What Ricoeur’s hermeneutics reveal about self and identity and aesthetic experience

Overview

Toni Morrison’s interviews with Sigmund Koch reveal the complex interactions between identity and aesthetic experience; more specifically, they reveal the dislocation of the self through the creative process and a moral engagement with an other that is inherent in her writing. For her, the practice of art serves as an anchor to bring a sense of coherence to her identity. Her novels, including The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987), are lauded for their epic themes, their depiction of the cultural inheritance in the lives of African-Americans, and a use of dialogue that is often closer to song than speech. During the first two interviews with Koch, Morrison talks about her early life growing up in Ohio, her experiences at Howard University, and the publication of the her first novel, The Bluest Eye. During the next four interviews she describes in vivid detail the genesis and background to her novel Beloved, before discussing the function of the novel in the 20th century during the last two interviews.

Interpretation

For Toni Morrison, the practice of art affects her identity by providing her access to her “interior self.” Morrison’s description of herself as a child positions her as a static character in a house perpetually flowing with activity, a girl who craves privacy as a means of developing her interior self, which was complex and inextricably linked with reading. Juxtaposed to this is an exterior self that was both decorative and attention-craving, as a second child who believed she had no status in the family. Her earliest desire for privacy was squashed by the large number of family members in the house and also by the economic circumstances she became aware of only retrospectively; she moved a lot, they were very poor, and one landlord set fire to the apartment they were in.

Via the extended family members who often lived with her, she was exposed early on to storytelling and the related world that belonged to her ancestral link to post-slavery. One of Morrison’s most poignant images is that of her great-grandmother alone in a house in Indiana on an 88-acre spread of land. With her sisters she watched her from a distance, almost afraid to enter her house since the woman embodied a phantasmagoric presence, indicative—as Morrison relates later—of the immense history that her great-grandmother lived through. Her description of her great-grandmother as a character embodying a type of magical realism serves as a point of organization in her narrative to delineate her personal connection to the history of slavery and to her family tendencies towards storytelling that, for her, were representative of black history.

These two images—Morrison herself as a static character in a busy house, and her great-grandmother as a figure emblematic of her link to post-slavery—serve the self-representative functions of allowing her narrative to move both regressively and progressively. Regressively these images signify the conflict of finding that “interior, real self,” and embracing family tendencies she long felt hesitant towards. She notes in the first interview, having never lived in an all-black neighborhood, that the task of growing up was

to hang on, to cultivate, to nurture our own culture while at the same time penetrating inroads into the mainstream culture. How that was done has always been, at bottom, the subject of most of my work. How one does that, the mistakes one makes, and what you give up, what you throw away, what you hold on to, what is necessary. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:22)

Her parents and grandparents relied on memory to quote long poems and stories that were part of the history of the race, explaining events with tendencies that veered from a fact-based approach. Eventually, though, she found their lack of scientistic inclinations denied her the publicly verifiable information that her fact-driven attitude sought out. However, when she turned to writing fiction, one can see the ways in which Morrison starts to privilege the progressive power of her interior self and the storytelling that she heard in her youth:

As I became a writer, I went there like a homing pigeon, to that very place that I had a great deal of disdain for as a high school student and a college student. All that way of knowing seemed so backwards, so unintelligent, interesting, but hopelessly ineffective. But as a source for not facts but truth, it was, for me, home, and the home of my imagination has always rested there. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:31)

Here she notes the transformative power of art to draw on early conflicts and core experiences which subsequently invigorated her art, and also illuminated an understanding of her identity. It is through art that Morrison becomes able to make external what had long been most internal to her. Ricoeur’s comment that art can function progressively by sketching the solutions to earlier conflicts shines through clearly here.

It follows that Morrison uses her art as a means of establishing a sense of coherence in her identity. When Koch asks her to speak in generalities about her creative process, she says:

I’m always interested in how central to the lives of men the construction of the house is, and the construction of the population of the house, and how different it is from women. And I remember when we were talking earlier about the first story I wrote, and I was describing to you my son on the couch. He also climbed up on the couch and threw up his orange juice on the paper I was writing on, and I remember distinctly writing around it. Because I had just solved a sentence, a problem, and I wasn’t sure that the sentence would last. I could always clean up orange juice, and I always would say that I think it had some meaning for the rest of my life, because I was always writing around the edges of somebody else’s needs. (Koch, 1987b, tape 3A, 0:12)

This image she presents of writing around the needs of others organizes her narrative in both regressive and progressive ways. Looking at what conflicts or events Morrison is trying to address, it is important to note that up until the time that she wrote Beloved, she worked multiple jobs amidst raising children, negotiating the needs of others to such an extent that she wrote not with daily discipline but with compulsion. Writing for her became a means of survival. As she puts it,

I was doing it because it was the only order I could create . . . the only place that was sovereign for me. It was simply an oasis for me. I had to write. I was thinking so much of getting it right and shaping it, that I never thought of another reader, of a public. (Koch, 1987b, tape 3A, 0:22)

Divorced with two children to tend to, she found herself in a state of uncertainty and interpersonal isolation in which any available time she had was devoted to writing.

