RIP: Toni Morrison
August 11th, 2019 12:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopThis is late because I wasn't sure if I had anything to say that isn't obvious. It's hardly necessary to point out that she was a hugely important writer—and in some other world where she wasn't "important" because no one ever noticed her work (which sadly isn't implausible), it still would've been amazing. And in saying that, I don't mean that I can really grasp her work and judge its full meaning and quality; as a white guy from Pennsylvania whose formative years were pretty segregated, many things about it will always be abstract to me. What I mean is that even someone like me can see it's amazing.
And I hope there will be fewer people like me in the future. That is, for someone who went to high school in the 1980s, and who was taught to respect great literature, it was possible to get the impression that even though enjoyable and thematically interesting novels might still be written in the present day, novels that had big things to say and said them in such memorable language that you couldn't imagine how someone could figure out how to string words together in that way... had pretty much ended some time in the 1950s. I'm pretty sure reading Morrison was my first realization that that wasn't true. I hope now no one can grow up thinking it's true.
And I hope there will be fewer people like me in the future. That is, for someone who went to high school in the 1980s, and who was taught to respect great literature, it was possible to get the impression that even though enjoyable and thematically interesting novels might still be written in the present day, novels that had big things to say and said them in such memorable language that you couldn't imagine how someone could figure out how to string words together in that way... had pretty much ended some time in the 1950s. I'm pretty sure reading Morrison was my first realization that that wasn't true. I hope now no one can grow up thinking it's true.
