Unspeakable Things Unspoken: T h e A fro-American Presence in

Unspeakable

Things

Unspoken:

The

fro

American Presence

American Literature

TONI MORRISON

ANNER

ECTURES

UMAN

ALUES

Delivered at

The

University

Michigan

October

1988

ONI

ORRISON

was appointed the Robert

Goheen Pro

fessor in The Council of the Humanities at Princeton Uni

versity in 1989. Prior to that she held the Albert Schweitzer

Chair in the Humanities at the University of Albany, State

University

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

Solomon

(1977), for which she won the National

Book Critics Award;

Tar Baby

(1981); and

Beloved

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

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

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

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

Also

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 Viet

nam 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 live

stock,”

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,

cane

like, reed.

the second,

sources include

rod

becoming

body

law, body

rules, measur-

ing rod.

When the

two

words faced each other, the image became

the shape of the cannon wielded on (or by) the body

law. The

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

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

logical connection

heard

father

fodder,

and sensed

father

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

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

But

changed my mind

(so

many have used the phrase) and hope

to make clear the appropriateness of the one

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 address

ing the Afro

American presence in American Literature that re

quire neither slaughter nor reification

views that may spring the

[ 123 ]

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The Tanner Lectures

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 Na

tive American, or

. . .

It is somehow separate from them and they

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

structured curricula, and anthologies, this separate confinement, be

it breached or endorsed, is the subject of

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 tran

scending paradigm or whether they constitute a disguise for

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 lit

erary discourse. The male part

the whitemale equation is al

ready deeply engaged, and no one believes that the body of litera

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

protected preserve of the thoughts and works and analytical strate

gies 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

swift and swiftly obeyed call to arms, their use is no longer for

bidden.’ 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 stan

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

Henry

Louis

Gates, ed.,

“Race,” Writing,

and

Difference

(Chicago: Univer

sity

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

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 it? What is possible is to try to recog

nize, identify, and applaud the fight for and triumph

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 en

titled 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 cul

tures 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 indi

vidual hubris) and African religion and philosophy. In other

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

feel

intellectually at home there. But that could hardly be

for those

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

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

available these varieties

provocative love because

is mas

terly

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 as

pect 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

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 unspeak

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

and circumscribed definitions that accompany it

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 dis

covered 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.

In trying to understand the relationship between “race” and cul

ture,

am tempted

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

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

Afro

American culture exists, and though it is clear (and becom

ing clearer) how it has responded to Western culture, the in

stances where and means by which it has shaped Western culture

are poorly recognized or understood.

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-

Among many examples, Ivan Van Sertima,

They Came before Columbus:

The African Presence in Ancient America

(New

York:

Random

House,

1976),

pp. xvi-xvii.

Tzvetan Todorov,

‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture,” trans. Loulou Mack,

Gates,

“Race,”

pp.

370

80.

[MORRISON]

Unspeakable

Things

Unspoken

127

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

textualize the route canon debates have taken in Western literary

criticism.

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 endorse

ment 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

attention and devotion on which Emily Dickinson

soared to what

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 ster

ling 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 prom

ise them security, legitimacy

and in whose hands alone rest the

gift of critical longevity? Interesting questions, but, as

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

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

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The Tanner Lectures

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 popu

lar 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

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 legiti

mate 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

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

at least, do not intend to live without Aes-

chylus or William Shakespeare, or James

Twain

Hawthorne,

or Melville, and

on. There must be some way to enhance canon

readings without enshrining them.

When Milan Kundera, in

The Art

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,

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

perverse, to American readers.

. .

The Art

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]

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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 dis

covered? 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

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 cul

ture.) Our novelists don’t discover cultural values within

themselves; they invent them.

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

ception 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.

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 re

garding 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 coun

tries, but about its miscegenation. The word is informative here

and

do mean its use. A powerful ingredient in this debate con

cerns the incursion of third

world or so

called minority literature

into

Eurocentric stronghold. When the topic of third

world cul

ture is raised, unlike the topic

Scandinavian culture, for ex

ample, a possible threat to and implicit criticism of the reigning

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

tury to the twentieth, the arguments resisting that incursion have

Terrance Rafferty, “Articles

Faith,”

New

Yorker

(May

16,

1988): 110.

