Toni Morrison’s two most significant works of literary criticism began as scholarly lectures that grew out of a course she taught for years, “Studies in American Africanism.” Her essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” was first delivered as the Turner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan in 1988. Her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is based on the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies she gave at Harvard in 1990. According to Morrison, those talks had landed like a scandal.
“The English department was just appalled that I would ‘race’ such writers as Hemingway, Cather, and Stein,” she later said. “The African American Studies department was appalled, too. They wondered why I was focusing on these traditional white writers.” Morrison’s critical writing on white canonical texts was indeed confrontational on the question of race, but it was also communitarian, brimming with affective ambivalence, a tender and meticulous excoriation of the American authors among whom she assumed her place.
This is why I find it so frustrating to come across items such as a 2019 New York Times op-ed, “Did Harold Bloom or Toni Morrison Win the Literary Canon Wars?” This piece claimed that, contra a more traditional scholar such as Bloom, “Ms. Morrison viewed literary canons as the contingent products of history and associated forms of domination and erasure, not as the timeless embodiments of universal human experiences or values...Her priorities, which were shared by a generation of scholars pursuing race, gender- and cultural studies-based approaches in the humanities, led toward a diversification of the canon.”
Whether algorithmic or illiterate, hot takes like these ignore the fact that Morrison was deeply and expressly committed to the canon. Indeed, in her criticism, she was as skeptical of its anti-intellectual attackers as of its blowhard defenders, writing:
Not only may the hands of the gun-slinging cowboy-scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration (the sacred texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This cannon fodder may kill the canon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, etc., etc., etc. There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them.
She even complained that the canon “controversy…has degenerated into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” This is far from the canon-wrecking cancel-culture caricature painted by the New York Times.
Morrison the critic did not disparage or derogate the canon. Rather, she diagnosed it, with the withering air of an analyst for whom nothing is personal, saying for example: “An author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them.” Morrison always focused on ideological symptoms over stated beliefs, on literary imagination over authorial biography. Rather than adjudicating an author’s historical actions, she queried their fictional words: “How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work?”
That said, to pretend that just because an author was not racist, their character’s point of view or diction is not racial would be just as much of a folly. In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison reflected, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference...Every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” In other words, when it comes to the way race works in literature, denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.
Morrison’s posture was instead to treat race and racism as worthy of interest, but unworthy of debate. Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence or distorted presence of race in American literature, she told us: Look again! No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it? This begins with something as simple as the act of noticing.
What does Morrison the critic notice? In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” she proposes “the examination and reinterpretation of the American canon,” the favorite “founding nineteenth-century works,” for the shadows of race that flicker within them. She likens these to “ghosts in the machine...that can distort the workings of the machine and can also make it work.” In Playing in the Dark, she develops this argument at length, showing that “through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts,” an Africanist presence, “real or fabricated,” was “crucial” to Americans’ “sense of Americanness.”
Morrison’s way of reading of this Africanist presence in American literature embraces what she elsewhere calls W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “outside/inside double consciousness”—turning it into “a strategy” that postulates “the inwardness of the outside.” A case in point is her bravura reading, in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). She reads this masterpiece from the inside, as an American writer, and from the outside, as someone Melville probably did not imagine: a black reader. (Morrison generally did not upper-case “black” to refer to people and nor do I.)
Morrison prefaces her analysis of Moby Dick with a characteristic caveat about the author’s relationship to race:
I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in some simple and simple-minded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology.
The object of this reading is not Melville, who, as Morrison points out, “called himself Typee, signed himself Tawney, identified himself as Ishmael,” and wrote ruthless critiques of missionary journeys. The object, rather, is his “complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text.”
Though it is not often remarked upon, Morrison’s analysis of Moby Dick is a classic example of what literary critics call “symptomatic reading,” a method inflected by psychoanalysis and Marxism. This method treats features of a text as signs of an underlying pathology or ideology, the way shadows sighted from the surface can hint at what’s swimming in the depths. Yet Morrison’s critique does not seek to condemn or dismiss the canonical text for this, but rather to, as she says, “enhance” it.
So, for instance, she interprets Captain Ahab’s “dismemberment”—his wooden leg—as a version of “the trauma of racism” that is “for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self... a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis.” She also notices, in a Marxist vein, that the crew of the Pequod is a “multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat...at work to produce a commodity, but...diverted and converted from that labor” by Ahab’s disfigured intellectual and ideological quest.
Most stirringly, Morrison uses these observations to argue that the titular behemoth is a figure for white supremacy. She quotes Melville to demonstrate that, for him, the “whiteness of the whale” is “formed in fright”; it “destroys all sin” and is a “patriot to heaven”; and “in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.” Morrison emphasizes that the whale symbolizes not the annihilating monstrosity of “white people, but whiteness idealized.” This brilliant exegesis showcases how noticing race in the novel helps us appreciate its profundity more.
Morrison’s reading of Moby Dick spilled beyond “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken.” In a 1990 interview about her argument, the journalist Bill Moyers declared to her, of the bestselling books on the eve of the Civil War: “Your people never show up in the novels of that time.” Morrison gently contested this, saying, “Well, they do. They show up...It’s in Melville, it’s everywhere in Poe.” These are aesthetic figures rather than three-dimensional characters: “getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the nineteenth century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with…classic complexities, but not real flesh-and-blood people.”
