Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison (review)

Morrison’s fiction wins praise from some critics for its ostensible transcendence of ideology, but Gurleen Grewal quite rightly sets out to illuminate the profound socio-political critique that Morrison’s novels develop. Grewal argues cogently that Morrison exploits African American oral storytelling techniques and Western narrative traditions to explore the “larger story” that emerges when we confront the “gap” between “middle-class black America and its subaltern origins.” According to Grewal, Morrison’s novels are “anti-Bildung projects” intended to subvert American bourgeois ideology, particularly that of middle-class blacks who invoke it to sever ties with the lower-class black community. Morrison exposes assimilated African Americans’ hypocritical refusal to see that the black community in general still lacks access to the modes of upward mobility and individualistic self-creation that define middle-class life. Grewal contends that Morrison’s view of such middle-class privilege—and of the results of its absence—significantly shapes her treatment of related issues of race and gender.

In six brief chapters and an introduction, Grewal analyzes each of Morrison’s novels, from The Bluest Eye to Jazz, as stages in the author’s creation of a “public space” of trauma. Forcing readers of all races to view up close what American bourgeois mythology masks—the inescapable suffering of the disfranchised—Morrison deftly manipulates reader response to remind us all of the high price of distancing ourselves from such individual and social trauma.

Grewal’s study is intelligent, well written, and critically sophisticated, with debts to an array of social and literary theorists from Raymond Williams to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Grewal’s analysis advances Morrison studies by enhancing our awareness of important, subtly managed political features of Morrison’s work; ironically, this dimension of Morrison’s fiction is more easily overlooked than the political elements of works by less talented writers, whose social agendas too often compete with their art rather than emerge from it.

Despite Grewal’s substantive contributions to Morrison studies, however, some of her readers might wish that she had pursued several of her best ideas in more depth. The last few paragraphs of the chapter on Sula, for example, assert provocatively that Morrison’s novel exploits important intertextual connections to works by T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and, indeed, that in Sula Morrison engages in a revisionary dialogue with these and other major Eurocentric voices. Similarly, Grewal’s chapter on Tar Baby points out the novel’s intertextual connections to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the long run, though, Grewal sidesteps intertextual analysis to do little more than compare Morrison’s works to those of her mainstream predecessors. As Grewal persuades us of the consciously developed, clearly conceived reformist agenda galvanizing Morrison’s art, we long to hear more about this declared dialogue between Morrison’s revisionary, interventionist texts and the Eurocentric literary landscape in which they are situated.