Toni Morrison

Paradise, Love, A Mercy

Lucille P. Fultz, Lucille P. Fultz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441167910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Toni Morrison features a collection of ten new essays by noted Morrison scholars, including recipients of the Toni Morrison Society Book Award. Focusing upon Morrison's most recently published novels ( Paradise, Love, A Mercy ) the contributors to this volume revisit issues that continue to engage Morrison and are part of the currency of contemporary American literary and cultural history. These selections examine Morrison's ongoing "romance" with African Americans as they continue to battle the demons of race, gender, class, and poverty, to name a few. Together, these essays offer comprehensive and nuanced discussions of Morrison's latest novels and provide new directions for Morrison scholarship in the 21st century. This volume provides students of literature, cultural studies, and history with an overview of Morrison's examination of African American progress and leadership at key moments in American history and culture from the Colonial Period to the present. Through their thematic interconnectedness, the essays reveal Morrison at her most brilliant in her ability to reach into the past to comment on contemporary issues.

1

Introduction: The Grace and
Gravity of Toni Morrison

Lucille P. Fultz

Toni Morrison in the international context

We are a group of 100 “spectators”—here to see Toni Morrison receive the 2010 Médaille Vermeil Grand Prix Humanitaire de France/Honor Medal of the City of Paris. Twenty-five of us are members of the Toni Morrison Society, in Paris for the Society’s biennial meeting. One hundred pairs of eyes (more if you include the professional cameras and camera phones) are directed toward Morrison, while she gazes intently and unblinkingly at the speaker, Christophe Girard, Deputy Mayor of Paris in charge of culture. She is regal in bright autumn colors redolent of the trees skirting the River Seine and elegantly appropriate to the occasion. Not so many years prior, the audience would have been instructed not to take photos, and had someone inadvertently done so, she might have been the object of Morrison’s discomfiting glance or her long unsettling pause.

The room—reminiscent of Medieval pageantry—is in the l’Hôtel de Ville (site of the administrative offices for the city and Mayor). It is a sunny, chilly November day in Paris. As the center of all the fuss, Morrison seems at ease, truly at home in this royal setting, while most in the audience seem eager and restive as they press against one another for a better view or a closer shot. It is as though she has been primed for this moment since she received the Nobel Prize in 1993. We are her guests—better stated, her devotees—invited by the Mayor of Paris to witness yet another recognition of Morrison’s extraordinary achievements as a writer.

The previous evening Morrison was inducted into la Legion d’Honneur/the French Legion of Honor. Referring to Morrison as “the greatest American novelist of her time,” Frederic Mitterrand, France’s minister of culture, spoke of her “modest” background and her “exceptional destiny,” as he reminded her, “we [the French] admire you and we love you.” Accepting the Legion of Honor Medal, Morrison averred that the award was an affirmation that she was both “welcomed” and “prized” by the French: “I’ve always felt welcomed in France and especially in Paris” (Barchfield). Indeed, she has been at home in Paris, where, in November 2006, she guest-curated a multigenres program—“Étranger chez soi”/“The Foreigner’s Home”—at the Louvre Museum. In conjunction with “The Foreigner’s Home,” the Toni Morrison Society sponsored the “Symposium: International Perspectives on Toni Morrison.” To further link Morrison to France, and especially Paris, a few days later, the Toni Morrison Society placed a “Bench by the Road” on Rue Delgrès in Paris, to commemorate Louis Delgrès—“insurgent revolutionary, and freedom fighter.” In response to Morrison’s lament that there were no public monuments honoring the lives of enslaved Africans, the Society established a “bench project,” the placement of metal benches at sites important to African American history and culture. (The Toni Morrison Society’s website provides details about the bench projects.)

In addition to her French connections, Morrison has garnered accolades elsewhere around the world. Most recently, in collaboration with the singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré, she has written the text for the musical “Desdemona,” which celebrated its 2011 World Premier on three continents—Europe (Vienna), North America (New York), and Africa (Bamako). In 1994, she merited, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, graffiti on the in/famous wall and, in Italy, the Rhegium Julii Prize. That her novels are studied across the globe is perhaps among her highest honors. A recent survey in Taiwan, for example, noted that Morrison “ranks as the most-studied African American writer” in that country. The survey recorded 134 entries for Morrison and 24 for Alice Walker, her closest competitor (Wen-ching Ho 515).

On the evening of the day she received the Médaille Vermeil, Morrison invited two other scholars and me to her Paris hotel for an informal evening of wine and conversation. During the course of the evening, I asked her three questions: How do you feel about all the recognition and honors you’ve received this week and over the years? What do you think about such honors? And what do you see as your responsibility in relation to such honors? To the first question, she offered a warm and almost tearful reply, “At first I felt it was for my people and I was pleased.” Her response to the second question came with no hint of arrogance or prepossession, “I think—in fact, I know—I deserve all the recognition because I work hard to produce what I know is my best work. I don’t put my work out there until I’m satisfied that it’s a polished piece of writing.”

