All American fiction is race fiction

Sitting with Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark.

For some reason, I can’t stop creating franchises for the newsletter. This one is In Theory, where I break down theory books in the hopes that people will pick them up and discuss them with me. The first book I’ll be covering is a short one, just 91 pages—Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. I read over two days, furiously underlining and sticky-noting and tabbing. It completely reshaped how I assess and think about texts and offered a new lens to read through. Much like bell hooks’ essay on “The Oppositional Gaze”, this gave me a new entry point into the text. I picked up All Fours right after, Miranda July’s much-hyped novel that has been billed the book of the summer, and found myself reading it with an eye trained for the things it was hiding. The spaces it refused to illuminate and failed to completely obscure. I’ll be writing about that next (hopefully), and once that’s published, I think the connection and the way I’m thinking about it will make sense. 

Toni Morrison published Playing in the Dark in 1992. I wasn’t born yet. My mom and dad had yet to meet fatefully at a party in Brooklyn. It came out the same year as Jazz and synthesized three lectures she gave at Harvard and the basis of an American Lit course she taught. Its primary focus is how Blackness is utilized in literature to create contrast, whether directly named or not, illuminating the attitudes of 20th-century writers toward a population that was largely left out of their work despite being incredibly relevant to the sociopolitical landscape. Morrison argues that writers write with multiple levels of awareness, whether they bring it to the page explicitly or not, meaning that in our highly racialized society, we are always talking about race even when we don’t address it specifically: “I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debate blanketed in their text.” Morrison is particularly invested in the psyche of the “master,” and the effects of a racialized society on their work. When discussing slavery and race, we often turn to racial discrimination’s impact on the oppressed, but what, asks Morrison, happens to the psyche of those who benefit from and/or perpetuate the racial hierarchy? 

Morrison explores this over three chapters, analyzing three classic texts: Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allen Poe, and To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. While all of these texts were published in the 20th century, her theory is also a worthwhile contemplation for contemporary books. For every book that seems to be unconcerned with Blackness, there is an overt or racial-coded undertone that weaves its way throughout the text. In Long Island Compromise, it’s the deviant kidnapper who, despite inconsistent evidence, is deemed a criminal and forced into a life of incarceration. In Detransition, Baby, it’s Torrey Peters’s incoherent thesis around the role of Black transwomen in the wider community. The narrator can’t decide whether she admires or is jealous of them, and thus, they become points of contrast for Reece to understand her whiteness. The list goes on and on and on. This tension is rarely if ever, discussed, entirely absent from reviews. Instead, Blackness is a specter hanging out on the edges of the work, waiting in the wings to be called up and teased out.

Morrison argues we should be doing just that. On page five, she writes, “contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.” She goes on to posit that the defining characteristics of American literature, from individualism to an obsession with figurations of death and hell, are in response to the “Africanist presence,” that coexistence has completely shaped the American entity:

Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence–one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows. (6) 

What Morrison gets at here is the duplicitousness of American identity. While the founding fathers were signing documents declaring all men are equal, millions of men would be hanged for daring to exercise that right. This dishonesty is at the core of the American experiment, thus that tension manifests itself in everything, including the literature. And while we have made some progress in the arena of equality, our society is still an unjust one. Yet the charade continues and the literature conspires with it. The critics, says Morrison, also engage in this game, refusing to name or analyze the texts with this in mind. As Morrison points out, resistance to this is in line with American tradition. Ignoring race, she says, is seen as the gracious, liberal thing to do. Before 2020, saying “I don’t see race,” had become a way of suggesting that you saw all people as equal, that racial characteristics didn’t factor into the way one conceived of a human being. Morrison argues that the work suffers because of this silence and that investigating the role of Blackness in the work does not diminish or reduce it but rather deepens our understanding of it. It allows us to wade into rich waters and reconstruct a more complete vision of the text. 

