Toni Morrison M.A. ’55, the only living American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, came to Cornell last week to read from her newest novel, A Mercy, and to participate in a panel discussion. Renowned for her unique, poetic style and for interrogating the past and its legacy, Morrison has established herself as a novelist, critic and publisher. On Friday, The Sun sat down with the 78-year-old author to discuss language, history and writerly superstitions.

THE SUN: Thank you for speaking with us, Ms. Morrison.

Toni Morrison: It’s a pleasure. Glad to do it.

SUN: If it’s alright with you, I’d like to talk primarily about language: the different ways it can be used, its relationship to the past, to culture and to heritage.

T.M.: Yes.

SUN: You said in your Nobel acceptance speech that language is “an act with consequences.” Whom should we hold responsible for these consequences? Who is responsible for language?

T.M.: It’s an intimate relationship with the listener and the speaker. I think that in that Nobel speech, some of the things were prescient — and you hear the political debates now, [in which] language becomes statist and lies become not even the opposite of the truth, but the apposite, this sort of leaning. It’s degraded. Political language, political debate is degraded.

SUN: And who do you think is responsible for that relationship between the listener and the speaker?

T.M.: The speaker is responsible for what they say. But we are responsible for either paying attention to it, absorbing it or not questioning it. Just the feeling that because it is articulated, then, therefore, there is some substance there. Or the opposite. But I think we’ve become complicit because language is action. It’s not just something that lies flat on the table or the ground. And we live in a country that really prides itself on not censoring, [but we do censor] really trivial things, like curse words or something.

There’s an enormous power in the written word and in the spoken word, and it can be used for good, and it can bring people in, it can help them sort out and think. Or it can shut off the conversation, it can lock the door against thought. Knowledge is a sin in most religions. So that there are generations and generations of people in history who distrust intellectuals, who distrust science, who distrust facts. Because if you know stuff, you go to hell, in a way. But the other thing is faith. Faith does not need facts. It does not need science. You can use it to [your] advantage, but it’s not a prerequisite. So faith is conviction without evidence. So in that sense, I’m not just talking about America … when you find a view of distrust of clarity, accuracy and truth, from the selection of the population who may be educated, then … the country and the population become more susceptible to the untruth if they don’t trust facts […] That’s a long way of trying to say language is just not passed through the thought, you know, it has real consequences.

Beloved Bard: Morrison is perhaps best known for shedding light on the African-American experience. Her latest book, A Mercy, was released last year.SUN: So can you consider the writer an actor, someone with political obligations whenever she writes or speaks?

T.M.: Yes, very much so. I don’t think there’s any good literature that’s not political. At all. I don’t care — I understand that the word “political” took on a bad meaning or definition, was corrupted after World War II. Some would call it “state art,” in Communist countries, in China, in Russia, where the art was designed to make people think things, propaganda. So that other people, from the West particularly, ran away from the so-called “political art” because it was assumed to be simple propaganda. And so therefore “political” took on a bad stance.

But when you think about it, I can’t think of any great writer who was not political. Whether it’s Euripides, or Shakespeare, or Tolstoy or Proust. They were all writing about the world they lived in, whether they were comedies, or tragedies or whatever, the collapse of, or the raising, or the war of and they had attitudes about it … And writers don’t write outside of that. Now, in some circles, the majority of people used to resist it, if there was any hint of the world that was not nature. In poetry, then it was bad poetry; if it was political poetry, it would be awful.

SUN: How do you conceive the difference between a fiction writer or a pundit or a journalist?

T.M.: [Laughs] Well, maybe there’s less difference than I thought.

SUN: In what unique way does the writer bear witness?

T.M.: Well, let me talk about the pundits. Theirs is a narrative also, it’s about stories. I think in some instances they’re devoid of any news, but [it’s] also just too short and they don’t give you the full picture. But a fiction writer can, obviously, put things in context, but also establish a kind of intimacy between the reader and the book so that you’re not just absorbing the text the way you would in an announcement [or something where] if someone says something, you say “yes” or “no.” But in a good book, you are there to think through. It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing, it’s about being there.

SUN: You live it.

T.M.: You live it. Exactly.

SUN: Are you concerned that there’s a certain way in which some languages are losing their authenticity as people come together, now that we have a more polyglot society? Do you think there’s a risk to some linguistic traditions?

T.M.: It may be. I always thought it was an improvement if different groups came together and tinkered with language and that’s what I regard as the brilliance and the power of writing in English. Its vocabulary is so … I mean it’s limitless. And so many languages are already there, it is already polyglot. And there’s nuance and there’s depth, it’s new.