By the time Morrison began writing Beloved, she had received a fair amount of critical acclaim which allowed her to organize her day around her writing for the first time in her life. But, instead of negotiating the needs of others, she found new problems in disengaging herself from the psychological space that she created in the novel, which resembled the physical and psychological space of her early years. Her narrative functions progressively here when she talks about trying to maintain a sense of coherence as she discovers the problems of merging her personal and occupational identities together for the first time. Unlike her earlier experiences writing, her work on Beloved shows a turn towards the collective, towards an other, in a way she had not yet experienced in her writing. Beloved “became a way to talk about the history, and the past, and the subject, but I have a lot of fears about writing about the slave world, because it was too big, it lasted so long.” For her, “there was some aspect of it . . . that was unspoken and unimaginable, but had to be described. I suppose it’s like learning to walk, to learn what it means to you” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:08). By making external what is most internal to her there is a certain dislocation of the self in writing. Even so, Morrison still demonstrates the ability to use art as a means of turning personal conflict into social or cultural phenomena.

Her desire to illuminate the complexities of people who had been passed over by much of recorded history reveals that, for Morrison, her art can open up a dialogic space between herself and the created subject that affects her identity by developing a moral engagement with an other. Two poignant images serve as a relevant point of organization into a discussion of otherness in her narrative, emerging around three women. In the second set of research conversations, Koch asks Morrison to discuss the genesis of Beloved (1987), a novel in which the murdered child of a former slave returns to her mother, Margaret Garner, in the tumultuous years following the Civil War. Morrison describes a salient image in the novel in which one of the main characters looks into the water and falls in love with her face. The three women in the story, she implies, are aspects of one another, and gazing into a reflective space has to do with “finding the self in the other which is the beloved, the thing you love regardless of what you do, or what loves you regardless of what you do. The benevolent other—the one whose love you cannot leave” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2B, 0:48). The three women in the story coincide with another important image that appears in her narrative about the enchanted world that she inhabited at first through her familial life and later creatively. Morrison recalls observing her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother together in one room, and ties it to groups of three women who appear regularly in her books. She speaks about this image in a regressive way, noting,

this comes from being quite overwhelmed with being the fourth. . . . I saw my mother, her mother, and her mother in one room, and it must have overwhelmed me in some way because I have repeated that idea without any other details, just the trinity, so to speak, has surfaced often in my work. (Koch, 1987b, tape 1A, 0:35)

At the same time, Beloved is not a work rooted only in the personal but also speaks to historical and social circumstances in which Morrison felt her history enmeshed.

Progressively, Morrison again uses art as a means of transforming the facticity of the image of three women to draw a conclusion about identity herself: there is continuity of the self that exists between the four women, the fourth being Morrison as the writer and observer. Yet on a more social level it elicits what has been unanswered about the world of post-slavery and the complexities of the people who inhabited that world. Morrison says:

I had never thought I would write a book about that period because I never thought that I had the stamina. I just didn’t want to live there, imaginatively, for four or five years. The story seemed to me to be a part of some other stories, that formed a triangle of which the best qualities a woman had—nurturing, love, generosity, and ferocity—frequently was displaced from the self to a thing outside. … I think this instance of Margaret Garner’s situation in which it is so important not to permit the best part of her, the thing that was most beautiful, unsullied, that cannot be tampered with, that cannot be made to suffer, would drive her to a position in which she had no life. (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:11)

By living imaginatively in the difficult psychological space of her novel, Morrison implies that there is a loss of the self to these enormous circumstances she writes about, a tremendous exertion of stamina that firmly situates her as speaking on the social level, thus providing her with the means to an identity.

