The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,86

is a phrase that properly, grammatically, belongs as a dependent clause with the first. Had I done that, however (“124 was spiteful, full of a baby’s venom,” or “124 was full of a baby’s venom”), I could not have had the accent on “full” (/ u u / u / u pause u u u u / u).

Whatever the risks of confronting the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined to take. Because the in medias res opening that I am so committed to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance—a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching—this kidnapping—propels one changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed. A few words have to be read before it is clear that “124” refers to a house (in most of the early drafts, “The women in the house knew it” was simply “The women knew it”; “house” was not mentioned for seventeen lines), and a few more have to be read to discover why it is spiteful, or rather the source of the spite. By then it is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control, but is not beyond understanding since it is not beyond accommodation by both the “women” and the “children.” The fully realized presence of the haunting is both a major incumbent of the narrative and sleight of hand. One of its purposes is to keep the reader preoccupied with the nature of the incredible spirit world while being supplied a controlled diet of the incredible political world.

The subliminal, the underground life of a novel is the area most likely to link arms with the reader and facilitate making it one’s own. Because one must, to get from the first sentence to the next, and the next and the next. The friendly observation post I was content to build and man in Sula (with the stranger in the midst), or the down-home journalism of Song of Solomon, or the calculated mistrust of the point of view in Tar Baby would not serve here. Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the “author,” with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey. The painterly language of Song of Solomon was not useful to me in Beloved. There is practically no color whatsoever in its pages, and when there is, it is so stark and remarked upon, it is virtually raw. Color seen for the first time, without its history. No built architecture as in Tar Baby; no play with Western chronology as in Sula; no exchange between book life and “real” life discourse with printed text units rubbing up against seasonal black childtime units as in The Bluest Eye. No compound of houses, no neighborhood, no sculpture, no paint, no time, especially no time because memory, prehistoric memory, has no time. There is just a little music, each other, and the urgency of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the work of language is to get out of the way.

I hope you understand that in this explication of how I practice language is a search for and deliberate posture of vulnerability to those aspects of Afro-American culture that can inform and position my work. I sometimes know when the work works, when nommo has effectively summoned, by reading and listening to those who have entered the text. I learn nothing from those who resist it, except, of course, the sometimes fascinating display of their struggle. My expectations of and my gratitude to the critics who enter, are great. To those who talk about how as well as what; who identify the workings as well as the work; for whom the study of Afro-American literature is neither a crash course in neighborliness and tolerance, nor an infant to be carried, instructed, or chastised