Othering
Whiteness – A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination
Priyanka Saha is a Research Scholar in the Department of English & Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam, India.
ABSTRACT
“Othering”
provides important perspectives in postcolonial and race studies wherein
the dominant group “others” the marginal group by creating negative
discourses about the latter. The literary scene of the U. S. has many examples
where white writers other the black characters in their works. The
literary canon again others the black writers by presenting them not within the
mainstream – not as Americans – but as African Americans. Blackness, therefore,
has constantly been othered in the American social and literary scene. Black
writers and critics have now retaliated by counter othering whiteness in their
works. Toni Morrison in her book Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination seeks to critically examine
“whiteness” in American literary tradition. This paper seeks to show how her
criticism engages in a Manichean discourse of blackness and whiteness and fails
to be inclusive. Her work follows the tradition of African American critics
like W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and bell hooks, which, according
to her detractors, is overtly propagandist and one-dimensional, with little
space for dialectics. In so doing, she fails to dismantle the hierarchies that
she condemns and ends up creating new hierarchies, which are also problematic.
KEYWORDS
Toni Morrison, other, whiteness, literature
The politics of “othering” provided important perspectives in
postcolonial and race studies wherein the dominant group “others” the marginal
group by creating a negative discourse about the latter. Similarly, the
literary scene of the U.S. shows white writers othering the black characters in
their works. The literary canon again others the black writers by presenting
them not within the mainstream- not as Americans- but as African Americans.
Blackness, therefore, has constantly been othered in the American social and
literary scene. Black writers and critics have now retaliated by counter
othering whiteness in their works. Toni Morrison in her book Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination seeks to critically
examine “whiteness” in American literary tradition. This paper seeks to show how
her criticism engages in a Manichean discourse of blackness and whiteness and
fails to be inclusive. Her work follows the tradition of African American
critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and bell hooks, which is
overtly propagandist and one-dimensional, with little space for dialectics. In
so doing, she fails to dismantle the hierarchies altogether that she condemns
and ends up creating new hierarchy- that is, black on top of white, instead of
white on top of black.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination is part of the
William E. Massey Lectures delivered by Morrison at Harvard University in 1992.
In this book, she talks about how the literature of America has been shaped by
a “dark, abiding, significant Africanist presence.” Morrison raises the
question whether a person could become white without the availability of a
black absence, of that which can be oppressed. She refers to the works of Edgar
Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway to substantiate
her argument. It is one of the most academically discussed works of African
American criticism. In this book, it is seen that Morrison, by speaking of a
black Africanist presence tries to provide an antithesis to whiteness. By doing
so, she tries to show the black force without which the white force would fail
to exist. According to her, the characters can assert their whiteness only
because there is a black presence. While on one hand, she manages to form a
balance and dilute to some extent an overarching white presence, she once again
ends up holding blackness as an anti-thesis to whiteness and fails in doing
away with the complex tropings of blackness and whiteness
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, an Afro-
Caribbean theorist, talks about the oppressed black person who is perceived to
be a lesser creature in the white world that s/he lives in, and studies how
s/he navigates the world through a performance of whiteness (see Fanon, Black
Skin). Fanon therefore seems to suggest that whiteness is a construct. If
this is to be true, then blackness is as much a construct. It is only in
America perhaps that literature is divided along black and white lines. Black
and white are, therefore, not just colours in the U.S.A. but have assumed an
epistemic status wherein everything from politics to literature to art to food,
clothing and lifestyle came to be identified either as white or black. The
narratives of whiteness and blackness and their associations with good and evil
respectively, were created by whites in the first place in order to keep the
hierarchy intact.1 The image of whiteness was reinforced by literary works
and by writers who were not racists but racial, that is to say, they had
internalised the racial discourses in the air which was reflected in their
writings as well.
The responses of the black writer to the constructs of whiteness are
governed by a desire to overturn the hierarchy and replace whiteness by
blackness. This can be understood as a reaction to the scars left by one
hundred years of slavery. However, by calling for a black form of literature,
the blacks have themselves assumed an identity which they believe is distinct
from the rest of America. Since the blacks cannot see themselves
autochthonously grounded in America and since they have no memories of their
homeland Africa, they reject both these identities and seek to occupy, what
Homi K. Bhabha calls “the third space” or “the liminal space” (see The Location of Culture, Bhabha). The black writers make an
insistence on her/his black skin colour as a referent for identification.
