The poetics of horror in Toni Morrison’s novels

Abstract

This study examines the narrative complexities and horror incidents that Toni Morrison employs in her fiction to discuss the socio-cultural dilemma of the African American existence. It focuses on the writer’s selected novels whose narratives are built upon horror: Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula and Love. The discourse of horror in Morrison’s fiction provides an important space in the representation of the African American experience. The deployment of a profusion of narrative strategies and terrifying instances projects a horror world that depicts the pain and the struggle of the African American community. These works are essentially constructed using horror as a strategy to explore the painful history of black existence. The study aims at examining the role and significance of horror and the related narrative devices of disruption and disconnectedness employed in the texts to reveal the effects of social exclusion. It evolves on the assumption that horror provides an alternative perception of the experience of the African American society. It is essentially guided by the psychoanalytic concepts of ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Abjection’ propounded by Freud and Kristeva to understand the characters’ violent reactions that emanate from the return of the repressed frustrations and the horrifying instances caused by moral disgust. The study also relies on Propp’s ‘Functions of dramatis personae’ to examine the narratological processes that generate a strange world in the narrative constructions of the selected texts. It employs a qualitative approach that enables us to identify characters with unusual behaviour and the reasons that motivate them to act uncannily. This study establishes that the discourse of horror in Toni Morrison’s novels centres primarily on the problematic issues of alienation and subordination to represent the historical pain of the African American existence. The writer deploys the grotesque as part of horror centred on black characters to reveal the destruction of black humanity. Her novels employ disruptive flashbacks that provide the reader a significant background information and context for an appropriate understanding of the texts. The deployment of the narrative device of defragmentation in the texts serves to connect the fragmented identities that were disrupted by the rigidity of the painful hardships. The narrative construction indicates that disconnectedness in character design affects black characters and most significantly the female ones to decry the self-alienation caused by the phallocentric structure that debases the African American woman. The setting design reveals that an individual’s experience of a given space keeps changing whenever body and mind experience new forms of violence, oppression or elation. In general, Morrison deploys horror in her writings to condemn the fragmentation of the African American society caused by racial marginalisation, phallocentrism and the degeneration of cultural values. The study recommends a further investigation of the relation between horror and magical realism in the writer’s writing to establish similarities as well as differences that exist between the two genres in the representation of the historical African American experience.