The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. . - book review

Style, Spring, 2002 by Gary Storhoff

John N. Duvall. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. New York: Palgrave, 2000. x 182 pp. $45.00 cloth.

"My imagination," Toni Morrison once told an interviewer, "is more interesting than my life" (163). In John N. Duvall's engrossing study of Morrison, however, her easy distinction between imagination and biography becomes complicated indeed. In perhaps one of the most important books on Morrison yet written, Duvall explores Morrison's "struggle to fashion a useable identity" (101), primarily in her first four novels. In his introductory chapter, he asks fundamental questions about Morrison herself as a historical figure that ground his study: what is the effect on her texts of Morrison's working-class childhood? of her coming to maturation before the Civil Rights Movement? of her choice to begin writing novels during the 1960s? of her professional status as an African-American woman in a corporate context? And--though not explicitly articulated in Duvall's study--of her failed marriage to Harold Morrison? Duvall's richly speculative answers discover the "identifying fictions" embedded in Morrison's texts, but also in her own self-constructed identity. He shows that Morrison is perpetually "self-fashioning" as a writer and as an African-American woman (11).

Duvall's title points to the double nature of Morrison's career. As a modernist, she explores in her first four novels her own racial identity to establish her authority as a cultural voice. During this period, she is an essentialist, searching through her narratives for "a place where the alienated individual might discover [an African-American] authenticity" (15). In her subsequent work, however, Duvall detects Morrison's increasingly "postmodernist understanding of the constructedness of all identity" (18), especially in Paradise, where the quest for a purist racial category is much more problematic than earlier in her career. For Duvall, "the tension between identity as a biological essence and identity as a social construction is perhaps the central motivating opposition in her work" (9). Duvall argues that this tension emerges especially in Morrison's depiction of symbolic artists. Morrison is consistently anxious about her existential position as an author, and this anxiety reflexively filters into her texts in her employment of metafictional author-surrogates, many of whom, like Soaphead Church, experience emotional detachment and social isolation. But in Morrison's later work, beginning with Beloved, her writerly anxiety subsides, and her meditations on authorship are performances of spiritual healing within the community, of "building bridges between African-American women and men" (142). If "[t]o write is to write the self" (11), Morrison's sense of self as revealed in her texts evolves from an alienated victim in her first four books toward a confident expositor of religious transcendence in her next three.

Duvall's discussion of The Bluest Eye is his most provocative chapter, since by exploring Morrison's "symbolically autobiographical" narrative strategies (49), he opens an entirely new but controversial dimension to this oft-discussed novel. Morrison empowers Soaphead Church as a metaphorical artist to encode her own ambitions and anxieties as an author, especially her concern about the marginalization--even ostracism--authorship may necessarily bring. What may be most intriguing in the chapter, however, is Duvall's speculation about Morrison's name-change. Changing her name from Chloe to "Toni" (diminutive of her purported middle name Anthony) was not for the convenience of pronunciation, as Morrison has claimed in interviews, but to escape the felt connotations (in Chloe) of a racialized sense of self, especially the implications of "racial oppression and servility in the agrarian South" (37-38).

Why "Toni"? Certainly not because of her middle name, which is not "Anthony" but "Ardelia," named as she is after her maternal grandmother (as her birth certificate shows). In fact, Duvall theorizes that Chloe Ardelia Wofford may have chosen her new first name, "a hip, modern name for the 1950s" (38), after the "Toni"--a hair permanent in a box! It is stunning to suppose that America's Nobel laureate has named herself after a do-it-yourself beauty product, especially given the devastating thematics of beauty in The Bluest Eye, yet this paradox reveals "Morrison's personal and professional implication in the things she critiques" (3).

Even if the reader rejects this speculation on Morrison's covertly autobiographical self-representation in Soaphead, Duvall convincingly shows that Morrison's s anxious engagement with her identity as an African-American woman writer continues throughout her career. Sula, for example, is "an allegory of identity" (49), a symbolic narrative that discloses the dislocation suffered by a black feminist who authors a text--even if that text is her own sexual life. In Song of Solomon, she revises William Faulkner's texts to criticize patriarchal social forms and to explore "possibilities of non-Western spirituality" in the creation of Pilate (93), yet another potential artist. In Tar Baby, Morrison "rewrites Morrison" in Jadine's character (98), since Jadine transforms herself from an unreflective black woman eager to assimilate to white middle-class values into a nascent artist who appreciates a potentially liberating, woman-centered, black consciousness. Ever a feminist, Morrison in Tar Baby completely renounces masculine "property rights in black women" (117). Significantly for Duvall, Son's rape of Jadine precipitates her change of character; whatever "identifying fiction" this episode may mirror in Morrison's own life, Son's violence against Jadine marks a definite shift in Morrison's artistic career. In her first four novels, Morrison self-reflexively measures the personal cost to her identity as an African-American woman who chooses to become a writer. In Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise the artist figures are forthrightly maternal, empowered, redemptive visionaries who announce a spiritual sense of reconciliation, "a new communion of the body" (146).