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.