Conversations with Toni Morrison.

Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994. 312 pp. $39.50 cloth/$15.95 paper.

When I write on or teach Toni Morrison's novels, I am accustomed to pulling out my file folder of rather battered, xeroxed interviews to review and to consult. Morrison, whose literary career includes the roles of prize-winning author, editor, critic, and teacher, is an astute analyst of her own novels and the literary canon as well as of American culture. The interviews that she has granted over the years exemplify the kind of criticism that Morrison herself calls us to: criticism that "goes into the work on its own terms" and that, in doing so, breaks new ground (161). Such criticism, like Morrison's art, is both beautiful and political. Danille Taylor-Guthrie has made meeting Morrison's challenge to critics easier by collecting, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, interviews produced between 1974 and 1992. These pieces give us Toni Morrison's reflections on all the facets of her profession and at the various stages of her twenty-five years as a novelist.

The twenty-four interviews included in the volume begin with Morrison's 1974 "Conversation" with Alice Childress from Black Creation Annual and end with Betty Fussell's 1992 "All That razz" interview/article from Lear's. Only the post-Nobel Prize Paris Review interview "The Art of Fiction" from 1994 is missing from the collection. Taylor-Guthrie's elegantly spare apparatus provides only what is essential. She gives us, first, a brief introduction that places Morrison in the context of the renaissance of black women writers, succinctly outlines critical themes in her fiction, and offers the reader an overview of the primary thematic content of the interviews. Taylor-Guthrie supplies, second, a chronology of Morrison's life and works, and, finally, an index to proper names that, in a very thoughtful and useful way, under Morrison's own name, highlights works and themes in the fiction.

The patterns and essential concerns of Morrison's thought emerge in these interviews: the history of black people in America, the changing roles of black men and women in culture and in intimate relationships, the construction of identity in the modern world, and the necessity and risk of loving. Morrison describes the importance of the novel for exploring these concerns and the relationship of her narrative technique to this function. She says that the novel must "bear witness" to the life and problems of the "tribe," the "village," as black people face the confrontation between "old values of the tribes and new urban values." Her work, she says, "suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it" (120-21). Morrison sees fiction as both bearing witness and effecting change, enlightening and strengthening (183). The importance of the theme of witnessing climaxes in the interviews as Morrison discusses Beloved, the crowning jewel of her work to date. Morrison says most explicitly about that novel what she has suggested throughout her work: that witnessing is responsibility. In describing the presence of the baby ghost Beloved, Morrison observes that, in the novel,

the gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and

the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It's

bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one's ever

assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en route. Nobody knows

their names, and nobody thinks about them.... there's a necessity for

remembering [the horror] in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner

in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing the book,

in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember.

(247-48)

Making it possible to confront the reality of the past and of our lives, and making it possible to remember, is at the heart of Morrison's narrative strategy. Her novels are about restoration and the growth made possible by going to the wounded heart of the black experience (77, 120, 165). The theme of intimacy runs throughout these interviews, whether Morrison is talking about her own life or about her work. Her fiction deals with putting "intimate things in place," as she told Robert Stepto in 1976--both with being rooted in a place and with making a home in the world. Morrison begins, she says, not with research but with her own memories. This starting point means that she brings large ideas and events "down small" and puts them "at home" (29) in order to examine both their particularity and their universality. Thus, Beloved is "not about the institution--Slavery with a capital S. It [i]s about these anonymous people called slaves. What they do to keep on, how they make a life, what they're willing to risk, however long it lasts in order to relate to one another ..." (257).

Getting down to the nitty gritty of experience, Morrison then invites the reader to become participant and teller, relating the experience of the novel to his or her own experience in the world. Morrison speaks of her narrative technique as an extension of jazz and blues, as a form that helps humans to construct and deconstruct the world in order to be able to function effectively in it (235, 252). She suggests that writing, like playing music, is about rhythm and sound--about getting back to the original power of language (165). This power is beyond the intellectual and the reasoned response that is prized in the West. As the sound points toward the future, it ties us to the past--to ancestors and to black cosmology, which are in touch with a source of magic and mystery (78, 225). We are tied to past, present, and future by blood: "That's all history means to me. It's a very personal thing--if their blood is in my veins, maybe I can do this little part right here" (132).

