Working with "Public Craziness" and "Private Cracks": Toni Morrison`s Jazz

김민정 ( Min Jung Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2010 현대영미소설 Vol.17 No.1

How the vicious ways of social categories and conditions affect the lives of ordinary individuals, and disrupt familial and interpersonal relations is a persistent theme in Toni Morrison. Her characters consist of those who perform unexplainable behaviors and commit violent acts, at times so unbelievably shocking, as though drawn to purposefully appall the readers. Yet, given that Morrison often bases the story elements for her novels on actual incidents, it is important to understand how and why things happen as they are in Morrison`s fictional spaces. With the overwhelming personal histories of her characters that intersect with the larger social oppression of African Americans, Morrison tries to conceive and map out relationships, communities, and ways of life that may present hopeful, unconventional alternatives to painful situations of dehumanization, and emotional and psychological trauma. In this regard, Morrison`s novel Jazz (1992) is not a conspicuous deviation. However, the novel`s accomplishment also lies in the nuanced intersection and complementarity between the novel`s experimentalist style and its thematic suggestiveness. As a substantial body of criticism has intelligently studied, Jazz takes a distinctive narrative style, where the novel upsets traditional role of the narrator, unsettling the familiar separation between the narrator, the characters, and the readers. The unexpectedness of the novel`s style complements the content, the unanticipated twists and turns in the story. Several commentators have accordingly attended to Morrison`s literary style-making sense of the culturally and politically meaningful title of the novel Jazz. This paper attempts to build on the critical work, by concentrating chiefly on the possibilities of Morrison`s characterization, in particular how the portrayal of Violet corresponds to the stylistic and the thematic possibilities present in the novel. As suggested in Morrison`s metaphor of "cracks," Violet is defined by her unusual and unauthorized conduct. In reading Violet, I examine how uncustomary behaviors that are stigmatized and unacceptable to communal norms--as Violet`s self-developed, distinct responses to her reality--can in effect work toward regenerative ends. I argue that in Jazz, it is the paradoxical situation of the evidently defective, problematic, and destructive which lead to the creative remaking and reconstruction of damaged selfhoods. Violet`s oddity also becomes the basis of her interpersonal relationship with Alice Manfred, a bond between two women who seem to be irreconcilably at odds, in common, conventional thinking and expectations. As such, while the theme in Jazz of women coming together is not notably new in Morrison, I consider how Morrison`s characterization of Violet--and the cracks that function as an empowering alternative to devastated subjectivities and severed relations--is defining and constitutive of the novel`s attention to improvisation, unpredictability, self-remaking, and recreation.

17세기말 미국의 계급, 인종, 종교와 토니 모리슨의 『자비』

신진범 ( Jin Beom Synn ) 한국아메리카학회 2012 美國學論集 Vol.44 No.2

In her 9th novel, A Mercy, Toni Morrison returned to 17th century America to show its early unformed economical, religious, and racial background, which had more flexibility and hybridity, and embraced multi-racial ethnic groups. That era was a time when religion, class, and race were purposefully inter-connected, and slyly separated for the manipulation of the slavery system. To show the chaotic and corrupted new world religion, Morrison portrayed several Christians and religious leaders, who sexually abused ethnic women and a white man indentee, as narrow-minded, sexually repressed and diverted. The main reason why the victims were exposed to sexual exploitations was because of the differences in race and class. Bacon`s Rebellion in this novel which was mainly caused by class difference, played a trigger role in white men`s legislating further race-related laws in America which helped the slavery system find its justification. Morrison emphasized white men`s strange but vicious project which excluded religion from the slavery system. By eliminating the religious factor from the slavery system and racial discrimination, they put in its place visible African Americans` black skin as the main defect and devilish trait, which gave them cause to enslave numerous African Americans for a long time. Morrison artistically demonstrated a parallel between American Indian, Lina and British, Rebekka`s religious choices for their individual survivals. Through Lina, Morrison sought to reflect on the syncretic ability and religion of an American Indian whose tribe became extinct because of the Europeans` germ war during which Europeans supplied poisonous blanks filled with smallpox that were taken from European hospitals. Morrison problematized Rebekka`s changing, and pretentious religious attitudes because her tricky retreat to the dogmatic and chilling religion might be harmful to herself and other members of her plantation. Through this novel, Morrison wondered aloud if the world has the possibility of finding not only God`s mercy, but humanity`s mercy as well.

