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- [00:01]
Nomi Frye
Museums are more than places we visit on a field trip across the country. Museums protect our shared history, care for
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Alex Schwartz
wildlife and collections, strengthen local economies, support
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Nomi Frye
job training, and spark curiosity in people of all ages.
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Alex Schwartz
Right now, you can help make sure museums stay strong for future generations. Museum Advocacy Day is a national moment when people contact Congress to ask for continued support for museums and the federal
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Nomi Frye
agencies that fund them. Learn how to take action@aam-us.org and tell your representatives that museums matter to education,
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Alex Schwartz
to communities, to the economy, and to our democracy.
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Vincent Cunningham
This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
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Alex Schwartz
I'm Alex Schwartz.
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Nomi Frye
And I'm Nomi Frye. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, friends. Hello.
- [01:05]
Vincent Cunningham
What's up?
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Nomi Frye
Hello to my fellow critics, hello to the listeners. Today is kind of special. Every once in a while we do this thing where we devote a whole episode to the work of a single artist. We've talked about Jane Austen. We've talked about Martin Scorsese, we've talked about Miyazaki. These are really people whose influence on the culture is so large, it's so significant and who are so beloved. You know, we really felt like we needed a whole show to do each of them justice. Today is another one of those examples. We are going to be talking about Toni Morrison. Morrison wrote 11 novels, starting with the Bluest Eye, also Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, all of them massive and important and recognized many accolades. But I wanted to turn to you guys. Why did you want to do this episode and why now?
- [02:06]
Vincent Cunningham
Well, we're close to Toni Morrison's birthday on the 18th of this month, February. She would have been 95 years old. There's a new book of essays about her work in terms of its substance, but also its, I don't know, style and form, called On Morrison by Namwali Zirpel.
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Alex Schwartz
Yeah, those were good reasons. It had also been a number of years since I really went back to Morrison, the text, as a reader, just to see what I found there. And I can't think of a more exciting artist to just encounter on her own terms. So that was something else I think we wanted to do with this episode, to just go back to the writing, to the books, to the criticism itself and see what we found. And it turns out there's a lot. There's so much.
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Nomi Frye
There's a lot. There's a lot. And I think in general and also in the years since Morrison's death in 2019. I think that the kind of the distance between the text, Morrison on the page, what you call Anne Morrison, the icon, the figure, the monument, has grown kind of broader.
- [03:14]
Alex Schwartz
Definitely. I mean, I think this was something going on in Morrison's life also. And we can talk about that. But there was, you know, for good reason. There was a determined effort to elevate. She's an icon. You know, she's an icon in every sense. She's a literary icon. She's a genius. She's an American genius. She's a black American genius. She's a black female American genius. There are a lot of labels and reasons to elevate Morrison. The person, and she also herself was an amazing explicator of her work and experience. So there are many, many clips that can be watched and shared and commented on. And her Persona is. I mean, it's like she's a star. It's a star Persona that happens to be attached to a writer. So you have both sides of this person, text side, and the Persona side. And it's just easier for a Persona to travel. It's harder to go back to rich, dense novels than it is to share a clip.
- [04:07]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, yeah. And the clips, you know, even if their genesis was in sort of relation to the texts, they're so eloquent and brilliant in so many cases that they become, you know, sort of generalizable comments about society, about race, about oppression, et cetera, et cetera, in a way that is good if you want Toni Morrison to be remembered and also maybe problematic if you want her work to be remembered as what it was. So there's always this kind of problematic and this kind of perpetuation.
- [04:36]
Nomi Frye
Yeah, you guys are leading me to kind of like, yeah, what we want to talk about today, which is like, does this monument that we've built to Morrison do her justice? Does it do her work justice, her life justice? That's today on critics at large. Truth of Toni Morrison. Okay, so, you guys, we're gonna get into the work, as we just discussed, but before we do, I just wanna hear a little bit from you. What was the first time you encountered Morrison's work? Which work was it, when was it, and how did it strike you?
- [05:20]
Vincent Cunningham
Initially, I wrote about this, actually, when Morrison died. The first work of hers that I read was the Bluest Eye. And it was under the instruction of my great English teacher, Deborah Stanford, who is one of the sort of loves of my life in so many ways. She just was a friend to me when I was a child. In a way that only certain special adults can be. And also was a friend of my mind. She was the first person that told me that she thought I could be a writer. She was the first person that told me, oh, you could be a teacher. You really love texts.
- [05:53]
Nomi Frye
Oh, I love that.
- [05:54]
Vincent Cunningham
Spoke into me as a child. And also was the first person that I saw really seriously exegete a novel page by page, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, et cetera, et cetera. And so in her classes over the years of high school, I read Bluestai Sula, Beloved, Song of Solomon.
- [06:14]
Nomi Frye
That's a lot for.
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Vincent Cunningham
Well, I took a senior elective with her, which was about. I took two senior electives with her. One was about the work of Morrison, and one was about the work of Flannery o'. Connor.
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Alex Schwartz
Great pairing.
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Vincent Cunningham
It was a great pairing. And, you know, it was like on some. One of the beginnings of whatever it is that I do.
- [06:30]
Nomi Frye
I love that. Alex.
- [06:31]
Alex Schwartz
Formative. Formative. Also in school in 10th grade. Was that for you the start, Vincent? 10th grade.
- [06:39]
Vincent Cunningham
It was precisely 10th grade.