However, they are aggravating the problem by making the same mistakes which
their white counterparts had made. In trying to do away with one kind of power
structure, they are introducing another power structure. A black writer can
never speak alone but has to always speak with the weight of the entire
community. She/he cannot sever herself/ himself from the past in a kind of
Bloomean misprisioning.2 Also, the black writer does not write into
a congenial but a competitive ancestry or an adversarial tradition which has
writers from the Euro centric tradition and whose works provide for the black
writers, as Gates says, “the grandfather clause” (Gates 48). That is to say,
being born in a racist society, a black writer can never afford to be oblivious
of race issues. However, art stands in danger of secessionism from
the black writer’s constant eulogizing of the black tradition and critiquing
the white tradition. Toni Morrison’s earlier works can be taken as cases in
point. She does to the whites what the white writers have done to the blacks,
that is, to reduce them to shadowy presences. The white characters are denied
humanity in her earlier novels and are represented as machines of oppression,
like those of the school teacher and his nephews in Beloved (1987).
This points to a tradition of apparently subtle but separatist criticism
which began with W.E.B Du Bois and continued through Henry Louis Gates Jr. to
Toni Morrison and bell hooks. Du Bois especially wanted black writings to be
political and was not happy with people like Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora
Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington etc. who according to him, were more cultural
than political. (Leitch, 868). He called for “voluntary segregation” as a means
for progress of blacks in a country which was not deceived them into dreams of
an America for all (Leitch, 868). In “Criteria of Negro Art” Du Bois explicitly
says, “All Art is propaganda and ever must be.” (Du Bois 869). According to
him, “the central duty of African American writers and artists is to advance
the cause of the race” (Du Bois, 869). Henry Louis Gates Jr., an authority on
black criticism and theory, in his essay “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it
Makes” calls for a separate critical tradition against which the works of
African American writers are to be judged. He argues that black literature is
essentially different from white literature and so the standards for judging
the two should also be different. Similar exclusivist concern is voiced by bell
hooks in her “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination” where she talks
about how white people inspire feelings of strangeness and awe in the black
imagination in a manner similar to the one produced by black folks in white imagination
(see “Representing Whiteness”, hooks). By doing so, she involves in an
‘othering’ of the white folks and tries to push whiteness to a disadvantageous
position. Morrison follows the exclusivist tradition of these critics her
book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
In the first chapter “Black Matters” of her book, Morrison talks about
how American literature and literary criticism has been participating in a willful
blindness towards the African American population which has contributed to the
American identity. Morrison begins the essay by very subtly attacking the
American society and by implication the whole of Western tradition which is
strongly driven by conquest motive:
I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use
that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure and
close exploration as did the original charting of the New World- without the
mandate for conquest. (3)
Morrison distinguishes between “readerly” reading and “writerly” reading.
She borrows the terms from Roland Barthes. In his book S/Z,
(1970) Barthes uses the terms “readerly” and “writerly” to distinguish,
respectively between texts that are straightforward and demand no special
effort on to understand and those whose meaning is not immediately evident and
demand some effort on the part of the reader. According to Morrison, her
reading as a writer has opened her eyes to forays into which she hadn’t been
initiated as a reader. It shows the considerations that the writer takes into
account while writing a book.
She also questions the apparently self-evident general knowledge “which
holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of and,
uninformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first,
Africans and then African-Americans in the United States”. Morrison argues that
the essential “Americanness” that is in collective unconscious is totally
oblivious of this presence. The American “mainstream” culture and literature,
in the popular belief, has been actually formed by the white American male and
is in no way connected to the black people. According to Morrison, the opposite
is the truth. “Individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical
isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematic; the thematic of innocence
coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell” (5) as the
popularly highlighted characteristics American national literature are, in
fact, responses to the Africanist presence. She says that the desire for
American literature as a distinguished entity exists as a response to a
difference from the black community. She coins the term “American Africanism”
as “an investigation into the ways in which a non-white African like (or
Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the
imaginative uses this fabricated presence served” (6). She makes it clear that
she does use the term to explain the complicacies of the African community
residing in America but uses it as a term “for the denotative and connotative
blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire
range of views, assumptions, readings and misreading that accompany Eurocentric
learning about these people” (7). This discourse provides an arena on which one
can contemplate contradictions at ease.
