A World of Ideas; 230; Toni Morrison Part 2 of 2

You Can you think what it would mean for me and my relationship to language and to text to be able to do that without having to always explain to the reader the race of the characters in this half hour a conversation with the novelist Tony Morrison I'm Bill Moyers A world of ideas with Bill Moyers funding for this program is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation a catalyst for change

Corporate underwriting is provided by General Motors and a Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Truck Divisions and GMAC. General Motors committed to excellence Tony Morrison seems always to be in two worlds. There is the visible world bustling around her and there is the world of her novels whose characters tell us about an interior reality hidden from the eyes of strangers In her five books, she has transported millions of readers into the experience of being black in America, the Blueest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby In Beloved, perhaps the most painful and beautiful of her creations, Tony Morrison reached back into the 19th century years of slavery

Riding has won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1978 and the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 15 universities have awarded her honorary degrees. Like many fiction writers, Morrison has earned a living by other means. She was an editor for Random House and taught at Howard University, Yale and the state University of New York at Albany She is now teaching in the humanities at Princeton University. She is also a trustee at the New York Public Library where we talked about her widely noted essay in the Michigan Quarterly Review, discussing the Afro-American presence in American literature Within your lecture at the University of Michigan that it's a great relief to you that terms like white and race are now discussable in literature How so?

Because a language had been developed and has still some sovereignty in which we mean white and we mean black or we mean ethnic but we say something else So there's an enormous amount of confusion. It's difficult even to understand the literature of the country if you can't say white and you can't say black and you can't say race. One of the things I was doing in that speech was using some of the scholarship that other African scholars had already done In order to say at last we can look clearly, for example, at Herman Noel, at at Galen Powell, at Will look after, at real issues that were affecting founding as well as 20th century American writers Because now it's not incoherent because we can talk about it now. We don't have to call it nature or we don't have to call it radical political. We can say what it was and that is a relief

The public rhetoric has been filled with race and white and black and so that it seems as surprised to someone say, well now at least we can discuss those in literature You're saying that they weren't a part of our tradition of storytelling novel? Not in the critique, not in the discourse, not in the reviews, not in the scholarship around these works That was not a subject to be discussed, it was not worthy of discussion Not only that, it admitted that the mass generative could not encompass all these things The silence was absolutely important, the silence of the black person The silence you mean that his voice was never heard? And that they don't speak in the text themselves, they are not permitted to say things So that the academy or the history can't really permit them to be center stage in the discourse of the text, in art, in literature

But in public discourse, when we talk about neighborhoods or policy or schools or welfare or practically anything, the real subject is race or is class I mean that's what it's about, we may call it disadvantaged or undeveloped or remedial All these sort of euphemisms for poor people and or black people and or any non white person in this country That is the subject of practically all of the political discourse there is But it has been kept out of the art world There is a wonderful collection of paintings, the image of the black in the western world No one thinks of Hogarth, for example, as having painted all these black people No one thinks of all of the important changes that the iconography of black people went through

They're everywhere, the country, particularly this one, is seething with the presence of black people But it was necessary to deny in critical language that presence when we discussed it I read all those books in graduate schools everybody that we never talked about what was really going on We talk about Huck Finn and Jim and we think about how wonderful the innocence of this sort of radical child is Kind of a paradigm for the American as he comes of age The white American because it is about the construction of a white male But what's serviceable to him to Huck is this grown up black man Who is never called a man Who is the battle plane or the arena through which Huck can become a moral person

He becomes a moral person because of his association with this black man who is never called a man And to Mark Train's credit he provides an extraordinary scene where you realize that Jim has a wife and has a child And he's trying to get home Huck's trying to get to territory He's trying to get home and a terrible little thing happened at that moment when he totally shut the door And she didn't do it and he told her again and she didn't do it and he got annoyed and he hit her And then later realized that she was sick, she had spinal meningitis or something and she had lost her hearing And he's reflecting on that and he tells that story to Huck And suddenly there's this man who has a context

Emotions and it's an overwhelming thing for Huck who can say interestingly enough These people think about children the same way we do So it's a revelation You were saying earlier before when we were talking before we began the conversation that in the movie Glory The only reference that is made to the fact that these black troopers have a family is once when they're being paid Exactly and they say we need the money I mean I have a family But those men are fighting and dying and willing to die for a very important cause freedom But it's never contextualized They are not seen as having children wives, aunts, mothers, they are a blasted family that doesn't matter for whom they are perceived of It's not feeling responsibility and who are not responsible to them and it's so absolutely contrary to the real life of black people For whom the family and the relations are paramount importance

