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Abstracts of papers selected by the Committee to be
presented in the seventh edition of the Summer Conference Story-Telling
and Sub-versive Memory: Reshaping Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Texts Carol Andrews-Redhead Department of Language and Literature The University of Trinidad and Tobago |
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Toni Morrison shapes her creative
stories through an extraordinary and experimental exploration of narrative.
These unconventional methods, techniques and strategies form the basis of her
story telling power. Her treatment of
time, voice, characterization, point-of-view, image, myth, metaphor and
symbol, re-constituted by specific African-American elements, such as
orality, rhythm, Blues and ‘Spirit Work’, are important stylistic features of
her narrative. These elements, both
traditional and unconventional, form the basis of a varied and very complex
black aesthetic that acquires importance as “tropes of darkness” through
which meaning of Morrison’s ignored and neglected black characters become
accessible and their value in the literature can be appreciated. Also, in addition to being the kernel of
her narrative, these elements help revolutionize her techniques for
expressing African-American identity, for they clarify how knowledge about
black people can be “transformed from invasion and conquest into revelation
and choice” (Morrison, 1992: 8). For example, Morrison’s integration of
the concept of ‘re-memory’ becomes an organizing psychological superstructure
in which the historical base supplies relevance and meaning for the
character/reader. This historical
framework is vital to the continual re-construction of the ‘Story’. The telling and re-telling from different
points of view, by different characters in Beloved for example, or diverse
narrators, as in Jazz, gives the reader the opportunity to meet historical
knowledge and to merge Substance and Imagination in a story which Morrison
re-creates through a temporally seamless whole. Consequently, this complex
aspect of her narration facilitates the dynamic process of story-telling by
bringing together three important constituents for a successful story; the
story, the teller [or narrator] and the audience [or reader] through a
dynamic process of inter-action.
Described as a well-formed and informing narrative collage, and
elaborated through a complex linguistic transaction, Morrison’s makes of her
narrative, tropes of past and present that give her characters leads towards
cultural recovery and her readers different ways and/or opportunities to
comprehend this recovery. Therefore, to create movement in the
text for this cultural accommodation in the retelling of these stories, place
and past time are continually shifted away from the purely
introspective. Instead, they become a
part of the cultural perspective of the present, giving depth and texture to
the stories being told. This three
dimensional configuration of introspection [an inner look at the historical
self], retrospection [creating an objectivity that is made possible by time]
and perspective [as an indicator of how there can be cultural movement into
the future] allow for significant intervention by readers through a narrative
that can be recalled, related to by reader’s own experience, refashioned and
then actualised by means of characters who load these texts with meanings
that attempt to answer the question, ‘ How can the historical experiences of
Black people help to resolve immediate or present predicaments in American
society’? bio: Dr. Carol
Andrews-Redhead is an Assistant Profesor at The University of Trinidad and
Tobago. She is coordinator of the
Language and Literature Department of The School of Cognition, Learning and
Education. She has worked as a
Teacher, Guidance Counselor and a Diagnostic Specialist inthe assessment of
children at risk in her country's Ministry of Education. She is a writer of Fiction and has
published her novel "Ruptures into Silence. She has - in press - a book of Children's short stories and is
at present editing a volume of her students' short stories which is to be
published. |