According to Morrison, there is paucity of critical material on the
subject of race. However, critics like James Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. had
already appeared on the scene and had started writing critically about race
issues. Therefore, the silence and evasion in critical discourse that she talks
about is only a myth. What Morrison wants to do in is to shift the critical
gaze of African American studies from the racial object to the subject, from
the oppressed to the oppressor, from the black to the white:
What I propose here is to examine the impact
of notions of racial hierarchy, racial
exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on non- blacks who
held, resisted, explored or altered those notions. (11-12)
A shift of gaze might well bring the whites within the realm of the
ethics of answerability. Whiteness as a trope needs to be interrogated.
However, the way Morrison tries to do this does not solve the problem. Her
method constantly draws attention to racial aspects of works hitherto judged
for their aesthetic qualities. While it opens a new foray of possibilities
altogether to study and examine the texts, it has also invited dangers of politicising
literary works and a search for a racial angle in every American text. This
might lead to examination of racism in every other work where there are black
and white characters.
Morrison justifies her stand by saying that “in a wholly racialized society,
there is no escape from a racially inflected language” (12-13). In this case
one needs to understand that it is only the duty of the writers to try as much
as to purge themselves of racial feelings and make their writings free of black
or white imagination, as she calls it. However, although Morrison’s project is
to interrogate racist imagination, it definitively intensifies racial
discursive practices. A prolonged approach to any text from a racial point of
view might lead to a reductionist kind of criticism. The author tries to draw
attention to how issues of racism in major American texts are carefully
sidelined in order to engage with apparently more important issues. She refers
to writers like Gertrude Stein, Flannery O’ Connor, Henry James, Willa Cather,
Ernest Hemingway to draw attention to how race related issues were
never part of the critical discussions of their works. According to
her, feminist critics have been successful with the result that sexist readings
have considerably declined. Therefore she calls for a revision of the critical
corpus in order to include race related issues. Cather’s book Sapphira
and the Slave Girl (1940), she thinks, is an underrated
work. According to her, the work failed because it tried to evade an important issue
simmering underneath the classic slave narrative of a fugitive slave, that of
“the power and license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves” (18).
However, it seems that she is keen on giving a racial angle to a
professional decision. The analysis that she makes of the work is interesting.
She takes a plunge into psychoanalysis so that she can tap on the whiteness in
Cather’s narrative. She had a problem with The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1984). Jim wasn’t freed because the writer being
white just could let that happen. In this case, Nancy in Sapphira is
both saved from rape and is free to live a new life altogether. In such
situation, it is to be questioned whether the whiteness of Cather’s imagination
is really at play while writing the book. It also makes a case for the fact
that a writer might not always be affected by racial considerations. In the
next essay “Romancing the Shadow”, Morrison, taking a cue from Edgar Allan
Poe’s works and the Africanist presence lurking therein, talks about how the
genre of romance provides the ground on which America’s fears and sense of
freedom found its free expression. Also America was desperately trying to free
itself from the clutches of European culture and do away with its sense of
belatedness. As “romance is an evasion of history” (37), this genre offers a free
play for the American terror “and terror’s most significant, overweening
ingredient: darkness, with all the connotative value it awakened” (37).
Morrison talks about how the Africanist presence is inextricably linked to the
concept of an impenetrable whiteness in American literature. She gives examples
from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), by Edgar Allan
Poe where there are references to a “shrouded human figure” with skin “the
perfect whiteness of the snow”. These white images, Morrison says, are “awe
inspiring”.
She shows how the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and
innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly
not free and that came to serve white writers as embodiments of their own fears
and desires. That is to say, the black bodies offered sites as the “other” on
which the whites could project all their latent wishes and desires. These
bodies provided opportunities for the whites to form their own ideal identity
in relation to and in difference from the blacks. Morrison calls the American
Dream an immigrant one. That is to say, she sees the dream only in terms of the
white European’s idea of America. According to her, the New World suggested for
the whites, endless possibilities of freedom. She says, “Romance was the form
in which the uniquely American prophylaxis could be played out” (36) and also
“There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of
blackness,’ especially not in a country in which the resident population was already
black, upon which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral,
metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated”
(37). She focuses her discussion only on the European immigrants who moved to
America in the 15th century. However, she does not take into
account other immigrants to the United States which included the blacks
themselves and people from other nationalities. For these people the
personification of their fears might well have been the white person. The
discourse on whiteness provides enough space for such kind of meditation. No
doubt the blacks are viewed as exotic creatures by the whites. However, the
blacks and other were not innocent of racist constructions and racist gaze as
can be seen in bell hooks’ discussion of the black gaze in her essay
“Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination”.