There is no life outside the family for the traditional black person The artist is supposed to carry our moral imagination It's astonishing to me that in the 1840s and 50s on the eve of the Civil War in the period of traumatic conflict over abolition and slavery That the American novelists were not dealing with those issues Hall Thorn was writing European Gothic with ruins and ghosts, the supernatural James Phenomore Cooper was writing bestsellers, said in primeval forest The bestselling novels in fact on the eve of the Civil War were written, were soapy stories written by women about courageous orphans They never show up in the novels of that time, how do you explain that? They show up, they're everywhere, they're in Hall Thorn's power of blackness

They're in all the dark symbols, they're in the haunting, what's he haunted by? What is the guilt? What is that real sin that is really worrying Hall Thorn all his life? They're there It's all in Phenomore Cooper, I think it was. I don't care where he took the story novelist writers are informed by the major currents of the world, its in Melville, its everywhere in Powell But black stones emerge as people with... No, not three different family with emotions The characters are discredited and ridiculed and perjured, but the idea of those characters, the construction of them as an outside representation of anarchy, collapse, illicit sexuality, all of these negative things that they feared

are projected onto this presence so that you find these extraordinary gaps and evasions and destabilizations, the chances of getting a truly complex human black person in a book in this country in the 19th century was unlikely. Melville came probably very close with, you know, sorts of classic complexities but not real flesh and blood people. There were symbols again. There were more. Yeah, complicated symbols. Shadows of war back there. That's the rear of his cave. But he gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Gweeklet. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a black brother. They're paired together. Fadala is the shadow of A. Gweeklet is the shadow of Ishmael.

They all have them. And they work together in tandem all through the book. So that what I am saying is that even though the realistic representation is not there, the sympathetic one you get sort of in, if you can call it, you know, Uncle Tom's Cabin, but the information, subtextual information, it is powerful what they are saying. It's all self-reflexive. It's all about the fabrication of a white male American. Isn't that tension the fate of this American experience? I mean, from the beginning, when blacks were the unacknowledged presence at Philadelphia when the Constitution was being written, in the constant, well, I think your term for it is unspeakable. Things unspoken. Unspeakable things unspoken. We are defining ourselves by the other, even when it has not spoken this deep and psychic struggle going on to see and not see the other.

That's right. And it can become truly pathological, truly crazy. In what sense? Well, when you think about the instruction one needs to become a racist, or the instruction one receives to become the victim of racism, it's truly debilitating. I don't mean it's vaguely unsettling. I mean, it can get to be of clinical proportions. It can... It says, though you... Remarrying the surgery of a civil war to... Exactly. And what it does on a personal level, if someone says to me, this hand is not your hand. It doesn't belong to you. It's on your body, but it's alien, and I'm convinced. What I do is it folds up, right? It afterifies. And I have to figure out something to do with it. It's a true severance of part of myself. It's a true severance of the body politic. You know, racism is not old.

I mean, it seems to have been around forever, but say a thousand years. The human race is what, four million years old? It's not a fixed star. The interesting thing is slavery is older than racism. Of course. And this is why there's a double bind in this country because you had the twin evils of slavery, which I don't know. Everybody knew something about... Everybody's ancestors knew something about that. But you have the visible other who cannot disappear, who cannot, quote, pass, who cannot... So wherever he is, he is the icon, and he is the reminder, not only of slavery, not only of degradation, not only of dishonor, but the associations that are racial. And that persists. That persists. And you say that it deeply infected the literature of... Oh, sure. ...of escapism and a sense in the 19th century, when these gifted men, and they did produce a wonderful body of work, were riding wonderfully romantic. I don't mean hardly connovels.

No, but... They were out there in the imagination where you weren't. No, there was an Eden. And what you needed for that Eden was for it to not be susceptible to corruption. It can't fall. America was, you know, this Eden for everyone. It was beautiful and perceived, although it wasn't as uninhabited. I was reading something in Bernard Balein and it said he bought this land, it was perceived of us being this large uninhabited tract surrounded by tribes of savages. So what do you mean you had this uninhabited land? A void. A void. So that, of course, they had to fill. And when they came, you know, they were, you know, dreamers. And what one has to remember, I think, over and over again,

is what they were running from. Which was? Poverty, humiliation, jail, prostitution. I mean, some of them were nice clerks and so on, but some of them were not even running too freedom. They were running from it. I mean, the license that the Puritans understood is corrupt. They were trying to get it over here so they could be disciplined and contained. Georgia, like Australia, was settled by, they won't like this done in Georgia, but the fact that history is the fact was settled by debtors and ex-prisoners. And criminals getting a second story over here. Now, it could have happened that all those people who came here figured it all out. And eventually, slavery was no use economically, perhaps. But to make an American, you had to have all of these people from these different classes,

different countries, different languages, feel close to one another. So what does an Italian peasant have to say to a German burger? And what does an Irish peasant have to say to a Latvian? You know, really, they tended to vulcanize. But what they could all do is not be black. So it is not coincidental that the second thing, every immigrant learns when it gets off the boat, is that word, nigger. In that way, he's establishing oneness, solidarity, and union with the country. That is the marker. That's the one. What kind of meat that meat in the psyche do you think? Well, these were people who were frightened.