“Turn White” and “Avoid Slipping Back”: Reproductionof Colonial Relation in Toni Morrison`s The Bluest Eye

( Kwang Soon Kim ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2014 미국소설 Vol.21 No.2

This essay examines how Toni Morrison`s first novel The Bluest Eye illustrates the mechanisms that reproduce the colonial relation between whites and blacks in modern America. While critics have discussed the theme of spiritual colonization of African American people in The Bluest Eye, they have paid less attention to the mechanisms that continue to interpellate African Americans as colonized subjects in America after slavery. In her first novel, telling the story of a black girl who has gone insane in her desperate pursuit of blue eyes, Morrison reports the destructive influence of white ideology on black people and critically examines the black community that is not able to provide its members with a cultural space where they can constitute a positive sense of self. However, Morrison equally closes up the social and psychological mechanisms that lure black characters, in Frantz Fanon`s words, to wish “turn white” and “avoid slipping back [to blackness].” Morrison introduces two distinctively different types of black people in her novel: first, black people whose only dream is to turn white because they blindly internalized white values through their daily consumption of cultural commodities; second, those who diligently imitate the middle class white people in order to distinguish themselves from low class “niggers.” And, Morrison represents both groups as people in grip of self-negation. Thus, Morrison`s The Bluest Eye suggests capitalist consumerism and mimicry as the mechanisms that keep colonizing black people in contemporary America. Reading capitalist consumerism as the institutional mechanism and mimicry as the psychological mechanism, this essay investigates how capitalist consumerism does not de-racialize but re-racialize modern America and how mimicry ceases to be a subversive strategy under certain circumstances.

토니 모리슨과 미국 흑인문학: “미국흑인”이라는 재상상된 공동체의 사명

김준년 ( Junyon Kim ) 한국영미문화학회 2015 영미문화 Vol.15 No.3

Like, or more than, any other African American fiction writers, Toni Morrison is concerned with the way African Americans have been conceived of as an imagined community and how the African American women`s community can be shaped as a politico-ethical agency in her novels. For a fuller understanding of Morrison`s views of black people and women`s community, I investigate in detail her responses to each case of such significant historical events ranging from the post-Civil Rights period to the so-called postracial era. Then, in order to locate Toni Morrison in broader currents of African American history and thought, I give an overview of the very contemporary criticisms which explore the tensions between the (local) community-based discipline of Black Studies and the transatlantic inquiry of Black Cultural Studies. Back to Morrison`s writings, I argue that the black people Morrison imagines is a ghostly community on the grounds that just as the past haunts the present, so the imagined community of black people serves as a historical reminder of the “something to be done” in American society. Further, drawing on a group of philosophers and theorists, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, etc. I also claim that Morrison`s black women`s community features an “inoperative community” and a “coming community” as well.

토니 모리슨의 흑인가정 역사쓰기에 대한 문화 변이적 시각

이영철 ( Young Cheol Lee ) 21세기영어영문학회 2020 영어영문학21 Vol.33 No.4

This study aims to discuss Toni Morrison’s historical writing of the Black family in view of Culture Variant perspectives. Morrison explores the historical facts that the Black families were vulnerable not only to the oppression and violence of their white owners during slavery but also to the hard lines of social-economical segregation that continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1964. However, Morrison lays out a vision for the restoration of traditional family values, such as cohesion, interrelationship, generational harmony among family members. In The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, Morrison represents the Black families who are collapsed, disorganized, and cracked in terms of structure and function. While the Breedloves in The Bluest Eye are a low class family who have not been able to escape from poverty, low status, and racial isolation, the Deads in Song of Solomon are an upper middle class family who have become rich by blindly following whites’ capitalistic ideas and values. Despite having contrastively different reasons, both families are disconnected, ruptured, and inter-isolated in terms of parent-child relationships, or family ties. In this context, Morrison casts a critical eye on Cholly Breedlove’s dangerous freedom and Macon Dead’s patriarchal power. Finally, in Song of Solomon, Morrison shows the restoration of the Deads through Milkman Dead’s travels from a Northern city to Southern cities in the United States. During these travels, Milkman discovers the Deads’ historical-spiritual presence and values. The family information he gains from his travels leads his father to go back to not only the root of the Deads but also to the values of family relationship.