She says, “Emerson’s call for that new man in ‘The American Scholar’
indicates the deliberateness of the construction, the conscious necessity
for establishing difference.” (39). However, if one reads through the essay,
there is nowhere the faintest trace of the racial consciousness. Even in the
way he talks of the unification of natural images in America, he talks of
merging, which would eventually lead to the melting pot culture of USA where
anomalies are diminished. Emerson’s approach, as opposed to what Morrison says,
seems to be inclusive rather than exclusive. The difference as clearly stated
in “The American Scholar” is that of a difference from Europe and not in any
way an attempt to establish a difference from the black slave population,
which, in any case was considered human enough for contemplation of identity
issues. Morrison raises the following questions: “What, one wants to ask, are
Americans alienated from? What are Americans always so insistently innocent of?
Different from? As for absolute power, over who is this power held, from whom
withheld, to whom distributed?” (45). The answer, different from Morrison’s
contention, is not a black African presence or population. The answer to the
first question, “What are Americans alienated from?” is that they are alienated
from all ties of history. They try to divorce themselves from Europe’s
influences. The next question, “What are Americans always so insistently
innocent of?” can be answered in the fact that they considered themselves to be
the chosen one and children of Adam to be sent to the land of America to make
the rough terrain a fertile spot for cultivation and smooth life. The answer to
the question “Different from?” is that they are different in their sense of
exceptionalism. The following question, “As for absolute power, over whom is
this power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed?” can be answered like
the Americans believed that they were chosen by God to conquer land, animals,
“lesser human beings” and other creatures. The “lesser creatures” should in no
way be mistaken with the blacks because the slave trade had begun only in the
later half of the seventeenth century Therefore the premise that “the
imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed
is in large measure shaped by the presence of the racial other” (46) looks
invalid.
Morrison states that “It was this Africanism deployed as rawness and savagery
that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the
quintessential American identity” (44). This exclusive focus on the shaping
presence of “American Africanism” in the constitution of American national
identity seems much too simple. For there were other races, cultures that vied
for geopolitical space and presence in writing and naming America. Moreover
blackness and Africanism cannot be separated from a whole complex of personal
and cultural phobias and fetishes around the body, nature, women, race, the
Orient, and the democratic masses that haunt and spook the American imaginary.
To reverse the hierarchical relation from black to white by claiming black
precedence risks reinstating the exclusions of the white literary tradition; it
also isolates blackness and Africanism from the complicated network of
religious, cultural, historic, economic and ultimately transnational relations
in which they were involved. Morrison’s focus on the shaping presence of
Africanism in creating a distinctively American literature keeps both
“American” and “African American” neatly contained within a nationalist and
exceptionalist frame and thus tends to erase the cross-currents of
international exchange, economic as well as cultural, imperial as well as textual,
in which the writing if the United States more generally have played a
commanding role (Kennedy 44).
According to her, “Black slavery enriched the country’s creative
possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found
not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin
color, the projection of the not-me” (38). This is the idea that she harps on
in the essay. In her attempt to show the blackness which offered a surrogate
for the white people’s fears or hope, she goes on tapping on the rhetoric of
racial difference which in case of people of African origin and those of
European origin. What Morrison says that “The act of enforcing racelessness in
literary discourse is in itself a racial act” (46), cannot be denied. The white
writers have mostly presumed racial inequality in the twentieth century to be a
myth and hardly in their works address the racial tension seething underneath.
The thing to be taken note of is that Morrison in order to contribute to the
discourse of race and its associated tropes of whiteness and blackness, is
being too radical or political. In these instances, it seems that the author is
desperate to somehow introduce blackness as an anti-thesis to whiteness.