I mean, I would be. You go to a strange country. Maybe you have some friends there. You need a job. You cut your bridges. You said something's terrible back home. You go, and you immigrate. You go someplace else. And if it's under duress, you're facing chaos. And when you're facing a chaos, you have to name it, or violate it, or control it in some way. So you want to belong to this large idea. You want to belong. And one learns very quickly what to belong to. And you belong to this non-black population, who is everywhere. But it serves. It has always served economically, a lot of forces in this country. That I can understand, but the failure of the writer to deal to cross the boundary, to incorporate the other into the novel, is one that I don't understand.

Although I don't want to run the risk of trying to read into the past, the race and visions, and insights of the more life. Of the 20th century's now. But I think many of them did. I think that book, I will look at it. Although it's laid, it's sort of 1938-3940, but still her writing life expanded earlier than that. Of this book's affair in the slave girl. I think that is a genuine attempt to talk about power, jealousy, othering, the process of entering the other. In that confrontation, she sets up with a white, paralyzed, ill, mistress, and her young, about to be a woman servant. And her response to that is to fabricate some mystical affair that's not taking place between this girl and her husband. And to invite her own relative down in order to rape and seduce her. And to destroy her.

It's a difficult book. It's a problematic book. But this is an instance in which a woman, and the women do it, I think, more easily than the men. Why? I don't know. I think they're already other, maybe it. But when you look at the literature of the women, I mean, I mean, Harry Beach is still after all. It's a woman. So it's Catholic. Gertrude Stein. I mean, Carson McCullochers and Reams and others, they are more likely, and especially Southern women. It's interesting. Flannery O'Connor. I mean, when they do you do a wealthy, there's something, I know this is going to be a great generation that's going to be proven fallacious. But it seems to me in the literature that emerges in which there's a real place for a complicated, either complicated black person or a problematized relationship between a white and a black. Frequently, the people who generate that are women and unbelievably many of them have lived in this house.

That's interesting to me. Why a different psyche there? I think it's the intimacy. Yeah. I mean, you know, the intimacy and the distance that has probably had been historically much more complicated in the south and in the north, where there was a lot of illusion and delusion and evasion. I mean, you know, you could sort of hide behind very virulent racism for a lot in the north because of the way in which it was constructed. In the south, it was almost impossible to do that. I don't mean this to be a trick question. It just occurs to me though. Is it conceivable that you could write a novel in which blacks are not center stage? Absolutely. You think the public would let you because the expectations are you made such a... You've achieved such fame and made such a contribution by writing about black people in your novel that they now expect you to write about black people. I will, but I won't identify

the message. That's the difference. There are two moments where I love it and which I tried to do it, which I set up a situation in which two people are talking with two black people and some other people enter the scene and they're never identified as black or white, but the reader knows instantly. Not because I use the traditional language of stereotype. The two moments, one, when Pauli and Seth are walking down the street he touches her shoulder to lead her off of the sidewalk onto the ground because three women are walking this way. That's all. But you know who that is. It's another moment when he's sort of in despair talking to a friend and a man rides up on a horse and says, where's... I don't know what her name is, Valerie. And he calls a woman to her first name. Doesn't she live around here somewhere?

And you can tell she's a black man that he is a white man. But I don't have to say it. So my thing that I really want to do and expect to do is to do what you say but I am not writing about white people. I will be writing about black people. But I won't have to do what they did and all these 19th century novels they always had to say it. I mean, you couldn't say Jupiter walked in the room or Mary, you said the Negro, the slave, black, but this, you know, it always required its own modifier. If you take the modifiers out, you see, if you had... Willek Hathor had entitled her book, Sephirah and Nancy, that changes the whole book. I mean, the strategies are different, the power relationships are different. But she said Sephirah and the slave girl, she's no first name, you know, in the title. In fact, as you talk, I remember now, in fact, my own reading in those periods that,

you were always called the something. That's right. There was not a name, there was an object. That's it. A noun. That's it. The Negro, the slave, the Negro. That's it. Or my. I challenged my students last year if they could find a 19th century novel in which a black male appeared and was called a man without the possessive pronoun or when he was not in the company of a black female, in which case they were distinguishing gender. Just find one reference in which somebody says, black man. I'll take you to dinner, I said. Did you have to pay on any? Not yet. You have it. But if I write a book and I can do that, whatever it will mean to the people who read it, they won't be confused. That will be part of my job. But can you think what it would mean for me and my relationship to language and to texts to be able to do that

without having to always explain to the reader the race of the characters. Even if in my mind they are all black or African Americans or whatever the word is at the time. If I don't have to say that. From the New York Public Library, this has been a conversation with Tony Morrison. I'm Bill Moyers. I'm Bill Moyers. I'm Bill Moyers.

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