The Truth of Toni Morrison

16:43Naomi Fry:I was like, okay, this is a work of genius. Like, it's undeniable. I'm like, here you go. And let me just, I'm just going to read a little thing from here. I mean, there's so many things to read. Read to us. I'm going to read. I so love to be read to. So 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. it. When I took it to bed, its hard, unyielding limbs resisted my flesh.

17:30Naomi Fry: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 that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll would what every girl child treasured.

18:11Naomi Fry:The kind of feltness of this passage, You know, you can actually imagine it. You can actually imagine that, like, those fingers. Like, it's just described so beautifully. And I was reading the profile of Morrison that Hilton Alls 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 so on. And 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.

18:57Naomi Fry:These are the forces at play. And I'm going to lay it out to you through an implotted 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.

19:23Vinson Cunningham:Can I ask you guys something about dolls that that brought to mind? Do you guys know about the Clark doll tests?

19:28Alexandra Schwartz:Yes.

19:29Vinson Cunningham:I know. 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.

20:03Vinson Cunningham: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. Yeah.

20:40Alexandra Schwartz: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 way the book speaks is through its form. What I love about the passage that you just read, Nomi, is this emphasis on dismembering, taking apart. And that imagery, the split, the break, the absence, Sopel talks about as like erasure. And the way that silences speak is so much a part of the texture of this novel.

21:15Naomi Fry:In a minute, we'll talk about arguably Morrison's greatest work, Beloved. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

21:52Transcription by CastingWords biggest stories in Hollywood, interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more. Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

22:08Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham.

22:10Vinson Cunningham:I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

22:14Alexandra Schwartz:Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy brain with it.

22:24Vinson Cunningham:Right, we take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

22:37Naomi Fry:We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

22:40Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison. K-pop to the Kennedys.

22:47Vinson Cunningham:From horror movies to heated rivalry. From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights, great expectations to desperate housewives.

22:54Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun. It's Critics Alarge from The New Yorker, every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jazzy Sepchak. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of 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 bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know.

23:31Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes. They're these adorable, maybe four-bite little galettes. So cute. Head to ba.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking!

24:09Naomi Fry:We're going to talk about some other Morrison novels. Vincent, do you want to go next? You've brought another text to share with the class. I have. Which one is it? I love our seminar. I know.

24:21Alexandra Schwartz:It is a 1992 novel, Jazz, which it's funny. 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 going to 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. Great cover. 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 it. It called to you. Yeah, in 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.

25:12Alexandra Schwartz: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.

25:33Naomi Fry:And this all happens on the...

25:35Alexandra Schwartz:This is told to us in advance. In advance. Then later we get... It's like two pages. Yeah. Later we get all of the advantages 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 like semi-unpronounceable, like a 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.

26:21Alexandra Schwartz: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? Yes, please.

26:40Vinson Cunningham:Heaven.

26:40Alexandra Schwartz: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 blasé thing takes place, clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women.

27:18Alexandra Schwartz: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 just incredible song-like announcement um and you can see how the narrator in fiction which is like really what fiction is about you know and uh serpel talks about uh this being a work of it's the most experimental of uh morrison's works and it is kind of um 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.

28:23Alexandra Schwartz:Henry Louis Gates talks about this and Sopel cites him.

28:26Naomi Fry:What does that mean exactly?

28:28Alexandra Schwartz:The idea that a book and its power, you know, 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.

29:10Alexandra Schwartz: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. It's the best book I read in my 30s, I guess. You know, I don't I'm not much of a list maker, but I think it probably is. And for me, it's it's just now I got to read it. I haven't I

29:34Naomi Fry:haven't read jazz. That's going to be my next book, you guys. Great.

29:37Alexandra Schwartz:It's brilliant. And just, you know it has one of the i don't know bluntest but also most psychologically like ravishing zips back in time that i've ever i was like where am i it's 18 what 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 it's jazz is not jazz the music is not part of the content of the book it is a little bit but it really is a an announcement of the strategy of the book which is like all just like this constant improvisation that um speaks to a culture and a music but also a way of life

30:21Naomi Fry: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 Pecola 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.

31:00Alexandra Schwartz:And I think this is important, too. 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 the latest modernist.

31:10Naomi Fry:Yes.

31:11Alexandra Schwartz: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 American surrealism, other strategies, keeping them alive, keeping the current fresh.

31:45Vinson Cunningham: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. I love modernism. 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, Wolf, 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.