- [06:41]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah. I think 10th grade is kind of it. With. Since Vincent is doing a delightful name check, I will delightfully Name Check my 10th grade English teacher, Catherine Sweattle. And this was an American literature course, kind of the great American canon. And Beloved was the last book that we got to in that canon. We had done Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Great Gatsby, et cetera, et cetera. And we ended with Beloved. And I think it just. I'm trying to find the words to describe that experience of reading both personally and collectively. I went to girls school, where a lot of things are felt collectively that can be a negative phenomenon, but it can also be a really positive phenomenon.
- [07:25]
Nomi Frye
Mass hysteria, anyone?
- [07:27]
Alex Schwartz
It was like a good. Yeah, it was like a good kind of mass hysteria. We were like, freaking out about Beloved. It was such an important moment, I think, especially coming after so many great white works and great male works. And suddenly we were reading this extraordinary thing, Beloved. So after that I wanted to read on my own. I have a really distinctive memory of reading Sula on one Yom Kippur while I was fasting, also in high school, which is like a crazy way to do anything. So high school. High school was the start.
- [07:59]
Nomi Frye
Yeah.
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Alex Schwartz
How about, you know me?
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Nomi Frye
For me, college was the start because I didn't go to. Mostly didn't go to high school in America. And so, you know, in Israel we had a different canon. But in college, in a kind of like, survey, like American literature survey, I read the Bluest Eye. And then later in college, I read Beloved. And, you know, much to say. And we're gonna say it. But before we do, I just wanna spend a minute talking about this new book that we're also gonna shout out over the course of the episode. It's a book of essays called On Morrison. It just came out by the critic and academic Nawali Serle.
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Alex Schwartz
And novelist.
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Nomi Frye
And novelist, which I think is important. That's true. And she writes about it as well.
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Alex Schwartz
I just have to say I love the approach that she takes in this book. And I wish more critics would do it to be a kind of companion to the books and to the reading. Because the way that Serpell has structured her book, she has an introduction, which is really interesting about the concept of difficulty in Morrison's writing and her Persona. And then she goes through sequentially each of the books with critical essays, but very accessible ones.
- [09:10]
Vincent Cunningham
And it's also, you know, in its structure, this way of opening up texts and announcing your affinity for a writer. One of the things that criticism does is that it ties together. Maybe this is another way of talking about accessibility. It ties together, on the one hand, affection, and on the other hand, analysis. That they actually go hand in hand. It matters that Serpell is a writer, that Morrison was, among other things, an editor. Both of these didactic professions that are always running in and out of the act of writing itself. So it's really. I am an Amwali Serpell fan.
- [09:51]
Nomi Frye
Yeah, I enjoy it very much as well. And I'm wondering, though, just to put a little bit of a finer point on it, do you think, you guys, that Serpell is arguing in the book that Morrison has been misunderstood by readers, by critics?
- [10:07]
Alex Schwartz
It's a really interesting question. What she's saying about Morrison is very interesting. She's saying that there is a kind of Persona around Toni Morrison and around her writing that has to do with difficulty. That has to do with resisting easy interpretation and resisting easy categorization. Toni Morrison, I mean, certainly publicly, was misunderstood or misconstrued many, many times. That's what some of these clips have to do with, that. We've been referring to, like, one of the most famous Toni Morrison clips that I always. I mean, I'm less on social media than I once was, but do recall seeing this many times on social media surfacing is a kind of, like, smackdown of Charlie Rose from 1998. Literally. The question he asks her is, can you imagine writing a novel not centered around race?
- [10:55]
Nomi Frye
Maybe I'm responding Because I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people. I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said, this is all well and good, but one day she, meaning me, will have to face up to the real responsibilities and get mature and write about the real confrontation for black people, which is white people. As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze. And I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
- [11:46]
Alex Schwartz
I bring up this clip because what Serpell is talking about is this kind of spikiness around the Persona of Morrison. And I think she is making a case that there is something a bit forbidding about getting closer to the work that also is in the work itself. Morrison was, and we'll talk about this, really influenced by modernism. And modernism really was about pressing the reader right into subjectivity and experience, where the balance between difficulty of comprehension and ease of comprehension is an aesthetic problem that the writer is working through and trying to solve. And so I think that this book is both stressing those things, kind of admiring the difficulty, such as it is, and then offering a hand and saying, let's do it together. Like Vincent used the phrase before friend of my mind about his English teacher, which real heads will know is a phrase from Beloved. Like, a phrase that frankly may bring tears to my eyes even as I say it. But isn't that what we want when we read or encounter something so profound and amazing, a friend of our mind? So I do feel like Serpell is offering that in the book.
- [12:51]
Vincent Cunningham
And she's also kind of saying, you know, the epigraph of the book is, critics generally don't associate black people with ideas. A quote from Toni Morrison. And also early on in the book, she quotes, one of the funniest things about Toni Morrison to me is that one of her closest friends was Fran Leibowitz. And Leibowitz says, like, people don't understand or, like, give credit enough for how experimental these books are. A lot is happening and people kind of gloss over it because they're interested in sociology, race, or other things. So it's just an invitation to address and engage with the books on the level of ideas.
