TONI MORRISON was appointed the Robert F. Goheen Professor

in The Council of the Humanities at Princeton University

in 1989. Prior to that she held the Albert Schweitzer

Chair in the Humanities at the University of Albany, State

University of New York, from 1984 until 1989. She was a

senior editor at Random House for twenty years. Her five

major novels are The Bluest Eye (1970) ; Sula (1974) ;

Song of Solomon (1977), for which she won the National

Book Critics Award; Tar Baby (1981); and Beloved

(1987), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

I

I planned to call this paper “Canon Fodder,” because the term

put me in mind of a kind of trained muscular response that appears

to be on display in some areas of the recent canon debate.

Also I liked the clash and swirl of those two words. At first they

reminded me of that host of young men - black or “ethnics” or

poor or working-class -who left high school for the war in Vietnam

and were perceived by war resisters as “fodder.” Indeed

many of those who went, as well as those who returned, were

treated as one of that word’s definitions: “coarse food for livestock,”

or, in the context of my thoughts about the subject of this

paper, a more applicable definition: “people considered as readily

available and of little value.” Rude feed to feed the war machine.

There was also the play of cannon and canon. The etymology of

the first includes tube, cane, or cane-like, reed. Of the second,

sources include rod becoming body of law, body of rules, measuring

rod. When the two words faced each other, the image became

the shape of the cannon wielded on (or by) the body of law. The

boom of power announcing an “officially recognized set of texts.”

Cannon defending canon, you might say. And without any etymological

connection I heard father in fodder, and sensed father in

both cannon and canon, ending up with “father food.” And what

does this father eat? Readily available people/texts of little value.

But I changed my mind (so many have used the phrase) and hope

to make clear the appropriateness of the one I settled on.

My purpose here is to observe the panoply of this most recent

and most anxious series of questions concerning what should or

does constitute a literary canon in order to suggest ways of addressing

the Afro-American presence in American Literature that require

neither slaughter nor reification - views that may spring the

[ 123 ]

124 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

whole literature of an entire nation from the solitude into which

it has been locked. There is something called American literature

that, according to conventional wisdom, is certainly not Chicano

literature, or Afro-American literature, or Asian-American, or Native

American, or . . . It is somehow separate from them and they

from it, and in spite of the efforts of recent literary histories, restructured

curricula, and anthologies, this separate confinement, be

it breached or endorsed, is the subject of a large part of these

debates. Although the terms used, like the vocabulary of earlier

canon debates, refer to literary and/or humanistic value, aesthetic

criteria, value-free or socially anchored readings, the contemporary

battle plain is most often understood to be the claims of others

against the whitemale origins and definitions of those values ;

whether those definitions reflect an eternal, universal, and transcending

paradigm or whether they constitute a disguise for a

temporal, political, and culturally specific program.

Part of the history of this particular debate is located in the

successful assault that the feminist scholarship of men and women

(black and white) made and continues to make on traditional literary

discourse. The male part of the whitemale equation is already

deeply engaged, and no one believes that the body of literature

and its criticism will ever again be what it was in 1965: the

protected preserve of the thoughts and works and analytical strategies

of whitemen.

It is, however, the “white” part of the question that this paper

focuses on, and it is to my great relief that such words as white

and race can enter serious discussion of literature. Although still

a swift and swiftly obeyed call to arms, their use is no longer forbidden.’

It may appear churlish to doubt the sincerity, or question

the proclaimed well-intentioned selflessness of a 900-year-old

academy struggling through decades of chaos to “maintain standards.”

Yet of what use is it to go on about “quality” being the

1 Henry Louis Gates, ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1986).

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 125

only criterion for greatness knowing that the definition of quality

is itself the subject of much rage and is seldom universally agreed

upon by everyone at all times? Is it to appropriate the definition

of quality for reasons of state; to be in the position to distribute

greatness or withhold it ? Or to pursue actively the ways and places

in which quality surfaces and stuns us into silence or into language

worthy enough to describe i t ? What is possible is to try to recognize,

identify, and applaud the fight for and triumph of quality

when it is revealed to us and to let go the notion that only the

dominant culture or gender can make those judgments, identify

that quality, or produce it.

Those who claim the superiority of Western culture are entitled

to that claim only when Western civilization is measured

thoroughly against other civilizations and not found wanting, and

when Western civilization owns up to its own sources in the cultures

that preceded it.

A large part of the satisfaction I have always received from

reading Greek tragedy, for example, is in its similarity to Afro-

American communal structures (the function of song and chorus,

the heroic struggle between the claims of community and individual

hubris) and African religion and philosophy. In other

words, that is part of the reason it has quality for me - I feel

intellectually at home there. But that could hardly be so for those

unfamiliar with my “home,” and hardly a requisite for the pleasure

they take. The point is, the form (Greek tragedy) makes

available these varieties of provocative love because it is masterly

- not because the civilization that is its referent was flawless

or superior to all others.

One has the feeling that nights are becoming sleepless in some

quarters, and it seems to me obvious that the recoil of traditional

“humanists” and some postmodern theorists to this particular aspect

of the debate, the “race” aspect, is as severe as it is because

the claims for attention come from that segment of scholarly and

artistic labor in which the mention of “race” is either inevitable or

126 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

elaborately, painstakingly masked ; and if all of the ramifications

that the term demands are taken seriously, the bases of Western

civilization will require rethinking. Thus, in spite of its implicit

and explicit acknowledgment, “race” is still a virtually unspeakable

thing, as can be seen in the apologies, notes of “special use,”

and circumscribed definitions that accompany it2 - not least of

which is my own deference in surrounding it with quotation marks,

Suddenly (for our purposes, suddenly) “race” does not exist. For

three hundred years black Americans insisted that “race” was no

usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships. During

those same three centuries every academic discipline, including

theology, history, and natural science, insisted “race” was the

determining factor in human development. When blacks discovered

they had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and

that it had specific and revered difference, suddenly they were told

there is no such thing as “race,” biological or cultural, that matters

and that genuinely intellectual exchange cannot accommodate it.3

In trying to understand the relationship between “race” and culture,

I am tempted to throw my hands up. It always seemed to me

that the people who invented the hierarchy of “race” when it was

convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away,

now that it does not suit their purposes for it to exist. But there is

culture and both gender and “race” inform and are informed by it.

Afro-American culture exists, and though it is clear (and becoming

clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the instances

where and means by which it has shaped Western culture

are poorly recognized or understood.

I want to address ways in which the presence of Afro-American

literature and the awareness of its culture both resuscitate the

study of literature in the United States and raise that study’s stan-

2 Among many examples, Ivan Van Sertima, They Came before Columbus:

The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976),

pp. xvi-xvii.

3 Tzvetan Todorov, "‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture,” trans. Loulou Mack,

in Gates, “Race,” pp. 370-80.

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 127

dards. In pursuit of that goal, it will suit my purposes to contextualize

the route canon debates have taken in Western literary

criticism.

I do not believe this current anxiety can be attributed solely to

the routine, even cyclical arguments within literary communities

reflecting unpredictable yet inevitable shifts in taste, relevance, or

perception. Shifts in which an enthusiasm for and official endorsement

of William Dean Howells, for example, withered; or in

which the legalization of Mark Twain in critical court rose and

fell like the fathoming of a sounding line (for which he may or

may not have named himself); or even the slow, delayed but

steady swell of attention and devotion on which Emily Dickinson

soared to what is now, surely, a permanent crest of respect. No.

Those were discoveries, reappraisals of individual artists. Serious

but not destabilizing. Such accommodations were simple because

the questions they posed were simple: Are there one hundred sterling

examples of high literary art in American literature and no

more? One hundred and six? If one or two fall into disrepute,

is there space, then, for one or two others in the vestibule, waiting

like girls for bells chimed by future husbands who alone can promise

them security, legitimacy - and in whose hands alone rest the

gift of critical longevity? Interesting questions, but, as I say, not

endangering.

