Rooms of Their Own

By Paul Gray

Nearly everyone, including the author, was startled last week when the Swedish Academy awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature to the American novelist Toni Morrison. For one thing, the academy has shown a fondness for spreading the prize around geopolitically and linguistically; because the last two winners -- Nadine Gordimer in 1991 and Derek Walcott a year ago -- write in English, this year's winner figured to be one who works in another language. For another, the U.S. authors rumored to be in contention for the prize were Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates; Morrison's name did not appear in the speculations.

Once the surprise wore off, though, the recognition that Morrison is the first African American, and only the eighth woman, to receive literature's most prestigious award, worth $825,000, provoked widespread elation. Inevitably, some people privately suspected that Morrison won because she is a black female. Had the prize gone to Pynchon, of course, the same skeptics would not have assumed it was because he is a white male. No one can understand, and probably laugh at, this double standard better than Morrison. She has dealt with it, triumphantly, throughout her life and through her fiction.

The two are closely akin. Although her six novels contain few autobiographical traces, they constitute intensely imaginative responses to the specific historical and social pressures she has experienced as a black woman in the U.S. The imagination is all hers; the pressures have been the inheritance of millions, including, now, those who have read her books.

Her parents were onetime Alabama sharecroppers who moved north to Lorain, Ohio, a small steel-mill town just west of Cleveland, in search of a better life. The second of four children, Chloe Anthony Wofford was born in 1931, in the teeth of the Great Depression. Her father took whatever jobs he could find and nurtured, as his daughter once recalled, an angry disbelief in "every word and every gesture of every white man on earth." He apparently had reason. As the daughter grew older, she heard family tales about an incident that occurred when she was only two, and too young to remember. Her parents had fallen short of their $4-a-month rent, and the furious landlord had tried to torch the house, with the family inside. That someone would intentionally destroy his own property or burn people alive for a pittance seems implausible. The young girl believed it, and her writing would later be etched with the incommensurability between what hatred intends and what it achieves.

From age 12 on, she took jobs to help her struggling family's finances. She graduated with honors from high school and went off to Howard University in Washington, at that time an all-black institution. Next came Cornell, where she did graduate studies in English and, after writing a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, earned an M.A. degree in 1955. Her degree qualified her to teach English, which she did, first in Texas and then back at Howard; but her familiarity with Faulkner's work proved invaluable when she later began to write fiction. Incantatory Faulknerian cadences crop up in all her novels, including her first, The Bluest Eye (1970), as in a description of women "old enough to be irritable when and where they chose, tired enough to look forward to death, disinterested enough to accept the idea of pain while ignoring the presence of pain."

While an instructor at Howard, she married a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison and had two sons. As the marriage turned sour, Morrison began to seek privacy and consolation in writing, like, as she later remarked, "someone with a dirty habit." One of the stories she produced, about a little black girl who prays to be given blue eyes so that others will find her beautiful, later inspired her first novel.

For many years, though, her writing was confined to the off-hours when she was not being a mother or a breadwinner. After her 1964 divorce and resignation from Howard, Morrison and her children moved to Syracuse, New York, where she edited textbooks at a subsidiary of Random House. Three years later she was transferred to the publisher's Manhattan headquarters.

By almost any measure except her own, Morrison moved easily and successfully through the overwhelmingly white provinces of publishing and academe. At the same time, while working to improve other people's manuscripts, she had territories of her own in mind. Where in contemporary American literature were the black girls and women she had known and been? Where were the fictional counterparts of her relatives back in Lorain, portrayed in all their loving, feuding, straitened complexity?

The novels she proceeded to write constitute provisional and consummately artful answers to these questions. Sula (1973) examines the stormy friendship of two black women and the opposing imperatives to obey or to rebel against the mores of their beleaguered community. Song of Solomon (1977), her only novel with a male protagonist, proved a critical and commercial breakthrough for Morrison; the phantasmagoric saga of a black man in mystical pursuit of his past won the author rapturous praise and a greatly enlarged circle of readers.

Those who do not find Song of Solomon Morrison's best book almost invariably choose Beloved (1987), an intricate, layered, harrowing story about what an escaped slave did to save her child from bondage and the rippling effects of this act through many years and lives. In 1988, after Beloved had been passed over by judges for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle, a group of 48 black authors signed and sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review complaining that Morrison had never won an NBA or a Pulitzer Prize. The gesture was well meant but unfortunate. Two months later, when Beloved received the Pulitzer -- based on merit, the judges insisted, not the public protest -- the honor could hardly fail to be perceived, at least in some quarters, as tainted.

No such reservations should attend Morrison's Nobel. The Swedish Academy sometimes works in mysterious ways, but it cannot be lobbied. It made an honorable, correct choice in Morrison, but probably for at least one wrong reason. In the statement explaining Morrison's selection, the academy wrote, in part, "She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race." This is wrong, as have been the many critics over the years who have praised Morrison for "transcending" the ( blackness of her characters and bestowing on them an abstract universality that everyone can understand.

In practice -- and this is the great lesson that her fiction has to teach -- Morrison does just the reverse. White authors are seldom praised for "transcending" the whiteness of their characters, and Morrison has demanded, through the undeniable power of her works, to be judged by the same standards. She has insisted upon the particular racial identities of her fictional people -- black women and men under stresses peculiar to them and their station in the U.S. -- because she knows a truth about literature that seems in danger of passing from civilized memory. The best imaginative writing is composed of specifics rather than platitudes or generalities; it seeks not to transcend its own innate characteristics but to break through the limitations and prejudices of those lucky or wise enough to read it. Madame Bovary is not Everywoman; she is a living complex of new knowledge and experience in the lives of all who have met her. Sethe, the tormented former slave in Beloved, is not Everywoman either; she is Toni Morrison's gift to those who desperately need to know her.