 Postmodern literature is called the literature of entropy or chaos

because it has rejected the creation of meaning as its main objective.

Pynchon is one of the best literary representatives of the moment.

 His prose is nonlinear and challenging and he represents the world as

a set of possibilities where one fixed referent seems impossible.

 Fond of polisemy and intertextuality.

 His works defy authorial control over meaning and obstruct the
readers’ search for it.

 They communicate the idea that technological progress is behind

modern distress and challenges the meaning of thought.

 Scientific discourse in his stories and shows than an entropic

understanding of the universe has replaced any rational organization.

 Communication theory and the physical laws of thermodynamics in his

works supply them with terms like white noise (superabundance of
communicative acts where it is difficult to single out independent
elocutions) and heat death (situations where disintegration occurs).

 Entropy measures the disorderliness of things. The random but

irreversible tendency of a system to lose energy and finally to run
down.

 Thermodynamics is the field dealing with energetic exchanges.

 Cold and hot objects exchange heat in a one-directional way, from the
hot ones to the cold ones. Exchanges between systems which are in
different states bc this difference is what brings forth the transfer of
energy. In systems which are long enough in contact, this energy
exchange ends up bc the systems reach a common state. In closed
systems, where energy cannot go in our out, energy is conserved and
entropy increases.

 Entropy became part of the volume Slow Learner. In his “Introduction”

he acknowledged his debt to countercultural movements of the 1950s
and 60s.

 Story’s double setting, functioning as closed and open systems.

 Scientific concepts structuring and informing the plot

 The allusions in the story

 Its playfulness regarding meaning

 Its unpromising view on culture.

 Sameness causes equilibrium and stagnancy. The story makes us

reflect on the terms of chaos or disorder.

 It takes place in W DC, during those years when leftist ideas were
considered threatening for the welfare of the n ation.

 The characters are engaged in uncertainty and the limits of

knowledge.
 Attempts to create a meaningful system of ideas and values are
challenged by a nonsensical world.

 We can find 3 definitions of entropy: measure of randomness in a

closed system (meatball’s), measure of thermal energy no longer
available to work (callisto’s) and the measure of the loss of information
in the transmission of a message (saul’s).

 When the particles of a system have reached thermodynamic

uniformity, energy cannot be generated unless it is provided from
outside that system.

 He relies on scientific concepts in order to apply them to a cultural

condition which seems to be reaching its heat-death, a state of equal
temperature in a system producing exhaustion of energy.

 The uniformity of the world outside the building in the story announces
such a heat-death, in contrast to the excess of difference and energy
in Meatball’s apartment.

 Spatial disposition is highly relevant to the story. He chose a binary

setting for the unfolding of the events. Meatball’s apartment is what
could be defined as a highly disorder place. It is an open system that
produces diverse forms of energy. Callisto’s apartment is a closed
system designed to resist the heat-death.

 Difference creates energetic transfers. Outside the apartment building

sameness menaces the lives of American citizens. Meatball’s
apartment is rich in difference while callisto attempts sameness.

 At the end of the story meatball tries to restore the chaos, as well as
callisto, to restore the sick bird’s health by holding it close to his
chest.

 The opening of the text with an epigraph from henry miller’s tropic of
cancer shows that pynchon’s story is concern with climatic
conditions.

 He suggests a cultural uniformity in the us of late 50s near decay. The

combat against the exhaustion of functional energy is manifest in the
double closure of the story. In callisto’s apartment, the absence of
energy makes it impossible for him to communicate life to the bird.
Heat-death has reached his hothouse. Meatball’s party gets so frantic
that energy becomes almost unmanageable.

 Narrative shifts from upstairs to downstairs, and the point of view

shifts as well. The distribution of characters according to the space
they occupy, characterization techniques are minimal. Space and
action convey all the information that readers need. Pynchon avoids
providing extra details about characters’ background by making
callisto himself supply those details. He dictates his autobiography to
aubade, so that an overall narrative voice is not necessary for the
provision of a framework that accounts for callisto’s strange life.

 Pynchon merges his authorial voice with callisto’s narrative and

aubade’s writing. The strategy of the autobiography makes the
scientific context and its implications available to the reader.
  The 3rd type informational or communicative entropy related to the
amount of information or noise conveyed in a signal and it entails the
idea that information cannot be conveyed in the totality of the signal.
Entropy is low when the potential of the message is high, when there
are several possibilities of meaning. If messages are ordered, distinct
and closed, then entropy is very high and communication is noiseless.
Heat death in information takes place when there is no disorder, no
potential no openness for meaning.