Nor is this detectable academic sleeplessness the consequence

of a much more radical shift, such as the mid-nineteenth-century

one heralding the authenticity of American literature itself. Or

an even earlier upheaval - receding now into the distant past -

in which theology, and thereby Latin, was displaced for the equally

rigorous study of the classics and Greek to be followed by what

was considered a strangely arrogant and upstart proposal: that

English literature was a suitable course of study for an aristocratic

education, and not simply morally instructive fodder designed for

the working classes. (The Chaucer Society was founded in 1848,

four hundred years after Chaucer died.) No. This exchange seems

128 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

unusual somehow, keener. It has a more strenuously argued (and

felt) defense and a more vigorously insistent attack. And both

defense and attack have spilled out of the academy into the popular

press. Why? Resistance to displacement within or expansion

of a canon is not, after all, surprising or unwarranted. That’s what

canonization is for. (And the question of whether there should be

a canon or not seems disingenous to me - there always is one

whether there should be or not - for it is in the interests of the

professional critical community to have one.) Certainly a sharp

alertness as to why a work is or is not worthy of study is the legitimate

occupation of the critic, the pedagogue, and the artist. What

is astonishing in the contemporary debate is not the resistance to

displacement of works or to the expansion of genre within it, but

the virulent passion that accompanies this resistance and, more

important, the quality of its defense weaponry. The guns are very

big; the trigger-fingers quick. But I am convinced the mechanism

of the defenders of the flame is faulty. Not only may the hands

of the gunslinging cowboy-scholars be blown off, not only may the

target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration (the sacred

texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This canon fodder may

kill the canon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus

or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne,

or Melville, and so on. There must be some way to enhance canon

readings without enshrining them.

When Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, identified the

historical territory of the novel by saying “The novel is Europe’s

creation” and that “The only context for grasping a novel’s worth

is the history of the European novel,” the New Yorker reviewer

stiffened. Kundera’s “personal ‘idea of the novel,’ ” he wrote,

is so profoundly Eurocentric that it’s likely to seem exotic, even

perverse, to American readers. . . . The Art of the Novel gives

off the occasional (but pungent) whiff of cultural arrogance,

and we may feel that Kundera’s discourse . . . reveals an aspect

of his character that we’d rather not have known about. . . .

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 129

In order to become the artist he now is, the Czech novelist had

to discover himself a second time, as a European. But what if

that second, grander possibility hadn’t been there to be discovered?

What if Broch, Kafka, Musil - all that reading -

had never been a part of his education, or had entered it only

as exotic, alien presence? Kundera’s polemical fervor in The

Art of the Novel annoys us, as American readers, because we

feel defensive, excluded from the transcendent “idea of the

novel” that for him seems simply to have been there for

the taking. (If only he had cited, in his redeeming version of the

novel’s history, a few more heroes from the New World’s culture.)

Our novelists don’t discover cultural values within

themselves; they invent them.4

Kundera’s views, obliterating American writers (with the exception

of William Faulkner) from his own canon, are relegated to

a “smugness” that Terrance Rafferty disassociates from Kundera’s

imaginative work and applies to the “sublime confidence” of his

critical prose. The confidence of an exile who has the sentimental

education of, and the choice to become, a European.5

I was refreshed by Rafferty’s comments. With the substitution

of certain phrases, his observations and the justifiable umbrage he

takes can be appropriated entirely by Afro-American writers regarding

their own exclusion from the “transcendent ‘idea of the

novel.’ ” For the present turbulence seems not to be about the

flexibility of a canon, its range among and between Western countries,

but about its miscegenation. The word is informative here

and I do mean its use. A powerful ingredient in this debate concerns

the incursion of third-world or so-called minority literature

into a Eurocentric stronghold. When the topic of third-world culture

is raised, unlike the topic of Scandinavian culture, for example,

a possible threat to and implicit criticism of the reigning

equilibrium is seen to be raised as well. From the seventeenth century

to the twentieth, the arguments resisting that incursion have

4 Terrance Rafferty, “Articles of Faith,” New Yorker 64 (May 16, 1988): 110.

5 Ibid.

130 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

marched in predictable sequence: (1) there is no Afro-American

(or third-world) art; (2) it exists but is inferior; (3) it exists and

is superior when it measures up to the “universal” criteria of

Western art; (4) it is not so much “art” as ore - rich ore - that

requires a Western or Eurocentric smith to refine it from its “natural”

state into an aesthetically complex form.

A few comments on a larger, older, but no less telling academic

struggle - an extremely successful one - may be helpful

here. It is telling because it sheds light on certain aspects of this

current debate and may locate its sources. I made reference above

to the radical upheaval in canon building that took place at the

inauguration of classical studies and Greek. This canonical rerouting

from scholasticism to humanism was not merely radical, it

must have been (may I say it?) savage. And it took some seventy

years to accomplish. Seventy years to eliminate Egypt as the cradle

of civilization and its model and replace it with Greece. The triumph

of that process was that Greece lost its own origins and became

itself original. A number of scholars in various disciplines

(history, anthropology, ethnobotany, etc.) have put forward their

research into cross-cultural and intercultural transmissions with

varying degrees of success in the reception of their work. I am

reminded of the curious publishing history of Ivan Van Sertimer’s

work, They Came before Columbas, which researches the African

presence in Ancient America, I am reminded of Edward Said’s

Orientalism, and especially the work of Martin Bernal, a linguist,

trained in Chinese history, who has defined himself as an interloper

in the field of classical civilization but who has offered, in

Black Athena, a stunning investigation of the field. According to

Bernal, there are two “models” of Greek history: one views Greece

as Aryan or European (the Aryan Model) ; the other sees it as

Levantin - absorbed by Egyptian and Semitic culture (the Ancient

Model). “If I am right,” writes Professor Bernal,

in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement

by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 131

to rethink the fundamental bases of “Western Civilization” but

also to recognize the penetration of racism and “continental

chauvinism” into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing

history. The Ancient Model had no major “internal” deficiencies

or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown

for external reasons. For eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury

Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for

Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe

but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the

mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and

Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown

and replaced by something more acceptable.6

It is difficult not to be persuaded by the weight of documentation

Martin Bernal brings to his task and his rather dazzling analytical

insights. What struck me in his analysis were the process

of the fabrication of Ancient Greece and the motives for the fabrication.

The latter (motive) involved the concepts of purity and

of progress. The former (process) required misreading, predetermined

selectively of authentic sources, and - silence. From the

Christian theological appropriation of Israel (the Levant) , to the

early-nineteenth-century works of the prodigious Karl Müller,

works that effectively dismissed the Greeks’ own record of their

influences and origins as their “Egyptomania,” their tendency to

be “wonderstruck” by Egyptian culture, a tendency “manifested in

the ‘delusion’ that Egyptians and other non-European ‘barbarians’

had possessed superior cultures, from which the Greeks had borrowed

massively,” on through the Romantic response to the Enlightenment,

and the decline into disfavor of the Phoenicians,

“[t]he essential force behind the rejection of the tradition of massive

Phoenician influence on early Greece was the rise of racial -

as opposed to religious - anti-semitism. This was because the

6Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,

vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.:

Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 2.

132 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Phoenicians were correctly perceived to have been culturally very

close to the Jews.”7

I have quoted at perhaps too great length from Bernal’s text because

motive, so seldom an element brought to bear on the history

of history, is located, delineated, and confronted in Bernal’s research

and has helped my own thinking about the process and motives

of scholarly attention to and an appraisal of Afro-American

presence in the literature of the United States.

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national

defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range

(of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition

of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology

of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures.

And all of the interests are vested.

In such a melee as this one - a provocative, healthy, explosive

melee - extraordinarily profound work is being done. Some of

the controversy, however, has degenerated into ad hominem and

unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious

and silly arguments about politics (the destabilizing forces are dismissed

as merely political; the status quo sees itself as not - as

though the term apolitical were only its prefix and not the most

obviously political stance imaginable, since one of the functions of

political ideology is to pass itself off as immutable, natural, and

“innocent”), and covert expressions of critical inquiry designed to

neutralize and disguise the political interests of the discourse. Yet

much of the research and analysis has rendered speakable what

was formerly unspoken and has made humanistic studies, once

again, the place where one has to go to find out what’s going on.

