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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
we're all listening to this podcast because, well, we love classic books. It's hugely exciting to be giving a big plug to our podcasting friends, the team from Book Riot, who are making the Fantastic Books podcast zero to well-read. I listen to it all the time and I learn from it constantly.
The team is Jeff O'Neill and Rebecca Shinsky from Book Riot, and they've been talking about books on the internet together for almost 15 years. They've heard from a lot of people who feel like they missed the window to read the so-called important books. So they created Zero to Well Read. It's a podcast that tells you everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read.
From classics to contemporary hits and social media sensations, you hear from Jeff and Rebecca why they're so great, what you should know about them, what makes them weird and fun and strange and why they matter. These guys are willing to go in and get their hands dirty talking about all sorts of books from the...
unquestionable classics to what we might call emerging classics or contemporary classics. Have a listen. Can't recommend them highly enough. Hi, everyone. As we come to the end of our series on Toni Morrison's novels, it's a huge pleasure to be welcoming to the show Namwali Serpell, who's recently published the acclaimed collection of essays on Morrison's
which is inspired both by the class that she's taught over several years as an English professor at Harvard and by her many years of critical thinking and creative writing about Toni Morrison's work. Namwali is a little bit of an intimidating legend. She's written multiple books of fiction, all of which have won and been nominated for incredibly prestigious prizes.
She's written Acclaimed Literary Criticism, which looks at the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle and bewilder us as being part of what literature's ethical value is. It's such an interesting set of questions to be thinking through at a time when we're trying to bring people back into relationship with books.
And this is also a part of what Namwali is writing about in her amazing essay collection on Toni Morrison. So we're feeling pretty lucky. getting both Autumn Womack and Namwali Serpell on the podcast. Jonti and I have been loving our conversations about Toni Morrison.
We've also, of course, been finding them extremely challenging and inviting us to rethink a lot of our assumptions that we have as readers of classic texts. Welcome to The Secret Life of Books, Namwali Serpell. It's so good to have you with us.
Thank you so much, Sophie. It's wonderful to be here with you.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Namwali Serpell to write 'On Morrison'?
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.
Yeah.
I think most readers would agree, and I think Morrison probably would agree, that the most classic of her novels is Beloved. I call it, in fact, her masterpiece or her masterwork. And part of it is because it is the work around which you can almost revolve all the others. It's like the sun at the center of everything. Forest and solar system.
But when it comes to the books that she loved, that she had a special affection for Tar Baby, which is her surrealist classic. She had a love for jazz. She said that jazz was her favorite of the novels that she'd written. Which is a very experimental novel. And so in terms of what were her standards or what were her classics when she's thinking about her, she didn't actually say Beloved.
Beloved, I think, also did come to dominate the way that people talked to her and interviewed her and spoke to her.
Yeah. Again, such an interesting answer. And just a quick shout out to the way that you've placed Nabokov in Morrison's imaginary. I thought one of your killer points in the book was, I think the comparison you made was between The Bluest Eye and Lolita as the intensely... provocative, risky, confronting ways of representing sexuality and sexual violence and desire.
And part of what I thought was brilliant about it was that it did write by both writers. Thank you. It kind of recognised Nabokov as having this kind of complexity and sophistication that in some ways has got lost in the furor of Lolita and that Morrison is doing something really interesting with... a canonical work of American writing that isn't merely pushing it aside.
She's using really active conversation.
And nor would I think she say that she was using it as mere influence either. Influence is a very tricky thing for Morrison. And so it's not like she's writing back to Nabokov or trying to correct. But as you say, nor is she trying to cancel. What I thought was really interesting was just that they both ā have an underappreciated focus on the child and the complication of love.
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Chapter 3: Why are Toni Morrison's novels considered classics?
And if that doesn't work, I want you to be compelled by the beauty to keep reading. She said this in an interview. And I think for Morrison, the And then it happened and then it happened and then it happened. Ian Forster describes this as the shock heads around the campfire. This is the origins of storytelling. What happened next? What happened next? This is why we love stories for this reason.
But she wanted us to be able to have both that suspense and the suspense of the how and why it happened. Because for her, writing is really a form of philosophy. Yeah. So you have to be able to go back and reread that opening, for example, of The Bluest Eye. Now that you have finished the book and see everything that is sort of latent, right, is hovering under those words.
Yeah.
So I think Morrison's a very specific aesthetic technique. But I recommend rereading for everybody, I think, and for every text. And I think best texts, as I said, beg for rereading. They want to be reread. Because there's always this kind of double self that you encounter, right? You remember what you felt or thought when you first read the book. And then you have your new self.
reading the book. Just that, I think, is enough to make rereading worthwhile. It's a form of self-reflection.
Totally. I so think that's true. So you must have been doing a lot of active rereading, certainly revisiting of Morrison, both in the course of writing the book, publishing the book, teaching the course and so on. What have you learned about yourself or about the books that maybe you didn't expect or came as a surprise?
I mean, that's a wonderful question. I just did an event here in California with Cathy Parcon, who's the wonderful author.
Oh, how wonderful. That must have been great.
And I've had the opportunity over the course of my book tour of doing close readings with my conversation partners. So the events that we do, we take a passage from one of Morrison's novels and we give little bookmarks with them printed to the audience. And we close read the passage together for about 15 minutes just to show what what I essentially do in the book. Right.
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Chapter 4: How does Namwali Serpell define a classic work of literature?
Her very act of reading the works of Willa Cather and Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway suggests shades hauteur, but also a careful objectivity that rises above mere accusation.
This is why I find it so frustrating when I come across items such as a 2019 New York Times op-ed, which claims that against a more traditional scholar such as Harold Bloom, quote, Ms. Morrison viewed literary canons as the contingent products of history and associated forms of domination and erasure. not as the timeless embodiments of universal experiences or values.
Her priorities, which were shared by a generation of scholars pursuing race, gender, and cultural studies-based approaches in the humanities, led toward a diversification of the canon.
Whether algorithmic or illiterate, hot takes like these ignore that though as an editor at Random House, Morrison aimed to break up the calcified demographics of contemporary publishing, as a critic, she was deeply committed to the existing canon. Indeed, in her criticism, she is as skeptical of its anti-intellectual attackers as of its blowhard defenders. She writes...
Not only may the hands of the gunslinging cowboy scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration, the sacred texts, get sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This cannon fodder may kill the cannon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare or James or Twain or Hawthorne or Melville, etc., etc., etc.,
There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them. Morrison, the critic, generally does not disparage or derogate. She diagnoses with the withering air of an analyst for whom nothing is personal. She focuses on ideological symptoms over stated beliefs, on literary imagination over authorial biography.
Rather than adjudicating an author's historical actions of racism or sexism, she queries their fictional words. How do embedded assumptions of language work, she asks.
I'm so glad you read that passage because it's both your book at its best and Morrison at her best. You're right. She's such a revurer critic and she brings so much style to it. Also, I love your playing in the shade pun. It's very fun.
Thank you.
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