The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  Yet articulating this valued and revered difference seldom failed to come across as anything but self-serving, defensive patterns of denial: the “prideful” rhetoric typical of the weakened. Taking the position that history is not the determining factor, that stability, beauty, creativity, brilliance are the real characteristics of black life, seemed to weight (and in some circumstances, sully) the study of black culture with an ennobling program, an agenda, that broke its back in its attempt to enforce it.

  These postures: (1) African American culture as examination and diagnoses of the patient, (2) African American culture as inoculation against intolerance, and (3) African American culture as an insistent celebration and recognition of cultural health and beauty (which could, by association or osmosis, heal others) clashed, and in the debris that resulted the literature itself was often buried. It appeared to me, as a writer participating in and inhabiting the world of that literature, that the work itself had become another kind of houseboy, opening doors for guests to enter a party to which it had not been invited.

  Well, that was what was on my mind in the late eighties. Yet I determined not to be distracted from creative work into defense work and remained silent on the employment of my work as social healer. But there was still another problem. I understood and indeed preferred the role of writer committed to the work and not its explication. I believed anything and everything I had to say on the subject of African American literature was in the books I had written. Participating in their critique was antithetical to what I wanted my work to do, which was to arrive without tags, labels, or final meanings identified by me and pinned to its lapel. I wanted it owned by whomever wanted to take possession of it. Requests by diligent, earnest scholars for a conversation or interview to accompany their research seemed inappropriate, somehow, a kind of journalistic glue to hold together conclusions already drawn from primary and secondary sources. In addition, nobody was really interested in my thoughts about my books. They were, naturally and correctly, more interested in their own thoughts about them. I was just there in the conversation to provide confirmation or, in some cases, to be wrong, to be unable to understand what I had actually written. It was a long time, I confess, before I took these interviews seriously, because I associated them, unfairly, with journalism, not scholarship.

  Finally I found myself forced to step up to the problem. My intense interest in the development of African American literary criticism and pedagogy and my refusal to participate in that criticism except as amicus curiae were incompatible once I understood that at the heart of my problem was a question at the heart of my work: that informing all of these kinds of approaches to the study of African American culture (pathology, tolerance, celebrated difference, erased difference; the writer as his or her best explicator, worse explicator, or friend of the court—or in my case an idle mixture) was the question, What constitutes African American literature? Is it the writing of Americans who “happen” to be Afro? Has it rather some cultural characteristics that surface, inform, and would surface and inform even if the literature had been shaped in Mexico City, London, Istanbul? Is there a difference? And if so, is the difference different from all other differences?

  It does not “go without saying” that a work written by an African American is automatically subsumed by an enforcing black presence. There is a clear flight from blackness in a great deal of African American literature. In some there is an antagonistic duel with blackness. And in other cases, as they say, you’d never know. If I were to participate in the critical discourse, I would need to clarify the question of what, other than melanin and subject matter, made me an African American writer. I didn’t expect to arrive at some quintessential moment when the search was ended, even if that were possible. But I did want to be counted among those for whom the quest was seriously taken and seriously pursued. Thus I entered the debate not as an artist only nor as an academic only, but as both. I believed that dual position could help expand and deepen the arguments about the validity, necessity, and direction of African American scholarship. Already there was significant work recontextualizing such studies, repositioning their impact in humanistic disciplines. But my interest turned from examining what black intellectuals and artists were up to, to something else. I was unhappy with the possibility of resegregation in African American studies—of driving the scholarship into protected turf where its uniqueness, its exceptionalism, its radical or even traditional characteristics could be interrogated, but where its powerful singularity could render it sui generis: a thing apart, in a class by itself. My thoughts were that African American studies could, but need not, confine itself to itself because the project was like the so-called race problem itself. It was not a neighborhood thriving or struggling at the edge of town, at the edge of campuses, at the outer rim of intellectual thought, nor was it an exotic, anthropologically interesting minority pulsing at the extremities of the body politic. It was and is at the heart of the heart of the nation. No policy decision could be understood without the black topic at its center, even or especially when unmentioned. Not housing, not education, the military, economy, voting, citizenship, prisons, loan practices, health care—name it, the real subject was what to do with black people, which became a substitute term for poor people. Very few disciplines escape the impact of racial constructs. Law, science, theology, medicine, medical ethics, psychiatry, anthropology, history were all implicated. Furthermore, was there any public discourse in which a reference to black people did not exist? As I wrote in Playing in the Dark, “It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles.” From the framing of the Constitution, to the Electoral College, “the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate…is there in the construction of a free and public school system; the balancing of representation in legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice; it is there in…the memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and the driving narrative of the Americanization of every immigrant who came ashore.” I was convinced there was no race card—there was simply a deck, each one operating on a terrain much wider than previously thought, echoing its influence in the national culture. The consequences of this inquiry was a series of twelve lectures, three of which became the book Playing in the Dark. In it I tried to articulate the breadth of the project and its complexity. African American studies could interrogate a large area of the cultural production, West and East, and in the process enliven and expand a wide variety of disciplines. That is, after all, the goal of education: access to more knowledge. There may come a time when we—students, faculty, administrators, artists, and parents—will have to fight hard for education, fight hard for uncorrupted science (not the ideological or racist science); for sound social history, apolitical anthropology (not strategies of control); for the integrity of art (not its celebrity).

