'The music's secret drive': Race and response in the work of Toni Morrison

Critics note Toni Morrison's exceptional ability to involve readers in her fiction, but largely neglect to explicate how and why. I analyze the textual "gaps" (Wolfgang Iser's term for textual spaces that readers must fill during the reading process)--specifically what I call textual and meta-textual enigmas--that discomfort readers and entangle them in her texts. She inspires readers' self-reflection and thus involves them in her mission of deconstructing the concept of "race" and battling racism.;The "secret drive" of Morrison's "music" manifests itself in several ways in her fiction. A primary tactic is her simulation of oral folktales, evoking the African griot (storytelling) tradition. Her narrators are storytellers of a particular sort: often proving to be unreliable and enigmatic, they force readers to discern the truth in the tales and to make moral judgments about the plots and characters. I compare these narrators to one in a Hawthorne story, citing Steven Mailloux's analysis.;Morrison also undermines the authority of the texts themselves by calling attention to their artifice; in a postmodern gesture, she declines to strive for readers' complete credence. This tactic is a component or her strategy to undermine generic, social, and political authority.;To highlight Morrison's rhetorical strategies, I use the findings of my own empirical study in which sixty-seven readers responded to Morrison's only short story, "Recitatif." The readers cited particular textual clues as they attempted to conjecture the two protagonists' racial identities, which are suppressed, in the story. Applying Robert B. Stepto's model of the African American framed narrative, I then explicate "Recitatif," a paradigmatic but critically neglected Morrison text. I also examine two of her novels, specifically the rhetorical tactics for enlisting readers in a critique of "white" standards of beauty and value in The Bluest Eye and Beloved's reclamation of a history that readers must face to enable the nation to heal from slavery's lasting wounds.;As readers struggle with the challenging features of the texts, they are trained to respond to the stories in circumscribed ways, leading to insight and ultimately toward enlistment in Morrison's anti-racist campaign.