Sula’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

Sula, published in 1973, may have been one of ten finalists for the National Book Award in 1975, but its critical trajectory was nonetheless nearly identical to that of The Bluest Eye and almost always connected to The Bluest Eye. Morrison’s foreword to the 2004 Vintage edition of Sula attributes this initially rocky path to the New Critical flight in the 1950s away from any accusation of being labeled a politically minded fiction writer, an awkward situation which became acute for African American writers in the racially thorny 1960s. Converting her concerns, per her usual way, into a question, in this case “What could be so bad about being socially astute, politically aware in literature?” she turned her attention to the source of the panic and the ways by which some artists and intellectuals sought to assuage it.

As a classical scholar, Morrison understood that derision toward politics in literature was either undirected at or unheeded by master writers such as Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Yet she struggled to complete Sula hard upon the heels of poor sales of and depressing reactions to The Bluest Eye by black and white reviewers alike, who ultimately questioned both books on the grounds that political fiction is not art. Morrison repudiates this critique, denying that fiction alleged political is “less likely to have aesthetic value because politics—all politics—is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production” (Sula foreword xi).

Because so many of these New Critics ignored the formalist criteria they themselves advocated, however, Morrison dismissed most 1970s commentary on The Bluest Eye as having little merit: “If the novel was [deemed] good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them.” With Sula, she continued to disregard the superficiality of such opinions, along with the problematic stigma of being a problem to be solved rather than a writer to be read.