CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past. Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition Transforming American Culture TESSA ROYNON 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University press in the UK and in certain other countries # Tessa Roynon 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–969868–4 As printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY At last, for Patrick This page intentionally left blank Preface This book is about the ambivalent engagement with the classical tradition in the fiction of Toni Morrison. Any work of this kind— any study of allusiveness and intertextuality—raises a plethora of now-familiar theoretical anxieties: about influence; about authorial intention and readerly reception. Questions related to ‘the death of the author’ are of course particularly fraught when the author in question is as magnificently alive and as articulate about her own work as is Toni Morrison at the time of my completing this mono- graph. In March 2012, when I gave a lecture at Princeton University entitled ‘Parsing the Classical Toni Morrison’, Morrison herself was among the audience. At the lecture’s end she spoke about the bril- liance of her high school Latin teacher, and referred (for by no means the first time) to the fact that she had been a Classics minor at Howard. She said the classical works she had read at that time (mostly in translation—she does not read Greek) had made an impression on her because ‘they were beautiful’. With regard to the close readings of allusions that I had aired in my lecture, she expressed (also for by no means the first time) her ambivalence, her paradoxical perspective on the extent to which her intertextuality is conscious or motivated: ‘Nothing is deliberate, you know’, she said. ‘Nothing is deliberate . . . but everything I have read seeps in. It all seeps in’. Faced (yet again) with such a wonderful conundrum—one that is so theoretically unsound and yet so completely convincing at the same time—I make no apology for hedging my bets, theoretically, in the readings that constitute this book. Morrison’s familiarity with classical literature and her expressed perspectives on it in interviews and essays—sometimes carefully- formulated, sometimes casually so—make their presence clearly felt in her fiction. Much of her allusiveness, in spite of what she said to me at Princeton, is indisputably ‘deliberate’. On the other hand, many of the resonances, echoes, or dialogues that interest me so much may well be subconscious on her part, and/or they are indistinguishable from what my own familiarity with classical culture and its American receptions leads me to see and hear in her writing. The classical viii Preface scholar Stephen Hinds points out in his 1998 book, Allusion and Intertext, that many ‘interpretive possibilities . . . would be lost if a rigidly polar choice were imposed between the clearly defined allusion on the one hand, and the “mere accidental confluence” on the other’. His own readings demonstrate that to make such a distinction is ultimately impossible anyway. The analyses that follow testify to my own belief that the power of literary writing, particularly that of a writer such as Toni Morrison, lies in no small part in what Hinds calls its ‘allusive inexactitude’, or in the new meanings that such inexacti- tude enables the writer and the reader to co-create. I am indebted to many institutions and many people. At Oxford University Press it has been an honour to work with the editors of Classical Presences, Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for their recommendation of my work and their suggestions for its improvement, and I also wish to thank Hilary O’Shea, Taryn Das Neves, Cathryn Steele, and my copyeditor, Rich- ard Walshe, for all they have done on my behalf. Parts of this book have already appeared, in a different form, elsewhere: I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint, in Chapter 6 of this book, sections of Chapter 22 from African Athena: New Agendas, edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and myself (2011), and to Cambridge University Press for permission to reuse, in Chapter 1 of this book, parts of my article, ‘A New “Romen” Empire: Toni Morrison’s Love and the Classics’, which was published in the Journal of American Studies 41/1: 31–47 (2007). The research with which this book began was originally funded by a postgraduate award from the Arts and Humanities Research Coun- cil. At the University of Warwick, where I completed my doctorate on this subject, I was fortunate to benefit from the insights and support not only of my supervisors, Helen M. Dennis and Daniel Orrells, but also of Karen O’Brien and Thomas Docherty. From my time as a Master’s student at Georgetown University before that, I owe much to Gay Gibson Cima, Lucy Maddox, George O’Brien, and the late (and always-missed) David Kadlec. And from my undergraduate years at Cambridge I wish to acknowledge Alison Hennegan, with whom I first worked on Toni Morrison. Marc C. Conner has been unfailingly generous with his time and his willingness to engage in scholarly exchange, and his example is one I try to follow. Paul Giles and Sarah Meer have patiently offered me advice and encouragement since they encountered my work in Preface ix 2007. In the field of Toni Morrison studies it has been my privilege to benefit from the intellectual and moral support of Justine Tally, Jennifer Terry, and the very many colleagues who have become friends in the Toni Morrison Society. It was a joy to maintain contact with the University of Warwick through the African Athena project. For all that I learned through that experience, and for the ways it has enriched this book, I am indebted (once again) to Daniel Orrells, staunchest of comrades, and to Gurminder K. Bhambra. In 2008 Juliet Becq was generous in sharing her experiences of working with Morrison at the Musée du Louvre, and in 2012 Wendy Belcher and Claudia Brodsky at Princeton made possible my lecture there—an experience which will stay with me always. At Oxford, where I have ‘moved at the margin’ since 2008, there are many people whose interest in and/or support for my work has made all the difference. These include: at the Rothermere American Institute, Nigel Bowles, Laura Gill, and Sally Bayley; at St Peter’s College, Dapo Akande, Mark Damazer, Sondra Hausner, Francis Leneghan, Alison Wiblin, Abigail Williams, and Claire Williams; at the Department for Continuing Education, Sandie Byrne, David Grylls, and Tara Stubbs; at the Faculty of English: Rebecca Beasley, Elleke Boehmer, Laura Marcus, Hayley Morris, Michèle Mendels- sohn, and Lloyd Pratt; at the Faculty of History, Stephen Tuck; and at the Faculty of Classics, Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Tim Whitmarsh. I have been fortunate, as well, to cross paths with many other distinguished Classicists blazing trails in Reception studies, including Barbara Goff, Edith Hall, Avery Willis Hoffman, Brooke Holmes, Miriam Leonard, Patrice Rankine, Phiroze Vasunia, and Maria Wyke. Among the students with whom I have had the pleasure of working thus far, Kathy Clarke and Nicole Sierra have become much-valued experts in their own right. I have dissem- inated and developed aspects of this research at numerous confer- ences in the US, France, and the UK thanks to generous grants from the Passmore Edwards Fund at the Faculty of English, and the John O’Connor Fund at St Peter’s College. I am also grateful to Roger Crisp at St Anne’s and Catherine Paxton at Merton. Finally I wish to thank my friends and all my family, in whose unconditional love, support, and companionship I am so greatly blessed. Tessa Roynon Oxford, October 2012