A Study Of Toni Morrison’s Narrative Art And Politics

Toni Morrison (1931-) is up to date the sole African American female writer to have received the Nobel Prize for literature. In her ten fictional works that carry the black literary tradition of resistance, the author uses text as a means to express her political agenda and literary aspirations, as she openly says, "the work must be political" (1984:344). In her Nobel lecture delivered in 1993, the prize winner, using the "bird-in-the-hand" as a metaphor for language, constantly warns us -- both writers and readers -- of the consequences and potential violence this agency might generate due to either mindlessness or state censuring. Because Morrison knows perfectly that language is power capable of both creation and destruction.As an avant-garde novelist, Morrison has always been seeking to experiment with different narrative techniques. Though her narrative art has aroused widespread attention worldwide, yet few critics and scholars have undertaken to offer a holistic analysis of the narrative aesthetics of her oeuvre with her political agenda therein together. Bearing this in mind, this dissertation endeavors to give particular attention to Morrison’s narrative poetics and politics in light of the theories of post-classical narratology, thus trying to disclose the author’s narrative aesthetics and the underlying political overtones, and in particular shedding light on how Morrison adopts unique narrative strategies and incorporates the themes of race, gender, and class into her novels to deconstruct the white-and-male dominated ideology, while at the same time offering critique to some secular yet narrow-minded ideas popular among black communities.Basically, this dissertation falls into three parts -- Introduction, the five chapters constituting the bulk, and Coda. The Introduction part first reviews the major themes of Morrison scholarship both at home and abroad, aiming to illustrate the shortage of monographs and essays that interpret Morrison’s political agenda from the perspective of narrative study and thus to justify the necessity and feasibility of my research project. Viewing Morrison’s work through the lens of the black literary tradition, the part of Introduction highlights the political mission of Morrison as an African American female writer and reveals the dual critical function of her narrative as a socially symbolic act:on the one hand, using words as a means, Morrison has offered relentless critique of the American ideology under the domination of the white-and-male hegemony; on the other, the author also sends a message to the black community to ponder over their intellectual thoughts during waves of movements and the issue of history and racial status.The first chapter, focusing on Morrison’s first three works The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, lays bare the author’s reflection on the issues of body color and racial identity. It is worth noting that the three novels were written in the 1970s, an age where the Civil Rights movement and the second wave of feminist movement met together. Her virgin piece The Bluest Eye, to a larger could be perceived as a feedback on the slogan "Black is Beautiful" popular among her folks in the 1960s. In this novella, the author subverts the idea of beauty based on binary opposition, and at the same time dissociates the artificial bond between physical beauty and body color. And in Sula and Song of Solomon, Morrison portrays pairs of black male and female characters to disintegrate the stereotypes, thus offering reflection over racial identity. Besides, nearly in all these works, the author delineates with heavy strokes a mother figure that functions as the solid base of black folk culture.The second chapter pays close attention to Morrison’s neo-slave narratives Beloved and A Mercy. In regard to the former, inspired by a historical case in which a fugitive slave woman committed infanticide, the author vows to speak up for the desperate mother and to present her inner psychology after several years of diligent socio-historical study. Setting the background to the late 17th century New England, Morrison in A Mercy depicts an even grander narrative scenario in which the European settlers, the forcibly transported Africans, and the Native Americans interacted with each other in the wildness of nature. Undoubtedly, both of the two works reaffirm the revisionist idea that both memory and history are highly malleable through narrativizing of texts. In other words, narratives could write and rewrite history, traumatic memory could be decorated with its aftermath blotted.While the first half of this dissertation deals with Morrison’s critique of race and color, and history and memory, the second half, consisting of three chapters and treating fiction as an intentional discoursal transaction between the author and the reader on several levels, concentrates on Morrison’s narrators/narration, plot structure, and speech strategies. The third chapter lays emphasis on two of the most salient features of Morrison’s works in terms of narrators and narration-one being the duo narrators in nearly half of her oeuvre, the other the multiple viewpoints in postmodern context. In The Bluest Eye, A Mercy and Home, the first-person character narrator and the external narrator alternate to tell the story, and the doubling of narrators not only complements necessary information for the readers, but also lays bare the narrative unreliability. While in Jazz the mysterious narrator "I" makes comments off and on, and the existence of such an agent not only reclaims the resurrection of the author and its authority, but also guides the readers’judgment of character and events within the fictional world. Writing from multiple points of view, Morrison in Paradise gives full play to the technique of polyphony, while at the same time granting female characters the chance to voice their thoughts suppressed by black patriarchy. Anyway, Morrison has never tried to conceal her presence in her works, thus there exists much overlapping between the author and her narrators.The fourth chapter first discusses the epigraphs and prologues that act as primers of the fictional works and analyzes into depth how these para-textual devices have helped the author establish her authority and the critics to broaden their interpretation. In terms of plot structure and patterns, I tried to categorize them into linear (chronological routine), cyclic, and double helix, making efforts to reveal how such plotting schemes serve the author’s communicative purposes. Besides, the chapter also takes into consideration Morrison’s frequent adoptions of the most traditional way of death plot to end her works.The fifth chapter concentrates on the innermost level of discourse as transaction, i.e. the dialogue between characters within the fictional. By applying the theories of pragmatics, this chapter first delves into the conversational implicature and irony, without ignoring the power relations of the interlocutors. Then the relationship between speech and characterization is discussed to show how Morrison has used speech to portray some uncommon characters. In addition to analyzing the unique effects of the FDS and monologue, the frequent slipover and crossover in speech presentation is also discussed by telling cases from Song of Solomon. In a word, by portraying the interpersonal power relations as well as the personality and psychology of the interlocutors, Morrison has endowed humanity to each of her characters.Fiction is an author’s unique representation of the human reality by words. Conclusion first emphasizes Morrison’s status as a postmodern African-American female in order to highlight her political agenda either consciously or unconsciously in her literary practice. After dissociating the unjustified bonds between body color and physical beauty, and race and character in her first three novels, Morrison goes on in her later masterpiece Beloved to reinterpret the Garner case in American history with unprecedented psychological depth, thus effectively attacking the tyranny of humanity and guarding the human dignity, while at the same time providing enough space for the black to define themselves. Generally foregrounding black females in her works, the author makes use of such narrative strategies as the first-person narrator, FDS/monologue, and multiple perspectives to redefine the postmodern narrative of democracy through many dimensions. Anyway, by playing the politics of race, gender and class together in her fiction, Morrison has succeeded in subverting and reconstructing the American canon at the same time, thus advocating and embracing the advent of the multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious society in which people of different races, cultures, and religions could finally co-exist in peace and harmony.