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Conclusion
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Conclusion In her novels, Toni Morrison uses the metaphor of the ghost to assert the presence of African American history and to re-create the personal experiences of those who lived this history. This information is often ignored by hierarchical and binary ways of thinking. The spectral figure shows the power of the ghostly and the supernatural to subvert dualistic and oppressive relationships, and the figure finds ways for socially ghosted characters, who are silenced and lost in the interstices, to endure traumatic experiences resulting from slavery, dispossession, racial violence, class conflicts, and oppression. These specters form conduits of communication across generations , races, classes, genders, life and death, and past and present. In Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, the ghosted characters are torn by issues of class and race and are disconnected from their family heritage, and in Beloved and Paradise, the ghosted characters are brought into communication with previous generations and with a violent cultural and personal history that has traumatized them. In Jazz and Love, the spectral guides become the narrators, breaking down the boundaries between text and reader as they unghost the characters who have been elided by precarious interactions with history, class conflicts, and patriarchal dominance. These concerns with the ghostliness of history and individuals continue in Morrison’s latest book, A Mercy, which, in a thematic return toward The Bluest Eye and Beloved, delineates the precarious positions of socially marginalized characters , including orphans, women, servants, and slaves, who are all trying to negotiate their relationships to power and agency in early America. This concern with the spectral is also present in Morrison’s nonfiction, particularly in her Nobel lecture and acceptance speech, which she delivered in 1993 between the publications of Jazz and Paradise. Tellingly, in her Conclusion acceptance speech to the Swedish Academy, she described as part of the honor of being awarded the prize her feeling of being “pleasantly haunted” by those who had been chosen before and “delightfully haunt[ed]” by those who will be chosen in the coming years (Nobel 31–32). During a 2004 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Renee Montagne asked Morrison how being haunted could be pleasant. “I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert,” Morrison replied. “If you are really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life that is on top. It’s not spooky, necessarily— might be, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s something I relish, rather than run from” (Montagne). This idea of looking beneath and beyond the accepted surface of things is of paramount importance in Morrison’s creative work, and it accounts for her frequent use of the ghost to communicate what is often lost to cultural and national amnesia. Furthermore, the themes in her novels of communication between generations, the possibilities of the shared text, and the avoidance of either/or thinking are all showcased in Morrison’s Nobel lecture. Here she forecasts the paradise where her souls do their work in the spaces between, and she reiterates the generational connections among spectral guides/ancestors and their charges, who lack a coherent narrative of their origins. Since Morrison delivered this lecture during the completion of her trilogy, its emphasis on spaces of mediation indicates the unifying nature of this theme of intergenerational haunting that is present throughout her canon. This theme of generations communally working through the past, a quality that is so important in the novels I have analyzed, is emphasized beautifully in Morrison’s Nobel lecture. She tells the story of an old wise woman who is blind but who, even though she has this disability, is held in honor by her community and possesses the insight that is a key ability for so many of Morrison’s spectral figures. This woman encompasses many oppositions comfortably: she is honored but “lives alone in a small house outside of town” (Nobel 9); she “is the law and its transgression” (10). One day, several disaffected youth come to ask this woman a question that hinges on her disability. They are “bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is” (10).Telling her that one of them is holding a bird, they ask her whether it is alive or dead. She answers that what she does know is that it is “in your hands” (11). Morrison uses this story to illustrate the responsibility that comes with the manipulation [52.90.40.84] Project MUSE (2024...