 Ineffectual communication is neutralized by musical patterns. Musical

imagery is important for music supplies organized structures of
sounds that create meaning and harmony.

 The exposition of entropy adopts a harmonious frame that reaches its

peak with the crescendo of the party’s wildest moments. Musical
imagery permeates the narrative until the diminuendo of the bird’s
heartbeat announces a closure in the narrative.

 The characters mirror the countercultural ambience prevailed in the

us from late 50s to 60s and 70s.

 Humor is ubiquitous in pynchon’s prose. He presents absurd situations,

unexpected plot turns.

 He explores solemn issues through bizarre character and events. Many

of the characters at the party have responsibility in national
institutions but are portrayed as pitiful and unproductive figures.
Government girls passed out on couches , bathroom sink. Ex
Hungarian freedom fighter described as a Don Giovanni. He challenges
usual charactrization frames by drawing on irony.

 The postmodern period questions any kind of authority and a

deconstruction of meaning. Questions the scientific metanarratives
and reason, binary oppositions and challenges the reader’s
expectations.

Mulligan’s party is as rowdy as it gets: there’s a drunk woman claiming she’s

drowning in the bathtub, different kinds of music blaring left and right, women
passed out in the sink, and more guests arriving even forty hours in. Mulligan has
just been woken up by the sound of a loud cymbal crashing and, despite being
hungover, tries to instill some order in his apartment. Chaos is everywhere, and
the noise is relentless. A group of sailors from the Navy arrives under the
assumption that the apartment is a brothel, choosing to stay for the party even
though they’re mistaken. The sailors are trying to win over all the single women;
they’re starting fights, making the party even more hectic than before. Mulligan
steps in and breaks up a fight between the sailors and a music group, attempting
to sort out some of the chaos and establish order.

The same crashing cymbal also wakes Callisto upstairs with his lover Aubade, who
is partially non-human and has a heightened sense of sound. The two are trying to
seal their apartment to prevent a heat death, as they fear the conditions outside. It
has been 37 degrees Fahrenheit for three straight days, and the temperature has
not wavered even though the weather is changing.

Inside their apartment, Callisto has attempted to create a safe and heated
ecosystem. He holds the bird close to him in the hope of transferring warmth and
creating a single circuit of heat between the two and delves into his thoughts
about entropy. He defines it as “the measure of disorganization for a closed
system,” and thinks about the physics behind thermodynamics as the noise
downstairs remains booming and constant. This is an important and intentional
juxtaposition, as Callisto’s attempts to seal off the apartment from all outside
aspects is essentially impossible due to the roaring sounds and boisterous guests
below. Mulligan seeks the order that once existed in his apartment, while Callisto
seeks to create an order that has yet to exist.

Pynchon alternates back and forth between the two different scenes to explore the
idea of entropy, sound, and physics. Returning to the chaotic party scene, Mulligan
is dealing with another new issue. A guest, Saul, sits on the stove, as it is typical at
this point for guests to treat Mulligan’s appliances as if they’re furniture. Saul is
venting about his ex-wife, Miriam, who left him over a disagreement about
communication theory and technology. The two were fighting about computers
acting humanlike, since Miriam felt unnerved by computers becoming too
advanced. Saul disagreed, and it spiraled into a full-on argument that separated
the couple after Miriam threw a copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics at
Saul and through a window. Saul then “slugged” Miriam, beating her over their
scientific debate and ending their marriage.
Meanwhile, the party is continuing to descend into deeper chaos. Someone alerts
Mulligan, but Mulligan’s efforts are not substantial enough to calm and control the
disorder that has taken over his apartment, as more guests arrive, people bring
more alcohol, and drunken, foolish acts continue.

This imagery of a broken window pops up again, but this time, it is present in
Callisto and Aubade’s hothouse. When the sick bird passes away after all of
Callisto’s attempts to transfer heat and warmth to it, Aubade finally interprets the
situation and punches out a window. Punching the window allows the cold
February air, still at 37 degrees Fahrenheit, to enter the heated ecosystem they’ve
created, ultimately achieving equilibrium.

1. Two different apartments create the setting of the story, each

representing one of the two already mentioned scientific notions of
entropy; that of information theory and
that of thermodynamics.
2. On an example of events that take place at these two apartments,
Pynchon shows as, how certain social and cultural tendencies in the
American society mirror the principles of an entropy..