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Alex Schwartz
Can we briefly pause on the idea of if you would have wanted to be at a table with Fran Leibowitz and Toni Morrison, like, having a drink, or if that is the most terrifying idea in the world, I would like
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Vincent Cunningham
to watch my Dinner with Andre style movie that is about Them talking. I don't know if I would want
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Alex Schwartz
to be at the table 100%.
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Vincent Cunningham
Yeah.
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Nomi Frye
I think if I could, like, be, you know, with, like. If they would allow me to just, like, sit at the table and be totally silent. So, you know, thinking about Serpell and this question of kind of, like, difficulty and accessibility. You know, she has this line here about this book, about her book. She calls it a jazzy, twofold goal to be as demanding and sophisticated as I want to be and at the same time, accessible.
- [14:09]
Alex Schwartz
Yes, that's what we want to do.
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Nomi Frye
Yes, that's what we want to do. That's it.
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Alex Schwartz
That's the dream.
- [14:13]
Nomi Frye
It's the dream. And I was thinking about this a lot when I was rereading the Bluest Eye, which, as I said, I first encountered in college. And I remember reading it in college. So this is, like, a book from 1970, Morrison's first book. She wrote it over the course of about five years when she was a single mother to two young boys working as, like, an early young junior editor at Random House. It's about a girl named Pekala, whose heart's desire is to be beautiful, which means for her, having blue eyes. Right. This is kind of like. And Serpell talks about this. It's a kind of reductive way to talk about the novel. I mean, it's called the Bluest Eye. It is, in some ways about this, but it is not just about this, because the book is about her inability to form a coherent identity under the kind of, like, structural racism, structural sexism. Her role as a young child who's overlooked, bullied, abused. The very first lines already kind of like, give the tale away. What happens with Pekala is that her father ends up raping her. She becomes pregnant with his baby. The baby dies. She, you know, completely. Her psyche completely shatters. Okay, this is where the book is heading to. And we know this from the very start. I remember the first time reading this book and being totally stunned by it. Like, not knowing what to expect and being completely gut punched by it in a way that felt just very visceral. I was like, okay, this is a work of genius. Like, it's undeniable. I'm like, dear. And let me just. I'm just gonna read a little thing from here. I mean, there's so many things to read to us. I'm gonna read.
- [16:11]
Alex Schwartz
I so love to be read, too.
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Nomi Frye
Mm. So this is. This is Claudia, the narrator, befuddled at other girls, other black girls, other white girls, but mostly other Black girls interest in a kind of like baby doll, like a blue eyed blonde baby doll. She says the other dolls, which were supposed to bring me great pleasure, succeeded in doing quite the opposite. When I took it to bed, its hard, unyielding limbs resisted my flesh. The tapered fingertips on those dimpled hands scratched. If in sleep I turned, the bone cold head collided with my own. It was a most uncomfortable, patently aggressive sleeping companion to hold it was no more rewarding. The starched gauze or lace on the cotton dress irritated any embrace. I had only one desire. To dismember it, to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me. But apparently only me, adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs, all the world had agreed the that a blue eyed, yellow haired, pink skinned doll would what every girl child treasured. The kind of feltness of this passage, you know, you can actually imagine it. You can actually imagine that, like those fingers, it's just described so beautifully. And I was reading the profile of Morrison that Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker for the New Yorker in 2003. Hilton talks about how Morrison says that one of the writers that influenced her, I mean there is the modernist writers, of course, Faulkner and Wolf, so on. She talks about Theodore Dreiser and his social realism, sort of turn of 20th century, kind of like naturalism, like this is what it is. These are the forces at play. These are the forces at play. And I'm gonna lay it out to you through an applauded narrative, right? And it's interesting how these two things come together for Morrison, right? You know, these like modernist techniques, but also the forces of society working on one and the individual's engagement with kind of like a structure that is set to topple her.
- [18:37]
Alex Schwartz
Can I ask you guys something about dolls that. That brought to mind. Do you guys know about the Clark doll tests?
- [18:42]
Vincent Cunningham
Yes.
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Alex Schwartz
So I had just gone into this history because I just did a piece about the history of toys in the United States. And what that immediately makes me think of that passage is the Clark doll tests, where a pair of black psychologists, child development psychologists, studied in the late 30s and 40s, children's self image, black kids, self image vis a vis dolls using identical white dolls and black dolls with all the same physiognomy, but different pigment to see how the children developed. And all the kids in the test preferred the white dolls and identified them as beautiful. I mean, things that are unsurprising to us now, but it just Strikes me that Morrison is taking and revising something like the Clark Dahl test, which was used, by the way, in Brown v. Board of Education in the court's decision. The result from this test to show that black kids self esteem was getting damaged by Jim Crow, by segregation. I just love that Morrison goes to this kind of like, not cold exactly, but sort of scientific coded moment in examining race and identity in American history and totally revises it in this character's relationship to the doll.
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Nomi Frye
Yeah, yeah.
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Vincent Cunningham
And Serpell does this really beautiful thing where she says, yeah, there is this like sort of psychology of the. Sort of disinherited, but also what the. The way the book speaks is through its form. What I love about the passage that you just read, Naomi, is this emphasis on dismembering, taking apart. And that imagery, the split, the break.
- [20:16]
Nomi Frye
Absolutely.
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Vincent Cunningham
The absence Serpell talks about as like erasure. And the way that silences speak is so much a part of the texture of this novel.
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Nomi Frye
In a minute, we'll talk about arguably Morrison's greatest work. Beloved critics of Larcher and the New Yorker will be right back.
