Cat's Cradles and Other String Figures, 1979

My Beautiful Mother 2026

1.8 m x 1 m

Whether algorithmic or illiterate, hot takes like these ignore that though as an editor at Random House, Morrison aimed to break up the calcified demographics of contemporary publishing, as a critic she was deeply committed to the existing canon. Indeed, in her criticism, she is as skeptical of its anti-intellectual attackers as of its blowhard defenders, writing:

"Not only may the hands of the gun-slinging cowboy-scholars be blown off, not only may the target be missed, but the subject of the conflagration (the sacred texts) is sacrificed, disfigured in the battle. This cannon fodder may kill the canon. And I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare, or James or Twain or Hawthorne, or Melville, etc., etc., etc. There must be some way to enhance canon readings without enshrining them."

She complains that the canon “controversy…has degenerated into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.”

And she asserts in Playing in the Dark of her own method: “In no way do I mean investigation of what might be called racist or nonracist literature, and I take no position, nor do I encourage one, on the quality of a work based on the attitudes of an author or whatever representations are made of some group.” She goes on to insist that her “deliberations are not about a particular author’s attitudes toward race.”

[...] In American literary criticism up to that point, Morrison notes, “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference…. [E]very well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse.” But again, to refuse to ignore race in the canon—to insist instead on notice, which I have suggested is the manifold imperative of black reading practice—is not necessarily to accuse its writers of racism. Denial and finger-pointing are equally childish.

Morrison’s posture is to treat race as worthy of interest but unworthy of debate: "I can’t help thinking that the question should never have been 'Why am I, an Afro-American, absent from it?' It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is 'What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work?'

Eschewing the representation game of bewailing the absence of blackness, she tells us: Look again! Even erasure leaves traces. Let’s pay attention to them, and to what they do. No need to destroy the canon. No need to deify it, either. Why not just read it—in the black sense: give notice (I’m watching you), draw notice (watch me now), but also simply notice (I see you).