The Identifying Fiction of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, and: Toni Morrison (review)

Male-authored book-length studies of African-American women writers have included wonderfully informed studies by Michael Awkward (Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women's Literature (1989)) and the Toni Morrison Society prize-winning Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels (1995) by Philip Page. Despite this luminous genealogy, John Duvall's intriguing, autobiographical study of Morrison begins with an exemplary and honest account of the contradictions and problematics of being a white male scholar of African-American women's literature. Duvall feels the need for his counterblast because of a nebulous and frightening essentialism that affects a sizeable proportion of the critical work on Morrison. This essentialism is not merely an African-American affectation but sometimes manifests itself in feminist approaches to her work. For instance, at a British gathering of Morrison feminist scholars discussing Beloved, I was lambasted for proposing that Paul D.'s linguistic affinity with Sethe exhibited through a call and recall pattern might just be as important to the novel's plot as the oral and aural affinity amongst the women in 124. Duvall's commentary "that while Morrison herself in her criticism has written of the danger of fetishizing blackness, the critical commentary on her work frequently becomes complicit with that very fetishization" (7). With the caveat that such fetishization could be expanded to the feminine, this seems to me an exemplary commentary on the dangers of any form of essentialism. It is brave for Duvall to stick his colors to the mast quite so forcefully, but it is important to assert that, "[b]eing an African American woman critic of Morrison may create more obstacles as well as advantages to a reading of Morrison and does not ensure correct interpretation" (7).

In looking at these two well-informed, generally politically astute and luminous studies of Morrison by two white male critics we should be thankful that the clarion calls to "authenticity" have not prevented the intercultural exchange their necessarily exterior account of Morrison's oeuvre has produced. There is a sense in which Duvall's insistence on interrogating the autobiographical antecedents and underpinnings of Morrison's fiction might best be done from the relative detatchment of a white male subject position. Duvall relates how Morrison's right to privacy was an intellectual Shibboleth defended by leading Morrison scholars who contended she is a "private person and would not want [biographical work] published" (3). If such a view was tenable in her early days as a writer, surely now after intervening publically in the Clarence Thomas and O.J. Simpson affairs as well as coming to Clinton's defence in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Morrison's claims to absolute privacy carry less weight. In the broad sweep Duvall's autobiographical contextualisation of Morrison is illuminating and astute, detailing her maturation from the Lorain High School, Chloe Wofford to the Howard University "Toni." He does not use this information to forward an "ad hominem" (sic) account but rightly details how "the question of identity for Morrison is not a given for Morrison because she rejects her name" (20). Moreover, she repeatedly refers to the act of self-naming in coded, yet fairly overt ways, "creating the paradox of the thing that wants simultaneously to be concealed and revealed" (20). The problem in the study comes, however, when Duvall posits the autobiographical as specifically generative in Morrison's texts. This leads to claims that Morrison's renaming and self-fashioning is crucial to her relationship to the African-American literary tradition. Thus, Aunt Cloe, a midwife character in the Trueblood incident in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) is seen to be crucial to Morrison's rewriting of the rape scene brilliantly highlighted in Awkward's 1989 monograph. Duvall comments that, "The Bluest...