- [20:49]
Alex Schwartz
Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals.
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Vincent Cunningham
But it's all okay.
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Alex Schwartz
The Great Awakening is coming.
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Vincent Cunningham
What is happening?
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Alex Schwartz
Every week on Conspirituality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck. Friends, family and wellness gurus down the
- [21:14]
Vincent Cunningham
right wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.
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Nomi Frye
We're gonna talk about some other Morrison novels. Vincent, do you wanna go next? You've brought another text to share with the class.
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Vincent Cunningham
I have.
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Nomi Frye
Which one is it?
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Alex Schwartz
I love our seminar.
- [21:36]
Nomi Frye
I know.
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Vincent Cunningham
It is the 1992 novel Jazz, which. It's fun. Like, you know, Morrison is one of those writers who I kind of purposely was like, okay, I've read half of these and I'm gonna maybe litter the rest of them throughout the rest of my, I don't know, middle age. I don't know. And one day I was at a party and Jazz, with its purple and green spine.
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Nomi Frye
Great cover.
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Vincent Cunningham
Great cover. Was gleaming from one of the bookshelves in this house. And I was like, it's time. You know, just like from having seen
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Alex Schwartz
it, it called to you.
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Vincent Cunningham
Yeah. And this, like, serendipitous way. Jazz tells the story of a man named Joe Trace, his wife Violet Trace, and a young woman named Dorcas, who, in a similar strategy to what you just mentioned about Bluest Eye, the tragedy of these people has unfolded for you within the first paragraph. Joe has had an affair with the young 19 year old Dorcas. It lasted for three months and when it ends, he can't take it. And so therefore he goes and he kills her. And Violet, the spurned wife, attends the funeral, defaces the corpse by stabbing it and then just kind of collapses in the middle of a Harlem street.
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Nomi Frye
And this all happens on the.
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Vincent Cunningham
This is told to us in advance.
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Nomi Frye
In advance.
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Vincent Cunningham
Then we. Later we get.
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Alex Schwartz
It's like two pages.
- [22:54]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, later we get.
- [22:56]
Nomi Frye
But at the very beginning of the
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Vincent Cunningham
vantages that lead up to it. But it's told to us at the beginning. And told is important for jazz because to me the brilliance of jazz is in its narration. And I wanted to talk about this book today because when I read this book I was like, yeah, this is why anyone would write fiction. It is told to us by this narrator who the first word of the book is the semi unpronounceable teeth suck spelled S T H. I know this woman. And we are never given to know exactly who this narrator is, who sometimes speaks in the first person. The confidence and serendipity and to, you know, reference the title. The improvisation of this narrator figure has been haunting me since I read this book. And also it's a book that is set in New York and I love writing about New York. Can I read you a passage?
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Nomi Frye
Yes, please.
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Alex Schwartz
Heaven.
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Vincent Cunningham
This is the eye. The eye. Here is the narrator who is just kind of flitting in and out, tells you, dispenses details, has a weird kind of omniscience that seems like it's pasted together by various, like tabloid news reports, whatever. But then all of a sudden the scenario starts to sing. I'm crazy about this city. Daylight slants like a razor, cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blase thing takes place. Clarinets and lovemaking fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river at church steeples and into the cream and copper halls of apartment buildings. I'm strong alone, yes, but top notch and indestructible. Like the city in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the Shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything's ahead. So just this incredible song like announcement. And you can see how the narrator in fiction, which is really what fiction is about, you know. And Serpell talks about this being a work of. It's the most experimental of Morrison's works. And it is kind of. On some level, you can think of the narrator being the book itself. It's about this concept that is ever present in black aesthetics of the talking book. Henry Louis Gates talks about this, and Serpell cites him.
- [25:42]
Nomi Frye
What does that mean exactly?
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Vincent Cunningham
The idea that a book in its power. And you could connect this to the sort of prohibition against reading among slaves and encountering literacy on one's own and feeling that the book is talking to oneself. Frederick Douglass, in his the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, talks about him learning sort of on the sly how to read when he's briefly in Baltimore. And how this sort of companionate relationship develops between himself and the book unmediated by masters and other sociological factors. All of a sudden, there's this pure channel of connection and communication. And this narrator is able to be one person. It might be a neighbor, but it can also be a whole host of people, like a city, you know? And it's one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my adult life.
- [26:35]
Nomi Frye
Oh, that's amazing.
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Vincent Cunningham
It's the best book I read in my 30s, I guess. You know, I'm not much of a list maker, but I think it probably is. And for me, it's just, now I gotta read it.
- [26:49]
Nomi Frye
I haven't read Jazz. That's gonna be my next book, you guys.
- [26:52]
Alex Schwartz
Great.
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Vincent Cunningham
It's brilliant. And it just, you know, it has one of the, I don't know, bluntest, but also most psychologically ravishing zips back in time that I've ever. I was like, where AM I? It's 18.
- [27:07]
Alex Schwartz
What?
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Vincent Cunningham
And then we come to understand where we are in the most kind of unsatisfying, unresolved way. Which, you know, part of it is a meditation on not jazz is not jazz. The music is not part of the content of the book. It is a little bit, but it really is an announcement of the strategy of the book, which is like. Just like this constant improvisation that speaks to a culture and a music, but also a way of life.
