A History of American Literature

668 The American Century: Literature since 1945

Telling impossible stories: Recent African-American fiction

If any novelist can be said to have a project similar to that of August Wilson in

drama, it is surely Toni Morrison (1931–). “For me, in doing novels about African-

Americans,” she has declared, “I was trying to move away from the unstated but

overwhelming and dominant context that was white history and to move it into

another one.” Her work can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric

histories of the American experience from a distinctively African-American

perspective. A series of fictional interventions in American historiography, her

novels draw what she has called, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary

Imagination (1992), “the overwhelming presence of black people in the United

States” from the margins of the imagination to the center of American literature and

history. What has been distinctive about the history of the United States, Morrison

has argued, is “its claim to freedom” and “the presence of the unfree within the heart

of the democratic experiment.” This was, and remains, “a nation of people who

decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and

mechanisms for devastating racial oppression.” As such, it “presents a singular

landscape for a writer.” And her aim in mapping that landscape has been twofold.

On the one hand, she has charted a specifically black history, giving voice to the

silence: pointing to the culpability for it of white America’s “failure” to apportion

human rights equally, while simultaneously celebrating that history’s achievements

and identifying its own failings. On the other, she maps out a general history of

America from the readjusted perspective, the angle of black experience. As Morrison

has noted in Playing in the Dark, “Africanism is inextricable from the definition of

Americanness – from its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating

twentieth-century self.” The history of black America, over the last two hundred

years and perhaps more, is the history of America, as she sees it. So what she is

pursuing, reclaiming in imaginative terms, is a history of the whole American

experience.

“The crucial difference for me is not the difference between fact and fiction,”

Morrison once admitted, “but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts

can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.” That search for truth began

with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). It has a simple premise. A narrator,

Claudia McTeer, tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl whose hunger for

love is manifested in a desire for blue eyes that eventually drives her to insanity.

What complicates is both structural and social. Morrison has said that one of her

goals as a writer is “to have the reader work with the writer in the construction of the

book.” And here she uses a number of narrative devices to realize that goal. The novel

opens, for example, with a parodic passage from a Dick and Jane school primer that

presents an ideal, inevitably white family: the kind of cultural intervention that seems

calculated to create false consciousness. Working with the writer here and elsewhere

in the novel, the reader gradually unravels a tale of personal and social disintegra-

tion. Pecola, it seems, is driven inward by the norms of white society (the bluest eye,

the ideal family) to shame, the destruction and division of the self. Claudia, the

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