Chapter 1 1. I Particularly Want to Thank Jeff Williams, Director of The
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Notes Chapter 1 1. I particularly want to thank Jeff Williams, director of the department’s con- centration in African-American literature, for risking the displeasure of other African-American faculty members by arguing that I should be al- lowed to teach Morrison. 2. No one can escape the contradictions of capitalism, but some instances seem stranger than others. Morrison is currently in vogue in the univer- sity, but in 1981 she was literally in Vogue, promoting her new book Ta r Baby. Given her critique of hegemonic notions of female beauty, there is something jarring about seeing her comments on sex and beauty,love, and female friendship sandwiched among advertisements for cellulite removal and Victoria’s Secret (Medwick 330–32). 3. Elizabeth Renker argues this thesis. 4. Her exact figure is of a woman riding naked on a subway.The extremity of this hypothetical example—I do not imagine too many readers have seen or ridden with naked women in public transportation—makes it dif- ficult to accept her logic. 5. Morrison may in time prove correct but one may wish to base social policy on more than her reported conversation with an unnamed oncologist. 6. Two recent studies have noted competing strains of modernism and post- modernism in Morrison. Kimberly Chabot Davis, focusing on Beloved, says that the novel “exhibits a postmodern skepticism of sweeping historical narratives” but “retains an African American and modernist political com- mitment to the crucial importance of deep cultural memory” (242). Michael Nowlin, writing about Jazz, sees in the figure of Wild “[t]he two poles of black identity—authenticity derived from the connection to the ancestors and deracination paradoxically derived from race consciousness [ . .]” (167). Nowlin also hears “a confessional, autobiographical voice” (154) in Jazz. My study,however, locates this autobiographical voice much earlier in Morrison’s writing, finding the autobiographical to be a consti- tutive feature of her writing. 7. Wilfred D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems productively use the ex- istentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the language of modernist authenticity 154 The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison to examine Morrison’s fiction. See particularly the section “The Sartrean Influence” (17–18) for their rationale.What I hope to demonstrate is that such notions of authenticity are in tension with postmodern conceptions of identity. 8. Page is not alone in recognizing such parallels. For example, Patricia McKee, though not equating the two writing practices, notes that “like de- constructionists, Morrison identifies spacing as a means of producing meaning” (4). Barbara Johnson’s work, which I discuss in chapter 3, also reads Morrison deconstructively. 9. It is not, however, my intention to read Morrison through Barthes’s dis- persal of everything into textuality.In fact, rather than the death of the au- thor, what my study charts paradoxically is the birth of Morrison’s artistic identity as it emerges through language. 10. Doreatha Drummond Mbalia is the first to focus attention exclusively on class. See her comments on how Morrison’s sense of class may have been focused by her experiences as an instructor at Howard University in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Toni 105–06). See also Linden Peach’s study, which in a number of instances draws attention to class issues. 11. Other statements, however, suggest Morrison did experience racism as a child, most notably her comments about white teenaged boys throwing rocks at her and her friends when she was six. (Kramer 15). 12. Dwight McBride, in examining Morrison’s use of essentializing rhetoric in her essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” argues that “a strategic essen- tialism becomes an almost indispensable tool” for an oppressed “people whose individual lives may be markedly different, but who nonetheless suffer from a common form of racial hegemony” (150). 13. This is not to say that an institutional affirmative action does not still have an important cultural work to perform. 14. See, for example, Hutcheon’s comments on Tar Baby (Poetics 68–69) and Song of Solomon (Poetics 151–52). 15. Homi Bhabha has identified Morrison’s Beloved as exemplary of postcolo- niality’s “salutary reminder of the persistent ‘neo-colonial’ relations within the ‘new’ world order and the multinational division of labour”; for Bhabha, perspectives such as Morrison’s allow for “the authentication of histories of exploitation and the evolution of strategies of resistance” (6). And on the cover of The Location of Culture, Morrison provides the fol- lowing endorsement:“Any serious discussion of post-colonial/postmodern scholarship is inconceivable without referencing Mr. Bhabha.” Satya Mohanty has also identified Morrison with postcolonialism. His attempt to designate what he calls a realist position on identity that medi- ates the essentialism of identity politics and the social constructionist views of identity is not unrelated to my sense of the tension in Morrison’s work between modernist authenticity and postmodern subjectivity; the differ- ence is that, while Mohanty uses Morrison to theorize his alternative third position, I am less certain that these tensions ever quite resolve themselves. Notes 155 16. Philip Weinstein briefly notes Morrison’s debt to Said (xx). 