Cultures, whether silenced or monologistic, whether repressed or

repressing, seek meaning in the language and images available

to them.

Silences are being broken, lost things have been found, and

at least two generations of scholars are disentangling received

7 Ibid., pp. 310, 337.

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 133

knowledge from the apparatus of control, most notably those who

are engaged in investigations of French and British colonialist literature,

American slave narratives, and the delineation of the

Afro-American literary tradition.

Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been “discovered”

actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved

from silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in

and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable

merely to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been

imagining ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s “aspects of nature,”

nor Conrad’s unspeaking. W e are the subjects of our own

narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and,

in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we

have come in contact. We are not, in fact, “other.” We are choices.

And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to

examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare

these centers with the “raceless” one with which we are, all of

us, most familiar.

II

Recent approaches to the reading of Afro-American literature

have come some distance; have addressed those arguments, mentioned

earlier (which are not arguments, but attitudes), that have,

since the seventeenth century, effectively silenced the autonomy of

that literature. As for the charge that “there is no Afro-American

art,” contemporary critical analysis of the literature and the recent

surge of reprints and rediscoveries have buried it, and are pressing

on to expand the traditional canon to include classic Afro-

American works where generically and chronologically appropriate,

and to devise strategies for reading and thinking about these

texts.

As to the second silencing charge, “Afro-American art exists,

but is inferior,” again, close readings and careful research into the

culture out of which the art is born have addressed and still ad134

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

dress the labels that once passed for stringent analysis but can no

more: that it is imitative, excessive, sensational, mimetic (merely),

and unintellectual, though very often “moving,” “passionate,”

“naturalistic,” “realistic,” or sociologically “revealing.” These

labels may be construed as compliments or pejoratives and if valid,

and shown as such, so much the better. More often than not, however,

they are the lazy, easy, brand-name applications when the

hard work of analysis is deemed too hard, or when the critic does

not have access to the scope the work demands. Strategies designed

to counter this lazy labeling include the application of recent literary

theories to Afro-American literature so that noncanonical texts

can be incorporated into existing and forming critical discourse.

The third charge, that “Afro-American art exists, but is superior

only when it measures up to the ‘universal’ criteria of Western

art,” produces the most seductive form of analysis, for both writer

and critic, because comparisons are a major form of knowledge

and flattery. The risks, nevertheless, are twofold: (1) the gathering

of a culture’s difference into the skirts of the Queen is a neutralization

designed and constituted to elevate and maintain hegemony,

and (2) circumscribing and limiting the literature to a mere

reaction to or denial of the Queen; judging the work solely in

terms of its referents to Eurocentric criteria, or its sociological accuracy,

political correctness, or its pretense of having no politics at

all, cripple the literature and infantilize the serious work of imaginative

writing. The response-oriented concept of Afro-American

literature contains the seeds of the next (fourth) charge: that

when Afro-American art is worthy, it is because it is “raw” and

“rich,” like ore, and like ore needs refining by Western intelligences.

Finding or imposing Western influences in or on Afro-

American literature has value, but when the sole purpose is to

place value only where that influence is located it is pernicious.

My unease stems from the possible, probable, consequences

these approaches may have upon the work itself. They can lead to

an incipient orphanization of the work in order to issue its adop[

MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 135

tion papers. They can confine the discourse to the advocacy of

diversification within the canon and/or a kind of benign coexistence

near or within reach of the already sacred texts. Either of

these two positions can quickly become another kind of silencing

if permitted to ignore the indigenous created qualities of the writing.

So many questions surface and irritate. What have these

critiques made of the work’s own canvas? Its paint, its frame, its

framelessness, its spaces? Another list of approved subjects? Of

approved treatments? More self-censoring, more exclusions of the

specificity of the culture, the gender, the language? Is there perhaps

an alternative utility in these studies? To advance power or

locate its fissures? To oppose elitist interests in order to enthrone

egalitarian effacement? Or is it merely to rank and grade the readable

product as distinct from the writable production? Can this

criticism reveal ways in which the author combats and confronts

received prejudices and even creates other terms in which to rethink

one’s attachment to or intolerance of the material of these

works? What is important in all of this is that the critic not be

engaged in laying claim on behalf of the text to his or her own

dominance and power. Nor to exchange his or her professional

anxieties for the imagined turbulence of the text. As has been said

before, “the text should become a problem of passion, not a pretext

for it.”

There are at least three focuses that seem to me to be neither

reactionary nor simple pluralism, nor the even simpler methods by

which the study of Afro-American literature remains the helpful

doorman into the halls of sociology. Each of them, however, requires

wakefulness.

One is the development of a theory of literature that truly

accommodates Afro-American literature: one that is based on its

culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to

negotiate the world it inhabits.

Another is the examination and reinterpretation of the American

canon, the founding nineteenth-century works, for the “un136

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

speakable things unspoken”; for the ways in which the presence

of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure

- the meaning of so much American literature. A search, in

other words, for the ghost in the machine.

A third is the examination of contemporary and/or noncanonical

literature for this presence, regardless of its category as mainstream,

minority, or what you will. I am always amazed by the

resonances, the structural gearshifts, and the uses to which Afro-

American narratives, persona, and idiom are put in contemporary

“white” literature. And in Afro-American literature itself the

questions of difference, of essence, are critical. What makes a

work “black”? The most valuable point of entry into the question

of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language-

its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive,

disruptive, masked, and unmasking language. Such a penetration

will entail the most careful study, one in which the impact

of Afro-American presence on modernity becomes clear and is no

longer a well-kept secret.

I would like to touch, for just a moment, on focuses two and

three. We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily

“not-there”; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum.

In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned,

they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and

purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population

held away from them. Looking at the scope of American literature,

I can’t help thinking that the question should never have been

“Why am I, an Afro-American, absent from it?” It is not a particularly

interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting

question is “What intellectual feats had to be performed by the

author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my

presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work?”

What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful

oblivion? I am not recommending an inquiry into the obvious

impulse that overtakes a soldier sitting in a World War I trench

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 137

to think of salmon fishing. That kind of pointed “turning from,”

deliberate escapism, or transcendence may be lifesaving in a circumstance

of immediate duress. The exploration I am suggesting

is, how does one sit in the audience observing, watching the performance

of Young America, say, in the nineteenth century, say,

and reconstruct the play, its director, its plot, and its cast in such

a manner that its very point never surfaces? Not why. How? Ten

years after Tocqueville’s prediction in 1840 that “Finding no stuff

for the ideal in what is real and true, poets ‘would flee to imaginary

regions.’Ó8 ” In 1850 at the height of slavery and burgeoning

abolitionism, American writers chose romance. Where, I wonder,

in these romances is the shadow of the presence from which the

text has fled? Where does it heighten, where does it dislocate,

where does it necessitate novelistic invention ; what does it release;

what does it hobble?

The device (or arsenal) that serves the purpose of flight can be

Romanticism versus verisimilitude ; New Criticism versus shabbily

disguised and questionably sanctioned “moral uplift”; the “complex

series of evasions” that is sometimes believed to be the essence

of modernism; the perception of the “evolution of art”; the cultivation

of irony, parody; the nostalgia for “literary language” ;

the rhetorically unconstrained textuality versus socially anchored

textuality, and the undoing of textuality altogether. These critical

strategies can (but need not) be put into service to reconstruct

the historical world to suit specific cultural and political purposes.

Many of these strategies have produced powerfully creative work.

Whatever uses to which Romanticism is put, however suspicious

its origins, it has produced an incontestably wonderful body of

work. In other instances these strategies have succeeded in paralyzing

both the work and its criticism. In still others they have led

to a virtual infantilization of the writer’s intellect, his sensibility,

his craft. They have reduced the meditations on theory to a “power

8 Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman

Melville (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 15.