Before she could answer the third question, she went to answer her telephone. When she returned, she asked, “What was your third question?” Then, she responded, “What is my responsibility? My responsibility is to my art and to no one else. My responsibility is to present what I know is my best work regardless of what anyone else thinks.” Morrison has repeated this conviction several times in interviews and public appearances. It is the same advice she offers to others, whether it is about writing or other projects. In a conversation with Roll Out, she insisted, “You must know when you’re at your best. . . . And, and no matter what, you must be unblinking, be really unblinking and really, really true” (“Toni Morrison: More Than Words Can Say” 17). Then speaking about her numerous awards and her attendant responsibilities:

I don’t know how to say this without sounding churlish. I love prizes and accolades and so on. But my responsibilities are to do the best work I can do and to be the best human being I can be. Now the Nobel [P]rize doesn’t help that. It doesn’t make it easier to write the book that I had to write. None of it helps that. What it does do, I think, which is one of my assumed responsibilities, is make it thinkable, possible, doable, for others—other African Americans and other women. (Verdelle 169)

Chloe Ardelia Wofford/Chloe
Anthony Wofford/Toni Morrison

Frederic Mitterrand referred to Morrison’s “exceptional destiny” as “what’s most beautiful about America”—that a child of working-class African American parents could and would achieve the pinnacle of literary success. Who is this woman the world knows as Toni Morrison? Who is this woman who has introduced African American life to readers around the globe? A brief review of the discussions about her names offers a glimpse of the conjecture that surrounds her. If one mills around groups at a Toni Morrison Society conference one may overhear her son refer to her as “my mother” or her niece address her as “Aunt Chloe.” Before she was any of these, of course, she was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, daughter of Ramah (Willis) and George Wofford of Lorain, Ohio, where she was born on February 18, 1931.

She became Chloe Anthony at 12 when she converted to Catholicism and chose St Anthony as her patron saint. Anthony was shortened to Toni, and this became the name by which she was known in college. When asked about how she became famous as “Toni Morrison,” she explains that she was “upset. They (her publishers) had the wrong name. Toni Morrison. My name is Chloe Wofford. Toni’s a nickname.” Toni Morrison became her official nom de plume when her publisher at Holt “misnamed” her. The mix-up occurred because she sent the manuscript as Toni Morrison since the editor “knew [her] that way” (Dreifus 101)—an interesting twist for a writer who devotes much of her craft to misnamed characters.

John Duvall has enlarged the mystique surrounding the name “Toni Morrison” by inventing his own narrative to explain it. Frustrated by his inability to locate sufficient auto/biographical information about Morrison, he searches for Morrison’s “self-making” in her fiction (Duvall 3). In one of numerous speculations, he suggests that Morrison dropped the name “Chloe” in favor of “Toni” “to distance herself” from a name that “often signals a particularly hated form of racial oppression and servility in the South,” and that her readings in college revealed “unflattering Chloes in American literature besides the one in [Ralph] Ellison’s novel” (Duvall 37–8). He might also have considered the not-so-remote possibility that Morrison, like many young girls of her generation, dropped or added a name out of vanity or pure fantasy. Granting Duvall his argument for a moment, one must then ask the question: Why would Toni Morrison, who has never run from her early life of poverty and who has always included the names of her family members in her books, disavow her given name? She has been quite adamant about her relationship to her family, “all my family call me Chloe. It was Chloe, by the way, who went to Stockholm . . . to get the Nobel Prize” (Dreifus 101). In the final analysis, Duvall is forced to admit that he is engaging in high speculation as he searches for the woman behind the name.

The grace and gravity of Morrison’s fiction

One thing is certain: when Chloe Ardelia/Chloe Anthony Wofford submitted The Bluest Eye to her editor, she signed her name “Toni Morrison.” And due to that un/fortunate error, she will forever be known to the world as Toni Morrison. Her astonishing accomplishments as a writer have made her an important point of reference on the international literary scene. Since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Morrison has been a familiar and frequent presence on the world’s stages. Of her achievement as a writer the Swedish Academy noted that her “novels [are] characterized by visionary force and poetic import [through which she] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” Of her craft, the Academy observed, “She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the luster of poetry.”

Sentient artistry

Paul Gray has remarked that the force of Morrison’s art resides in “a mélange of high literary rhetoric and plain talk. She can turn pecan shelling into poetry: “the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl” (“Paradise Found” 66). Morrison deftly captures the sensual, reminding readers that characters are not merely speaking and moving but that their entire bodies are engaged in activities that involve a larger environment. Consider this image created by boiling water that greets Junior Viviane when she first enters Christine Cosey’s kitchen, “A bouquet of steam wandered away from water lifting to a boil on the stove” (Love 21). Similar examples abound across Morrison’s oeuvre. Consider two examples from Paradise when the church lights are turned off in preparation for the Christmas pageant: “Quiet coughing domesticates the dark” (208); and a description of African Americans confronting unearned suffering, “people who made Job’s patience look like restlessness. Elegance when all around was shabby” (160). What reader can forget 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove’s father “snatch[ing] his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina” (The Bluest Eye 163)? Two final images should underscore what I am calling Morrison’s sentient artistry. First, this is L’s description of Cosey’s decaying hotel: “The wood siding of the hotel looks silver-plated, its peeling paint like the streaks on an unpolished tea service” (Love 7). The language and imagery are appropriate to L, who worked many years in the hotel’s kitchen. Finally, this description of Sethe preparing biscuits:

