Though perhaps best known to most as the first African American Nobel laureate in literature, it would be short-sighted - as evidenced by the other essays in this volume - to limit Toni Morrison's incredible contributions to the world of arts and letters to her achievements as a novelist alone. The author of scores of critical essays and articles, published speeches, book reviews, interviews, opinion pieces; author of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; editor of both Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality and Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case; and a professor of writing and literature for decades, Morrison's record, role, and influence as an intellectual are by any measure extraordinary. Indeed, it could be argued that Morrison's corpus is best understood when read as a broad, far-reaching intellectual contribution that defies our contemporary artist-scholar divide with which we have become increasingly comfortable in the academy.

In Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981) Toni Morrison artfully employs African American vernacular language and folklore to foreground her concern with subversion both in the language itself and in narrative structure. Indeed these two novels effectively exemplify M. M. Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque through the enactment of ritual spectacles, comic verbal exchanges, and various examples of “abusive” language. In both Song of Solomon and Tar Baby the carnivalesque is at once “heteroglossic” - simultaneously producing multiple meanings - and “disruptive” - challenging hegemonic structures on two levels. First, it establishes an interracial dialogue that challenges white America's view and ordering of the world; and second, it give voice to an intra-racial dialogue, which confronts a privileged black middle-class materialism with the vernacular discourse of the black folk community.

Song of Solomon

For Milkman Dead, Morrison's protagonist in Song of Solomon (SOS), history, identity, and spiritual healing are linked to the power of naming and the verbal facility to impress his experience on the language. This he ultimately achieves through initiation into the discursive formulas of the African American vernacular. Milkman must acquire the vernacular speech and culture of black urban males in order to be spiritually reborn and “discursively” reinserted into a history from which he and his family have been estranged. The narrative structure of Milkman Dead's quest depicts a series of initiatory phases of reappropriation of folk knowledge through encounters with black culture-bearers who actively engage in the production of their own meaning.

Toni Morrison's eighth novel, Love (2003), foregrounds one of her most crucial concerns, a major theme recurrent in all her novels: how can love be defined, dissected, or accounted for? What are its multiple meanings and manifestations? In this her latest novel Morrison explicitly investigates the elusive nature of love in relation to heterosexual sex and pedophilia, but also to female friendship, mother-daughter and, especially, father-daughter relationships, and communal ties. As Morrison herself said in an interview with novelist Diane McKinney-Whetstone, “I was interested in the way in which sexual love and other kinds of love lend themselves to betrayal. How do ordinary people end up ruining the thing they most want to protect? And obviously the heart of that is really the effort to love.” In trying to answer these questions, Morrison tackles many key issues in her fiction: the empty category of “race” or the uselessness of racial boundaries, the rewriting of history from an African American standpoint, the importance of the survival of the community, the definition of black womanhood, and the crucial role of female bonding. This novel, therefore, becomes almost a compedium in which it is possible to see Morrison at her best, proving both her artistry as a gifted writer and her profound social commitment to the transmission of the values of the black community.

The novel recounts the story of Bill Cosey and the women who surround him, whose diverse stories center on their obsession with the patriarch of the family, defined as father, husband, lover, and, at times, friend. Twenty-five years after his death, his pervasive presence still shapes and conditions these women's responses to each other.

Jazz

Toni Morrison might be considered an “author's author” for her willingness to discuss the process through which her works develop. She shares with her readers the impetus behind each novel's origin, disclosing how the artistic mind transforms memories, folklore, and other works of literature into potent, compelling, and highly individualistic texts. As is the case with Beloved, which was prompted by her unearthing documentation regarding a slave woman who murdered her child to prevent it from being enslaved, both Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) were set into motion by similar literary finds. A photograph of a young Black girl in her coffin, taken by James Van Der Zee and reprinted in a collection of his funereal photography entitled The Harlem Book of the Dead, for which Morrison wrote the foreword, provided the impetus for a novel set in 1926, precisely the year in which the photograph was taken. In an interview with Gloria Naylor, Morrison explained how the girl, at a party, refused to tell anyone why she was suddenly very weak and bleeding, saying only, “I'll tell you tomorrow,” thereby enabling her lover, who had shot her, to escape safely. The incident haunted Morrison because, in her words, “a woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself.” In this novel, then, Morrison again interrogates the devastation caused by love. As she wrote earlier, in The Bluest Eye, “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly.” Her major characters in Jazz, Joe and Violet Trace and Dorcas Manfred, are neither wicked, nor violent, nor weak, nor stupid, but they do carry the trauma of orphaned childhood made more devastating by the racial terror to which they have borne witness.

