<p>Both were born in Ohio to African-American parents who had migrated
from the South. Both became writers. Last week Rita Dove began
her term as the U.S. poet laureate. And novelist Toni Morrison
won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
</p>
<p> TONI MORRISON
</p>
<p>By PAUL GRAY
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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?
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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