Hortense Spillers—professor of English, literary critic, and discussant in the second set of interviews about the genesis of Morrison’s creative work—applauds the tendency of the characters in Beloved to seem not only physically real but psychologically imaginable. Morrison states that her goal was “to make them concerned with their own life and the spirit and the blossoming of that life. … You’re not a father but this man. You’re not a mother but this girl. And it’s something only art can do” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:27). Morrison’s work takes on a progressive movement here, intent to fill in the important details in the lives of those often ignored by history. In the final research conversation, which asks about the placement of Morrison’s own work and the trajectory of the novel in the 20th century, she echoes this point again, noting that she has nothing but contempt for the notion of art for the sake of art. What has been necessary since the novel came to form has been the confrontation with situations that were social and political, and not merely rendering an interesting technique. “That is the respectable work of art. That is what it is for” (Koch, 1987b, tape 2A, 0:29).

Overview

Arthur Miller’s legacy as a playwright includes such works as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1952), and A View from the Bridge (1955), among many more. In Miller’s interviews with Sigmund Koch, he discusses each of those works and several others, always with an attention to the social context in which he lived and the system he was living under. Miller reveals that he long attempted to create a social conscience in his work by drawing on his personal experiences growing up in the Depression and the circumstances outside himself, highlighting his belief that the divide between one’s internal and external life is non-existent. He speaks about the moral commitment inherent in art, and how such a commitment builds a system of values into his identity. In the present analysis, Miller does not speak through vivid images as Morrison did, to serve an organizing function in her narrative. Instead, when he discusses his life and art, he draws on value statements that serve the regressive and progressive functions that her uses of images performed.

Interpretation

According to Miller, there is no divide between his internal life and the social and political context in which he lived. Growing up in the era of the Depression, he became especially conscious of the enormous history he was living through:

It is one of those cases where my own internal development corresponded to the destruction of the old order. … Those were revolutionary years. Again, the correspondence between my own inner development and the social collapse made my aesthetic what it is. Namely, that there is no division between the internal life of a human being and his own social, political environment. One is the fish in the water and the other is the water in the fish. (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:42)

Miller’s statement here serves as a major point of organization in his narrative, showing that his identity is shaped by blending together the familial experiences of his early life with the societal conditions of his time period in order to create a social conscience, which he accomplishes through the practice of art. He conceives of his identity as inextricably linked to the circumstances of the external world.

Looking at his narrative regressively, this statement refers to the economic crises that characterized the 1930s, which provided Miller with a great—and at times debilitating—amount of empathy towards others. When families around him in Brooklyn were financially ruined, and while some committed suicide, Miller was unable to rely on the idea that people brought on their own troubles, which he cites as a major development in his thinking. Within his own family he observed the “basic American strand of risk-taking and high dreams of success and a certain reliance on the continuation of the system as it stood” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:18). His father emigrated to the US from Poland by himself at a young age and immediately went to work making women’s coats. His mother, who read widely and quickly, hoped that her children would somehow become connected to the arts. Although his father knew nothing of that, Miller portrays him as seeing quite clearly into the social issues portrayed in a play, and “he was totally honest that way because he had no pretensions. I found that very valuable later on in life when I began to write” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:32). Yet Miller notes what is salient in the center of many of his plays is a father and a son with various relationships to each other. Miller explained that this recurring theme is in part rooted in his own experiences within his family.

His narrative takes on progressive movement here with respect to his statement about the lack of division between internal and external development. The conflict with his father around his father’s belief in the capitalist system, and the burdensome amount of empathy that Miller felt during the Depression, are understood through the larger social context in which he lived. “This sublimated my own conflict with my father and made it possible to deal with him as a social figure” (Koch, 1987a, tape 1B, 0:33). If his work was entirely personal he could not have written it. He found that he could write autobiography unashamedly if he wrote on the social level. In doing so, Miller implies that his writing is not rooted merely in the family sphere of his early experiences but always understood through the larger social context, since the former does not exist outside of the latter. Writing, for him, is a means of transforming the enormous amount of empathy he always felt and applying it to a social level.

Miller also implies that the practice of art requires an ever-present social commitment, transcending mere commentary, and instead demanding a direct engagement with history. His value-laden statements come in the form of a critique of modern theater as he differentiates himself from most contemporary playwrights. He speaks about theater as a mass art which faded with the arrival of movies, decreasing the social involvement in theater and making it elitist. Miller’s comment that serves a symbolic function about the degree of his moral commitment deals with his belief that the majority of playwrights now are “people who are not related . . . to the prophecy of the great drama of the past. That is, saving the country from itself. … The artist back then took it as a given that his play had to do with the salvation of his people” (Koch, 1987a, tape 4A, 0:08).