I write a lot in the vernacular, dialogue of the vernacular. And that, it seems to me — this may be a poor comparison — however, Dante changed Latin into Italian. And that’s why we have the Inferno and all of that. He expanded the language, which means you expand thought. So that’s a good thing. And I think English — I don’t know enough languages to say it’s the only one — but certainly it is an important leap forward, not just as a scientific language and a mathematical language, obviously, a musical language, but just everyday language. There’s so much to draw from.

SUN: As a hybrid.

T.M.: As a hypbrid, yeah. Very exciting to write [in].

SUN: What about the historical plane? You mentioned at your reading last night that you had some difficulty in approaching the time setting of A Mercy. Do you think that has to do with a difference in discourses? How it’s harder to understand a time whose language we’ve lost?

T.M.: It was data, mostly. The language of that period was quite eloquent. I mean, everyday language people spoke was sort of, literate even though they may not have been literate.

SUN: Well, at least that’s what we have written down.

T.M.: Yes, that’s what we have written down. Who knows? I mean, we didn’t have recorders. But when you think, maybe Hawthorne, who’s writing about that period 100 years later, did Hester really … well, anyway [laughs].

But anyways, for me the problem was the data, the landscape. What’d it look like? What the weather was like. You hear these little tiny tales of people complaining bitterly on some shore because they couldn’t get down to the water because it’s littered with oysters. And they couldn’t walk. And they had to have teams come and clean up all that mess. And literally choked rivers of fish. The bounty was just overwhelming. But particularly for Europeans … You understood why they had a Spice War. [Laughs] Imagine British cooking with no spices. No cinnamon, no sugar.

So anyways, that and what trees there were. I was telling someone earlier: What was all this business about lumber being a big time treasure? To take overseas? Didn’t they have any trees? Well, no, they didn’t. They cut them down and made houses and ships and so on and to just have fires, but [Britain] was a little island, so they were short on lumber. But more importantly, in this part of the country and further east, the trees were like the sequoia, like 1500 years old. And even when they weren’t, they were so tall they could make one mast instead of putting two trees on top of each other. So ship building just exploded.

So it was that kind of minutiae that really gave me a feeling of comfort, to put the people in there when I knew about the differences between how the natives farmed and the newcomers did … Just difference. And how cutting up the land into squares was antithetical to [the natives], but it’s the way British and Europeans had been farming for generations. So that’s very timely. But once you know it, then you may never use all of that information, but feel a comfort in knowing that it’s there.

SUN: So you don’t think that language is exclusive, that you have to be a part of the culture that created it in order to fully understand it?

T.M.: Well, I think that it would be better if you could. I had some trouble. How did this child speak, this girl Florens in A Mercy, if her first language is maybe an African language, as an infant? If her mother was a slave, but probably Portuguese — certainly Portuguese, because she was owned by a Portuguese plantation owner? Then she gets taken away at six and her closest person is a Native American who speaks English and a Native American language. Plus the Brits who own her — so she has a lot of languages in her at an age when people do learn languages. And I thought, “Oh is she going to talk like this?” Then I thought, “Oh, why am I pretending that I could know this stuff, and who would be interested anyway?” So what I tried to do was give her a very peculiar, very singular voice that was only hers. And I solved the problem logistically for by having her speak only in the present. And if she did that, then that means she’s very young, everything is now. And also it’s amazing how hard that is.

SUN: To write all in the present tense?

T.M.: Yes. I never had any reference to the past at all. Even when you’re talking about the past. It’s really an exercise. I should give one to my students.

And then trying to change the language even though it was third person in the head of all the other characters, so they had their own perception. Other then her and her mother at the end, I didn’t even play around with trying to get the right vocabulary. [But] I wouldn’t put anything modern in there obviously, or anything recent, I hope.

SUN: Do you do this every time you write, try to craft the language for your characters?

T.M.: Yes.

SUN: How does that work?

T.M.: First you have to get inside the character, instead of writing about them from the outside — [that’s] why I seldom go into great detail about how people look. And that is an exercise that people could do. I say, “I don’t want to hear about your mom and your papa or friends and your little likes.” Because part of it is to write what you know, what you’re familiar with, which is a good practice. But it’s a limiting one. I want them to invent somebody they don’t know. Someone who’s fifty years older or comes from another culture.

