Word: nobelity
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...write a novel again?'" At that moment, deluged by congratulations, invitations and preparations, never mind another novel, Morrison found herself stymied by her acceptance speech. She had no free time to work on it, and when she stole some, she produced nothing she liked. "I called someone at the Nobel Committee," she remembers, "and I said, 'Look, if you're going to keep giving prizes to women--and I hope you do--you're going to have to give us more warning. Men can rent tuxedos. I have to get shoes, I have to get a dress...
Morrison has learned since, of course, that the Nobel Prize carries burdens somewhat heavier than the problem of what to wear to the celebration. Although every writer drifts into daydreams of winning the prize, actually having it can produce some nightmarish side effects. A crushing mantle of gravitas descends on the winners...
...immensely talented. I just think she needs a new subject matter, the world she lives in, not this world of endless black victims." But for every pan, Morrison has received a surfeit of paeans: for her lyricism, for her ability to turn the mundane into the magical. In the Nobel sweepstakes at the moment, Morrison looks to be a lot closer to William Faulkner, whom many critics regard as this century's greatest American novelist, than to Buck and Steinbeck...
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...
...There were plenty of roadblocks along the way," she recalls of her career and her life. "The world back then didn't expect much from a little black girl, but my father and mother certainly did. She was still alive when I won the Nobel, although she died three months later. She was delighted but not surprised...