The Unchurched Preacher and the Circulated Sermon: Literary Preaching in Toni Morrison's Beloved

I long for a critic who will know what I mean when I say "church," or "community," or when I say "ancestor," or "chorus." Because my books come out of those things and represent how they function in the black cosmology. … I am yearning for someone to see such things—to see what my structures are, what the moorings are, where the anchors are that support my writings.

—Toni Morrison ("An Interview with Toni Morrison," by McKay 151)

In a 1981 interview with Charles Ruas, Toni Morrison describes her novels with a comparison that discloses one of the enabling "moorings" or "anchors" of her fiction. She explains the "multiple endings" of her novels by insisting that they do not "stop" or "shut" because their meaning, as in an oral folktale, rests in her readers' responses. To explain this authorial sensibility further, she likens reading her novels to participating in a call-and-response sermon: "Being in church and knowing that the function of the preacher is to make you get up, you do say yes, and you do respond back and forth. … [S]omething is supposed to happen so the listener participates" ("Toni" 101). In this arresting explanation, Morrison acts as precisely the sort of critic that she would later claim to "long for," a critic who understands African American cultural forms, their "function in the black cosmology," and their structuring influence on her oeuvre. This vision of the novel as something like a call-and-response sermon that requires audience participation for its success is no fleeting vision for Morrison. In another interview of the same year, Thomas LeClair asks Morrison what makes her work distinctive, and she responds by saying, "the language, only the language" ("Language" 123). Morrison scholars with a special interest in her style frequently cite the first part of her answer: "The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time." Rarely, however, does her further elaboration receive critical attention, perhaps because it suggests a puzzling identification of her style with that of the preacher. After saying that the language "must not sweat," Morrison says that her stylized language's "function is like a preacher's: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself" (124). In other words, her language, like her strategic refusal to "shut" her novels, is designed to provoke a response, and, curiously, Morrison compares both of these aesthetic commitments to the art of preaching.

Despite Morrison's attraction to the energy, openness, and sensuality of the sermon, she has an intensely ambivalent relation to invoking the sermon for several interlocking reasons. First, Morrison holds the form at arm's length because it tends to reify highly centralized structures of authority and, more broadly, to fortify culturally dominant modes of Christianity that fail to address the needs of African Americans, especially women and children.¹ Second, although Morrison compares her literary style to that of a preacher, her intricate strategies of characterization reveal an attempt to navigate a dialectic of desire and repulsion as she constructs her vocational identity in relation to her numerous fictional preachers. Her attraction to the preacher's verbal artistry, moral authority, and cultural insight exists in dialectical tension with her repulsion at the preacher's hubris, elitism, and tendency to privilege abstractions over the needs of the body. Consequently, Morrison's intentionally multivalent scenes of preaching throw the reader into interpretive crisis and demand patient critical attention.

No single article could effectively treat each of Morrison's engagements with what I refer to as literary preaching, an enduring US literary form in which authors invoke the Protestant sermon in order to address a wide variety of cultural, political, or aesthetic questions. From Soaphead Church's epistolary sermon against God in The Bluest Eye (1970), to the sermonic wars that take center-stage in Paradise (1997), to what Morrison, in her 2004 foreword to Song of Solomon (1977), describes as Pilate's "extemporaneous sermon" (xiii), the sermon...