Although she makes a case for the marginalised black population in American
that is always seen as the other of the dominant white population, to say that
in every case the literature if the United States is backed by a black
population is to shift the focus from the aesthetics of the text to a political
powerplay. Generalising her statement by taking into account few examples of
American texts and the role of the black characters in driving the plot and
informing the psyche of the white characters does not hold good. Morrison quite
easily labels writers as racist while race might not even be a concern for most
of them. It is true that these writers belong to the white category and do not
have to be race conscious like blacks. However, Morrison who had been critical
of allegorical tradition on American literature fails to pay attention to the
artistic and subjective dimensions of each of them and covers them under a
grand narrative of response to the black presence as she allegorises them.
She even goes on to state that the black American population is different
from what is “American”: “Deep within the word American is its association with
race. To identify someone as South African is to say very little; we
need the adjective ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘coloured’ to make the meaning clear.
In this country it is quite the reverse. American means white and Africanist
people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and
hyphen after hyphen after hyphen” (47). An example of this would be the way
black skinned Americans are referred to as African-Americans as opposed to the
white skinned Americans who are only Americans. The way in which artists- and
the society that bred them-transferred internal conflicts to a “blank
darkness,” to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies, is a
major theme in America literature. Morrison says, “Slave narratives in the
nineteenth century were a publication boom. The press, the political campaigns,
and the policy of various parties and elected officials were rife with the
discourse of slavery and freedom.” (50). It is true that the slave narratives
flourished during the period when America as starting to be conscious of the
humanity of the newly freed slaves. However, literature, unlike the general
societal consciousness, concerns itself with many topics on diverse fields.
Therefore, to say that American literature is invariably related to a
consciousness of the black population in America is not justified. There might
be a kind of consciousness in the mind of the writer but it is not always
reflected in literature which does not abound in black characters.
Morrison brings out the racist implications of one of America’s most
celebrated novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The issues,
while they have an authentic basis, were nevertheless certainly in literary
terms and in terms of the imagination perhaps, limited. Morrison begins the
essay “Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks” by speaking of race as a
discourse which is more a metaphorical expression than a biological category.
These metaphorical uses of race, according to Morrison, constitute the national
character of America. What she means to say is that America as a nation is
works along strong racial lines and divides. This character, as an obvious outcome,
is reflected in the literature of the country. According to Morrison,
“Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness- from its
origins on through its integrated or disintegrating twentieth-century
self.” (65) She says that the idea of America can never be divorced from
the black population that constitutes the largest minority in America. If we
compare this to Morrison’s earlier assertions of America being synonymous with
whiteness, it would seem paradoxical. She refers to Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick to show the black-white dynamics are at work even there:
Melville uses allegorical formations- the white whale, the racially mixed
crew, the black-white pairings of male couples, the questing, questioning white
male captain who confronts impenetrable whiteness-to investigate and analyze
hierarchic difference. (69)
Here Morrison does not take into account the pairing of Ishmael and
Queequeg and even if she does, she surely mistakes Queequeg for a black man.
Ishmael nowhere says that Queequeg is a black man. Queequeg’s physical features
are recorded in Ishmael’s first impression of the former:
This accomplished, however, he turned round-when, good heavens! What a
sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there struck
over with large blackish looking squares.... To be sure, it might be nothing
but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s tanning a
white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South
Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced those extraordinary effects upon the
skin. (Melville, 33)
Morrison undertakes a critical examination of Hemingway’s works where she
thinks the black presence is one of the loci around which issues of the novel
revolve. Her interest is heightened by the fact that Hemingway’s works are not
studied much for their racial implications: “My interest in Ernest Hemingway
becomes heightened when I consider how much apart his work is from
African-Americans” (69). Morrison points out that in To Have and Have
Not (1937) “the protagonist Harry says ‘Wesley’ when speaking to the
black man in direct dialogue; Hemingway writes “nigger” when as a narrator he
refers to him” (71). However, To Have and Have Not was
published only in 1937. It was only in 2007 that the New York City Council
banned the use of the word “nigger”. What Hemingway used was only part of the
general consciousness and can’t be termed racist. Had the novel been written
after 2007, the case would have been different. The use of the word “nigger”
was just a kind of replacement of proper names for common names for example
“Harry” for “the boy” and nothing more. She says, “Eddy is white and we know he
is, because nobody says so” (72). This instance though might at first sight
seem to be one of racism, is actually not so. Black is mentioned because it is
the minority in a white American society. The anger contained in Morrison’s
words support the fact that she is insistent on establishing the attribute of
blackness as an anti-thesis to whiteness. Not that she has launched out a
verbal war against the white supremacist society. But it is clear that she is
driven by her political stance as a black leader which makes her ignore the
other minor factions in the American society which might as well have served as
subjects of contemplation and constituted the whiteness in literary imagination
that she talks about. Morrison talks about how the black man is denied speech
by the white writer:
The power of looking is Harry’s; the passive powerlessness is the black
man’s, though he himself does not speak of it. Silencing him, refusing him the
opportunity of one important word, forces the author to abandon his search for
transparency in the narrative act and to set up a curiously silent mate-captain
relationship. (73)
Morrison’s criticism brings to mind Chinua Achebe’s criticism of
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in “An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”. There Achebe accused Conrad
of being “a thoroughgoing racist”. Of the many arguments he gives, one is that
of the silencing the black characters in the novel or endowing them with quite
incoherent speech. Achebe, however, is a poor reader of Conrad’s novels as he
fails to make a distinction between Conrad, the author and the unnamed narrator.
