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

Reviewed by Jesús Benito Sánchez

In an interview with Bessie Jones and Audrey Vinson, Toni Morrison once declared that "the novel has to be socially responsible as well as very beautiful" (Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994] 183). The very dualism emerging out of this pronouncement--the ideological implied in the social responsibility of the author, and the aesthetic evident in his or her search for beauty--has been present not only in Morrison's career as a writer, but also in the long tradition of African-American letters. The tension between the political and the artistic, or the ideological and the aesthetic, has gone through several stages in African-American cultural history. We can trace it back to the turn of the century in the differing perspectives of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, continuing through the Harlem Renaissance at the hands of Langston Hughes and Zora N. Hurston, and in the debates of the mid-century, with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and then on to the Black Aesthetic Movement. Pieces like Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" or Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing," among others, defend the social responsibility of the author to his or her community. On the contrary, Hurston and Ellison, among others, give prominence to the artist's aesthetic search over all other claims. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison, edited by Marc C. Conner, positions Toni Morrison within this debate, as a writer who balances both perspectives, the ideological and the aesthetic, in a rich prose that neglects no side of the divide.

Conner's apt introduction to the volume explores a parallel distinction between the aesthetic and the ideological in the critical assessment of African-American literature. Some contemporary critics, following Houston Baker, have sought to explore the political and ideological aspects of African-American literature; others have sided with Robert Stepto and Henry L. Gates in their analyses of the distinctive uses of figurative language by black authors. Given his own critical stance (as well as that of the volume in general), Conner seriously downplays the full dimension of Baker's (and others') formal analysis, as well as the ideological readings of Gates and others, thus making room for this volume, which, Conner claims, "seeks to avoid the tired oppositions that have persistently defined African-American cultural theory" (xx).

The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison is, in the words of the editor, an effort to achieve a balanced view of Morrison's works, one that bridges the gap between openly political and ideological critiques, and others that promise to explore the rich complexity of her poetic prose. In an effort to surpass the already abundant scholarship on the African-American folk roots of Morrison's literary art, the different contributors to the volume explore how Morrison's works "talk back" to the Western aesthetic tradition. However, despite its emphasis on Morrison's training in the classics, and her many debts to many Western, non-African-American authors, most of the essays in the volume incorporate the Western aesthetic tradition without undervaluing Morrison's immersion in the vernacular. A first essay by Barbara Johnson sets the tone for the rest of the volume in her analysis of "the profoundly political nature of the inescapability of the aesthetic" (11). The last article in the volume, by Cheryl Lester, links back to Johnson's essay with a particularly emotive, personal reading of ethics and aesthetics in Morrison's Nobel Prize speech.

Other articles are more typical of Morrison's scholarship so far. As a case in point, Yvonne Atkinson explores, once again, the symmetry in Morrison's masterful use of the African oral and the Western literate traditions, while another essay by Maria DiBattista explores Morrison's role as novelist and storyteller. But no doubt the core of the volume is the three essays that project Western aesthetic concepts onto Morrison's works. Susan Corey explores Morrison's use of the category of the grotesque in Beloved to "disrupt the familiar world of reality in order to introduce a different, more mysterious reality" (31). Marc C. Conner invokes the traditional concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in his exploration of the individual and the community in Morrison's works. Katherine Stern retakes the traditional distinction between beauty as physical idea and as philosophical category to examine the ways Morrison manages to "circumvent Western aesthetic standards" (78) and to propose "an experience of physical beauty that is tangible and improvisational, relational and contextual" (78). Finally, an article by Michael Wood continuous to place Morrison within many different literary and philosophical traditions--joining her to authors like Flaubert, Woolf, Faulkner, Henry James, or García Márquez--a multiplicity that results in her frequently elusive and indeterminate prose style. The different contributions finally make up for an uneven volume, whose main interest lies in the effort to open up current criticism of Morrison to allow new perspectives, rather than in the critical insights offered.