Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays.

Linden Peach, ed. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998. 211 pp. $18.95.

This New Casebook features eleven critical essays on the novels of Toni Morrison. Linden Peach's introduction provides an overview of each essay, identifying the theoretical perspectives from which each critic approaches Morrison's writing. Peach briefly yet clearly explains the origin and layers of sub-theories within each critical school. In addition, he specifies how the writers of these essays have modified traditional critical theories to interpret African American literature in general and Morrison's fiction in particular.

Peach also supplies explanatory notes following each essay and offers suggestions for further reading in the final pages of the book. This reading list features not only Morrison's fictional and critical works but also significant interviews, bibliographies, and literary criticism. In addition, articles and books examining Morrison's work are classified according to the contemporary critical approaches used.

In her intricate essay on Morrison's first three novels, Cynthia Davis interprets the "psychic violence" shown by many of Morrison's characters as a result of Western society's "systematic denial of the reality of black lives." Drawing upon existentialist and Marxist ideology, Davis shows how the "look of white society" so objectifies black members of society that they cannot form a "recognisable public self," exemplified by Morrison's pattern of misnaming people and places. Along similar lines, Barbara Rigney examines the "illusion of unified selfhood" in "Hagar's Mirror: Self and Identity in Morrison's Fiction." From a feminist perspective, Rigney posits that the notion of an "integrated self" is a male concept, as opposed to the merging of identities in the female triads of Sula, Beloved, and Song of Solomon. In addition to her poignant study of mirror symbolism, Rigney brings out the significance of naming and marking in developing or shattering the self.

Madhu Dubey challenges black feminist/nationalist readings of Sula in "'No Bottom and No Top': Oppositions in Sula." However, Dubey acknowledges that the novel both "affirms[ldots] the newness of the ideal black subject" and critiques heterosexuality through the fulfilling relationship shared by Nel and Sula. Dubey's strongest point is that Sula actually "plays feminism and nationalism against each other" while resisting pressure to conform to "Black Aesthetic discourse."

Terry Otten, in a chapter taken from his 1989 book The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, discusses the deconstruction of the fall motif in

Morrison's novel Tar Baby. With a clear writing style that follows the structure of the novel, Otten uncovers striking biblical parallels in this story of "wanderer[s] in search of self." In contrast, Doreatha Drummond Mbalia renders a brilliant Marxist reading, "Tar Baby: A Reflection of Morrison's Developed Class Consciousness." Her article commends Morrison for "matur[ing] to understand" that capitalism and imperialism have caused the oppression of African people everywhere. Extending the definition of African to mean "anyone of African descent," Mbalia sees the novel as indicting the United States as "the African's worst enemy." Mbalia praises Morrison's "heightened class awareness" through her choice of setting (outside of America on a post-colonial island), her inclusion of Euro-Americans as major characters, and her thematic concerns with the "schism that exists in the African community" over identification with one's oppressor or one's people (as symbolized by the irreconcilable struggle between Jadin e and Son). Yet she criticizes Morrison for the novel's "unsatisfactory ending," in which Son "escapes reality" instead of offering a "viable alternative" for African existence. A scathing yet accurate analysis of Valerian and his nonhuman nature as well as a detailed portrayal of Son and his "class-sightedness" further accentuate Mbalia's critique.

"Knowing Our Place: Psychoanalysis and Sula," by Houston Baker, presents a primarily Freudian analysis of a chapter in Sula titled "1922" which begins, "It was too cool for ice cream." Baker explains the sexual connotations of this remark in light of Sula's and Nel's pubescent stage; comments on their desire for the "PHALLUS," and identifies three "burials" that take place in this passage. Jennifer Fitzgerald's "Selfhood and Community: Psychoanalysis and Discourse in Beloved" draws an intriguing parallel between traditional psychoanalytic discourse and the discourse of slavery. Fitzgerald utilizes object relations theory to explain the "psychic trauma[s]" that the characters experience as they progress psychologically from objects to subjects and eventually to "reciprocal self-love."

In his essay on Beloved, Rafael Perez-Torres discusses the novel's postmodernist characteristics in "Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread-Beloved as Postmodern Novel," even as he warns against limiting Beloved with such a label. Although his study is commendable, many readers, particularly those not familiar with recent postmodernist critical theory, may find Perez-Torres's terminology and logic difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, the excerpt from Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's article "Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved" uses new historicism to illuminate the reports surrounding the Margaret Garner story that inspired Morrison to write Beloved and "keep [ldots] in touch with the ancestor."

In "Experiencing Jazz," Eusebio L. Rodrigues compares the structure, pace, and narrative voice of this novel to the "experimental form" and "improvisatory" rhythms of a musical jazz composition. Angela Burton's "Signifying Abjection: Narrative Strategies in Toni Morrison's Jazz" resolves the enigma many readers face when confronted with "bizarre [acts] of crisis resolution" committed by Morrison's black protagonists. Rather than affirming such crimes and chaos, Burton believes that Morrison is actually "Signifyin(g) on abjection," so that a character's erratic and often destructive behavior conveys both a "conventional" and an "oppositional" meaning at the same time. Burton's definitions and examples of "Signifyin(g)" and "abjection" clarify her study for the reader.

For its variety of interpretations of and approaches to the fiction of Toni Morrison, this New Casebook is invaluable to any Morrison scholar. And because Peach balances the purely intellectual experience of reading these critical assessments with explanatory comments and supplemental materials, he makes the essays accessible to anyone who wants to appreciate the gifts of Toni Morrison even more fully.