- [27:37]
Nomi Frye
I mean, the idea of a lack of satisfaction, of a lack of closure. Right. I mean, that is a very modernist thing as well. And just to go back to the bluest eye, I mean, it ends famously with Pekala psychically Shattered, looking at herself in the mirror and, you know, she has gone insane. And this complete rivenness, this complete fragmentation, it is a satisfying end only in the sense that there can be no satisfying end, if that makes sense. I mean, that is the whole point, that this shattering is the point.
- [28:15]
Vincent Cunningham
And I think this is, like, important too. Just. I don't want to drag us too long. But it's important too, because just in terms of literary history, you can think of Toni Morrison as like, the latest modernist.
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Nomi Frye
Yes.
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Vincent Cunningham
You know, someone who, to the extent that these strategies will survive into the 21st century, that Morrison was writing like this in the 1990s, when there's a bunch of other kinds of realism around, other, you know, other things are in the air. You know, Raymond Carver and other people have already kind of picked up the Hemingway thread or whatever, which I'm not denigrating. It's a different thing here. Morrison is still looking back not only to American modernism, but also to, you know, Latin Americans. Realism, other strategies, keeping them alive, keeping the current fresh.
- [29:00]
Alex Schwartz
And I think it might be worth saying even one further thing about why that might be, if I may just enter into the realm of literary speculation for a second. Because what I. I love modern. I find modernism to be exhilarating. Some of my favorite books are modernist books. And I think it's worth asking what purpose modernism served in its creation. And I'm thinking back to early 20th century Woolf, Joyce, et cetera. And for me, one of the greatest, most beautiful literary ideas is Virginia Woolf's idea of catching the atoms as they fall, catching experience as it is experienced and as it is felt in language. And so I think that's such a huge part of Toni Morrison's project. Here's how it is. Here's how it feels. Here's who we are. Here's who I am. Here is the conflict in the we. You know, Morrison was really conscious of, and as we've talked about and being asked all the time about writing as a black woman representing black experience. And I think one of her answers to that was to say it's about subjectivity, it's about character. It's about breaking down a bigger category into the way that life is and life happens. Press you close. Come inside.
- [30:15]
Nomi Frye
The way it feels. Yeah.
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Alex Schwartz
Which kind of brings me around to the book that I wanna discuss.
- [30:20]
Nomi Frye
Okay, Alex, come on down.
- [30:23]
Alex Schwartz
Here I am. The price is right for me.
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Nomi Frye
Which book did you choose for us today?
- [30:28]
Alex Schwartz
Well, I chose Beloved from 1987, and before my reread of Beloved, this time I read an introduction that Morrison had written to Beloved after its publication. And in her introduction, she talks about having just quit her job at Random House. Okay, so let's coming back into, like, her history. Toni Morrison comes to Random House and does a lot of really interesting and important work at Random House. Publishes many black writers, advocates for their work, really builds up a very impressive stable of writers. And then at some point. And Beloved is the first book she writes after she leaves. And in her introduction to Beloved, later written, she writes about freedom, about feeling free for the first time, about she was living along the Hudson river upstate from New York City, looking out at the river, not owing her time. Her children were grown up. She didn't owe her time to anyone. And what she describes is a woman walking out of the Hudson river water towards her with a fancy hat. Beloved, the character kind of coming to her as a visitation. And Beloved is a ghost story.
- [31:39]
Nomi Frye
Yes. Tell us about Beloved.
- [31:41]
Alex Schwartz
Guys, I'm gonna tell you something. There's a reason this book is very famous, because this book is very good.
- [31:47]
Vincent Cunningham
It's disastrously good.
- [31:49]
Alex Schwartz
It's so freaking good. I just gobbled it up. And the woman sitting next to me at the coffee shop as I finished, I had tears in my eyes, the whole thing. And she just said, is that your first time? And I was like, no. Okay. I moved again. I moved all over again.
- [32:06]
Vincent Cunningham
It happened again.
- [32:07]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, it happened again.
- [32:09]
Nomi Frye
Can't believe how many tears we have in this episode.
- [32:12]
Alex Schwartz
Tears are good. What is the point if we can't get to the feelings? Let's go right to it. The mind, the heart, all of it. Okay, so Beloved starts with a number. 124 was spiteful, which I think is one of the greatest opening lines of any book ever. You don't know what it means. That is important. You may not know what it means for a few pages. And so already you are actively engaged in trying to figure out what the hell is going on and what and where you are. And where you are is in a house in a town in Ohio after the Civil War, after slavery has ended. And you are with a family, a family of women. Sethe is the matriarch of the family. She lives there with her timid and very unworldly 18ish year old daughter, Denver. We know that she has two sons who have left home as soon as they could at the age of 13. And we start to realize very early on that this house is haunted.
- [33:09]
Vincent Cunningham
Mm.
- [33:10]
Alex Schwartz
It's haunted by the ghost of a baby. And the baby ghost does a Lot of weird stuff. The baby ghost knocks over chairs. The baby ghost, like is a pain in the ass. The baby ghost is bothering everybody.
- [33:21]
Nomi Frye
Baby angry.
