The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable.

Marc C. Conner, ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000. 153 pp. $18.00.

This collection of eight essays, with an introduction by the editor, Mark C. Conner, enters the apparently ineradicable debate about the relationship between politics and art. Conner offers The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable as a corrective to a perceived imbalance caused by a critical lens too narrowly focused on the racial politics of Morrison's writing to the neglect of her artistic achievement. (Conner is not unaware of the tenuous-ness of this distinction. Less acknowledged is a counter-argument that would suggest a paucity of politically engaged criticism that approaches Morrison's work from a queer or global perspective, that situates her use of African cosmologies next to that of, say, Simone Schwarz-Bart or Bessie Head.) In a lucid introduction that outlines productive and contentious twentieth-century talk about the proper goal of African American literature, Conner cites the importance of the Black Aesthetic movement while lamenting some of its effects, namely the ostracism o f certain artists and the subordination of what might be called formal considerations to what might be called political concerns. Conner concludes that Morrison's "writing is uncompromisingly political; but its aspiration is to the status of art, the realm of story and music and restoration." Take the but out of that sentence, and we may finally begin to move.

The collected essays are accessibly written with useful information about signifying, nommo, the grotesque, the sublime, Aristotle, Booker T. Washington, Edmund Burke, Madam C. J. Walker, Maurice Merleau-ponty, Salmon Rushdie, narrative theory, and founding racism. In a brief, suggestive essay, Barbara Johnson reads the severed limbs, traumatic scenes, and primal reverberations in Sula as a reworking of Freud's theory of the uncanny, which Freud considered an aesthetic question. The structure of the novel performs an "affective discontinuity"; or, as Johnson nicely puts it, "Things don't happen when they happen." She argues that the novel mediates between "aesthetic" and "rapport," between detachment and attachment, contemplation and action. A great deal of violence in the novel is "watched" by characters (Shadrack watches the face of a soldier fly off, Nel watches Chicken Little disappear into the river, Sula watches her mother burn to death), and in turn readers watch, and enjoy. As in ancient theatre, aest hetic pleasure derives, in part, from personal and political trauma. Maria DiBattista also investigates Morrison's attraction "to the sheer gorgeous-ness of the language of pain and contention." Focusing on Tar Baby, DiBattista questions whether or not Morrison comfortably fits within the realist-novelist tradition, casting her primarily as a communal storyteller: "It is the fabulist, the teller of tall tales, and not the novelist in her that communicates the most painful, damning knowledge of her race and her history."

Michael Wood offers an analysis of the storyteller's proximity to the tale with a detailed reading of multiple points of view (including that of the dead) in Paradise. He argues that the narrative voice "not only re-enacts, by example, the questions raised by the emergence of competing knowledges, but also refigures knowledge itself in the light of what fiction can and cannot do." The conflicting narrative perspectives do not lead to relativism, he suggests, but to a demand that the implicated reader think and decide. Katherine Stem is also interested in these shifting epistemologies. Her essay opens with a remarkable observation made by Morrison in 1974: "However much beauty matters to white people... 'it never stopped them from annihilating anybody.' "Stem traces in Morrison's fiction the devastating effects of white beauty myths and the creation of an alternative beauty that is tactile, imaginative, and improvisational rather than visual, packaged, and fixed. Her novels explore the "material practice of be auty" (the beauty parlor with its "laying on of hands") rather than abstract notions of "the beautiful." The political power of Morrison's writing inheres in this kind of imaginative work and the seductive invitation to reclaim history.

Inevitably all the essays demonstrate that the political is inextricable from the aesthetic. Morrison both embraces the label of the political ("'that's what an artist is--a politician'") and insists on artistic freedom ("'no one should tell any writer what to write, at all, ever..., one of the goals of this whole business of liberation was to make it possible for us not to be silenced'"). These essays testify to the newest results of this insistent artistic struggle. DiBattista elegantly concludes that, for readers of Morrison's fiction, "there is comfort in knowing that the world is not cursed, only intricate." And perhaps this dialogue about what constitutes art, what constitutes politics, is not cursed either, only intricate, and, like the world, without end.