Quickly, lightly she touched the stove. Then she trailed her fingers through the flour, parting, separating small hills and ridges of it, looking for mites. Finding none, she poured soda and salt into the crease of her folded hand and tossed both into the flour. Then she reached into a can and scooped half a handful of lard. Deftly she squeezed the flour through it, then with her left hand sprinkling water, she formed the dough. . . . Now she rolled the dough out with a wooden pin. (Beloved 18–19)

Sensual and sensuous language pervades Morrison’s fiction. For Morrison it is as much about secondary gestures as it is about primary ones. What occurs while the major events are unfolding tells us as much about characters—sometimes more—as do their spoken words. Moreover, such gestures locate events in space and time. Francine Prose suggests that when used effectively, gestures “are like windows opening to let us see a person’s soul . . . the precise relations between that person and the self, between the self and the world” (213).

Daunting narratives

Not everyone who reads Morrison’s fiction is impressed. Many readers approach her novels with predetermined expectations and are sometimes disappointed when they are faced with a daunting narrative requiring intensive labor on their part. Some readers, for example, expecting a linear narrative become frustrated and set the novels aside, while others hang in for a while then surrender because the texts require so much input from the reader. Such readers have to be reminded that Morrison writes for readers who are willing to work with her. Stated another way, she expects readers to meet her on her terms—not theirs. Carol Shields has observed that Morrison defies expectations, “consistently, book after book, she remakes the novel as we know it” (“Heaven on Earth” 33).

While many praise Morrison’s literary art, others are eager to point to what they perceive as “flaws.” Brooke Allen has this to say about the language of Jazz: “her aim was obviously to produce a prose poem, an evocation and lilt of the jazz music that filled the air of Harlem in the 1920s. She succeeded magnificently, but as fiction “Jazz fails to move” (Allen 7). Allen is, however, kinder than Charles Johnson, who has stated that Jazz has “no characters, there’s no story, there’s no plot, and even the poetry which Morrison is good at is not there. I’m not sure why she released that book at all.” And, to Beloved’s selection as the best American novel of the past 25 years, Charles Johnson responded, “It’s an interesting middle-brow book. I don’t think it’s an intellectual achievement, because I’m not sure where the intellectual probing is going on” (Little 107).

The African American cultural critic, Stanley Crouch, one of Morrison’s most virulent critics, has argued that Beloved “is designed to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn’t weaken.” Crouch, like Johnson, admits that Morrison “has real talent, an ability to organize her novel in a musical structure, deftly using images as motifs,” but he seems most annoyed that Morrison “perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials” (Crouch 205). What some critics see as the power of Morrison’s writing, Crouch sees as a lack of “control.” He insists that Morrison “can’t resist the temptation of the trite or the sentimental” (Crouch 209). It is conceivable that Crouch, like other reviewers of Beloved, may have read the novel too quickly and failed to grasp not just Morrison’s narrative strategies but the full import of the kind of stories she adumbrates in that novel. Countering Crouch’s comparison of Sethe Suggs to her historical model, Morrison has noted that “Margaret Garner didn’t do what Medea did and kill her children because of some guy. It [infanticide] was for me this classic example of a person determined to be responsible” (Gilroy 177). Finally, Geoffrey Bent has called Paradise Morrison’s “weakest book” because of its “didactic purity that underlies every paradise.” He contends that flaws in this novel “can only send ripples of reappraisal back over the rest of her oeuvre” (“Less Than Divine” 145).

I have elected to include such negative critiques of Morrison’s writing in order to provide a range of opinions about her work. But I have also elected to mobilize these critiques in order to show that there is a consistency about her art—even her critics speak of the poetic power of her prose. She writes with the sensibility of a poet and the deeply probing mind of a novelist who creates narrative environments for readers to find their own truths about African Americans.

The issue of language

Because so much has been written about the “luster of poetry” in Morrison’s fiction, it may be helpful at this point to review some of what Morrison herself has to say about her use of black speech and what she hopes to achieve with it. She has stated that her desire is “to polish and show, and make it [black idiom] a literary vehicle” (Als 73). In her Nobel Lecture, Morrison focuses her remarks around the issue of language and the efforts, at times, to stifle or censor it or, in her words, “the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex mid-wifery properties, replacing them with menace and subjugation” (15–16). Referring to the Tower of Babel in her Nobel Lecture, she observes, “Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives” (19). But she also acknowledges in her Nobel Lecture the writer’s limitations in the deployment of language: “Language ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 Introduction: The Grace and Gravity of Toni Morrison, Lucille P. Fultz
• Part I Paradise
• Part II Love
• Part III A Mercy
• Notes on Chapters
• Works Cited
• Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors
• Index