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Toni Morrison Reads From New Novel

Candace Braun

Speaking silently but emphatically in writing can sometimes have more of an impact than stating something outright, author Toni Morrison said.

Of one of the characters in her new novel, Love, the author said, "There's something about her voice that stabilizes the text, but also tears it apart."

The character only speaks out loud about four times in the novel, however she shares her thoughts with the reader continuously throughout.

The book, Ms. Morrison said, is an exploration of African-American culture, following several women from the 1940s through the 1990s, covering periods before, during, and after the civil rights movement.

The author read excerpts from her book on Tuesday, November 4, in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University.

Novelist, Nobel Laureate, and a professor at Princeton University, Ms. Morrison is renowned, both in Princeton and around the world. She is the author of seven previous novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, The Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Many of her writings focus on the legacies of slavery, and the effects it has had on African-Americans.

Ms. Morrison moved to Princeton in 1989, becoming the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

In addition to her writing, she has contributed to student life at the University in many ways, one example being the Princeton Atelier.

Ms. Morrison was inspired when she was collaborating a song cycle entitled Honey and Rue, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for opera star Kathleen Battle. Ms. Battle, Ms. Morrison and Andre Previn, who wrote the music, came together to create a musical piece that was original and collaborative. This inspired her to do the same with students in a seminar.

In 1994, Ms. Morrison started Atelier at the University by bringing together guest artists from different media to create works of art that involve both the creators and the students. The first Atelier seminar brought together choreographer Jacques d'Ambroise, director of the National Dance Institute, and A.S. Byatt, novelist critic. Together the artists and students created a dance inspired by A.S. Byatt's novel, Possession.

Ms. Morrison said she believes the Atelier gives students the chance to grow as artists, while acquiring an appreciation for art and the desire to experiment with different ideas.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was raised in a family of sharecroppers. Her father, George Wofford, was a welder, who often told his daughter folktales about African-Americans and slavery. It was here that she first received the information she would later incorporate into her novels.

Ms. Morrison first changed her name when she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1949, America's most distinguished black college. She changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni" because she said her name was too difficult for others to pronounce.

After graduating from Howard, she went on to Cornell University, where she wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. In 1955, she received her M.A.

She then became an English instructor at Texas Southern University, while teaching in the English department at Howard. Later she worked as a textbook editor in Syracuse, New York, as well as a book editor for Random House in New York. In 1984 she was appointed an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of New York.

Ms. Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, and won the National Book Critics Award. The book examines the African-American community, rape, and the main character's relationship with family and community. With this book Ms. Morrison established her identity, beginning to write novels that would later be read in and outside of the classroom, and around the world.

In 1988, just before coming to Princeton, Ms. Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Beloved. This novel was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner. The woman and her husband escaped from slavery on a Kentucky plantation to Ohio, where they remained until their slave masters overcame them. She then killed her baby to save the child from slavery.

"Love"

The author's latest novel, Love, is the story of several women connected to Bill Cosey, the dead owner of Cosey Hotel and Resort. Two of the women, Heed, Bill's arthritic, nasty, second wife, and Christine, Bill's granddaughter, are in cahoots over the property that has been left in limbo. They are forced to wait and hope for the other's death so they can own the land.

As the story unfolds, Ms. Morrison gradually hints to the reader why these women feud with one another, while incorporating both women's pasts, along with the history behind the other women affected by Bill Cosey.

Described by critics as a Gothic comedy, this novel has been said to most closely parallel Ms. Morrison's Beloved.

This novel went on bookshelves October 28.
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