- [33:22]
Alex Schwartz
Baby angry. Baby angry is bothering everybody. This ghost is not leaving. 124 respiteful we're in a haunted story. And into the mix of this shows up one day a man named Paul D. Paul D. And Sethe were enslaved together at a place called Sweet home, a plantation in Kentucky, 20 years before. And Paul D. Is coming to re enter her life and they begin a relationship. But pretty soon the baby ghost who has been kicked out of the house, Wampaldi arrives. That ghost comes back in embodied form. And here is the spoiler of all spoilers. Beloved is the child who Sethe killed years before during the time of slavery. When the plantation owner named schoolteacher comes to hunt her down. After her escape, Sethe tries to kill all of her children. But manages only to succeed in killing beloved. And now 20 years later, beloved has come back to reunite and also haunt her family. So this book is so extraordinary in so many ways. It's an amazing act of imagination for all the reasons you can just immediately tell. It's taking certain genre forms. And I really like the way that Serpell talks about this too, about it being a ghost story. She also talked about something that had not occurred to me, which is that ghost stories and like supernatural stories were really popular in the 80s. Like when Morrison was publishing. I was like, oh, that wasn't something I was thinking about at all.
- [34:46]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, a publishing trend.
- [34:47]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, yeah, like a publishing trend. But like, you know, make it hugely supernatural. Yeah.
- [34:52]
Nomi Frye
I was thinking it's not that exactly. But like, I was thinking of like the Anne Rice novels, you know, or something. It's like all of those kind of like pulpy.
- [34:59]
Alex Schwartz
Totally.
- [35:00]
Nomi Frye
Yeah. Paperbacks.
- [35:01]
Alex Schwartz
She's taking that. She's taking the American gothic. And she's taking also slave narratives which were. Serpell calls it a neo slave narrative that comes into reinhabiting the experience of slavery. But one thing. So there's so many things I love about this book. I will say that I think the characterizations in this novel are among the best in literature, period. These people feel real to me, like trees who have their roots so deep in the ground that they have come to us really embodied. They're the opposite of ghosts in some ways. Like the way that Morris Nechef's presence is really incredible. The other thing about this book. So it's a conjuring also because it's based on a true story. It's based on the story of a enslaved woman who did exactly this. And one fascinating thing is this instance of the murder, the child murder, happens pretty much right in the middle of the book. But when you start the book, it's happened. You're living in the aftermath. You're living in the aftermath of slavery. Also, you're living in a very protected, very limited, very small space that Sethe has made for herself. The world is shut out. And when Paul D. Comes, he brings in something that in the book is called rememory, the recurrence and recurrence and recurrence of certain lived things and how they cannot be stamped out, no matter what Sethe might try to do or try to think. And so the book is about exposure to memory, exposure to the past, and then how you can possibly take these things as you continue to live into the future.
- [36:34]
Vincent Cunningham
And if you can, in many ways. Right. I mean, it seems to me like these incredibly powerful symbols of what it means to live in a sort of generational or like, ancient relationship to a very important past. Right. That you know, in the same way that when you're a child, you know that there is this absolutely important but irretrievable relationship to what happened before I was born.
- [36:59]
Nomi Frye
Yes.
- [37:00]
Vincent Cunningham
You know, and this is part of your everlasting attraction to your parents, because the past is so important to you. It produced you, but you can't touch it. You know, I've said jazz is my favorite, but it does seem to me that beloved is the great cathedral. You know, it just is such a great work of construction.
- [37:20]
Nomi Frye
In a minute. How do we square Toni Morrison, the icon, with the writer? We know on the page, critics of Large from the New Yorker. We'll be right back.
- [37:37]
Alex Schwartz
I'm Shilpa Uskokovic. And I'm Jessie Sevczyk. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jesse and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't works that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bon appetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake. Send us any questions you have, and we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the Ba Bake Club new episodes on the first Tuesday of every Month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.
- [38:26]
Nomi Frye
You know, now that we've closely read some of Morrison's greatest works, can we like think about it a little more broadly and talk about what was Morrison's project based on these kind of like more close readings?
- [38:44]
Vincent Cunningham
I mean, it's so hard to say.
- [38:46]
Nomi Frye
Yeah, I mean, this is a big
- [38:48]
Vincent Cunningham
ask, but yeah, the diversity and the fertility of the works. But I do think that there is something that we've been circling a while in this discussion of form and aesthetic
- [38:56]
Alex Schwartz
and
- [38:58]
Vincent Cunningham
modernism, which is an insistence on being on the front lines of consciousness and experience, it seems to me, and doing that with a certain freedom that of course talks about politics and of course talks about race and circumstance and situation and certain forms of underclass life and certain kinds of fugitive status. On the case of maybe Sethi and Beloved to insist that there are depths of experience and reasoned interaction with the things of the world that are happening everywhere. You know, one of the interesting things, just to go really quickly back to Serpell's book, she talks a lot about the use of free indirect speech or close third person as a. In Morrison and as an interaction between utter subjectivity, but a kind of enlightenment rationality, reason dispassion. And she's saying, no, you can't lean on one or the other. They're always being put together. And so in Morrison that's always happening on a level of the paragraph, like here's the sociological tone and here is the utterly gut bucket blues based personal tone.
- [40:21]
Nomi Frye
And she's always being like super subjective.
- [40:23]
Vincent Cunningham
They accompany one another. So that relationship to experience to me seems to be like what is always constantly knocking on my door when I read this stuff.
