Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Introduction: “What Does it Mean to Follow a Ghost” in Toni Morrison’s Fiction?

Introduction “What Does it Mean to Follow a Ghost” in Toni Morrison’s Fiction? Among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, Beloved (1987) is the obvious ghost story since one of the integral characters of the novel is a revenant, but supernatural events and ghosts are present throughout her canon. Labeling Morrison’s other works “ghost stories” may initially seem to be an exaggeration, but in reading the trilogy (1987–97), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Love (2003), and A Mercy (2008) as “ghost stories,” I do not mean to suggest that they are preoccupied with conventional fireside stories of haunted houses or apparitions. Once Morrison’s novels are read as haunted texts, peopled by ghosts and “ghostly” characters, connections within her work as a whole become clearer. What if the specter of Beloved is a “type” of character that readers should notice throughout the novels, not just as “the beloved” but as a figure of spectrality mediating personal and cultural history?1 I posit that Morrison connects her novels not only through cultural history but also through a preoccupation with spectrality and the haunting, disjointed natures of both personal and cultural history. As Kathleen Brogan notes, “In contemporary haunted literature, ghost stories are offered as an alternative—or challenge—to ‘official,’ dominant history” (17). In her work, Morrison plays with the boundaries of American culture and life, showing where the past is still present, even if certain groups’ histories seem separate or invisible to the “mainstream’s” eye. “The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present,” writes Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events” (Spectral America 5).  Introduction To understand why Morrison would write spectral literature to subvert the master narrative, one can turn to Carlos Fuentes: “The role of the marginal cultures is that of the guardians of memory. A memory of what the West sacrificed in other cultures through imperialist expansion and what it sacrificed within its own culture” (qtd. in Zamora, The Usable Past 123). But how can a writer engage this silenced history through the use of spectrality? Specifically she can do the subversive cultural work of imagining a communal past and origin. In spectral literature, even if the original ancestors are no longer alive, they are present. Therefore, in books like Morrison’s Beloved, the work of the specter is cultural and generational, helping the second generation understand specific cultural moments of dispossession and slavery, important events that are often elided in the greater American historical purview. The specter provides connection and identity to confused and, subsequently, “ghosted” characters. Ghosts create spaces that indicate issues of dispossession and trauma, and they can create places for memorializing and healing. Shining a light on this very issue of the ghostly relationships between cultures, Morrison’s study Playing in the Dark (1992) traces the African American presence as a shadow that refused to be ignored in the works of canonical, predominantly white American writers. She posits that “[t]he contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (5). Critic Tammy Clewell identifies this underlying motivation in Morrison’s fiction as well: “While Morrison uses her fiction to recover black histories ignored by dominant Western traditions, she also manages to emphasize what has been irretrievably lost—those personal memories, communal traditions, and unrealized possibilities that have disappeared without benefit of permanent documentation” (130). Through the metaphoric power and the poststructural binary-busting possibilities of the specter, Morrison does her cultural work of emphasizing African American history in America and of reestablishing the connections among past and present, life and death, and generations. Her spectral figures elicit an awareness of the actual lived experience of the African American past situated within historical events, and by writing about these memories and personal experiences, she calls attention to the unique position of this past as a haunting presence in relation to mainstream American history. As a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author, she certainly is one of the  “What Does it Meanto Follow a Ghost” inToni Morrison’s Fiction? most important presences in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American critical and creative thought, and she uses her position to...