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50books_poc2009-03-10 09:16 pm
esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com) wrote in 50books_poc2009-03-10 09:16 pm
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Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel lecture
Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture is available as a very small book from Knopf. I highly recommend it. Although it may be read quickly, that only means that you can read it again.
The lecture is very much about the power of language and narrative.
I can't match Morrison, so I'm going to quote a little of it to let her words speak for themselves.
Morrison has said that stories are the most effective way to preserve and pass on knowledge. Her acceptance speech for the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature began, “Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge."
She tells the story of an old blind woman who talks with a group of young people who come to her door one day. They say they have a bird, and they test her, asking her to tell them whether it is alive or dead. She won't give them a simple answer.
Morrison says of her, “Being a writer, she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences."
Morrison talks of the beating heart of language, and tells us that “the vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie."
Nonfiction often attempts to explain human events finally, what Morrison calls “monumentalizing”. “Language,” she says, “can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable."
The lecture is very much about the power of language and narrative.
I can't match Morrison, so I'm going to quote a little of it to let her words speak for themselves.
Morrison has said that stories are the most effective way to preserve and pass on knowledge. Her acceptance speech for the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature began, “Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge."
She tells the story of an old blind woman who talks with a group of young people who come to her door one day. They say they have a bird, and they test her, asking her to tell them whether it is alive or dead. She won't give them a simple answer.
Morrison says of her, “Being a writer, she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences."
Morrison talks of the beating heart of language, and tells us that “the vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie."
Nonfiction often attempts to explain human events finally, what Morrison calls “monumentalizing”. “Language,” she says, “can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable."