Introduction to the Fiction

One of Morrison’s favorite metaphors to describe her fictional project is that of the house and home. “If I had to live in a racial house,” she wrote in the landmark essay “Home” (1997), “it was important ... to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, ... but rather an open house” (H 4). In this image, the “house” in need of rebuilding stands for many things at once: for mainstream American ideology, for the national literary canon, for the genre of the novel, and even for language itself. The challenge Morrison sets herself is to transform these flawed but powerful structures, and to create a better version of reality that she conceives of as “home.” The title of her most recent novel, Home, therefore comes as no surprise. From the very beginning of her writing career, from the early 1960s when she was working on the short story that was to become The Bluest Eye, she set out quite deliberately and self-consciously to create literature that was different from what had gone before.

Morrison writes slowly, with great forethought and deliberation. She reworks her drafts until she is completely satisfied, and until the writing appears “effortless” (TG 123). The result is a dense, allusive prose that demands to be read aloud and that richly repays rereading and close analysis. Paradoxically, it is the complex layeredness of her writing that, on the one hand, makes her an obvious comparison with other innovators such as Joyce, Woolf, Ellison, Faulkner, and Bambara, and that, on the other, ensures the uniqueness of her vision and of her voice. In her foreword to Sula, Morrison describes her “sensibility” as “highly political and passionately aesthetic” (S xi). As far as she is concerned, aesthetic integrity and political effectiveness are inseparable, and to try to distinguish the way something is written from the influence it has is nonsensical and futile. When setting out on a study of this author, it is essential always to bear in mind that the unifying impulse in her work – that of perpetually taking preexisting cultural structures apart and revising, rewriting, reenvisioning, or rebuilding them into new and better forms – is always and already both an artistic and a political process.