Toni Morrison: Playing in the Dark/"Recitatif"
(Originally discussed on 5/26/20)
I hope everyone is having a good weekend. Next week, we will discuss two short pieces by Toni Morrison: her short story "Recitatif" (1983) and the Preface from her first collection of critical essays, Playing in the Dark (1992). I selected these two pieces to extend our conversation about identity politics, the limitations of intersectionality, and the racialized-yet-race-dismissive language of psychoanalysis. Morrison briefly cites "Recitatif" in the preface of Playing, describing it as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial" (xi). Morrison's experimentation with the representation of race within a narrative matters because it highlights the ways in which language, when sewn into narratives, has the power to overdetermine or overwrite the "Truth" or lived reality of those who have been named as a specific racial classification. This is why Hortense Spillers and Luce Irigaray were adamant about the idea that grammar is both a social and linguistic construct. Language acts as the mirror onto which we project ourselves in order to develop a sense of self and an identity. Society--from large governmental structures to individual bodies--is organized to reflect the grammar of a language, meaning its conventions, lacunae, assumptions, and limitations.
Just as Irigaray defied Lacan to assert that the "mirror" of the mirror stage is actually Woman (who is reduced to being a defective version of Man and a silent vessel for his desires), Morrison is drawing attention to what she calls the "Africanist presence" within language and the American literary canon. For Morrison, race generally and blackness specifically must unfairly bear the burden of being the mirror to whiteness--the white subject confirms the "Truth" of his whiteness by seeing all that is not himself in the face of a Black person. Similarly, the historically-segregated American literary canon confirms the validity of its existence by excluding Black writers, even as its most dominant novels (such as those by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner) rely on the (white) reader's assumptions of racial codes to ensure the cohesiveness or "rationality" of their narratives. This contradiction would have been especially obvious to Morrison, who earned her MA in English from Cornell in the 1950s. She wrote her graduate thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner because it would have been logistically and canonically unthinkable to produce scholarship on a Black American writer.
If, to quote Fred Jameson, "language is as specific as one's face," what are the contours of Morrison's face? Her faces? If Morrison and Jameson received virtually the same education at Ivy League graduate programs during the 1950s, how are we to distinguish them from each other? The language that both Jameson and Morrison were allowed to reproduce in their graduate scholarship was designed to produce infinite copies of one specific type of writer/thinker, much like Sylvia Wynter's critique of Man, Theri Pickens' critique of the normate, and Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Oedipus. Certainly, we could look at Morrison and Jameson and assign a code such as "white man" or "Black woman," but, as Morrison noted in her 1993 Nobel lecture, "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." The body goes its own way, but the text always remains. We do language through writing and speech in order to transform ourselves, ideally in life but also inevitably in death. Now that Morrison is physically gone, it is technically no longer possible for a reader or critic to point to a synonymity between the name "Black American woman," Morrison's body, and the complex lived experience of a person who adopted the pseudonym "Toni Morrison." The mirror is dead--how will we see ourselves now? We can attempt to see ourselves through recognizing that the mirror did not consent to its role; that, as Spillers notes in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," "my country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented." In "Recitatif" and Playing, Morrison is attempting to separate the "I" from the violent mechanics of invention through the practice of imagination. What would it mean for someone who is visually and linguistically coded as a Black woman to invoke "I" as a speculative or indefinite concept, rather than as a reipscription of the same? And what would it mean for a reader to encounter a narrative told and written by two entities that we assume to know as "Black women," but continually elude our usual methods of classification, our stereotypes?
What is race without code? If schoolchildren read Beloved in a hundred years, who will they think "Toni Morrison" is? Perhaps a man, based on her first name. Perhaps white, based on her status as a Nobel Prize winner and inclusion into the American literary canon. Paying close, nearly paranoid attention to the conventions of grammar and language can tell us quite a bit about the ways we have been socialized to see the world, ourselves, and each other. We assume the truth of each other's faces, and we couldn't be more wrong, mostly because we are looking for the wrong things (What color is grief? Isolation? Anger? Joy? Love?). Deconstructing the racial scaffolding of language can make us more aware of the ways we reproduce those assumptions in our own writing, speech, and political and social relations.
Here is the link to "Recitatif": https://www.
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