The Writing Life

Editor’s Note: Toni Morrison, author of, among other works, “Beloved,” was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. What follows is an expanded version of her conversation with Michael Silverblatt, which recently aired on Bookworm, his weekly radio show about writing and books that is broadcast Thursdays at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9).

Michael Silverblatt: I recently wrote Toni Morrison a letter knowing that the movie of “Beloved” would be coming out and wanting, not even having seen the film, to talk about the book. It’s my sense that after a movie hits the public, a book is altered by it. There are things that we find in language, in the shaping and writing of literature, that a movie cannot touch, not because it doesn’t want to or because it’s inadequate but because they are different forms.

People don’t usually talk about what’s at the center of “Beloved.” They talk instead about a story that actually occurred in the days of slavery, one in which a woman killed her children rather than see them brought back into slavery, back to the life she led on the plantation.

This is the background of the book, but you have also brought to it the question--which is also the question in your two recent books, “Jazz” and “Paradise”--what kind of love is too much? When does love of another eclipse the love of the self? It seems to me that this question--how much of the self can you give--is central to you as a writer.

Toni Morrison: Very much so. The question is: How are we able to love under duress and, when we can’t, what distorts love for us? How can we negotiate the various claims and loves we choose in order to make them include ourselves--the love of the self that is not narcissistic, not simply selfish--and also something bigger than ourselves, something that is not martyrdom, something that does not mean setting one’s self aside completely. I’m interested in negotiating between those two extremes, to get to someplace where the love is generous.

*

Silverblatt: It seems that your books have been leading up to this question all along--in the same way that one finds one’s self on a path without knowing where one’s embarked. Your first book, “The Bluest Eye,” is about the consequences of self-loathing. And the books that follow take the impaired self into the world where attempts at love are made, and it’s not until “Beloved” that the question of a transfiguring love--one that might destroy the self in the process of being enacted--becomes the central subject of the book. All of the books have been a sequential path from the frightened self to the self that begins to risk in the world and then the self that is taking grand and possibly disastrous strides.

Morrison: Yes. There is a path from the frailty of the child in the first book, who is fairly doomed by things outside of her control and who is collapsing emotionally, to another kind of child in “Beloved,” whose disrupted love, lack of love, abandoned love, matches the ferocity of mother love, which is, on the one hand, laudatory and, on the other, something that can actually condemn everybody--not just Sethe’s child but herself, and her living child, and even make love impossible for her with a man.

It is an all-consuming love, an exaggeration of parental love, a love that expresses itself in a fierce, unhealthy distorted way under circumstances that make it ironically logical. The mother is not merely psychotic; she didn’t just erupt into the world that way. I had to try very hard as a writer to put into language the theatricality and the meaning of these kinds of distortions, to reveal not only their consequences but to warn against what we should look out for, what we should be wary of.

I always thought the circumstances of “Beloved” are not limited in any way to 1873 or 1855. I think for those of us who live in 1998, male or female, the problems of trying to love one’s self and another human being at the same time is a serious, late 20th century problem, a very serious problem. And I think, in particular, mother love is a very serious problem in the late 20th century because of the choices that women can make now. You don’t really have to have children. Some women feel that not having children is the freedom they should seek, and some women feel that having children is the fulfillment they seek. But in both cases, things can go completely and terribly wrong, if you don’t understand the potential difficulties, and no one instantly does.

It was interesting for me to write in 1984 about how one woman felt that she was only free and complete when she asserted herself as a mother, as opposed to post-feminist notions of not having to be forced into motherhood as a way of completing and fulfilling the self and expressing one’s freedom. It’s not so much that they’re contrary; it’s just the same area, the same park in which I wanted to work and work out the problems of that kind of love, as opposed to comparing the notions of romantic love in the so-called jazz age with our notions of romantic love today. Whatever the historical background, my hope, my earnest hope, was that the relevance of these people--whatever race, whatever region, whatever the historical circumstances--will resonate powerfully with contemporary difficulties.

*

Silverblatt: You’ve mentioned that you brought the manuscript of “Beloved” to your editor Robert Gottlieb feeling that it was not complete, that it was one part of a trilogy of novels, and you didn’t even know if it could be published on its own.

Morrison: That’s true.