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

much “art” as ore

rich ore

that

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

ral” state into an aesthetically complex form.

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

demic struggle

an extremely successful one

may be helpful

here. It

telling because it sheds light on certain aspects of this

current debate and may locate its sources.

made reference above

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

inauguration of classical studies and Greek. This canonical rerout

ing from scholasticism to humanism was not merely radical, it

must have been (may

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 tri

umph of that process was that Greece lost its own origins and be

came 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.

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

work,

They Came before Columbas,

which researches the African

presence in Ancient America,

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 inter

loper 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

am right,” writes Professor Bernal,

in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replace

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

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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 writ

ing history. The Ancient Model had no major “internal” de

ficiencies or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was over

thrown for external reasons. For eighteenth

and nineteenth-

century 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.

It is difficult not to be persuaded

the weight of documenta

tion Martin Bernal brings to his task and his rather dazzling ana

lytical insights. What struck me in his analysis were the

process

of the fabrication of Ancient Greece and the

motives

for the fabri

cation. The latter (motive) involved the concepts of purity and

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

termined 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”

Egyptian culture, a tendency “manifested in

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

had possessed superior cultures, from which the Greeks had bor

rowed massively,” on through the Romantic response to the En

lightenment, and the decline into disfavor of the Phoenicians,

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

mas

sive Phoenician influence on early Greece was the rise of racial

as opposed to religious

anti

semitism. This was because the

Martin Bernal,

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,

vol.

The Fabrication

Ancient Greece,

1785

1985

(New Brunswick, N.J.:

Rutgers University

Press,

1987),

132

The Tanner Lectures on

Human

Values

Phoenicians were correctly perceived to have been culturally very

close to the Jews.”

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

cause

motive,

seldom an element brought to bear on the history

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

search and has helped my own thinking about the process and mo

tives 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 defini

tion of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the soci

ology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash

cultures.

And

all

of the interests are vested.

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

the personal habits of artists, specious

and silly arguments about politics (the destabilizing forces are dis

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

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

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 lit

erature, American slave narratives, and the delineation of the

Afro

American literary tradition.

Now that Afro

American artistic presence has been “dis

covered” 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 na

ture,” nor Conrad’s unspeaking. We 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.”

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 com

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

us, most familiar.

Recent approaches to the reading of Afro

American literature

have come some distance; have addressed those arguments, men

tioned 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

reprints and rediscoveries have buried it, and are press

ing on to expand the traditional canon to include classic Afro

American works where generically and chronologically appropri

ate, and to devise strategies for reading and thinking about these

texts.

As to the second silencing charge, “Afro

American art exists,

but

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

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

134

The

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Lectures

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,

much the better. More often than not, how

ever, 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 liter

ary theories to Afro

American literature

that noncanonical texts

can be incorporated into existing and forming critical discourse.

The third charge, that “Afro

American art exists, but is supe

rior 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 gather

ing of a culture’s difference into the skirts of the Queen is a neu

tralization designed and constituted to elevate and maintain hege

mony, 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 accu

racy, political correctness, or its pretense of having no politics at

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

native 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

Western intelli

gences. 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

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 coex

istence 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 writ

ing.

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?

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

specificity of the culture, the gender, the language?

there per

haps an alternative utility in these studies?

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 read

able 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 re

think 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 pre

text for

it.”

There are at least three focuses that seem

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, re

quires 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 Ameri

can canon, the founding nineteenth

century works, for the “un

136

The Tanner Lectures

Human Values

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

of Afro

Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the struc

ture

the meaning of

much American literature. A search, in

other words, for the ghost in the machine.

A third is the examination of contemporary and/or noncanoni-

cal literature for this presence, regardless of its category as main

stream, minority, or what you will.

am always amazed by the

resonances, the structural gearshifts, and the

uses

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 lan

guage

its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, in

ventive, disruptive, masked, and unmasking language. Such a pen

etration 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.

