The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar, common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, /…with gay enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of Paradise”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; / Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—Hesperian fables true, /…of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / Of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant.”

  That scenario, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and visited by guests and tourists, regularly on display for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they stack up in 1995.

  Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified by what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.

  Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.

  Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.

  Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling feature of paradise because some, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.

  Eternity, since it holds the pain of dying again, and, in its rejection of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest appeal. And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life, and fitter life, remind us of the desire for earthbound eternity, rather than eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is. Thus, paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to heaven, has serious intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me or us forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.

  But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes. There are many reasons why the images of the horrors of hell were meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times, with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a loss of shame in contemporary life.

  One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the numbness toward anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is understood, justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its awe-fullness. It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why are we not so frightened by its possibilities that we turn toward good? Is afterlife of any sort too simple for our complex, sophisticated modern intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise, evil needs costumes, constantly refurbished and replenished? Hell has always lent itself to glamour, headlines, a tuxedo, cunning, a gruesome mask or a seductive one. Maybe it needs blood, slime, roaring simply to get our attention, to tickle us, draw from us our wit, our imagination, our energy, our heights of performance. After which paradise is simply its absence, an edgeless and therefore unavailing lack full of an already perceived, already recognizable landscape: great trees for shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious metals, jewelry, animal husbandry. Outside fighting hell, waging war against the unworthy, there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do. A nonexclusionary, unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis, is no paradise at all.

  The literary problem is harnessing contemporary language to reveal not only the intellectual complexity of paradise, but language that seizes the imagination not as an amicus brief to a naïve or psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent life itself. If I am to do justice to, bear witness to the deeply religious population of this project and render their profoundly held moral system affective in these alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired times—where religion is understood to run the gamut from scorned, unintelligible fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I have serious problems.

  Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance, seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the occasional rhetorical flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing the traditional language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and proselytize a population indifferent or unresponsive to the language that moved our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a constituency whose discourse has been shaped by the language of media and commerce and whose expectation of correlating images to accompany and clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears reasonable to accommodate altering circumstances with alternate modes of discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such efforts, I suspect the “modernization” of God’s language has been rewarding—otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.

  Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it sacrifices ambiguity, d
epth, and moral authority, but also because its techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.

  I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons, powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums, or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction. Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from holy texts.

  Is it possible to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language? Is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on?

  I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with nonmarket vocabulary (or “its insistence on refueling itself with marketing vocabulary”), its substitution of the terminology of popular psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal triumphalism, its morally bankrupt dictatorial praxis, the unearned congratulations it awards itself for performability rather than content; its low opinion of its mission.

  How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved, limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke paradise in an age of theme parks?

  The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot. I chose something else, some other means of freshening the inquiry. I chose not only to explore the idea of paradise, but to interrogate the narrow imagination that has conceived it.

  But that, I think, is another essay entirely.

  On Beloved

  I BEGAN thinking about Beloved in 1983. As it had been since the beginning of my writing years, I was drawn to it by my complicated relationship with history. A relationship that was wary, alert, but ready to be persuaded away from doubt. It was a caution based on my early years as a student, during which time I was keenly aware of erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to me—silences that I took for censure. History, it seemed, was about them. And if I or someone representative of myself ever were mentioned in fiction, it was usually something I wished I had skipped. Not just in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain’s unconscionable humiliation of a grown man at the hands of children; there was no respite in those years even in the encyclopedia or in history texts. While I maintain a cool eye while reading historical texts, it is an eye no cooler than the one historians maintain, and ought to maintain when reading fiction. Yet in spite of my wariness, my skepticism, there is a dependence, solid and continuous, that I have on history, partly for the data available to me there, but mostly for precisely those gaps, those erasures, that censure. It is in the interstices of recorded history that I frequently find the “nothing” or the “not enough” or the “indistinct” or “incomplete” or “discredited” or “buried” information important to me. For example, in 1963, my first novel, The Bluest Eye, was a consequence of being overcome by the wholesale dismissal of a certain part of the population (to which I belonged) in history texts and literature. Of all the characters chosen for artistic examination, with empathy or contempt, vulnerable young black girls were profoundly absent. When they did appear, they were jokes or instances of pity—pity without understanding. No one it seemed missed their presence center stage and no one it seemed took them seriously except me. Now, I didn’t blame literature for that. Writers write what they like and what interests them. And even African American writers (mostly men, but not all) made clear that, except as background, prepubescent black girls were unable to hold their interest or stimulate their curiosity. Nevertheless, writers’ lack of curiosity was not the point. To me the enforced or chosen silence, the way history was written, controlled and shaped the national discourse.

