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    Playing in the Dark
    Playing in the Dark
    Playing in the Dark
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Playing in the Dark

    By Toni Morrison

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner

    Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. 

    Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 24, 2007
    ISBN9780307388636
    Playing in the Dark

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    Reviews for Playing in the Dark

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Three essays on that originated as Toni Morrison's William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures given at Harvard are here in written form, exploring the way in which an "Africanist" persona is contrasted with individualistic whiteness in American literature.

      Morrison delivers a challenging read that's just as prescient and timely now as it was when it was printed in 1992. She never calls authors racist, but talks about examples from the works of Poe, Hemingway, Twain and more, and analyzes the way in which race is presented in their works. Her argument that there's a sort of persona that becomes an other, a contrast for protagonists and a fill in for danger or subjugation is especially compelling. My reading was impeded somewhat by not having read the works she was analyzing, and I would want to reread it to get the full impact and mull over her points more. Excellent reading for any student of American literature who would like to think more about how race is written.
    • 5/5
      a genius at work
    • 4/5
      Sometimes I wish that all literary critics were obligated to first serve an apprenticeship as great writers of fiction. Surely, like Toni Morrison, they would then be better able to appreciate the practical challenges and choices writers face. And that might make them more sensitive to what those choices reveal. Although she was well taught as a reader, Morrison says that, “books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer.” In Playing in the Dark, Morrison turns that writerly attention on the canon of American literature and asks what effect the largely unspoken Africanist presence in America has had on the choices that writers make. The answer is fascinating.

      The writing here sometimes explodes in flourishes of enthusiasm, almost poetic. And at times it seems that Morrison is presenting a prolegomena to a future body of criticism, or a platform of work for future students of American literature, rather than critical analysis itself. But when she does turn to specific texts, such as Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl or Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, her insights are piercing. Her scrutiny of Hemingway’s syntactically awkward locution “saw he had seen” in order to enforce the narrative silence of his black shipmate is a case in point. Morrison’s concern is with the choice made by the writer just there. Perhaps only a serious writer can appreciate the import of such choices.

      Morrison says that, “thinking about these matters has challenged me as a writer and as a reader.” It’s the kind of thinking that we could each use more of as readers.
    • 4/5
      Morrison's essays are both striking and gracefully woven. Her powerful ideas about not just American literature and race, but American identity and ideas of freedom, are unique literary explorations well worth reading for anyone interested in American history and identity or literature. As compositions, the essays come together to form questions on statements regarding freedom and identity which are both thought-provoking and frightening. This book is one worth exploring and re-exploring.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting essay (composed as three lectures) focusing on the tremendous importance of what Morrison calls "Africanism" for the white literary tradition in the US. Morrison writes: "Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and personae have been constructed-- invented-- in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served. In no way do I mean investigation of what might be called racist or nonracist literature, and I take no position, nor do I encourage one, on the quality of a work based on the attitudes of an author or whatever representations are made of some group....My project is to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served."(90)

      Still, it is interesting that her discussion of Cather's Sapphira and the Slavegirl reveals that the novel's failures are in some sense enabled by a certain obtuseness in its depiction of and use of its black characters. And repeatedly, Morrison notes the necessity of the presence "Africanism" for depicting freedom, individualism, and difference. Looking at a variety of instances where the protagonist meets an impenetrable field or wall of whiteness, Morrison notes "Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say."(59)
    • 5/5
      Toni Morrison is brilliant, as usual. I can't think of another scholar I admire more.

      I've read her criticism and her novels, and loved both, but her criticism is the most lucid and perceptive...I can't get over it. Her gifts as a novelist bring something to her critical work that few have ever matched.

      Maybe no one working today. She elevates criticism to poetry:

      "For young America, [Romance] had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation--above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror--and terror's most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all of the connotative value it awakened."

      Highly recommended, highly readable, and very short. You can get this into an afternoon easily, although I didn't, and it deserves re-reading.
    • 4/5
      interesting and well written. she's got some great ideas that made me wish i had an english class to discuss it with.
    • 3/5
      I am not competent to review this book; I need to read more of the works analyzed.

    Book preview

    Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison

    Preface

    Some years ago, in 1983 I believe, I read Marie Cardinal’s The Words To Say It. More than the enthusiasm of the person who suggested the book, I was persuaded by the title: five words taken from Boileau that spoke the full agenda and unequivocal goal of a novelist. Cardinal’s project was not fictional, however; it was to document her madness, her therapy, and the complicated process of healing in language as exact and as evocative as possible in order to make both her experience and her understanding of it accessible to a stranger. The narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis, and Cardinal proves herself ideal in rendering this deep story aspect of her life. She has written several books, won the Prix International, taught philosophy, and, during her journey into health, admits that she always planned someday to write about it.