- [40:32]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, I would say that the Morrison project is to put black life, and particularly the life of black women at the very center of literature. But to do it in a way that is true to character and to human experience rather than sociologically or politically representative. And it's a project that I think every great writer who is seen as being representative of a community has to wrestle with and deal with, whether it's like a Philip Roth getting letters from middle class Jews saying, how dare you? You've betrayed our people.
- [41:11]
Nomi Frye
You're embarrassing us.
- [41:12]
Alex Schwartz
You're embarrassing us.
- [41:13]
Nomi Frye
Yeah, yeah, it's the dirty laundry.
- [41:14]
Alex Schwartz
It's not. They're not supposed to know. What are you doing?
- [41:18]
Nomi Frye
Why are you.
- [41:19]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, why are you making us look bad? I've seen similar reactions to Morrison lately on social media, which I find really fascinating, cuz it means she's Working. It means like it's working, basically.
- [41:28]
Nomi Frye
Interesting. What kind?
- [41:30]
Alex Schwartz
I've just seen a kind of like, this is not a flattering portrait of black womanhood. This is not elevating. This is, you know, because people. And the people she's writing about are damaged, are greedy, are jealous, are sad, are whatever it might be. And also. Yeah, and also are rapists and murderers. Exactly, exactly. And also are generous and loving and hurt and trying to heal and all the rest of it. So that is. Yeah, I think that is her project. She writes in her introduction to Sula, her novel, her wonderful novel Sula. She writes something that struck me as very interesting. I'm just gonna get it and share it with you guys. She Sundays, in the 50s, when I was a student, the embarrassment of being called a politically minded writer was so acute, the fear of critical derision for channeling one's creativity toward the state of social affairs so profound, it made me wonder why the panic, the flight from any accusation of revealing an awareness of the political world in one's fiction, turned my attention to the source of the panic and the means by which writers sought to ease it. So she's basically saying that in the 50s, when she's starting to think about these things, to be seen as having a political agenda was to be seen as being kind of bankrupt as an artist, that you were just trying to get a message into your work. But that there was no way for a black female writer to not be seen as political because her whole identity was politicized. Just the fact that she was not a white man was itself made representative. So she goes. She goes on to write, if Phillis Wheatley wrote the sky is Blue, the critical question was, what could blue sky mean to a black slave woman? If Jean Toomer wrote the Iron is Hot, the question was how accurately or poorly he expressed chains of servitude. So she's writing about early in her career trying to get free of this, like, how to get free of these assumptions that are coming with her. How to break through and just make her art. And this is always a question. With Morrison, a really interesting thing happened when Beloved came out. It was nominated for the National Book Award. It did not win the National Book Award. And a group of black writers wrote a really angry letter, basically saying, how dare you? To the National Book Award. This is an act of whimsy that you haven't chosen this book. You haven't recognized the accomplishment. Everyone else sees how important this is. What are you doing? The National Book Award that year went to A book I've never heard of. I'm sorry to that man who wrote it. Also, the counter life has passed over. And then, of course, she won the Pulitzer Prize, and then she won the Nobel. So very quickly, that whole question of recognition was reversed. And I feel like, certainly not overnight, but Morrison went from being in this position of being negatively politicized, marginalized, to being, for lack of a better term, positively politicized, made representative. And that's a huge burden and a huge weight to create work under.
- [44:22]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, it is a huge burden. And it does have something to do with maybe, like, historicizing her in the 20th century. You know, like in the 50s and 60s, you had all these black writers. You think about Baldwin, you think about Richard Wright in certain ways. Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, who kind of were coming out of the Harlem Renaissance period, are writing through the Cold War. Jesse McCarthy wrote a really wonderful book, and he periodizes this as the blue period in black literature. These works are more influenced or more sort of insistent on the. What Jesse sometimes calls, I think, the black interior. Not shunning politics, but sort of playing a countermelody by an emphasis on the inside, how life feels. So Morrison, this is what I think she means by saying, when I was younger, it was frowned upon to just look directly at politics. But on the other hand, the letter, that New York Times letter, which is called Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison, is totally a product of the next period. You call it the Black arts movement. So some of the signatories are Amiri, Barack, June Jordan, other folks who have
- [45:40]
Nomi Frye
said no to that generational, did not sign the letter. Right.
- [45:44]
Vincent Cunningham
Ellison is mortified by the letter. He's like, what are you talking about, people?
- [45:49]
Nomi Frye
It was like, tony doesn't need this.
- [45:50]
Vincent Cunningham
You don't need identity as a marker of greatness, et cetera, et cetera. So she's in between these two things, it seems to me, and cannot be fully encapsulated by either.
- [45:59]
Nomi Frye
I think the question we're circling around with this talk about what does a writer represent? Right? Like, this is a question that Serpell is talking about, especially in the conclusion to her book, which is called On Monuments. And she is talking about how in 2017, Princeton, where Morrison taught for a long time, decided to rename a building after her. And she, in a kind of like humorous diva movement, steps up to the podium to accept this honor and says, I am not humbled. Then she joked about the mouthfeel of Morrison Hall. Sounds good, doesn't it? The more I say it or murmur it, the more natural and even inevitable it seems. So that's, of course, funny, but also kind of like, yeah, I deserve this. Like, I'm more than pretty good. I'm the best. Right? So. And Serpell says Toni Morrison was not averse to monuments. She was a diva. She knew the worth of her work and was unabashed about being honored for it. Right. But then Serpell goes on to talk about Morrison's own relationship to monuments. And very interestingly, and I wasn't aware of it, about kind of like her rejection of the notion of taking down Confederate monuments. She said about this, the conversation about monuments, the ones that ought to be blown up and the ones that ought to be revered. I don't like that. I don't want to get rid of a monument because the guy was mean or bad or stupid. We'll just find out about it. It can stay there. I don't like the destruction. I don't like erasures. So I thought that was extremely interesting. And then Serpell kind of thinks about that binary. In our rush to monumentalize her, to make her a palatable icon of black wisdom or black joy or black excellence, I fear we may inadvertently veil or shroud her with beautifying or burnt edges sheets. After all, to tear down a monument figure and to prettify it are not our only options. What do you guys think about that?
