One of the latest targets of schools, libraries and states looking to ban certain books is Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose death in the summer of 2019, unleashed a flood of words upon the world. Elegies from artists and readers streamed down social media feeds; obituaries from critics and friends pooled in the usual venues. The New Yorker - which published her fiction exactly once in her lifetime - collected crystalline musings from Hilton Als, who admitted he had insulted Morrison, and Doreen St. Félix, who admitted she had feared her. The New York Times ran an assessment saying she began as a disciple both of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, whom she absorbed splendidly in Song of Solomon, which seems likely to be a permanent work. Wading around in all this eulogizing, I remember thinking that the only words I wanted to read were hers. Now, even more so, since Song of Solomon has made its way to the banned book list.
Vintage UK published new editions of her fiction. Galleries showed artwork inspired by her books. USPS issued a Forever stamp. An edition of her quotations and a book called The Toni Morrison Book Club appeared, as if she were an inspiration board or a grandmotherly griot. As novelist A. J. Verdelle writes in Miss Chloe, a memoir whose title refers to Morrison’s birth name, “Now that she’s gone, she’s a literary monument.”
Princeton University, where Morrison taught for 17 years and where the building that now houses the African American Studies department was renamed for her, joined all this memorializing with an exhibit from her archives.
A fire at her home in Hudson, New York, in 1993 devoured much of the material surrounding Morrison’s early novels: notes, outlines, letters, diagrams. Morrison had also scribbled notes in the margins of her day planners, some of which had survived the flames.
An exhibit of archival materials is about as close to putting an author in a museum as you can get. It sits somewhere between, say, a tour of the writer’s home - which feels akin to celebrity worship - and an exploration of the writer’s words, which feels like the scholar’s remit. At what level should the curation be pitched? How biographical should the placards be, how academic? The question that hovers over all literary tourism of this kind is: Who is this for exactly?
This question intensifies when it comes to Toni Morrison. Morrison was an archetypal writer: she was on the staff of her high school newspaper; she acted in Shakespearean plays at Howard University; she experimented with pen names (Should she go by Chloe, her given name, or Toni, a shortening of her baptismal name, Anthony?); she wrote insecure letters to editors about whether The Bluest Eye was a real novel. Morrison was truly exceptional, too - a black woman born in 1931 who did not go just to college (already a rarity) but also to graduate school at Cornell in 1955, where she wrote a master’s thesis on Faulkner and Woolf, both of whom had only recently become canonical. Morrison is still one of the only black editors to dot the snowy landscape of publishing; after she left Random House in 1983, the number of black authors published there dropped precipitously.
Despite the seemingly widespread availability of artifacts of Morrison’s public persona, one cannot assume that the average American knows anything of her singular life. This is the biographical conundrum. When it comes to the writing, the question of audience gets even more complicated. Her novels are by now classic works of American literature that can be considered in the context of their making and reception: When, how, and with what influences and responses? But the books are difficult, and they are not well known enough for her materials to be exhibited without substantial supporting analysis.
She was also very methodical. During her research for A Mercy, she questioned when Native Americans started calling themselves Indians.
Morrison had initially planned for Beloved to reach beyond the nineteenth century. I thought she had simply connected the bloodlines of its characters to those in Jazz - Beloved running pregnant and naked off the page of one novel and onto the page of the next, where she is renamed Wild and gives birth to the hero, Joe Trace. But, in a fictional family tree, there are alternative lineages - a different putative child of Beloved and Paul D named Susannah. "The ghost” Beloved would age slower than other people and thus be able to reappear as a maid in a household in the 80s. Morrison never completed this tripartite project, perhaps because she could not sustain this more whimsical conceit of a ghost as she immersed herself in the history of slavery’s brutalities.
It does raise an interesting question, though: What do we seek in the remnants that writers leave behind? A museum, an archive, the mounting of a monument, a kind of memorial? As the toppling of even the grandest looking ones over the last few years has shown, the foundations of monuments are far more unstable, our feelings about them far more fickle, and the meanings we find in them far more fluid than their sturdy appearance would suggest.
Toni Morrison was not averse to monuments. She was a diva. She knew the worth of her work and was unembarrassed to be honored for it. She respected art and history, even - perhaps especially - their gravest distortions and atrocities.
On this point, Morrison was consistent. In 1974 she published The Black Book, a compendium of historical fragments of black life - some, powerful testaments to cultural and literal survival; others, like Amos ‘n’ Andy, embarrassing stereotypes.
I fear that in the rush to monumentalize Morrison, to make her a palatable icon of black wisdom or black joy or black excellence, we may inadvertently veil - even shroud - her with beatifying (or burnt-edged) sheets.
But to tear down a monumental figure or to prettify it are not our only options. Morrison’s own work is instructive in this regard. She had a hard-won sense of how we ought to attend to cultural artifacts, whether they were what she called dark valleys of unraised consciousness, or the canonical works of art and literature that inspire and disgust us. Much of her criticism - and some of her fiction as well - was aimed at uncovering the roiling, sometimes disturbing forces underlying the creation of art.
Morrison did not want to erase this art, she wanted to know how it worked; she was interested in what the image of black bodies enabled for those white writers, and why. So careful, so intelligent was she that even her sharpest critique bestowed dignity on its object. I would describe her sensibility as a combination of grace and acuity, as the highest form of discernment, as what black people first named shade, which is not just a vicious slur fight but rather when reading goes to the fine point. Take Morrison’s equanimity about the blatant racism in an Ernest Hemingway novel: “an author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them.” Or her plainly accurate description of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as amazing and troubling.
Morrison teaches you to read this way - even to read her this way. It seems that The Bluest Eye is in conversation with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. But Morrison claimed that she wrote a book she wanted to read and by her poignant premise of a little black girl who wants blue eyes.
How do you mourn without worshipping a monument or desecrating it? How do you mourn a monument? You read it. You write it.
People love to quote Morrison on how there is no suitable memorial of slavery, not even a small bench by the road. I prefer to quote the original “Site of Memory,” Morrison’s wonderfully strange essay on the relations between fiction and memoir, image and text, revelation and obscurity, and the obligations of art and of history. She mentions that, as an editor, she thought she understood writers better than their most careful critics, because in examining the manuscript in each of its subsequent stages she knew the author’s process, how his or her mind worked, what was effortless, what took time, from where the ‘solution’ to a problem came, But then she realized that there is something more mysterious about how the act of imagination is bound up with memory.
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. Floods is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding.
Many people will remember Toni Morrison for her museum-worthy life, for the career as an editor, teacher, and writer that Princeton has conscientiously archived and deftly curated. But I know that I will remember her for elaborate metaphors, for what her unaccountable rushes of imagination carved into our ground, for what spills into place and what floods in me, whenever I reread her.
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