In our current cultural landscape it is difficult for white writers to talk about race in their work for fear of getting it wrong or the work being deemed “political”, but we all live and are writing in the same context and that reality makes its way to the page, regardless of pains taken to hide it. This is especially evident, says Morrison, in books that are not written with a Black audience in mind. In these cases we have to ask what the function of Black people or the representation of darkness is doing in the text. Is it there to add “local color” and create the notion of diversity? Is it to create contrast between the main white characters? To add a layer of cool? Morrison puts forth a compelling suggestion. “The subject of the dream is the dreamer,” she says, and so thinking of the construction of race in the American consciousness, the collective obsession with racial difference, we can conclude that Blackness/darkness, or as she puts it, the “Africanist persona,” functions as the not-author, revealing the writer’s deepest fears and desires—or offering a space to explore that—rather than stretching toward representation for a Black readership. As a Black reader and writer, this is always obvious. The character is not Black as much as they are a representation of blackness, harnessing all of the shorthand associations in the reader’s mind when that presence appears on the page. The result, says Morrison, is a “sometimes metaphorical, sometimes allegorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.”  

To demonstrate this, Morrison starts with a novel with an overt figuration of the Africanist other: Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The novel is about the contentious relationship between a mistress and her slave Nancy, who she is jealous of because she suspects her husband wants to sleep with her. Nancy is virtue personified, the epitome of an innocent, but her presence enrages Sapphira, who asks her nephew to visit knowing he will sexually violate her. This fate is avoided thanks to Sapphira’s daughter, an abolitionist, who steps in and helps Nancy escape to freedom. What Morrison finds fascinating is the depiction of Nancy’s mother Till, who also lives on the plantation. Till is framed as so loyal to her mistress that she is unable to help her daughter in any capacity or show concern for her wellbeing. Cather’s choice to do this invokes the idea of slaves being “natally dead,” meaning they have no parent-child relationships and thus don’t have access to feelings of loyalty or protection. Morrison asserts that this is a bizarre choice, one that the story forces Cather to clumsily address. A couple hundred pages in, Till asks Rachel if Nancy has made it safely North. This, Morrison says, is not to rehabilitate Till in the reader’s eyes, but because it would have been impossible not to. Morrison then lays out the conflicting narrative threads: 

Consider the pressures exerted by the subject: the need to portray the faithful slave; the compelling attraction of exploring the possibilities of one woman’s absolute power over the body of another woman; confrontation with an uncontested assumption of the sexual availability of black females; the need to make credible the bottomless devotion of the person on whom Sapphira is totally dependent. It is after all hers, this slave woman’s body, in a way that her own flesh is not (23). 

All of these demands, says Morrison, stretch to the point of “breaking narrative coherence.” This depiction of Till is not of a mother whose daughter’s life is in danger but rather an opportunity for Cather to explore her own fascination with complicated mother figures. Nancy is not a woman competing for her husband’s affections but a person over whom she has complete control. Even her fears around “ruining” Nancy’s innocence have no merit. As a slave, Nancy is not considered virtuous and there are no protections to save her from being violated by anyone at any time. As Morrison points out, “if Mr. Colbert is tempted by Nancy the chaste, is there anything in slavocracy to make him disdain Nancy the unchaste?” (25). Nancy functions an opportunity for Cather to explore the unchecked power of a desperate woman who cannot recognize her own power or even develop her own personality. Everything that she is, from her status to her perceived goodness is derived from the Black people she exploits, people she can contort into whatever shape she wants as long as it serves to reinforce her ego. These Black bodies, says Morrison, become her surrogates, and operate at her behest. 

This reading of the text was compelling to me (there was lots of underlining) because it sums up the token Black friend that appears across mediums—a void for white writers to host characteristics they wished the protagonist possessed (cool, funny, sassy, witty, etc.) or act as a center of moral clarity for their bumbling, complex friend. As Morrison explains, the sole function of the black character is to “define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters,” (53). These token characters lack interiority because, similarly to Till and Nancy, it’s wrapped up in the white character they support. This specific framing made me think of Kiley Reid’s popular novel Such a Fun Age, which purports to be about Ermira, a young Black girl who works for a wealthy, white family and is grappling with her ambition but is actually about Alix, the woman she works for. In it, Ermira wonders if she has any talent beyond taking care of Alix’s daughter and is grappling with her role as a caretaker and its implicit association with the mammy figure. The novel volleys between perspectives but the richer, more developed terrain is Alix’s. She is rendered as a complex character while Ermira exists solely in relation to her work and function in the household. She is a site for Alex to consider herself. One of the biggest climaxes in the novel doesn’t occur between Ermira and Alix but between Alix and Kelley, the white man Ermira dates that also happens to be Alix’s ex. Ermira becomes the terrain onto which they project their virtuousness and work out their liberal guilt, a space to measure their relationship to whiteness through their interactions with a Black woman.

