[This Wednesday,
my summer
hybrid grad course on 20th Century American Women Writers kicked
off (we started with a discussion of Sui
Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance!).
So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some exemplary such writers, leading up to a
weekend post on some of what I’m most excited for with that summer course.]
On a few reasons
to read the only published short story by one of our greatest novelists.
I can’t imagine
that I have to spend much time on an AmericanStudies blog making the case for Toni
Morrison, the Nobel
Prize-winning novelist and professor
and scholar and speaker
and icon who is without much argument the single most significant American
literary figure of the last half-century (or at the very least would have to be
a starting point for that debate). Despite those many achievements and
successes, she’s still best-known for her novels, and for good reason: between The
Bluest Eye (1970) and last year’s God
Help the Child (2015) she’s published 11 novels, and with each has
significantly contributed to and redefined the forms, themes, and trajectory of
American fiction, literature, and culture. If those novels (and of course those
yet to come) were Morrison’s sole literary legacy, they would be more than
enough to cement her position as one of our greatest writers.
They’re not,
though—and because they’re her most consistent and central body of work, they
can sometimes overshadow her efforts in other genres, such as her one published
short
story, 1983’s “Recitatif.” “Recitatif” is unique, not only among Morrison’s
works but in American literature more broadly, in the clever and provocative way
it unsettles our ideas about race and identity: Morrison creates two central
characters, the narrator Twyla and her girls’ home roommate Roberta, who are
overtly defined as black and white; but we are never informed which character is
which race, and our reading of the story becomes a continued exercise in
examining and engaging with how, where, and to what end we identify racial and
cultural identities. That might sound like more of a parlor game than a
literary text, but I assure you that it’s not, or rather that it’s both—that while
we do participate in a sort of game while reading and re-reading Morrison’s
story, in the process we are thinking in unique ways that no other text (to my
knowledge) prompts about those questions of identity, identification, and what
they do and don’t reveal about individuals and communities. That effect alone makes
Morrison’s story a must-read for any AmericanStudier, I’d say.
Like any great
short story, however, Morrison’s has multiple layers, and as we move through a
handful of stages in the lives of those two mysteriously racialized
protagonists we’re also being led through a compelling historical journey in
two distinct but interconnected ways. We move forward chronologically with the
protagonists, from what seems to be an early 1960s starting point through the
height of the 60s
counter-culture, the shifts into the 1970s, and a busing/segregation
crisis, among other flashpoints. And at the same time we are continually moving
backward into the protagonists’ memories, as they return again and again to the
mysterious, traumatic, and defining story of what happened to a disabled, seemingly
abused woman who worked at the girls’ home. Race is only one factor in any
individual’s identity, of course, and through these parallel journeys Morrison’s
story likewise engages at length with how both the sweep of history and the intimacy
of memory inform and influence and amplify and shift each and every identity
and life as well. All great reasons not to leave this singular short story
aside in our readings of an American legend.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other women writers (20th century American or otherwise)
you’d highlight?
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