  There may indeed come a time when universities may have to fight for the privilege of intellectual freedom.

  Gertrude Stein and the Difference She Makes

  I HAVE READ somewhere that there are two responses to chaos: naming and violence. The naming is accomplished effortlessly when there is a so-called unnamed, or stripped-of-names population or geography available for the process. Otherwise one has to be content with forcible renaming. Violence is understood as an inevitable response to chaos—the untamed, the wild, the savage—as well as a beneficial one. When one conquers a land the execution of the conquest, indeed its point, is to control it by reshaping, moving, cutting it down or through. And that is understood to be the obligation of industrial and/or cultural progress. This latter encounter with chaos, unfortunately, is not limited to land, borders, natural resources. In order to effect the industrial progress it is also necessary to do violence to the people who inhabit the land—for they will resist and render themselves anarchic, part of the chaos, and in certain cases the control has included introducing new and destructive forms of hierarchy, when successful, a
nd attempts at genocide when not.

  There is a third response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness. Stillness is what lies in awe, in meditation; stillness also lies in passivity and dumbfoundedness. It may be that the early Americans contemplated all three: naming, violence, and stillness. Certainly this latter surfaces (or seems to) in Emerson, Thoreau, and the observer quality of Hawthorne. It is traceable in the Puritan ethos as well. But unlike the indigenous population of America, and unlike the bulk of the populations brought to America from Africa, the American stillness was braced with, even mitigated by, pragmatism. There was always an aspect of preparing for heirs, a distant future unresponsive to the past, and the virtue of wealth as God’s bounty—which it was a sin not to accumulate. This highly materialistic “stillness” as practiced by the clerical/religious immigrants was in marked contrast to the “take only what you need and leave the land as you found it” philosophy of preindustrial societies. One of the more interesting matters in the Christian formation of public and private responsibility is the negotiation between thrift and awe; religious solace and natural exploitation; physical repression and spiritual bounty; the sacred and the profane. That negotiation persists in the tension among these three responses to chaos: naming, violence, and stillness. Although the majority of settlers in America were by no means the panicked religionists or the kind but gloomy Plymouth Rock crowd of national reverence, convenient commodification, and nostalgic delusion. I believe some 16 percent were, but that leaves 84 percent “other,” as they say on censorship forms. Yet even among that 16 percent it did not take long for that already ambivalent idea and complicitous stillness to dissipate in the wake of industrialization. With the abundant supply of free labor in the form of slaves, indentured servants, convicts, and term debtors, and of cheap labor in the form of poor immigrants fleeing from indebtedness, starvation, and death. Even as Twain privileged rural and village life, language, and humor, even as he endowed the Mississippi and the lanes and roads of nineteenth-century America with pastoral yearning, he invested in profit-making schemes himself, disastrously as it turned out, and clearly urged and enjoyed the search for gold and the cleverness of money-making schemes in his characters. And it was our retiring, transcendentalist scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote of the California gold rush that “it did not matter what immoral means were used: the function of the gold rush was to hasten the settlement and civilizing of the West.” The underscoring of civilizing is mine.

  Melville, of course, was preoccupied with the counterclaims of a blossoming capitalism as it mirrored or impaled itself upon the force of nature. And along with much else, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, White-Jacket, and “Benito Cereno” address the impact of economic pressure on the “innocent,” the naïf laborer, and his “captain.” All within the context of that two-thirds of the globe that represents chaos: the sea, and which seems to illustrate most clearly all three responses: naming (charting, mapping, describing), violence (conquest, whaling, slave ship, the naval fleet, etc.), and stillness (soul searching, idle watches aboard ships that produce the most self-reflective passages). Poe responded to chaos with violence and naming. Violence in his attraction to the damned, the dying, the murderer’s mind. Naming in his insistent “scientific” footnotes, editorializing, indexing of historical and geographical data. But there was an additional element available to these writers, indeed to all Americans, for the contemplation of chaos. Nature, the “virgin” West, space, the proximity of death—all these mattered. Yet it was the availability of a domestic chaos, an invented disorder, a presumed uncivilized, savage, eternal and timeless “Other” that gives American history its peculiar and special formulation. This “Other,” as we have suggested, was the Africanistic presence. American colonialists and their heirs could and did respond to this serviceable, controllable “chaos” by naming, violence, and, very late in the day, tentatively, carefully, hesitantly, a measure of pragmatic stillness. Again it is to the literature, the writers that we turn for evidence and figurations of this meditation on dominance. There one sees stillness (in Melville, for example) in the refusal to name in order to contemplate the mystery, the message of chaos’s own inscription. In the refusal to do violence to, the refusal to conquer, to exploit. But to confront, to enter, to discover, as it were, of what this presence was or could be made.