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

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

sarily “not

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

In addition, certain absences are

stressed,

ornate,

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 litera

ture,

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

“Why am I, an Afro

American, absent from it?” It is not a par

ticularly 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?

am not recommending an inquiry into the obvious

impulse that overtakes a soldier sitting in a World War

trench

[MORRISON]

Unspeakable Things Unspoken

137

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

deliberate escapism, or transcendence may

lifesaving in a cir

cumstance of immediate duress. The exploration

am suggesting

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

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

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

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 imagi

nary regions.’Ó

”

1850

at the height of slavery and burgeoning

abolitionism, American writers chose romance. Where,

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 “com

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

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

tivation 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 para

lyzing 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

Michael Paul Rogin,

Subversive Genealogy:

The

Politics

and

Art

Herman

Melville

(Berkeley and

Los

Angeles: University

California Press,

1985),

15.

138

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Human Values

struggle among sects,” reading unauthored and unauthorable ma

terial, 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 ques

tion.

the nineteenth

century flight from blackness, for example,

successful in mainstream American literature

Beautiful

Artisti

cally 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 ma

chine and can also

make

it work? These kinds of questions have

been consistently put by critics of colonial literature vis

vis Africa

and India and other third

world countries. American literature

would benefit from similar critiques.

am made melancholy when

consider that the act of defending the Eurocentric Western pos

ture 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

that the body can remain enthroned, immobile, static

under

house arrest,

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 white-

male writers frequently abjure and deny the excitement

fram

ing or locating their literature in the political world. Nineteenth-

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

Mainstream writers in Young America understood their competi

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

World, certainly not vis

vis an ancient race (whether Native

American or African) that was stripped of articulateness and in

tellectual thought, rendered, in

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, with

out 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

thought Young America. It could

never have occurred to Edgar Allan Poe in

1848

that

for ex

ample, might read

The

Gold

Bug

and watch his efforts to render

my grandfather’s speech to something as close to braying as pos

sible, an effort

intense you can see the perspiration

and the

stupidity

when Jupiter says

“I

knows,” and

Mr.

Poe spells the

verb “nose.”

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

Ameri

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

studiously

so.

In fact these absences

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

much transcending politics, or escaping

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

yet artistic modes of discourse.

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,

believe, a spendthrift one. The

reexamination of founding literature of the United States for

Older America is not always distinguishable from its infancy. We 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 Ameri

can 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 Mel

ville’s father

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

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?”

Rogin also traces the chronology

the whale from its “birth

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

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

Rogin,

Subversive

Genealogy,

pp.

107,

142.

Ibid.,

112.

ORRISON

]

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

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

tified 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 en

counter 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 mas

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

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

tion 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, nineteenth-

142

The

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Lectures

Human

Values

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

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

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

perate, and very doomed. Madness would be the only appropriate

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

cinct and appropriate description of that obsession.

would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was

engaged in some simple and simpleminded black/white didacti

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

What

am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philo

sophical 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 chap

ter

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

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

tion. 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 commo

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

. .

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

ship

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

to him who acknowledges no law or lord, but the

Lord his God, and

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 Amer

ica. Capitalism ? Perhaps. Capitalism fed greed, lent itself inex-

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

to Melville. Sin suggests

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

a different Ahab. Not an adolescent male in

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

Parrington thought Melville was. Not even a morally fine

liberal voice adjusting, balancing, compromising with racial insti

tutions. 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 chap

ter

42,

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

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 lan

guage of this chapter ranged between benevolent, beautiful images

of whiteness and whiteness as sinister and shocking. After dissect

ing the ineffable, he concludes: “Therefore . . . symbolize what-

ever grand

gracious he will by whiteness, no man can deny that

in its profoundest

idealized significance

it calls up a peculiar ap

parition to the soul.”

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 in

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

144

The Tanner Lectures

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

is gigantic. He cannot. Nor can we. But in nonfigurative lan

guage, he identifies the imaginative tools needed to solve the prob

lem: “subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no

man can follow another into these halls.”

And his final observa

tion 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 “nat

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

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

sively established in

Moby

Dick,

from the dominant consciousness

of his time.”

differ on this point and submit that Melville’s hos

tility 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, legis

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

alone would not have condemned him to the almost autistic sepa

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

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

gerous

he had company or could have found it. But to ques

tion 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, self-

destroying philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from

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

self 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.”

this day no novelist has

wrestled with its sub-

[MORRISON]

Unspeakable Things

Unspoken

145

ject.