토니 모리슨의 초기 소설에 나타난 '타자성'의 의미

류정미 ( Ryu Jeong-mi ) 대한영어영문학회 2004 영어영문학연구 Vol.30 No.3

Toni Morrison’s novels usually represent the influences of the racial oppression by the whites upon black individuals and their communities in America. Moreover Morrison criticizes the black people who follow the destructive ideologies of the whites. She opposes any oppression and alienation of the weak by the strong resulting from racial and patriarchal domination. Ultimately Morrison emphasizes harmonious cooperation through love and responsibility for others in human society. This essay aims to examine aspects of ‘otherness’ in Morrison’s early three novels. In these novels, black women and children are established as American society’s ‘other’; epistemologically inferior beings in white-dominated and patriarchal society. In The Bluest Eye Morrison establishes Pecola, the ugly black girl as an ‘other’ of the segregational and sex discriminative American society. In Sula, Morrison creates a woman character who resists the black community that follows the values of white society. Sula is treated as an evil, that is, ‘other’ because of her subversive behavior against traditional society which is founded on the alienation of ‘other’. As a result she is excluded from her own community. In the third novel Song of Solomon, Morrison provides the examplary black woman, Pilate, who loves others and has a spirit of tolerance. Pilate becomes a protective being as a subject not as an ‘other’ for her black community, although she is in an inferior situation in race, class and sex. She is able to deconstruct the dominant culture that creates the dichotomy of white and black, man and woman, and self and other. < Jeonbuk National University >

토니 모리슨의 『낙원』에 나타난 다층적인 서술전략 연구

신진범 한국현대영미소설학회 2002 현대영미소설 Vol.9 No.2

Toni Morrison's multi-layered narrative strategies in Paradise are mainly based on the cultural heritage of African Americans. In this research, I analyzed the last novel of Morrison's trilogy, Paradise, by focusing on mainly three narrative strategies: African American migrations, thematic emphasis with black repetition, return with a religion of diaspora. Paradise features the reasons and effects of African American migrations for nearly two centuries and at the same time signifies the racial history of America. Morrison traces back the history of Ruby community to depict various racial discrimination in America. If the history of Ruby shows the collective experience of African Americans, the history of Convent shows the personal experience of several women of both black and white. Morrison, like her African American literary predecessors uses repetitive narrative strategies to emphasize themes of her novel. This thematic emphasis consists of multiple perspectives and repetition with black differece, and call and response pattern of the black church. Thus, Morrison helps readers to have insight and wisdom by put together and compare various version of real stories. This novel was developed from two major sources: a newspaper article and a rumor when she heard in Brazil. Morrison uses these material to restore African American history and point out religious-correctness. Candomble, a religious practice from Africa is transformed into a powerful narrative strategy in this novel which plays a healing role to the women in the Convent. Consolata who came from Brazil to America as a adoptee cures the trauma of the women at the Convent. When Consolata cures them, she uses a therapeutic ritual, Candomble originated from Africa and survived the horrible Middle Passage. The aim of Morrison's multi-layered narrative strategies symbolize the return of the repressed culture and its aesthetics which have retained the magic for whole survival, subversive imagination, healing power and ancestor's wisdom. In short, through her multi-layered narrative strategies, Morrison is doing what Houston Baker Jr. in his Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory called "writing/righting American history and literary history."

