Abstract
Tell us ... what moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of a town that cannot bear your company. Toni Morrison Perhaps it is the reality of a future as durable and far-reaching as the past, a future that will be shaped by those who have been pressed to the margins, by those who have been dismissed as irrelevant surplus, by those who have been cloaked with the demon's cape. Toni Morrison Toni Morrison opens her lecture upon receiving the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature with a parable and a meditation. A blind guru is consulted by a group of young men who question her about the contents of one member's hand: is he carrying a live bird or one that has died? The question is meant to shame the interrogated, to publicly undermine her credibility as a clairvoyant, to make her physiological blindness stand in for and reveal a larger metaphysical one. The guru sidesteps the performance of disparate power, stating simply that the responsibility for the bird's life or death belongs to those who have taken hold of it. Taking the bird for words, Morrison proceeds to contemplate the properties of language, what words can and must do, where language inevitably fails, and the overarching ethical dimensions of the literary enterprise. For Morrison, survival is bound up with words; subjects either dwell in language or are dwarfed by it. The essay that follows analyzes the voluminous and intricate Absalom, Absalom! as a novel of southern masculine defeat and renewal in the three decades immediately following Reconstruction, a period typically referred to as the nadir of black experience.