Toni Morrison’s Ethics of Attention

Abstract

AbstractChapter 3 argues that the late modernist character of Toni Morrison’s fiction resides not in allusions or even stylistic debts to William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, but in her repurposing of modernist forms—especially the focalizing resources of free indirect narration—to engender disturbing intimacies between readers and characters in the grip of the most destructive forms of sexual desire. It begins by illustrating that Morrison’s mobilization of modernist aesthetics is far more troubling than critics have tended to recognize through a reading of a famously disquieting passage of Beloved (1987), which has been the focus of some of the most incisive and influential analyses of Morrison’s prose. The chapter focuses principally, however, on The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s debut, and arguably her most emotionally and ethically disturbing novel. It illustrates that the formal intricacies of her famously lyrical prose do not promote an ethically salutary world view, as other critics have troublingly suggested, but rather work to affectively involve readers in philosophical questions about the kinds of narratives the novel form is capable of encompassing and the ethical ramifications of the interest we are invited to take in different people’s narratives. The third chapter presents Morrison as a writer who surprisingly resembles the Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita (1955), both in the obsessive probing of inadmissible desire, and in openly challenging readers to at once succumb to and resist an aestheticization that risks aggrandizing the most egregious of sexual acts.