The Deed of Reading: Toni Morrison and the Sculpted Book

With Jazz (1992) and especially A Mercy (2008), one finds in Toni Morrison's writing an attempt to figure the very reading of that writing as a three-dimensional enterprise, somatic and architectonic by turns, where either the body of the text or its "talking room" bears comparison with the kind of conceptual book sculptures that suspend the act of legible decipherment to figure the cognitive and emotional space of reading. But no immersive verbal experience is thereby disavowed. Even contradictory tropes of embrace and dispersal for readerly contact with a narrator's words can lead us back to the audiovisual materiality of inscribed lettering in Morrison's subvocal sound play, her "oralterity."