3. As the story goes on, the reader is able to observe that the party
guests are alienated not only from each other, but also from society by
remaining at the party for a longer period of time, and thus isolating
themselves from the outside world. In this way reaches Mulligan’s
apartment a higher state of entropy.

4. According to information theory, it causes distortion or ‘noise’ in

communication and the content or ‘signal’ of the message becomes
too incoherent to be received and understood by the recipient, which
leads to a break-down in communication.

5. Mulligan’s neighbor, Saul, is mistaken for a burglar when he chooses a

window over a door for his arrival: ‘. The reader finds out that Saul is
not only detached from the outside world, he is also separated from
his wife Miriam because of a lapse in communication regarding
communication theory.

6. The chaos in Meatball Mulligan’s apartment takes a quick turn for the
worse as meaningful communication ceases entirely and the guests
alienate themselves further from each other by moving towards private
spheres of activity that are symptomatic of the escalating
miscommunication, ‘

7. The noise in Meatball’s apartment had reached a sustained, ungodly

crescendo, (96) that not even Mulligan can comfortably ignore
anymore, as he contemplates what to do next,:

8. The party guests’ alienation from society and by extension, from each
other, causes interference or ‘noise’ in their attempts to communicate
with the other people at the party, leading to miscommunication that
discourages them from attempting to communicate at all, which, in
turn, leads to more misunderstanding, confusion, chaos and entropy in
the apartment.

9. So he [Meatball] decided to try and keep his leasebreaking party from

deteriorating into total chaos; he gave wine to the sailors and
separated the morra players; […] he helped the girl in the shower to
dry off and get into bed; he had another talk with Saul; he called a
repairman for the refrigerator, which someone had discovered was on
the blink. (97)
The process of increasing entropy or chaos is automatic and in order
to counter it and create order, additional effort and work is required,
such as in Mulligan’s case, when it takes him the rest of the day to
organize the chaos and disorder in his apartment.

10. The state of Mulligan’s apartment not only exemplifies entropy as

understood by information theory, but also reflects the confusion and
loss of purpose to do anything.

11. On the other hand, Calisto’s apartment is kind of deserted island, the
only place in the building, directly above Mulligan’s place, where the
 entropy decreases. the effects of entropy, as understood in
thermodynamics,

12. . The apartment itself is depicted as a completely isolated artificial

greenhouse: ‘Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in
the city’s chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national
politics, of any civil disorder’ (83-84), 65 It represents a temporary
place of order, amidst the increasing disorder or entropy of the
external world, exemplified by the aforementioned events that
transpire in Mulligan’s apartment directly below.

13. The amount of energy that Callisto has had to exert to create this local
and temporary island to resist the effects of entropy is reflected by the
amount of time it has taken him: ‘this hothouse jungle it had taken him
seven years to weave together’ (83).

14. The amount of time spent is much greater than the amount of energy
Mulligan spent to create a lesser degree of local and temporary order
amongst the guests in his apartment. The temperature in Callisto’s
‘hothouse jungle’ is not revealed, but the temperature outside remains
stagnant, even though the weather is going through extreme changes:

15. , Callisto has removed himself from the disorganized outside world and
isolated himself within a local and temporary island of ecological
balance or order in his apartment, which as the reader is told, neither
he, nor Aubade, ever leaves, Callisto realizes that the scientific
tendency toward greater entropy and heat-death extends beyond
science toeverything in the world around him:

16. A heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no
longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the
same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly,
cease.

17. Despite Callisto’s meticulous attempts to create a local and temporary island of
order or ecological balance in his apartment, the death of the bird he tried to
bring back to health for the past three days by transferring heat indicates, that
even Callisto’s ‘hothouse jungle’ has reached a state of high probability, high
entropy and possibly even heat-death, where the transfer of heat-energy is no
longer possible, Realizing that the apartment has succumbed to the inexorable
effects of entropy and that there is no escape from it, Aubade reconnects the
apartment to the outside world by breaking a window and slowly awaits the
unavoidable heat-death:
until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit
should prevail both outside and inside, and forever,

TONI MORRISON

The Life of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio after
her parents moved to the North to escape the problems of southern
racism. On both sides of her family were migrants and sharecroppers.
She spent her childhood in the Midwest and read avidly, from Jane
Austen to Tolstoy. Morrison's father, George, was a welder, and told
her folktales of the black community, transferring his African-American
heritage to her generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in
Washington, D.C. one of America's most distinguished black college.
Morrison continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York where she received her M.A. in 1955.

