Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion.

Missy Dehn Kubitschek. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. 203 pp.$29.95.

The past decade has seen the publication of a great number of books and anthologies on the work of Toni Morrison, including several of the "teacher's guide" sort. I confess to being highly suspicious of teacher's guides or any book-length literary study resembling a textbook. Anthologies of criticism are invaluable to me in classroom discussions, as I frequently juxtapose another critic's interpretation with my own in order to highlight the text's availability for multiple, even contradictory readings. Textbook-type studies, however, tend to obscure the particular interest or bias of the critic, presenting what is an interpretation as the "true" and/or "underlying" meaning. Given Morrison's interest in her own texts' blank spaces, spaces she expects readers to fill from their own imaginations, I initially wondered about the appropriateness of a textbook approach to her fiction. However, Professor Kubitschek's book succeeded in laying most of my fears to rest. Kubitschek presents a wide variety of relevant inf ormation on Morrison and her novels, explaining theoretically sophisticated concepts in a responsible and clear manner.

Part of the "Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers" series, this volume is directed toward both high school and college student researchers, but it should also appeal to non-academic readers, according to the series forward by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Each book in the series contains one biographical chapter, one chapter on literary and historical contexts, and several chapters focusing on structural and thematic aspects of at least one text. This particular volume devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's novels, with each chapter containing a section on plot development, character development, and theme, as well as what Klein calls an "alternative" theoretical reading of the novel. These readings draw on different contemporary literary theories, each of which is defined and then applied to a particular text. While I dislike the term alternative, since it implies some standard reading (by implication the one presented earlier in the chapter), I greatly appreciated these theoretical readings both a s necessary correctives to textbook ideology and as entirely appropriate to Morrison's literary work. In fact, at the end of the biographical chapter, Kubitschek explicitly examines the idea of interpretation, arguing that "no final authority" on "what the text means" (not even the author herself) exists in Morrison's "world," but rather that Morrison "values the processes of interaction and discussion that take place in a community of readers." Overall, Kubitschek's book is true to this process.

Kubitschek gives adequate coverage to just about every Morrison-related issue that has emerged in research on (and in my teaching of) Morrison during the past decade. These issues include the place of politics in art; literacy and the slave narrative; African world view and cosmology; racism and the women's movement; the African American literary tradition; the protest tradition and the question of audience; individualism and community, call-and-response, and various other cultural and theoretical issues, all of which are carefully contextualized. Her alternative readings of the novels are clearly explained and supported, yet brief enough to inspire readers to continue the interpretations on their own.

In particular, I enjoyed the "multicultural" reading of Song of Solomon, in which she draws on mythologies of flying in European, African American, and American Indian cultures.

Kubitschek doesn't name individual critics or styles in defining the particular theory in each chapter, which is probably appropriate for high school and some college readers but might be misleading for more sophisticated readers. Her feminist reading in the chapter on Sula, for example, states that the "defining characteristic" of various "feminist criticisms" is their "woman-centeredness," their investigation of issues and concerns related to women "from women's points of view." While I like her subsequent discussion of the "Cult of True Womanhood" concept as it shapes the gender identities of Sula and Nel and their families, her definition minimizes the political dimensions of feminist criticism. The idea of a "woman's point of view" is a problematic (and highly charged) notion for male and female students alike.

Appropriately, Kubitschek highlights issues of identity in each of her chapters, beginning with the opening of the biographical chapter. As she notes, Morrison identifies herself as a black woman writer, despite the attempts of many critics (including those on the Nobel Prize committee) to "universalize" her beyond that designation. Morrison makes the point that nowadays one chooses the identity "black," whereas it used to be forced on one. In Kubitschek's chapter on The Bluest Eye, she emphasizes the constructed nature of identity in a "mythic reading" using Jungian archetypes and Greek myths. While Jungians view these archetypes as transhistorical, speaking to some "shared core that makes us human," Kutbitschek argues, The Bluest Eye "denies the existence of a core that remains untouched or unconstructed by social conditions." She adds that social forces can destroy even those qualities such as "mother-love" that we believe "fundamental to humanity." This is an idea that many students need to hear.

The concept of the self as constructed reappears in other chapters. In her discussions of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, Kubitschek contextualizes Morrison's development of identity over the course of this trilogy. The concept of self differs between Jazz and Beloved, she notes, because of the "different modes of survival" faced by the characters from different time periods. Beloved's Sethe must "identify what in herself is continuous, what lived through slavery," whereas the "postmodernist self" found in the characters in Jazz requires "continual redefinition" and development, involving in Violet's case two coexistent selves, a "blues self" and a "jazz self." In discussing Paradise, Kubitschek emphasizes the role of the black community in identity development (or lack thereof); because the novel's separatist all-black town, Ruby, views itself as pure and perfect, its inhabitants must "prove their own goodness by separating themselves from all who are evil," resulting in the splitting of psyches as well as fam ilies.

While preparing this review, I happened to be teaching Morrison's Sula and Beloved in two different senior-level literature courses. My students, many of whom are education credential students on their way to teaching high school English courses, found Kubitschek's treatment of thematic and plot-related issues interesting and helpful, although they didn't agree with all of her interpretations. In the chapter on Beloved, Kutbitschek states that Baby Suggs's "preaching ignores conventional Christian religious practices and doctrines," yet my students noted that Baby Suggs draws on Biblical phrasing--e.g., "let the children come." Their interpretation allows for the idea that Baby Suggs (and her followers) have combined elements of Christian and African religions, an idea supported elsewhere in the novel. We also found some minor plot-related errors in the Beloved chapter, for example the idea that Denver was named after Amy Denver's destination, rather than her last name (her destination was Boston, not Denver ), and that Pauls "A through F" lived at Sweet Home (we hear only of Paul A, Paul D, and Paul F). While I would prefer to see these errors corrected in a subsequent edition, their presence encouraged my students to view themselves as authorized critics of both Kubitschek's book and Morrison's novels, which, finally, is the goal of a book like this.