  It is in this context that I wish to read Gertrude Stein: her dedicated investigation of the interior life of this Other, and the problems of nonintervention that it presented and fell victim to. The “modernism” of which Stein is generally understood to be precursor has many forms: if we consider modernism to have as its single most consistent characteristic the merging of forms, the raveling away of borders, of frontierlessness, the mixing of media, the blending of genres, the redefinition of gender, of traditional roles, the appropriation of various and formerly separate disciplines in the service of new or conventional ones, the combination of historical periods and styles in art—then we can trace the particular ways in which American literature made that journey. In America, the first mark and fearful sign of merging, of mixing and the dissolution of what was held to be “natural” borders, was racial merging. It was the best represented, most alarming, most legislated against, and most desired foray into forbidden, unknown, dangerous territory, for it represented the slide into darkness, the outlawed and illicit; the provocative, shocking break with the familiar.

  In terms of literary embraces of modernism, as is also true of the visual-arts move toward modernism, the imaginative terrain upon which this journey took place was and is in a very large measure the presence of the racial “Other.” Explicit or implicit, this presence informs in significant, compelling, and inescapable ways the shape of American literature. Ready to hand for the literary imagination it constituted both a visible and invisible mediating force. So that even, and especially, when American texts are not “about” Africanistic presences, the shadow hovers there, in implication, in sign, in line of demarcation. It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations understood their “Americanness” as an opposition to the resident black population—and still do. In fact race has become so metaphorical, and as a metaphor so much more necessary to Americanness, it rivals the old pseudoscientific and class-informed racialism we are familiar with. As a metaphor, this Africanistic presence may be something the United States can do without. For in this part of the twentieth century, if Americans are to be different, if they are to be Americans in some way that Canadians are not, that Latin Americans are not, that Britons are not, then they must be white Americans, and that distinction depends on a constantly reliable darkness. Deep within the word “American” is its association with race. (One notes that to identify someone as a South African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” South African or “black” South African. In the States it is quite the opposite: “American” means white, and Africanistic peoples struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with hyphens and ethnicity.) The Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest its identity while coveting its license. They seemed to have merged both the wrench and the envy in their self-conscious and self-reflexive contemplation of mythological Africanism.

  For the intellectual and imaginative adventure of writers who have come to signify “modern” in literature, this convenient Africanist Other was body, mind, chaos, kindness and love, the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom, the problem of aggression, the exploration of ethics and morality, the obligations of the social contract, the cross of religion, and the ramifications of power. The authors, American, who escape this influence are the ones who left the country—but not all of them.

  Some astute critical observers believe that individualism American style precluded the possibility of, any room for, an “Other” and that, in the case of sexism, it was an erasure of the other as significant, as a nonperson. I wonder whether it is
quite the contrary; that individualism emanates from the positioning of a safely bound self, out there. That there could be no inside, no stable, durable, individual self without the careful plotting and fabrication of an extrinsic gender, and likewise, an extrinsic, external shadow. Both are connected, but only at the outer limits of the self, the body. That this was true of white males should be clear. And since the definition of an American is a white male who is different, and a good or successful American is a white male who is different and powerful, what makes the whole contraption work is blackness, femaleness, disfamiliarizing strategies, and oppression. Bernard Bailyn provides the most succinct and fascinating portrait of this classic self-perpetuating and self-defining process. Among the immigrants and settlers he traces in his extraordinary book Voyagers to the West is a well-documented personage named William Dunbar.

  The striking conclusion of this cameo is that there are four desirable consequences to the successful formation of this particular American: autonomy, authority, newness and difference, and absolute power. These benefits translate, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, into individualism, difference, and the wielding of power. Unsurprisingly, they are also the major characteristics of American literature. Newness and difference; individualist; heroically powerful. These terms translate, at least until World War II, as follows. Nineteenth-century “newness” becomes twentieth-century “innocence.” “Difference” becomes the hallmark of the modern. “Individualism,” the cult of the Lone Ranger, is fused with a solitary, alienated malcontent (who is nevertheless still innocent)—and of course there is the interesting digression, which we won’t enter into here, of Tonto. My puzzlement used to be why is the Lone Ranger called “lone” if he is always with Tonto? Now, I see that given the racial and metaphorical nature of the relationship, he is able to be understood as “alone” precisely because of Tonto. Without him he would be, I suppose, simply “Ranger.” The heroically powerful gives way, after the war, to the problems of using and abusing power. Each of these characteristics, I think, is informed by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism as the trained ground and stadia for its identity. What, one wonders, are Americans always being insistently of? What is the relationship of the modern to the actively creative presence of African Americans? (It has been pointed out to me, that whenever the film industry wishes to and does manifest some brand-new technology or scope it employs Africanistic characters, narrative, or idiom. The first full-scale speaking film was The Jazz Singer; the first box-office hit was Birth of a Nation; the first situation comedy on television was Amos ’n’ Andy; and, although this does not quite fit, but it almost does, the first documentary was Nanook of the North. And there is probably no contest from any quarter that the informing scores of “modern” filmmakers have been what we call in the States “black music.”) Back to the matter at hand, the final question is what is the individual alienated from, if not his “white” self in an abiding but somehow fraudulently maintained articulated pluralism? The final question focuses on the holding, withholding, and distributing of power.