Nobelist Morrison hails the redemptive powers of literature

Novelist Toni Morrison sits with senior Dalila Scruggs in front of two paintings by Romare Bearden in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum's "Blackness in Color" exhibition Oct. 4. Scruggs, a student intern at the museum, was Morrison's guide during a tour of the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 22. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Literature has the power to defend against the assaults of a digitized, globalized, time-compressed world. That was the message of hope at the bottom of the Pandora's box of contemporary evils cataloged with brilliance and originality by Toni Morrison Oct. 3 at Cornell.

"I believe that literature reclaims private life," Morrison told a crowd packed into David L. Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall during her second public lecture at Cornell as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large. Expanding on themes she introduced during her first lecture, in November 1998, the Nobel Prize-winning author continued to reveal that she is an observant social critic as well as one of the great writers of our time.

Morrison began by criticizing the marketing of time as a commodity. "During the marketing of the new millennium, we saw time become money," she commented, noting that high prices and oversell caused people to "cancel their reservations for millennial pie."

She went on to decry the loss of "real time," and its replacement with "virtual time," as exemplified by the recent Olympic broadcasts in which events were compressed into "narrow programming time. If 'time' is a resource to be rationed," she told the audience, "then the promise of more time is tantamount to a promise of more 'life' -- desperately longed for and aggressively sold." She then asked, "When time is slashed from its moorings, what effect will it have on literature?"

In a shift from the message in her first address, however, Morrison acknowledged there were positive aspects to some of the changes buffeting people's lives. For example, she confessed to the audience that she had an e-book and intended to use it. "It can store dozens of books. One of my greatest fears is to be stuck somewhere with no books."

With digitization of the written word, she warned, "the threat and the promise to literature are positioned side by side like two zeros in the year 2000, one representing the accessed and privileged, the other representing the unaccessed and unprivileged."

But the deepest danger in instant words and images, she said, is that they bring about "the dissolution of public and private memory, the substitution of a faux memory for a more nuanced one." Repeating a phrase she used during her 1998 lecture, she told the audience: "We live in 'the age of spectacle' in which the reigning images promise to mediate between us and the spectacle, but they have forfeited that promise. We're not engaged, we're distanced when confronted with rapid visions of catastrophe. Rather than concretize the nation's identity, they damage, alter, distort time, language, the moral imagination and access to knowledge."

Such an assault can lead to "feelings of rage, fear, disorder, helplessness ... the shudder of the intellect when language has failed it," she said.

But literature has redemptive powers, asserted Morrison. "It refuses and disrupts passive consumption of the self. It demands the experience of ourselves as multidimensional. It rejects lazy responses to other cultures and races and instead mines language for its power to disrupt" stereotypical thinking and complacency.

"Now, when time is slashed, when public and private merge in a single dot, when language becomes bankrupt into the rush to one size fits all," declared Morrison, "literature, it seems to me, is now more needed than it has ever been." Her words drew a standing ovation.

Professor James Turner, director of the Africana Studies and Research Center, greets Toni Morrison at the Johnson Museum exhibition Oct. 4. Robert Barker/University Photography

Associate Professor Anne Adams introduced the writer's public lecture. During her four-day visit to campus, Morrison met with other faculty and students in the departments of Africana studies and English. She also viewed the "Blackness in Color" exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art.

On Thursday, Oct. 5, Morrison met in the A.D. White House with a small group of undergraduate students who had taken a Knight writing seminar titled "Toni Morrison's Remembering." Six of the students -- Carrie Gonella, Liz Roller, Christina Harewood, Jeremy Weinberg, Conniel Arnold and Brian Donnelly -- presented creative and analytic responses to Morrison's works. The presentations clearly delighted the author, who praised the students' interpretations and commented at length on them.

Gonella picked a passage from The Bluest Eye, in which a speck appears on a tooth in the mouth of the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, and eventually grows and destroys it. "There must have been conditions that allowed it to happen," she read, drawing parallels between the tooth's loss, the loss of rootedness in the black community and societal indifference.

"This passage does exactly what Carrie suggested," said Morrison, "the tooth that doesn't get any attention and eventually breaks and leaves a ragged edge." She went on to place the book in the context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when it was written. Despite the movement's great gains, "some people didn't make it," said Morrison. She said that she wanted the book to speak for the most vulnerable members of the black community, the ones treated by society like children because they lacked money, resources and material goods, "the ones no one could speak for who could not speak for themselves."