Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [Hardcover]

Instead of dealing with Morrison the storyteller, I chose to read Morrison the academic analyst in the form of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination". And, boy, could I not have chosen a more challenging book.

Morrison skillfully directs the reader's attention to how American literature abounds with overt and/or covert attempts to perpetuate the white male's superiority and the black man's inferiority. She shows how the "Africanist" influence can be found in the respective characters, their dialogues, and their interaction with their white counterparts. By citing examples from Hemingway, Poe, and Cather, the author makes a reader contemplate the author's symbolism and intent. I know that I will look at "great" American works with increased scrutiny.

I wish that she had tackled Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind".

As one of America's most respected writers and a proponent of civil and women's rights, Miss Morrison uses her talent wisely here in this riveting exposé.

Mind you, there are a few words that not even the context will reveal their meanings; therefore, a dictionary would be handy to have around. But, the "research" is well worth it for the book is a feast for the mind.

Bring on Stephen now!

The author's claimed intention is stated relatively plainly: "...to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions." (Page 11.) But much of the book reads for all the world like the work of a sophomore who has learned that her instructor fancies Martin Heidegger and who has checked out a translation of Being and Time to serve as a model for her first essay. Here's a fairly typical example: "For excellent reasons of state - because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country - the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony." (Page 8.) This is the writing of a Nobel laureate? Heidegger's writing was required, it seems to me, by his inaccessible subject; by comparison, Ms. Morrison's subject is elementary.

This is not to say that the author doesn't occasionally reach the levels of creative expression for which she is justly so well known, it's just that in this work her gift seems impotent against her anger. Try though she does to disguise her feelings ("My project rises from delight, not disappointment." Page 4.), it doesn't work, and its failure manifests itself in the oddest ways ("It was not simply that this slave population had a distinctive color; it was that this color "meant" something.... One supposes that if Africans all had three eyes or one ear, the significance of that difference from the smaller but conquering European invaders would also have been found to have meaning." Page 49. Presumably the Japanese would have been, racially, even less appropriate as slave owners).

It seems, finally, that it is Ms. Morrison who is playing in the dark. She senses it, but she can't find the words to say it.