Toni Morrison Lecture

Beloved (1987)

Further Reading
Discussion Points

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, a year after publication of Beloved, and was the first black American and only the eighth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, for "her lyrical accounts of the black experience". She has received a number of other awards: the National Book Award nomination and Ohioana Book Award both in 1975 for Sula; and the National Book Critics Circle Award and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison has now written seven novels: The Bluest Eye (first published 1970), Sula (first published 1974), The Song of Solomon (first published 1977), Tar Baby (first published 1981), Beloved (first published 1987), Jazz (first published 1992) and Paradise (first published 1998)

After the publication of Paradise she did a number of readings in the UK and made a number of media appearances. Some of her statements seemed to have moved on from earlier stances, and I think as readers we should be alert to a progress in her career as a writer and be aware of the pitfalls of applying to later novels statements made earlier. In effect there is a temptation to read some earlier pronouncements and apply them to later work, when she might have developed her thinking about race and gender in more subtle and sophisticated ways. So this is just a warning to be attentive to dates.

I want to begin by briefly reporting some of the things she said on that publicity tour in 1998. She was of course mainly promoting Paradise, but some other useful things emerged.

She said that her first novel, The Bluest Eye was roughly autobiographical, that it was based on Lorain, Ohio where she grew up, and that it was loosely based on herself and her sister (although her sister wouldn't recognise this). After that she felt that her novels were not so autobiographical.
She said that with the exception of Jazz, music was not that important to her. In Jazz she wanted to get the structure of a "jazz ensemble" into the narrative. She also said, that "everyone is hungry for narrative".
She stressed the importance of the reader and the ways in which the reader brings emotion to the text. She talked about the ways in which she was able to create certain effects by using her knowledge of reader responses; knowing that certain phrases will evoke an emotional response in the reader. [This relates to the notion of "call and response" in black American culture which you might have come across in relation to Zora Neale Hurston.]
She talked about her fascination with the different ways people interpret the world, the different ways of "seeing it as real". This is particularly true of Paradise where she juxtaposes two different communities (Catholic and Protestant) who "read the world" in very particular ways. She spoke of the "magic" of believing these dream worlds, these constructs. [I think it is particularly useful to us as critics that she used that word "magic", because she has rejected the label "magic realism" as being meaningless. Yet clearly she is fascinated by different "takes" on the world, and representing in narrative different versions of reality as people see it and read it. In effect what she sees as "true" is how people envision the world, rather that the belief systems that might underlie their vision.]
She argued strongly the case for "difference without hierarchy".
She also talked about "rememory". She talked about characters trying to block memory, "keeping it out", and about how when it finally breaks through, they have to learn to do something with the memories. So "rememory" is not just memory or remembering, but the process of learning what to do once you've remembered.
Although she played down the importance of music as an influence, she mentioned, as she has done in previous interviews, that visual art is a great inspiration to her. She said that she tends to conceive the structure of her novels as shapes, as circles and squares. She talked about there being levels or layers of narrative, and that sometimes she knows the end of the narrative or story, but not the beginning and that she has to finish the end before she can write the beginning. [This would suggest that she also is involved in a process of rememory as she writes, and this is what I want to consider first - the contemporary black American woman writer's relationship to history and historical memory].

More pages on Beloved:

Discussion Points

Who is Beloved? Think about the ways in which Morrison creates ambivalence in her depiction of Beloved.
The importance of names and naming: the dead child is never named to the reader. The Pauls: why does Morrison choose to call the slave-owners Garner when she is consciously telling a story based on Margaret Garner?
History and the Post-modern. Can we say that the post-modern space allows African-Americans to write their own history for the first time? Does post-modern fiction become the only form through which African-American history can be reclaimed?
Is there a difference between the term "historical memory" and Morrison's neologism "rememory"? How does rememory operate in the text?
Is Beloved a novel? Can an African-American text be successful in achieving an autonomous voice using an Anglo form? In what ways does Morrison play with the form of the novel to articulate her subject?
Who is Morrison writing for? In the Preface to Playing in the Dark Morrison notes that "until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white."

With thanks to Tracy Playle who devised a first version of this list for a seminar presentation.

English and Comparative Literary Studies

Toni Morrison Lecture

Beloved (1987)

Further Reading:

Discussion Points