138 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

struggle among sects,” reading unauthored and unauthorable material,

rather than reading with the author the text that both

cons truc t.

In other words, the critical process has made wonderful work

of some wonderful work, and recently the means of access to the

old debates have altered. The problem now is putting the question.

Is the nineteenth-century flight from blackness, for example,

successful in mainstream American literature ? Beautiful ? Artistically

problematic? Is the text sabotaged by its own proclamations

of “universality”? Are there ghosts in the machine? Active but

unsummoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine

and can also make it work? These kinds of questions have

been consistently put by critics of colonial literature vis-à-vis Africa

and India and other third-world countries. American literature

would benefit from similar critiques. I am made melancholy when

I consider that the act of defending the Eurocentric Western posture

in literature as not only “universal” but also “race-free” may

have resulted in lobotomizing that literature, and in diminishing

both the art and the artist. Like the surgical removal of legs so

that the body can remain enthroned, immobile, static - under

house arrest, so to speak. It may be, of course, that contemporary

writers deliberately exclude from their conscious writerly world

the subjective appraisal of groups perceived as “other,” and whitemale

writers frequently abjure and deny the excitement of framing

or locating their literature in the political world. Nineteenthcentury

writers, however, would never have given it a thought.

Mainstream writers in Young America understood their competition

to be national, cultural, but only in relationship to the Old

World, certainly not vis-à-vis an ancient race (whether Native

American or African) that was stripped of articulateness and intellectual

thought, rendered, in D. H. Lawrence’s term, “uncreate.”

For these early American writers, how could there be competition

with nations or peoples who were presumed unable to handle or

uninterested in handling the written word? One could write about

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 139

them, but there was never the danger of their “writing back.” Just

as one could speak to them without fear of their “talking back.”

One could even observe them, hold them in prolonged gaze, without

encountering the risk of being observed, viewed, or judged in

return, And if, on occasion, they were themselves viewed and

judged, it was out of a political necessity and, for the purposes of

art, could not matter. Or so thought Young America. It could

never have occurred to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848 that I, for example,

might read The Gold Bug and watch his efforts to render

my grandfather’s speech to something as close to braying as possible,

an effort so intense you can see the perspiration - and the

stupidity-when Jupiter says “I knows,” and Mr. Poe spells the

verb “nose.”9

Yet in spite of or because of this monologism there is a great,

ornamental, prescribed absence in early American literature and,

I submit, it is instructive. It only seems that the canon of American

literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” “white.” In fact it is

studiously so. In fact these absences of vital presences in Young

American literature may be the insistent fruit of the scholarship

rather than the text. Perhaps some of these writers, although under

current house arrest, have much more to say than has been realized.

Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping

blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible,

yet artistic modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by never

questioning the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise

the writer, diminish the text, and render the bulk of the literature

aesthetically and historically incoherent - an exorbitant price for

cultural (whitemale) purity, and, I believe, a spendthrift one. The

reexamination of founding literature of the United States for

9 Older America is not always distinguishable from its infancy. W e may pardon

Edgar Allan Poe in 1848 but it should have occurred to Kenneth Lynn in 1986 that

some young Native American might read his Hemingway biography and see herself

described as “squaw” by this respected scholar, and that some young men might

shudder reading the words “buck” and “half-breed” so casually included in his

scholarly speculations.

140 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper

and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other

significances.

One such writer, in particular, who has been almost impossible

to keep under lock and key is Herman Melville.

Michael Rogin, among several astute scholars, has done one

of the most exhaustive studies of how deeply Melville’s social

thought is woven into his writing. He calls our attention to the

connection Melville made between American slavery and American

freedom, how heightened the one rendered the other. And he

has provided evidence of the impact on the work of Melville’s

family, milieu, and, most important, the raging, all-encompassing

conflict of the time: slavery. He has reminded us that it was Melville’s

father-in-law, Judge Shaw, who had decided the case that

made the Fugitive Slave Law law, and that

other evidence in Moby Dick also suggest that impact of Shaw’s

ruling on the climax of Melville’s tale. Melville conceived the

final confrontation between Ahab and the white whale some

time in the first half of 1851. He may well have written his

last chapters only after returning from a trip to New York in

June. [Shaw’s decision was handed down in April 1851].

When New York antislavery leaders William Seward and John

van Buren wrote public letters protesting the Sims ruling, the

New York Herald responded. Its attack on “The Anti-Slavery

Agitators” began: “Did you ever see a whale? Did you ever

see a mighty whale struggling?” 10

Rogin also traces the chronology of the whale from its “birth

in a state of nature” to its final end as commodity.11 Central to

his argument is that Melville in Moby Dick was being allegorically

and insistently political in his choice of the whale. But within his

chronology, one singular whale transcends all others, goes beyond

nature, adventure, politics, and commodity to an abstraction. What

10 Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, pp. 107, 142.

11 Ibid., p. 112.

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 141

is this abstraction ? This “wicked idea ?” Interpretation has been

varied. It has been viewed as an allegory of the state in which

Ahab is Calhoun, or Daniel Webster; an allegory of capitalism

and corruption, God and man, the individual and fate, and most

commonly, the single allegorical meaning of the white whale is

understood to be brute, indifferent Nature, and Ahab the madman

who challenges that Nature.

But let us consider, again, the principal actor, Ahab, created by

an author who called himself Typee, signed himself Tawney, identified

himself as Ishmael, and who had written several books before

Moby Dick criticizing missionary forays into various paradises.

Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship’s voyage,

its point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it. His intention,

revenge, “an audacious, immitigable and supernatural revenge,”

develops stature-maturity-when we realize that he is not a

man mourning his lost leg or a scar on his face. However intense

and dislocating his fever and recovery have been after his encounter

with the white whale, however satisfactorily “male” this

vengeance is read, the vanity of it is almost adolescent. But if the

whale is more than blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine

aggression, if it is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we

can consider the possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition

of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology.

And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost

to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his

own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for

the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and

has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis -

strangely of no interest to psychiatry. Ahab, then, is navigating

between an idea of civilization that he renounces and an idea of

savagery he must annihilate, because the two cannot coexist. The

former is based on the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is

that the idea of savagery is not the missionary one: it is white

racial ideology that is savage and if, indeed, a white, nineteenth142

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

century, American male took on, not abolition, not the amelioration

of racist institutions or their laws, but the very concept of

whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, very desperate,

and very doomed. Madness would be the only appropriate

description of such audacity, and “he heaves me,” the most succinct

and appropriate description of that obsession.

I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was

engaged in some simple and simpleminded black/white didacticism,

or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that.

What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical

and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and

unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own

time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful

assertion of whiteness as ideology.

On the Pequod the multiracial, mainly foreign, proletariat is

at work to produce a commodity, but it is diverted and converted

from that labor to Ahab’s more significant intellectual quest. We

leave whale as commerce and confront whale as metaphor. With

that interpretation in place, two of the most famous chapters of

the book become luminous in a completely new way. One is chapter

9, “The Sermon.” In Father Mapple’s thrilling rendition of

Jonah’s trials, emphasis is given to the purpose of Jonah’s salvation.

He is saved from the fish’s belly for one single purpose:

“To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!”

Only then the reward - “Delight” - which strongly calls to mind

Ahab’s lonely necessity:

Delight is to him . . . who against the proud gods and commodores

of this earth, ever stand forth his own inexorable self.. . .

Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the

ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath

him, Delight is to him who gives no quarter in the truth and

kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from

under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight - top-gallant

delight is to him who acknowledges no law or lord, but the

Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. (italics mine)

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 143

No one, I think has denied that the sermon is designed to be

prophetic, but it seems unremarked what the nature of the sin is -

the sin that must be destroyed, regardless. Nature? A sin? The

terms do apply in Calvinistic America but not in romantic America.

