Morrisonian Polyphony - Hybrid Characters in Toni Morrison’s Love

Hybrid Characters in Toni Morrison’s Love

1. Morrisonian Polyphony

Toni Morrison made her literary debut at the same time as Alice Walker and, like in Walker’s authorship, the lives of black women have occupied a central place in her texts. Apart from this thematic affinity, their literature is, however, aesthetically mostly dissimilar. In essays and interviews Morrison has explicitly stated her desire to signal blackness and communicate something that is recognizably African American: “There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is” (1984, 341). She has on several occasions acknowledged her indebtedness to black music: “The power of the word is not music, but in terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror that gives me the necessary clarity […] I use the analogy of music because you can range all over the world and it’s still black … Sometimes I hear blues, sometimes spirituals or jazz and I’ve appropriated it. I’ve tried to reconstruct the texture of it in my writing” (quoted in Gilroy 1993b, 181–182). She has broken with the strictly realistic novel and the term fantastic realism has been used to label her fiction. Her own response to this has mostly been that it is not an adequate term in the context of her literature. Rather, she has seen the term as a disambiguation since her own reference has been the discredited knowledge embedded in black American culture: “My own use of

enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and for the black people that I knew” (Morrison [1988] 1993c, 414). The insertion of vernacular elements into the modern African American novel has for Morrison been a very deliberate act expressing

her self-awareness of participating in two traditions. In particular, she mentions the oral quality of the written language; “the ability to be both print and oral literature” (1984, 341).

However, more than anything else her textual universe is marked by narrative and cultural hybridity. Morrison’s texts are double-voiced constructions that show the creative interrelatedness of vernacular African American and canonical western traditions.

In terms of theme as well as form, Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2003) can be described as an archetypal Morrisonian novel.⁹⁸ Thematically, it places at the front what has been an underlying theme in many of her previous novels, namely love’s many different manifestations. In an interview with Jane Bakerman from 1977, Morrison lists her recurrent themes as “ ‘beauty, love … actually, I think, all the time that I write, I’m writing about love or its absence. Although I don’t start out that way’ ” (Morrison [1977] 1994b, 40). In Morrison’s novels, love can be redemptive but also violent and destructive. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), presents rape as a father’s only expression of love for his daughter; in Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987) mothers kill their own children as an act of love and protection, and in Tar Baby (1981) a mother tortures her own baby with cigarette burns.

Barbara Hill Rigney writes that “Morrison’s novels are always about love and its distortions, and also about slaughter, often with the blood” (1991, 83). Love, then, is never a simple and straightforward affair in Morrison’s fiction, and least of all in her eighth novel, which is a probing into interhuman relationships and into love’s many-faceted nature. It explores the unpredictable and often inscrutable manifestations of love, or something resembling love, through portrayals of friendship, sexual attraction, infatuation, obsession, fascination, and even hatred; it is a novel about love and hate and all the shades of feeling in between. In The Bluest Eye the narrator addresses this issue directly by saying that “[l]ove is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, …” ([1970] 1994a, 163), thus implying love’s many guises. Love further complicates the matter by showing that humans, too, are many-faceted and often contradictory. All of the characters in Love are complex and hard to define, and it is no simple matter to ascertain whether they are wicked, violent, weak or stupid. The central setting and environment in the novel is a household of women of different generations, which

98 Michiko Kakutani in a critical review in The New York Times states that “[a]ll of Ms. Morrison’s perennial themes are here: lost innocence and the hold that time past exerts over time present; the sufferings sustained by black women at the hands of black men; the fallout that social change and changing attitudes toward race can have on a small community; the possibility of redemption, if past grievances and hurts can somehow be left behind” (Kakutani, 2003).

we also see in Sula, Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved, Paradise (1998) and A Mercy (2008), and in the course of the novel their lives are shown to be closely intertwined.

Also in terms of form Love draws on elements characteristic of Morrison’s fiction.

Her novels are polyphonic, open-ended constructions that defer closure and frequently conflate the past and the present. Love is a profoundly dialogic novel that does not primarily follow a linear progression but rather grows in complexity. It circles around its events and characters, approaches them from different angles, and each new perspective and relation adds to its complexity by making relational patterns discernible but also interpretive closure difficult. Morrison’s novels should thus not be thought of as entirely open-ended, relative, or, even, chaotic; conclusions and interpretations are not arbitrary but are problematized and poly-dimensional. The deferral of closure so often referred to as a characteristic of her fiction is carefully constructed. This dual movement towards closure and openness could be seen as the working of Bakhtinian dialogue; centripetal forces work toward closure and prevent the text from dispersing completely while centrifugal forces create openings and distance, and thus prevent closure. It is the balanced co-working of these movements that accounts for the complexity of Morrison’s novels. Through the dialogic processes at work in Love centripetal and centrifugal forces serve to simultaneously approach and defer closure; they both hold together and open the novel up, and the centrality of this mechanism in Morrison’s fiction makes her novels, and Love in particular, an heir to Jean Toomer’s style in Cane. The play with ambiguities, with parallels and contrasts, repetition and difference, and the deferral of closure seen in Cane are also found in Morrison’s eighth novel where it is particularly visible in the presentation of character.

