A Foucauldian Reading of Morrisons Novel (1)

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International Journal of Arts and Sciences 3(10): 295 - 311 (2010)

CD-ROM. ISSN: 1944-6934

© InternationalJournal.org

A Foucauldian Reading of Morrison’s Novels

Sima Farshid, Islamic Azad University, Central Branch of Tehran, Iran

Jalal Sokhanvar , Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Perhaps more than any other distinguished Afro American writers, Morrison

has contributed to the process of bringing the black from the margins of literary and

critical texts to the center of such texts. To accomplish such a painstaking enterprise, shehas ardently resisted the political and cultural power of Euro Americans in her work. She

undermines so many time-honored Western concepts, and presents so many different

perspectives in her full-of-gaps texts that several postmodern critical theories can beapplied to her subversive, polyphonic oeuvre. One of the prominent theories of our times

to draw on which would shed much light on Morrison’s work is Foucauldian theory,

because she is a politically-inclined writer who is quite aware of the functioning of powermechanism and the considerable role of discourse in sustaining it. As Morrison believesthat every work of art ‘must be political’, she attempts to expose power relations in the

American society via her highly-conscious language and meticulously-molded narratives.

She fervently resists the dominant Euro American power and its prevalent discourse, andsubverts several American myths such as the benevolence of the white and the violence

of the black – presented by the dominant discourse. She has also depicted power relations

within Afro American communities without any biases toward the black, to expose howcalamitous replacing white racism with black chauvinism would be. Moreover as one of

her major concerns is to unearth the ‘unspoken’ agonies of her slave and ex-slave

predecessors, she has made conscientious efforts to accomplish the very thing Foucault

demands new historians to carry out – the uncovering of the ‘other history’ that ‘runs beneath’ the traditional historiography – hence the instigation of ‘literary archeology’.

Keywords: power mechanism, dominant discourse, unearthing history, racism

Introduction

The first Afro American Nobel laureate in literature and the most celebrated writer of her

generation, Toni Morrison seems to have achieved such a grand status not only on

account of her entrancing imagination, mastery of language and superb writing aptitudes, but also because of her enduring endeavors to articulate the age-silenced, agonized voice

of her slave ancestors, and her insightful portrayal of the anguishes of subsequent

generations of American black people. Perhaps more than any other distinguished AfroAmerican writers, Morrison has contributed to the process of bringing the black from the



margins of literary, critical and academic texts to the center of such texts. To accomplish

such a painstaking enterprise, she has ardently resisted the social, political and cultural

power of Euro Americans who enslaved, tortured and lynched her ancestors, and subduedtheir progeny in a marginalized, mortified position via political and economic power and

their white-centered discourse and media that altogether retained the black in the

degraded status of the inferior, none-human ‘other’. To resist Euro Americans’ power,Morrison has made conscientious efforts to unearth the atrocious history of slavery by her

‘literary archaeology’, to expose ‘power mechanisms’ in the American society, to portray

the disastrous effects of the white-governed discourse and media on black people and to

awaken their suppressed sense of dignity by reminding them of forgotten African values,so that they could release themselves from the yoke of white’s domination. She

undermines so many time-honored Western concepts, and presents so many different

perspectives in her full-of-gaps texts that several postmodern critical theories can beapplied to her subversive, polyphonic oeuvre. One of the prominent theories of our times

to draw on which would shed much light on Morrison’s work is Foucauldian theory, as

she is a politically-inclined, race-conscious writer who is quite aware of the functioning

of power mechanism and the considerable role of discourse in sustaining it.

Morrison’s early novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) were not recognized as

great literary pieces at the time of their publication. It was her third novel that broughtabout national distinction and prominence; Song of Solomon (1977) “was a Book-of-the-

Month Club selection, the first by an African-American since Richard Wright’s Native

Son in 1940”, and also “received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award” (McKay“Introduction” 6). The American Academy of Arts and Letters “named” her

“Distinguished Writer of the Year” in 1978 (ibid. 7). When Tar Baby (1981) was

published, Newsweek “featured Morrison on its cover, the first black woman to receivesuch notice since 1943 when Zora Neale Hurston (the first ever) did”, and the same year

she “was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Writer’s

Guild and the Author’s league” (ibid.). She won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved (1987) that is considered her masterpiece and has played a significant role in the

decree of the Nobel Committee for granting her the Nobel Prize in 1993. She was also

awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to

American Letters in 1996.