32:28Vinson Cunningham: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's 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. The way it feels. Yeah. Which kind of brings me around to the book that I want to discuss.

33:04Vinson Cunningham:Okay, Alex, come on down. Here I am. The price is right for Which book did you choose for us today? 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 come 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 leaves.

33:50Vinson Cunningham: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. Yes. Tell us about Beloved. Guys, I'm going to tell you something.

34:28Vinson Cunningham:There's a reason this book is very famous. Because this book is very good.

34:32Alexandra Schwartz:It's disastrously good.

34:34Vinson Cunningham:It's so freaking good. I just gobbled it up. And the woman sitting next to me in the coffee shop, as I finished, I had tears in my eyes, the whole thing. She just said, is that your first time? And I was like, no. Okay, I moved again. I moved all over again.

34:51Alexandra Schwartz:It happened again.

34:52Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it happened again.

34:54Naomi Fry:Can't believe how many tears we have in this episode.

34:57Vinson Cunningham: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 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. Setha is the matriarch of the family.

35:38Vinson Cunningham:She lives there with her timid and very unworldly 18-ish-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. 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.

36:06Naomi Fry:Baby angry.

36:07Vinson Cunningham:Baby angry. Baby angry is bothering everybody. This ghost is not leaving. 124, respectful. 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 reenter her life, and they begin a relationship. But pretty soon, the baby ghost, who has been kicked out of the house when Paul D. arrives, that ghost comes back in embodied form. And here is the spoiler of all spoilers. Beloved is the child who Setha killed years before during the time of slavery when the plantation owner named schoolteacher comes to hunt her down after her escape.

36:54Vinson Cunningham:Setha 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.

37:31Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, it's like a publishing trend.

37:31Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, yeah, like a publishing trend, but like, you know, make it hugely— Yeah, the supernatural.

37:36Naomi Fry:Yeah, meaningful. 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 those—all of those kind of like pulpy— Totally. Yeah, paperbacks.

37:46Vinson Cunningham:She's taking that. She's taking the American Gothic, and she's taking also slave narratives, which were—Srapel calls it a neo-slave narrative, that coming into re-inhabiting 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 embody. They're the opposite of ghosts in some ways. Like the way that Morrison achieves presence is really incredible.

38:22Vinson Cunningham: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 an 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 re-memory, 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.

39:09Vinson Cunningham: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, and if you can.

39:19Alexandra Schwartz: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.

39:44Naomi Fry:Yes.

39:45Alexandra Schwartz: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.

40:04Naomi Fry:In a minute, how do we square Toni Morrison, the icon, with a writer we know on the page? Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

40:25Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham.

40:26Vinson Cunningham:I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

40:31Alexandra Schwartz:Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy-brand with it.

40:40Vinson Cunningham:Right, we take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

40:53Naomi Fry:We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

40:56Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

41:01Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys.

41:03Vinson Cunningham:From horror movies to heated rivalry. From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations to Desperate Housewives.

41:10Alexandra Schwartz:That's what we're talking about over here. We're having fun. It's Critics Alarge from The New Yorker.

41:16Naomi Fry:Every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

41:40works that come with it. Every month we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have, and we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month we're making tiny tomato galettes. They are these adorable, maybe four-bite little galettes. So cute. Head to ba.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake.

42:15Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

42:24Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. And just because the Oscars are done, for now, doesn't mean we are. Join us every week for coverage of the biggest stories in Hollywood, interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more. Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

42:59Naomi Fry: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, you know, based on these kind of, like, more close readings?

43:17Alexandra Schwartz:I mean, it's so hard to say. Yeah, I mean, this is a big ask. 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 and 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.

44:13Alexandra Schwartz: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 a close third person as a, in Morrison, 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 the level of the paragraph. Like, here's the sociological tone and here is the utterly gut bucket, blues-based personal tone. And she's always being like, they accompany one another.

44:58So that like relationship to experience to me seems to be like what is always like constantly knocking on my door when I read this stuff.

45:05Vinson Cunningham: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 you're embarrassing us yeah yeah it's the dirty laundry they're not supposed to know what are you doing why are you making us look bad I've seen similar reactions to Morrison lately on social media, which I find really fascinating because it means she's working.

46:00Vinson Cunningham:It means, like, it's working, basically. Interesting. What kind? I've just seen it 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 or greedy or jealous or sad or whatever it might be. And also, yeah, and also are...

46:24Alexandra Schwartz:Rapists and murderers.