- [48:06]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, it is. It's a delicate dance, right? Because I don't think it's overblown to say that civilization depends on a certain kind of monumentalizing urgent that, you know, in order to make sense of the group, in this case, being like the human species, we have to find exceptional examples of our species and say, this was good.
- [48:34]
Nomi Frye
Yes. You know, and this can show us the way.
- [48:37]
Vincent Cunningham
And this is still. And to. And to. One way to talk about a monument, even like in the logic of urban planning, is to say, well, what does it mean to come up to the statue not yesterday, but today, that a monument makes us think about the contemporary and its connections to the past in a kind of ongoing way. On the other hand, there is a kind of, if you encounter Morrison more through the clip, something that's more about kind of wisdom or like snappy comebacks or et cetera, shade. Yeah. And it doesn't keep pushing you back to the. Back to the sources. There's a danger in that, too. And so this stuff always exists on a continuum. Right now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, there's an exhibition Called Monuments, co curated by Kara Walker, who comes up on Morrison. And it's all about taboo imagery, including monuments, Confederate monuments and others, and seeing how we can sort of intervene and play with and mess them up. It almost seems to me like we need to continually be doing that, even to the quote, unquote, positive monuments, always testing them, like knocking on them to say, does still work? Still work? Are we still corresponding to the actual and not to an attitude, a gesture, et cetera? So I think that's healthy. And books like this, Serpell's insistence on, as we've all mentioned, being yet super rigorous, but also very accessible. Efforts like this keep us in contact with those sources so that we don't let them just sort of turn into mere signs.
- [50:23]
Nomi Frye
Yeah.
- [50:23]
Alex Schwartz
This talk is reminding me of a new book of Morrison's essays, or really lectures that's out right now, which I read earlier this week called Languages Reflections on the American Canon. It's cool because it takes you into the lectures and her kind of, like, lecture notes that she gave. But I do find it funny that its title is Language is Liberation. Because that's like, again, it's this kind of. And I get why. Like, I hope it sells many copies, but it's this kind of great.
- [50:49]
Vincent Cunningham
This positive.
- [50:50]
Alex Schwartz
Yes. This positive idea of language can take us there. We can be our own liberation. And then you open the book and it's full of dense, difficult, thorny ideas and analyses that had me kind of being like, okay, I gotta go. I gotta go back to Benito Serino. Like, I gotta get back into the text, guys. It's not the kind of graduation day message that maybe you'd expect. And I do think that there is an effort to position Morrison in this way as a wise elder. And guess what? She was a wise elder by the time she died. Like, well earned. I get it. But I think the saving grace here that leads away from that character, however comforting or useful it might be, is that you go right back to the books. That's why I'm fired up right now, because you go right back to the books. And if, like, look, I love that Charlie Rose clip. Who doesn't now pair it with one of the amazing books you wrote.
- [51:48]
Nomi Frye
Yeah.
- [51:49]
Alex Schwartz
And we're great. That's my recommendation to myself also.
- [51:53]
Nomi Frye
I mean, for me, you know, rereading the Bluest Eye and now hopefully going into some of the other books, I think there is a comfort and a relief in difficulty to know that there is another person, you know, of great, great talents who reaffirms to you that things are very complicated.
- [52:17]
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, you know, Absolutely. I love that point, Nomi. Yeah. I think that's so wise.
- [52:21]
Nomi Frye
And also, I am a wise elder myself.
- [52:24]
Alex Schwartz
Absolutely. Yeah. And also, if I may just add on one thing that you just made me think of, we've talked on the show about books that provide a kind of very, like, frictionless pleasure. Like, we've talked about Romantasy. We've talked about the kind of just gobble it up reading. What a pleasure. Like in the same way to feel your body working on challenge, to feel your mind come alive.
- [52:44]
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah.
- [52:44]
Alex Schwartz
Nothing better than that.
- [52:45]
Nomi Frye
Nothing better.
- [52:45]
Vincent Cunningham
That's the whole point.
- [52:53]
Nomi Frye
This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Pran Banty, with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Next week, you can hear our live event at the 92nd Street Y. And finally know what we all think about Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. If you missed us in person, join us for that on the pod. And as always, you can find every episode of our show@newyorker.com critics. We'll see you next week.
- [53:41]
Alex Schwartz
Hey, psst. You didn't hear this from me, but Normal Gossip is back for its ninth season. Join me, Rachel Hampton, as I share the juiciest gossip from the real world with some very special guests. This season, we're bringing back some old friends, a Radiotopia buddy, and for the first time ever, a Nobel laureate. That's right, we have Malala on season nine, Normal Gossip is out on all your favorite podcast platforms
- [54:13]
Nomi Frye
from prx.