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

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Philip M. Weinstein

John N. Duvall. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. New York: St. Martin's (Palgrave), 2000. 182 pp. $45.00.

Several decades ago, Henry James served as the American academy's premier novelist, and his artist-story that most haunted professional commentators was entitled "The Figure in the Carpet." The most tantalizing of James's stories, this one intimated a certain elusive but all-implicating design functioning as the center of its fictional writer's work, but this design had escaped identification, despite obsessive detective work on the part of the fictional writer's critics. John Duvall's haunting study of Toni Morrison's work is no less in search of "the figure in the carpet," and as in the Jamesian story, that "figure" is autobiographical to the hilt. Read rightly, Duvall argues, Morrison's work can be seen to declare nothing so tellingly as the scripted identity of its author.

Whereas James's "figure" remained fixed (however elusive to the critical eye), Morrison's figural identity, as Duvall pursues it, is fluid, aleatory, postmodern: "Supplementing the genuinely autobiographical is the symbolically autobiographical, since 'what makes one write anyway' is the need to confront self." Duvall has written a species of inspired sleuthing. The figure in the carpet he would delineate is the "symbolical" Toni Morrison, an entity inseparable from the biographical Morrison, yet one whose lineaments are traceable only in the symbolic arena of her own proliferating words. In a number of ways this enterprise succeeds admirably.

Most broadly, Duvall reads the becoming of Toni Morrison as a drama in two acts: the first four novels (The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby) invested in the project of racial authenticity (a modernist project, this), and the later three novels (Beloved through Paradise) sharing a postmodern awareness of "the constructedness of all identity." As a postmodernist himself, Duvall is clearly aligned with the stances operative in that second act; this alignment furnishes the critical edge of his book's meditation on the novels that pursue "identity" as authenticity in the first act. This two-act drama also unfolds as a drama of seven scenes: one per novel. Here Duvall shrewdly assigns to each of Morrison's novels the precursor writer he finds it implicitly interrogating: Ellison for The Bluest Eye, Woolf for Sula, Faulkner for Song of Solomon and Jazz, Stowe for Beloved, and the earlier Morrison herself for Tar Baby and Paradise.

These intertextual engagements are not always persuasive. But when they are, they not only illuminate the text in question, they also demonstrate Duvall's operative conviction: that writerly identity emerges in and as the engagement of one's own writing with that of others (including one's earlier self)--dialogic, mirror-driven. Finally, and this may be Duvall's greatest achievement, he manages, through this set of encounters, to convey a compelling inner narrative of Morrison's genealogy as a writer (what James called "the story of the story"). Adroitly, he shows how the "Pecola problem" festers and reemerges as Sula, then as Pilate, and finally (in a weird inversion) as the social neurosis of skin color in Paradise's Ruby. Equally, he shows how place in Morrison's novels gets reconfigured rather than set aside: how authentic Shalimar becomes troubling Eloi (of Tar Baby), and finishes as the quietly disastrous Ruby of Paradise. Most intricately, Duvall traces Morrison's own shifting handwriting on the walls of her texts: the disappearance and reappearance of Chloe, the invention of Anthony and of Toni, the family-name allusions that escape most readers yet insinuate legible dramas for those prepared to decipher. In all, Duvall demonstrates that Morrison's texts not only wrestle with precursors but unfold as a contestatory inner/autobiographical history: never repeating, never forgetting either. The hydra that emerges is many-headed, but it remains one beast.

There is more to praise here: courage for taking on the touchy issue of racial identity politics (Morrison as the preserve of black critics who understand her as white critics cannot), humor in seeing himself implicated in his dealings with others' words no less than Morrison is, and finally a carefully wrought clarity of expression. You may not agree with all of Duvall's claims, but thanks to his labor you will know what he is talking about and why he is talking about it.

Another name for "courage" is foolhardiness, and sometimes Duvall forges ahead when a measure of "negative capability" might be wiser. He likes, in comparing a fictional moment with a biographical one (even when they are decades apart), to press hard on the contradictions. Morrison's sympathy for dark-skinned Pecola is thus juxtaposed against her undergraduate predilection for "pretty-girl" popularity, with Duvall commenting that he is not criticizing her, "since people during their young adulthood often participate in activities that they later find suspect." The tone of schoolmasterish forgiving in this sentence recurs (we hear often, in a raised-eyebrows sort of way, of Morrison's having been a beauty queen), and it makes me wonder two things: At this level of sleuthing, who'd escape whipping? and in what ways do such inconsistencies matter? What more do they tell us about Morrison's fiction? Duvall has a tendency to insist rather than ponder. The Seven Days in Song of Solomon are read repeatedly as patria rchal villains, and while the case for criticizing them is good, Duvall cannot see why the anguish of black males might lead them into such disastrous paths. Likewise, he reads Morrison's investment in distinctive black differences as a simple inversion of the white racist trope of a drop of "black" blood. Now the "sacred drop," rather than the "fatal drop," but a drop is a drop: Morrison's unjustifiable thinking in essences. Omitted from this judgmental assessment are the intricate reasons that Morrison might well consider black culture fundamentally different from white culture. (In this study fundamental tends to equal "essential," which tends to equal "mistaken.")