Regressively, Miller’s critique of modern theater refers to the importance of theater he saw early on in his life. In the 1930s and 1940s, when theater was more of a mass art, going to the theater was part of one’s spiritual existence. Similarly, he claims, the Greek and Elizabethan periods produced a great number of renowned playwrights partially based on an audience who took the theater to be a central element to their lives. In the increasing commercialization of theater, its ability to assume moral responsibilities dissipated, bringing us closer, in Miller’s view, to Toqueville’s claim about America, “We know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

The progressive movement of Miller’s art attempts to transcend what he sees as a recurring problem where the social and political circumstances are ignored, endemic in his view of certain modernist tendencies to focus on form and ignore substance. These modernist practices are essentially evading one of the most basic responsibilities that the artist has, in Miller’s opinion. Similarly, he laments critics who strive for a scientific objectivity they never ascertain in an attempt to make blanket statements about his plays when they are unfamiliar with the historical context in which he was writing. He tells a story in this context of meeting a woman in New York during one production of The Crucible who spent seven years in solitary confinement in China. She saw the play and thought someone understood what she had been going through, observing that the questioning used by judges in The Crucible was not at all unlike the questioning she had been subjugated to in Mao’s China. Miller notes that this work, like his others, involves a certain statement of values in the sense that it is meaningful not only to him but to others, too. By using his plays to achieve this aim, he sees himself instilling in the present an ideal held by playwrights of the past who refused to turn away from societal wrongs.

For Miller, the theater was the most appropriate forum for ideological critiques, a forum where there was a constant integration of action and meaning. In one of his initial conversations with Koch, Miller notes that early in life he was markedly introverted but led a totally extraverted life. “I suspect that what I was doing was following a life of fantasy. And that to me was real life,” he remarks (Koch, 1987a, tape 1A, 0:19). What serves as an important point of organization in Miller’s narrative is this description of himself as an adolescent, enmeshed in theatrical work because he believed that it was the primary means towards upward social mobility. When he read Dostoevsky, “it all changed,” as Miller became aware that art should serve a purpose that is meaningful to others and capable of action in the world, too.

A regressive interpretation of Miller’s statement should address his early experiences in which he saw facts and learning as obstacles that got in the way of his natural inclinations toward acting. While his mother despaired of his scholarship, she forgave everything because she saw him as an extension of herself. At college at the University of Michigan, Miller saw the chance of becoming a playwright as quite remote. He considered pursuing a career as an historian but surrendered the idea when he found the discipline of history inundated with facts. The development of his interest in writing is explained as largely spontaneous: making an impromptu speech at his bar mitzvah that captivated the audience; writing a comedic piece that was stolen by a well-known comedian and subsequently broadcast over the radio; winning an award for a play he wrote in college but being entirely unaware if it was any good. Looking at Miller’s early experiences, it seems that his fascination with history and the belief that his generation was particularly historical, combined with his interior life of fantasy, were crucial in informing his belief about the necessity of meaning and action in art. Yet before “it all changed” by reading Dostoevsky, Miller appears to be addressing his apparent talent but lack of commitment to the arts. His description of himself as performative is very much a “not-Me” description that he feels a certain amount of disdain for.

Interpreting Miller’s narrative progressively to understand how action and meaning become central constructs in his identity requires moving beyond the radicalization that he underwent during the Depression. History continued to move his progress along as a playwright as his work became less explained by spontaneous events—as in adolescence—and instead by what concerns mattered most to him in the external world. The process of identity development becomes one of spontaneity transformed into increasing differentiation of focus on social concerns and hence a greater cohesion of identity. After he wrote The Crucible, the Cold War was in full effect, and in Miller’s terms, circumstances were down to the bare bones of human behavior. He suggests that in the early 1960s, “You had to create an ethos out of yourself” (Koch, 1987a, tape 3B, 0:36). His work at this point began to examine what lies inside the human being that could create the basis for an epic, whilst also concerning itself with the idea of personal conscience. The prophetic idea underlying American history that we were heading towards self-perfection was annihilated with World War II. In the silence and indifference that Miller felt in the 1950s, the goal of his work began to shift: “My plays in that period are attempts to discern whether there is in anybody, in the human animal, in the ones that I deal with, a more extant kind of moral energy” (Koch, 1987a, tape 3B, 0:34). Miller privileges the progressive power of art here to maintain fidelity to what he sees as one of his most fundamental commitments: the constant integration of meaning and action in a work of art and hence in his conception of his own identity, too.