Although Morrison is mostly celebrated as a great novelist, she is a prominent critic as

well. Her works of literary criticism and her critique of social, political and judicialsystems have significantly contributed, as Tally argues, to the process of releasing the

American mind from “the strictures and constraints of the inherited, the given, the

unquestioned, the ‘unspeakable’” (“Introduction” 1). By questioning ‘the unquestioned’in her critical works and depicting the ‘unspeakable’ in her novels in a likewise

challenging way, Morrison has effectively undermined the ‘strictures’ of the ‘given’ and

refuted the traditional disentanglement of creative writing from intellectual criticism, thus

her “corpus is best understood when read as a broad far-reaching intellectual contributionthat defies our contemporary artist-scholar divide” (McBride 162).



Four decades of enduring creative and critical writing have not presumably diminished

Morrison’s imaginative talents and intellectual aptitudes, and she seems to be still on

move in her apparently endless artistic-scholarly career. Her onward exploration ofcomplicated human relations and her experimentation with language and narrative

techniques seem to be an ongoing process that has not come to descend in her latest

works in which she puts forth new modes and contrivances for depicting the complexitiesof human conditions. She is indeed one of the most form-conscious American novelists

and all her novels are conscientiously designed upon the interrelation of form and

content. Moreover she is keenly mindful of the persuasive operation and entrancing

power of language which she has impressively accentuated in her Nobel Lecture.

Drawing on the age-old metaphor of physical blindness to signify ‘insight’, Morrison

relates the story of “an old woman. Blind but wise” who is once “visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance”, thus enter her house and

“one of them says, ‘Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or

dead’” (Nobel Lecture 267). After some moments of contemplation, the old woman

responds this way: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, butwhat I do know is that it is in your hands” – focusing on their “responsibility” (ibid. 268).

Morrison’s ‘reading’ of her own story is presented this way: “I choose to read the bird as

language and the woman as a practiced writer” who “thinks of language partly as a

system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency” that

must “ form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling

silences”, otherwise it would be a “dead language” [emphasis added] (ibid.).

Presuming that language must “form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts” and

“fill baffling silences”, Morrison frequently evades rising any fixed notions in her novels,and instead persuades her readers to perceive the multi-faceted world of her fiction in a

likewise way. Her ‘writerly’ texts which are full of gaps or ‘holes’ in her own terms

impel her readers to be active in the process of making sense, and perpetually make themreconsider their formerly figured notions. In this call-response process, Page argues,

Morrison’s “texts are deliberately like other African American art forms, such as jazz and

preaching, that allow for audience response” (55). She refers to the interaction of her

texts with her readers in an interview with Tate where she affirms: “My writing expects,demands participatory reading, and that I think is what literature is supposed to do. It’s

not just about telling the story; it’s about involving the reader .… My language has to

have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it” (125).

What she directly confirms in that interview is portrayed in the interaction of the old

woman and the young boys of her Nobel Lecture. While the old woman has several ideasabout ‘the bird’, she does not disclose them to compel the boys contemplate themselves;

“she keeps her secret, her good opinion of herself, her gnomic pronouncement, her art

without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it, and retreats into the singularity

of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space” (271). The young boys who are ‘annoyed’ by her ‘silence’, attempt to “fill it with language invented on the spot” (ibid.) that is

exposed as an inquiring language – practically provoked by the old woman. When their

speech comes to an end, she declares: “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is



not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we

have done – together” (ibid. 273). This ‘lovely’ ‘thing’ is what Morrison terms ‘involving

the reader’ in the world of her novels that “inscribe a reader”, as Ryan affirms, “who isneither a consumer nor a decoder, but a co-creator of the text. Not only does she

anticipate that the reader possesses certain (perhaps diminished) competencies but she

assists the reader in reclaiming and strengthening these” (154).

Besides the insightful story of her Nobel Lecture, in the speech upon receiving the Medal

for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996, Morrison highlights the

interaction of her text with her readers via the pictorial image of the “dancing of minds”.She talks about “a certain kind of peace” which “is not merely the absence of war”, rather

“the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one” (The Dancing

Mind 7), thereby she compares the interaction of her readers with her work as the‘dancing’ of two ‘open’ minds – hers and the reader’s. By drawing that picture, she

“liberates the notion of peace”, Ludwig argues, “from its supplementary position” and

“redefines it as an alternative activity of dancing, a pleasurable agency of interaction and

cooperation” (132). Besides the emphasis she puts on the “interaction and cooperation”of the writer and reader, she deems the process of reading a text an artistic deed, and this

seems to be a new idea in the field of literary criticism, as her image spotlights “the

company” of reader’s mind that her mind “touches” (The Dancing Mind 15).

