Postnational narration in the novels of Toni Morrison

Abstract

This thesis attempts an innovative literary theoretical approach to the novels of Toni Morrison, namely the postnational perspective, with the main focus being on character representation through a close textual critique ranging from form to discourse, as well as the projection of sociological, political, ideological, cultural and racial matters appertaining to the African American culture onto her text. This study aims at capturing those instances where Morrison is in the throes of her conscious ecriture, cautiously striving to liberate her writing from the aggressive nationalistic propaganda of the Black Aesthetic, the black literary movement that flourished in the 1970s, the period during which her first novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, were published. The ineluctable and important presence of political ramifications in one's writing is affirmed by the writer herself in her essay 'Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation', but then she circumspectly, wedges her text between any convenient subjective racial positions. Ironically, the denunciation of the dominant white methodology, or masternarrative can only slip to the equally erratic black monolithic perspective. Maintaining strict objectivity throughout is not Morrison's intention; much as essentialism is circumvented in her novels, the representation of the African-American post-slavery plight, together with the black postcolonial resistance to the white authoritative nucleus serve as the means to stir both the complacent master's outlook by the depiction of the sometimes secret potential of the colonized to destabilize the controller, and the black consciousness into the realization that power is not necessarily mandatory but definitely belongs to whoever plans strategic manoeuvres to debilitate the constraining, intimidating subject. No desperate cry for insurgence is felt in Morrison's text; only through subtle character portrayal and ambivalent gaps and silences, at times even through deceptive depictions of helpless victims - like Pecola in The Bluest Eye whose vulnerability unwittingly challenges prevalent oppression - that Morrison's subversive, deconstructive subtext works. The Introduction provides an insight into what characterizes the postnational narration and the reasons for the validity of the choice of this literary frame of reference to the novels of Toni Morrison. It also shows that the nationalistic claim of an origin is untenable in postmodern analysis, just as the pinpointing of the functioning of the 'economics of slavery', as delineated in Morrison's fiction, proves difficult. There is also an interesting discussion of how the trickster figure typical of the vernacular tradition adds to the deliberate ambivalence at the core of the African American literature. A background of the political rise of two waves of black nationalism in America is given together with a study of the black literary movements referred to by Houston Baker as 'generational shifts'.