Sophie Gee

And I suppose what comes up for me in hearing you say that about this idea of a universal question about a child's life, to what extent for Morrison do you think that that is a specifically racialized question or specifically a question about African-American and African history as opposed to a question about, say, childhood?

I love that.

I'm also thinking about sort of Black childhood as it had appeared in American writing by white writers before the 19th century and then into the 20th century.

And I wonder whether there's a sense in which Morrison and her contemporaries are, you know, rewriting that consciously in terms of literary history as well as the history of childhood.

That's really interesting.

I'm sort of putting you on the spot.

Which parts do you think don't hold?

In The Bluest Eye, but Morrison's other writing where, you know, she's testing the template in a very purposeful way.

Sometimes it holds up, sometimes it doesn't.

Incredibly interesting.

And so narrative, to get a little fancy with it, narrative is a form that from a sort of Anglo-European framework, it's moving toward an end point and it's kind of linear.

In the hands of Morrison and other black writers...

that linearity becomes a problem.

And so you're looking for ways of thinking about cyclical stories and also, I think, stories that are simultaneously playing out and looping back and kind of folding into one another in a complex way.

I have a lot of directions I'd like to take that in.

Let me take it in a really obvious one, first of all.

Did you meet Tony?

It's such an interesting story that you're telling, and I actually want to push a little bit on the kind of getting a break from the 19th century.

So, you know, you're obviously deeply immersed in 19th century writing and history and the sort of archive period.

How do you think that knowledge and that sort of background either helped you to read Morrison or possibly changed the way you read her as an older person from when you were in high school?