From Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American
Presence in American Literature
TONI MORRISON
Delivered at
The
October 7, 1988
(The lecture is well in progress at this point. Morrison has been discussing other important literary works, authors, and the perception of African-American literature as a distinctive form. Here she turns to examples from her own writing as a way to elucidate the method and purpose of her art as black writer.)
It is on this area, the impact of Afro-American culture on contemporary American literature that I now wish to comment. I have already said that works by Afro-Americans can respond to this presence (just as non-black works do) in a number of ways. The question of what constitutes the art of a black writer, for whom that modifier is more search than fact, has some urgency. In other words, other than melanin and subject matter, what, in fact, may make me a black writer? Other than my own ethnicity-what is going on in my work that makes me believe it is demonstrably inseparable from a cultural specificity that is Afro-American? Please forgive the use of my own work in these observations. I use it not because it provides the best example, but because I know it best, know what I did and why, and know how central these queries are to me. Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover. Let me suggest some of the ways in which I activate language and ways in which that language activates me. I will limit this perusal by calling attention only to the first sentences of the books I’ve written, and hope that in exploring the choices I made, prior points are illuminated.
(Morrison talks about the opening lines of other works prior to discussing Song of Solomon)
“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of
in a small-town newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event of minimal local interest, Yet I wanted it to contain (as does the scene that takes place when the agent fulfills his promise) the information that the novel both centers on and radiates from.
The name of the insurance company is real, a well-known black-owned company dependent on black clients, and in its corporate name are “life” and “mutual”; agent being the necessary ingredient of what enables the relationship between them. The
sentence also moves from
course it does not. The two other significant words are “fly,” upon which the novel centers and “mercy,” the name of the place from which he is to fly. Both constitute the heartbeat of the narrative. Where is the insurance man flying to? The other side of
grant it; some never find it; one, at least, makes it the text and cry of her extemporaneous sermon upon the death of her granddaughter. It touches, turns, and returns to Guitar at the end of the book - he who is least deserving of it - and moves him to make it his own final gift. It is what one wishes for Hagar; what is unavailable
to and unsought by Macon Dead, senior; what his wife learns to demand from him, and what can never come from the white world as is signified by the inversion of the name of the hospital from Mercy to “no-Mercy.” It is available only from within. The center of the narrative is flight; the springboard is mercy. But the sentence turns, as all sentences do, on the verb: promised. The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten
his act. He promises, as though a contract is being executed faithfully- between himself and others. Promises broken, or kept; the difficulty of ferreting out loyalties and ties that bind or bruise wend their way throughout the action and the shifting relationships.
So the agent’s flight, like that of the Solomon in the title, although toward asylum (
It is tacked on his door as a mild invitation to whomever might pass by, but it is not an advertisement. It is an almost Christian declaration of love as well as humility of one who was not able to do more.
There are several other flights in the work and they are motivationally different. Solomon’s the most magical, the most theatrical, and, for Milkman, the most satisfying. It is also the most problematic - to those he left behind. Milkman’s flight binds these two elements of loyalty (Mr. Smith’s) and abandon and 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 recognizes this marriage and recalls enough of how lost he himself is to put his weapon down.
The journalistic style at the beginning, its rhythm of a familiar, hand-me-down dignity, is pulled along by an accretion of detail displayed in a meandering unremarkableness. Simple words, un-complex sentence structures, persistent understatement, highly aural syntax - but the ordinariness of the language, its colloquial, vernacular, humorous, and, upon occasion, parabolic quality, sabotages expectations and masks judgments when it can no longer defer them. The composition of red, white, and blue in the opening scene provides the national canvas/flag upon which the narrative works and against which the lives of these black people must be seen, but which must not overwhelm the enterprise the novel is engaged in. It is a composition of color that heralds Milkman’s birth, protects his youth, hides its purpose and through which he must burst (through blue Buicks, red tulips in his waking dream, and his sister’s white stockings, ribbons, and gloves) before discovering that the gold of his search is really Pilate’s yellow orange and the glittering metal of the box in her ear.
These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they were planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances. That is planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the questions the community asks, and both reader and “voice” stand among the crowd, within it, with privileged intimacy and contact, but without any more privileged information than the crowd has. That egalitarianism which places us all (reader, the
novel’s population, the narrator’s voice) on the same footing reflected for me the force of flight and mercy, and the precious, imaginative, yet realistic gaze of black people who (at one time, anyway) did not anoint what or whom it mythologized. The “song” itself contains this unblinking evaluation of the miraculous and heroic flight of the legendary Solomon, an unblinking gaze which is lurking in the tender but amused choral-community response to the agent’s flight. Sotto (but not completely) is my own giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the journey to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western fable, they are in deep trouble; but the African myth is also contaminated. Unprogressive, unreconstructed, self-born Pilate is unimpressed
by Solomon’s flight and knocks Milkman down when, made new by his appropriation of his own family’s fable, he returns to educate her with it. Upon hearing all he has to say, her only interest is filial. “Papa? . . . I’ve been carrying Papa?” And her longing to hear the song, finally, is a longing for balm to die by, not a submission obedience to history - anybody’s.
(Conclusion)
I hope you understand that in this explication of how I practice language is a search for and deliberate posture of vulnerability to those aspects of Afro-American culture that can inform and position my work. I sometimes know when the work works, when it has effectively summoned, by reading and listening to those who have entered the text. I learn nothing from those who resist it, except, of course, the sometimes fascinating display of their struggle. My expectations of and my gratitude to the critics who enter, are great. To those who talk about how as well as what; who identify the workings as well as the work; for whom the study of Afro-American literature is neither a crash course in neighborliness and tolerance, nor an infant to be carried, instructed, or chastised or even whipped like a child, but the serious study of art forms that have much work to do, and which are already legitimatized by their own cultural sources and predecessors - in or out of the canon - I owe much. For an author, regarding canons, it is very simple: in fifty, a hundred, or more years his or her work may be relished for its
beauty or its insight or its power; or it may be condemned for its vacuousness and pretension - and junked. Or in fifty or a hundred years the critic (as canon builder) may be applauded for his or her intelligent scholarship and powers of critical inquiry. Or laughed at for ignorance and shabbily disguised assertions of power – and junked. It’s possible that the reputations of both will thrive, or that both will decay. In any case, as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น