Coda

Summary

The Critical Life of Toni Morrison ends not with the conclusion but with a coda: in ongoing memoriam of the writer, critic, teacher, editor, and public intellectual who died on August 5, 2019. Unlike Southern white male poet and New Critical theorist John Crowe Ransom, who, in defense of “l’art pour l’art,” described the professional literary critic as “a man who, in dealing with a work of art, creates a little work of art in its honor,” Toni Morrison defined great literature as socially astute and politically aware: “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time” (Denard 64). Most of us who began our careers under the New Critical banner have come to engage with both schools of thought: blowing up the white male literary canon was certainly a result of the successful political assault by the feminist scholarship of men and women (black and white) on traditional literary discourse; literary critics are, indeed, men (and women) who, in dealing with a work of art, create art in its honor. Morrison has taught us “to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes not even closing the book—leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, re-visitation, a little ambiguity” (Jaffrey).

In his 2017 foreword to Morrison’s The Origin of Others, author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates honors the centrality of her work to America’s present as well as its past. Although the book, derived from her 2016 Harvard University lecture series, “is not directly concerned with the rise of Donald Trump,” it is “impossible to read her thoughts on belonging, on who fits under the umbrella of society and who does not, without considering our current moment.” Coates sees yet another American cultural crisis resulting in our turning over the rocks on the field of American history to uncover the systemic racism writhing there from the beginning. As Morrison addresses “the oldest and most potent form of identity politics in American history—the identity politics of racism”—her oeuvre becomes politically for all time (ix–x).

The present moment also validates Morrison’s belief in connections between the political and the personal as we bounce between one binary and another. A personal anecdote comes to mind.