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C O N C E P T S
The alternative for Frye, and I hope for us, is a poetics that attempts
to describe the conventions and strategies by which literary works achieve
the effects they do. Many works o f literary criticism are interpretations
in that they focus on particular works, but their aim may be less to re
construct the meaning of those works than to explore the mechanisms or
structures by which they function and thus to illuminate general problems
about literature, narrative, figurative language, theme, and so on.
Works that do this are often criticized for overinterpretation or for
distorting the works they treat by emphasizing one aspect to the neglect
o f others. So Toni Morrison’s brilliant Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
the Literary Imagination contains interpretations o f a number o f literary
works, from Willa Gather’s Sapphira and the Slave G irl and Twain’s Huckle
berry Finn to Ernest Hemingway’s
The Garden o f Eden. Taken in isolation,
some o f these interpretations may indeed seem extreme.
The Garden o f Eden, for instance, is the story o f a newly married
couple, Catherine and David, who move around in the South o f France:
he writes in the morning, she sunbathes; they swim in the afternoon and
eat well and make love a lot. Morrison emphasizes “the Africanist field in
which the drama is played out,” so that Catherine’s devotion to tanning,
her desire to become ever darker, is linked to “the specter o f black sexual
ity,” while her new husband, David, writes stories about hunting with his
father in Africa (which Catherine eventually burns because they are not
about her). “Africa, imagined as innocent and under white control, is the
inner story,” writes Morrison. “Africanism, imagined as evil, chaotic, im
penetrable, is the outer story.
Though this is certainly a possible read
ing o f Fiemingway’s novel, it neglects what most strikes readers: Cathe
rine’s determination to transform her intense sexual relationship with her
new husband into incestuous androgyny— a different form o f darkness
and “devil things” not obviously marked by race. She strives to make the
two o f them look alike, cutting her long hair short like his and then bring
ing him to her hairdresser to have his hair lightened and cut like hers. She
calls him “girl” : “Let me feel your hair, girl. It’s cut so full and has so much
body and it’s the same as mine. Let me kiss you girl.” “ David thinks, “She
IQ.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina
tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 88-89; hereafter abbrevi
ated PD and cited parenthetically in the text.
I I .
Ernest Hemingway, The Garden o f Eden (New York: Scribner’s, 1986),
86; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Garden.
changes from a girl into a boy and back to a girl ceaselessly and beautifirl-
ly” {Garden, 31). “Can I be a boy again?” she asks. “I’d like to be again in
bed at night if it isn’t bad for you. . . . I’ll only be a boy at night and won’t
embarrass you?” {Garden, 56). And eventually she recruits another girl to
join their party, with whom she can have a lesbian affair and who can be a
woman for David. What starts as an obsession with tanning, a desire to be
ever darker, and for them both to be dark— “I want every part o f me dark
and it’s getting that way, and you’ll be darker than an Indian and that takes
us further away from other people” {Garden, 30)— becomes an intense ex
ploration o f possible perversions, where the diabolical is scarcely African.
Morrison’s Africanist focus seems an overinterpretation, especially
since Catherine sees darkness as Indian as well as African: “you’ll be dark
er than an Indian,” or “I wish I had some Indian blood. I’m going to be
so dark you won’t be able to stand it” {Garden, 31). But Morrison’s treat
ment o f this story occurs in the context o f a strong thesis about the consti
tutive role o f blackness and slavery for the American literary imagination,
a brilliant account o f how the distinctive characteristics o f American lit
erature have as their condition o f possibility what she terms the Africanist
presence— the four-hundred-year-old presence o f Africans in the United
States. “The imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American
writers journeyed,” she writes, “is in large measure shaped by the presence
o f the racial other” {PD, 46). Such concerns as autonomy, authority, new
ness and difference, absolute power, which “become the major themes and
presumptions o f American literature,” are “made possible by, shaped by,
activated by, a complex awareness o f a constituted Africanism. It was this
Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging
ground and arena for the elaboration o f the quintessential American iden
tity” {PD, 44). Thus, for instance, “the concept o f freedom did not emerge
in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom— if it did not in fact create
it— like slavery” {PD, 38). The celebration o f freedom relies on an African
ist presence even in novels where there is no mention o f slaves or slavery.
This is a speculative account o f a framework for the explanation of
literary productions— but when in this enterprise one writes about partic
ular works, it will seem like interpretation. I f it is the case that the thematic
concerns o f American literature are the product o f the presence of an Afri
canist other, then this is true even for those works that conceal it best, but
to write about one o f these works in this context is to give the impression
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