Capitalism ? Perhaps. Capitalism fed greed, lent itself inexorably

to corruption, but probably was not in and of itself sinful

to Melville. Sin suggests a moral outrage within the bounds of

New World man to repair. The concept of racial superiority as

such a sin would fit seamlessly. It is difficult to read those words

(“destruction of sin,” “patriot to heaven”) and not hear in them

the description of a different Ahab. Not an adolescent male in

adult clothing, a maniacal, egocentric, or an “exotic plant” that

V. S. Parrington thought Melville was. Not even a morally fine

liberal voice adjusting, balancing, compromising with racial institutions.

But another Ahab: the only white male American heroic

enough to try to slay the monster that was devouring the world

as he knew it.

Another chapter that seems freshly lit by this reading is chapter

42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Melville points to the

do-or-die significance of his effort to say something unsayable in

this chapter. “I almost despair,” he writes, “of putting it in a

comprehensive form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above

all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself

here; and yet in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,

else all these chapters might be naught” (italics mine). The language

of this chapter ranged between benevolent, beautiful images

of whiteness and whiteness as sinister and shocking. After dissecting

the ineffable, he concludes: “Therefore . . . symbolize whatever

grand or gracious he will by whiteness, no man can deny that

in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition

to the soul.” I stress “idealized significance” to emphasize

and make clear (if such clarity needs stating) that Melville is not

exploring white people, but whiteness idealized. Then, after informing

the reader of his “hope to light upon some chance clue

144 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

to conduct us to the hidden course we seek,” he tries to nail it.

To provide the key to the “hidden course.” His struggle to do so

is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. But in nonfigurative language,

he identifies the imaginative tools needed to solve the problem:

“subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no

man can follow another into these halls.” And his final observation

reverberates with personal trauma. “This visible [colored]

world seems formed in love, the invisible [white] spheres were

formed in fright.” The necessity for whiteness as privileged “natural”

state, the invention of it, was indeed formed in fright.

“Slavery,” writes Rogin, “confirmed Melville’s isolation, decisively

established in Moby Dick, from the dominant consciousness

of his time.” I differ on this point and submit that Melville’s hostility

to and repugnance for slavery would have found company.

There were many white Americans of his acquaintance who felt

repelled by slavery, wrote journalism about it, spoke about it, legislated

on it, and were active in abolishing it. His attitude to slavery

alone would not have condemned him to the almost autistic separation

visited upon him. And if he felt convinced that blacks were

worthy of being treated like whites, or that capitalism was dangerous

- he had company or could have found it. But to question

the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial

superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary

ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, selfdestroying

philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from

under the robes of Senators and Judges,” to drag the “judge himself

to the bar” - that was dangerous, solitary, radical work.

Especially then. Especially now. To be “only a patriot to heaven”

is no mean aspiration in Young America for a writer-or the

captain of a whaling ship.

A complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text is Moby Dick,

and among its several meanings it seems to me this “unspeakable”

one has remained the “hidden course,” the “truth in the Face of

Falsehood.” To this day no novelist has so wrestled with its sub[

MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 145

ject. To this day literary analyses of canonical texts have shied

away from that perspective: the informing and determining Afro-

American presence in traditional American literature. The chapters

I have made reference to are only a fraction of the instances

where the text surrenders such insights, and points a helpful finger

toward the ways in which the ghost drives the machine.

Melville is not the only author whose works double their fascination

and their power when scoured for this presence and the

writerly strategies taken to address or deny it. Edgar Allan Poe

will sustain such a reading. So will Nathaniel Hawthorne and

Mark Twain; and in the twentieth century, Willa Cather, Ernest

Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Conner,

and William Faulkner, to name a few. Canonical American literature

is begging for such attention.

It seems to me a more than fruitful project to produce some

cogent analysis showing instances where early American literature

identifies itself, risks itself, to assert its antithesis to blackness.

How its linguistic gestures prove the intimate relationship to what

is being nulled by implying a full descriptive apparatus (identity)

to a presence-that-is-assumed-not-to-exist. Afro-American critical

inquiry can do this work.

I mentioned earlier that finding or imposing Western influences

in or on Afro-American literature had value provided the

valued process does not become self-anointing. There is an adjacent

project to be undertaken - the third focus in my list: the

examination of contemporary literature (both the sacred and

profane) for the impact Afro-American presence has had on the

structure of the work, the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise

in which it is engaged. Like focus two, this critical process

must also eschew the pernicious goal of equating the fact of that

presence with the achievement of the work. A work does not get

better because it is responsive to another culture; nor does it become

automatically flawed because of that responsiveness. The

point is to clarify, not to enlist. And it does not “go without say146

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

ing” that a work written by an Afro-American is automatically

subsumed by an enforcing Afro-American presence. There is a

clear flight from blackness in a great deal of Afro-American literature.

In others there is the duel with blackness, and in some cases,

as they say, “You’d never know.”

III

It is on this area, the impact of Afro-American culture on contemporary

American literature, that I now wish to comment. I

have already said that works by Afro-Americans can respond to

this presence (just as nonblack works do) in a number of ways.

The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for

whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In

other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact,

may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity-what

is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably

inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American ?

Please forgive the use of my own work in these observations.

I use it not because it provides the best example, but because I

know it best, know what I did and why, and know how central

these queries are to me. Writing is, after all, an act of language,

its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover.

Let me suggest some of the ways in which I activate language

and ways in which that language activates me. I will limit this

perusal by calling attention only to the first sentences of the books

I’ve written, and hope that in exploring the choices I made, prior

points are illuminated.

The Bluest Eye begins “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds

in the fall of 1941.” That sentence, like the ones that open

each succeeding book, is simple, uncomplicated. Of all the sentences

that begin all the books, only two of them have dependent

clauses; the other three are simple sentences and two are stripped

down to virtually subject, verb, modifier. Nothing fancy here.

No words need looking up; they are ordinary, everyday words.

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 147

Yet I hoped the simplicity was not simpleminded, but devious,

even loaded. And that the process of selecting each word, for

itself and its relationship to the others in the sentence, along with

the rejection of others for their echoes, for what is determined and

what is not determined, what is almost there and what must be

gleaned, would not theatricalize itself, would not erect a proscenium

-at least not a noticeable one. So important to me was this

unstaging, that in this first novel I summarized the whole of the

book on the first page. (In the first edition, it was printed in its

entirety on the jacket.)

The opening phrase of this sentence, “Quiet as it’s kept,” had

several attractions for me. First, it was a familiar phrase, familiar

to me as a child listening to adults; to black women conversing

with one another, telling a story, an anecdote, gossip about some

one or event within the circle, the family, the neighborhood. The

words are conspiratorial. “Shh, don’t tell anyone else,” and “No

one is allowed to know this.” It is a secret between us and a secret

that is being kept from us. The conspiracy is both held and withheld,

exposed and sustained. In some sense it was precisely what

the act of writing the book was: the public exposure of a private

confidence. In order fully to comprehend the duality of that position,

one needs to think of the immediate political climate in

which the writing took place, 1965-69, during great social upheaval

in the life of black people. The publication (as opposed to

the writing) involved the exposure; the writing was the disclosure

of secrets, secrets “we” shared and those withheld from us by ourselves

and by the world outside the community.

“Quiet as it’s kept,” is also a figure of speech that is written,

in this instance, but clearly chosen for how speakerly it is, how it

speaks and bespeaks a particular world and its ambience. Further,

in addition to its “back fence” connotation, its suggestion of illicit

gossip, of thrilling revelation, there is also, in the “whisper,” the

assumption (on the part of the reader) that the teller is on the

inside, knows something others do not, and is going to be generous

148 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

with this privileged information. The intimacy I was aiming for,

the intimacy between the reader and the page, could start up immediately

because the secret is being shared, at best, and eavesdropped

upon, at the least. Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy

seemed crucial to me then, writing my first novel. I did not want

the reader to have time to wonder, “What do I have to do, to give

up, in order to read this? What defense do I need, what distance

maintain?” Because I know (and the reader does not - he or she

has to wait for the second sentence) that this is a terrible story

about things one would rather not know anything about.