The construction of character is very important in Love, as in all of Morrison’s novels, which is not surprising since interpersonal relationships constitute one of its most important themes. When asked by Nellie McKay how she handles “the process of writing,” Morrison responded that “I start with an idea, and then I find characters who manifest aspects of the idea – children, adults, men or women” (Morrison [1983] 1994e, 143). Character analysis and analysis of character construction can therefore serve as textual openers and as ways of explicating the text as a whole. The self in her novels has been described as “a relative concept, decentered rather than alienated, relational rather than objectifying” (Rigney 1991, 45), and in Love this is even more noticeable than in her previous novels. Its characters are dialogically constructed, or, dialogized, and there are several categories of dialogic mechanisms at work. Characters are dialogized through the use of multiple perspectives;

through the manner in which they form parallels and oppositions to each other; through the

dialogic presentation of time, and through the dialogic relationship between different genres.

The novel’s dialogic mechanisms serve to achieve dynamic and relational rather than static and monologic character presentation, and thus also promote deferral of textual closure.

Dialogization of character through the use of multiple perspectives, or what I will call perspectival dialogization, is a recurrent feature of Morrison’s fiction: characters and events are typically seen from several different points of view, neither of which is clearly preferred over the other.⁹⁹ What is important is not any one of these perspectives per se but the manner in which they relate to each other. Morrison’s novels thus reflect Bakhtin’s description of polyphony in Dostoevsky as the interaction between and interdependence of different consciousnesses (Bakhtin 1984b, 36). In Love the only character actually given a narrative voice is L who replaces the third-person narrator in sections of the novel and appears to address the reader directly. However, several of the other characters function as what Henry James calls centres of consciousness in sections of the text, which is to say that their stories, world views, and their views on the other characters dominate parts of the narrative. These often divergent views interact and confirm or contest each other, and should also be seen in relation to what we can distil as factual events; what a character actually does regardless of how his or her actions should be interpreted.

This perspectival dialogization of character is particularly important in relation to the late Bill Cosey. He may not be the main character in the novel, but there is no doubt that he is at the centre of the narrative; he is the common denominator in the lives of all the characters and is on everybody’s mind. He thus forms an important part of what holds the novel together, and he is its dialogic centre, which is indicated by that the titles of the novel’s chapters, which indicate the roles he has played in the lives of the various characters.¹⁰⁰ Bill Cosey’s position in Love is not unlike the position of Valerian Street in Tar Baby. When confronted with the fact that Tar Baby begins with Valerian rather than with Jadine, who is the tar baby character, Morrison responded by saying: “But he is the center. He’s not the main character, but he certainly is the center of the world […] He is the center of the household – toppled, perhaps, but still the center of everybody’s attention” (Morrison [1981] 1994d, 101).

This sounds like a description of the situation in Love, only in Love this scenario is magnified.

99 This is also noted by Elliott Butler-Evans in relation to Song of Solomon: “What is dialogically significant here is the manner in which individual consciousnesses present themselves as autonomous voices unmediated by either the narrator or Morrison, thereby opening the novel to numerous interpretive possibilities” (1995, 125).

100 However, the meaning of the chapter titles is not as straight-forward as it may seem. For instance, the chapter titled “Father” tells us how Christine felt about losing her father. The only way to say that Bill Cosey is related to the term father in this part of the chapter would be to argue that he, as her paternal grandfather, had to fill the role of father in her life after her actual father died.

All the major and minor characters have been affected by Cosey and have their own views of who he was and why he did what he did. Even Junior, who has never met Cosey in real life, forms a relationship with him. Most of the female characters have at some point in their lives loved or admired Bill Cosey, while Sandler Gibbons, the only other significant male character in this context, was made his reluctant friend and confidant and is thus privy to information none of the women possess. In spite of the factual deeds we can ascribe to him, such as marrying Heed when she was only twelve years old, lack of kindness towards his grandchild Christine, infidelity to his wife Heed, and generosity towards the community of Silk, it is conspicuously difficult to determine Bill Cosey’s character. Why Cosey married Heed is an example of one of the many questions the novel does not answer. L divulges to us that Cosey himself claimed he married Heed because he wanted children, but she also contests this statement: “Well, that’s what he told his friends and maybe himself. But not me. He never told that to me because I had worked for him since I was fourteen and knew the truth. He liked her” (Morrison 2003, 139). But L more or less admits that liking someone is not reason enough to marry. She also thinks Cosey married Heed because his “sporting woman” left town and “to make old Dark groan” (139). Sandler Gibbons adds to the picture by recollecting what Cosey confessed to him:

But he remembered Cosey’s dream-bitten expression as he rambled on about his first sight of Heed: hips narrow, chest smooth as a plank, skin soft and damp, like a lip.

