2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
ment with language and structure. (See, for instance, John Barth, “The Literature
of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly [August 1967]; reprinted in his The Friday Book:
Essays and Other Nonf iction [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], pp.
62–76.) Yet, The Bluest Eye gave voice to an emotionally powerful experience not
previously heard in American literature and ushered in an era when many previ-
ously silenced lives would be given voice. In an early interview, Morrison explains
how she sees the focus of her work:
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I
never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never.
And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you.... It is
this business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for
me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and
had it published all over the world. It is good—and universal—because it is
specifically about a particular world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to
write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the sug-
gestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing
(Thomas LeClair, “The Language Must Not Sweat: Conversation with Toni
Morrison,” New Republic, 184 [21 March 1981]: 25–29).In 1973 Morrison published Sula, the story of an unconventional woman
and her relationship with her more-conventional friend. That novel received
fairly divided reviews, although still with much praise for Morrison’s prose. Song
of Solomon in 1977 firmly established her as a major voice in American letters.
With a male protagonist and a plot based on traditional quest motifs but all set
within distinctly African American culture and folklore, it introduced her to a
wide readership and garnered significant critical praise, including the National
Book Critics Circle Award.
Morrison is not a writer who hurries her work. Tar Baby appeared in 1981;
Beloved in 1987; Jazz in 1992; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination; Paradise in 1998; Love in 2003; and A Mercy in 2008. She has also
written an opera libretto, Margaret Garner (2005); six children’s books with her
son Slade; and a frequently anthologized short story, “Recitatif ” (1983), and has
edited two collections of essays on issues of race and gender. She has produced a
substantial body of essays and speeches, some of which are collected in her What
Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonf iction (2008). Students wishing to more deeply
understand her project, African American culture and history, white American
presuppositions, and storytelling and narration, among other relevant contempo-
rary topics, are urged to explore these writings.
The central story of Beloved is about Sethe, her life as a young woman on
the Sweet Home plantation, her escape from slavery after the “benevolent”
master dies and the farm falls into the hands of the sadistic Schoolteacher, and
her twenty-eight days spent living free followed by the arrival of Schoolteacher.
While free, Sethe murders her child. Her life after that event, including the
departure of her sons, is interwoven with the present story of the arrival of