  However much historical analysis has changed (and it has changed enormously) and broadened in the last forty years, the silences regarding certain populations (minorities) when finally articulated are still understood to be supplementary accounts of a marginal experience, a supplemental record, unassociated with the mainstream of history; an expanded footnote, as it were, that is interesting but hardly central to the nation’s past. Racial history, for example, remains very much parallel to main historical texts, but is seldom seen as either its warp or woof, and seldom threaded into the whole cloth. These ancillary and parallel texts are gaining wide readership while remaining the site of considerable controversy. (Debates about reading material swirled in many high schools.) Although the silences provoked virtually all of my work, inhabiting them with one’s own imagination is easy to note, not so easy to do. I have to find the hook, the image, the newspaper article that produces sustained musing, a “what if?” or “what must it have been like?”

  Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping. The general question (remember, this was the early eighties) centered on how—other than equal rights, access, pay, etc.—does the women’s movement define the freedom being sought? One principal area of fierce debate was control of one’s own body—an argument that is as rife now as it was then. Many women were convinced that such rights extended to choosing to be a mother, suggesting that not being a mother was not a deficit and choosing motherlessness (for however long) could be added to a list of freedoms; that is, one could choose to live a life free of and from childbearing and no negative or value judgment need apply.

  Another aspect of the women’s movement involved strong encouragement of women to support other women. Not to have one’s relationship to another woman be subordinate to a relationship with a man. That is, the time spent with a female friend was not downtime. It was real time.

  The completion of the debate was more complicated than that (there was much class conflict roiling in it) but those were the issues surfacing with gusto. I addressed the second one (women being important friends) in Sula. But the first one—freedom as ownership of the body, childlessness chosen as a mark of freedom, engaged me deeply.

  And here again the silences of historical accounts and the marginalizing of minority peoples in the debate claimed my attention and proved a rich being to explore. From the point of view of slave women, for example. Suppose having children, being called a mother, was the supreme act of freedom—not its opposite? Suppose instead of being required to have children (because of gender, slave status, and profit) one chose to be responsible for them; to claim them as one’s own; to be, in other words, not a breeder, but a parent. Under U.S. slavery such a claim was not only socially unacceptable, it was illegal, anarchic. It was also an expression of intolerable female independence. It was freedom. And if the claim extended to infanticide (for whatever reason—noble or crazed) it could and did become politically explosive.

  These lines of thought came together when I recalled a newspaper article I had read around 1970, a description of an abolitionist cause célèbre focused on a slave woman named Margaret Garner who had indeed made such claims. The details of her life were riveting. But I selected and manipulated its parts to suit my own purposes. Still my reluctance to enter the period of slavery was disabling. The need to reexamine and imagine it was repellent. Plus, I believed nobody else would want to dig deeply into the interior lives of slaves, except to summon their nobility or victimhood, to be outraged or self-righteously gripped by pity. I was interested in neither. The act of writing is a kind of act of faith.

  Sometimes what is there—what is already written—is perfect and imitation is absurd and intolerable. But a perfect thing is not everything. Another
thing, another different thing is required. Sometimes what is already there is simply not enough; other times it is indistinct, incomplete, even in error or buried. Sometimes, of course, there is nothing. And for a novelist that is the real excitement. Not what there is, but what there is not.

  A tall door rises up into this nothing; its hardware is heavy, secure. No bell invites your hand. So you stand there, perhaps, or move away and, later, sticking your hand in your pocket, you find a key that you know (or hope) fits the lock. Even before the tumblers fall back you know you will find what you hoped to find: a word or two that turns the “not enough” into more; the line or sentence that inserts itself into the nothing. With the right phrase, this sense becomes murky, becomes lit, differently lit. Through that door is a kind of freedom that can frighten governments, sustain others, and rid whole nations of confusion. More important, however, is that the writer who steps through that door with the language of his or her own intellect and imagination enters uncolonized territory, which she can claim as rightfully her own—for a while at least.

  The shared effort to avoid imagining slave life as lived from their own point of view became the subtheme, the structure of the work. Forgetting the past was the engine, and the characters (except for one) are intent on forgetting. The one exception being the one hungry for a past, desperate for being not just remembered, but dealt with, confronted. That character would be the only one in a position to accurately render judgment of her own murder: the dead child. Beloved. Thus, after following a number of trails trying to determine the structure, I decided that the single most uncontroversial thing one can say about the institution of slavery vis-à-vis contemporary time, is that it haunts us all. That in so many ways all our lives are entangled with the past—its manipulations and, fearful of its grasp, ignoring or dismissing or distorting it to suit ourselves, but always unable to erase it. When finally I understood the nature of a haunting—how it is both what we yearn for and what we fear, I was able to see the traces of a ghostly presence, the residue of a repressed past in certain concrete but also allusive detail. Footprints particularly. That disappear and return only to disappear again. The endings of my novels have to be clear in my mind before I begin. So I was able to describe this haunting even before I knew everything that would lead up to it.