Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts , livre ebook

Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts
Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts
Juda Bennett
Cover image entitled “Wings Not Meant to Fly” by Jamea Richmond-Edwards, courtesy of artist (ink, acrylic, and mixed media collage on canvas), 2012.
36" × 36".
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Juda.
Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts / Juda Bennett.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5355-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5357-6 (ebook)
1. Morrison, Toni—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3563.O8749Z55 2014 813'.54—dc23 2013048556
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Johnny
But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.
—Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Spirit: Sula Haunts Beloved
Chapter 3 Houses: Beloved Haunts Paradise
Chapter 4 Matriarchy: Paradise Haunts Love
Chapter 5 Music: Love Haunts Song of Solomon
Chapter 6 Voice: Song of Solomon Haunts Jazz
Chapter 7 Blackness: Jazz Haunts Tar Baby
Chapter 8 Whiteness: Tar Baby Haunts A Mercy
Chapter 9 Mutable Bodies: The Bluest Eye Haunts Home
Chapter 10 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This project grew out of a presentation (“Hitting the Wrong Note”) submitted to Yvonne Atkinson for the ALA Conference panel on “Toni Morrison and Aurality” in San Francisco in 2010. I am indebted to Atkinson and my many new friends at the Toni Morrison Society for making me feel welcomed into a dynamic, creative, and generous community. Inspired by this experience, I attended the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society in Paris, France, in November of 2010, presenting a paper on the queer narrator in Love. I am eternally grateful to the many society members who attended my panel and provided feedback. At this conference, I found it invaluable to meet and speak with Deborah McDowell, Justine Tally, Jan Furman, and others, but one scholar changed my life by stating very clearly, “Write that book!” For the greatest inspiration, wisdom, and wit, I am indebted to Stephanie Li.
The first draft of this book was written during a sabbatical, and I am indebted to the sabbatical committee at The College of New Jersey for seeing merit in this project, which was originally entitled Queering the Ghost. As the project evolved, Cassandra Jackson provided guidance, suggestions, and enthusiasm. I often left her office with a head full of ideas and a renewed passion for the project. Every scholar should be so fortunate as to have someone down the hall, on speed dial, and at lunch, and this project would not have been as rewarding—let alone finished—without her.
I am thankful to the outside reviewers for State University of New York Press for their insightful, careful, and generous readings of the manuscript. One reviewer was very kind to say that even a great manuscript could be made into a better book, and these reviewers have certainly offered guidance, sometimes very specific and sometimes quite expansive, that has definitely moved this book to a better place.
State University of New York Press has been a joy to work with, and I am especially thankful to Beth Bouloukos for her important role as support, guide, and advocate, and Rafael Chaiken for his role in shepherding the book to press.
I have been teaching the works of Toni Morrison for two decades, and I have been reading her for a much longer time. I first read Song of Solomon while living in a commune in Ithaca, New York. I remember opening the flap to my tipi in order to get more light because I wanted to read into the night. This study of Morrison really starts in a tipi. It starts with Toni Morrison in a tipi with me, her pages illuminated by moonlight, her presence a blur of black and white in the moonlight. There is a real person responsible for those words, and I am deeply thankful for the gifts she has given the world.
I am especially thankful to my partner, John Bennett, and our beautiful child, for reminding me that a productive life does not stop either at the front door of a house nor at the door of the office. The heart in this project belongs to you.
Chapter 1

Introduction
Bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death) is the ultimate queer act.
—Sharon P. Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
I am very happy to hear that my books haunt.
—Toni Morrison, in Nellie McKay, Conversations with Toni Morrison
In delivering her acceptance speech to the Nobel committee in 1993, Toni Morrison invoked the ghosts of past recipients: “I entered this hall pleasantly haunted by those who have entered it before me.” Ten years later, Morrison explains what she meant by this statement: “I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert. If you are really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life that is on top. It’s not spooky, necessarily. It might be. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s something I relish, rather than run from” (Morrison, “Toni Morrison’s ‘Good Ghosts’ ”). I begin this book imagining Morrison’s many memorable ghosts—L from Love, Circe from Song of Solomon, and Dorcas from Jazz (to name just a few)—haunted by Beloved. What they tell us about Morrison’s most famous specter is rather simple but surprisingly important. She has captivated readers, so much so that all other ghosts in the Morrison canon have had to fight for their due. Beloved, they remind us, is just one of many specters and not even the first one to be fully realized in the Morrison canon. Why must she eclipse the others, and what do we learn from listening to the others, asking all of them to speak in chorus?
Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts queers one of the most fertile and beloved topics in Toni Morrison scholarship, the ghost. Moving beyond, but not ignoring, Morrison’s representation of ghosts as the forgotten or occluded past, the book uncovers how Morrison imagines the spectral sphere as always already queer, a provocation and challenge to heteronormativity—with the ghost sometimes an active participant in disruptions of compulsory heterosexuality, sometimes a figure embodying closet desires, and sometimes a disembodied emanation that counterpoints homophobia. In the introduction to In a Queer Time and Place, Judith Halberstam argues that “[f]or the purposes of [her] book, ‘queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (6). It is interesting to note that such an important queer theorist as late as 2005 must define the term as if it were still a new concept in the field, but such are the implicit demands of such a flexible term. It is this flexibility that is both its strength and weakness. In 2011, an anthology of queer theorists (a virtual who’s who in the field), debated the meanings, future, and even limitations of the term in After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, edited by Jonathan Goldberg and others. In this study I have tried both to capitalize on the term’s flexibility while also holding close to Halberstam’s definition and its emphasis on “nonnormative logics,” which I take to pursue an antiessentialist inquiry into structures of power and identity.
The ghost may not always be queer in the way we often imagine lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender identities, but in Morrison the apparition inhabits, and perhaps may even be said to attract, a representational field of queer valences around itself, supporting Kathleen Brogan’s argument that in contemporary ethnic women’s literature “ghost stories are offered as an alternative—or challenge—to ‘official’ dominant history” (17). In Morrison, the ghost is at the center of queer subterfuge, disruption, and challenge. And there are many of them—everything from old-world hauntings to postmodern erasures, dead or disembodied narrators to fleeting shadows and visions, strange eruptions of sound and music to the indecipherable and uncanny. Morrison’s ghosts are at turns fascinating presences, disturbing absences, but mostly provocative embodiments of both and therefore prime figures to trouble the binaries that queer theory seeks to deconstruct.
This project embraces a definition of queering as a broad challenge to all forces of convention and conformity, but it also addresses a very specific nexus of representational and reading practices centered upon the homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual figure. The ease with which queer readings may erase race is the subject of the next chapter, which situates Morrison’s work within current debates