Tony Morrison -Nobel Laureate of 1993

TONY MORRISON – NOBEL LAUREATE OF 1993

This year’s Nobel Prize winner of literature Toni Morrison is one of the rare black writers who has attracted a lot of attention in the past two decades as an essayist and a novelist. Her first novel The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. There was no looking since then, novels flowering one after an­other from her pen in quick succession. Sula 1973, Song of Solo­mon 1978, Tar Baby 1981, Jazz, and finally the great writer was cited for the Nobel Prize for Literature 1993.

The Swedish Academy defined her work “amazingly high” having given “life to an essential aspect of American reality. She describes as­pects of the blacks’ lives and especially of blacks as the people they are.” Earlier in 1988 she won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, a year after publishing Beloved in which she wid­ened her themes of the black world in life and legend, first described in the 1978 Song of Solomon” It is very unusual for a writer to have six novels with such outstanding quality”, said Mr. Sture Allen, the permanent secre­tary of the Academy, announcing Ms. Morrison the 90th Nobel Laureate.

Endowed with epic power, unerr­ing ear for dialogue and richly expres­sive depictions of “Black America” Toni has been claimed as a spokes­woman in her fiction for a number of points of view, including Marxist and Feminist. Others have tried to charac­terize her as a postmodern fictionalist whose work reveals the deep fissures in our comfortable illusion that the world outside the text has some kind of innate coherence apart from that, conferred by language. Most of the claims tend to “modernize” or “post modernize” Toni’s work by seeing her as a reviser of past traditions in fiction which have been predominantly male, or white or upper-class. While part of her five novels do indeed display such revisionist inclinations, much of the present criticism about her fiction misses her deeply traditional view of the relation between literature and culture. She can be termed as “conservator”. She is a writer deeply interested in depicting and thereby pre­serving and perpetuating the culture practices of black community. Not isolated from culture and history. Toni through her fiction has been maintaining and communicating im­portant cultural values which other­wise might be lost. In an interview to Jane ennan in 1978 she said:

I am not experimental. I am simply trying to recreate some­thing out of an old art form in my books - the something that defines what makes a book ‘black’. And that has nothing to do with whether the people in the books are black or not. The open-ended quality that is some­times a problem in the novel form reminds me of the uses to which stories are put in the black community. The stories areconstantly being retold, constantly being imagined within a framework. And I look into this like a life-support system, which for me, is the thing out of which I come.

Her works reveal a blend of real­ism and fantasy, unsparing social analysis, and passionate philosophical concerns and therefore, it is not a surprise that many critics label her work as “magical realism.” The sto­ries of her novel are represented as ways of creating sense out of the chaos of reality, for her characters and for readers as well, by providing signifi­cant information about reality. Fic­tions, according to her have powerful epistemological effect and aesthetic fineness, besides providing opportuni­ties for certain sorts of imaginative play and most importantly for giving the information for living. About the future of novels she commented:

Novels aren’t dying, people crave narration. Magazines only sell because they have stories in them, not because somebody wants to read those ads...people want to hear a story...That’s the way they learn things. That’s the way human beings organize their human knowledge - fairy tales, myths. All narration. And that’s why the novel is so important.

More than anything else, Morri­son emphasizes the essential continu­ity between past and present achieved by means of the story. Experience it­self may somehow be radically dis­junctive, but it is made far less so by the power of the story and by the knowledge stories communicate to tell­ers and hearers. In this respect, knowledge is not individual so much as it is communal, in the same sense that knowledge and experience are more continuous than discontinuous. She emphasizes the tremendously social aspect of knowledge and iden­tity. Language in her view is not a fun­damentally unreliable tool. We use it to understand reality; it is not a sys­tem which is abysmally referential only to itself. The fluidity of language is of great value, not so much because it leads us to play but because it facilitates the serious work which is the essence of life. We need stories and novels not only because they are ways
of “organizing human knowledge”: but they are also the rituals by which we create individual and communal identity.

Much has been written about the, situation of the black people, by various writers ever since the turn of the century. The experience has been be­coming more and more traumatic and complicated by political, social, ethnic and economic oppressions. Toni Morri­son’s fiction presents interesting aspects of the examination of this exis­tential and ideological flux to be made sense by means of the story. The reader after going through her work likes to fill in the spaces - to create a sense of history by means of appre­hending fiction. She lays bare two pairs of values to her readers: opacity and transparency and rigidity and fluidity. The essence of her fiction is to set these opposites in motion, forcing her characters (and readers) to take obscuring opacities and try to make them more fluid. Rather than stressing the deconstructive aspect of language, Morrison seems more interested in its constructive function.

The characters of her novels exist in a world defined by its black­ness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it. The destructive effect of the white society can take the form of outright physical violence, but oppression in Morrisons’s world is more often psy­chic violence. Avoiding, in general, the common theme of “invisibility” of black American literature, Toni im­merses the reader in the black com­munity whereby the white society’s ignorance of that concrete, vivid, and diverse world is thus even more stark and striking. It reflects a distortion. Blacks are visible to white culture only insofar as they fit its frame of refer­ence and serve its needs. Thus they are constantly reduced and modified, losing their independent reality.

Black women in Morrison’s fic­tion discover “that they are neither while nor male, and that all freedom and triumph are forbidden to them” (Sula p. 44). Womanhood, like blackness, is “other” in this society, and the dilemma of the woman in a patri­archal society, is parallel to that of blacks in a racist one: they are made to feel most real when seen, defined as the other, made to be looked at, re­duced to a cold and infantile image where they are labelled as “Pig meat,” they can never satisfy the gaze of society. Problems of identity have been raised by her in most of her novels in terms of self/others, seer/seen, pub­lic/private and in Tar Baby (1981) it becomes all the more clear when she has depicted them as complicated by social divisions and pressures and for the first time perhaps the intersection between black and white worlds to the minute details is laid bare in all its conflicts.

Morrison’s use of mythic struc­ture, more and more overtly as her work develops, is central to her exis­tentialist analysis. The heroic quest for identity achieved by conquest in and of the outer world embodies the human need for transcendence and self-defini­tion; at the same time the mythic sense of the fate and necessity corre­sponds to the experience both as irrevocable consequence and as con­crete condition for choice. Between these two poles - free heroism and determined role - move Morrison’s characters. Therefore, she captures “universal” aspirations without deny­ing concrete reality, construct a myth that affirms community identity with­out accepting oppressive definitions. In the process, she takes the outline of the mythic structure, already so well suited to the existentialist quest for freedom and identity, and adapts it to historical circumstances that sur­round this version of the quest. She values the myth as a way to design, not confine, reality.

The writer has consulted Black American Literature Forum 1982 and 1988 while writing this article.