During 1955-57 Morrison was an instructor in English at Texas

Southern University, at Houston, and taught in the English department
at Howard. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, in
1958. Together they had two children, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin.
After 6 years of marriage she divorced Harold in 1964. While working
and caring for her children, Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest
Eyes, which appeared in 1970. She continued to write novels and later
Morrison was appointed the position Robert F. Goheen Professor of
the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of
1989, becoming the first black woman ever to hold a chair at an Ivy
League school. Morrison now continues to teach fiction and live in
Princeton, New Jersey.

Awards and Novels

In 1970 Morrison’s literary career began

when The Bluest Eye was published. Set in
Morrison’s hometown, the novel received critical
acclaim but failed to attract the public’s
interest. Sula, Morrison’s second novel, was
published in 1973, and because of her insightful
portrayal of the African-American
lifestyle; Sula was nominated for National Book
Award and received the Ohioana Book Award.
Her next novel, Song of Solomon(1977), was a
paper back best seller. Its homage to the richness of the black cultural
heritage helped Morrison win two more awards: National Book Critics
Circle Award and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
Award. Later, in 1987 Morrison published Beloved. The novel
illustrated the horrifying lives of slaves and how one ex-slave’s past
haunts her. The novel received international success and was honored
with the Pulitzer Prize. Beloved also won other awards including New
York State Governor's Arts Award, First recipient of the Washington
College Literary award, National Book Award nomination and National
Book Critics Circle Award nomination.

In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature as an author "who
in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life
to an essential aspect of American reality". She became the eighth
woman and the first African-American to win the prize. After hearing
the news from a colleague at Princeton University she was happy and
honored by her achievement. She further explained, “What is most
wonderful for me, personally, is to know that the Prize at last has been
awarded to an African-American. Winning as an American is very
special-but winning as a Black American is a knockout.” After receiving
the highest honor in literature, Morrison continued her success and
reentered the best sellers list with the publication of Paradise and later
wrote with her son The Big Box.

Morrison's Writing Style

Morrison's writings concentrate on rural Afro-

American communities and on their cultural
inheritance, which she explores with cold-blooded
detail and vivid vocabulary. Her intricate writing
style does not just tell the reader about issues
concerning African-Americans instead she shows
them. In Beloved, set in Ohio and a plantation in
Kentucky, Morrison shows slavery through
flashbacks and stories told by characters. Her word
choices give the reader the sense on how slave
masters viewed their slaves as savage animals. Her work is described
as breath taking, leaving Beloved more then a story; it is a history, and
it is a life of its own.

Also growing up in Ohio gives Morrison a distinction as writer. Morrison

places the setting in some of her novels there. Morrison explained “I
am from the Midwest so I have a special affection for it. My beginnings
are always there (Ohio) ... No matter what I write, I begin there ... Ohio
also offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither
plantation nor ghetto."

“Vivid dialogue, capturing the drama and extravagance of black

speech, gives way to an impressionistic evocation of physical pain or
an ironic, essay-like analysis of the varieties of religious hypocrisy" --
Margo Jefferson (Newsweek).
“Toni Morrison is an important novelist who continues to develop her
talent. Part of her appeal, of course, lies in her extraordinary ability to
create beautiful language and striking characters. However, Morrison's
most important gift, the one which gives her a major author's
universality, is the insight with which she writes of problems all humans
face.... At the core of all her novels is a penetrating view of the
unyielding, heartbreaking dilemmas which torment people of all races"
-- Elizabeth B. House (Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook).

“(Morrison) works her magic charm above all with a love of language.
Her ... style carries you like a river, sweeping doubt and disbelief away,
and it is only gradually that one realizes her deadly serious intent" --
Susan Lydon (Village Voice).

Morrison and Race

Through out Morrison’s novel she does not use

whites for main characters. Often she is criticize for
this. She explains her choice of characters by“ I
look very hard for black fiction because I want to
participate in developing a canon of black work.
We've had the first rush of black entertainment,
where blacks were writing for whites, and whites
were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now
we can get down to the craft of writing, where black
people are talking to black people." Furthermore,
she stated “the Black narrative has always been
understood to be a confrontation with some White people. I’m sure
there are many of them. They’re not terribly interesting to me. What is
interesting to me is what is going on within the community. And within
the community, there are no major White players. Once I thought,
‘What is life like if they weren’t there?’ Which is they way I- we lived it,
the way I lived it.”

