Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

This interview, titled "A Conversation with Toni Morrison: 'The Language Must Not Sweat'," was conducted by Thomas LeClair for New Republic (March 21, 1891). This excerpt focuses on her use of folklore and mythology in her novels and reflection on her family tradition that shaped her imagination. The full interview is available here.

LeClair: How do you conceive of your function as a writer?

Morrison: I write what i have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people, which is necessary and legitimate but which also allows me to get in touch with all sorts of people. I think long and carefully about what my novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment. . . . I am not explaining anything to anybody. My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. . .  I wanted to restore the language that black people spoke to its original power. That calls for a language that is rich but not ornate. 

LeClair: Does this mean working with folklore and myth?

Morrison: I think the myths are misunderstood now because we are not talking to each other the way I was spoken to when I was growing up in a very small town. You knew everything in that little microcosm. But we don’t live where we were born. I had to leave my town to do my work here; it was a sacrifice/ There is a certain sense of family I don’t have. So the myths get forgotten. Or they may not have been looked at carefully. Let me give you an example: the flying myth in Song of Solomon. If it means Icarus to some readers, fine; I want to take credit for that. But my meaning is specific. It is about black people who could fly. That was always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts. I don’t care how silly it may seem. It is everywhere--people used to talk about it. It’s in the spirituals and gospels. Perhaps it was wishful thinking--escape, death, and all that. But suppose it wasn’t. What might it mean? I tired to find out Song of Solomon. 

[ . . . ]

LeClair: One of the complaints about your fiction in both the black and white press is that you write about eccentrics, people who aren’t representative.

Morrison: This kind of sociological judgment is pervasive and pernicious. “Novel A is better than B or C because A is more like most black people really are.” Unforgivable. I am enchanted, personally, with people who are extraordinary because in them I can find what is applicable to the ordinary. There are books by black writers about ordinary black life. I don’t write them. Black readers often ask me, “Why are your books so melancholy, so sad? Why don’t you ever write about something that works, about relationships that are healthy?” There is a comic mode, meaning the union of the sexes, that I don’t write. I write what I suppose could be called the tragic mode in which there is some catharsis and revelation. There’s a whole lot of space in between, but my inclination is in the tragic direction. Maybe it’s a consequence of my being a classics minor.

Related, I think, is the question of nostalgia. The danger of writing about the past, as I have done, is romanticizing it. I don’t think I do that, but I do feel that people were more interesting then than they are now. It seems to me there were more excesses in women and men, and people accepted them as they don’t now. In the black community where I grew up, there were eccentricity and freedom, less conformity in individual habits—but close conformity in terms of the survival of the village, of the tribe. Before sociological microscopes were placed on us, people did anything and nobody was run out of town. I  mean, the community in Sula let her stay. They wouldn’t wash or bury her. They protected themselves from her, but she was part of the community. The detritus of white people, the rejects from the respectable white world, which appears in Sula was in our neighborhood. In my family, there were some really interesting people who were willing to be whatever they were. People permitted it, perhaps because in the outer world the eccentrics had to be a little servant person or low-level factory worker. They had an enormous span of emotions and activities, and they are the people I remember when I go to write. When I go to colleges, the students say “Who are these people?” Maybe it’s because now everybody seems to be trying to be “right.”