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ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison is not conventionally viewed as a humourist or comic novelist; her chosen subject-matter has inevitably led critics to explore the bleak, tragic and painful dimensions of her writing.Her deployment of both comic anger and of the absurd dimensions of black American history, however, has yet to be properly recognised. This article does not seek to demonstrate Morrison’s place within the tradition of African American women’s politicised humour, however rightful and obscured that place may be. My analysis here instead builds on the general idea that black humour has serious concerns to examine one very specific phenomenon: that of Morrison as a theorist of laughter. In an unprecedented reading, I argue that Morrison’s fiction contains within it a sustained and sophisticated consideration of the act of laughter, the sound of laughter, the look of laughter, and the power of laughter. I am interested in the aesthetic and political dimensions of Morrison’s representation of laugher itself – in her descriptions of not just why but how characters laugh, and of her detailed attention to the variously transformative effects of the act of laughing. Acknowledging this author’s preoccupation with the seriousness of laughter is key to understanding her work, her position within twentieth/twenty-first century black American cultural production, and the complex nature of her intellectual legacy. After tracing a neglected genealogy of black women’s laughter through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, my exploration focuses on the three ‘post-migration novels’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See for example Tucker 159–60, or Watkins 402, 441.
2. On Sula as satire see Bergenholz.
3. Farebrother, comments in reader’s report to author. I am grateful to Rachel Farebrother for her careful reading of this article in draft form, for her many invaluable suggestions for its improvement, and for recommending several works of scholarship that have shaped its argument.
4. See Fraser and Griffin.
5. See Lowe, Jump at the Sun.
6. Although rarely referenced in current scholarship, when first published Willis’s work was in the vanguard of single-authored studies of black American women writers. This enables her to make the statement quoted above in such generalised terms. She first published the original article that became her Morrison chapter, under the title ‘Eruptions of Funk.’ in Black American Literature Forum 16.1 (1982).
7. Willis makes one reference to humour – see 44.
8. See chapters 2 and 3 in Watkins.
9. This is Chasar’s only mention of Morrison besides his opening gambit that she is, like Hughes, a ‘noisy’ writer (57)
10. See Roynon, The Classical Tradition, 163–65.
11. For Morrison’s scepticism in interviews about some aspects of the Harlem Renaissance see Taylor-Guthrie 233 and Denard 37.
12. See also Chasar on Hughes’s ‘Minstrel Man’: 72–73.
13. Catherine Keyser’s chapter on Fauset in her book Playing Smart exactly exemplifies this process.
14. For quotations from Fauset’s essay see Chasar 62; Watkins 168 and 204–05. Tucker does not mention Fauset at all, and Lowe does not mention this essay by name in the Oxford Companion entry on ‘humor’.
15. Wall discusses Fauset’s essay in detail on 92–94.
16. As Rachel Farebrother argues, the emotional subtlety of Fauset’s fiction and non-fiction in general is still underestimated (reader’s report to the author).
17. This book’s first page explains that its title is a quotation from Hurston to Carl Van Vechten, written in 1934, ‘referring to a series of photographs he had taken of her’ (np).
18. See Wall 108–12.
19. Books such as Lena Hill’s Visualising Blackness (Citation2014) and Nicole Brittingham Furlonge’s Race Sounds (Citation2018) discuss Hurston and Ellison in comparative context, but Wall’s suggestion of Ellison’s debt to Hurston is distinctive.
20. See Roynon, ‘Ellison and Literary Modernism’.
21. For similar sentiments see Ellison, Shadow and Act 40; 137; 249; see also Wall’s discussion of Ellison’s essay, ‘An Extravagance of Laughter’ (Wall 150).
22. See Wall 176–86.
23. On Jazz and The Winter’s Tale see Conner; see Roynon, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition 107–08.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tessa Roynon
Tessa Roynon is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (2012), the prize-winning monograph Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture (2013), and The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction (2021). She is the co-editor of African Athena: New Agendas (2011), ‘Ovid and Identity in the Twenty-First Century’ (special issue of The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2019), and Global Ralph Ellison: Aesthetics and Politics Beyond US Borders (2021). After teaching for 12 years on temporary contracts at the University of Oxford, she has now left academia and works as the founding Librarian at The Swan School, a new, diverse and dynamic comprehensive school in Oxford.