In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison contributes significantly to the debate about the canon of American literature in general and, in particular, its underlying discourse of what she calls the “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” She uses 'Africanism' as a term for denoting the undercurrent of blackness in American literature and culture, on the one hand, and as a term for designating the unspeakable in discourses about class, sexuality, issues of power and domination, on the other. The metaphor she employs most prominently is that of the map that needs to be redrawn in order to lay bare the intellectual legacy of the African American in the United States, an endeavor that she compares to “the original charting of the New World” (Playing, 3). The earlier article and the volume are dazzling pieces of scholarship, thoughtful and provocative analyses of the presence of African American characters, themes, language, and structure in American literature. They are grounded in African American criticism and have turned out to be a persistent call to arms answered by an array of scholars. In the following my analysis will be divided into a discussion of the content and main points of Morrison's critical theory, then an investigation of its theoretical background, and, as a third part, recent scholarly responses.

Both pieces of criticism foreground Morrison the scholar, the Professor of the Humanities, with training and various teaching experiences in departments of English and the Humanities, and demonstrate, as Nancy J. Peterson says, her high stature as a writer and her “prominence as a cultural commentator.”

Though much less widely recognized or acclaimed than her fiction, or even her work in the field of literary theory, Toni Morrison's social criticism specifically elaborates on discussions raised elsewhere in her oeuvre. As in her other work, it contains a strong cognitive element, in the sense that she is primarily preoccupied with the way in which language is used by human beings and how it shapes what she calls the “construction of social reality.” Much of this is dealt with in her fiction, which is often fairly straightforward about the social conditions of African Americans, as, for example, in the episode in Song of Solomon, when in a “lecture” dominated by the word not, Railroad Tommy lists many of the things that a black person cannot have.

Nevertheless, Morrison's criticism goes beyond the mere representation of facts. Using the label “cognitive” can take much of the mystery out of the socalled “magic realism” of her work and place it in a context of pragmatics, of a discourse that connects language and the human beings who use it in a framework which puts at the center of intellectual activity embodied minds rather than some kind of textualist grammatology. Language is something that people “do”; it is a part of human behavior and therefore intrinsically of social relevance.

Toni Morrison is best known for her extraordinary novels and her influential essays. However, though less well known, her “shorter pieces” are as remarkable as those, for they share that clear, visionary insight into the fate of Africans in the New World which is the guiding concern of all her work, whether as an editor, a writer, or a teacher. Her abiding artistic impulse is, in the words of one of her own songs, to “cut through the dark and get to the heart” of the complex issues at stake. To date Morrison has produced four of these “shorter works”: the unpublished songs and the story for District Storyville, a 1982 musical set in that district of New Orleans, choreographed by Donald McKayle and based on his 1962 dance of the same name; “Recitatif,” a short story published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka; a play, Dreaming Emmett, written for and produced by the Albany Repertory Theater in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday in January 1986; and the libretto for the opera, Margaret Garner, music by Richard Danielpour, commissioned and produced by the Detroit, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia Opera Houses which premiered at the Detroit Opera in May 2005.

Three of these four pieces are, at the time of writing, unpublished for different reasons, and have received little critical attention. Thus, as indicated, my accounts of them are based primarily on a series of conversations with individuals involved in these collaborations; my sincere thanks to them all, in particular Ms. Morrison.

Beloved (1987) occupies a singular place in Morrison's oeuvre. One of the most important American novels of the post-war era, it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1988) after a national controversy that mobilized Black intellectuals and artists. When first writing the book, Morrison was obsessed with fragments of stories about two different incidents: a child-murder by an ex-slave, and the forgiveness of a young lover who helped her murderer escape the police. Although she cannot explain the connection, something seemed clear to her: “a woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all the value of her life in something outside herself” (CTM, 207). The project later developed into the trilogy Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). The topic - remembrances of slavery around the tragic core of infanticide - partly accounts for the novel's success. Situated in 1873, after the abolition of the Peculiar Institution, Beloved deals with the recollections - what people remember - and the memory of slavery - the act of remembering. It probes its effects on the individual psyche of black and white people, but also the repressed memory of slavery in the make-up of the American nation.

