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  • Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt
  • Laurie Vickroy (bio)
Wyatt, Jean. Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2017.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, in her 1989 essay "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," articulated her concern for the traumatic effects of racism on victims and perpetrators, citing the "severe fragmentation of the self" that she regretted was not of sufficient concern to psychiatry at that time (16). And extending her ideas in the 1993 Playing in the Dark, she identifies the extent of cultural pathologies about race in the representations of African Americans in canonical American fiction that illustrated and reiterated whites' identity fantasies about themselves and African Americans. The social, political, and economic realities for African Americans in America historically are significant contexts and triggers for her characters, but Morrison's focus has always been on their inner lives and the psychological consequences to them of dealing with a racialized and pathologized white dominant culture. Literary trauma narratives like hers are uniquely able to represent such dynamics by creating personalized allegories of historical situations and their personal costs (Vickroy 68), therefore, psychoanalytic and trauma critics are well positioned to elucidate her valuable contributions to rethinking race.

Psychoanalytic interpretations of race and culture have been important supplements to Marxist, cultural, and historical criticisms because they highlight individuals' internalizations of, and replayed patterns of, social inequalities. Postcolonial theorists acknowledged the psychological, traumatic, identity-altering effects of colonization that enable its perpetuation. Early practitioners like analysts Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks 143–44), Albert Memmi (Dominated Man 86), and Ashis Nandy (The Intimate Enemy 19–21) recognized these effects: 1) the devalued identity of the colonized can become [End Page 111] split or conflicted, leaving them vulnerable to adopting colonizers' definitions of them or absorbing colonizers' identities; 2) the reification and generalization of native collectivities that deny individuality; and 3) a general devaluing and displacement of subject cultures by the dominant culture (Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized 91–92). It's not a stretch to see African Americans' experience as a similar type of cultural imprisonment with similar consequences.

Psychoanalytic approaches can effectively examine how writers like Morrison employ narrative innovations and multiple perspectives to explore the psychological ramifications of the historical traumas of racial designations and slavery. A recent study extends the examination of the relationship of character to culture for Morrison and other African American writers. In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, Jean Wyatt employs a unique intersection of psychoanalytic, rhetorical narrative theory, and historical analysis to examine how the language and narrative strategies Morrison employs express the theme of troubled love relationships among her African American characters in traumatic historical circumstances. Wyatt applies particular psychoanalytic concepts of regression, trauma, and displacement, and in particular psychoanalyst Jean LaPlanche's concept of the enigmatic signifier, to analyze Morrison's narrators and characters, and to examine how the characters' fractured syntax and mental focus express their psychological wounds. Further, Wyatt demonstrates how psychoanalytical and narrative concepts spotlight the narrow focalizations of Morrison's multiple narrators that illustrate her rejection of binary thinking that perpetuates the "tyranny of the single truth . . . [and where for Morrison] enigma leads to a democracy of interpreters" (Wyatt 94).

Wyatt also maintains that Morrison's "peculiarities of narrative structure—its gaps, discontinuities, and surprises—bring a reader to question his or her own fixed beliefs about love" (2). She thinks Morrison wants to engage and implicate readers to see warped and destructive aspects of love that can accompany historical traumas of racism, diaspora, and slavery. For example, Wyatt unveils the ways that Morrison uses dynamic permutations of love relationships to break with traumatic cycles of emotional loss and lack of love connected to slavery and the color line in Jazz. And in her interpretation of Morrison's Paradise she demonstrates how their psychological defenses lead a group of patriarchs to displace or transfer racial shaming experienced by their ancestors onto their own proprietary control of women. This psychological defense enables the men to live with that shame by adopting a rigidity of mind and "gendered power...

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