My life in books

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison

In 1990, Toni Morrison was invited to deliver the William Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. This book collects her three lectures in essay form.

The thesis of these lectures is that the fact of slavery and racism in the U.S. has had a significant impact on American literature, quite independent of whether or not a specific work is “about” issues of race or contains characters who are black. Morrison argues that what she terms “the Africanist presence” can be seen throughout the American literary canon – primarily consisting of works written by white (male) authors, for an audience assumed to be white (and predominantly male). By examining the works of writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway, Morrison looks at how blackness – whether of a specific character or the sense of an ever-present and pervasive ground against which the action of white characters can be placed – has been used by American authors to create their sense of being white, and of how the consciousness of slavery has been used to create the themes of individualism and liberty that are si much a part of American literature.

I must confess that I have not read a lot of American “canon” literature, my tastes having tended to based themselves more firmly in the traditions of British and Commonwealth literature. So I am ill-prepared to comment critically on the validity of Morrison’s argument. Nonetheless, the argument is interesting, and seems to point to new perspectives on the American “canon” novels I am familiar with.

Furthermore, something that has struck me since reading these essays is how Morrison’s argument can in some ways be adapted to a consideration of the influence of Aboriginal peoples on the development of Canadian literature. (Canadian literary critics have already gotten well into the ways in which the existence of two separate linguistic and cultural colonising peoples, and the looming historical event of the conquest of Quebec, has influenced our literature in both languages.)

I’m not as well-versed in French-Canadian literature as I would like to be, but English-Canadian literature often seems to take as one of its themes survival - of the body, of the functioning structure of the mind, and of the broader functioning of society: life against death, sanity against madness, civilisation against chaos. Many have argued that this is a response to the significantly more challenging climate, but perhaps it can also be seen as a struggle for the white colonising settler cultures to justify their conquest by positioning life (among settler peoples) in Canada as a struggle to create order and civil society from savagery and chaos - which, in order to do, we (as settler peoples) must first define the Aboriginal peoples as unordered and uncivil - and by defining ourselves (the settler peoples) as civilised against the imagined picture of a people who we need to pretend are not.

Morrison’s criticism has certainly given me some interesting things to think about.