The image of ‘dancing’ Morrison uses in The Dancing Mind does not only signify

‘company’, but the beauty of the act as well, and this reveals her ardent concern withaesthetic and imaginative aspects of her work, though her concern sharply differs from

that of the modernist advocates of ‘art for art’s sake’ theory. As a highly race-conscious

novelist writing at a time “when the dictum of art for art’s sake had not yet been strippedof its disguise”, Ryan contends, “Morrison was adamant in asserting that a socio-political

function neither detracted from, nor conflicted with, aesthetic worth” (151). She deems

every work of art a ‘political’ activity, as she affirms in the following passage where shedefies the ‘art for art’s sake’ theory: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels, (or

whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not

about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise

of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams – which is tosay yes, the work must be political” (“Rootedness” 344). As candidly stated here, all her

oeuvre is about the ‘community’ not about her ‘personal dreams’, and as every society is

affected by politics, she believes that her work is and ‘must be political’.

As she writes about the ‘community’, none of Morrison’s novels is autobiographical,

though some of them expose traces of her own experiences or viewpoints. For instancethe story of The Bluest Eye is molded upon the actual life story of one of her childhood

friends. Song of Solomon, her celebration of African myths and notions, inaugurates on

the date of her own birth and its protagonist, who is to revive those myths, is born the

next day. In the same novel and later in Paradise, she defies black racialism, as in realityshe does, and its consequent aggression and violence. Beloved depicts the sufferings of a

mother due to her excessive love for her children, and mothers’ selflessness and

excessive love are among Morrison’s preoccupations.



Foucault’s Theories and Inquiries

The outstanding French historian-philosopher, Michel Foucault has imprinted his impact

on so many fields of thought that few postmodern thinkers have not been impressed byhis wide-ranging inquiries. To regard him as one of the most influential thinkers of the

recent decades does not sound an overestimation, because his archaeological inquiries

and theory of power are among the most-referred ideas in critical, historical and political

arguments of our times. One of the fields of study he has greatly influenced is postmodern literary criticism, and different critics set up their arguments on his ideas.

Foucault’s inquiries into discursive formations and the role of discourse in exerting and

sustaining power, the ‘interiority’ of resistance to every power relation, the advent ofsubversive social forces, and the interaction of power and knowledge are mostly referred

to in New Historicist readings of literary texts. Feminist critics refer to him when theydiscuss power relations in patriarchal societies, when they identify the role of society and power relations in giving form to women’s gender and social roles, and also when they

argue the manipulation of women’s body by men. And post-colonialist critics turn to his

ideas when they explore the ways via which colonizers exerted their power in colonies

and how they sustained that power by gaining knowledge about the colonized, and alsowhen they inquire into the resisting and subversive movements in colonies.

Despite his great influence on postmodern critics, no particular critical approach toliterature has been entirely formed on Foucault’s theories. One of the novelties of this

article, therefore, is to initiate a Foucauldian critical approach to Morrison’s novels to

come to a new understanding of them. In so doing Foucault’s theory of power and theissues he embarks on in his inquiries into power relations, such as the role of discourse

and knowledge in sustaining the power of the dominant, their controlling and disciplinary

techniques, and the resistance and subversive activities of the dominated would be drawnon. Moreover his ground-breaking archaeological investigations of history, especially in

discussing Morrison’s ‘literary archaeology’ Beloved which is an imaginative

‘reconstruction’ of the history of slavery would be resorted to.

Perhaps the most appealing features of Foucault’s oeuvre to the postmodern mind are his

avoidance of giving any decrees, his vigilance against dogmatism and his defiance of

universal truths as the result of which his work seems to be a run-on process of

observation. In his comprehensive analysis of discursive formations, The Archaeology ofKnowledge (1971), Foucault challenges the traditional holistic view of history that

emphasizes such concepts as unity, continuity and correlation, and contends that historyis a process of ‘ruptures’ and ‘discontinuities’. He contends that history “must be

detached from the image through which it found its anthropological justification: that of

an age-old collective consciousness” (7), and instead historians must attempt to take “the

opposite direction”, as stated below:



To undertake the history of what has been said is to re-do, in the opposite direction, the workof expression: to go back from statements preserved through time and dispersed in space,toward that interior secret that preceded them, left its mark in them, and (in every sense ofthe term) is betrayed by them. Thus the nucleus of the initiating subjectivity is freed . A

subjectivity that always lags behind manifest history; and which finds, beneath events,another, more serious, more secret, more fundamental history, closer to the origin …. This

other history, which runs beneath history, constantly anticipating it and endlessly recollectingthe past, can be described … as the evolution of mentalities…[emphasis added] (The

Archaeology of Knowledge 121)

Foucault’s objective as a historian is to ‘re-do’ the things ‘said’ by traditional records of

history so that the ‘interior secret’ and the ‘other history’ that ‘runs beneath’ those

records and is ‘more fundamental’ would be uncovered, in so doing he questions the“ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any

examination” ( Archaeology 22). These points would be referred to while discussing

Morrison’s effort to ‘re-do’ the history of slavery.

