Transcript
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The interview opens with an overview of Toni Morrison’s success and the premise of Beloved, including Sethe’s desperate act and the haunting return of her daughter’s ghost.
next tonight Charlayne hunter-gault talks with award-winning author Toni Morrison about her highly acclaimed novel beloved as one of America's most formidable women of letters Toni Morrison always gets a lot of attention when a novel of hers is publishedher latest beloved came out in September and is already in its third printing it's fast moving to the top of the bestseller list following the pattern of Morrison's four other novels published over the last 16 years The BluestEye Sula Song of Solomon and tar baby went our baby was published in 1981 Morrison stature in the world of fiction earned her a Newsweek cover story beloved is the second morris a novel to become a Book ofthe Month Club main selection beloved is the story of a runaway slave seta who tries to kill her children rather than see them return to slavery she succeeds in killing only one a daughter named beloved the story unfolds
around the return of beloved's angry ghost she moves into the house with her mother and sister Denver here Morrison reads from a passage that illuminates Denver's view of the murder and sets his need to make beloved's ghosts understandit Safa was trying to make up for the handsaw the loved' was making her pay for it but there would never be an end to that and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her yet she knew sufficegreatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning that beloved might leave that before sufferer could make her understand what it meant what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin tofeel the baby blood pumped like oil in her hands to hold her face or her head would stay on to squeeze her so she could absorb still the death spasms that shot through that door body plump and sweet
with life beloved might leave leave before Seth could make her realize that worse than that far worse was what baby Suggs died of what Ellen you what stamped saw and what made Paul D Turnbull that anybody white couldtake your whole self for anything that came to mind not just work kill or maim you but dirty you dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore dirty is so bad you forgot who you were and couldn'tthink it up and though she and the others lived through and got over it she could never let it happen to her own the best thing she was was her children White's might dirty her all right but not
Morrison explains the historical inspiration for the novel and discusses motherhood, slavery, memory, and why she chose to make the past physically present through a ghost.
her best thing her beautiful magical best thing the part of her that was clean Toni Morrison what inspired this lean I read an article in the 19th century newspaper about a woman whose name was Margaret garner who hadindeed killed or tried her children she was a fugitive slave and rather than have them go back she decided to take them all into a permanent place of oblivion and it was an article that stayed with me fora long long time and seemed to have in it an extraordinary idea that was worthy of a novel which was this compulsion to nurture this ferocity that a woman has to be responsible for her children and at thesame time the kind of tensions that exist in trying to be a separate complete individual you said that she has no she had no right to do it but I would have done the same thing I mean it
was the right thing to do but she had no right to do it I think I felt the the cleans you see those women were not parents they could have they were people insisted that they have children butthey could not be mothers because they had nothing to say about the future of those children where they went they could make no decisions they frequently couldn't even name them so that they were denied humanity in a numberof ways but they were denied that role which isearly I mean has nothing to do with history it's what women do and so she claimed something she had no right to claim which was the property her children and claimed it so finally that she decided that shecould not only dictate their lives but in them and when one knows what the life what their future would be her decision is not that difficult to understand you you've talked about previous accounts of slavery being simplistic and
and not probing the interior being of of the characters is this how difficult was it for you to probe the interior being of characters albeit black still from a long long time ago exactly well my disappointment in someof the accounts was based on the fact that this is so large you see and then the big problem is a slavery is so intricate so immense and so long and so unprecedented that you can let savoury bethe story the plot and we know what that story is and it is predictable and then you do the worst thing which is you D you the center of it becomes the institution and not the people so ifyou focus on the characters and their interior life it's like putting the authority back into the hands of the slave it's rather than the slave older what is the rationale for the ghost first of all I really wanted
her past her memories her haunting memories not to be abstract I wanted her to actually sit down at the table with the things she's been trying to avoid and explain away which is this past this is a terriblething that happened to confront it as a way of saying that's what the past is it's a living thing there's this relationship between ourselves and our personal history and our racial history and our national history that sometimes getsmade you know sort of distant but if you make it into a person then it's inescapable to confrontation the other was that it was part of the milieu of black people to think in terms of a very intimate
The conversation turns to criticism of Morrison’s characters and her belief that life is larger and more complex than modern fiction often allows. She also reflects on publishing, readership, and the need for black literature to move beyond victim narratives.
relationship between the living in the dead they didn't have that you know sort of modern dismissal they didn't dismiss those things this book beloved has received almost no critical reviews I mean just total acclaim but one of thethings that critics have said both about this book and the character of Sethi and other works of yours is that you draw characters that are larger than life does that disturb you or is that even a criticism asfar as you're concerned if used to disturb me but I realize that what they are saying is that life is small my characters are not bigger than life they are in fact as big as life and life isreally very big we tend to cut it down these days smaller and smaller and smaller to make it fit I don't know what a headline or a room do you think that modern readers have a diminished view of
life the readers don't but the writers are making it smaller and smaller why television maybe so we've been cut down to screen size and two short articles dwelling in the life of a complicated person over a complicated periodis not involved if this is shorter it's smaller it's a narrower geography one can do it in history and biography but not in contemporary life you said many years ago many years ago and back in the 70s thatyou were an editor at that time at Random House and you were saying that you wanted to participate in developing a canon of black work beyond black self-flagellation the kind of entertainment that you felt was being encouraged amongblack writers by white editors or the white society did you succeed in particular and has the publishing world succeeded in general in having a better balance of work for little there has but there's still resistance because the fix
on who that reader is hasn't changed a great deal the reader is a somebody between 40 and 60 who's white and lives you know in a suburb near a big city there's sort of classic profiles of who buysbooks but something happened in the meantime and a huge readership emerged black and white and female which made a difference in what was published there when I mentioned the self-flagellation I was particularly aware of some titles in particularbut more importantly the eagerness with which publishers and people in the book industry were interested in books by black people that said let me tell me how angry you are let me see your anger tell us how terribleit has been for you and so there was an in sly encouragement to sort of expose the horrors of being the victim which some people played into but it was like feeding the vampire with one's own blood instead
of describing you know a complicated extraordinary survival life it doesn't mean you wipe the slate clean and all the black people are heroic and there was a mood of that but you have some what I regard is someof the most complicated interesting mysterious people in the world a whole group of them and they need to be revealed for what that life is not simply to reveal and educate or even play into the hands of theyearning what used to be a yearning for guilt expressions of government white people and that's what I meant by that sort of large book and I wanted that to change and really black women writers have succeeded along those
Morrison discusses stepping back from editing, the importance of opening doors for younger writers, and how her visibility helps create space for a new generation of black women authors.
lines because there was this active growing readership out there who was just desperately hungry to see themselves such a stage for change what happens as a Toni Morrison who has been responsible for introducing so many new voices intoAmerican fiction letters as you move farther and farther away from your editing responsibility because of the success of your own publishing who fills that void and what does that do how does that make you feel I mean ina way you're abandoning your children it's true I am abandoning them as an editor but I am convinced that the more I am well known the better note I am the easier it is for other writers to comealong if I till that soil myself in publicity traveling around Europe selling books lecturing what-have-you then all of the younger people who won't have to break down those same doors they'll be open they will write infinitely better than
I do they will write of all sorts of things that no one writer can ever touch they will be stronger and they will be delicious to read but part of that availability and accessibility because six or seven blackwomen writers among whom I am one have already been there and tells us oil