ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison's aim in writing is very often to disrupt alienation with what she calls 'eruptions of funk'. Dismayed by the tremendous influence of bourgeois society on young black women newly arrived from deep-south cities like 'Meridian, Mobile, Aiken, and Baton Rouge', Morrison decries their loss of spontaneity and sensuality. At one level, Morrison writes to awaken her reader's sensitivity, to shake up and disrupt the sensual numbing that accompanies social and psychological alienation. This is the function of her 'eruptions of funk', which include metaphors drawn from past moments of sensual fulfillment as well as the use of lack, deformity and self-mutilation as figures for liberation. Morrison's most radical 'eruption of funk' is the vision of an alternative social world. When 'funk' erupts as myth, its potential for estranging fetishized relationships is minimized because of its distance from the urban and suburban settings that condition the lives of more and more Americans - both black and white.
