Developing an academic analysis of Toni Morrison's Book 'Playing in the Dark'

Meer Tanzina Husain

Date: December 2nd 2002

In her book ‘Playing in the Dark’, Toni Morison carefully examines the importance of African Americans in the American literary imagination. Throughout the book she talks about the works of writers like Cather, Poe, Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville to argue that American literature's central characteristic is its response to an ‘Africanist’ presence. She argues that a black or ‘Africanist’ presence exists throughout the history of American Literature.  Morrison discusses the effect of the use of black images and black people in literature on the literary imagination.

The collection of essays she has written in this book mainly argues that American Literature has been formed and reshaped around the presence of African Americans. And we can see it distinctly when she states in her own words, “There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States." (Morrison, 5). Morrison argues that the characteristics of our national literature are in fact responses to the dark, abiding, signing ‘Africanist’ presence and this black presence has affected and shaped the development of the American Literary canon. She says, "The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination." (Morrison, 5). She is trying to say that anyone is able to understand the study of black presence in national literature. She concludes by calling for greater attention to the place of race and slavery in classic American Literature. She then compares the ‘Africanist’ presence to a fishbowl--"the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world." (Morrison,17). This metaphor suggests that if we are to rescue ourselves from the deceptively tranquil world of the stagnant fishbowl, we should study both the roles of white literary imagination and the black presence within it. She says "readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white." Morrison asserts that until recently all readers of American fiction were assumed to be white and thus questions how "literary whiteness and literary blackness" are constructed. She then examines works from Willa Cather, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ernest Hemingway, while contriving comments on Melville, Twain, and other archetypal American figures into the argument.

Morrison's first chapter “Black Matters” centers on her reading of Willa Cather's virtually ignored novel, ‘Saphira and the Slave Girl’. Here, Morrison claims that the book's real critical point and power originates from the way that Cather describes a white mistress who exercises control over her black slave girl's body and ultimately defines herself against and within the ‘Africanist’ presence around her. She convinces herself that her husband is having an affair with the daughter of one of her slaves. Morrison goes on to parallel the metaphor of the white slave mistress who uses the black female body with Cather herself as a white author who exploits the vehicle of blackness in her fiction to define her beliefs of whiteness and femininity.

Morrison's second chapter, “Romancing the Shadow,” deals primarily with Edgar Allen Poe and the dialectic between American Romantic opinions of egalitarian liberty and black slavery. She claims an important place in the development of American ‘Africanism’ for Poe. Toni Morrison claims that no early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of "American Africanism”. She then closely reads this chapter making a more general cultural argument about America as a "New World" (Morrison, 3) in which a horrific void of darkness, shadows, and blackness serves as the context for an emerging consciousness of whiteness. Morrison argues here that as nineteenth century Americans struggled with questions of human freedom, social hierarchy, and individual will, the black body became the focus for meditation on these problems of human freedom, its lure and elusiveness. As she says at one point, "The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom--if it did not in fact create it--like slavery." (Morrison, 38). She says that the importance of autonomy, authority, newness and difference and absolute power which are the major themes of American Literature are made possible by the constitution of the ‘Africanism’.

She says that the Africanist presence was crucial to the sense of Americanness.

The final chapter “Disturbing nurses and the Kindness of Sharks” treats Hemingway's ‘To Have and To Have Not’ and ‘The Garden of Eden’, asserting that the often-ignored black characters in his fictions serve major roles in defining white manhood. While she acknowledges that Hemingway virtually ignores race in his work, she finds that a compelling case for the purity of her argument--insisting that the ‘Africanist’ presence states itself firmly even without authorial intentions. Morrison traces a connection between the erotic connotations of the black "other" and the self-definition of the virile white hunter, then goes on to complicate the black role in Hemingway's fiction by insisting that women in his novels are predatory "sharks" while the black men provide nurturing and nursing. Morrison argues that studies in racism should also consider the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it, that is, the oppressors by which I think she probably meant the writers who dominate our literary canon and not only the oppressed. From her writings it can be seen that her only purpose for writing this book is to make the readers aware of the cruel reality of racism underlying some of the greatest works of American Literature. She analyzes these works and establishes a methodical tone with her audience, readers and interpreters of American Literature. It is a necessary and a very urgent issue to analyze the effect of racial ideology on mind, behavior and imagination. If language is racially inflected, is the imagination also? Morrison draws a parallel between the blindness of literary critics towards African-American texts and feminist discourse.

Toni Morrison says in the concluding paragraph of her book that she doesn’t take any position on the quality of a work based on the attitude of an author or whatever representations are made of some group in this book. She says this project is “an effort to turn the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the servings to the served”. She asks all readers to look more closely to the origins and the roots of these critic writings rather than investigating racist or non racist literature.

Morrison's writing deals with narration in a distinctive way. She discusses the ‘Africanist’ presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather and Hemingway. Morrison is more focused on how a narration is presented than on using straightforward narration and clear chronology, that is, her discussions have not been presented in a sequence of time and events. Toni Morrison finally ends her book saying that “all of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes” (Morrison, 90).  She says it’s a pity when one takes no notice of the importance of race recognition in American Fiction and how this recognition determines the white literary self with that of the “other”. The book ‘Playing in the Dark’ reveals integrated critical discourse by an African American writer.                                             

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