Invisible navel above scant, newborn hair. Cosey never explained the attraction any other way, except to say he wanted to raise her and couldn’t wait to watch her grow.

(148)

We as readers are left to figure out largely for ourselves whether Bill Cosey was a cold- hearted tyrant, or perhaps even a paedophile, or simply a normal man ruined by possessive and crazy women, which is what Vida thinks: “For it came to that: a commanding, beautiful man surrendering to feuding women, letting them ruin all he had built” (36). Like Cholly in The Bluest Eye, another male victimizer, Bill Cosey is not himself given a voice in the novel.

His thoughts are communicated through the thoughts of the other characters. However, despite the magnitude of Bill Cosey’s presence, Love is primarily a story about women.

A similar perspectival dialogization is at work also in the construction of the other characters, albeit here it is less obvious. The prevalence of the narrative’s dialogic structure and way of looking at the world is so strong that it becomes not only a structural element but also a theme. In the character of Romen the issue of a dialogized and ambivalent identity is internalized as he sees himself from different perspectives in different contexts: “But he knew who it was. It was the real Romen who had sabotaged the newly chiseled, dangerous one. The

fake Romen, preening over a stranger’s bed, was tricked by the real Romen, who was still in charge here in his own bed, forcing him to hide under a pillow and shed girl tears” (Morrison 2003, 49). Although a minor character in the novel, Romen is the character who most overtly questions and examines his own self. He experiences an internal strife between society’s expectations of him and his own sense of self that brings to mind Du Bois’ double-consciousness.

A second form of dialogism is achieved through the way the different characters form patterns of contrasts and parallels, and this narrative feature reveals the very careful and intricate composition of Love. Discussing the relationship between Nel and Sula in an interview with Robert Stepto, Morrison declared: “And so I wanted to say, as much as I could say it without being overbearing, that there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something the other one had” (Morrison [1973]

1993a, 381). In Beloved Paul D is thinking that he would like to put his story next to Sethe’s (1988, 273), implying that their lives are to be seen as individual yet related stories.

Presenting characters in relation to each other is a central principle in Love and something which prevents the characters from being closed, autonomous structures; each of them to some extent, finds resonance in the other characters. They cannot be explained in isolation because their identities primarily emerge as a result of relational structures. A character may share traits, dispositions, or situational contexts with other characters, and these parallels serve to define and complicate the characters. This could be seen as a working of centripetal and centrifugal principles. The parallels, or similarities, between the characters are centrifugal forces that serve to open them up to each other while the contrasts between them are

centripetal forces that serve to separate and distance and thereby close them to each other. The complexity and depth of the characters and their actions and motivations grow through this dialogic interplay of contrasts and parallels.

The dialogic oscillation between the past and the present is a third dialogic cornerstone in Love’s narrative structure and a feature of Morrison’s fiction in general. Morrison’s narrative is layered in terms of time, and the text moves freely between the present and its many pasts. It portrays an African American community from a historical perspective, but in a fragmented and disrupted narrative chronology. In order to comprehend the present it is necessary to know the past as the two are intrinsically linked and mutually throw light on each other. Thus Love is both the story of Heed and Christine as two elderly ladies and the story of them as two little girls. Their present lives must be seen in light of their past, at the same time

as knowing their present lives places the deeds of the past in high relief. The prominence of the past and its impact on the present is felt also by the characters of the novel, like Sandler Gibbons, whose mind seems to follow the same direction as the narrative:“Now he wondered if there was brain damage he hadn’t counted on, since he was becoming more and more fixed on the past rather than the moment he stood in” (Morrison 2003, 46).This insistent narrative interdependence of the past and the present contributes to the dialogization of the characters and their motivations. No character can be understood solely on the basis of his or her present situation; a perspective that spans his or her life history is essential. It could be argued that this is a general principle that relates to most literary texts. However, in Morrison’s texts it becomes conspicuous because of the meandering narrative structures that bind the past and the present together. Morrison’s style is often compared to that of Faulkner, and this is no doubt one of their coalescing stylistic features. The reader’s comprehension of history grows gradually as we get acquainted with the different phases of the characters’ lives. Love is the story of individual characters, but it is also the story of a the rise and fall of a family and the story of a community.

The fourth main aspect of dialogism, and of the dialogized character, is the interplay of different genres. Love is marked by generic and intertextual polyphony and displays great literary virtuosity. The text creates a polyphony of different genres, drawing freely on African American as well as white western traditions: the Gothic, the picaresque, African American folktales, western fairy tales, and textualizations of African American musical genres, like jazz and the blues. By drawing on these genres the novel also evokes several specific

In document Genre Polyphony in African American Literature : Dialogic Readings of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Love (sider 176-183)