46:26Vinson Cunningham:Exactly, exactly. Yes. And also are generous and loving and heard 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 going to get it and share it with you guys. She says, 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?

47:00Vinson Cunningham: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.

47:34Vinson Cunningham:So she goes on to write, if Phyllis 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.

48:08Vinson Cunningham: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? But 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 like negatively politicized, like marginalized to being, for lack of a better term, like positively politicized, made representative.

48:52Vinson Cunningham:and that's a huge burden and a huge weight to create work under.

48:56Alexandra Schwartz: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.

49:38Alexandra Schwartz:Not shunning politics, but sort of playing a counter-melody by an emphasis on the inside, how life feels. So Morrison, you know, this is what I think she means by saying when I was younger, it was frowned upon to just like 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. You know, so some of the signatories are Mary Barak, June Jordan, other folks who have said no to that.

50:14Naomi Fry:Because Ellison did not sign the letter, right?

50:18Alexandra Schwartz:Ellison is mortified by the letter. He's like, what are you talking about? People—

50:22Naomi Fry:It was like, Tony doesn't need this, right?

50:24Alexandra Schwartz:You don't need identity as a marker of greatness, etc., etc. So she's in between these two things, it seems to me, and cannot be fully encapsulated by either.

50:33Naomi Fry:I think the question we're circling around with this talk about, like, 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 move, 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.

51:19Naomi Fry: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.

51:59Naomi Fry: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?

52:39Alexandra Schwartz: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 urge 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.

53:07Naomi Fry:Yes. And this can show us the way.

53:11Alexandra Schwartz:And this is still—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.

53:46Naomi Fry:Shade.

53:47Alexandra Schwartz:And it doesn't keep pushing you back to the sources. There is 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 like testing them, like knocking on them to say, still work, still work?

54:34Alexandra Schwartz:Are we still corresponding to the actual and not to an attitude, a gesture, etc.? So I think that's healthy. And books like this, Ser Pell's insistence on, as we've all mentioned, being, yeah, 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.

54:56Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. 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 Language is Liberation, 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

55:20Alexandra Schwartz:copies, but it's this kind of great, this positive idea of language can take us there.

55:26Vinson Cunningham: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 got to go. I got to go back to Benito Serino. Like I got to 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.

56:07Vinson Cunningham:Like, that's why I'm fired up right now. Yeah. Because you go right back to the books. And if like, like, look, I love that Charlie Rose clip. Who doesn't now pair it with one of the amazing books you wrote? Yeah. And we're great. That's my recommendation to myself also.

56:26Naomi Fry: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.

56:50Vinson Cunningham:Yeah.

56:51Naomi Fry:You know?

56:52Vinson Cunningham:Absolutely. I love that point, Nomi.

56:53Naomi Fry:Yeah. I think that's so wise.

56:55Vinson Cunningham:And I think I am a wise elder myself.

56:57Naomi Fry:Absolutely.

56:58Vinson Cunningham: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 romanticcy. 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. Nothing better than that. Nothing better.

57:19Naomi Fry:That's the whole point.

57:26Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor, and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy, 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 at newyorker.com slash critics. We'll see you next week.

58:15The Wired Newsroom is known for award-winning reporting on how technology shapes our world. On Wired's Uncanny Valley, we take that curiosity even further. Each week, journalists from Wired break down the biggest stories in tech while speaking directly with the people building, challenging, and reshaping the future. Is the AI boom sustainable? How do you protect your privacy in an age of constant surveillance? Uncanny Valley tackles the questions driving today's tech debates and lighting up your group chats. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

58:50Alexandra Schwartz:I'm Vincent Cunningham.

58:51Vinson Cunningham:I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Alex Schwartz, and we host Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

58:56Alexandra Schwartz:Each week, we pick a starting point. The new novel you can't stop thinking about, the movie everybody's seeing this weekend, and we kind of go galaxy brain with it.

59:05Vinson Cunningham:Right. We take the ideas at the center of these things and trace them across history, across mediums, all to get to the bottom of why this particular text is important right now in politics and culture and also in your everyday life.

59:18Naomi Fry:We go highbrow, we go lowbrow, we go everything in between.

59:22Alexandra Schwartz:Food culture to meme culture, Charlie XCX to Toni Morrison.

59:26Naomi Fry:K-pop to the Kennedys. From horror movies to heated rivalry.

59:30Vinson Cunningham:From the Oscars to the Met Gala. The Golden Bachelor to Wuthering Heights, great expectations to Desperate Housewives.

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