Critical Insights: Morrison, Toni

The Paris Review Perspective

by Sasha Weiss

In an essay called “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison articulates one of the central concerns of her work as a novelist. American literature, she argues, has been shaped as much by the negative space around it and within it as by what it contains. The critic’s task is to observe what is hidden in its shape; the novelist’s job is to alter that shape by filling in the gaps. Stories of black life were ancillary to most American literature before the twentieth century. Blacks were foils, fools, props, symbols, but rarely subjects from whose point of view the story of American life was told. But of course black people were telling their own stories all along. “We have always been imagining ourselves,” Morrison writes.

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.” We are choices.

Her critical and literary work offers a vigorous rebuff to the view that white men are the originators of culture, that their literature is the ideal against which all others must be measured, that white is the norm and black is a deviation. In her novels—The Bluest Eye (1970); Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977); Tar Baby (1981); Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Jazz (1992); Paradise (1998); Love (2003); and A Mercy (2008)—black men and women live their lives without restraint or censor.

Morrison didn’t begin writing until she was in her late thirties because, as she has said, she was too busy working and raising two children on her own. Born in Ohio in 1931 and educated at Howard University and Cornell, for twenty years she worked as an editor at Random House. While there in the sixties and seventies, she insistently made the case for the relevance and power of black writers like Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis. After she in turn found success as a writer, Morrison began teaching at colleges across the country, ultimately settling at Princeton University, where she is a professor of African American studies and creative writing. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In an interview published in The Paris Review in 1993, Morrison talked about how she often gives away the climax of her novels on the very first page, likening the technique to jazz:

The delight and satisfaction is not so much in the melody itself but in recognizing it when it surfaces and when it is hidden, and when it goes away completely, what is put in its place. I wanted the delight to be found in moving away from the story and coming back to it, looking around it, and through it, as though it was a prism, constantly turning.

The worlds in her novels are constructed like musical improvisations, combining the recognizable with the surprising.

Set in American towns complete with doctors, poor people, priests, eccentrics, candy stores, and abandoned houses, Morrison’s stories throw the reader directly into the chaotic action of street life, into the swell of its special rhythms and languages. Song of Solomon begins in medias res—a ragtag crowd has gathered to watch a local insurance collector attempt to fly off the roof of the town hospital, which, we’re told, is located somewhere on the edge of Lake Superior:

Only the unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young were available—deliberately available because they’d heard about it, or accidentally available because they’d happened to be walking at the exact moment in the shore end of Not Doctor Street, a name the post office didn’t recognize. Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal service became a popular means of transferring messages among them, envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to the Dead Letter Office.

City officials send out a notice declaring that the official street name “had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street. It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street.” In these quick, sly sentences, we get a potted history of a black community, the apparatus of control that attempts to limit the scope of its influence, and the subversion of that control through language.

Morrison’s works are influenced by magical realism —although written in a naturalistic mode, mystical events suddenly intrude: a person discovers he can fly (in Song of Solomon), a ghost disrupts the life of a household (in Beloved), or flowers refuse to grow after a young girl is raped (in The Bluest Eye). But her prose is never gauzy or elusive; she describes sensory, bodily experience with more keenness and immediacy than almost any other contemporary novelist. Speaking about Beloved in The Paris Review, she goes some way to explaining why: her aim is to make her novels be “truly felt,” to “translate the historical into the personal.”

Here is just one example among hundreds, a passage from The Bluest Eye about three women friends who keep each other company in old age:

They hugged the memories of illnesses to their bosoms. They licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured—childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles. All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth—harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stooping, kneeling, picking—always with young ones underfoot… . When white men beat their men, they cleaned up the blood and went home to receive abuse from the victim. They beat their children with one hand and stole for them with the other. The hands that felled trees cut umbilical cords; the hands that wrung the necks of chickens and butchered hogs also nudged African violets into bloom; the arms that loaded sheaves, bales, and sacks rocked babies into sleep.

Licked lips, chicken necks, and umbilical cords: these are the sexy, grotesque, and absurd objects of life, and they stand as a testimony to the existence of women whose stories have been elided. Magic is indeed required for the work Morrison does: a transubstantiation of memory, a restoration to history of the particularities and peculiarities of the lives that it has neglected.

Source

Copyright © 2010 by Sasha Weiss.

Bibliography

1 

Morrison, Toni. “The Art of Fiction No. 134.” Interview with Claudia Brodsky Lacour and Elissa Schappell. The Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993).

2 

____________. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

3 

____________, ed. The Black Book. New York: Random House, 1974.

4 

____________. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

5 

____________. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

6 

____________. Love. New York: Knopf, 2003.

7 

____________. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.

8 

____________. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

9 

____________. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.

10 

____________. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

11 

____________. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.

12 

____________. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Weiss, Sasha. "The Paris Review Perspective." Critical Insights: Morrison, Toni, edited by Solomon O. Iyasere & Marla W. Iyasere, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CIMorrison_1003.
APA 7th
Weiss, S. (2010). The Paris Review Perspective. In S. O. Iyasere & M. W. Iyasere (Eds.), Critical Insights: Morrison, Toni. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Weiss, Sasha. "The Paris Review Perspective." Edited by Solomon O. Iyasere & Marla W. Iyasere. Critical Insights: Morrison, Toni. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.