It is the narrator and not Conrad who chose to tell parts of the story which he
found interesting. In a story telling practice, the narrator will resort to
various devices in order to make the story interesting. Similar is the case
with Hemingway’s narrator who chooses to speak for the black man because he
feels that the black person is not that important. The presence of a silent
black character might invite critical attention but does not make the racism
integral to the concerns of its discussion. Morrison here confuses the implied
author or the narrator with the author. Also, she commits intentional fallacy,
that is, she judges the work by the writer’s intentions. Moreover, if we go by
Eliot’s dictum of impersonality according to which, in the process of creation
a writer loses his self. The quality of a work is judged by the extent to which
the writer’s presence is least felt in the work. In spite of this it cannot be
doubted that the writer is shaped by her/his circumstances and her/his experiences
are reflected in the work. It is true that the black characters are presented
and to some extent also determined the subconscious responses of the white
characters towards them. However, it might as well be only the obvious response
of their writers to their circumstances. Morrison presents instances
of the black man accusing the white of inhumanity to show how it presents
another side to Harry’s character:
Ain’t a man’s life oth more than a load of liquor?” Wesley asks Harry.
“Why don’t people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?...You
don’t care what happens to a man. You ain’t hardly human.” “You ain’t human,’
the nigger said. You aint got human feelings. (76)
This presents a strong case in favour of Hemingway as a fair writer who
has given scope or the black man to express his views. It certainly does not
present Hemingway as a writer with racist intentions. This also does not speak
in favour of Morrison’s serviceability thesis, according to which a black man
is considered for human treatment only in so far as he is serviceable. In this
case Wesley is given a fair treatment despite his not so serviceable behaviour.
Morrison, in fact, at one point in the essay accepts the problem of applying
her thesis to Hemingway’s novels. She admits it beforehand so as not to be
singled out for criticism on this ground:
It would be irresponsible and unjustified to invest Hemingway with the
thoughts of his characters. It is Harry who thinks a black woman is like a
nurse shark, not Hemingway. An author is not personally accountable for the
acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them. And there
is no evidence I know of to persuade me that Hemingway shared Harry’s views. In
point of fact, there is strong evidence to suggest the opposite. (86)
Morrison spends a lot of time on the racial attributes of whiteness and
white society rather than the literary and professional merit of arguments and
decisions. Also, she demands recognition of the marginal presences in American
literature. This might remind one of Leslie Fiedler who in his Love and
Death in the American Novel (1960) talks of marginal presences in
American literature. What is to be dwelt upon is that whether the blacks are
the only marginal groups in America where the Indians, the indigenous people,
were completely erased by both the blacks. This is not a critical review of the
book which would judge it on arbitrary standards of right and wrong. The
process of argumentation is interested in looking at moments in the text where
the author’s arguments seem not logical enough to drive her point home.
Endnotes
1 For a better
understanding of the binaries and discourses created by the colonial powers,
see Edward Said’s Orientalism.
2 Harold Bloom in
his The Anxiety of Influence explains the younger poet’s
relation to his literary predecessor in six revisionary ratios: (i) Clinamen
(ii)Tessera (iii) Kenosis (iv) Daemonization (v) Askesis and (vi) Apophrades.
“Misprisioning” refers to the first ratio “clinamen” where the younger poet
swerves away from the path showed by the elder poet.
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