17. Martin Kreiswirth, writing about William Faulkner, has termed such revi- sion “auto-intertextuality.” Chapter 2 1. In “Rootedness,” Morrison comments that Ellison serves as an ancestor, a kind of grandfather to more contemporary African-American writers. (343). 2. Melvin Dixon sees Church as a figure whose alienation doubles Pecola’s. (147). Chickwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi admits that Church’s letter “is powerful and arouses pathos” but argues finally that the letter “is an un- necessary diversion” (115). Jan Furman’s judgment is that Church “does lit- tle more than use [Pecola] in his own schemes of revenge against God” (22). Gurleen Grewal usefully reads Church in a postcolonial context, though she is not interested in his act of writing:“His biting letter to God shows him bound to the master’s imperial power; after all, his nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding, it is a small piece of this power he desires, not revolution” (29). Denise Heinze correctly notes the self-reflexivity of the letter as a “moment in which the reader is faced with ambivalence, uncer- tainty,conflict, and guilt” in which both readerly and authorial implication in Pecola’s fate emerge (157). I argue that the letter is more intensely self- reflexive than Heinze’s useful description indicates. 3. Linda Dittmar, for example, has written intelligently about the “disparate modes of narration” in The Bluest Eye that point to the “insufficiency of any one voice” (143) and has much to say about Claudia and the power of different voices in the novel; however, her discussion does not consider Church’s authorial voice. 4. In 1981 Morrison comments,“I went to school with white children—they were my friends. There was no awe, no fear. Only later, when things got...sexual...did I see how clear the lines really were. But when I was in first grade nobody thought I was inferior” (Strouse 54). 5. My introduction of Hawthorne into the discussion is not unmotivated. In the chapter on Virginia Woolf in her M.A. thesis, Morrison, writing about Mrs. Dalloway, speaks of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith in terms of “the unpardonable sin” (“Virginia” 9), language that suggests Morrison’s awareness of Hawthorne’s obsession. 6. Morrison has even suggested that, like Church, she was celibate at the time of writing. Speaking of her move to Syracuse, Morrison says,“In those days I didn’t even know any men” (Dowling 52). 7. Recognizing the disjunction between names and identity in Church’s let- ter, Shelley Wong argues that by “refusing the fixed identity of word and ob- ject, Morrison begins the work of decentering the logos itself. Through Soaphead’s address to God, Morrison reveals the inanity at the center of the authoritarian word” (478). But the moment may not be as deconstructive 156 The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison as Wong sees it since the letter simultaneously reinscribes a new authorial identity that is unwilling to abdicate this newly constituted authority. 8. Grewal suggests V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men as a different intertextual possibility arising out of Church’s added middle name (28). 9. This story is repeated in Douglas Century’s biography aimed at adolescent readers (33). 10. In 1948,The Gillette Company acquired The Toni Company and its line of home permanents and brought the Toni brand to national prominence in the 1950s. Morrison’s 1953 Howard University yearbook picture sug- gests she has had a permanent. In a historical irony, given Morrison’s cri- tique of standards of beauty in The Bluest Eye, Gillette licensed in 1958 a ten-inch-tall white fashion doll,Toni,a precursor to Mattel’s more famous Barbie. Historical information about Gillette can be found on the com- pany’s Web page <www.GILETTE.com>. (Note the address’s spelling with only one “l.”) 11. The Toni brand’s emphasis on the secret twin neatly fits into Alan Nadel’s notion of the doubled space of political and gender representation in Cold War America (117–32). Inexpensive sexual allure (the inexpensive home permanent) that could pass for the effect of conspicuous consumption (an expensive salon treatment) constituted the Toni user as a secret agent. 12. Morrison, for example, is identified as Chloe Anthony Wofford in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Preface (ix) to Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present and in Nellie Y. McKay’s Introduction (3) to her edited collection Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Gates and McKay merely repeat a presum- ably reliable fact from numerous other sources, such as Current Biography Yearbook 1979 and Contemporary Authors, vol.