Sula's Compromise: Toni Morrison and the Editorial Politics of Sensitivity

In her 1988 lecture "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Toni Morrison performed a series of self-reflexive close readings of her published work, parsing the first sentences of her novels word by word. Among these openings, the beginning of Sula (1973) inspires in its author an uncharacteristic ambivalence, even distaste; Morrison professes to "despise much of [it]" (187). Her lecture goes on to lay bare the novel's contested editorial history, pointing to a reluctant revision and an unsatisfactory "compromise" over its opening. The beginning pages, she explains, now serve as an "embarrassing" reminder of her concessions to her editor. Morrison's lecture represents Sula not only as a literary work but as an editorial archive, one that provides a record of "the strategies one can be forced to resort to in trying to accommodate the mere fact of writing about, for, and out of black culture while accommodating and responding to mainstream 'white' culture" (189). The "strategies" documented in the text testify to the institutional conditions of its fashioning.

I investigate those strategies, centering Sula as an instructive case study in the shifting editorial treatment of race in the novel across the late twentieth-century United States. While the editor's reorientation of Sula toward "mainstream 'white' culture" represents a common intervention in the writing of African American novelists, Morrison's resultant "strategies" for addressing her two audiences participated in a cultural turn toward a new, multiculturalist understanding of interracial dynamics, one in which pluralistic practices of racial awareness achieved new prominence. Reading Sula in light of its contested editorial history reveals the novel's careful, if reluctant, management of its imagined white readers, accomplished through exhortations against racist misperception and toward more attentive modes of regarding Blackness. I comparatively analyze multiple versions of Sula, highlighting how editorial changes to the novel's opening fundamentally altered its thematic focus. Moving from Sula's production to Morrison's subsequent reflections on the editing of Sula and Beloved (1987), I argue that Morrison's career during the 1980s and '90s illuminates shifting norms in the editorial practice of racial sensitivity—that is, in the focusing of deliberate editorial attention on the racial implications of language and its potential reception across multiple racial audiences. Morrison's self-conscious meditations on racial sensitivity as a literary-political strategy contextualize the racial dynamics of the major American publishing house within the cultural environment of the post-civil rights United States. Having outlined modes of racial awareness for white readers in the opening of Sula, Morrison nevertheless went on to articulate an immanent critique of racial awareness in the 1990s, characterizing sensitivity as an ameliorative but not radically disruptive anti-racist practice.

Morrison's career as an author and an editor has attracted significant interest in the field of African American book history.¹ Many scholars have analyzed the marketing of her work through Oprah's Book Club and studied the sociological, economic, and affective dynamics of her reception there.² Brief reflections on elements of Morrison's career serve as touchstones in the introductions to two recent collections of scholarship in African American book history: Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 (2013), edited by George Hutchinson and John K. Young, and MELUS's 2015 special issue African American Print Cultures, edited by Joycelyn Moody and Howard Rambsy II. In recent years, Cheryl A. Wall and Margo Natalie Crawford have also brought new attention to Morrison's work as an editor, particularly to the fashioning of The Black Book (1974). As Wall notes, Morrison the editor took pride in her ability to welcome black writers from a black cultural perspective, to be an editor to whom the black author "doesn't have to explain everything" ("Toni" 139). Given Morrison's commitment to such editorial dynamics, it is surprising that her disagreements with her own long-time editor, Robert Gottlieb, remain underexplored by scholars.³ Morrison's accounts of her conflicts and compromises with Gottlieb provide a contemporary perspective on James Weldon Johnson's famous "problem of the double audience" and its...