I often think the writer she had the most in common with was Vladimir Nabokov, another notoriously difficult insider-outsider and artist-reader who now, in an unlikely turn, sits close to the center of the American canon. Each evinced a snobbery that wasn't defensive but inborn, and cut with a dry sense of humor. Morrison liked to say she grew up feeling superior, "like an aristocrat," and she read canonical literature for filth in her criticism and speeches. Nabokov was born a literal aristocrat and his interviews and lectures are spiked with acerbic dismissals of other writers.
Morrison's titles are softerāBeloved, Love, Paradise, A Mercyābut her novels. like Nabokov's, brim with cruelty. A father rapes his daughter. A mother lights her son on fire. A woman poisons her boss. Most people don't know that Toni Morrison wrote horror novels. But she was more invested in genre fiction than you might imagine. She and Nabokov were equally fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe, for example, and flirted with melodrama, the fantastic, the Gothic.
At the same time, both writers willfully sometimes irrepressibly, penned rather difficult prose. I'm a full professor of English with tenure at Harvard University, and I'm not ashamed to admit that it took me at least three readings to comprehend Beloved at even a basic level. There are passages in Morrison's works that no reader I've ever met understands on the first go. But this literary difficulty was neither aesthetically coy nor glibly aspirational. It was an ethos.
Morrison's insistence on making us puzzle things out was an attempt to effect, she said, an "egalitarianism that places us all (reader, the novel's population, the narrator's voice) on the same footing." This democratic orientation to the work doesn't pander. Morrison doesn't condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers. "My writing expects, demands participatory reading," she said. "My language has to have holes and spaces so that the reader can come into it.'
In other words, this ambiguity has a purpose. The point is that we cannot know, we cannot judgeāand sometimes the point is that there are ways of doing both that allow contradictions to coexist. Morrison believed that literary form could instantiate philosophical ideas of this kind. As she said of William Faulkner: "The structure is the argument." As she wrote of Mark Twain: "The brilliance of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises."
I should note that Morrison may well have reiected these comparisons to white male writers, too: "I am not like James Joyce: I am not like Thomas Hardy: I am not like Faulkner," she insisted. "I am not like in that sense." She knew she was their equal, but she felt that this critical shortcut of analyzing her in relation to them relegated her to the minor (read: minority) status of the acolyte or the copycat.On one hand, she refused to be subsumed by and whitewashed into canonical neutrality. Or the other hand. she refused for her work to be reduced solely to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon it as a result. As she once lamented, "I'm already discredited, I'm already politicized, before I get out of the gate." This double bind proved both a crux and a crucible for Morrison's creative difficulty.
Namwali Serpell, On Morrison
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