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 chap

ters

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 fasci

nation 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.

will Nathaniel Hawthorne and

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

Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Eliot, Flannery O’Conner,

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

ture 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

assumed

not

exist. Afro

American critical

inquiry can do this work.

mentioned earlier that finding or imposing Western influ

ences in or on Afro

American literature had value provided the

valued process does not become self

anointing. There is an adja

cent 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 enter

prise 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 be

come automatically flawed because of that responsiveness. The

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

say-

146

The Tanner Lectures

Human Values

ing” that

work written by an Afro

American is automatically

subsumed by an enforcing Afro

American presence. There is

clear flight from blackness in a great deal of Afro

American litera

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

as they say, “You’d never know.”

III

It is

this area, the impact

Afro

American culture on con

temporary American literature, that I now wish

comment.

have already said that works

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

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

activate language

and ways in which that language activates me.

will limit this

perusal by calling attention only to the first sentences

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 mari

golds in the fall of

1941.”

That sentence, like the ones that open

each succeeding book, is simple, uncomplicated.

all the sen

tences 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.

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 prosce

nium

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

unstaging, that in this first novel

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

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

secret between us and a secret

that is being kept from us. The conspiracy

both held and with

held, 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

that posi

tion, one needs to think of the immediate political climate in

which the writing took place,

1965

69,

during great social up

heaval 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 our

selves 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

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 im

mediately because the secret is being shared, at best, and eaves

dropped upon, at the least. Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy

seemed crucial to me then, writing my first novel.

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?

botanical aberration. Pollu

tion, perhaps.

skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things:

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

about this shocking information. The point

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 frui

tion. This foregrounding of “trivial” information and background-

ing 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,

thought, would be in having this story of female viola

tion revealed from the vantage point of the victims or could

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, gull

ible, vulnerable girlfriends, looking back as the knowing adults

they pretended

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 some

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

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

tion between a minor destabilization in seasonal gora with the in

significant 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.

they have any success, it will be in trans

ferring 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 constitu

ency, and justified the public exposure of a privacy.

the con

spiracy that the opening words announce is entered into by the

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

tion on the disruption

“nature,”

being a social disruption

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

the population

the text, is implicated.

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

the novel. The shattered world

built (to complement what is

happening to Pecola), its pieces held together

seasons in child-

time 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 “un

being.” It should have had a shape

like the emptiness left

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

boom or

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

was pressing for a female expressiveness

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

and

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

thought

would have the most difficulty subvert

ing the language to a feminine mode,

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 lan

guage, “passive,” and,

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 lan

guage (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full com

prehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect

immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, ex

planatory fabric), as well as my (failed) attempt to shape

silence

while breaking it are attempts (many unsatisfactory)

trans

figure the complexity and wealth of Afro

American culture into

language worthy of the culture.

Sula,

it’s necessary to concentrate on

two

first sentences be

cause what survives in print is not the one

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,

recognized that it was a false beginning.

[MORRISON]

Unspeakable

Things

Unspoken

151

medias res

with a vengeance, because there was no

res

to be in the

middle of

implied world in which to locate the specificity

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

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 dom

inant. In

1988,

certainly,

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.

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 de

marcation between the sacred and the obscene, public and private,

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

tions of the reader, or his or her alarm heightened by the emo

tional luggage one carries into the black

topic text. (I should re

mind 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

even touched, much less opened, by placing the complete

“plot” on the first page

and finally on the cover of the first edi

tion), here

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

people in the lobby

but

did, rather heavy

handedly in my view, end the welcome

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

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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

finally wrote is about the com

munity, 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

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 neigh

borhood.” Instead of my original plan, here

am introducing an

outside

the

circle reader into the circle.

am translating the anon

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

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

tween “place” and “neighborhood”

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 conse

quences 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 neces

sarily 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.

familiar plant

[MORRISON] Unspeakable Things Unspoken

153

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

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

thrived there together,

that place when

was

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 con

text; not houses, or factories,

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.

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).

always thought of Sula as quintessentially black,

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

tainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World

black and New World woman extracting choice from choiceless-

ness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational.

Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out

the

house, out

lawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And danger

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

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

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

chosen

black

ness and

biological

blackness

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 “black

berry 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

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The Tanner Lectures

Human Values

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

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

ernity 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

have taken to explain it may be helpful in iden

tifying the strategies one can be forced to resort to in trying to accom

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

while accommodating and responding to mainstream “white” cul

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

mise. 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) be

ginning 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

replicated the demiurge

discriminatory, prosecutorial racial oppression in the loss to com

mercial “progress” of the village, but the references to the com

munity’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 disrup

tive remembering presence which helps (for awhile) to cement

the community, until Sula challenges them.

“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised

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

wanted it to contain (as does the

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

formation 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 cor

porate 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

geo

graphical 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

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 grand

daughter. 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 un

available 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 hos

pital 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,

the verb: prom

ised. The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten

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

faithfully

between himself and others. Promises broken, or

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The Tanner Lectures

Human Values

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

bruise wend their way throughout the action and the shifting rela

tionships.

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

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

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 con

trition, 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 moti

vationally different. Solomon’s the most magical, the most theatri

cal, 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 self

interest (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 recog

nizes 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

down dignity, is pulled along by an accretion of detail

displayed in a meandering unremarkableness. Simple words, un-

[MORRISON]

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157

complex sentence structures, persistent understatement, highly

aural syntax

but the ordinariness of the language, its colloquial,

vernacular, humorous, and, upon occasion, parabolic quality, sabo

tages expectations and masks judgments when it can no longer

defer them. The composition of red, white, and blue in the open

ing scene provides the national canvas/flag upon which the narra

tive 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

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 dis

covering 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

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 recol

lected 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 re

flected 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

the miraculous

and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an unblinking gaze

which is lurking in the tender but amused choral

community re

sponse 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

also contami-

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

nated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self

born Pilate is unim

pressed

Solomon’s flight and knocks Milkman down when,

made new

his appropriation of his own family’s fable, he re

turns 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

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 char

acter and the distrust

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.

believed; was

convinced. And although the word suggests his conviction, it does

not reassure the reader. If

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 mys

tery 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.

was not, of course, interested in retelling the

tale,

suppose that is an idea to pursue, but it is certainly not

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Things

Unspoken

159

interesting enough to engage me for four years.

have said, else

where, that the exploration of the Tar Baby tale was like stroking

pet to see what the anatomy was like but not to disturb or distort

its mystery. Folklore may have begun as allegory for natural

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 construc

tion 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, archi

tecture 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 untrust

worthy 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, dis

enchanted; wounded and wounding world is played out on and

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 be

comes possible in creative encounters with that history. Nothing,

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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 sepa

rate 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 num

bers have

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 in

stant 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,

give these an adverb

spiteful (there are

two other modifiers of 124). The address is therefore personalized,

but personalized

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

inner-

ear 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)

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, au

thoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her,

determined

to take it. Because the in

medias

res opening that I am

com

mitted to is here excessively demanding.

is abrupt, and should

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]

Unspeakable

Things

Unspoken

161

appear

so.

native informant here. The reader is snatched,

yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and

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.

lobby,

no door, no entrance

a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short

one). And the house into which this snatching

this kidnap

ping

propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, like

the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed.

few words have to be read before it is clear that "124" refers to

house (in most of the early drafts “The women

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 accom

modation by both the “women” and the “children.” The fully

realized presence of the haunting

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

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

was content to build and man in

Sula

(with the stranger in the

midst), or the down

home journalism of

Song

Solomon

or the

calculated mistrust of the point of view in

Tar

Baby

would not

serve here. Here

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 neces

sity available for the journey. The painterly language of

Song

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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

stark and

remarked upon, it is virtually raw. Color seen for the first time,

without its history.

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

The Bluest Eye.

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.

hope you understand that in this explication of how

practice

language is a search for and deliberate posture of vulnerability to

those aspects of Afro

American culture that can inform and posi

tion my work.

sometimes know when the work works, when

nommo

has effectively summoned, by reading and listening to

those who have entered the text.

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.

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, in

structed, 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 prede

cessors

in or out of the canon

owe much.

For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in

fifty,

hundred,

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

“The life force, which produces all life

the shape of the

word”

(Janheinz Jahn,

Muntu:

The

New

African

Culture

[London: Faber and Faber,

1961],

124).

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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

both will thrive,

that both will decay.

any case, as far as the future is concerned,

when one writes, as critic

as author, all necks are on the line.