ABSTRACT
Michelle Dreiding, in “Rethinking the Beginning: Toni Morrison and the Dramatization of Liminality,” observes that the beginnings in Morrison’s novels enact an uncanny moment of disorientation. They are beginnings in medias res, and, more importantly, beginnings of spatial deictic uncertainties that leave a reader with the absence of a stable system of reference. They enact the predicament of a beginning that precludes the fantasy of an absolute point of origin. Morrison’s beginnings self-consciously advocate an imperative to engage in a continual process of re-reading; of revisiting the initial disorientation so as to avoid a “conclusion to living” (as Nietzsche had put it). Dreiding finds that, in these liminal moments, Morrison actualizes the particularly American discourse of the frontier, the privileged locus of “perennial rebirth.” Within this discursive American space of potentiality and of a compulsive return to the border, Dreiding argues, Morrison rewrites the American myth of the frontier and thereby moves to the centre a narrative that has been culturally marginalized. Reading the incipits of Morrison’s novels Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), and Love (2003), each of which dramatize a structural and geographical liminality, Dreiding discovers a spatial poetics necessary for the political project, which in turn opens up the dialogical possibility to “draw a map,” as Morrison puts it, but “without the mandate for conquest.”