In chapter two, Morrison moves on to the use of darkness as a motif—“reined-in, bound, suppressed and repressed darkness,”—and its link to the expansive power of whiteness. Through narrative language, this difference becomes conflated with an Africanist persona, gesturing at Blackness even when it’s absent from the page. Her text of choice is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allen Poe, a novel about a young boy who stows away on a whaling ship and his various misadventures. At some point Pym encounters hostile Black natives before escaping back into into the ocean and heading to the snowy South Pole. No early American writer, says Morrison, is more important to the concept of African Americanism than Poe. He is a master at the juxtaposition between light and dark, of conjuring a “closed and unknowable white form” that often occurs after encountering darkness (32). In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym it’s the death of the native Nu-Nu and the “white curtain” and shrouded human figure with white skin that follows. Morrison says this powerful imagery, which almost always happens in conjunction with “black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent or under complete control,” resolves any questions of the hierarchical relationship between black and white. 

It’s also important to consider the role of the writer in this dynamic. The writer is not an objective recorder of the world reproducing what they see. Writers actively contribute and often define the character of a people and generation. There’s a case to be made now for a writer’s ignorance of deploying these linguistic strategies—it has become innate—but at that time, with auction blocks in the town square, America had every opportunity to define itself, and many writers (at least the ones whose work has survived) chose to enshrine racial difference and use it, both implicitly and explicitly, to elevate the notion of whiteness in the American story. This didn’t have to happen. Americans, fleeing the oppression of Europe, could have just contrasted themselves against their forefathers. But instead much of the American identity was cultivated through turning the violence of slavery into a feeling of power and self-esteem. To illuminate this construction Morrison quotes Bernard Bailyn’s 1987 book Voyagers to the West, which utilized an emigration roster of everyone who left Britain for the New World from 1773 to 1776 to reconstruct their lives and motivations. She hones in on the portrait of William Dunbar, a well-educated Scot who ends up becoming a Mississippi planter. It is in his role as a plantation owner that he truly flourishes and comes into his own. Morrison points out that it isn’t his literacy or education or London sophistication that turns him into a gentleman but his total subjugation of other human beings. If he was mediocre before he is powerful now. Against the backdrop of unsophisticated, “natural” savagery, he gleams. At some point, Dunbar experiences a rebellion on his plantation and he is shocked by the ungratefulness of his slaves. He orders 2500 lashes and is able to convince himself that it is their savagery, not his at play.

In the invention of the American identity, the Black population is not a sentient one but rather a site of self-definition, a convenient tap from which ego and contrast flows. In the absence of self-reflection there was the Africanist other, an opportunity to meditate on big ideas and contradictions without having to ascribe them to its master.  To become comfortable with the cognitive dissonance of belonging to a “free republic with a deep commitment to slavery,” requires a language of disguise but also an understanding of the un-free as your opposite (49): 

Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self know itself as not enslaved, but free, not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less but historical; not damned but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution but a progressive fulfillment of destiny (52). 

If the figuration of American identity is the “self,” an amalgamation of our best values, then it is in the depictions of Blackness or the “not-self” that we find the hidden truths.

Morrison then calls for four paths of critical inquiry. First, the Africanist character as surrogate and enabler, an opportunity for white writers to think about themselves. Second, Black dialect to establish difference and in later literature signify modernity, an association with cool (James seems to be engaging with this explicitly). Third, the use of the Black character to support the invention of whiteness (Such a Fun Age) and fourth, the use of the Black narrative (a story of bondage, institutional violence) to meditate on humanity, ideas of limitation and suffering while contemplating ideas of fate and destiny. By applying this frame to literature, Morrison argues that the work will yield much more interesting discussion, and I agree. By engaging contemporary and classic literature with these inquiries as a guidepost, we are able to investigate the function of Blackness in the national story, examining the ways it has evolved while also grappling with the places where it remains intact.

