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.
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