Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

“I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination.” 

Morrison is approaching the study of literature not as a literary critic but as a writer. As a writer, she is interested in examining other writers’ minds and imaginations. In particular, she wants to find out what writers access in their minds and what they keep at bay.

“This knowledge holds that traditional canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.” 

This is the primary claim that Morrison wishes to investigate and challenge. Traditionally, literary critics have stated that the presence of African Americans has not affected white American literature.

“These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are not in fact responses to dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” 

Morrison states that the qualities that define American literature may come from a reaction to the African presence in the country. She identifies these qualities as, among others, an emphasis on individuality and the tension between isolation and social engagement. Her thesis is that the presence of Africans and African Americans help define whiteness in American literature and culture.

“It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject.” 

Morrison writes that racism has mainly been studied by looking at its effects on the victims. However, she states that it’s equally important to look at the effects of racism on those who perpetuated it. That is one of the goals of this book.

“As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.” 

When Morrison first read American literature, she accepted the conventional wisdom that the Africanist presence was largely missing. However, she changed her mind when she began reading through the lens of a writer. She then began to understand that the American writers commented on the Africanist perspective in a “coded” way that actually shed light on the authors’ own perspective of blacks.

“It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl—the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface—and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.” 

For a long time, Morrison didn’t notice the effect of the Africanist perspective on American literature. She then approached the reading of American texts in a different way. Like the person who steps back from the contents of a fishbowl and sees the bowl that contains all the materials, she backed up and saw the larger forces that affected American literature’s canonical works.

“The final fugitive in Cather’s novel is the novel itself.” 

Morrison uses Cather’s novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl as an example of a book that fails because the author has not acknowledged the tangled web of race and gender in which her characters exist. The slave girl in the novel, Nancy, escapes north and is a fugitive. Morrison writes that the novel itself is a fugitive as it tries to dodge complicated questions of race and gender.

“No early American writer is more important to the concept of African Americanism than Poe.” 

Poe writes in a self-conscious way about race. His writings reveal his desire to be part of the white planter class. In works such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe’s black characters are at once submissive and violent. Pym concludes with the appearance of an all-encompassing white form, reasserting white power and privilege after the black characters have died.

“Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under almost complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function both as antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing.” 

Morrison analyzes the white forms that often appear in literature. They tend to occur at the conclusions to books, and they appear after the death or impotence of the black characters. These white forms are meant to reassert white power in contrast to the impotence of the black characters.

“Power—control of one’s own destiny—would replace the powerlessness felt before the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution.” 

Morrison writes this about the formation of early America. In the new republic, white men were no longer subject to the European hierarchy. However, Americans, in their quest to make new definitions, instituted a racial hierarchy and formed a national literary tradition in which white freedom contrasts to black servitude. 

“The ways in which artists—and the society that had bred them—transferred internal conflicts to a ‘blank darkness,’ to conveniently bound and conveniently silenced black bodies, is a major theme in American literature.” 

Americans defined their freedoms and their conflicts about their freedoms by the contrast between free whites and black slaves. White writers included this conflict in their works. In the process, the Africanist presence in white works became silenced and powerless.

“The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if in fact it did not create it—like slavery.” 

Morrison writes about the way in which the American national identity was founded on contrasts. Freedom did not exist by itself. Instead, it was given form and power from its contrast with slavery.

“It was this Africanism, deployed as a rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for elaboration of the quintessential American identity.” 

White Americans located violence in the Africanist presence around them. Their national identity and story were about the control of black savagery through white power. Rather than recognizing the savagery inherent in themselves as slave masters, whites projected this savagery onto Africanism.

“The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act.” 

Many critics have claimed that early American literature is not concerned with race. Morrison believes that this statement is a racial act. She maintains that one cannot will away race and critics stating that American literature is raceless does not make it so. 

“Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand.” 

Morrison describes the way in which some critics have tried to analyze literature in a raceless way. However, she believes that simply trying not to see the Africanist presence in texts does not erase it. Instead, the African presence informed both what writers put into their texts and what they left out. Trying not to see the influence of the Africanist presence is like pouring acid on fingers to erase fingerprints while ignoring the force of the hand that holds the fingers. 

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.” 

Africanism, the mythology around African Americans, is critical to the way whites define themselves. Whites are powerful because they see blacks as powerless. This definition also allows whites to see their progress as ordained by destiny rather than as an accident. 

“Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed. That would blast the predilection from its mooring.” 

Morrison writes about the ending to Huckleberry Finn, in which the slave Jim is kept captive. This is particularly disappointing and disheartening after Huck has recognized Jim’s humanity. She writes that both Twain and Huck needed to keep Jim enslaved to make Huck feel free.

“Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness.”

Rather than being absent from the pages of American literature, black characters—or at least whites’ perceptions of them—are central to it. Whites’ myths about blacks helped whites define what is American. To whites, Americanness is synonymous with whiteness, in contrast to the shadowy presence of blacks.

“Collapsing persons into animals prevents human contact and exchange; equating speech with grunts or other animal sounds closes off the possibility of communication.” 

Morrison writes that one of the rhetorical devices that white writers use is metaphysical condensation. The works present blacks as unintelligible animals, which prevents communication between whites and blacks.

“The term occupies a territory between man and animal and thus withholds specificity even while marking it.” 

Morrison analyzes Wesley, the black character in the Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not. At times, the narrative refers to Wesley simply as a “nigger,” and this term conveys his caste and status. With this coded shorthand, white writers could convey character in a way that did not require long character descriptions.

“What would have been the cost, I wonder, of humanizing, genderizing this character at the opening of the novel? For one thing, Harry would be positioned—set off, defined—very differently.” 

Morrison writes about the choices Hemingway made as a writer. He gave little definition to the black character in To Have and Have Not. If he had, the white character, Harry, would have been rendered less virile and powerful. Hemingway made Harry more powerful by making the black character powerless.

“That was the first time I ever made my hair blonde.”

Marie, a character in the Hemingway novel To Have and Have Not, says this after her husband throws the hat of a black man into the street after he spoke to Marie. It is by showing himself to be more powerful than the black man that Harry expresses his virility. Marie responds by making herself even whiter by bleaching her hair to establish her difference with the black man.

“...Not only is the Hemingway Ranger invariably accompanied but his Tontos, his nursemen, are almost always black.” 

Morrison notes that nurse-like figures often tend to Hemingway’s white male characters. These figures are both women and men. These black men cater to the white men and are docile and enabling.