To detect the ‘interior secret’ and the “initiating subjectivity” of a historical era, heattempts to “discover the law operating behind” ( Archaeology 50) the discourse of the era

that “is constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, thatis, in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence” (ibid. 106). His

account of ‘discourse’ as “a group of sequences of signs” that refer to “particular

modalities of existence” can be resorted to in discussing Morrison’s first novel The Bluest

Eye in which the disastrous effects of Euro American’s ‘sequences of signs’ on the life

and mentality of Afro Americans are depicted

Foucault refutes the durable validity of any discourse, since ‘discursive formation’, heargues, “does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or

centuries” ( Archaeology 74). To endow his assertion with convincing substance, Foucaultaffirms that every discourse is comprised of some “statements” or the “elementary unit ofdiscourse” (ibid. 80), and as every statement belongs to a specific discursive formation,

he contends that “there is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement;

but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among otherstatements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself from them; it is always a

part of a network of statements” ( Archaeology 99) on which the discussion of The Bluest

Eye can be drawn on.

Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment discourse and its ‘statements’ on unity,

rationality and predictability of human’s ‘self’ as the concurrent ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of

knowledge in Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Order of Things (1966) might bethe basis of the Foucauldian reading of Morrison’s Sula that defies all of those

‘statements’. Besides the claim to rationality, observed in the entire Western philosophy

and particularly in the Enlightenment, and severely criticized by Foucault, would be afocal point in reading Song of Solomon.

More than any of his inquiries, however, a Foucauldian study of Morrison’s oeuvrewould resort to Foucault’s theory of power, mostly elaborated in his Discipline and



Punish (1975), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1984) and his subsequent lectures. All six

novels under observation in this article can be discussed in the light of Foucault’s

inquiries into power relations that enfold his investigations of power/knowledge relation,the significant role of discourse in sustaining power, modern disciplinary techniques and

systems especially ‘the techniques of the body’ and ‘Panoptic mechanism’, and the

ensuing resistance of the dominated against power.

The ‘omnipresence’ of power” is one of Foucault’s most controversial perceptions.

Unlike some theorists of power, he asserts that power is not the “privilege” of the

dominant class; rather it comes from “innumerable points” in the society through which it“circulates”, and thus “functions in the form of a chain”. Foucault argues that power is

“exercised through a net-like organization” in which individuals are “the vehicles” (“Two

Lectures” 98), therefore power is

exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege”, acquired or preserved, of the

dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested

and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated . Furthermore, this power

is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who “do not have it”; itinvests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as

they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means thatthese relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the

relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes [emphasisadded] ( Discipline and Punish 26- 27)

Foucault’s observation that power is “extended” and “transmitted” by the “dominated”

who, subsequently “resist the grip” of the “pressure” the power holders “exert” “uponthem” is one of the key points in his theory of power. He claims ‘multiplicity’ and‘productivity’ for power, seeing that every exercise of power induces resistance, and

hence gives form to new modes of thought and behavior. Despite asserting productivityfor it, Foucault does not deny that “power is tolerable only on condition that it masks asubstantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own

mechanisms” ( History, Vol. I 86), thus he states that power relations “are perhaps among

the best hidden things in the social body” (“Power and Sex” 119).

Foucault’s investigations of pre-modern and modern forms of punishment in Discipline

and Punish led him to conclude that in ‘modern mechanisms’ of punishment, the ‘trace’of torture and also the controlling agents are hidden. Moreover he contends that this

controlling system, which he calls “discipline” and “Panopticism” interchangeably, is

expanded all over modern societies, and power holders control the whole social body via

subtle, complicated disciplinary techniques. His scrutiny of these techniques has led himto confirm: “The historical moment of disciplines was the moment when an art of the

human body was born, which was directed” at the “formation of a relation that in the

mechanism itself makes it more obedient” ( Discipline 137- 138). The practice of thosetechniques to make people “more obedient”, he argues, mainly depends on the knowledge

of the “dominant” about the “dominated” – hence the conclusion that



power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or byapplying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another thatthere is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor

any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analyzed, therefore, not on the basis of asubject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the

contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge

and their historical transformations. [emphasis added] ( Discipline and Punish 27- 28)

While most of his investigations enfold the indications of power/knowledge relation, it is

the first time that he explicitly proclaims that “power and knowledge directly imply one

another”, and “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field ofknowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute” power, thus he

states that to understand that relation, “the subject”, “the objects” and the “modalities of

knowledge” should be analyzed.

