The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable

Meditations on a Bird in the Hand: Ethics and Aesthetics in a Parable by Toni Morrison

MEDITATIONS ON A BIRD IN THE HAND Ethics and Aesthetics in a Parableby ToniMorrison Cheryl Lester My reflections on aesthetic ideology in Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize Lecture appear in what follows as a form of call-and-response, staying very much in the neighborhood and spirit and order of the Lecture. They engage and resonate with the aesthetic principles foregroundedin the Lecture rather than being organized around them. Therefore, it may help to offer an overviewof these principles before turning to my reflections on the Lecture itself. First and foremost is Morrison's insistence that language and its productions are acts rather than products or artifacts. Using language is thus equivalent to performing particular, situated actions, aimed at particular audiences, for specific purposes, with specific effects. Now, language use can be ethical or unethical. Language used ethically may have any or all of the following aims: it may be used to grapple with meaning, express love, or provide guidance. For the purpose of ethical action, Morrison believes that language users should aim to express the historical specificity of their knowledge and experience , should place truth before beauty, and should recognize their expressive activity as a moral imperative. The longstanding dominance of market values notwithstanding, Morrison's aesthetic principles suggest that language offers an economy and a site where non-market values such as love, wisdom, and guidance can be sustained and transmitted. Storytelling serves as an apt 125 Ethics and Aesthetics in a Parable by Morrison 126 figure for Morrison's belief that language use can animate or stifle meaningful relationships with others, ourselves, and our past. As I drove around New Orleans in myfriend Carrie's car listening to Toni Morrison delivering her Nobel Prize Lecture (not the same thing, I see from my xeroxed pages of the slim and too expensive Knopf edition, as her Acceptance Speech), I started to cry. Narrative has never been merely entertainment forme. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. I wasfinally in New Orleans. Carrie had just moved there, from Kansas, and I was there to gather at a conference with the three other women who had organized the Quindaro Oral History Project in Kansas City, Kansas, in summer 1996. One of these women had taken mypicture the day after myfather died and sent it to me with the title "Woman in Grief," but I suspected she meant "Co-Director ofNEH Summer Seminar in Grief When She Was Supposed To Be Working." Throughout that summer,my attention wasdivided, between my father's battle to recover from triple bypass surgery just enough to undergo an operation on stomach cancer and... I hope you will understand, then, why I begin these remarks with the opening phraseof what must be the oldest sentence in the world, and the earliest one we remember from childhood: "Once upon a time ..." My father saw Kansas for the first time in April, riding in a wheelchair-accessible van from the airport to Lawrence. He had been in Harper Hospital in Detroit since the first week ofJanuary, mostly in the Intensive Care Unit, where we celebrated his eightieth birthday. He'd had a dual-lead pacemaker installed in December; there'd been problems with the installation—loss of blood, a lead left unconnected—and thus began the first of a hundred Doctor talks. "If it were my father," they often said, hurriedly glancing at the chart, with little or no idea what the last specialist had thought, or done, or forgotten to do, or whose problem my father would be tomorrow. Viewing the Kansas fields and livestock and sunshine, my father beamed, muttering blessings over those who had helped him survive the past hundred days and nights and curses at those who had failed to visit, call, or even send a card. He was not happy to be heading for a nursing home. "Why can't I stay by you?" he pleaded. For the tenth time, I reminded him that he couldn't walk, i2/ Cheryl Lester go up or down stairs, be alone all day in my house. As soon as he could walk up and down stairs, he would come "by us." "Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like...