Writing becomes "deep talking" (169) with "self" and "other." In her narrative technique, Morrison wants to get to a place of conversation that includes but moves beyond words. She wants to get back to that primary link to the ancestors, to the rhythm of the blood and of the body as it is expressed in black music. As she told Anne Koenen in 1980,

... the rhythm of the book has this kind of building up, sort of in and out,

explosion. There's this beat in it ... that's operating underneath the

language, it's hard for me to get it in there so that you don't read it....

underneath there has to be some other thing, it's like a heartbeat.... (76)

She seeks, she says, what "dancers have on stage in their relation to gravity and space and time. It is energetic and balanced, fluid and in repose. And there is always the possibility of growth ..." (120).

As important for her as the words, therefore, are the silences: "... it's like a painter uses white space, a musician uses silence. So a writer has to use the words he does not use in order to get a certain kind of power" (37). Rhythm creates a sound in a novel (152, 230) but also provides the silences--creates the space for a sound that the reader makes as a member of a chorus. Morrison's novels call for the participation of the reader; they call for risk. For Morrison, being civilized, as she says of Milkman in Song of Solomon, is learning how to take risks about something important (75). This risk-taking in relationship to the novel is an exercise of the moral imagination that forces us, as readers, to stretch to the borders of our own beings as we read then tell the stories again within the framework of the novel and of the black community (153). This forces the reader to develop the self, and the novel is a safe place, "a haven" (109), a place of intimacy in which the reader can risk and in which transformation can occur. Morrison, for example, says of Cholly Breedlove in The Bluest Eye that "he's stretching, he's going all the way within his own mind and within whatever his outline might be" (19). So too the reader stretches until he or she is "touching the borders of [his or her] own life" (18). Doing so, we learn to live this life "intensely and well" (47). For Morrison, then, the black novel is characterized by rhythm, the presence of the ancestors, the openness to discredited knowledges and to the magic and mystery of the body, and the restraint or reserve of the novelist (155) as well as the novel's open-endedness--characteristics which invite the villagers' participation.

Reading, for Morrison, humanizes (109), as does writing. Morrison calls the reader to adulthood: to become, as our ancestors were, "morally coherent people." That, I think, is what makes her novels so tough. This call means, in response, honoring the past, the ancestor. She says, "Kill your ancestors, you kill all. There's no future, there's no past, there's just an intolerable present. And it is intolerable under the circumstances, it's not even life" (73). This idea is emphasized throughout the interviews as Morrison moves from discussing The Bluest Eye to discussing Beloved (131, 141, 184, 227, 238). The inheritance the ancestor offers us is a model of "this very pure, very aristocratic love that made [our ancestors] the most civilized people in the world. That was their dignity, how they transcended" (116). The novelist brings the memory of that love and dignity to the page; she bears witness. The reader, in reading and participating in the making of the novel, acknowledges, honors, and carries that witness forward beyond the page into life. In doing so, we become responsible and loving adults:

A grown-up--which, I think, is a good thing to be--is person who does what

she has to do without complaining, without pretending that it's some

enormous, heroic enterprise. One doesn't have to make a choice between

whether to dance or to cook--do both. And if we can't do it, then it can't be

done!

We have a special insight that can find harmony in what is normally, in

this country, perceived as conflict. (135)

This capacity to deconstruct, to revise, and to think about things in a new way, along with what Morrison calls the "tar quality" (131), the capacity for holding the multiple tasks of life in tension, if not in balance, allows us to create a personality that is "more fluid, more receptive" (270)--a self that can survive "whole" (40) and flourish, as our ancestors did, under the most difficult of circumstances.

Danille Taylor-Guthrie's volume of interviews lets us look at Morrison's career over time and read Morrison's thought to this point as a process and as a whole. What emerges is a complex person with a set of concerns that she, to use her word, "frets" (121) from The Bluest Eye to Jazz. We meet a woman and a thinker--a human being who is strong, evocative, sassy, and whole. Morrison tells Betty Jean Parker, "I don't dwell on the idea that I am a full human being. I know that" (65). From that address (121), that located space, Morrison addresses us: as she puts it, takes us by the hand and tells a simple story about complicated people (121), like her and like us. I can give up my tattered xeroxes now. Danille Taylor-Guthrie's Conversations with Toni Morrison is a gift to the Morrison reader and scholar, a gift of wholeness and intimacy. She invites us to Toni Morrison's intellectual home, where we can sit down, listen, and learn.