A Foucauldian Reading of Morrison’s Novels

As an insightful, innovative postmodern writer, Morrison has challenged so many time-

honored Western conceptions and traditions through her four-decade creative-critical

career, and has presented so many perspectives in her full-of-gaps texts that several postmodern critical approaches to literature can be applied to her subversive, polyphonic,

writerly oeuvre. One of the prominent critical theories of our times to utilize which would

shed much light on Morrison’s work is Foucauldian criticism, as she is a politically-inclined, race-conscious writer who is extremely aware of the functioning of power

mechanisms and the considerable role of discourse as “the instrument through which that

power is exercised” (Nobel Lecture 268).

As Morrison believes that every work of art “must be political” (“Rootedness” 344), she

has persistently endeavored to expose power relations in the American society via her

entrancing imagination, highly-conscious language and meticulously-molded narratives.Thereby she has ardently resisted the dominant Euro American power and its prevalent

discourse, and has subverted several American myths such as virtue, innocence and

benevolence of the white and savagery and violence of the black – presented andsanctified by Euro American discourse. Morrison has also depicted power relations

within Afro American communities without any bigotry or biases toward the black, to

expose how calamitous replacing white racism with black chauvinism would be. Besidesone of her major concerns is to unearth the unspoken, unrecorded agonies of her slave

and ex-slave predecessors, hence she has made conscientious efforts to accomplish thevery thing Foucault demands new historians to do – the uncovering of the ‘other history’

that ‘runs beneath’ the traditional historiography, in so doing Morrison has instigated akind of ‘literary archeology’ that has deeply impressed many readers all over the world.

When the ‘blind woman’ of Morrison’s Nobel Lecture tells the young boys that ‘the bird’is in their hands, whether “dead or alive”, she practically “shifts attention”, Morrison

points out, “from the assertion of power to the instrument through which that power is



exercised” (“Nobel Lecture” 268), to focus on the significance of that “instrument” in the

exertion of power. To accentuate the significant role of discourse in sustaining power,

Morrison proclaims in the same lecture: “Oppressive language does more than representviolence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge: it limits

knowledge”, thereby “Sexist language, racial language, theistic language” are all “typical

of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge orencourage the mutual exchange of ideas” [emphasis added] (269).

Although Morrison brings into play the term ‘language’ in the above-cited passage, it

seems that what she denounces as the “policing languages of mastery” are indeed“policing” “discourses” of “mastery”, in the same way as Foucault distinguishes

discourse from language by contending that discourses are not “a mere intersection of

things and words” ( Archaeology 48). Though discourses “are composed of signs”,Foucault states, “what they do is more than use those signs [merely] to designate things”,

consequently they are “irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech” (ibid. 49).

Morrison’s reproachful tone and the political terms she exploits such as “oppressive

language” and “policing languages of mastery” signify something more than the “signs”which “designate things”. What she means by the term ‘language’ sounds to be the socio-

political “sequences of signs” that indicate “particular modalities of existence” (ibid. 106)

which accords with Foucault’s explanation of ‘discourse’.

All in all Morrison’s mind seems to be obsessed with how language “shapes what she

calls the ‘construction of social reality’” (Ludwig 125), and how it is used, or misused, to“powerfully evoke and enforce” what she considers “hidden signs of racial superiority,

cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people” (Playing in the Dark x).

Consequently her novels and critical works elucidate how much language is “enmeshedwith the power structures” which are “embodie[d] in language and in social institutions”

(Peach 34-35). In one of her critical essays, Morrison recounts her deep concern, as an

Afro American writer, with the prevalence of the dominant discourse and how intenselyshe has avoided to reproducing “the master’s voice”:

As an already- and always-raced writer, I knew from the very beginning that I could not,would not, reproduce the master’s voice and its assumption of the all-knowing law of the

white father. Nor would I substitute his voice with that of his fawning mistress or his worthyopponent, for both of these positions (mistress or opponent) seemed to confine me to histerrain, in his arena, accepting the house rules in the dominance game. (“Home” 4)

As an “always-raced writer”, Morrison’s evasion from adopting “the master’s voice” orthe voice of “his fawning mistress” manifests her awareness of the significant role of “the

master’s” discourse in confining her within “his terrain”, and also her fear of “beingmerely reactive in her intellectual enterprise, and of becoming the victim of an active

negation that eclipses her own self” (Ludwig 134). Despite her ardent yearning andaspiration to avoid “the master’s voice” and his “all-knowing law” that would have

restrained her in “the master’s” “terrain”, she has been forced, like most black writers in

Western societies, to utilize “the master’s” language.



