Fifty Books Project 2023

Playing in the Dark – Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary “blackness,” the nature – even the cause – of literary “whiteness.”  What is it for?  What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as American?

These three linked essays were given as the Massey Lectures in American Studies at Harvard in 1992, just before Morrison published Jazz.  While the ideas here are complex, her delivery is easy going – erudite without being obscure.  While no doubt her central ideas about whiteness are more familiar to us now, she makes what was a radical leap in interpreting American literature seem effortless.

Her central point is easily summarized:  even though African American writers are largely suppressed in the first 150 years of our culture, and even though white writers created few black characters and paid scant attention to black life, because American society and culture was centered on the exploitation of Africans and then African Americans and because every aspect of American political and economic life was suffused with issues of relations between the races, there is a distinct Africanist (her word) presence in all of American literature.  She argues that this is a fruitful avenue for future literary criticism.  Now, thirty years later, we know she was correct, as issues of whiteness and the Africanist aspects of American culture have been so much more widely recognized and analyzed.  Still her arguments are powerful and relevant.  Each chapter (or lecture) centers on one major work’s Africanism, while mentioning several others.

First is the Willa Cather novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The novel centers on the handicapped white woman Sapphira’s fear that her husband is going to betray her by raping her personal attendant, the beautiful, teenaged Nancy.  Sapphira punishes Nancy for this possibility in a number of ways (including attempting to get another white man to rape her) and pushes Nancy to run away.  The novel is clearly a mediation on power, with the focus on Sapphira’s limited power.  Morrison shifts the focus to what the novel says about the concept of whiteness by analyzing the actions and feelings of Nancy’s mother – who aids both her mistress’s plots and her daughter’s escape.  In this reading, Sapphira’s status as a white woman is defined by her ability to torture Nancy and her mother.  When Nancy successfully escapes, Sapphira is mystified and loses some part of her identity as white – the balance of her need for Nancy’s assistance and her near total power over Nancy’s life is what defines her whiteness.

The second major black character Morrison identifies is Wesley, the nearly silent, often unnamed deckhand in Ernest Hemmingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937).   Morrison makes clear that Wesley is one of a number of black characters in Hemingway works who silently and namelessly to help and care for the white male protagonist.  She gives an excellent close reading of passages involving Wesley, and other characters, paying attention to when they are allowed to speak, what they say, when they are given names and when they are simply referred to by the N-word (which Morrison has no compunction about using).  What she makes clear is that Harry Morgan’s identity as a fiercely independent, capable and principled white man is entirely dependent on his relationship with these black characters, both because they lack any personal agency or principles beyond momentary pleasure and because they are occasionally angry and outspoken.  It is the Hemingway character’s willingness to put up with these outbursts that proves his principled independence.  Hemingway sets up a straw-man in the form of a  dependent and subservient black man – whose very identity is centered on his subservient dependence – and then proves his character’s better qualities by having him allow this stereotype to step out of his defined identity for a moment.  His whiteness is defined by this balancing act – he can dominate but he does not have to.

Finally, Morrison discusses the character of Jim in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (1885) She is not terribly interested in Jim’s character – nor does she seem terribly impressed by Twain’s accomplishment in making him fully human.  What interests her is how Jim’s continual humiliation and re-enslavement is necessary for the novel to continue to explore freedom.  In the mistake of missing Cairo (and Jim’s chance at freedom), in the continual humiliation of Jim – especially in the final chapters, but at various points throughout the novel – and in the way that Jim is granted his freedom in the end, she sees Twain’s dilemma in creating a concept of freedom within an American culture that is so bound to color restrictions.  In her view, Huck, Tom Sawyer and Twain himself can only exist as white, can only be vehicles for the exploration of freedom, if Jim is available as a continual reminder of bondage.  Jim cannot become an autonomous being who grabs his own freedom – having been developed as a cogent and rational adult, he must be reconverted into an absurd, ignorant child incapable of independence before he is granted that independence by the ghost of his master.

There is another category of literary whiteness Morrison is interested in exploring – images of whiteness that are presented as if they are separate from social breakdowns of skin color.  The most obvious of these, which Morrison has discussed in other essays, is Melville’s great whale in Moby Dick (1851).  Here, she discusses, too briefly, the white world at the end of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.  Poe’s band of adventurers have reached the end of their resources and, adrift on a lifeboat, they encounter first an unusual white light emanating from the sea (contrasting with the sudden darkness of the sky) and then a shrouded white figure, vastly larger than an ordinary human and of “the perfect whiteness of the snow.”  Poe being Poe, the figure’s import is left mysterious and the meaning of whiteness goes unexplored.  For Morrison it is the finality of the image that gives it its importance.  Like Melville’s whale or the snow on the top of Kilimanjaro that ends Hemingway’s short story, this image of purity and infinity is touched with evil, with death, with an unknowable power.  In these moments, American writers seem to see whiteness as both a goal and a dilemma – the impossibility of a vision of whiteness without blackness is a trope in American literature that reflects an essential truth about American culture and society:  they do not exist without their Africanist elements.

While most critics of American culture have long appreciated that there is no American culture without the contributions of African American writers, artists, musicians and thinkers, Morrison would expand the importance of these Africanist elements to recognize their impact on white writers, artists, musicians and thinkers.