What, then, is the Big Secret about to be shared? The thing

we (reader and I ) are “in” on? A botanical aberration. Pollution,

perhaps. A skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things: a

September, an autumn, a fall without marigolds. Bright common,

strong and sturdy marigolds. When? In 1941, and since that is a

momentous year (the beginning of World War II for the United

States), the “fall” of 1941, just before the declaration of war, has

a “closet” innuendo. In the temperate zone where there is a season

known as “fall” during which one expects marigolds to be at their

peak, in the months before the beginning of U.S. participation in

World War II, something grim is about to be divulged. The next

sentence will make it clear that the sayer, the one who knows, is a

child speaking, mimicking the adult black women on the porch or

in the backyard. The opening phrase is an effort to be grown-up

about this shocking information. The point of view of a child

alters the priority an adult would assign the information. “We

thought it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that

the marigolds did not grow” foregrounds the flowers, backgrounds

illicit, traumatic, incomprehensible sex coming to its dreaded fruition.

This foregrounding of “trivial” information and backgrounding

of shocking knowledge secures the point of view but gives the

reader pause about whether the voice of children can be trusted at

all or is more trustworthy than an adult’s. The reader is thereby

protected from a confrontation too soon with the painful details,

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 149

while siniultaneously provoked into a desire to know them. The

novelty, I thought, would be in having this story of female violation

revealed from the vantage point of the victims or could-be

victims of rape - the persons no one inquired of (certainly not

in 1965) -the girls themselves. And since the victim does not

have the vocabulary to understand the violence or its context, gullible,

vulnerable girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults

they pretended to be in the beginning, would have to do that for

her, and would have to fill those silences with their own reflective

lives. Thus, the opening provides the stroke that announces something

more than a secret shared, but a silence broken, a void filled,

an unspeakable thing spoken at last. And they draw the connection

between a minor destabilization in seasonal gora with the insignificant

destruction of a black girl. Of course “minor” and

“insignificant” represent the outside world’s view - for the girls

both phenomena are earthshaking depositories of information they

spend that whole year of childhood (and afterward) trying to

fathom, and cannot. If they have any success, it will be in transferring

the problem of fathoming to the presumably adult reader,

to the inner circle of listeners. At the least they have distributed

the weight of these problematical questions to a larger constituency,

and justified the public exposure of a privacy. If the conspiracy

that the opening words announce is entered into by the

reader, then the book can be seen to open with its close: a speculation

on the disruption of “nature,” as being a social disruption

with tragic individual consequences in which the reader, as part of

the population of the text, is implicated.

However, a problem, unsolved, lies in the central chamber of

the novel. The shattered world I built (to complement what is

happening to Pecola), its pieces held together by seasons in childtime

and commenting at every turn on the incompatible and

barren white-family primer, does not in its present form handle

effectively the silence at its center. The void that is Pecola’s “unbeing.”

It should have had a shape - like the emptiness left by

150 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

a boom or a cry. It required a sophistication unavailable to me,

and some deft manipulation of the voices around her. She is not

Seen by herself until she hallucinates a self. And the fact of her

hallucination becomes a point of outside-the-book conversation,

but does not work in the reading process.

Also, although I was pressing for a female expressiveness (a

challenge that resurfaced in Sula), it eluded me for the most part,

and I had to content myself with female personae because I was

not able to secure throughout the work the feminine subtext that

is present in the opening sentence (the women gossiping, eager

and aghast in “Quiet as it’s kept”). The shambles this struggle

became is most evident in the section on Pauline Breedlove where

I resorted to two voices; hers and the urging narrator’s, both of

which are extremely unsatisfactory to me. It is interesting to me

now that where I thought I would have the most difficulty subverting

the language to a feminine mode, I had the least: connecting

Cholly’s “rape” by the whitemen to his own of his daughter. This

most masculine act of aggression becomes feminized in my language,

“passive,” and, I think, more accurately repellent when

deprived of the male “glamor of shame” rape is (or once was)

routinely given.

The points I have tried to illustrate are that my choices of language

(speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension

on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect

immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory

fabric), as well as my (failed) attempt to shape a silence

while breaking it are attempts (many unsatisfactory) to transfigure

the complexity and wealth of Afro-American culture into a

language worthy of the culture.

In Sula, it’s necessary to concentrate on two first sentences because

what survives in print is not the one I had intended to be the

first. Originally the book opened with “Except for World War II

nothing ever interfered with National Suicide Day.” With some

encouragement, I recognized that it was a false beginning. In

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 151

medias res with a vengeance, because there was no res to be in the

middle of - no implied world in which to locate the specificity

and the resonances of the sentence. More to the point, I knew I

was writing a second novel, and that it too would be about people

in a black community not just foregrounded but totally dominant;

and that it was about black women - also foregrounded and dominant.

In 1988, certainly, I would not need (or feel the need for)

the sentence - the short section - that now opens Sula. The

threshold between the reader and the black-topic text need not be

the safe, welcoming lobby I persuaded myself it needed at that

time. My preference was the demolition of the lobby altogether.

As can be seen from The Bluest Eye, and in every other book I

have written, only Sula has this “entrance.” The others refuse the

“presentation”; refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation

between the sacred and the obscene, public and private,

them and us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to the diminished expectations

of the reader, or his or her alarm heightened by the emotional

luggage one carries into the black-topic text. (I should remind

you that Sula was begun in 1969, while my first book was in

proof, in a period of extraordinary political activity.)

Since I had become convinced that the effectiveness of the

original beginning was only in my head, the job at hand became

how to construct an alternate beginning that would not force the

work to genuflect and would complement the outlaw quality in it.

The problem presented itself this way: to fashion a door. Instead

of having the text open wide the moment the cover is opened (or,

as in The Bluest Eye, to have the book stand exposed, before the

cover is even touched, much less opened, by placing the complete

“plot” on the first page - and finally on the cover of the first edition),

here I was to posit a door, turn its knob and beckon for

some four or five pages. I had determined not to mention any

characters in those pages, there would be no people in the lobby -

but I did, rather heavy-handedly in my view, end the welcome

aboard with the mention of Shadrack and Sula. It was a craven

152 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

(to me, still) surrender to a worn-out technique of novel writing:

the overt announcement to the reader whom to pay attention to.

Yet the bulk of the opening I finally wrote is about the community,

a view of it, and the view is not from within (this is a

door, after all) but from the point of view of a stranger - the

“valley man” who might happen to be there on some errand, but

who obviously does not live there and to and for whom all this is

mightily strange, even exotic. You can see why I despise much of

this beginning. Yet I tried to place in the opening sentence the

signature terms of loss: “There used to be a neighborhood here;

not any more.” That may not be the world’s worst sentence, but it

doesn’t “play,” as they say in the theater.

My new first sentence became “In that place, where they tore

the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make

room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.”

Instead of my original plan, here I am introducing an

outside-the-circle reader into the circle. I am translating the anonymous

into the specific, a “place” into a “neighborhood,” and

letting a stranger in through whose eyes it can be viewed. In between

“place” and “neighborhood” I now have to squeeze the

specificity and the difference; the nostalgia, the history, and the

nostalgia for the history; the violence done to it and the consequences

of that violence. (It took three months, those four pages,

a whole summer of nights.) The nostalgia is sounded by “once”;

the history and a longing for it is implied in the connotation of

“neighborhood.” The violence lurks in having something torn out

by its roots - it will not, cannot grow again. Its consequences are

that what has been destroyed is considered weeds, refuse necessarily

removed in urban “development” by the unspecified but no

less known “they” who do not, cannot, afford to differentiate what

is displaced, and would not care that this is “refuse” of a certain

kind. Both plants have darkness in them: “black” and “night.”

One is unusual (nightshade) and has two darkness words: “night”

and “shade.” The other (blackberry) is common. A familiar plant

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 153

and an exotic one. A harmless one and a dangerous one. One produces

a nourishing berry; one delivers toxic ones, But they both

thrived there together, in that place when it was a neighborhood.

