The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,120

let me hasten to say that there are eminent and powerful, intelligent, and gifted black writers who not only recognize Western literature as part of their own heritage but who have employed it to such an advantage that it illuminates both cultures. I neither object to nor am indifferent to their work or their views. I relish it, in precisely the way I relish a world of literature from other cultures. The question is not legitimacy or the “correctness” of a point of view, but the difference between my point of view and theirs. Nothing would be more hateful to me than a monolithic prescription for what black literature is or ought to be. I simply wanted to write literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black not because its characters were, or because I was, but because it took as its creative task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable principles of black art.

TAR BABY

Recollecting the told story.

Refusing to read a modern or Westernized version of it.

Selecting out the pieces that were disturbing or simply memorable: fear, tar, the rabbit’s outrage at a failing in traditional manners (the Tar Baby does not speak). Why the Tar Baby was formed, to what purpose, what was the farmer trying to protect, and why did he think the doll would be attractive to the rabbit (what did he know and what was his big mistake)? Why does the Tar Baby cooperate with the farmer, do the things the farmer wishes to protect, wish to be protected? What makes his job more important than the rabbit’s, why does the farmer believe that a briar patch is sufficient punishment, what does the briar patch represent to the rabbit, to the Tar Baby, and to the farmer?

CREATION

Putting the above pieces together in parts.

Concentrating on tar as a part. What is it and where does it come from; its holy uses and its profane uses, consideration of which leads to a guiding motif: ahistorical earth and historical earth. How that theme is translated into the structure.

Coming out of the sea (that which was there before earth) is both the beginning and the end of the book—in both of which Son emerges from the sea in a section that is not numbered as a chapter.

The earth that came out of the sea and its conquest by modern man; that conquest as viewed by fishermen and clouds. The pain it caused to the conquered life forms.

Movement from the earth into the household: its rooms, its quality of shelter. The activity for which the rooms were designed: eating, sleeping, bathing, leisure, etc.

The houses disrupted precisely as the earth was disrupted. The chaos of the earth duplicated in the house designed for order. The disruption is caused by the man born out of the womb of the sea accompanied by ammonia odors of birth.

The conflict that follows is between the ahistorical (the pristine) and the historical (or social) forces inherent in the uses of tar.

The conflict is, further, between two kinds of chaos: civilized chaos and natural chaos.

The revelation, then, is the revelation of secrets. Everybody with one or two exceptions has a secret: secrets of acts committed (as with Margaret and Son), and secrets of thoughts unspoken but driving nonetheless (as with Valerian and Jadine). And then the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.

I apologize for using my own work as an illustration to those of you who may not be familiar with it. But had I chosen material from other writers, the possibility of its being unfamiliar would be equally as great.

My inability to consider the world in terms other than verbal means that I am not able to not think about writing. It is the “world coherent” for me. So I am perplexed by the dread and apprehension with which some writers regard the process. I am also bored by the type and space devoted to the death of fiction when the funeral is lasting longer than the life of the art itself; we can be safe in our assumption that the corpse is immortal. The “goodbye” is at least 110 years old.

What the fiction-obituary critics are responding to is the peril literature is in. Peril that can be categorized in three parts:

First is the suspicion (or fact—I am not sure which) that the best young minds are not being attracted to writing, that technology,