The Nobel Prize should be more than ample recompense for the prize Morrison is famous for not getting: the 1987 National Book Award, which went to Larry Heinemann’s “Paco’s Story,” rather than to Morrison’s “Beloved.” Forty-eight black writers and critics signed a statement protesting the neglect by major awards panels; later that year “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize. Morrison, in fact, has long had at least a modest place in the literary establishment: she’s been a graduate student at Cornell (her 1955 master’s thesis was on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf), a trade-book editor at Random House and, since 1987. a professor of humanities at Princeton. Her six novels, from “The Bluest Eye” (1970) to “Jazz” (1992), reflect the scholarship of the academy and the craftsmanship of the publishing house as well as an outsider’s outrage. Morrison is above all a great synthesizer: in her novels the sensibility of the African diaspora melds with the mainstream of American literary tradition.
But the undeniable political significance of Morrison’s work–and now, of the Swedish Academy’s imprimatur–tends to obscure its literary significance. “The Nobel Prize in Literature is not awarded for gender or race,” says Nadine Gordimer, the last woman to win the prize, in 1991. “If it were, many thousands of mediocre writers might qualify. The significance of Toni Morrison’s winning the prize is simply that she is recognized internationally as an outstandingly fine writer.” While Morrison writes about black women with ferocious reverence, her rhapsodic novels don’t traffic in uplift; in “Beloved,” for instance, a mother kills her child rather than have her live in slavery. For Morrison, liberation comes in the act of writing. “Our silence has been long and deep,” she told NEEWSWEEK last week. “In canonical literature, we have always been spoken for. Or we have been spoken to. Or we have appeared as jokes or as flat figures suggesting sensuality. Today we are taking back the narrative, telling our story.”
It’s arguable, of course, that on the brink of the 21st century, narratives are no longer worth appropriating, by women of color or anybody else; that they’re being soundbitten, hypertexted and MTV’d into irrelevance. But don’t argue that with Morrison. “The narrative line is the way we understand the world,” she says. “So all these announcements about the diminished need or importance of novels are premature.”
Now that Morrison has the Nobel, she can start worrying about less theoretical problems–like what to do with the $825,000 that goes with it. “This is new to me, having to decide what to do with money,” she says, laughing. “I have no history of having to make such decisions.” A more insidious concern is how heavily the world’s highest literary honor, heaped on top of the fame she already has, will weigh on her when she sits down to write. “That’s a real fear,” she says, “but I’m fortunate because I had begun something extremely important to me last year a new novel that has engaged me thoroughly. " If there’s any doubt that Toni Morrison can survive even the Nobel Prize, consider her answer when asked which of her books she loves most. She says, “The one I’m not talking to you about.”