Morrison’s upbringing has additionally contributed to her character

choice, themes in her novel and how she views white people. Her
father was the main contributor towards her outlook on whites.
Morrison has described her father’s racist attitude towards whites and
events in her childhood in interviews. When she was two years old her
family’s home was set on fire while they were in it. “People set our
house on fire to evict us…” said Morrison. Her father became even
more upset with whites after the incident. “He simply felt that he was
better and superior to all white people” explained Morrison. When she
was asked if she felt the same way that her father felt she responded
“No, I don’t feel quite the same way as he did. With very few
exceptions, I feel that White people will betray me: that in the final
analysis, they’ll give me up.”

Toni Morrison, the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature, was
born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, U.S.A.
She was the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder and
Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape
racism and to find better opportunities in the North. Her father was a
hardworking and dignified man. While the children were growing up, he
worked three jobs at the same time for almost 17 years. He took a great deal
of pride in the quality of his work, so that each time he welded a perfect seam
he'd also weld his name onto the side of the ship. He also made sure to be
well-dressed, even during the Depression. Her mother was a church-going
woman and she sang in the choir. At home, Chloe heard many songs and tales
of Southern black folklore. The Woffords were proud of their heritage.

Lorain was a small industrial town populated with immigrant Europeans,

Mexicans and Southern blacks who lived next to each other. Chloe attended
an integrated school. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her
class and the only one who could read. She was friends with many of her
white schoolmates and did not encounter discrimination until she started
dating. She hoped one day to become a dancer like her favorite ballerina,
Maria Tallchief, and she also loved to read. Her early favorites were the
Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert and
English novelist Jane Austen. She was an excellent student and she graduated
with honors from Lorain High School in 1949.

Chloe Wofford then attended the prestigious Howard University in

Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics.
Since many people couldn't pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it
to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory
company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours
of the South. She saw firsthand the life of the blacks there, the life her parents
had escaped by moving north. Toni Wofford graduated from Howard
University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955.

After graduating, Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in

Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University,
where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they
"always had Negro history week" and introduced to her the idea of black
culture as a discipline rather than just personal family reminiscences. In 1957
she returned to Howard University as a member of faculty. This was a time of
civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the
struggle. She met the poet Amiri Baraka (at that time called LeRoi Jones) and
Andrew Young (who later worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, and later still,
became a mayor of Atlanta, Georgia). One of her students was Stokely
Carmichael, who then became a leader of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Another of her students, Claude Brown,
wrote Manchild in the Promised Land which was published in 1965 and
became a classic of African-American literature.

At Howard she met and fell in love with a young Jamaican architect, Harold
Morrison. They married in 1958 and their first son, Harold Ford, was born in
1961. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also
joined a small writer's group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married
life. She needed company of other people who appreciated literature as much
as she did. Each member was required to bring a story or poem for discussion.
One week, having nothing to bring, she quickly wrote a story loosely based on
a girl she knew in childhood who had prayed to God for blue eyes. The story
was well-received by the group and then Toni put it away thinking she was
done with it. Her marriage deteriorated, and while pregnant with their second
child she left her husband, left her job at the university, and took her son on a
trip to Europe. Later, she divorced her husband and returned to her parents'
house in Lorain with her two sons.

In the fall of 1964 Morrison obtained a job with a textbook subsidiary of

Random House in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. Her hope was to
be transferred soon to New York City. While working all day, her sons were
taken care of by the housekeeper and in the evening Morrison cooked dinner
and played with the boys until their bedtime. When her sons were asleep, she
started writing. She dusted off the story she had written for the writer's group
and decided to make it into a novel. She drew on her memories from
childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters
developed a life of their own. She found writing exciting and challenging.
Other than parenting, she found everything else boring by comparison.

In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at
Random House. While editing books by prominent black Americans like
Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young and Angela Davis, she was busy sending her
own novel to various publishers. The Bluest Eye was eventually published in
1970 to much critical acclaim, although it was not commercially successful.
From 1971-1972 Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State
University of New York at Purchase while she continued working at Random
House. In addition, she soon started writing her second novel where she
focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula was published
in 1973. It became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for
the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.

From 1976-1977, she was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven,
Connecticut. She was also writing her third novel. This time she focused on
strong black male characters. Her insight into male world came from watching
her sons. Song of Solomon was published in 1977. It won the National Book
Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the
National Council on the Arts. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar
Baby, where for the first time she describes interaction between black and
white characters. Her picture appeared on the cover of the March 30, 1981
issue of the Newsweek magazine.