    It is a fascinating book and, although I was skeptical at first of its classification as autobiographical novel, the accuracy of the label quickly becomes apparent. It is shaped quite as novels most frequently are with scenes and dialogue selectively ordered and situated to satisfy conventional narrative expectations. There are flashbacks, well-placed descriptive passages, carefully paced action, and timely discoveries. Clearly her preoccupations, her strategies, and her efforts to make chaos coherent are familiar to novelists.

    From the beginning I found one question insisting itself: when precisely did the author know she was in trouble? What was the narrative moment, the specular even spectacular scene that convinced her that she was in danger of collapse? Less than forty pages into the book she describes that moment, her first encounter with the Thing.

    "My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole. I was not disappointed: the atmosphere warmed up very fast. The scaffolding and flying buttresses of the jazz instruments supported Armstrong’s trumpet, creating spaces which were adequate enough for it to climb higher, establish itself, and take off again. The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those who followed it.

    My heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so the air could no longer enter them. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.

    I remember smiling when I read that, partly in admiration of the clarity in her recollection of the music—its immediacy—partly because of what leaped into my mind: what on earth was Louie playing that night? What was there in his music that drove this sensitive young girl hyperventilating into the street to be struck by the beauty and ravage of a camellia svelte in appearance but torn apart inside?

    Enunciating that incident was crucial in the launching of her therapy, but the imagery that worked as a catalyst for her anxiety attack goes unremarked—by her, by her analyst, and by the eminent doctor, Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote both the Preface and the Afterword. None of them is interested in what ignited her strong apprehension of death (I’m going to die! is what she was thinking and screaming), of physical power out of control (nothing could appease me. And so I continued to run), as well as this curious flight from the genius of improvisation, sublime order, poise, and the illusion of permanence. The "one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those [other than Armstrong, apparently] who followed it [italics mine]. Unbearable equilibrium and duration; nerve-wracking balance and permanence. These are wonderful tropes for the illness that was breaking up Cardinal’s life. Would an Edith Piaf concert or a Dvorak composition have had the same effect? Certainly either could have. What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal’s possession" as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.

    The Louis Armstrong catalyst was an addition to this file, and encouraged me to reflect on the consequences of jazz—its visceral, emotional, and intellectual impact on the listener. Later on in Cardinal’s autobiography, another luminous moment is described. But this one is not a violently physical reaction to the art of a black musician; it is instead a conceptual response to a black, that is, nonwhite, figuration. The author names the manifestation of her illness—the hallucinatory images of fear and self-loathing—the Thing. In reconstructing the origin of the powerfully repellent feelings the Thing incites, Cardinal writes, It seems to me that the Thing took root in me permanently when I understood that we were to assassinate Algeria. For Algeria was my real mother. I carried her inside me the way a child carries the blood of his parents in his veins. She goes on to record the conflicting pain that war in Algeria caused her as a French girl born in Algeria, and her association of that country with the pleasures of childhood and budding sexuality. In moving images of matricide, of white slaughter of a black mother, she locates the origin of the Thing. Again, an internal devastation is aligned with a socially governed relationship with race. She was a colonialist, a white child, loving and loved by Arabs, but warned against them in relationships other than distant and controlled ones. Indeed, a white camellia svelte in appearance but torn apart inside.

    In Cardinal’s narrative, black or colored people and symbolic figurations of blackness are markers for the benevolent and the wicked; the spiritual (thrilling tales of Allah’s winged horse) and the voluptuous; of sinful but delicious sensuality coupled with demands for purity and restraint. These figures take shape, form patterns, and play about in the pages of the autobiography. One of her earliest realizations in therapy concerns prepubescent sexuality. When she understands and no longer despises this aspect of her self, Cardinal is emboldened to stand up and tell the doctor, as she exits his office, You shouldn’t keep that gargoyle in your office, it is hideous. And to remark further, It was the first time I addressed him other than as a patient. Signaling the breakthrough, and strategic to its articulation, is this sign of horror and fear lodged in a gargoyle over which the now liberated patient has some control.

    Many other examples of these narrative gearshifts—metaphors; summonings; rhetorical gestures of triumph, despair,

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