Tar Baby’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby, no doubt thanks to the popularity of Song of Solomon, received some lengthy, politely worded mixed reviews from the highbrow popular presses when the former was published in 1981 but less literary critical attention until its author received the Nobel Prize in 1993. In 1981, with four novels in print, a frustrated Morrison put one white male interviewer on notice: “I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. . . . It’s like having a linguist who doesn’t understand your language tell you what you’re saying. [Novelist] Stanley Elkin says you need great literature to have great criticism. I think it works the other way around. If there were better criticism, there would be better books” (LeClair 376–77).

If Morrison determined to amend this dearth of useful African American literary criticism and disrupt the trajectory of her own literary critical reception by including a 1993 afterword to the 1970 edition of The Bluest Eye, along with forewords to the 2004 Vintage editions of Sula and Song of Solomon, the most conspicuous thing about the foreword to the 2004 paperback of Tar Baby may be its absence of recriminations. Describing her linguistic choices in The Bluest Eye (her “reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture”; her “effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy” without succumbing to what she calls in Sula a welcoming introductory “lobby”; her failed effort to “shape a silence while breaking it”) as “attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture,” she deems her narrative project as difficult in 1993 as in 1973: “With very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread. And it has taken twenty-five years to gain for her the respectful publication this edition is” (215–16).

Sula’s foreword becomes an endeavor to redress Morrison’s embarrassment at what she now views as its staged opening by delineating the strategies African American writers “can be forced to resort to in trying to accommodate the mere fact of writing about, for, and out of black culture while accommodating and responding to mainstream ‘white culture’” (“Unspeakable Things Unspoken” 154).