The situational irony that Morrison has encountered is the problem of most black writers

in white-dominated societies, as the prominent Afro American scholar-critic Henry Louis

Gates Jr. has pointed out. He observes an irony in the efforts of the writers who try toarticulate the “black identity” in the West, as they attempt to “posit a ‘black self’”, as he

argues, “in the very Western languages in which blackness itself is a figure of absence, a

negation”, since “Ethnocentrism and ‘logocentrism’ are profoundly interrelated inWestern discourse as old as the Phaedris of Plato, in which one finds one of the earliest

figures of blackness, a figure of negation” (“Criticism in the Jungle” 7). That early

“figure of negation” attached to the “figure of blackness” is evident in Plato’s “metaphor

of the soul” in Phaedris where he speaks about the soul as “a white horse” which is “a‘follower of true glory’”, whereas there is another horse “‘of a dark color’, which in turn

attempts to lead the soul ‘to so terrible and unlawful deeds’” (cit. Powell 45).

Although Morrison has struggled with the problem that Gates refers to, she seems to have

achieved her aspiration to evade ‘the master’s voice’, because to “bring black meanings

out of the semantic shadows of the Master’s language and to affirm these meanings in a

medium which can truly be called a black text”, as Powel argues, no Afro Americanwriter “has accomplished this more fully than Toni Morrison”, since her “quest” has not

only aimed to “de-center the white logos, but finally to rebuild the center” (47). In the

present America, Tally affirms, “it is more than inappropriate to define Morrison as‘marginal’, not because she has moved to the center of the canon, but because she has

managed to move the center” (“Introduction” 1).

Morrison’s “quest for the black logos” has ironically been initiated with the “consummate

example of the white text – the Dick-and-Jane reader” in The Bluest Eye which is “a

direct confrontation with the white logos”, as Powell affirms (47), and “a necessary firststep toward clearing the way for the (w)holy black text to appear” (ibid. 51) in her later

novels. In her “first step”, however, she ventures to resist the dominant Euro American

power and assert ‘power’ for herself as a black writer. In the part where she describesPauline’s “education in the movies”, her proclamation that Hollywood movies have

pictured: “Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” (The

Bluest Eye 95), is “striking in its self-assured authority”, likewise is her “closing critique

of the social environment responsible for Pecola’s collapse”, as Ryan argues (157), because as “an extra-representational act, the adult Claudia’s closing critique of ‘this soil’

bridges the gap between the fictional universe and the social universe in which the novel

exists, effectively consolidating Morrison’s authority” (ibid. 158).

To apply Foucault’s theories to The Bluest Eye, his conception of ‘discourse’ as

“constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, inso far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence” ( Archaeology 106)

would come into the play. Moreover his inquiries into ‘Panoptic mechanisms’ in

Discipline and Punish would offer enough substance to discuss the obsession of Pecola

the central character and other major female characters of the novel with the prevailingAmerican image of beauty as the consequence of American Euro discursive system and

‘Panoptic mechanism’ that affect Afro Americans’ mind via various media, especially

Hollywood movies. Constructed upon the white’s racial superiority, and by the means of



different media, especially cinema, Euro American discourse, the novel exposes, has

presented an image of beauty whose components are white skin, blue eyes and blonde

hair – the ‘sequences of signs’ which confirm the white’s superiority and colored people’s inferiority. Likewise the ‘modalities of existence’ pictured by the media are

mostly those of Euro Americans, therefore black people are impelled to define their lives

according to the white’s ‘modalities of existence’, and to look at themselves through thewhite’s ‘sequences of signs’ and under their constant ‘Panoptic gaze’.

Foucault’s theory of power besides his critique of the Cartesian ‘philosophy of the

subject’ would substantiate the discussion of Morrison’s second novel Sula (1973). Oneof Foucault’s well-known statements about power relations is: “Where there is power,

there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of

exteriority in relation to power” ( History, Vol. I 95). Unlike The Bluest Eye in which black people are depicted in a white-dominated context, the setting of Sula is an isolated

Afro American community on the hill of Bottom, consequently my reading of the novel

would be an inquiry into the power relations of that community and its three

nonconformist members in the Peace household, especially the youngest one Sula whoselife story is related in the novel. Sula resists the community’s established codes of

behavior, while her “resistance is never in a position of exteriority” to that community

which does not, ironically, exclude her due to its African beliefs.

Defying the Cartesian ‘philosophy of the subject’, Foucault argues that after the Second

World War the emphasis “on philosophical subject no longer seemed so self-evident” and“the philosophy of consciousness” “failed to found a philosophy of knowledge (“About

the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self” 160). His investigations of “the philosophy

of consciousness” and its proponents’ efforts to know human ‘self’ resulted in refutingtheir definition of the “self” as a unified, reasonable and knowable entity, thus he is

deemed one of the architects of postmodernism, as he considers the ‘self’ an

unpredictable, “decentered and relativist” (Poster 212) entity. As a postmodern novel,Sula defies any possibilities of holding the ‘self’ as a unified, reasonable and knowable

entity, because its central character is a torn, irrational, unpredictable figure with “no

center” (Sula 119). Sula’s lack of center also signifies Morrison’s “move from a white

center to ‘no center’”, as Powell argues (54); “Blackness is still being used here to meanabsence or negation: Black center is read here as ‘no center’” (ibid. 53).

