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and are being conducted—nor that we judge the quality of a work based on its representation of nonwhite characters. Rather, she encourages us to examine the ways in which the major and championed characteristics of our national [white] literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are . . . responses to a dark, abiding . . . Africanist presence. (5)
That is, Morrison wants to analyze the ways in which canonized white Ameri‑ can literature has defined a positive “quintessential American identity” (44) by contrast with an invented Africanist identity, “raw and savage . . . bound and unfree, rebellious but serviceable” (45), against which whites have been able to define their own civilized virtues. “These topics,” Morrison observes, “seem to me to render the nation’s literature a much more complex and rewarding body of knowledge” (53). Among the many ways in which white writers have employed the Africanist presence, Morrison notes, is the use of black characters as a sign of and “vehicle for,” among other things, “illegal sexuality, fear of madness, expulsion, [and] selfloathing” (52) as well as “to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters” (52–53). For example, Morrison argues that Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937), among other strategic uses of Africanist characters, employs a black crewman on a fishing boat to “solicit our admiration” (80) for the boat’s white captain, protagonist Harry Morgan, a deep-sea fisherman. “Harry Morgan,” Morrison notes, seems to represent the classic American hero: a solitary man battling a government that would limit his freedom and his individuality. He is romantically . . . respectful of the nature he destroys for a living . . . competent . . . virile, free, brave, and moral. (70)
How does Hemingway show the reader that Harry has these qualities? He does so largely by contrasting the protagonist with a “ ‘nigger’ in his crew, a man who, throughout all of part one, has no name” (70). In part two, when Hemingway switches from Harry’s first-person narration to a third-person narrator, the black character is “named” in two different ways: “Harry says ‘Wesley’ when speaking to the black man in direct dialogue; Hemingway writes ‘nigger’ when as narrator he refers to him” (71). The word man, however, is reserved for Harry. Furthermore, “[t]his black character either does not speak (as a ‘nigger’ he is silent) or speaks in very legislated and manipulated ways (as a ‘Wesley’ his speech serves Harry’s needs)” (71). Even when the black man is the first to spot the flying fish for which everyone on board has been waiting, Hemingway does not let him “cry out at the sighting” (73), which would be the natural thing for
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