*

Silverblatt: And in each of these books, a triangle or a configuration emerges, and it’s as if the brilliance of the book is to rotate that configuration--which I see as a triangle--from every conceivable angle. In “Jazz”--because the metaphor is jazz--the characters at the vertices of the triangle stop to sing, they solo, they swing their arias.

In “Beloved,” one senses that the novel has been directing itself toward a moment that, in my mind, film can’t possibly realize, a triangle of locked gaze and psychic transfer that seems at the heart of the narration of all of these books: that there is a moment in an exchange of sight and feeling, mind and touch that allows people to know each other’s stories without speaking them.

Morrison: You have a major void in a movie, which is: You don’t have a reader, you have a viewer, and that is such a different experience. As subtle as a movie can be, as careful and artful as it can be, in the final analysis it’s blatant because you see it. You can translate certain things, make certain interpretations, create wonder, certainly there can be mystery, but the encounter with language is a private exploration. The imagination works differently.

The things that I can create and hint at via the structure, via the choice of words, via the silences, are not the kinds of things that will be successful in any movie. So what you call the exchange of mind and touch would never be attempted in a movie because that’s not what movies do or do well, and it’s something you and I have to realize.

At first I was not very interested in selling any book to the movies ever, and when I was persuaded to complete the sale of this one, I thought I would let them do what they do, and I would go home and do what I do. I had no further contact with it until they were filming, and I went to the set to say certain things that I thought might be helpful and might be used; I felt it important to simply say these things, and my judgments were powerfully structural--where to linger, where not to. And they were unusable; they were literally unused by anybody because they were not cinematic.

*

*

Silverblatt: It seems to me that your fiction does bring the reader to a space that cannot be defined, that that space for a lack of better terms must be called the “sacred” or thought of as the indeterminate space of the imaginative experience.

Morrison: Exactly.

*

Silverblatt: Words then are the inadequate clothing of that experience when you’re reaching the heart. Up until that point, the writer’s choices, word by word, are immensely important. When you reach the heart, no word can be correct. You’re talking about an experience that is close to a mystical experience.

Morrison: I wanted that point to be rendered in a couple of occasions in “Beloved,” especially when the women are in front of Sethe’s house, having been persuaded that enough is enough. And when they go there, they come with whatever they’ve got, whatever faith they’ve got, whatever superstition they’ve got, whatever religious iconography they have, using all the symbolic world, and then they pray, and then there’s a moment when none of that works--not the symbol they hold in their hands, not the cross they may have around their necks, not the desire to have their will done. The only thing that works is to go very very far back before language when there was only the sound, and the sound is a kind of choral singing in this case, which works I think in terms of the folklore, in terms of who those people were. It’s another way of saying: “I can’t say what this is. There are no words to tell you how to get there from here.”

*

Silverblatt: Opposed to the things that can’t be voiced, there is another kind of silencing that runs through your novels, that is not helpful to a writer, that a writer fights with every straining instinct, and that is the silence that fills the master’s wife’s throat. She can no longer speak. It is the silencer on the gun that kills Dorcas. She is silenced in “Jazz,” and I wondered if you could talk about the ways in which these books combat silence.

Morrison: I think the signal instrument of silence for me in “Beloved” is the bit, a familiar, frequently used and adjustable homemade instrument that you put into a person’s mouth. There are quite a variety of them, and whatever other feature they had, they were not to keep you from working--because you worked with them--they were to shut you up, so that you could not say, you could not talk back, you could not articulate a contrary position or do any violence with your tongue or your words. And that was a complete erasure of all language that the victim or the oppressed had. For me, it was operating this way: I would try to say what they were prevented from saying.

*

Silverblatt: It seems to me that the writer’s role in work of this kind is to save the characters from the silencing of society and bring Please see Page 9 Continued from Page 3 them to that point that can only be quasi-articulate: the witnessing of the holy or the miraculous.

Morrison: Precisely. Indeed it is. It’s bearing witness on the one hand. It’s not quite secular; it’s not quite secular work.

*

Silverblatt: Now in that scene of the bit, there is what I consider to be one of the signatures and triumphs of your way of looking and writing. In the scene in which this brutal silencing occurs, several tortures and punishments are going on at once, several witnessings without voicings. And what we see instead is that rooster, and I wondered if you would tell me about it.

