Passing of Toni Morrison
 

I'm interested to see if folks here have anything to say about the death of American novelist and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, at 88. I'm not particularly knowledgable about her or her work but admired the novels I read a long time ago very much, especially The Bluest Eye and Beloved.

Others here have expressed admiration for her, I believe, and I recall at least one radically negative opinion being aired, too.

The popular press is saying things like "towering figure", and I'm wondering how members of this community assess her legacy and influence.

Any comments?

Beloved blew the top off my head when I read it. It was fairly early in my reading of African American literature - I grew up in Europe - and I'd thought well, I know the American experience. I did not. So I remain forever grateful to Morrison for opening my eyes. Her work introduced me to a constellation of tremendous prose - Ellison, Wright, DuBois, Baldwin, what have you - to a new realm of American experience, to another and telling vision of my homeland, to a new vision of art. I will forever respect and admire and indeed love her for that. I admire Maya Angelou, but frankly, and since you ask for frankness, African American poetry has almost without exception not done for me what prose has. Maybe it just hasn't clicked. Though I do think Walcott is astonishing.
Anyway, yes, Toni Morrison. What genius she had. What vision. How lucky we were to have her write.

Cheers,
John

I haven't read a single book of hers. She's a legend and we'd be dumb to think otherwise.

I took a "Contemporary American Fiction" course in undergrad, and we read Roth, Russel Banks, Tim O'Brien, Raymond Carver, etc.

The best text we read was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

That's all I've read of hers, but it was damn good.

Hmm. Toni Morrison doesn’t seem to generate a lot of strong feelings in people.

Cheers,
John

I read Beloved, which is really powerful stuff, and one called Jazz, both years ago. I got them out of the local library. I remember preferring the second at the time, because it was denser and more prosepoetry, stream-of-consciousness. I was young and enamoured of strangeness, perhaps, so I don't know how right I was. But God, yes, she could definitely write.

RIP Ms Morrison. Not a bad innings.

I suspect it depends on the people. She quite unapologetically wasn't writing for some of them.

In my first year (1986) at U.C. Berkeley, my Korean-American next-door neighbor in the dorms read The Bluest Eye for her African American Studies class, and she became quite evangelical about it. She insisted that I start reading it right away. So I promised I would. And I did.

When I saw her in the dining hall the next morning she said, "Did you finish it?" "Yes," I answered, nervously, because I assumed that next she was going to ask me what I had thought of the book. And I had no idea what I was going to say. I had found the rape and voyeurism scenes very, very disturbing. The author had fully intended them to be atrocious (in the literal sense of atrocities), so this would probably not have been a controversial opinion on my part; but I was nervous about saying so, anyway, because my friend had loved the book so much.

But she didn't ask me what I thought. Instead, she slowly and solemnly took back the book, and then slowly and solemnly said to me, "NOW you understand."

It must have been obvious from my expression that nothing could be further from the truth, because after a dramatic pause she went on: "NOW you understand the HARM that YOUR BLUE EYES do to women of color."

I sat there speechless. And 100% certain that that was NOT one of Toni Morrison's intended take-aways.

But my friend had already bounded off to find another blonde girl with blue eyes to bully into enlightenment.

Hi Julie,

I love that line, there are lots of white people in my books. Similarly, there are lots of black people in books written by white authors over the centuries. I guess there are a million ways to read Toni Morrison, like anybody. I don’t find personal empowerment in her writing, straight white male that I am, but I sure did learn stuff, and I’m glad others did find empowerment there - though as you illustrate, empowerment takes many forms, among them even a license to oppress. It reminds me a bit of Notorious BIG’s character The Mad Rapper, asked on a call in why he’s so madd. Sometimes people are, it can be tough to let go of. Or as John Lydon put it, anger is an energy.
Anyway, I think Toni Morrison is great, irrespective of her readers (such as myself).

Cheers,
John

Oh - at Mount Vernon, they used to sell a book on black-white interaction in America, pre-about 1800, called The World We Built Together. I found that title resonant.

Passing of Toni Morrison
 

“We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

The language in her novels sounded like no other novel I had ever read.
It made me understand why at such a young age I had felt that this was not my country and why when I sat down
at a table with white people to eat dinner, it always felt like a mistake to me ("Tar Baby").

