morrison’s first novel to illustrate the ways in which her language lives on in translation. In “Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: Lost and Found in Translation” Lynn Penrod considers a critical question that is often overlooked by literary scholars: the fate of a particular text, or indeed, of a particular author’s entire body of work, when it is translated. Nobel Prize laureates in literature have long provided lively debates worldwide on this issue. The market in literary translation is dominated by English speakers and readers desperately seeking translations of texts originally published in