Postscript

Abstract

Toni Morrison has written more novels to date than any other African-American woman writer. There should be more — may be many more — to come. For the same reasons as Norman Page in his volume in this series on Muriel Spark, I have decided to provide a postscript rather than a conclusion. As Professor Page points out, ‘claims of conclusiveness where the work of a living writer is concerned seem impertinent, if not fraudulent’. If it is inappropriate to provide a conclusion in discussing the work to date of a living and prolific writer, it is especially so in Morrison’s case, however, for in her novels she always eschews closure as incompatible with the black artistic sensibility. As she observed in interview with McKay (1983): ‘Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord … a long chord, but no final chord’ (429). There is, however, more consensus as to Morrison’s status as a novelist than is the case with Muriel Spark, but as the debates which followed her award of the Nobel Prize revealed, she also courts more vehement controversy.

The original definitions of me as a Black writer were an attempt to reduce the area in which I wrote, to ghettoise me — I’m forceful so I turned that around as those are the sensibilities out of which I write. (Morrison in Kenyon, 1993, 12)