Document Type
Article
Abstract
Beginnings in Toni Morrison's novels enact an uncanny moment of disorientation. They are beginnings in medias res, and, more importantly, beginnings of spatial deictic uncertainties that leave a reader with the absence of a stable system of reference. They enact the predicament of a beginning that precludes the fantasy of an absolute point of origin. Morrison's beginnings self-consciously advocate an imperative to engage in a continual process of re-reading, of revisiting the initial disorientation so as to avoid a "conclusion to living." (Nietzsche) I want to argue that it is in these liminal moments of beginnings of novels that Morrison actualizes the particularly American discourse of the frontier; the privileged locus of "perennial rebirth." (Turner) It is within this discursive American space of potentiality and of a compulsive return to the border that Toni Morrison sets out to a revisionist project, rewriting the American myth of the frontier and moving to the center a narrative that has been culturally marginalized. The paper presents readings of the incipits of Morrison's novels Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997) and Love (2003); incipits that dramatize a structural and geographical liminality, that establish a spatial poetics necessary for the political project, and that open up the dialogical possibility to "draw a map […] without the mandate for conquest." (Morrison)
Repository Citation
Dreiding, Michelle. "Rethinking the Beginning: Toni Morrison and the Dramatization of Liminality." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1–13. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol14/iss3/17