This invites to us to interrogate the function and notion of “escapist” literature, and its ability to represent our society without engaging meaningfully with it. For every “fun, fluffy” novel that allows us to “turn off our brains,” there is an active bleaching of the environment in order to support that fantasy. A society where racism or racial hierarchy doesn’t exist—how could it? we’re in a lake house—and friend groups look like United Colors of Benetton ads, beautiful images with no tension underneath. Our ability to participate in it, our willingness to suspend belief and even buy into it, to make it popular, is reflective of the work that was done by the romanticist writers of the nineteenth century and the embedding of those ideals in the American psyche. We are able to create an intellectual separation between the world outside and the one inside the novel, but they are one and the same, even if the writer avoids addressing it directly.

In the final chapter Morrison looks at the modern function (as in 1992) of racism. She argues that race has become metaphorical rather than material, and traces the evolution from race as establishing hierarchy to self-reflexive meditations to becoming entrenched in the rhetoric of dread and desire. Cultural notions of Blackness and race have become innate and unavoidable, like microplastics in our drinking water, invisible but aggregating and poisoning us over time. This evolution argues Morrison, is cumulative. New functions don’t replace old ones and are called on at will: “There is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminisces of “individualism” and “freedom” if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom’s polar opposite: freedom is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency.” (64). The flexibility of Blackness continues to take on new meanings as our society faces new challenges, in line with Morrison’s assertion that the master narrative can make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact (51).

As we grapple with squaring racism’s longterm impact of slavery on our modern society, a new/old frame has emerged. Whiteness scrambles for claims to innocence and Enlightenment-era ideas of individualism (it was so long ago, that doesn’t apply to me, etc.) while simultaneously conflating Blackness as predation (they’re blaming us for everything, erasing us from our own stories, and so on). We’re even seeing an inversion of white identity, where white America feels accused of being stereotyped and blackness as being exalted and overrepresented. Then there’s Blackness as psychic freedom, as authenticity, as “real,” and whiteness as bland and restrictive (more on this when we discuss All Fours). We don’t even need white people to espouse the rhetoric. There are Black people who write in this language and conjure the same images to (often unintentional) paradoxical effect.

Next, Morrison quotes James Snead’s Figures of Division: William Faulkner's Major Novels, in which he explores the contradictions of the American south. He outlines six categories of the function of racism and Morrison expands on these with six linguistic strategies that help to achieve Snead’s observations. 

Morrison then applies that analysis to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, a novel about a fishing boat captain named Harry Morgan. The book offers social commentary on Key West and Cuba in the 1930s. Morrison finds this novel, and Hemingway more generally, interesting because she sees his work as having “no need, desire, or awareness of [African-Americans] as readers of his work or as people existing anywhere but in his imagination,”(69). This does not stop him, however from employing them to serve his narrative . To outline the ways Hemingway used Black people in service of the white protagonist and the narrator she highlights Wesley, a crew member who is referred to only as the “nigger.” Wesley is continuously stripped of personhood throughout the text, never referred to by a pronoun or allowed to speak. Morrison argues that Hemingway’s refusal to humanize Wesley, allowing him to stand in as an “other” offers starker contrast for Harry, underscoring his virility and goodness. As a “nigger,” Wesley is potentially dangerous, perhaps sexually charged, and it is in this landscape that a more compelling Harry emerges. To take things further, Harry is the only one who calls Wesley by his name (even the narrator uses the slur). This paints Harry to be a compassionate figure who sees Wesley as somewhat human. Harry does eventually refer to Wesley as a nigger, though Hemingway presents it as an act of intimacy. If it were 2024, I’d imagine he’d use the soft ‘a’. 

The thesis that Morrison lays out (and convincingly argues) is a haunting one. If, as she says, cultural identities are informed by a nation’s literature, then we must accept that literary notions of Blackness are intentional even when unconscious. And just as it was crafted meticulously, so too it has to be undone. Even though Morrison wrote this 30 years ago, her mandate remains relevant. Every critic should be sitting with and considering the role of race in the work, asking “raceless” novels about the burden of whiteness on the narrative, calling attention to it not to shame or reduce but to invite discussion and expand the meaning of the text. Good criticism deepens our understanding of the work by layering in meaning and creating new understandings, allows it to fully mature in the cultural consciousness. I hope critics finally, consistently take up this mantle. The work, and we, are better for it.

If you made it to the end, thank you for reading! This was incredibly fun and I hope we’ll continue the conversation in the comments or over email. Until next time.