- Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, by Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert, expands upon existing scholarship on narrative strategies in the fiction of Toni Morrison and analyzes four novels in terms of their negotiation and disruption of the languages and genres established by the dominant culture. Heinert succeeds in showing that what Morrison's critics consider a lack of resolution in her novels is actually Morrison's conscious attempt to create narratives that cause her readers to question traditional, culturally dominant modes of storytelling. Heinert falls short, however, in connecting Morrison's narrative strategies to elements of the African American vernacular tradition.
In the book's first chapter, titled "Situating Morrison in (African-) American Literary Criticism," Heinert divides existing scholarship on Morrison's novels into two categories: that which views Morrison's work as existing apart from the body of American literature and that which considers it a part of this tradition. A central issue dividing these schools of thought, Heinert contends, is that of politics versus aesthetics, particularly within the African American literary tradition. Heinert links the "aesthetic" school of thought to writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, whose 1928 essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," privileges aesthetics over politics. Heinert traces the political school of thought to W. E. B. Du Bois's 1926 essay, "The Criteria of Negro Art," which urges African American writers to value politics over aesthetics. Although Heinert does well in analyzing both positions, she would better substantiate her argument by examining the politics in Morrison's novels as an extension of Du Bois's 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois champions the idea that African American writers should reflect racial politics that expose the issue of double consciousness. While Heinert never directly addresses Morrison's reference to double consciousness in her writing, her research demonstrates how Morrison employs elements of the African American vernacular tradition within narrative genres established by the dominant culture.
In her second chapter, "Novel of 'Education': Bildungsroman and The Bluest Eye," Heinert posits The Bluest Eye (1970) as a bildungsroman. She explains not only how the narrative attached to each character—Cholly, [End Page 201] Soaphead, Geraldine, and Pauline—involves his or her development or quest for some form of education, but also how coexisting in a predominantly white society prevents each character from achieving self-actualization. The novel gives voice to the daily plight of a community of African Americans whose race impedes their full education and development in a white majority society. A discussion of how Morrison revises the traditional bildungsroman with an African American vernacular blues narrative, grounded in double-consciousness theory, would have rendered Heinert's argument far more complex.
In Chapter Three, Heinert also examines what we might term double-consciousness in Tar Baby (1981), maintaining that the novel "revises the racial stereotypes found in the dominant culture's versions of the [African American] 'Tar Baby' folktale" (36). Heinert details how Jadine, unlike the passive "Tar Baby" who appears open to male exploitation, refuses to be subjected to Son's continued abuse and Ryk's objectification. Heinert would illuminate a more nuanced perspective if she were to discuss Jadine's narrative in light of the subversive message of survival that it shares with traditional African American folktales. Additionally, she would demonstrate how Morrison's narrative strategies help readers to understand the challenges associated not only with being black in a predominantly white society, but also with being female in a society where males dominate.
In her discussion of Jazz (1992), Heinert continues her focus on the intersection of race and narrative, examining how Morrison revises the novel genre by offering the book itself as the narrator of the story. While Heinert calls attention to the multiple voices—and therefore multiple discourses—competing within the larger narrative, she misses a key opportunity to examine the way Morrison employs a jazz aesthetic, which interrupts...