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  • The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison
  • Alan Rice (bio)
The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 220 pages. $95.00 cloth; $27.99 paper.

A signal moment for African American women's literature arrived with the 2007 publication of this Cambridge Companion. Toni Morrison is the rst black woman writer to enter this canonical series—only the latest in a series of groundbreaking achievements in her ve-decades-long writing career. Critics engaged with Morrison studies since the 1970s and 1980s have stories of how her works were patronized by traditionalists in curriculum committees who charged her champions with an overweening political correctness and her with being fashionable and ultimately only important from a sociological perspective. Let us celebrate this moment and what it means for the maturation of African American women's writing into mainstream consciousness. Furthermore, we should celebrate an excellent roster of transatlantic contributions covering Morrison's complete oeuvre.

Probably the best essay is Claudine Raynaud's dissection of Beloved (1987). Raynaud not only makes an efcient synthesis of the most important critiques of the novel, but also uses a dynamic admixture of Derridean, trauma theory, and African American folkloric approaches to show how the novel recreates "the moving texture of memory" (57). Shirley Ann Stave likewise does compelling work on Jazz (1992), showing how the city is "rough terrain on which to battle those ghosts who refuse to remain buried in the past" (61). Editor Justine Tally's own contribution is similarly astute. A synopsis of the importance of treating Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise (1999) as a trilogy dealing with key components of narration where "[m]emory is ckle, story is unreliable and history is subject to manipulation" (81), Tally's thesis interweaves Michel Foucault's archaeology of knowledge, Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogics, and Julia Kristeva's feminist interventions about motherhood. Tally shows how "a concern for the theories of discourse" at issue in the late twentieth century [End Page 184] is both the subject of the trilogy and the key to unlocking its multivalent meaning (89). Joyce Hope Scott also uses Bakhtin's theories about language and the carnivalesque in her essay on Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981) to show how Morrison uses her characters' differences to "transform . . . meaning through dialogic encounters" (37). Despite this essay's strengths, it is undermined by the lack of a postcolonial reading of Tar Baby to complement its Bakhtinian rigor. To write of ideologies striking back in the Caribbean without mentioning the prime theorist of postcolonial retribution, Frantz Fanon, seems a missed opportunity at the very least. Judylyn Ryan's essay on language and narrative technique in the novels shows the importance of combining political and cultural comment and is astute on the white gaze in Morrison, which she sees as doubled, "both debilitating and debilitated" (154).

Some of the essays in this collection fail to sparkle. Mar Gallego does a more than competent job of unraveling the complexity of Love (2003), but fails to rescue the novel from the commonly held belief that it is the weakest of Morrison's career. Writing about The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1974), Ágnes Surányi at times degenerates into an extended plot-summary with wayside commentary on previous critics. There is excellent explication here of Barbara Johnson's discussion of aesthetic rapport in Sula and what it tells us about Toni Morrison's self-reflexive style, but other issues such as "Morrison's comment on Freud's theory of penis envy" are not given the space to be fully worked out (21). Furthermore, Surányi's contention that Cholly in The Bluest Eye remains mute rather misses the point that Morrison, using the expressivity of jazz musicians through her jazz-like prose, potentially gives his underclass life an amazingly vibrant voice. This essay also illustrates a rather hagiographic attitude to the great novelist. Morrison's hyperbolic claim about Sula being the rst novel to depict female friendship as the major theme is left unchallenged.

Morrison's nonction prose, though beautifully written, does tend to such exaggeration, and Sämi Ludwig is a little prone to take...

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