In 1983, Morrison left her position at Random House, having worked there for
almost twenty years. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor
of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany. While living
in Albany, she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based
on the true story of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by racist whites in
1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The play premiered
January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theater in Albany. Morrison's next
novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret
Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in
Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children
rather than return them to life of slavery. Only one of her children died and
Margaret was imprisoned for her deed. She refused to show remorse, saying
she was "unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done." Beloved was
published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer prize for
fiction.

In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the
Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black
woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. While
accepting, Morrison said, "I take teaching as seriously as I do my writing."
She taught creative writing and also took part in the African-American studies,
American studies and women's studies programs. She also started her next
novel, Jazz, about life in the 1920's. The book was published in 1992. In 1993,
Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth
woman and the first black woman to do so

“Recitatif” is a story about two girls who meet at an orphanage. We know that one is black
and the other white, but the author does not tell us who is who. The story covers several
years. Along the story, they meet several times, but they end up taking different sides at a
protest in the context of racial integration at schools.
Morrison has described the story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from
a narrative about two characters of different races for whom identity is crucial”. What does
she mean by that?

• What do we know about the characters?

• What details does the author give us about the race and background of each of the girls?

• What do the characters’ attitude towards food throughout the story tell us about them?

• Discuss the role of ambiguity in the story.

Immediately, Twyla establishes a parallel between her mother’s dancing and Roberta’s
mother’s illness, both of which are ailments that prevent them from fulfilling their role as
parents. Their children, meanwhile, are resilient, finding opportunities for play despite
the odds.

Morrison challenges conventional understandings of race and racism by presenting Mary and
Twyla’s racism in a nonspecific way. The reader cannot be sure if they are prejudiced toward white
people or black people, a fact that points to the arbitrary social construction of race and racism in
the first place. This in turn forces the reader to confront their own assumptions and prejudices
about race. Although Roberta cannot read and thus is obstructed from understanding
much of the world around her, she has a particular talent for understanding Twyla. The
girls’ connection is fused through their exclusion by the rest of the children at the
shelter, which is representative of the broader exclusion the children at St. Bonny’s face
as poor, parentless, and vulnerable figures in a world filled with “normal” families. The
children at St. Bonny’s act tough, but Morrison continuously drops reminders of the
neglect and abuse they have suffered in their homes. While Twyla has some
understanding of the fact that the older girls are also vulnerable, she cannot afford to
seem as such because they are cruel to her. Throughout the story, vulnerable people
often take out their anger and fear on those who are weaker than them. Twyla’s
statement that she dreamed about the orchard establishes it as an important symbol in
the story, even if Twyla herself is not consciously aware of its significance yet. The
orchard’s meaning is steadily revealed as it troubles her conscience in later passages. In
some ways, Maggie’s disabilities seem to be reflections of the issues facing those
around her. Like the children at St. Bonny’s who do not have any power or agency within
their own lives, Maggie cannot communicate, and thus ends up a passive presence who
cannot fight the horrible things done to her. Similarly, the way she walks connects her to
Mary’s dancing, which Twyla then subconsciously turns into a “disease” by comparing it
to Roberta’s mother’s illness. As with the two main characters, Maggie’s race is left
ambiguous, described only as “sandy-colored. Like Maggie and Mary, Roberta’s mother
carries her “abnormality” within her very physical presence. Everything about her is
larger-than-life, making her seem like a somewhat mythical, unreal figure. At the same
time, we never learn her name or hear a single word she says; her personality, along
with her illness, remain a mystery throughout the story. The only thing that is clear is
that she is the opposite of Mary. Once again, Roberta has undergone a total transformation.
Her clothes and groceries indicate that she is now wealthy, but still do not determine her race.
Note that while the women now live in the same town, they are divided by economic (and likely
also racial) segregation. While as children they were equals in their exclusion, there is now a
distinct divide between Twyla and Roberta. The juxtaposition of Roberta’s statement that she
now has servants and the discussion about Maggie suggests that Roberta may feel a
greater sense of guilt because of her current privileged position in society. Unlike Twyla,
Roberta is less forgiving of the gar girls, and instead is horrified by the fact that they
chose to push and kick Maggie, who is totally vulnerable because of her disabilities. Also
note that even though Roberta is finally literate, she shows off her ability in a childish
manne, Once again, Morrison manages to depict racial tension between the two women
without actually revealing which of them is white and which is black. In doing so, she
shows how both black people and white people can be dissuaded from interacting with
others of a different race on account of broader tensions around them. Twyla’s
contrasting opinion—that the 1960s were a time of racial mixing and (relative) harmony,
at least among young people—shows that the ability to perceive racial tensions often
depends on one’s particular position in society.