Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture

233 Pages·2014·1.08 MB·English

by  Tessa Roynon

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate
the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over
the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities,
old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the
contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Toni Morrison and the
Classical Tradition
Transforming American Culture
TESSA ROYNON
1
3
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At last, for Patrick
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Preface
This book is about the ambivalent engagement with the classical
tradition in the fiction of Toni Morrison. Any work of this kind—
any study of allusiveness and intertextuality—raises a plethora of
now-familiar theoretical anxieties: about influence; about authorial
intention and readerly reception. Questions related to ‘the death of
the author’ are of course particularly fraught when the author in
question is as magnificently alive and as articulate about her own
work as is Toni Morrison at the time of my completing this mono-
graph.
In March 2012, when I gave a lecture at Princeton University
entitled ‘Parsing the Classical Toni Morrison’, Morrison herself was
among the audience. At the lecture’s end she spoke about the bril-
liance of her high school Latin teacher, and referred (for by no means
the first time) to the fact that she had been a Classics minor at
Howard. She said the classical works she had read at that time (mostly
in translation—she does not read Greek) had made an impression on
her because ‘they were beautiful’. With regard to the close readings of
allusions that I had aired in my lecture, she expressed (also for by no
means the first time) her ambivalence, her paradoxical perspective on
the extent to which her intertextuality is conscious or motivated:
‘Nothing is deliberate, you know’, she said. ‘Nothing is deliberate . . .
but everything I have read seeps in. It all seeps in’. Faced (yet again)
with such a wonderful conundrum—one that is so theoretically
unsound and yet so completely convincing at the same time—I
make no apology for hedging my bets, theoretically, in the readings
that constitute this book.
Morrison’s familiarity with classical literature and her expressed
perspectives on it in interviews and essays—sometimes carefully-
formulated, sometimes casually so—make their presence clearly felt
in her fiction. Much of her allusiveness, in spite of what she said to me
at Princeton, is indisputably ‘deliberate’. On the other hand, many of
the resonances, echoes, or dialogues that interest me so much may
well be subconscious on her part, and/or they are indistinguishable
from what my own familiarity with classical culture and its American
receptions leads me to see and hear in her writing. The classical
viii Preface
scholar Stephen Hinds points out in his 1998 book, Allusion and
Intertext, that many ‘interpretive possibilities . . . would be lost if a
rigidly polar choice were imposed between the clearly defined allusion
on the one hand, and the “mere accidental confluence” on the other’.
His own readings demonstrate that to make such a distinction is
ultimately impossible anyway. The analyses that follow testify to my
own belief that the power of literary writing, particularly that of a
writer such as Toni Morrison, lies in no small part in what Hinds calls
its ‘allusive inexactitude’, or in the new meanings that such inexacti-
tude enables the writer and the reader to co-create.
I am indebted to many institutions and many people. At Oxford
University Press it has been an honour to work with the editors of
Classical Presences, Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. I am grateful
to the anonymous readers for their recommendation of my work and
their suggestions for its improvement, and I also wish to thank Hilary
O’Shea, Taryn Das Neves, Cathryn Steele, and my copyeditor, Rich-
ard Walshe, for all they have done on my behalf. Parts of this book
have already appeared, in a different form, elsewhere: I am grateful to
Oxford University Press for permission to reprint, in Chapter 6 of this
book, sections of Chapter 22 from African Athena: New Agendas,
edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and myself
(2011), and to Cambridge University Press for permission to reuse,
in Chapter 1 of this book, parts of my article, ‘A New “Romen”
Empire: Toni Morrison’s Love and the Classics’, which was published
in the Journal of American Studies 41/1: 31–47 (2007).
The research with which this book began was originally funded by
a postgraduate award from the Arts and Humanities Research Coun-
cil. At the University of Warwick, where I completed my doctorate on
this subject, I was fortunate to benefit from the insights and support
not only of my supervisors, Helen M. Dennis and Daniel Orrells, but
also of Karen O’Brien and Thomas Docherty. From my time as a
Master’s student at Georgetown University before that, I owe much to
Gay Gibson Cima, Lucy Maddox, George O’Brien, and the late (and
always-missed) David Kadlec. And from my undergraduate years at
Cambridge I wish to acknowledge Alison Hennegan, with whom
I first worked on Toni Morrison.
Marc C. Conner has been unfailingly generous with his time and
his willingness to engage in scholarly exchange, and his example is
one I try to follow. Paul Giles and Sarah Meer have patiently offered
me advice and encouragement since they encountered my work in
Preface ix
2007. In the field of Toni Morrison studies it has been my privilege to
benefit from the intellectual and moral support of Justine Tally,
Jennifer Terry, and the very many colleagues who have become
friends in the Toni Morrison Society. It was a joy to maintain contact
with the University of Warwick through the African Athena project.
For all that I learned through that experience, and for the ways it has
enriched this book, I am indebted (once again) to Daniel Orrells,
staunchest of comrades, and to Gurminder K. Bhambra. In 2008
Juliet Becq was generous in sharing her experiences of working with
Morrison at the Musée du Louvre, and in 2012 Wendy Belcher and
Claudia Brodsky at Princeton made possible my lecture there—an
experience which will stay with me always.
At Oxford, where I have ‘moved at the margin’ since 2008, there
are many people whose interest in and/or support for my work has
made all the difference. These include: at the Rothermere American
Institute, Nigel Bowles, Laura Gill, and Sally Bayley; at St Peter’s
College, Dapo Akande, Mark Damazer, Sondra Hausner, Francis
Leneghan, Alison Wiblin, Abigail Williams, and Claire Williams; at
the Department for Continuing Education, Sandie Byrne, David
Grylls, and Tara Stubbs; at the Faculty of English: Rebecca Beasley,
Elleke Boehmer, Laura Marcus, Hayley Morris, Michèle Mendels-
sohn, and Lloyd Pratt; at the Faculty of History, Stephen Tuck; and
at the Faculty of Classics, Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, Justine
McConnell, and Tim Whitmarsh. I have been fortunate, as well, to
cross paths with many other distinguished Classicists blazing trails in
Reception studies, including Barbara Goff, Edith Hall, Avery Willis
Hoffman, Brooke Holmes, Miriam Leonard, Patrice Rankine, Phiroze
Vasunia, and Maria Wyke. Among the students with whom I have
had the pleasure of working thus far, Kathy Clarke and Nicole Sierra
have become much-valued experts in their own right. I have dissem-
inated and developed aspects of this research at numerous confer-
ences in the US, France, and the UK thanks to generous grants from
the Passmore Edwards Fund at the Faculty of English, and the John
O’Connor Fund at St Peter’s College. I am also grateful to Roger Crisp
at St Anne’s and Catherine Paxton at Merton.
Finally I wish to thank my friends and all my family, in whose
unconditional love, support, and companionship I am so greatly blessed.
Tessa Roynon
Oxford, October 2012