Self-Cancelling Narratives: Explicit Unreliability and Authorial (Ir)Responsibility in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Self-Cancelling Narratives: Explicit Unreliability and Authorial (Ir)Responsibility in Toni Morrison's Fiction Paula Martín-Salván (bio) Introduction This essay emerges from the observation of a recurrent textual phenomenon in Toni Morrison's fiction. A paradigmatic example occurs near the end of her 1992 novel Jazz, when the narrative voice famously exclaims: "I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" (160; emphasis added). This is followed by a confession of the narrator's ineptitude in correctly grasping the characters in the story and of her failure to predict their behavior. The confession affects readers in a radical way, changing perceptions on the narrated facts and the ethical judgments that we were inclined to derive from the narrator's depiction of characters until that moment; it works as a kind of parabasis by bringing the illusion of a bounded diegetic world to a halt, and it generates an ontological and ethical instability which will not be resolved at the end of the text. Because the term "unreliable" is explicitly used in the text, many critics have been inclined to read this as an instance of an unreliable narrator.1 The narratological concept of unreliability, however, falls short to describe the textual device deployed by Morrison and its effects on the reading process, particularly regarding readers' ethical judgments about characters and actions (Phelan, Experiencing 9). The need to appropriately describe this textual phenomenon is, therefore, what drives my argument. Although this textual effect can also be identified in works by Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Zoe Wicomb or Paul Beatty, I would claim similar [End Page 107] moments appear in Morrison's novels with striking recurrence, and hence my attention is devoted to the study of three cases selected from her oeuvre: the aforementioned Jazz, and the two later novels Love (2003) and Home (2012). Another emblematic example may be found at the end of Beloved (1987), where the narrative voice repeats that "this is not a story to pass on" (274, 275). As is frequently noted (Henderson 101; Miller, Conflagration 254–5; Rushdy 55), the implicit command made in the final lines of the novel is broken every time a reader reads it. We only realize it once we reach the end, and we come to the conclusion that the story has indeed been passed on, that we are inevitably affected by the retroactive impact on our reading. The question of the narrator's responsibility over the narrated is thus brought to the forefront. Narratives that include moments of collapse through an explicit confession of unreliability, or through statements which call into question the nature of what has been or is being narrated, undo the narratives to which they refer, forcing the reader to reconsider the fictional pact implicitly established at the beginning of the texts. In the case of African American authors like Beatty or Morrison herself, moreover, the device acquires a further, controversial function in the light of potential expectations of authenticity on the part of a black narrator. The cultural anxieties derived from a demand for authenticity in the context of African American writing has been explored by critics like Shelly Eversley (2004), Gene Andrew Jarrett (2007) and Cameron Leader-Picone (2019). They have identified a thread running through the tradition positing the value of African American fiction on its ability to express authentic experience through an un-mediated voice (Eversley 10; Jarrett 1; Leader-Picone 4–5). This may be observed diachronically, from the textual apparatus enveloping slave narratives to Amiri Baraka's advocacy of "the Real Thing," from the critical appreciation of Dunbar's vernacular or Hurston's folklorism to Wright's defense of naturalism. Explicitly unreliable narrators challenge such demands of authenticity by foregrounding, precisely, the constructed, mediated, and mediating nature of narrative voice. The narrators' explicit acknowledgement of their unreliability in Morrison's novels, moreover, has an immediate effect on the readers' perception of the narrated, particularly on the judgments passed on the characters and their ethical stances. The three novels selected for analysis place situations of racial and gendered violence in the spotlight. Violet and Joe [End Page 108] Trace from Jazz...