Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison (1992)

A collection of three essays based on "The William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization" that Toni Morrison delivered in 1990.


Book Review: Playing in the Dark, subtitled "Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," finds Toni Morrison ably fulfilling her role as Ivy League academic. Here she promotes the need for a deeper and more nuanced critical analysis of the portrayal and use of black characters in American literature. Presenting her thesis as questions she asks, "How did the founding writers of young America engage, imagine, employ, and create an Africanist presence and persona? In what ways do these strategies explicate a vital part of American literature? How does excavating these pathways lead to fresh and more profound analyses of what they contain and how they contain it?" Morrison examines Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather's last novel, which I'd never heard of but apparently is universally panned. Morrison agrees. She then looks at The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe, which just seems like a quite odd story. Morrison concludes with a lengthy discussion of Hemingway's minor novel (his only one set in the States) To Have and Have Not and his posthumous The Garden of Eden. The first seems to be Hemingway (or the Hemingway character) acting like an ass (or horribly worse) and the second is much enlightened by the description of his childhood-based fantasies in the recent biography by Mary Dearborn (more fetish than race). Playing in the Dark presents a solid and necessary case for a deeper analysis of the portrayal of black characters in traditional American fiction, though I wished she'd used less obscure and unaccomplished examples. None of these are "a vital part of American literature." (There is a good though short discussion of Huckleberry Finn.) Fortunately, there has been a greater critical examination of black roles in traditional American literature, just as there has been in the portrayal of women (not enough, but more). In fact, I think her proposal should be extended to works without obvious or significant black characters, but in which black populations must exist just off-stage. The investigation of fiction that unaccountably fails to include notable black characters, the setting of which must have a strong if unacknowledged black presence would be a fertile field of study. My thought here is similar to Warren Roberts' 1979 study of the French Revolution in the novels of Jane Austen, even though that event is never mentioned in her work. My only criticism (I'm not an academic nor even a literature student, so we know I'm on thin ice) is that, as with the Freudians and cigars, not every fictional description of dark and light, day and night, the shining and the void, means race. It's just me, but I must admit I'll always prefer her fiction.  [3½★]