Danille Taylor-Guthrie.

Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: U of Mississippi P 1994 312 pp $3950 cloth/$1595 paper.

When I write in succession or teach Toni Morrison's novels, I am accustomed to pulling not at home my file folder of rather battered, xerox interviews to review and to confer Morrison, whose literary career includes the parts of prize-winning author, editor, critic, and teacher, is an astute analyst of her allow novels and the literary canon as well as of American agriculture The interviews that she has granted throughout the years exemplify the kind of criticism that Morrison herself calls us to: criticism that "goe into the work upon its own terms" and that, in doing likewise breaks new ground (161). in the same state [i]or[/i] condition criticism, like Morrison's art, is one as well as the other beautiful and political. Danille Taylor-Guthrie has made meeting Morrison's challenge to critics easier according to collecting, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, interviews produc between 1974 and 1992 These pieces give us Toni Morrison's reflections in succession all the facets of her profession and at the various stages of her twenty-five years as a novelist.

The twenty-four interviews included in the tome begin with Morrison's 1974 "Conversation" with Alice Childress from Black Creation Annual and cessation with Betty Fussell's 1992 "All That razz" interview/article from Lear's. merely the post-Nobel Prize Paris Review interview "The Art of Fiction" from 1994 is missing from the collection. Taylor-Guthrie's elegantly spare apparatus provides alone what is essential. She gives us, first, a brief introduction that places Morrison in the connection of the renaissance of black women writers, succinctly outlines critical themes in her fiction, and moves the reader an overview of the primary thematic contented of the interviews. Taylor-Guthrie supplies, next to the first a chronology of Morrison's life and works, and, finally, an index to special names that, in a to a high degree thoughtful and useful way, subordinate to Morrison's own name, highlights works and themes in the fiction.

The patterns and essential be of importance tos of Morrison's thought emerge in these interviews: the history of black populace in America, the changing parts of black men and women in agriculture and in intimate relationships, the construction of identity in the recent world, and the necessity and risk of loving. Morrison describes the importance of the novel for exploring these touchs and the relationship of her narrative technique to this function. She says that the novel must "bear witness" to the life and moot points of the "tribe," the "village," as black the community face the confrontation between "old values of the tribes and of the present day urban values." Her work, she says, "suggest who the outlaws were, who survived subordinate to what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as oppos to what was legal outside it" (120-21) Morrison views fiction as both bearing witness and effecting change, enlightening and strengthening (183) The importance of the theme of witnessing climaxes in the interviews as Morrison discusses Beloved, the crowning jewel of her work to date. Morrison says most numerous explicitly about that novel what she has give an inkling ofed throughout her work: that witnessing is responsibility. In describing the air of the baby ghost Beloved, Morrison sees that, in the novel,

the gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and

the dead and the gap between the past and the at hand does not exist. It's

bridged for us by the agency of our assuming responsibility for the bulk of mankind no one's ever

assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en way Nobody knows

their names, and nobody thinks about them.... there's a necessity for

remembering [the horror] in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner

in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing the book

in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember.

(247-48)

Making it possible to stand in front of the reality of the past and of our lives, and making it possible to remember, is at the heart of Morrison's narrative strategy. Her novels are about restoration and the extension made possible by going to the hurted heart of the black experience (77 120 165) The theme of intimacy speeds throughout these interviews, whether Morrison is talking about her avow life or about her work. Her fiction deals with putting "intimate things in place," as she told Robert Stepto in 1976--both with being etymoned in a place and with making a fireside in the world. Morrison begins, she says, not with research further with her own memories. This starting point means that she brings large ideas and ends "down small" and puts them "at home" (29) in order to examine the couple their particularity and their universality. Thus, Beloved is "not about the institution--Slavery with a capital s It [i]s about these anonymous clan called slaves. What they do to detain on, how they make a life, what they're willing to risk, however prolonged it lasts in order to relate to single another ..." (257).

Getting down to the nitty gritty of experience, Morrison then invites the reader to become participant and teller relating the experience of the novel to his or her possess experience in the world. Morrison speaks of her narrative technique as an extension of jazz and sads as a form that helps humans to erect and deconstruct the world in order to be able to function effectively in it (235 252) She refer tos that writing, like playing music, is about regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement and sound--about getting back to the original power of language (165) This power is beyond the intellectual and the reasoned answer that is prized in the West. As the good points toward the future, it ties us to the past--to ancestors and to black cosmology which are in touch with a source of magic and mystery (78 225) We are tied to past, not absent and future by blood: "That's all history means to me It's a actual personal thing--if their blood is in my veins, maybe I can do this little part right here" (132)