Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison.

Gurleen Grewal. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 154 pp. $25.00.

Gurleen Grewal explores the combination of psychoanalytic mourning and postcolonial resistance that is so central to Toni Morrison's work. Like other critics before her, Grewal locates much of the power of Morrison's novels in Morrison's explicit attempts to historicize and politicize psychological trauma. Using tools ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to its most recent, more historically responsive form in Caruthian trauma studies, and working from a foundation built by such post-colonial scholars as M. M. Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, and Trinh T. Minhha, Grewal argues persuasively for Morrison as a writer deeply engaged in resistance to the ongoing effects of political and cultural colonialism. Grewal shows that the attempt by Morrison's characters to "claim themselves" (made explicit in Beloved but prevalent in all her work) fits snugly within a postcolonial project to decolonize subjectivity--a project to rewrite, as it were, the "master narrative." Like Morrison, Grewal emphasizes that this attempt to establ ish and maintain cultural, socio-economic, political, psychological, and creative freedom is always simultaneously an individual and a communal experience. That is, while the dynamics of oppression, trauma, and resistance run along similar structural lines for all dispossessed peoples, history is always psychologically experienced in a profoundly individual way. Morrison reconnects the individual's "unspeakable" pain to a communal expression of healing--a connection that, as Grewal convincingly reveals, relies on Morrison's invigoration of the Western bourgeois form of the "writerly" novel through "speakerly" rhetorical strategies springing from African American oral and musical traditions.

What makes Grewal's contribution to the burgeoning field of Morrison studies distinct, however, resides less in her deft handling of the critical tools of postcolonial theory and trauma studies and more in the pleasing idiosyncrasies of her individual readings of Morrison's novels. In fact, when her readings fall within the Critical Mission of claiming Morrison as a Postcolonial Writer, they are less illuminating; the novels become flattened out into interchangable tales of cultural resistance. One symptom of this is that Deleuze and Guattari's servicable distinction between an always already political "minor" (subaltern) literature and an individualistic focus in "major" (dominant) literature springs up as a newly introduced idea in nearly every chapter. However, when she departs from the strict confines of this reading of Morrison"s work as resistant "minor" literature (not a difficult argument to make), the intertextual connections Grewal makes are quite illuminating. For example, when she rearticulates M adhu Dubey's argument that Sula exposes fissures between a black nationalist agenda and a black feminist agenda, the result is perfectly satisfying, but it offers nothing new. However, when her reading of Sula reveals not only the novel's jazzlike, signifying riffs on several icons of Euro-American modernism, T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but also the novel's provocative links to works by writers ranging from Yevgeny Yevtushenko to Richard Wright, Morrison's work and Grewal's analysis become truly "decolonized." No longer subjects to any one theory, Morrison and Grewal free themselves to range over various terrains and to name their own complex connections to historical, literary, and theoretical narratives of painful dispossession and redemptive resistance.