3 epigraphs from PLAYING IN THE DARK

On three epigraphs from Playing in the Dark



Writers use epigraphs, short quotations from other writers, to indicate the tone of their own texts, or to establish a thematic range.  Epigraphs can secure both literary kinship and literary difference.  Perhaps the epigraphs Morrison used in Playing in the Dark promote curiosity, a desire to know what she thought her kinship as a writer and thinker was in relation to three white American males who were esteemed for various contributions to American literary tradition.  Warren and Williams were less esteemed than Eliot, but the inequality dims upon our inspection of how, and for what purpose, Morrison links them to her critique of what was under-acknowledged in the canon of American literature.



The four lines Morrison chose from T. S. Eliot's "Prelude, IV" set a thematic focus for Lecture 1 "Black Matters," itself a prelude for her project on the literary imagination.  Divorced from the context of Eliot's poem, the lines seem to refer to nothing black. Such a perception is wrong from the start.  Read as a part of Eliot's  four poem  imaging of the gritty modern city in the early 20th century, the lines suggest much about darkness and decaying of the human spirit, both in the urban night and morning.



 Poem 1 asks readers to see in their minds "the burnt-out ends of smoky days," "grimy scraps," "chimney-pots," and "the lighting of the lamps" to brighten the dark.



Poem 2 resonates morning in the French Quarter of New Orleans "coming to "consciousness/Of faint stale smells of beer" and hands "That are raising dingy shades/ In a thousand furnished rooms."  Some readers might begin to think of Tennessee Williams; other readers think of decadence, discord, brutality, madness, sin, and despair, the stuff so brilliantly rendered in the film "A Streetcar Named Desire."



Poem 3 refers to a sleeper, a woman who "watched the night revealing / The thousand sordid images" and who upon awakening "clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both sordid hands."  She might have been a denizen of Storyville, a sad and fallen lady of the evening.



Poem 4 refers to a man's "soul stretched tight across the skies," to his "conscience of a blackened street/  Impatient to assume the world." 

Morrison made a clever choice in selecting stanza 2 of poem 4 as her epigraph:



I am moved by fancies  that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.



By doing so, Morrison is hinting that what curled in the mind of the narrator in the poem, in the mind of Eliot's persona, curls and clings in her imagination also.  And what sticks is knowledge that Eliot was forecasting his later and quite more famous poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," touchstones of white male modernist American poetry.  What we have is Morrison's placing trust in her ability to image others and her willingness " to project consciously into the danger zones" such others might represent for her (3).  Thus, the epigraph serves as prelude to Morrison's reading of Sapphira and the Slave Girl and other white-authored works.  Once the  epigraph is examined, we understand better just what is gentle and suffering in Morrison's act of reading black matters, the Africanist or black presence one can detect  in a few classics of American literary imagination.



It is likely Morrison read the version of "Penological Studies: Southern Exposure, 3" that was first published in the September 13, 1968 issue of the New York Review of Book and chose to segregate a part of  two lines  from the poem -----



"…shadows

Bigger than people and blacker than niggers…



in her collecting of Africanist images in white American literature.  But it is very important to know how what she selected appears in  "III . Wet Hair: If Now His Mother Should Come" in Robert Penn Warren's collected poems, in lines 6-9



"On the table already light, and shadows

Bigger than people and black than niggers swinging

On the board walls on the kitchen, one kid ,

The youngest, already asleep



in lines 6-9 from a poem about white-on-white  crime and punishment in the American South;  the murderer Jake's electrocution somehow can't be told without making the shadow black.  Do note Morrison cuts out the word "swinging" from line 7 to prevent, it might be guessed, identification with the song "Strange Fruit."  The subject of Lecture 2 is "Romancing the Shadow," and it includes the fear depicted by Edgar Allen Poe in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," the willfulness in the story of William Dunbar, the historical prototype for William Faulkner's imaginary Thomas Sutpen (1802-1869) in Absolom, Absolom!  The Lecture also includes notice of the excessive punishment the already free Nigger Jim suffers as a result of the "elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanist character's escape" (56), notice of the hell Nigger Jim is put through so that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn can enact a microaggressive romance worthy of Don Quixote.  In accord with the epigraph from Warren, Lecture 2 conducts its own penological study of the Southern exposure implicit in much of American literature.



The epigraph from William Carols William's poem "Adam,"  used for Lecture 3 functions exceptionally well to illuminate the eroticism of Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. "Adam" only slantwise refers to Genesis and Eden, because the Adam in the poem



"…grew up by the sea

on a hot island

inhabited by negroes ---mostly"



And this Adam is an Englishman , a colonial subject in the New World of the Caribbean.  Putting the "black women" who lie in waiting for a boy, displaced by Morrison's epigraph,  back into the poetic segment



It would have been enough

to know that never

never, never, never would

peace come as the sun comes

in the hot islands.

But there was

a special hell besides

where black women lie in waiting

for a boy ---



Naked on a raft

he could see the barracudas

waiting to castrate him

so the saying went --

Circumstances take longer----



Colonialism and colonial dominance will never produce peace,

and the special, additional hell of that situation

is the erotic dread of the black women

who are to be identified as  the women depicted in





 "…the Latin ladies admired him

and under their smiles

dartled the dagger of despair --

in spite of

the most thorough trial --

found his English heart safe

in the roseate steel.  Duty

the angel

which with whip in hand…

---along the low wall of paradise

where they sat and smiled

and flipped their fans

at him



The Adam of Williams' poem is the brother under the skin of Hemingway's characters who so interest Morrison, for truly Adam is a surrogate for the white male writer who is



God's handy man

going quietly into hell's mouth

for a paper of reference---

fetching water to posterity

a British passport

always in his pocket ---

muleback over Costa Rica

eating pâtés of black ants



What Morrison already knew in selecting the epigraph becomes know to her readers belatedly by way of her remarks on two books by Ernest Hemingway.  The epigraph lubricates the reader in a stealthy fashion.  For Morrison, the Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not is "the classic American hero" (70).  And there is a second Harry in the Harry and Marie duo (Adam and Eve) in Cuba, but actually Catherine in The Garden of Eden who reinvents herself as a black woman (the white woman blackened by sun-tanning) in order to be better "nurse shark," better attractive imitation of "black female sexuality" for her husband David Bourne "the narrator/protagonist."  Morrison is certainly asking that we dwell on the sexual commerce of Catherine and David (88-90) in order to grasp the full import of what William Carlos Williams was writing about in his poem.



When we study Morrison's use of epigraph, we understand to a greater extent why we can find her work to be seductive and instructive.  Morrison was a writer who did things in words (language)  in mysterious ways to accomplish her purposes.



SOURCES



T. S. Eliot, "Preludes" ---https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/ preludes -56d22338dc954



Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1998.



William Carlos Williams, "Adam" ---https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/adam2





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            September 21, 2019