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10 layered Rhythms: Virginia Woolf and toni Morrison (1994) Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty flight for, meaning and response-ability.1 I see your face,Toni Morrison, possibly the best novelist inAmerica today , when people ask, “What does it mean that you wrote your M.A. thesis in the early fifties, on suicide in the works ofWilliam Faulkner andVirginia Woolf?”2 Do such people want to inflict the “anxiety of influence” on you? Or perhaps, is it that they want to be sure that your writing will be seen as a part of the GreatWestern tradition?What is the purpose of securing a link between you and William Faulkner, as Harold Bloom did in his introduction to his edition of collected essays on your work?3 Or between you and VirginiaWoolf, as the program of this conference suggests?Why must you be studied in relation to such writers, icons of twentieth-century European and Anglo-American literature? Is it that as an African American woman writer, clearly a “genius,” you must have aWestern white literary father and mother—not just any white father but one such as Faulkner who, as Ralph Ellison has put it in Shadow and Act, was one of the few Anglo-American writers to fight out “the moral problem [of Negroes in America] which was repressed after the nineteenth century.”4 Not just any white mother, but one such as Virginia Woolf who is now clearly situated in the canon, First published in Mark Hussey andVara Neverow, eds., VirginiaWoolf:EmergingPerspectives (New York: Pace University Press, 1994), 164–77.This paper was originally written to be the featured event at theThirdAnnual Conference onVirginiaWoolf that took place at Lincoln University, Jefferson City, Mo., June 10–13, 1993. as Modernist, satisfying the twentieth-century Great Books requirement,5 as Feminist, satisfying the needs of twentieth-century women scholars?6 You have commented on this tendency among critics.Your own words are a cautionary preface to our project: My general disappointment in some of the criticism that my work has received has nothing to do with approval. It has something to do with the vocabulary usedinordertodescribethesethings.Idon’tliketofindmybookscondemned or embraced as good, when that condemnation or that praise is based on criteria from other paradigms. I would much prefer that they were dismissed or embraced based on the success of their accomplishment within the culture out of which I write.7 I am anAfricanAmerican woman critic who wrote about your work before you were celebrated and who has, despite critical trends, maintained my sense of your writing as an African American woman. Please allow me to invent, as you do in your novels—in this case, a fiction about you and VirginiaWoolf —for fictions can be beneficial, imaginative, even transforming. Because I know this is an invention and I worry about “notions of risk and safety,” I will rely primarily on your words andVirginia’s in the charting of my invention. I am inspired by your andVirginia’s different related projects, layered rhythms I call them. I see you in the early fifties, a colored graduate student when colored meant black, pacing yourself through Cornell, squinting your eye at that famous suicide point on the campus where too many students took their lives. I see you, a colored girl who, a few years before, had changed her name from Chloe (a name inAmerica associated with blacks) toToni (an androgynous name), because even folk at Howard U had trouble pronouncing it. I find that an instance of serendipity forVirginiaWoolf used the name Chloe in her fictional representation of Mary Carmichael’s novel in ARoom of One’s Own, “Chloe liked Olivia,” pointing to Shakespearean characters, even as she disrupted bourgeois heterosexuality.8 Yes, yes, I do see you, assessing the wintry whiteness at Cornell. But you are used to whiteness.You are from Lorain, Ohio, where possibly your father, like Claudia’s daddy in your first novel, TheBluest Eye (1970), became, in the winter, a “Wolf killer turned hawk fighter, [who] worked night and day to keep one from...

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