The Toni Morrison Syllabus

On Monday night, Toni Morrison died at the age of 88. “We die,” Morrison said in the closing of her Nobel Prize address in 1993. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” In celebration of her life as a groundbreaking, enduring author, Ringer staffers meditated on the language she gave us.

The Bluest Eye

Tyler Tynes: It is still too fresh, too painful, too tear-inducing to believe that Toni Morrison is gone from this world. After I heard the news, I found myself revisiting The Bluest Eye, her first novel, from 1970, about the aftermath of the Great Depression, the young black upstart Pecola, and the pains America reminds you of when you wield dark skin. Pecola finds herself longing to be white, attracted by the privileges whiteness offers, and desiring those tantalizing blue eyes. The Bluest Eye is essential to the teachings Morrison gave to our nation. So many of us have been Pecola during the trials of our youth, during the maturation of our minds. America has so often tried to beautify black thoughts, to change black expression, to experiment with the blending of blackness so as to neuter it, gifting it whiteness for a moment, only to steal it away like a dream in the night. Whiteness is the constant; blackness, a mere interruption to the American Dream. For what happens to Pecola and the characters in The Bluest Eye, Morrison was often derided. Her book was banned from shelves and schools. But Morrison wanted to reveal, with poignant intent, how hurtful racism is, how it can grind away at the soul and leave it tattered and bloody. Reading The Bluest Eye as a black boy coming of age in an ever-changing America, with darker skin and quirky mannerisms, Morrison’s prose was freeing. She spoke on behalf of those who could not find themselves beautiful right away with words that liberated and phrases that fractured. She made you understand what it was like to be black, to be treated with ill intent, by a place you call home that never sought to bring you in as family.

Beloved

Lindsay Zoladz: Beloved was published in 1987; it’s astonishing to me that I briefly lived in a world where this book didn’t already exist. More so than perhaps any other work of literature published in the past four decades, Beloved has become an inarguable fixture of American letters—its neighbors on the national bookshelf aren’t its contemporaries so much as totems like Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. For a book to make a place for itself in what we call the American fabric, an act of tearing is necessary, fibers fraying so that new space can be made. More than any of those other aforementioned classics, though, Beloved did not seek to seamlessly sew up that rupture. Instead, it laid bare the crude horror of the stitches, and forced us all to look.

Beloved tells the story of the unforgettable Sethe, a woman born into slavery who has escaped physically if not spiritually. Her present still throbs with the trauma of her past, and the lengths she went to in order to protect her children from a life enslaved. Morrison’s prose is sharp and vivid, but the atmosphere she creates is radically porous, so that the past and the future, the mundane and the magical, the monstrous and the divine bleed into each other, as they do in life. The tale of Sethe and her daughters is the kind from which American history had too often averted its gaze: A clear-eyed, brutal rendering of the routine violence inflicted upon black female bodies. “This is not a story to pass on,” Morrison writes in the final moments of the novel. And then look what she did.

In one of the most famous passages of Beloved, Sethe explains to her daughter Denver a concept she calls “rememory.” “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay,” she explains. “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but other there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there.” Thank goodness Morrison’s words will forever float like that, too.

Sula

Charlotta Goddu: Like many people, I first read Toni Morrison’s work in a high-school classroom; by the time I was a teenager, her novels had become required reading. But unlike most of what I’d read in class before, Morrison’s books didn’t feel like they were making my understanding of the world simpler. Instead, her books were teaching me how to be confused, how to feel bad, how to love a book that made me feel confused and bad.

Morrison’s writing was the first place I saw a writer make disgusting things pretty. In Sula, a mother goes into her drug-addicted son’s bedroom and sees what she thinks is a glass of strawberry crush, sweet red soda. When she tries to drink from it, though, she realizes it’s water mixed with blood and throws the glass to the ground.

The realization that something violent can look sweet and good is at the center of Morrison’s writing, which cycles from beauty to horror in almost all of her scenes. Morrison has long been recognized for both her poetic, magical-realist style and her deft grappling with America’s legacy of slavery and racism. Her stories prove how easy it is to be fooled by beauty––to think that the pretty red drink must taste good, too, when the truth is that something can be beautiful and bloody all at once.

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“No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear”

Alyssa Bereznak: When Morrison took an assignment for The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue, America had a lot to be hopeful about. Many of us were still riding on the tempered optimism of Obama’s presidency, and Donald Trump had yet to cruise down that tacky glass escalator and announce his presidential campaign. But being the ever-prescient thinker that she was, Morrison took an opportunity not to relish in the comfort of an empathetic leader, but to reflect on the depths of political despair. In this essay, the then-84-year-old author recalls the re-election of George W. Bush, and a moment of creative paralysis that came with the thought of his second term. She argues that these painful moments are precisely the ones that artists must seize to make a difference. “I know the world is bruised and bleeding,” she wrote. “And though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” That kind of unrelenting perseverance will define Morrison’s legacy, both in the dignity with which she approached her work, and in the way it continues to inspire her readers.

The Nobel Lecture, 1993

Brian Phillips: Language is the bird that, when you have caught it, is not in your hands. That image, which comes from the end of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture, is not the moment of that speech that you’ll see quoted in most of the obituaries this week. The line you’ll see quoted is, appropriately enough, the line about language and death quoted above. Those are hard, clear, true sentences, in keeping with Morrison’s best work. But it’s that other image, the magical, slightly unsettling idea of language as a bird that can only be held if you haven’t truly caught it, that I found myself thinking about after I heard the news of her death.

Morrison’s Nobel lecture takes the form of an extended allegory. An old, blind woman who is famous for her wisdom is visited by some children, one of whom says: “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” Their purpose is perhaps to mock the blind woman: If you know so much, why can’t you tell whether this bird is dead or alive? The old woman replies: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.” In other words: Whether it is dead or alive, you are responsible for it. Morrison says that as she understands the story, the woman is a writer, the bird is language, and the question at the heart of the fable is what we will do with our power over the language we have been given.

These are bad times for language, which makes the loss of Toni Morrison—who, among all the other things that she was, was one of contemporary literature’s clearest and most powerful critics of how language is used—that much more painful. The central section of the Nobel lecture, in which she enumerates some of the ways that the bird of language can be killed, is a devastating, 25-years-early critique of our current climate of discourse. At one point Morrison cleanly anatomizes Facebook, Donald Trump, 8chan, and Instagram in one laser-precise sentence: “There will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.”

Morrison argues in her lecture that we can only save language from becoming a tool of oppression by remaining fully alive to its nuance and complexity. In a world in which power is almost invariably allied to bad faith, this is an almost impossible task. If we can manage it, though, the proof of our mastery—as she herself showed, again and again—isn’t control of the bird. It’s the bird’s flight.