• Toni Morrison's A MercyA Meditation on Othering
• Dana A. Williams (bio)

Toni Morrison has famously noted that her novels always begin with a question. In The Bluest Eye the question is How do we make sense of a young Black girl's longing for blue eyes at a moment when chants of "Black is beautiful" abound? In Paradise she asks, What happens when you strip away racial markers?—what's left of the story? In Love, we are prompted to wonder, What are the unintended consequences of integration? In A Mercy, the question is about place: What can we know about a place before the people who populated it were racialized?

In each instance, race/racism/racialization undergird the inquiry.¹ That the relationship between literature and race is of especial significance to Morrison is evidenced throughout her fiction, in interviews, and, perhaps most aggressively, in her collection of essays and lectures Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, the first extended exploration of the question of race and literature (and literature's language) she offers us publicly. There she writes: "When does racial 'unconsciousness' or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail?" (Morrison, Playing xii). The queries here are meant to direct our attention to the ways American literature written by white authors often uses constructs of Blackness (characters, sounds, cultures, symbols, and the like) as narrative gearshifts—critical moments of discovery or change. This line of inquiry then leads to an interrogation of the ways the literary enterprise is or is not altruistic as a humanistic enterprise. "When, in a race-conscious culture," Morrison writes, "is that lofty goal actually approximated? When not and why?" (xiii). Her recognition of the fact that so much of early American literature reflected a worldview that linked individual freedom to racial oppression was also a recognition of the limits of this literature. [End Page 101] What would happen if a writer rejected this singular landscape and pursued one absent "the pressure that racialized societies level on the creative process" (xiii)? In its determination to commingle history and fiction to re-create the North American landscape before racism is codified, A Mercy takes up this challenge.²

Morrison's interest in the relation of race and literature and the ways racism compromises literature's potential to enact humanism has a long history. Years before publishing Playing in the Dark, Morrison evidenced an interest in the topic in the classroom, both as student and as teacher. She has noted often in interviews her determination to write a paper on race in Shakespeare as an undergraduate student at Howard University (and how that determination was thwarted). As a theater student under the guidance of Owen Dodson, John Lavelle, Anne Cooke, and James Butcher, Morrison had played the role of Queen Elizabeth in a production of Richard III. And she had observed Dodson's reinterpretation of that play as "Richard and the Three Queens." In short, she was attentive to the ways race informed Shakespeare's work. It would be years before professors and scholars would understand how such explorations taught us more about ourselves and each other when we were attentive to race than when we ignored race. Ironically, they saw efforts to focus on racial undertones in literature as limiting. Color-blind acquiescence was, presumably, the only path to universality. As a faculty member, Morrison pursued the ideas articulated in Playing in the Dark off and on for more than five years with undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton and three William E. Massey Sr. Lectures at Harvard before ultimately publishing the lectures. As a writer, she experimented with removal of the racial codes from language in the short story "Recitatif" and again in the novel Paradise. Both projects foreshadow the work of "unracing" literature to which A Mercy commits itself.

I do not think it is an overstatement to say that critics encouraged Morrison to double down on her examination of the role race plays in literature (really how...

• 托妮·莫里森的《慈悲——对他人的沉思》
• 达纳·A·威廉姆斯（简介）

托妮·莫里森（Toni Morrison）曾说过一句名言：她的小说总是以问题开头。在《最蓝的眼睛》中，问题是在“黑人是美丽的”的口号盛行的时刻，我们如何理解年轻黑人女孩对蓝眼睛的渴望？在《天堂》中，她问道，当你去掉种族标记时会发生什么？——故事还剩下什么？在《爱情》中，我们不禁想知道，整合会带来哪些意想不到的后果？在《仁慈》中，问题是关于地方的：在一个地方的居民被种族化之前，我们能对这个地方了解些什么？

在每一个例子中，种族/种族主义/种族化都加强了调查。¹文学与种族之间的关系对莫里森来说具有特殊的意义，这一点在她的小说、采访中得到了证明，也许最积极的是在​​她的论文集和讲座《在黑暗中玩耍：白人与文学想象力》中得到了证明，这是第一部扩展的著作。她公开向我们提供了对种族和文学（以及文学语言）问题的探索。她在那里写道：“种族‘无意识’或种族意识何时丰富了解释性语言，何时又使解释性语言变得贫乏？在美国这样一个完全种族化的社会中，将一个人的写作自我定位为不分种族和所有其他人，这意味着什么？”赛车需要吗？” （莫里森，演奏十二）。这里的问题旨在引导我们关注白人作家所写的美国文学经常使用黑人结构（人物、声音、文化、符号等）作为叙事齿轮的方式——发现或改变的关键时刻。这一探究路线随后引发了对文学事业作为人文事业是否是利他主义的质疑。莫里森写道：“在一个具有种族意识的文化中，什么时候这个崇高目标才真正实现？什么时候没有，为什么？” (十三).她承认许多早期美国文学反映了一种将个人自由与种族压迫联系起来的世界观，这也是对这种文学局限性的认识。[完第 101 页]如果一位作家拒绝这种奇异的景观并追求一种没有“种族化社会对创作过程施加的压力”的景观（xiii），会发生什么？《慈悲》决心将历史和虚构结合起来，重建种族主义被编入法典之前的北美景观，接受了这一挑战。²

莫里森对种族与文学的关系以及种族主义损害文学发挥人文主义潜力的方式的兴趣由来已久。在出版《在黑暗中玩耍》一书的几年前，莫里森就在课堂上表现出了对这个话题的兴趣，无论是作为学生还是老师。她在采访中经常提到，作为霍华德大学的本科生，她决心写一篇关于莎士比亚种族的论文（以及这一决心如何遭到挫败）。作为一名戏剧专业的学生，​​莫里森在欧文·多德森、约翰·拉维尔、安妮·库克和詹姆斯·布彻的指导下，在一部理查德三世的作品中扮演了伊丽莎白女王的角色。她还观察到多德森将该剧重新诠释为“理查德和三皇后”。简而言之，她很关注种族对莎士比​​亚作品的影响。教授和学者们要过很多年才能明白，当我们关注种族时，这些探索如何让我们更多地了解自己和彼此，而不是忽视种族。讽刺的是，他们认为关注文学中种族色彩的努力是有局限性的。不分肤色的默许大概是实现普遍性的唯一途径。作为一名教员，莫里森在普林斯顿大学与本科生和研究生以及哈佛大学的三场威廉·E·梅西先生讲座中断断续续地研究了《在黑暗中玩耍》中阐述的思想，然后最终出版了这些讲座。作为一名作家，她在短篇小说《Recitatif》中尝试从语言中删除种族代码，并在小说《天堂》中再次尝试。这两个项目都预示着《慈悲》所致力于的“非竞赛”文学作品。

我认为批评家鼓励莫里森加倍努力审视种族在文学中的作用（真的如何......