MORRISON AWARDED NOBEL
WRITER'S 'VISIONARY FORCE' CITED

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: Friday, October 8, 1993
Page: 1
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

In its citation, the Swedish Academy lauded Morrison for the "visionary force and poetic import" of her six novels, which include "Song of Solomon" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Beloved." The Academy further praised the 62-year-old professor of humanities at Princeton for the "epic power" of her fiction, for its "unerring ear for dialogue and richly expressive depictions of black America."

Morrison is the 11th American writer to win the Nobel, which last went to an American in 1987 when the prize was awarded to Joseph Brodsky. Speaking through her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Morrison expressed gratitude that a black American had been named by the Academy. "I am outrageously happy," she said. "But what is most wonderful for me, personally, is to know that the prize at last has been awarded to an African-American. Winning as an American is very special -- but winning as a black American is a knockout."

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers who had migrated north, Morrison began her career of letters in academe and publishing. After teaching stints at Howard and Yale, she became an editor at Random House in 1967. Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published in 1970, followed by "Sula" and "Song of Solomon," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978. "Tar Baby" followed in 1981; in 1983, Morrison resigned from Random House in order to write full-time. She spent five years working on the novel that would become ''Beloved," the story of an ex-slave, Sethe, and her children, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

By now acknowledged as a cornerstone in African-American literature, Morrison's work broke new ground during a critical time for black writers, particularly black women writers. If they had only a handful of superlative black role models in the literary mainstream -- Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston -- they had even fewer open avenues to literary success. Morrison's early fiction not only authenticated the black experience by delivering the painful stories of a modern dispossessed, it also imbued those tales with a language so resonant it seems to belong as much to myth as to memory. In Morrison's hands, the starkest of tragedies comes transported with the hushed force of gospel singing.

For this singular, magical vocabulary that would soon define her voice, Morrison turned to her childhood and ancestry: to the ghost stories she had heard as a girl, the songs and preaching that were part of the black oral tradition. All her novels are rich with supernatural lore, from the dream imagery of "Sula" to the ghostly narrators of "Beloved" and her most recent novel, "Jazz." If Gabriel Garcia Marquez had his yellow butterflies and levitating priest to make the enduring mark of the Latin American magic realists, Toni Morrison, too, has her omniscient imagery -- her melancholic cadences from the other side of the grave.

But it is the terrible beauty of Morrison's fiction that, above all else, grants it such abiding elegance. Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," contains such precisely rendered sorrow that it seems astounding as a first novel; in the black girl Pecola's stagger into madness, one sees "all the waste and beauty of the world." "Song of Solomon," a rhapsodic epic where a man's determination to fly takes him home again, offers as much celebratory promise as it does grief; the novel solidified Morrison's reputation as a writer of perfect-pitch dialogue and lyrical description. A decade later, Morrison turned to one of the great agonies of history, capturing the ravages of slavery through the story of what a woman would do to save her children.

The tragedy of "Beloved" is almost unendurable; only a voice as sinewy and faithful as Morrison's could have mastered so wrenching a narrative. The novel secured a kind of grand stature for Morrison, assuring her a permanence beyond the capricious reach of literary fame. Far more important, "Beloved" broke tens of thousands of hearts and delivered truths that even history sometimes fails to convey. Such is the job of literature, and rarely in contemporary fiction has it been achieved with such anguished grace.

In 1992 came the publication of "Jazz," Morrison's sixth novel, as well as a critical work, "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination." Set in 1920s Harlem, "Jazz" is a lush, sensual prose riff that mirrors its name, while "Playing in the Dark" displays a formidable grasp of the contours and hidden sentiments of American literature -- what Morrison calls "the rhetoric of dread and desire." The text of "Playing in the Dark" was originally presented as the Massey Lectures at Harvard; with ''Jazz," it represents a creative intelligence as fluent as it is far- flung.

Throughout her career, Morrison has embraced her heritage and acknowledged her creative debt to her experience as a black female. In 1986, addressing an international literary congress in New York, she spoke to the obstacles she had overcome: "Had I lived the life that the state planned for me from the beginning," she said, "I would have lived and died in somebody else's kitchen, on somebody else's land, and never written a word.

"That knowledge is bone deep, and it informs everything I do."

Two years later, in an interview with the Globe, Morrison said that she had wrestled with the difficulty of being known as a black writer, or a woman writer, rather than simply a member of the international community of letters. ''So I've just insisted -- insisted! -- upon being called a black woman novelist," she said. "And I decided what that meant, because I have claimed it. I have claimed what I know. As a black and a woman, I have had access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who were
neither.

"So I say, 'Yes, I'm a black woman writer.' And if I write well enough, then maybe in about five years -- or 10, or 15 . . ." Morrison left the sentence unfinished. What she couldn't have known was that, six years later, it would simply be: Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate.

"And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last."

". . . We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life."

CALDWE;10/07 NKELLY;10/08,16:53 MORRIS08