Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 518

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Toni Morrison: The Last Interview."

HUNTER-GAULT: This book, Beloved, has received almost, uh, no, uh, critical, uhm, reviews. I mean, just total acclaim. But one of the things that critics have said both about this book in the character of Sethe 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 as far as your concerned? 

MORRISON: It used to disturb me. But I realized 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 is really 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.

JAFFREY: You don’t feel you need to protect yourself from listening to critics? 

MORRISON: You can’t. 

JAFFREY: You need to know what’s being said? 

MORRISON: I know there are authors who find it healthier for them, in their creative process, to just not look at any reviews, or bad reviews, or they have them filtered, because sometimes they are toxic for them. I don’t agree with that kind of isolation. I’m very much interested in how African American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It’s been a long, hard struggle, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done. I’m especially interested in how women’s fiction is reviewed and understood. And the best way to do that is to read my own reviews, for reasons that are not about how I write. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the work. I’m not entangled at all in shaping my work according to other people’s views of how I should have done it, how I succeeded at doing it. So it doesn’t have that kind of effect on me at all. But I’m very interested in the responses in general. And there have been some very curious and interesting things in the reviews so far.