Both are gone now, and the description that follows is of the other

specific things, in this black community, destroyed in the wake of

the golf course. “Golf course” conveys what it is not, in this context;

not houses, or factories, or even a public park, and certainly

not residents. It is a manicured place where the likelihood of the

former residents showing up is almost nil.

I want to get back to those berries for a moment (to explain,

perhaps, the length of time it took for the language of that section

to arrive). I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black,

metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly

not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World

black and New World woman extracting choice from choicelessness,

responding inventively to found things. Improvisational.

Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed,

unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously

female. In her final conversation with Nel she refers to herself

as a special kind of black person woman, one with choices.

Like a redwood, she says. (With all due respect to the dream

landscape of Freud, trees have always seemed feminine to me.)

In any case, my perception of Sula’s double dose of chosen blackness

and biological blackness is in the presence of those two words

of darkness in “nightshade” as well as in the uncommon quality of

the vine itself. One variety is called “enchanter,” and the other

“bittersweet” because the berries taste bitter at first and then sweet.

Also nightshade was thought to counteract witchcraft. All of this

seemed a wonderful constellation of signs for Sula. And “blackberry

patch” seemed equally appropriate for Nel : nourishing,

never needing to be tended or cultivated, once rooted and bearing.

Reliably sweet but thorn-bound. Her process of becoming, heralded

by the explosive dissolving of her fragilely held-together ball of

string and fur (when the thorns of her self-protection are removed

154 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

by Eva), puts her back in touch with the complex, contradictory,

evasive, independent, liquid modernity Sula insisted upon. A modernity

which overturns prewar definitions, ushers in the Jazz Age

(an age defined by Afro-American art and culture), and requires

new kinds of intelligences to define oneself.

The stage setting of the first four pages is embarrassing to me

now, but the pains I have taken to explain it may be helpful in identifying

the strategies one can be forced to resort to in trying to accommodate

the mere fact of writing about, for, and out of black culture

while accommodating and responding to mainstream “white” culture.

The “valley man’s’’ guidance into the territory was my compromise.

Perhaps it “worked,” but it was not the work I wanted to do.

Had I begun with Shadrack, I would have ignored the smiling

welcome and put the reader into immediate confrontation with his

wound and his scar. The difference my preferred (original) beginning

would have made would be calling greater attention to the

traumatic displacement this most wasteful capitalist war had on

black people in particular, and throwing into relief the creative,

if outlawed, determination to survive it whole. Sula as (feminine)

solubility and Shadrack’s (male) fixative are two extreme ways of

dealing with displacement - a prevalent theme in the narrative of

black people. In the final opening I replicated the demiurge of

discriminatory, prosecutorial racial oppression in the loss to commercial

“progress” of the village, but the references to the community’s

stability and creativeness (music, dancing, craft, religion,

irony, wit, all referred to in the valleyman’s presence) refract and

subsume their pain while they are in the thick of it. It is a softer

embrace than Shadrack’s organized, public madness - his disruptive

remembering presence which helps (for awhile) to cement

the community, until Sula challenges them.

“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised

to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at 3:OO.”

This declarative sentence is designed to mock a journalistic

style; with a minor alteration it could be the opening of an item

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 155

in a small-town newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event

of minimal local interest, Yet I wanted it to contain (as does the

scene that takes place when the agent fulfills his promise) the information

that the novel both centers on and radiates from.

The name of the insurance company is real, a well-known

black-owned company dependent on black clients, and in its corporate

name are “life” and “mutual”; agent being the necessary

ingredient of what enables the relationship between them. The

sentence also moves from North Carolina to Lake Superior - geographical

locations, but with a sly implication that the move from

North Carolina (the south) to Lake Superior (the north) might

not actually involve progress to some “superior state” -which, of

course it does not. The two other significant words are “fly,” upon

which the novel centers and “mercy,” the name of the place from

which he is to fly. Both constitute the heartbeat of the narrative.

Where is the insurance man flying to? The other side of Lake

Superior is Canada, of course, the historic terminus of the escape

route for black people looking for asylum. “Mercy,” the other

significant term, is the grace note; the earnest though, with one

exception, unspoken wish of the narrative’s population. Some

grant it; some never find it; one, at least, makes it the text and cry

of her extemporaneous sermon upon the death of her granddaughter.

It touches, turns, and returns to Guitar at the end of the

book - he who is least deserving of it - and moves him to make

it his own final gift. It is what one wishes for Hagar; what is unavailable

to and unsought by Macon Dead, senior; what his wife

learns to demand from him, and what can never come from the

white world as is signified by the inversion of the name of the hospital

from Mercy to “no-Mercy.” It is available only from within.

The center of the narrative is flight; the springboard is mercy.

But the sentence turns, as all sentences do, on the verb: promised.

The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten

his act. He promises, as though a contract is being executedfaithfully-

between himself and others. Promises broken, or

156 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

kept; the difficulty of ferreting out loyalties and ties that bind or

bruise wend their way throughout the action and the shifting relationships.

So the agent’s flight, like that of the Solomon in the

title, although toward asylum (Canada, or freedom, or home, or

the company of the welcoming dead), and although it carries the

possibility of failure and the certainty of danger, is toward change,

an alternative way, a cessation of things-as-they-are. It should not

be understood as a simple, desperate act, the end of a fruitless life,

a life without gesture, without examination, but as obedience to a

deeper contract with his people. It is his Commitment to them,

regardless of whether, in all its details, they understand it. There

is, however, in their response to his action, a tenderness, some contrition,

and mounting respect (“They didn’t know he had it in

him”) and an awareness that the gesture enclosed rather than

repudiated themselves. The note he leaves asks for forgiveness.

It is tacked on his door as a mild invitation to whomever might

pass by, but it is not an advertisement. It is an almost Christian

declaration of love as well as humility of one who was not able

to do more.

There are several other flights in the work and they are motivationally

different. Solomon’s the most magical, the most theatrical,

and, for Milkman, the most satisfying. It is also the most

problematic - to those he left behind. Milkman’s flight binds

these two elements of loyalty (Mr. Smith’s) and abandon and selfinterest

(Solomon’s) into a third thing: a merging of fealty and

risk that suggests the “agency” for “mutual” “life,” which he

offers at the end and which is echoed in the hills behind him, and

is the marriage of surrender and domination, acceptance and rule,

commitment to a group through ultimate isolation. Guitar recognizes

this marriage and recalls enough of how lost he himself is to

put his weapon down.

The journalistic style at the beginning, its rhythm of a familiar,

hand-me-down dignity, is pulled along by an accretion of detail

displayed in a meandering unremarkableness. Simple words, un[

MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 157

complex sentence structures, persistent understatement, highly

aural syntax - but the ordinariness of the language, its colloquial,

vernacular, humorous, and, upon occasion, parabolic quality, sabotages

expectations and masks judgments when it can no longer

defer them. The composition of red, white, and blue in the opening

scene provides the national canvas/flag upon which the narrative

works and against which the lives of these black people must

be seen, but which must not overwhelm the enterprise the novel

is engaged in. It is a composition of color that heralds Milkman’s

birth, protects his youth, hides its purpose and through which he

must burst (through blue Buicks, red tulips in his waking dream,

and his sister’s white stockings, ribbons, and gloves) before discovering

that the gold of his search is really Pilate’s yellow orange

and the glittering metal of the box in her ear.

These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they

were planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances.

