Toni Morrison and the American Tradition: A Rhetorical Reading. - Review - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Nghana tamu Lewis

Herbert William Rice. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 155 pp. $35.95.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

To position and distinguish himself among scholars who read Toni Morrison's literary repertoire as a coherent unit, Herbert William Rice offers Toni Morrison and the American Tradition: A Rhetorical Reading as an investigation of the various creative and rhetorical strategies Morrison deploys from The Bluest Eye (1972) through Jazz (1992) to negotiate among the expectations of her audience(s) - those who believe that she writes exclusively either within or against the conventions of the Western literary tradition. "Morrison's 'discursive universe,' "Rice contends, "is of and apart from the Western traditions in American literature." Consequently, Rice sets out to map the ways in which Morrison both complies with and rebels against the notion that she is "like Joyce, Hardy, and Faulkner" by exposing an irreconcilable "tension at the core of her work" that is informed by the multi-cultural influence under which Morrison as reader and as writer has labored.

Rice's hermeneutic thrust compels an all-too-familiar yoking of theoretical apparatuses to underscore his examination of Morrison's works. Juxtaposing analyses of black narratology as distinguished primarily by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with a range of Bakhtinian theories about language, voice, and the novel as a genre, and qualifying certain narrative/literary devices as historically and unproblematically "Western" in design, Rice succeeds in recycling the jaded notion that we can differentiate and locate "black" and "white" expectations, values, pre-occupations, desires, and limitations along aesthetic and rhetorical trajectories that are somehow always at odds with one another.

Rice insists in chapter two of his study that Morrison's primary concern in The Bluest Eye is to demonstrate how the "primer version" of family life - a picture of the predictability and stability of white conjugal dynamics - distorts as it destroys the lives of black Americans forced to struggle within and against the constraints of this white-ordered world. Here, the telling insight that Rice claims we should not miss is Morrison's projection of the complexities of black personal, familial, and cultural life which render the black American experience altogether unintelligible to white Americans, whose realities are so harmoniously organized by the primer that they, with either conscious or unconscious ignorance, expect that black Americans' existence should be similarly configured.

Chapter three imagines Morrison extending her indictment of "white, middle-class culture" and values by reading a deliberately fabricated symbiosis between The Bluest Eye and Sula (1973) designed to expose yet another constraint to which white Americans have forced black Americans to conform to the detriment of black interpersonal, familial, and communal relationships: the materialist-capitalist impulse. In this light, Rice privileges the "characterization" and importance of the Bottom, the "black" community that lies in tangent to "white" Medallion, above even Sula, the character for whom the novel is named. According to Rice, it is the failure of the citizens of Medallion to validate, appreciate, and preserve the lives cultivated in the Bottom that destroys this community and its people.

Chapter four leaps dramatically into a clearly though unconvincingly gendered approach to understanding Morrison's craft. Rice argues that in Song of Solomon (1977) Morrison seeks to decry the inability of "traditional forms" such as the Bildungsroman to inflect the distinctiveness of black women's experiences in relation to the experiences of black men. Against a mainstream of criticism that reads Milkman as the central "heroic" figure in the novel, Rice posits that Milkman's quest for "selfhood" actually brings into sharper relief the "stationary" status of Pilate, whose ancestral, communal, and familial loyalties are necessarily called in to temper the selfish individualism (a central theme within the American literary tradition) urging Milkman's journey.

Chapters five and six parallel chapter four in that Rice reads Tar Baby (1981) and Beloved (1987) against the more or less formalist impulses of certain Western/American narrative traditions which by design give voice to as they sustain various projections of black isolation, alienation, and displacement. Organizing his analysis of Tar Baby around an allusion the novel (allegedly) makes to Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer," Rice contends that, while "darkness" - a trope for blackness, the unknown, the absent presence, and all the anxiety it engenders - functions in Conrad's work as an kind of existential enabler, in Tar Baby "darkness" increasingly exposes and characterizes the fragmented and confused identities of the novel's central (black) characters in light of their physical and spiritual distance from African/American home fronts. Here, again, Rice highlights the contrast between enabling and delimiting projections of selfhood and community along "white" and "black" lines. Rice observes that, by confronting (and, perhaps, mastering) the unfamiliar that lies both within and outside of himself, the protagonist in "The Secret Sharer" "comes to know a kind of darkness" that enables him "to trust himself more fully and thus to trust and know his ship." In contrast, "all of [the] characters [in Tar Baby] - black and white - share one perception: they all see in Son a kind of savagery that they associate with color. . . . They see the uncivilized and the unknown as black" and are, consequently, incapable of locating and maligning the "savagery and power of European civilization" which so depreciates the value of African culture and traditions that the central black characters in the novel are never fully capable of embracing them as their own. Rice's examination of Beloved further indicts the trappings of "white" visions/versions of the black experience by exposing the inability of historical accounts of slavery and slave narratives to represent the "particular lives" and, hence, the full humanity of those who lived in bondage. Against the public-oriented design of slave narratives and textbook and journalistic depictions of the institution, Rice argues that Morrison narrates stories that are "oral and personal," bringing into relief the centrality of the African tradition in giving flesh to, as it preserved, the lives and history of the slave community.