Beyond Heteronormativity in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Home

( Jina Moon ) 한국영어영문학회 2018 영어 영문학 Vol.64 No.1

This essay examines Toni Morrison’s African-American characters’ struggle in The Bluest Eye (1970) and Home (2012) through the lens of heteronormativity, arguing that they suffer double victimization due to both their race and gender. The Bluest Eye portrays a family tragedy caused by an African-American husband and wife’s failure to live up to images of gender as represented in white, middle-class media. Written forty-two years later, Home describes an African-American man and woman who establish their own lives away from gendered standards after striving to meet social expectations and becoming traumatized in the process. Their adversities stem not only from the deeply rooted racial discrimination in American society but also from subtle gendered norms implanted by heteronormativity. Morrison’s characters in her earlier narrative face a tragic denouement, ultimately destroying their children’s lives. By contrast, Morrison’s later characters explore more utopian ways of life unfettered by heteronormativity, overcoming hardships imposed by white- centered heteronormal society. By portraying socially victimized characters, Toni Morrison problematizes the power behind the discriminatory nature of heteronormativity and suggests a more gender-neutral, egalitarian way of organizing society, free from the constraints of heterosexuality and from violence created by normalized gender rules.

The African-American Text as a Cultural Event: Toni Morrison`s Case of Aging, Gender, and Creativity in God Help the Child

( Junyon Kim ) 미국소설학회 2017 미국소설 Vol.24 No.2

Just as the emergence of the novelist Toni Morrison in 1970 can be defined as a Badiouian “event” that breaks with what African-American literature had been before, so too can the fact that she continues to renew her last/latest fiction be seen as a literary event. Morrison published Love at age 72, A Mercy at age 77, and Home at age 81. In 2015, she published her eleventh novel God Help the Child at the age of 84. Fiction writing is a relentlessly time-consuming and brain-consuming job. But like other older writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and the late Doris Lessing, Morrison would not stop writing fiction simply because she has aged. To use some key terms from age studies, Morrison does not seem to accept “decline at midlife” as natural. Regarding the relationship between aging and creativity, we need to take a look at what is at issue in literary gerontology. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, much attention was paid to issues of diversity. At a consequence, “age,” along with the three major analytical categories of race, class, and gender, has similarly obtained minor status as a social classifying device and a determinant of subjectivities. Inspired by scholars of age studies such as Katheen Woodward and Margaret Gullette, this paper analyzes briefly the aged characters of Morrison`s later novels under the rubric of the literary gerontology. Then, focusing on the relationship between age and youth in God Help the Child, I examined the ways in which the novel`s elderly black female characters affect younger ones.

Flying without Leaving the Ground: Liberation into the Master`s House in Ishmael Reed`s Flight to Canada and Toni Morrison`s Tar Baby

( Kwang Soon Kim ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2011 현대영미소설 Vol.18 No.2

Ishmael Reed`s Flight to Canada and Toni Morrison`s Tar Baby share the theme of black liberation. Set in America under slavery, Reed`s Flight to Canada is a narrative of Raven Quickskill who runs away from his master to Canada, the land of freedom. Set in contemporary America, Morrison`s Tar Baby dramatizes the tension between Jadine Childs and Son Green who respectively designate the site of postcolonial black identity in urban white culture and ancestral black culture. However, Reed and Morrison do not envisage the vision for true emancipation through those central characters that step outside of their oppressive reality. In Reed`s Flight to Canada, Raven Quickskill never reaches the land of freedom. In Morrison`s Tar Baby, Jadine and Son fail to locate the site where black people can be culturally and spiritually decolonized and free from racial ideologies. It is through Uncle Tom-ish characters in the underlying narrative that Reed and Morrison illuminate the possibility of achieving true freedom. Uncle Robin in Flight to Canada and Sydney in Tar Baby, apparently corresponding to the Uncle Tom figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe`s Uncle Tom`s Cabin, never leave their oppressive reality and remain faithful to their master. However, they surreptitiously mock/challenge the master`s authority and transform their oppressive reality into the site of liberation by taking advantage of the colonial situation where the mastership is maintained by the service and labor of black slaves. Thus, Uncle Robin and Sydney show that black people can achieve true liberation without ever leaving the oppressive ground. Ultimately, Reed`s Flight to Canada and Morrison`s Tar Baby imply that black liberation should be sought and fought right inside their oppressive reality without totalizing the ground.