But the trick — I shouldn’t say “trick” — the method is to get inside the head of characters and see the world the way that character does. It’s not about judging and saying, “Oh I like this character, I don’t like this character.” They can be mean or not mean or wonderful. But the point is the bear witness, and the best technique, I think, for it is to assume you’re on stage. If you’re an actor or an actress and I give you a part and you have to rehearse, you try to figure out, who is this person? And what helps you to act out the life of that character?

SUN: But now it’s the reverse, because you don’t have the script yet.

T.M.: That’s right. It’s reverse, but I do the work. For me, first you have to know their name. If you don’t know their name, they don’t behave properly. And you know, you don’t always know it, but sometimes you know it’s not right. And sometimes you hear it. Sort of what writers call “hear.” You know, we choose any superstition, anything you can just to get there. I know a writer, a famous writer … and he wrote a book that was extremely successful and [he and his wife] were able to move out of the house and buy a really big beautiful house. And [his wife] looked for houses for about 18 months and she found one. And he wouldn’t go because he was afraid that if he changed his environnent he wouldn’t be able to write. And I understand that.

SUN: Do you have anything like that? Or maybe it’s too secret to share …

T.M.: No, I don’t have anything quite that dramatic. I know that I like to be up before the sun, really. I want it to still be a little bit dark before I start to write. I’d be up then anyways, but now it’s a routine that I’m afraid to break. We hang onto anything we can do.

SUN: I would imagine, though, that there’s an authorial voice behind the different character voices. How do you think you or other writers arrive at their own discourse or their own language?

T.M.: Well, I didn’t know. I have a style that I didn’t know about. ’Cause I thought I wrote The Bluest Eye that way because that’s the way it was. Then I wrote another book and I realized that there was still this style. And I was an editor at the time, and I thought, “Is this really style?” But then I realized that the big thing was, if there was a piece of manuscript on the ground somewhere and a reader picked it up and read it, they would know it was mine. That’s the ultimate narcissism of the writer. But as I said, we do what we can.

It worked for me. Whatever that style — I say “style”, but I really mean “sound” — there’s a certain sound I hear in the language. And I try to replicate it.

SUN: Would you say there’s not much distinction between style and content? Can you separate the two? What you’re writing about and how you say it?

T.M.: I’m going to say they’re connected. I’m going to say that. I’ll probably regret it.

SUN: That’s not too bold.

T.M.: [Laughs] I know. Style is content.

SUN: How have your publishing work and your scholarly work affected your creative work? A lot of people talking about it creating some type of dissonance.

T.M.: Mine seems to be harmonious. “Harmonious” meaning, the things I say in essays and speeches or, say, Playing in the Dark or the Nobel speech, they seem to me to be the way I think and they also reflect what I am trying to do. For example, in Paradise, if I have a section, I say first, “they shot the white girl first:” OK, I’m setting up race, and I have an all black town. But over here I have a group of women and nobody knows who’s white and whose black, you can guess if you want to, but there’s no flag. So that language, which would have to withdraw all definite racial signals, is freeing up the language and letting it do its thing, which is some of the stuff I was talking about in the Nobel speech and also some of the hints of what lies in American literature — you know, race signals. I could have done it with other things, but race sort of played around and bubbled around in there.

With or without the author’s being aware or not aware or just routine conversation about race, it wasn’t about their position, just [about] what lies in the language. So that if I’m aware of that in Hemingway or Faulkner or Hawthorne or whomever — or Henry James — suppose I take it out. I’ve already said it’s there, suppose I remove it.

So in the essay [Playing in the Dark] I said, “It’s here, it’s in American literature,” that I write and so I remove it and try to see what the consequences are … That was a fun project for me. I have to say, everyone hated me after I did that. The African-American scholars who had just gotten turf to talk about African-American literature seriously and importantly. So they don’t want to hear me talk about Henry James. And of course the English Department, the routine, traditional one at Harvard, they went “What? What is that about? You’re telling us that we haven’t read it?” It just makes people think a little bit more, even if it’s to take the Saran wrap off of the fiction, mine and other people’s. And also the scholarship, to snatch off that little cover that’s holding it together. And you see of what it is made.

SUN: So you’re just thinking about literature. You’re not thinking, “I’m a scholar …”

T.M.: No no, no. It was because I’m, if you think about it, a reader. And I was a reader before I was a writer and I became a writer because I wanted to read something that I hadn’t found, a kind of book that took me seriously, took the little black girl seriously. Not as a joke, not as some pitiful thing. But seriously, something really important happening under different circumstances. I wanted to read that book. It took me forever to write it. About seven years. It’s a little book. Because I enjoyed writing it so much, I couldn’t stop.