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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature ... draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.… (more)
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I've read her criticism and her novels, and loved both, but her criticism is the most lucid and perceptive...I can't get over it. Her gifts as a novelist bring something to her critical work that few have ever
Maybe no one working today. She elevates criticism to poetry:
"For young America, [Romance] had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation--above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror--and terror's most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all of the connotative value it awakened."
Highly recommended, highly readable, and very short. You can get this into an afternoon easily, although I didn't, and it deserves re-reading.
Still, it is interesting that her discussion of Cather's Sapphira and the Slavegirl reveals that the novel's failures are in some sense enabled by a certain obtuseness in its depiction of and use of its black characters. And repeatedly, Morrison notes the necessity of the presence "Africanism" for depicting freedom, individualism, and difference. Looking at a variety of instances where the protagonist meets an impenetrable field or wall of whiteness, Morrison notes "Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say."(59)
The writing here sometimes explodes in flourishes of enthusiasm, almost poetic. And at times it seems that Morrison is presenting a prolegomena to a future body of criticism, or a platform of work for future students of American literature, rather than critical analysis itself. But when she does turn to specific texts, such as Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl or Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, her insights are piercing. Her scrutiny of Hemingway’s syntactically awkward locution “saw he had seen” in order to enforce the narrative silence of his black shipmate is a case in point. Morrison’s concern is with the choice made by the writer just there. Perhaps only a serious writer can appreciate the import of such choices.
Morrison says that, “thinking about these matters has challenged me as a writer and as a reader.” It’s the kind of thinking that we could each use more of as readers.
Morrison delivers a challenging read that's just as