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

[Slate Tone] 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 Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby. In Beloved, perhaps the most painful and beautiful of her creations, Toni Morrison reached back into the 19th century years of slavery.

Her writing 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. You said in 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 Melville, at Edgar Allen Poe, at Willa Cather, 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, novels? 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, or 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 there had- it was necessary to deny, in critical language, that presence when we discussed it. I read all those books in graduate schools. Everybody did. 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. A kind of a paradigm for the American as he comes of age. His generosity- The white American. 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-plain 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 Twain'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 told his daughter to 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. He has a family. He has a family.

Emotions. 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 as 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 of paramount importance.

There is no life outside the family, for the traditional Black, you know, person. The artist is supposed to carry our- 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. Hawthorne was writing European Gothic with ruins and ghosts, the supernatural. James Fenimore Cooper was writing bestsellers, set in primeval forests. The bestselling novels, in fact, on the eve of the Civil War were written- were soppy stories written by women about courageous orphans. Your people never show up in the novels of that time. How do you explain that? Well, they do. They show up. They're everywhere. They're in Hawthorne'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 Hawthorne all his life? They're there. Do you think it was- It's all in Fenimore 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. It's in Melville. It's everywhere in Poe. But Blacks don't emerge as people with... Oh, no, no, no, no. No. Not three-dimensional- no. With family, with emotions- Oh, no. 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 are- 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. Symbols more, yeah. Complicated symbols, but- Shadows of the wall back there, at the rear of his cave. But, he gets into bed with him in the very first scene. Ishmael goes to bed with Queequeg. Each one of those white people in Moby Dick has a Black brother. They're paired together. Fedallah is the shadow of Ahab. Queequeg 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. Always we are defining ourselves by the other, even when it is 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, I think it can get to be of clinical proportions. It can- It says, though you- Requiring the surgery of a civil war to- Exactly. And what it does on a personal level, if someone says to me, you know, 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. So, what I do is, it folds up, right? It atrophies. 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. 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, in a sense, in the 19th-century, when these gifted men, and they did produce a wonderful body of work, were writing wonderfully romantic- I don't mean harlequin novels.

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 as though, although it wasn't, as uninhabited. I was reading something in Bernard Bailyn and it said, he bought this hu- this land was perceived of as 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 they were- some of them were not even running to 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 down in Georgia— but the fact of- history is the fact, was settled by debtors, and ex-prisoners, and criminals getting a second start over here. Now, it could have happened that all those people who came here figured it all out. Um, 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 burgher? 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 he 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 need did that meet 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've 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 is- one learns very quickly what to belong to. And you belong to this non-Black population, who is everywhere. But it serves. It serves. It has always served, economically, a lot of forces in this country. That I can understand, but the failure of- 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 modern life- Of the 20th-century now. But I think many of them did. I think that book by Willa Cather, although it's late, it's sort of 1938- 39- 40, but still her life- her writing life spanned 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 othered, maybe. But when you look at the literature of the women, I mean, I mean, Harriet Beecher Stowe is, after all, a woman. So is Cather. Gertrude Stein. I mean, Carson McCullers, and reams of others. They are more likely, and especially Southern women. It's interesting. Flannery O'Connor. I mean, when they do- Eudora Welty. There's something- I know this is going to be a great generalized 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 the South.

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. Do 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

them as such. That's the difference. There are two moments in Beloved in which I tried to do it, which I set up a situation, in which two people are talking to 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 Paul D. and Seth are walking down the street, and 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 her first name. Doesn't she live around here somewhere?

And you can tell by the reactions of the 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 in 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, the Black, the this, you know, it always required its own modifier. If you take the modifiers out, you see, if you had- Willa Cather had entitled her book Sapphira and Nancy, that changes the whole book. I mean, the strategies are different, the power relationships are different. But she said Sapphira and the Slave Girl. She has 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. Exactly. The Negress, the slave. 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 out any? Not yet. You haven't. Uh-uh. 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 Toni Morrison. I'm Bill Moyers. I'm Bill Moyers. I'm Bill Moyers.

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