Toni Morrison, the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and a professor emeritus in The Council of the Humanities at the University, discussed her perception of the relationship between readers and text on Tuesday evening in McCosh 50.
Morrison delivered her lecture, titled “Invisible Ink: Reading the Writing and Writing the Reading,” to a packed auditorium of students, University officials and community members. The lecture was hosted by Wilson College as part of its lecture series in honor of the residential college’s 50th anniversary.
Wilson College master Eduardo Cadava prefaced the lecture with a summary of Morrison’s works and numerous accomplishments, noting that she has written nine novels, seven children’s books, one play, one libretto, three books of essays and four edited volumes. Morrison has also been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Nobel Prize in Literature, among many others.
Morrison began the talk with a childhood recollection of learning how to read, which she remembered as difficult “in the sense of having a hard time looking for meaning in and beyond the words.” The common first-grade phrase “Run, Spot, run” presented her with great difficulty, because it led her to the question of “why?”
The story of Hansel and Gretel, she joked, entailed even more complex questions.
As an adult, Morrison said, she attempted to articulate the characteristics of fiction that enabled it to be read over and over again. But at the time, “what I could not clearly articulate was the way in which the reader participates in the text,” she said.
Later in her life, she found the answer in what she called the “invisible ink,” an unwritten meaning in the silences, delays and exemptions of a text that certain readers are able to discover and use to fully understand it, she explained.
“Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it,” Morrison said. “By right reader, I’m suggesting that certain books are not for every reader ... Even a reader who loves the book may not be the best or right lover. The reader who has made the book is the one attuned to ... discover the invisible ink.”
Morrison went on to argue that written text is stable, but the reader changes over time, and that “a successful relationship between text and reader can only come about through changes in the reader’s projections.”
She introduced the author as the third party to this relationship and discussed various ways in which authors shape their stories to engage, manipulate and “shake up” the world of the reader.
Gender and race are two factors that authors can use to affect the reader’s projections, Morrison noted. She said that she would like to see a novel written from the point of view of a narrator whose gender was not distinguishable, because it would remove the assumptions that typically accompany a reader’s conception of the sexes. The same thing, she said, applied to race.
She mused upon the effect of removing race and gender from a story extensively. “We feel or think we know so much about both. The assumptions are already there, so your imagination is already constrained, but suppose they’re removed.” The result, she said, is greater control over the story by the author and the reader’s use of “invisible ink.”
Morrison concluded the lecture by reading several pages from one of her unpublished manuscripts. She read it because, as she said, the last line was an interesting example of “invisible ink.”
After the lecture, Morrison answered questions from the audience and, in the process, explained various aspects of her personal method of writing.
When asked whether she wrote only for “the right reader,” mentioned in her discourse on “invisible ink,” she replied that her works were not esoteric. “I write so that everyone [can understand, with] simple sentences, simple words, very little jazz, some say conversational [style], colloquialisms.”
She illuminated her relationship with her characters, saying that “you don’t even need to know their names,” but that “if you sort of fall in love with a character, they will write the book, and then you have to shut them up.”
When asked about where she acquired the elements of her style — such as rhythm and meter — Morrison explained that “it’s having an ear, and the ear is shaped by early intimacy with the sound of speech ... I used to listen to stories on the radio, and they say green, but they don’t tell you what shade, so you have to figure it out ... Poetry is like that.”
After further reflection on her writing methods, Morrison was asked what advice she had for young aspiring writers in light of the increasing demand for books with popular appeal. She replied: “Nothing should stop you from doing what you want to do.”
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