I have elaborated upon this media version of crisis in order to distinguish it from conflict. Conflict is the clash of incompatible forces, the Shaper versus the dragon; a disharmony calling for adjustment, change, or compromise. Conflict recognizes legitimate oppositions, honest but different interpretations of data, contesting theories. These oppositions may be militarized, may have to be, but in the academy they should, must not be. In fact, they must be embraced if education is to occur. Conflict in the halls of the academy is unlike conflict in the malls, arcades, or on a battlefield. In academic halls versus arcade malls, conflict is not a screen game to play for its own sake, nor a social gaffe to avoid at all costs. It has a bad reputation only because we have been taught to associate it with winning and losing, with the desperate need to be right, to be alpha. With violence. Conflict is not another word for crisis or for war or for competition. Conflict is a condition of intellectual life, and, I believe, its pleasure. Firing up the mind to engage itself is precisely what the mind is for—it has no other purpose. Just as the body is always struggling to repair itself from its own abuse, to stay alive, so is the mind craving knowledge. When it is not busy trying to know, it is in disrepair.
The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can invent, imagine, and, most important, it can delve.
I like to think that John Gardner’s view will hold: that language—informed, shaped, reasoned—will become the hand that stays crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our lives and rippling our intellect. I know that democracy is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. You only have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey until the blood of Grendel’s mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor’s as well.
The Writer Before the Page
I ONCE KNEW a woman named Hannah Peace. I say “knew,” but nothing could be less accurate. I was perhaps four years old when she was in the town where I lived. I don’t know where (or even if) she is now or to whom she was related then. She was not even a visiting friend. And I couldn’t to this day describe her in a way that would make her known in a photograph, nor would I recognize her if she walked into this room. But I have a memory of her and it’s like this: the color of her skin—the matte quality of it. Something purple around her. Also eyes not completely open. There emanated from her an aloofness that seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I remember her name—or the way people pronounced it. Never Hannah or Miss Peace. Always Hannah Peace—and more. Something hidden—some awe perhaps, but certainly some forgiveness. When they pronounced her name, they (the women and the men) forgave her something.
That’s not much, I know: half-closed eyes, an absence of hostility, skin powdered in lilac dust. But it was more than enough to evoke a character—in fact any more detail would have prevented (for me) the emergence of a fictional character at all. What is useful—definitive—is the galaxy of emotion that accompanied the woman as I pursued my memory of her, not the woman herself.
In the example I have given of Hannah Peace it was the having-been-easily-forgiven that caught my attention, and that quality, that “easily forgivenness” that I believe I remembered in connection with a shadow of a woman my mother knew, is the theme of Sula. The women forgive each other—or learn to. Once that piece of the constellation became apparent, it dominated the other pieces. The next step was to discover what there is to be forgiven among women. Such things must now be raised and invented because I am going to tell about feminine forgiveness in story form. The things to be forgiven are grave errors and violent misdemeanors, but the point was less the thing to be forgiven than the nature and quality of forgiveness among women—which is to say friendship among women. What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the emotional value of the relationship. But Sula is not (simply) about friendship between women but between black women, a qualifying term the artistic responsibilities of which are what goes on before I ever approach the page. Before the act of writing, before the clean yellow legal pad or the white bond are the principles that inform the idea of writing. I will touch upon them in a moment.
What I want my fiction to do is to urge the reader into active participation in the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text. And to refuse him makes it difficult for him (the reader) to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data. When one looks at a very good painting, the experience of looking is deeper than the data accumulated in viewing it. The same, I think, is true in listening to good music. Just as the literary value of a painting or a musical composition is limited, so too is the literary value of literature limited. I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in Greece before Christ, or religious narrative in 1000 AD, when literature was need and did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the writer’s imagination. How magnificent not to have to depend on the reader’s literary associations—his literary experience—which can be as much an impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a writer’s. It is important that what I write not be merely literary. I am most self-conscious about in my work being overcareful in making sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I avoid, too studiously perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary references, unless oblique and based on written folklore. The choice of a tale or of folklore in my work is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or her and provides irony, sometimes humor.
Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others, enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a story about parents who abandoned their own children to a forest and a witch who made a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his racial and cultural ignorance and confusion, is flagged. Equally marked is Hagar’s bed being described as Goldilocks’s choice. Partly because of Hagar’s preoccupation with hair, and partly because, like Goldilocks, a housebreaker if ever there was one, she is greedy for things, unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and Hagar is emotionally selfish as well as confused.
This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm if boring habit with me, not only because it leads to poses, not only because I refuse the credentials it bestows, but also because it is inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of that literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests me. (Emphasis on me.) Literary references in the hands of writers I love can be extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t want the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same plane an illiterate or preliterature reader would have to. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.