Morrison: I had to imagine what it must feel like, what it must look like: this man under those circumstances being treated like a beast. I tried not to over-emphasize that but to have him look at something that is edible, something that he brought into the world. Roosters, you know, have a royal way of behaving in the yard, and I wanted to compare him, to have him compare himself, to a creature so beneath him but who visually--if you visualize a rooster, you see the crown, you see the beak, you see the eye, you see something close to an eagle, you see something painterly--has a certain kind of authority, while at the same time, you know it’s just a little three or four pounds of nothin’. To have him feel less than that and, more important, to have him know that rooster’s name. He remembers when it was born; he remembers helping it, and they named it Mister because he was so tough. So here we have a man who will never be called Mister walking out of that yard, looking at a rooster that is already called Mister.

*

Silverblatt: And also participating, in flashback, in a kind of ritual of male birth in which he in some way mothered this rooster. Now this is, of course, what a movie cannot do because it can only show you a rooster. It can’t tell you where the rooster came from. It can’t make the red of its comb pulsate the way Mister’s does; it cannot enter the mind of the man who named it Mister, whose mouth is filled by a bit.

These are the things that stay in the memory when a book is over. They’re intersections that the author has structured, and only the most innovative editing can achieve them on film. One needs a Sergei Eisenstein to think of a structure that would allow for so much association, for so much fullness to go on in the midst of such devastation.

Morrison: Movies and books are so different. It’s a most obvious thing to say, but I had no idea how very different the two experiences were. And it’s not just a reduction; it’s just a powerful difference. First of all, it was important to me at least on the paperback jacket not to see Beloved’s face. That she must be someone that the reader invents. Well already when you’re in the movie, you have a face that fixes it. And it moves from there to other kinds of scenes, gestures, voices, some of which enhance the dialogue. You hear amazing things with very good actors--and they’re very good in this movie. On the other hand, there are whole areas that not only are not there, but they’re not even gestured toward. The mechanics of cinema doesn’t work that way.

The part that you worked so hard on is of no use whatsoever; they cannot use it and should not. I remember a scene in “Paradise” in which I worked a long time to make sure that the palette was right--that the same colors that were in this scene were also the colors in another scene, and I don’t expect a reader to necessarily know all of that, but I do believe that because I’ve painted the scene the same colors, there’s this sort of undertow or Ur-text.

*

Silverblatt: It’s very deeply embedded in the work, and it’s wonderful. It came to me in “Beloved” with Baby Sugg’s quilt, in which there are two patches of orange, and Baby Suggs is working on pink, and what we realize is going on in this book is a new way to think about color.

Morrison: In a fresh way.

Silverblatt: Yes.

Morrison: I wanted it to be absolutely raw, and in the rest of the book nobody mentions color. And when Sethe meets Paul D. again, and she thinks that maybe this can work, she thinks about color. Maybe she’ll look at turnips. It’s a pleasure; it’s a deep sensual gratifying pleasure. The movie’s treatment of color is both gorgeous and subtle--but quite unlike the book’s.

*

Silverblatt: When you think of viewers who have not read and do not know the book, do you have fears of what they might come to think “Beloved” is? Do you have fears they won’t understand the book?

Morrison: I don’t. I am very serious about trying to write a certain kind of novel that readers who are not fastidious can enjoy. The story has a level in which you find out what happened or you worry about this or you see the characters. But at the same time I’m hoping that it has the other layers for readers who are more demanding, who are aware of nuance, subtleties, all sorts of things that are there, that were honed by me, so that I don’t have to negotiate that split between the so-called popular and the so-called elite or scholarly. Sometimes a book starts out popular like a Dickens novel and then becomes a subject for scholars. Sometimes it’s the other way around, but I want to very deliberately embrace a readership that can operate on different levels.

I got my paradigm from music, particularly from jazz--music you can dance to, or is mood music, or if you listen to it, it’s so complicated, so deep, so artful, that it is the kind of art form that demands the best of you. You can approach it on a less complicated--and I don’t mean superficial--level where you just taste it in a way, and I wanted my books to work like that. I know that some people’s acquaintance with the book is narrow or light and maybe even unreaderly in a sense, but those are the risks you take when you’re trying very hard to say: You read the book and the book reads you. And there is something going on in that process that is truly extraordinary.