Professor Autumn Womack

And I particularly love a writer's archive because you do get this kind of like unconscious logic of the book.

See, we have the published book.

We always think of that as the final thing, especially when we think about writers like Morrison who are,

undoubtedly like gifted literary geniuses right we just think of the final project and then we don't actually think of like all of the things that they had to do to get there and all the things that didn't happen but could have happened so for me the archive is like at once we think of it as this this official place that records everything that happened right like we go to the archive to confirm a fact or to get proof or to affirm that something happened but there's also this way that it's

All of these things that didn't happen, like the characters who didn't make it in or the versions that could have been but weren't or like the Bluest Eye, Claudia was not in it for a very long time.

It was not in the first person for a very long time.

And so those kind of questions for me are just they're interesting.

It's like, oh, wow.

But then it also and this is kind of where my my interest in the narrative and form comes in.

It also is OK that why for the story did Claudia have to be there?

Right.

So that becomes like another kind of interesting question for me that opens us up into a different level of thinking about the book.

So I really think of archives as a place that you go to ask questions, really, which I know is a kind of counterintuitive way to think about it.

And often when I teach with the archives, my students want to go there to confirm their suspicion about something.

And I really try to encourage them to say, OK, no, you go to the archive and you think of it as this like boundless field of questions.

And you see where it takes you and you let it speak to you and you listen to what it says, not to what you wanted to say about the novel or about the book or about a historical moment.

Yeah, so one of the things... So I was recently going through the drafts for The Bluest Eye, and one of the things that I found is a scene, and I don't even think the scene makes sense in the novel, which makes it interesting in and of itself, but there's a scene where the character who becomes, in the published version, Piccola, originally in the drafts, her name was Eunice, so that's another interesting thing.

But she's getting teased, and initially Morrison says...

they were shouting at her full of hate, okay?

And then she revises it, and she says, shouting at her full of joy.