In her reflections on the writing ofBeloved, Toni Morrison laments the decision to end her novel with the wordkiss, remarking that her substitution of that word for a still-unnamed “wrong word” transformed an “assertion of agency” into “genuflection” (“H,” 7–8) The original word, though wrong, may also have been the only word, she remarks (P8), thereby staging for herself the question of how any writer, especially any African American writer, might resist the gravitational pull of everyday speech toward racialized images, symbols, or metaphors, each of which would drag language back into what she terms the...

In his consideration of the philosophy of witnessing, Giorgio Agamben attempts to map out some of the relationships between injury, survival, witnessing, and testimony. He argues that a twofold impossibility confronts the one who would testify: to bear witness to what one doesn’t know, and to bear witness to what cannot be known. He is struck by the lacunae in witnessing, which he understands to be a speech act, an active, outspoken remembering.¹ He argues that those who survive cataclysms and who are called upon to speak of their experiences are trapped in the strict logic or structure that demands...

At the center ofParadise’s Ruby, deep in Oklahoma, is the Oven. Nails have inscribed into its surface the imperative phrase, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow” (P7). The descendants of fifteen families, who migrated “from Mississippi and two Louisiana parishes” and the failed Restoration, live in obedient, though increasingly tested observance of this command (P13). They, however, call it by different names. It is a command to some, a motto to others.

The Oven is Ruby’s social and psychic hearth, perhaps even its most sacred space, more sacred than the two churches that face each other on...

In a moment of delirious optimism, the invisible, unnamed narrator ofJazzvirtually sings out, “Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help-stuff” (J7). We are invited to bear witness to the end of a time, not its residue. This end occurs in language, as the narrator utters the lyrical phrases that are already redefining and modulating the “sad stuff.” What was before is already under erasure, disappearing out of detail, into the generalization of “The way everybody was then and there.” We are invited to “Forget that” as the narrator...

In the early pages ofJazz, Joe Trace utters these words: “you could say, ‘I was scared to death,’ but you could not retrieve the fear” (J29). Any scene, no matter how intense, can be replayed, but insofar as it is replayed in narrative, his earlier experiences make him afraid that all memories will remain, for him, “drained of everything but the language to say it in.” He tells himself that this fear, of feeling’s dissipation or absence and the desire to recover or perpetuate it, is why he shot his young lover, Dorcas. It was “just to keep...

Morrison has described her project inA Mercyas wanting “to separate race from slavery to see what it was like, what it might have been like, to be a slave but without being raced; where your status was being enslaved but there was no application of racial inferiority,” when what is called America was “still fluid, ad hoc.”¹ The novel also imagines emergent subjectivities in such an ad hoc state.

Two journeys take us intoA Mercy: that of the young slave Florens and that of Jacob Vaark, her master. Although they traverse the same geography for part of...

This book has treated Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as she writes about the condition of African American historical consciousness within the larger America. Over the years, Morrison has increasingly produced writing that cites itself, as well as the canons with which she associates her work. Indeed, the canny practice of self-citation has underscored the relation of her writing to the production or reproduction of canon, and to what being drawn into a canon demands of her writing.

In the figure of the prison house of race, discussed in the Introduction to this book, an...