That is planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should

fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected

or misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks

the questions the community asks, and both reader and “voice”

stand among the crowd, within it, with privileged intimacy and

contact, but without any more privileged information than the

crowd has. That egalitarianism which places us all (reader, the

novel’s population, the narrator’s voice) on the same footing reflected

for me the force of flight and mercy, and the precious,

imaginative, yet realistic gaze of black people who (at one time,

anyway) did not anoint what or whom it mythologized. The

“song” itself contains this unblinking evaluation of the miraculous

and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an unblinking gaze

which is lurking in the tender but amused choral-community response

to the agent’s flight. Sotto (but not completely) is my own

giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the journey

to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western fable,

they are in deep trouble; but the African myth is also contami158

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

nated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self-born Pilate is unimpressed

by Solomon’s flight and knocks Milkman down when,

made new by his appropriation of his own family’s fable, he returns

to educate her with it. Upon hearing all he has to say, her

only interest is filial. “Papa? . . . I’ve been carrying Papa?” And

her longing to hear the song, finally, is a longing for balm to die

by, not a submission obedience to history - anybody’s.

The opening sentence of Tar Baby, “He believed he was safe,”

is the second version of itself. The first, “He thought he was safe,”

was discarded because “thought” did not contain the doubt I

wanted to plant in the reader’s mind about whether or not he

really was-safe. “Thought” came to me at once because it

was the verb my parents and grandparents used when describing

what they had dreamed the night before. Not “I dreamt,” or “It

seemed” or even “I saw or did” this or that - but “I thought.”

It gave the dream narrative distance (a dream is not “real”) and

power (the control implied in thinking rather than dreaming).

But to use “thought” seemed to undercut the faith of the character

and the distrust I wanted to suggest to the reader. “Believe”

was chosen to do the work properly. And the person who does the

believing is, in a way, about to enter a dreamworld, and convinces

himself, eventually, that he is in control of it. He believed; was

convinced. And although the word suggests his conviction, it does

not reassure the reader. If I had wanted the reader to trust this

person’s point of view I would have written, “He was safe.” Or,

“Finally, he was safe.” The unease about this view of safety is

important because safety itself is the desire of each person in the

novel. Locating it, creating it, losing it.

You may recall that I was interested in working out the mystery

of a piece of lore, a folktale, which is also about safety and

danger and the skills needed to secure the one and recognize and

avoid the other. I was not, of course, interested in retelling the

tale, I suppose that is an idea to pursue, but it is certainly not

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 159

interesting enough to engage me for four years. I have said, elsewhere,

that the exploration of the Tar Baby tale was like stroking

a pet to see what the anatomy was like but not to disturb or distort

its mystery. Folklore may have begun as allegory for natural or

social phenomena; it may have been employed as a retreat from

contemporary issues in art, but folklore can also contain myths that

reactivate themselves endlessly through providers - the people

who repeat, reshape, reconstitute, and reinterpret them. The Tar

Baby tale seemed to me to be about masks. Not masks as covering

what is to be hidden, but how masks come to life, take life over,

exercise the tensions between themselves and what they cover. For

Son, the most effective mask is none. For the others the construction

is careful and delicately borne, but the masks they make have

a life of their own and collide with those they come in contact

with. The texture of the novel seemed to want leanness, architecture

that was worn and ancient like a piece of mask sculpture:

exaggerated, breathing, just athwart the representational life it

displaced. Thus, the first and last sentences had to match, like the

exterior planes match the interior, concave ones inside the mask.

Therefore “He believed he was safe” would be twin of “Lickety

split, lickety split, lickety lickety split.” This close is (1) the

last sentence of the folktale (2) the action of the character,

(3) the indeterminate ending that follows from the untrustworthy

beginning, (4) the complimentary meter of its twin sister

( with ´), and (5) the wide and marvelous

space between the contradiction of those two images: from a

dream of safety to the sound of running feet. The whole mediated

world in between. This masked and unmasked; enchanted, disenchanted;

wounded and wounding world is played out on and by

the varieties of interpretation (Western and Afro-American) the

Tar Baby myth has been (and continues to be) subjected to.

Winging one’s way through the vise and expulsion of history becomes

possible in creative encounters with that history. Nothing,

160 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

in those encounters, is safe, or should be. Safety is the fetus of

power as well as protection from it, as the uses to which masks

and myths are put in Afro-American culture remind us.

In beginning Beloved with numerals rather than spelled out

numbers, it was my intention to give the house an identity separate

from the street or even the city; to name it the way "Sweet

Home" was named; the way plantations were named, but not with

nouns or "proper" names - with numbers instead because numbers

have no adjectives, no posture of coziness or grandeur or the

haughty yearning of arrivistes and estate builders for the parallel

beautifications of the nation they left behind, laying claim to instant

history and legend. Numbers here constitute an address, a

thrilling enough prospect for slaves who had owned nothing, least

of all an address. And although the numbers, unlike words, can

have no modifiers, I give these an adverb- spiteful (there are

two other modifiers of 124). The address is therefore personalized,

but personalized by its own activity, not the pasted-on desire for

personality.

Also there is something about numerals that makes them

spoken, heard, in this context, because one expects words to read

in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound of the novel,

sometimes cacaphonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an innerear

sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a

musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than

music can. Thus the second sentence is not one: it is a phrase that

properly, grammatically, belongs as a dependent clause with the

first. Had I done that, however (124 was spiteful, comma, full of

a baby's venom, or 124 was full of a baby's venom) I could not

have had the accent on full

Whatever the risk of confronting the reader with what must

be immediately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative, authoritative

sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined

to take it. Because the in-medias-res opening that I am so committed

to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 161

appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched,

yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I

want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be

possible between the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched

just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place

to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby,

no door, no entrance - a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short

one). And the house into which this snatching - this kidnapping-

propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, like

the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed. A

few words have to be read before it is clear that "124" refers to

a house (in most of the early drafts “The women in the house

knew it” was simply “The women knew it.” “House” was not

mentioned for seventeen lines), and a few more have to be read

to discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite. By

then it is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control,

but is not beyond understanding, since it is not beyond accommodation

by both the “women” and the “children.” The fully

realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the

narrative and sleight of hand. One of its purposes is to keep the

reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world

while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political

world.

The subliminal, the underground life of a novel, is the area

most likely to link arms with the reader and facilitate making it

one’s own. Because one must, to get from the first sentence to the

next, and the next and the next. The friendly observation post I

was content to build and man in Sula (with the stranger in the

midst), or the down-home journalism of Song of Solomon or the

calculated mistrust of the point of view in Tar Baby would not

serve here. Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there

as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor

from the “author,” with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity

available for the journey. The painterly language of Song of

162 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Solomon was not useful to me in Beloved. There is practically no

color whatsoever in its pages, and when there is, it is so stark and

remarked upon, it is virtually raw. Color seen for the first time,

without its history. No built architecture as in Tar Baby, no play

with Western chronology as in Sula; no exchange between book

life and “real” life discourse -with printed text units rubbing up

against seasonal black childtime units as in T h e Bluest Eye. No

compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture, no paint, no

time, especially no time because memory, prehistoric memory, has

no time. There is just a little music, each other, and the urgency

of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the

work of language is to get out of the way.

I hope you understand that in this explication of how I practice

language is a search for and deliberate posture of vulnerability to

those aspects of Afro-American culture that can inform and position

my work. I sometimes know when the work works, when

nommo12 has effectively summoned, by reading and listening to

those who have entered the text. I learn nothing from those who

resist it, except, of course, the sometimes fascinating display of

their struggle. My expectations of and my gratitude to the critics

who enter, are great. To those who talk about how as well as

what; who identify the workings as well as the work; for whom

the study of Afro-American literature is neither a crash course

in neighborliness and tolerance, nor an infant to be carried, instructed,

or chastised or even whipped like a child, but the serious

study of art forms that have much work to do, and which are

already legitimatized by their own cultural sources and predecessors

- in or out of the canon - I owe much.

For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty,

a hundred, or more years his or her work may be relished for its

beauty or its insight or its power; or it may be condemned for its

12 “The life force, which produces all life . . , , in the shape of the word”

(Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: The New African Culture [London: Faber and Faber,

1961], p. 124).

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken 163

vacuousness and pretension - and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred

years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her

intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed

at for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power - and

junked. It’s possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or

that both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned,

when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.