Namwali Serpell

For me, I think the easiest way to describe what a classic work of literature is to my students is something you want to reread.

Something that affords rereading, is generative when you reread it, is not boring when you revisit it.

Something that you can endlessly return to that way, because I think that's both subjective and objective.

Morrison herself very much believed in classics in multiple senses.

And she studied the classics in the ancient Greek sense when she was a student at Howard, which is something not that many people know.

And she also was very...

oriented toward what she knew of as the canon.

And there were many people who I think associate Morrison with being someone who broke open the canon or who wanted to destroy the canon or cancel the canon as we know it.

But she actually was extremely committed to holding on to Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Dante and all of the writers that had inspired her in her writing.

And when Morrison first started writing novels,

The way she articulated it was, I wanted to write a book I had never read.

I wanted to write a book that was missing from the array of possibilities in the bookstore or the library.

And people often remember that as this very personal aspect to her work.

It's almost a work of self-expression.

But then you read the novel itself and you realize that it's engaging with

earlier classic works of literature, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

I think she's engaging with Nabokov's Lolita.

She's engaging with ancient Greek myth, right?

So there's a way in which she was entering into what she perceived as a tradition, a literary tradition, as you say, from the very first book.

I think most readers would agree, and I think Morrison probably would agree, that the most classic of her novels is Beloved.