She raised a pattern in Moby Dick as an example of this complex symbolism: “He gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They’re paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg is the shadow of Ishmael. They all have them, and they work together in tandem.” She explained that, “even though the realistic representation is not there, the information, subtextual information…is all self-reflexive, it’s all about the fabrication of a white male American.” This is one meaning of her title, which also appears as an uncanny refrain in her 1987 novel Beloved: “Unspeakable things unspoken. Always we are defining ourselves by the other.”
Morrison’s critical engagements with perhaps the most famous of what she calls these “black–white pairings” in American literature also used the “inwardness of the outside” as a reading strategy. In the same interview with Moyer, she drew to his attention that young, white Huck Finn “becomes a moral person because of his association with this black man who is never called a man…to Mark Twain’s credit, he provides an extraordinary scene where you realize that Jim has a wife, and has a child, and he’s trying to get home…And suddenly there’s this man who has a context.”
In her brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn in Playing in the Dark, she castigates the way critics of Twain’s 1884 novel had thus far tended to “focus on its celebration of savvy innocence, at the same time voicing polite embarrassment over the symptomatic racial attitude it enforces.” Morrison, by contrast, never dismisses or defends the racism in that novel in her writings on it. Instead, she considers its aesthetic and ideological function—and its narrative one: “Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed...freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.”
She goes on to make a counterintuitive claim for Huckleberry Finn’s canonicity: “The book may indeed be ‘great’ because in its structure, in the hell it puts its readers through at the end, the frontal debate it forces, it simulates and describes the parasitical nature of white freedom.” This contention—that Twain’s novel is great not despite but because of the hell it puts us through—is possible only under Morrison’s unflinching double gaze. Rather than abandon or censor it, she suggests we reevaluate this “beautifully complicated work.” She even makes a case here that “the term nigger [is] inextricable from Huck’s deliberations about who and what he himself is or, more precisely, is not.”
In Morrison’s later introduction to a 1996 edition of Huckleberry Finn, she describes an array of negative feelings natural for any black reader encountering that word so many times on the page: embarrassment, boredom, annoyance, alarm. But she also acknowledges, as an American writer, the novel’s satisfactions, its “riveting episodes of flight, of cunning”; the “renegade tongue and sharp intelligence” of its voice; its convincing commentary and “liberating language.” Ultimately, most compelling of all to Morrison is the co-presence of both kinds of response: “the combination of delight and fearful agitation lying entwined like crossed fingers in the pages” of Twain’s novel.
Huckleberry Finn's atmosphere of tragicomic contradiction produces an ongoing double feeling in Morrison: neither pure love nor pure hate, but a lively, curious love–hate, so to speak, that inspires her to reread, to notice anew, to track “the source of my unease reading this amazing, troubling book.” She concludes, “My fury at the maze of deceit, the risk of personal harm that a white child is forced to negotiate in a race-inflected society, is dissipated by the exquisite uses to which Twain puts that maze, that risk.” Doubling down on trouble, punning on the maze in “amazing,” serious and furious and admiring at once, Morrison’s readings of “this amazing, troubling book” is as Janus-faced as Twain’s text itself.
It turns out that Morrison was thinking about race in Twain’s novel as early as 1983, and in another form entirely. She sent to her agents a filmic treatment of Huck Finn with the bold idea that Richard Pryor should play the role of Jim. Interestingly, her synopsis of Twain’s novel in this treatment foreshadows one of her later scholarly arguments: that Jim is a thwarted paternal figure to Huck. And the language of her pitch is riven with the rich contradictions—of the interracial duo, of double consciousness, of tragicomic feeling—endemic to her sensibility as a critic, but also to her style as a creative writer.
It is unsurprising then that the “black–white pairing” so key to Morrison’s interpretations of American literature found its way into her fiction—in gender-swapped form. In Beloved, for instance, Amy Denver, a white girl fleeing indentured servitude, pairs up with Sethe, a black mother fleeing enslavement. Amy wisecracks nonstop, searches for “huckleberries,” and claims she “wouldn’t be caught dead in daylight on a busy river with a runaway,” yet takes pains to care for Sethe’s wounds, and midwifes her baby on a boat on the banks of the Ohio River. Is this not Morrison signifying on Twain and Melville both?
Why can’t literature itself be a kind of criticism? In a 1981 essay, Morrison notes that while, historically, “the great critics were the writers,” literature has oddly become “the only discipline in which the scholars do not produce what they criticize.” She argues that “the individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work.”
Writing back to—or alongside—the canon clearly sparked Morrison’s artistic imagination as well as her scholarly one. In this sense, having one critical eye and one creative eye could be seen as yet another version of Morrison’s strategic double consciousness. It gifted her with what Du Bois called “second-sight,” or what I like to think of as the 3D vision produced by glasses with lenses of different colors.
Adapted from On Morrison, by Namwali Serpell. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Namwali Serpell. All rights reserved.