When she called “Recitatif” an “experiment,” she meant it. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We will assume, we can insist, but we can’t be sure. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” A little later, they were placed together, in Room 406, “stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” What we never learn definitively-no matter how closely we read-is which of these girls is black and which white. The characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” 1 Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain-page by page, line by line-that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, “ The Source of Self-Regard,” was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre.
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