Word: morrisons
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...Morrison has argued for years that stories and storytelling convey information, necessary information, available nowhere else. She made this case again in her Nobel Prize address: "The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie." To read Morrison as an allegorist or a sloganeer is to overlook completely the power...
That power is visible on nearly every page of Paradise. Morrison's prose remains the marvel that it was in her earlier novels, a melange of high literary rhetoric and plain talk. She can turn pecan shelling into poetry: "the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal adjustment, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks." She captures the stark geography surrounding Ruby: "This land is flat as a hoof, open as a baby's mouth." And she builds Ruby practically brick by brick: its streets (named after the four Gospels...
...they come to pin the blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could...
...that on purpose," Morrison says. "I wanted the readers to wonder about the race of those girls until those readers understood that their race didn't matter. I want to dissuade people from reading literature in that way." And she adds: "Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing...
This assertion may surprise some people, since it comes from the author who almost single-handedly gave African-American women their rightful place in American literature. Racial questions have figured prominently in many of Morrison's critical essays. But there is really no contradiction between what she says now and what she has written in the past. She views her life and work as a struggle against the use of racial categories, or any categories, as a means of keeping groups of people powerless and excluded. She resents seeing her writing pigeonholed by her skin color. "I was reading some...