Fiction’s inability to reinvent the past

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Toni Morrison compiled a collection of her essays and speeches into a book called The Source of Self-Regard. In one of these essays, “God’s Language,” Morrison explores whether modern fiction can genuinely convey the centrality of religion to African Americans in the 1900s. Along the way, she leaves some insights into her writing process and questions whether writing can genuinely convey certain aspects of the past.

Her writing process

Morrison forms her ideas by “just wondering” about the issues underlying some of her past experiences, encounters, and observations—particularly the ones where people had mixed reactions (“what were my mother’s friends appreciating while they were disapproving?”). For instance, the idea for her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was inspired by one of her black childhood friends wishing she had the bluest eyes imaginable to be beautiful. Morrison found this idea deeply sad and grotesque: “I looked around to picture her with them and was violently repelled by what I imagined she would look like if she had her wish…implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing.” Moments that create conflicting reactions (like yearning and awe vs. disgust) are crucial because they prompt examination of why the reactions differ and which are more appropriate or authentic. Are the characters’ actions driven by wanting to conform to social pressures or by a deep-rooted internal conflict?

Once Morrison has an idea, this isn’t enough for her to write it down. It must prompt a recurring response of wonder or curiosity to a troubling image, encounter, or impression. If Morrison doesn’t continually think about a topic over several months or years, she deems it unworthy of being physically recorded. To write down an idea that doesn’t last would be to give it more weight than it merits. Thus, anything that makes its way onto paper is from thorough reflection and consideration.

 Her process is interesting in the broader context of writing and the longstanding question of whether to prioritize the style of writing over the subject matter or vice versa. Morrison’s approach is surprising because she’s mainly associated with lyrical, poetic prose, which would seem to imply she favors style over subject. However, she invests a considerable amount of time into forming her ideas, and this is the part of her writing process she chooses to emphasize.  

The problem with paradise

Moving on to the main focus of the essay, one of Morrison’s goals was to create a novel where religious faith was so deeply embedded in the story’s narrative that it genuinely reflected how religion was inseparable from the lives and principles of African Americans in the 1900s. Morrison’s writing focuses on slaves, ex-slaves, and their children. Religion and faith were essential for them to endure, and a 1994 poll Morrison cites showing that 96% of the African American community believed in God evidences how important religion was to this group of people. Morrison needed to find a way to reflect religion’s deeply motivational and binding power. She decided to do this by conveying the prospect of heaven, hope, and salvation by recreating “in the setting of the black towns of the West, a narrative about paradise—the earthly achievement of—its possibility, its dimensions, its stability, even its desirability.”  

The main obstacle she identified in depicting paradise was if it’s possible to give religious language credibility and power in a modern, secular world with a largely non-God-faring audience: “is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on?”

The issue exists because heaven has become overimagined; readers are too accustomed to seeing and reading grand descriptions about heaven that it’s become familiar instead of mysterious and mystical. And the previous methods authors used to depict heaven—biblical citation, allusion, and sexual metaphors to convey bliss and peace—are now archaic, overdone, and insufficient. What effect could quoting scripture have on a modern reader?

Morrison concludes that it isn’t possible to express the importance of religion to African Americans in the 1900s through fiction. Most modern readers don’t have a significant source of faith to surrender themselves to or have as much to fear. Fiction’s failure to convey the significance of heaven raises broader questions about what else from the past is impossible to replicate with writing. Is the past becoming more and more inaccessible, something best left behind and only looked upon with a level of objectivity?

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Sources:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Source-Self-Regard-Selected-Speeches-Meditations/dp/0525521038