That “Black center” was to be discerned and honored in Morrison’s third novel Song of

Solomon (1977) that recounts the story of a middle-class, indifferent young man whose

character is improved by discovering his African origins. Milkman’s gold-quest that turns

into a ‘genealogical’ quest considerably parallels Morrison’s own quest for setting hermind free from the bondage of Euro American discourse. Her ardent quest can be

construed in the light of Foucault’s observations on the stance of the ‘dominant’ and the

‘dominated’ in power relations. He contends that as power “exerts pressure upon” those

who are under its control, they in turn “in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has onthem” ( Discipline 27).



Morrison’s creative “struggle against” the “pressure” of the dominant discourse and her

fervent attempt to “resist [its] grip” was launched by The Bluest Eye, but did not reach

any culminations in Sula, while in her third novel she seems to have identified a route forliberating Afro Americans’ mind from the ‘grip’ of Euro American discourse. Morrison

ardently gives vent to that route in Song of Solomon where she makes Milkman unearth

and commemorate African myths and beliefs that is the only way to her mind to instigatean Afro American discourse that would ingrained in African ‘imagination’ instead of

European ‘rationality’.

While in The Bluest Eye Morrison depicts the formation of Afro Americans’ mentalityunder the ‘gaze’ of Euro Americans’ ‘Panoptic mechanism’ to evade which she makes

the black community of Sula live isolated on the hill of Bottom, in Song of Solomon,

conversely, she does not point up to isolation as a solution for resisting the dominantdiscourse. Rather she exalts a return to the myths and legends of African ancestors as the

best possible way for resisting the control of that ‘Panoptic mechanism’. Morrison’s third

novel enthusiastically celebrates the ‘imaginative’ components of Afro Americans’

cultural heritage to ‘resist’ the ‘grip’ of the ‘rational’ Euro American discourse. Therebyher undeviating quest to create a kind of “literature that [is] irrevocably, indisputably

black” (Morrison cit. Hope Scott 27) and “to free herself and her characters from the

imperialism of the white logos” (Powell 54) seems to be ultimately accomplished bywriting Song of Solomon.

To interpret Beloved from a Foucauldian perspective would be very rewarding, becauseMorrison’s endeavor to unearth the history of slavery resembles Foucault’s enterprise to

rewrite history. The task of a historian in his eyes is the excavation of a given period to

expose the “other history, which runs beneath history” through “go[ing] back fromstatements” “towards [the] interior secret” ( Archaeology 121). In other words a

Foucauldian historian must reconstitute “on the basis of what the documents say, and

sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they emanate and which has nowdisappeared far behind them”, as that “document” articulates “the language of a voice

since reduced to silence” (ibid. 6). In a comparable way, Morrison endeavors to articulate

the “voice” of her slave ancestors, “reduced to silence” by the “statements” of the

dominant discourse, in a conscious attempt to uncover the “other history” of slavery that“runs beneath” the official records, consequently she “recognizes what Foucault

articulates about history and its ‘documents’”, as McBride confirms (168) by functioning

as a “fiction-writer-become-historian” (ibid. 169) who has described “her narrativestrategy as a ‘kind of literary archeology’” (cit. Henderson 83).

Besides Foucault’s groundbreaking ideas about history, his theory of power can also beapplied to Beloved . He proclaims in Discipline and Punish that “power and knowledge

directly imply one another” and “there is no power relation without the correlative

constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and

constitute at the same time power relations” (27- 28). He also declares that “the body becomes a useful force if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. This

subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence”; “there may be a

‘knowledge’ of the body”, and “this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be



called the political technology of the body” (ibid. 26). Morrison depicts the

power/knowledge relation and “the political technology of the body” in the appalling

picture she draws of the allegedly ‘civilized’ Schoolteacher who epitomizes manyhideous features of slavery, in particular the assumed power of slave owners for detecting

the corporal features of their slaves, as he presumes it his essential right to identify the

slaves’ ‘human’ and ‘animal’ ‘characteristics’ in accordance with his “scientific method”(Krumholtz 112).

As the concurrent owner of power and knowledge, Schoolteacher exerts his power not

only “by the instruments of violence”, but also by gaining ‘knowledge’ about the slavesvia taking notes about their physical features and psychological reactions. And as the

brazen representative of slavery, he does ‘invest’ the slaves’ bodies to raise profits and

‘torture’ them in the most brutal ways; he violates Sethe’s body, chains Paul D and putsthe ‘bit’ in his mouth, and roasts Sixo alive. The ‘resistance’ of slaves against

Schoolteacher and subverting his power give form to some major events of Beloved most

of which are traumatic, specifically Sethe’s hysteric act of killing her beloved child to

hinder the slave catchers take hold of her, and Sixo’s getting burned without uttering anysigns of pain. Besides these painful acts, Sixo’s subversion of the master’s defining

power is done so intelligently in an argument with Schoolteacher that the master beats

him “to show that definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined” ( Beloved 190).