What makes Beloved stand out is the centrality of memory in the poetics of the text and as subject matter. As she acknowledges, Morrison set out to write about the “interior lives” of the slaves to “fill in the blanks” that were left out of the slave narratives when the narrators drew a veil over “proceedings too terrible to relate” (SM, 193,191).

Though critical evaluation of Morrison's novels Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998) has been copious (in descending order, respectively), there has been a curious critical silence concerning what the author herself has described as a trilogy. In spite of the author's indication that her editors imposed the break-up of her original project for Beloved, insisting that it was too long, certain critics have argued that the relationship among the resulting works is tenuous and that most readers are interested only in each individual novel - again in descending order. This fact notwithstanding, there are many valid reasons for considering these three novels as a whole artistic endeavor. This essay intends to invigorate the discussion and point to ways in which critical inquiry might be expanded.

The most obvious and superficial links among the three novels concern the relationship between the temporal and spatial locus of each, what Mikhail Bakhtin would call the chronotope. Beloved is set during the 1870s in the rural area outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, with flashbacks to plantations in Kentucky and (probably) Carolina, and a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, during slavery. The emphasis on the rural is exchanged for the urban beat of “the City” in the 1920s in Jazz, while the flashbacks are centered on the Reconstruction Era of the 1870s. Paradise moves the locus forward to the 1970s to a small-town setting in Ruby, but the memories that constantly surface concern the “Founding Fathers” of Haven in the 1870s after the political failure of Reconstruction, and the second migration during the 1920s to the “perfect” all-black town of Ruby in Oklahoma. The time frame thus set out spans one hundred years of black life in the United States, and the interrelated settings encompass black experience in the rural South, the urban North and the small-town (southern) Mid-West.

Toni Morrison has described writing as the work she could not live without, but she has also expressed the “huge joy” she took in her work as an editor. She edited a range of books, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, on subjects ranging from abortion rights to reparations. But she took particular pride in what she called her contribution to “the shelf,” that is, to the tradition of African American literature. She believed that her presence in the offices of Random House, where she served as senior editor from 1970 to 1988, assured the black author who walked through the door “that he doesn't have to explain everything - somebody is going to understand what he's trying to do, in his terms, not in somebody else's, but in his.” Among the writers to whom she conveyed this assurance were Toni Cade Bambara, Wesley Brown, Lucille Clifton, Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, Nettie Jones, June Jordan, John McCluskey, and Quincy Troupe. No other editor before Morrison or since has boasted a comparable list of African American writers. As an editor, she helped to define two decades of African American literary history.

Although they do not share a common aesthetics the writers on Morrison's roster share a common sensibility which is preoccupied with “the kind of information you can find between the lines of history. It sort of falls off the page, or it's a glance and a reference. It's right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with names.” Whether it is Bambara's description of the Harlem woman who arranges a field trip for the children on her block to the Fifth Avenue toy store F. A. O. Schwarz to teach them a lesson about race and class, or Brown's account of the “tragic magic,” the cool machismo of young black urban men that both preserves their selfhood and dooms them to violent deaths, they reveal cultures and communities observed with care from the inside.

In her seminal essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison throws down the gauntlet. What we do as writers and critics is not just important, it is crucial; it is not just informative, it is formative; it is not just interesting, it profoundly shapes the perception of the world as we, and others, come to “know” it. It is a responsibility that we as critics must take extremely seriously because what we do makes a difference, whether it is fawning over a popular writer whose subtext is actually pernicious to human relationships, or unfairly criticizing a more complex writer struggling to speak from a different world. The choices we make are not gratuitous; they are most often political, emerging from an ideology that we are not even, not necessarily anyway, aware of. If there is one thing that Toni Morrison - author, playwright, librettist, lyricist, Nobel Prize winner, social and literary critic - has taught us, it is that we are all responsible for those choices, and ignorance is not a lawful excuse for committing an infraction: For Morrison “. . . as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.”

But as Morrison herself (following Bakhtin) has noted, “responsibility” is also “response-ability,” the capacity for a dialogue between writer and reading public, often mediated by the critic, which demands that (1) we take the author and her work seriously and meet her on her own terms, and (2) we prepare ourselves, yes, academically, but equally important, psychically to free our minds from the strictures and constraints of the inherited, the given, the unquestioned, the “unspeakable,” in order to meet “marginal” authors on their own terms.