Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth- Century African American Literature

CHAPTER FOUR: TONI MORRISON, OPRAH WINFREY, AND POSTMODERN POPULAR AUDIENCES

[ 119 ] TONI MORRISON, OPRAH WINFREY, AND POSTMODERN POPULAR AUDIENCES In June 2003, Oprah Winfrey launched her television book club anew, with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden as the first selection. Paperback copies of the fifty-one-year-old novel immediately appeared in bookstores nationwide (they had been held in sealed cartons until Winfrey’s official announcement ), with wrappers around the front cover declaring it “The Book That Brought Oprah’s Book Club Back.” The Oprah Winfrey Show also brought East of Eden back: by July it had risen to the second spot on USA Today’s best-seller list (above Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir but below the latest installment in the Harry Potter series). Annual sales for East of Eden had been strong,at 40,000 to 50,000,for a lengthy and difficult novel,but 1.2 million copies were in print a month after Winfrey’s selection (“Oprah Helps”). Following a fourteen-month book club hiatus, Winfrey had demonstrated once again her extraordinary success in literary marketing. In this chapter I examine Oprah’s Book Club as an antidote to the fundamental problem confronting Larsen, Brooks, Reed, Ellison, and all American minority writers before 1996, when Winfrey began her first book club. Over the next six years, every Oprah selection became a best-seller, with Winfrey’s CHAPTER FOUR publishing power manifesting itself in reduced prices for Oprah books and numerous requests from editors and agents that Winfrey bestow her magic touch on their books. As a New York Times profile concluded, “Winfrey has taken considerable cultural authority away from publishers” (Max 40). I focus especially on the“Oprah effect”and Morrison, who after three appearances on Oprah’s Book Club has become the most dramatic example of postmodernism’s merger between canonicity and commercialism. I argue that the alliance between Morrison’s canonical status and Winfrey’s commercial power superseded the publishing industry’s field of normative whiteness, enabling Morrison to reach a broad, popular audience while also being marketed as artistically important, in contrast to an established white male author like Thomas Pynchon, of whom Gates satirically observes,“Now there was someone you never saw on‘Oprah Winfrey’”(Loose Canons 15). By embracing Oprah’s Book Club, Morrison replaces separate white and black readerships with a single, popular audience. Before her first Oprah appearance in December 1996, Morrison was a Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner, held an endowed chair at Princeton University , and was one of the most respected voices in contemporary American literature . While Pierre Bourdieu’s inverse equation between cultural and commercial capitals would make this aesthetic success dependent on a consequent lack of marketability, since aligning herself with Winfrey Morrison became the best-selling author of Song of Solomon, nineteen years after its first publication; of Paradise, probably the least accessible book she has yet written; of The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel; and, most recently, of Sula (2002).1 In each case Morrison appeared on Oprah to discuss her novels with Winfrey and selected viewers,while stores sold the books with special Oprah’s Book Club stickers and often in displays based more onWinfrey’s appeal than Morrison’s. While Morrison’s books had long sold well, her Oprah connection propelled her into an altogether higher order of marketability. (Winfrey also devoted an episode to a discussion of the film version of Beloved, which she produced while playing Sethe.) Morrison’s embrace of popular markets extends as well to the audiobook versions of her novels, which constitute another important merger of “high” art with “low” media. In this chapter,I argue that for African American women writers in particular , the connection between high cultural forms and popular audiences is a crucial stage in their adaptation of authorship’s public space. These writers, [ 120 ] TONI MORRISON, OPRAH WINFREY, AND POSTMODERN POPULAR AUDIENCES who have only very recently established themselves commercially, let alone canonically, engage in a complex interaction with the market and the canon. Television and audiobook audiences commodify Morrison’s texts while also crediting her with a new kind of social authority.By constructing an audience built through popular, ostensibly low, culture for her serious novels, Morrison explodes the high-low divide that still holds for much of postmodern art. Morrison sells herself and her novels, like jazz, through popular media and thus constructs herself as a self-consciously commodified textual authority. No doubt it is tempting...