As the second piece of Morrison’s trilogy, Jazz (1992) exposes a different era in Afro

American history when black people were no longer slaves, but resided in the first totally black urban district. Regarding Foucault’s ideas about resistance engendered by every

exertion of power, the black musicians of Harlem resisted the dominant art by inventing

their totally black music that undermined the rules of composition and performance of theWestern music. Likewise the narrative techniques used by Morrison in Jazz are the

products of a resisting imaginative act against the traditional narrative devices, so that the

nonconformist spirit of the Jazz Age would be demonstrated. To reflect the rebelliousspirit of that epoch, Morrison subverts some major narrative techniques in her most

unconventional novel with regard to form. She tinkers with the standpoint of the narrator

by mingling different narrative viewpoints and presenting her narrator as a fallible figure

whose alleged ‘power’ is thereby undermined.

Applying Foucault’s inquiries to the ethics criticized in Jazz, what he discerns as

bourgeois principles that emerged at “the beginning of an age of repression emblematic”of “the bourgeois societies” ( History Vol. I 17) which “tried to erect too rigid or too

general a barrier against sexuality” (ibid. 47) can be discussed. That “barrier” was

strongly rejected in the Jazz Age – evident in the conduct of Dorcas who represents theyoung people of the time. Moreover the strict method of Alice’s parents to bring her up

can be read in the light of what Foucault has surveyed as the “meticulous rules of self-

examination” (ibid. 19) or the “techniques of the self” by utilizing which, he contends,

some “individuals” have tried to “effect” some “operations on their own bodies” and“thoughts” to “modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection” or “purity”

(“The hermeneutics of the self” 162).



To present a Foucauldian reading of Paradise (1997), again Foucault’s theory of power

can be the basis of discussion. In Discipline and Punish, he argues that power is

“transmitted by” and “through” those who “do not have it”, besides it is “manifested andsometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated” (26), as the power of

Ruby’s patriarchs is “transmitted” by their wives to their children and is “extended” for a

long time “by the position” of the “dominated” women. That procedure, however, isneither eternal nor a one-way track, because “Where there is power”, Foucault confirms,

“there is resistance”, and this “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to

power” ( History, Vol. I 95), as the resistance of Ruby’s youth is not “in a position of

exteriority” to that isolated community.

In view of the fact that the exertion of power engenders resistance, Foucault asserts that

power relations are productive, since the dominant forces produce their counterpoints – new perspectives, divergent discourses and “new forms of behavior” (Mills 33). Morrison

portrays the degeneration of an ‘all-black’ community to a dystopia in Paradise, as a

result of the unwavering conduct of its adamant founders and their obstinate descendents

against which the female and young members of the community rebel, while converselyshe depicts the regeneration of a group of women in a nearby mansion thanks to the

embracing, tolerant attitude offered over there. By her comparative depiction of the

collapse of the repressive, male-dominated town of Ruby (New Haven) and the rise of agenuine ‘haven’ in the female-occupied Convent, Morrison subverts the time-honored

biblical myth of paradise that has been usually imagined as the location of “male

enclaves”, as she affirms herself, “while [its] interloper” is “a woman, defenseless and[yet] threatening” (cit. Matus 154).

Conclusion

Although Foucault is one of the most influential thinkers of the recent decades and manyliterary critics have resorted to his theories in giving form to their arguments, no

particular critical approach to literature has been founded on his inquiries. Moreover

Morrison’s novels, with the exception of Beloved , have rarely been read by resorting toFoucault’s ideas, though many critics have embarked upon the points that are relevant to

his theories, such as power and discourse. It has been elucidated in the present article that

to read Morrison’s novels in the light of Foucault’s theory of power (including his

observations on power/knowledge relation, the significant role of discourse in exertingand sustaining power, controlling and disciplinary techniques and systems such as

Panoptic mechanism and the ‘techniques of the self’, and the formation of resistance

against power) would be very rewarding. The same could be said about Foucault’s

groundbreaking ideas about the necessity of rewriting history in an archaeologicalattempt to uncover the things hidden in traditional historiography while reading

Morrison’s Beloved that she regards as her ‘literary archaeology’. Foucault’s defiance ofWestern rationality and his repudiation of the Cartesian concepts of ‘self’ would also be

helpful to deal with the portrayal of splintered, unknowable ‘self’ in Morrison’s oeuvre.



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Documents

A Foucauldian Reading of Morrisons Novel (1)