I began reading Toni Morrison’s novels many years ago and slowly circled through them all.
When I came to the last one I began reading them again.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...eading-writers

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I am like Walter.

But Julie, your story gives me such insight -- and beautifully told, as always.

This...

But my friend had already bounded off to find another blonde girl with blue eyes to bully into enlightenment.

...seems to articulate the modus operandi of these days of turbulence we are struggling through.
x

For my part, though I have never been head over heels for magical realism, I did enjoy Beloved through and through, as I found magic in her prose and real perspective in her characters.

Hmm. Trying to get a global impression here, our eleven comments on Toni Morrison in the past, oh, day and a half since she died still give me the impression that this Nobel prizewinner has not had a big impact on Sphereans. Which, if so, is what it is, after all - I just find myself a little surprised by the discovery, I'd thought this thread would generate more comments, pro or con. For me personally, I'm glad to see that people seem to admire her work, since I think the work compels that.
Anyway, that's what's on my mind. The loss, the passing.

Cheers,
John

Here is a link to a great interview with Morrison on the eve of her 1993 Nobel Prize win. In it, she touches on, among other things, her writing routines and how she was always unapologetic in her focus on the black American experience. ‘... It’s very important to me that my work be African American,’ says she, ‘if it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too. It just so happens that that space for me is African American...’

And here is a link to an excerpt of her prose from Sula selected by the Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy.


P.S. John, the number of comments is not necessarily a reliable index to the degree of appreciation among Spherians. How many did not have time in the short interval you cited, had nothing to say not already said perfectly well, did not log on, or did not comment for any number of other reasons otherwise than lack of appreciation? Also, mind you she is not a poet. Myself, I thought there was a decent amount and did not expect cascades pouring in on all sides for any novelist alive or dead necessarily. Still, sorry you are disappointed, if you are, only I would not put so much into it I think.

Hi Erik,

And thank you for the links. I'm not sure disappointment is what I feel; perhaps it's mostly just a sort of nagging surprise. As you note, people are likely busy or may feel they've nothing to add to the discussion so far, and she is a prose writer after all. And in fact, the death of say Saul Bellow or Philip Roth would not generate a lot of comments from me. It's just, I guess, that Toni Morrison marks an epoch in my life as an American. So I'm processing that. I can continue I guess to do so in private. :-)

Cheers,
John

X
This in the New Yorker. For those not able to access, here is the opening paragraph:

In December, 1993, Toni Morrison flew to Stockholm to deliver the lecture required of those awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her subject was the power of language. Words, she said, have the capacity to liberate, empower, imagine, and heal, but, cruelly employed, they can “render the suffering of millions mute.” Morrison was unsparing in her depiction of people who would use language to evil ends. Pointing to “infantile heads of state” who speak only “to those who obey, or in order to force obedience,” she warned of the virulence of the demagogue. “Oppressive language does more than represent violence,” she said. “It is violence.”
X
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Passing of Toni Morrison
 

There may be a brotherhood that we can all get to where a novel or a poem speaks to us as nothing more nor less than a human being and not as a member of a particular culture or gender. I once had a conversation with a friend who regretted immensely that Toni Morrison could not speak more to the ‘human experience’ instead of the 'black experience'. I just didn’t understand what he meant. I only know that in order to get to some meaning of what a ‘human experience’ might actually mean, all of my experience had to next go through Toni Morrison's language in order to have a chance of getting to where he was. And I found that I didn’t want to stay where he was for very long.

To me, as an aging white dude, Toni Morrison’s voice is quintessentially American. That’s why it resonates in my heart, that’s why it blew the top off my head, as Emily Dickinson put it. Morrison showed me that this country is quite a bit bigger than I had rather solipsistically realized. In other words, she showed me America.

Cheers,
John

Oh - it’s also just brilliant writing.

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Toni Morrison.

Yup. What a brilliant mind.

Cheers,
John

Well, my sister-in-law must have a brilliant mind too, because she posts stuff like that on facebook constantly. Of course, she might not be writing her own material.

Sorry Ralph and John. It's a nice quote and a sincere response and possibly I'm a horrible person. And from the evidence of the two novels I've read, and her reputation, of course Toni Morrison clearly had a brilliant mind. This exchange just made me laugh.

Yup. As you say, Mark, she clearly had a brilliant mind.

Cheers,
John

Recitatif is one of the first stories my lit students read. John, yes, more people should have marked that here.