Naming Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison's Covert Letter to Ralph Ellison

NAMING INVISIBLE AUTHORITY: TONI MORRISON'S COVERT LETTER TO RALPH ELLISON John N. Duvall The University of Memphis And all those people were me. I was Pecóla, Claudia. ... I was everybody. —Toni Morrison Soaphead Church and his letter to God have occasioned a variety of critical responses.1 A fact generally overlooked in the commentary on The Bluest Eye, even in articles specifically on narration, is that Soaphead, because of his letter, is a narrator too.2 His narration is coterminouswith his actofauthorship. Since authorship is what Morrison herself stakes a claim to in her first novel, I want to argue that Church stands as a significant early figure in Toni Morrison's attempt to fashion a usable racialized authorial identity.3 Growing up in the workingclass town ofLorain, Ohio, where there were no black neighborhoods, Morrison'syouth and adolescence were largely free ofrace consciousness . "I never absorbed racism," Morrison says in a 1992 interview, "I never took it in. That's why I wrote The Bluest Eye, to find out how it felt."4 Morrison's various accounts of her relation to her first novel invite speculation on howthis fiction figures in a process ofracial selfdiscovery that is indistinguishable from the act ofwriting. Taken as an instance of self-fashioning, Church's letter to God reveals itself as a metafictional gesture that encodes Morrison's own ambitions and anxieties regarding her authorial identity. Church's urge to address God's transcendent spiritual authority symbolically represents Morrison's desire to address and contest the cultural authority of Ralph Ellison. Church's letter, in fact, provides further evidence ofthe way the central plot situation of The Bluest Eye—Pecóla Breedlove's rape by her father—rewrites the Jim Trueblood episode of Invisible Man, a connection suggestively articulated by Michael Awkward.5 To argue that Soaphead Church should be read as an instance of self-fashioning might seem to overlook perversely the more obvious authorial figuration, Claudia MacTeer, who rather straightforwardly seems a portrait ofthe artist as a young woman. Like Morrison, Claudia 242John N. Duvall is in 1941 aten-year-old girl living in Lorain, Ohio.6 Morrison's thinly disguised autobiographical impulse becomes even more apparent when one examines her character's name. Morrison was born "Chloe," and "MacTeer" is a family name. Beginning the novel speaking from the child's perspective, Claudia/Chloe nevertheless concludes the novel speaking from an older and wiser adult perspective. From this adult perspective, she speaks a theory of radical implication, one that refuses to blame Cholly entirely for Pecóla's fate and sees rather the entire community's role in what befalls Pecóla. Nor does Claudia excuse herself in her communal/self-critique: we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite ; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.7 This moment of self-critique by one author-figure leads back to Soaphead Church in two ways. First, there is his letter's content. Church makes his living through false revelation by marketing himselfas the medium of God's Word, but his letter contains a strong element of self-critique even as it overtly criticizes God for flaws in his design. Second, and perhaps more significant, a rhetorical pattern in Church's letter directly echoes the rhetorical strategy Claudia/Chloe deploys at the end ofthe novel. Speaking ofhis Caribbean genealogy and its relation to the white ruling class, Church maintains: In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish , not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom, (p. 1 77) In this rhetorical doubling, the métonymie chain of...