TONI MORRISON the Author

Authors on Their Work: TONI MORRISON

From "Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV" (1993)*

MORRISON: [William] Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race, and you can't find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can't see it.... Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? And then to reveal it in order to say that it is not the point anyway? It is technically just astonishing. As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism.

• • •

MORRISON: ...I wrote a story entitled "Recitatif," in which there are two little girls in an orphanage, one white and one black. But the reader doesn't know which is white and which is black. I use class codes, but no racial codes.

INTERVIEWER: Is this meant to confuse the reader?

MORRISON: Well, yes. But to provoke and enlighten. I did that as a lark. What was exciting was to be forced as a writer not to be lazy and rely on obvious codes. Soon as I say, "Black woman ..." I can rest on or provoke predictable responses, but if I leave it out then I have to talk about her in a complicated way—as a person.

'Elisa Shappell, with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, "Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV," Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993): 82-125.