CHAPTER 8
Toni Morrison’s Determinate
Ambiguity in “Recitatif ”
I
N THIS CHAPTER, I continue to explore the ways in which authors can
use the resources of character narration and ambiguity in order to achieve
their communicative purposes. As I consider Toni Morrison’s purposes in
her remarkable short story, “Recitatif,” I move from the multiple, competing
meanings of stubbornness about event and character in “Das Urteil” and Lord
Jim to the determinate ambiguity of an either/or interpretive judgment about
a teller (and its ripple effects) in Morrison’s powerful exploration of race, class,
gender, (dis)ability, and women’s friendship. At the same time, I broaden the
theoretical discussion by taking up the relation between the project of rhetori-
cal poetics and some lines of research in cognitive narrative theory.^1
Indeed, as a rhetorical narrative theorist interested in the flourishing sub-
field of cognitive narrative theory, I have been struck by a significant and
surprising gap in narrative studies. Rhetorical and cognitive narrative the-
ory share several fundamental commitments and interests, but for the most
part, rhetorical theorists and cognitive theorists have engaged in parallel play- Of course, feminist narrative theory, which emphasizes the imbrication of narrative
with the identity issues foregrounded in Morrison’s story, would be another highly relevant
approach to pair with the rhetorical theory. But I also think that the lines of differentiation
between the rhetorical and feminist ways of looking at “Recitatif ” would not be that strong.
To put it another way, my rhetorical reading, while not identical to a feminist reading, is not
merely compatible with, but to a large extent is informed by, such a reading.
150