Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative - Critical Essay

(12.) For more on the tension between telling and not telling, see Morrison's Nobel Prize lecture.

(13.) Marianne Hirsch describes Song of Solomon as mediating "between the too close incestuous literality of a nonsymbolic nonlanguage and the arbitrariness and uncaring distance that has made the characters 'dead'" (87). In examining how names function in this novel, Hirsch describes how Pilate becomes her mother by singing. But there is more weight to that name. Morrison accentuates how Sing's legacy is vocal and disembodied, but Sing's name, which had been nearly erased by the grieving husband's ban, survives. This creates a fascinating parallel to the survival of blackness, which the act of passing itself threatens. Passing is paired with Sing, whose name is lost, because they share the dynamics of secrecy and the loss of family ties.

(14.) Eusebic Rodrigues argues that "we easily make the cross-connections...that, for Violet, Joe was a substitute for Golden Gray" (258). Morrison does underline this and ether connections between the two stories, although the stories are set in different states, at different times, and with mostly different characters. But Morrison has also introduced a narrator who significantly highlights the distance and the problems with connecting these stories.

(15.) See Hogue, who positions Morrison in a Modernist tradition on the strength of Sula and Song of Solomon. "Recitatif," Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise would lend themselves to his later readings of postmodernity. It would not, for example, be difficult to apply these texts to Hogue's description of a postmodern narrative: "These texts critique and expose racial essentialism and deconstruct notions of racial wholeness and historical continuity. They show the Ineffectiveness of the pure notion of culture in a postmodern world" (193). For essays that situate Morrison in a postmodern tradition, see Rafael Perez-Torres, Marianne DeKoven, and Dwight McBride In Peterson's Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches.

(16.) See the preface to Morrison's Playing in the Dark (xi). Although she only mentions "Recitatif" in a parenthetical remark, her brief remark about this experimental story is situated in a longer discussion about what it means to be a black writer.

(17.) See Goldstein for another rare examination of this short story.

(18.) Morrison also challenges herself. Her Nobel Prize lecture is basically an allegory of how teacher and student must collaborate and learn from one another. The allegory begins with a classic tale of youthful presumption, but Morrison does not allow students to serve merely as a foil for the wise woman's intelligence. Their brash criticism of the woman suggests the importance of their role as challengers to wisdom and age.

(19.) Elsewhere, I have argued the "central" importance of passing to Show Boat, noting that "Julie's story of racial 'passing' structures the rest of the narrative, and ... actually bleeds through into Magnolia's story" (75).