Good afternoon, everyone, and
welcome to the 2012 Ingersoll lecture on immortality. I feel exceptionally fortunate
to have my life at Harvard punctuated by opportunities
to listen to and learn from today's
distinguished lecturer. Shortly after I arrived
at Harvard in 2001, Toni Morrison delivered the
fifth Radcliffe Institute Inaugural Lecture here
in Sanders Theatre with the audience rising
to applaud her before she had uttered a single word. In 2007, she received
the Radcliffe Medal on the very last days,
during the very last days of my deanship. And four months later,
she gave a reading on the eve of my
inauguration as president. She said to me
earlier this afternoon that I'm one of four women
presidents she adopted. So I feel very grateful. Every-- [APPLAUSE] I told her she was
responsible for everything that had happened since. Half a decade later,
it is such a joy to welcome Toni Morrison
back to Harvard. She has spoken of
artists whose voices are, and I quote her,
powerfully different, profoundly different. And we recognize that
she is in their company. She has bent our heads
with her writings, demanding our
undivided attention and rewarding our effort
at the intersection, and I quote her, where the
historical becomes people with names. Today she is here to
contribute once again to one of Harvard's great
intellectual traditions made even greater this year
through the drawing together of students, faculty, and staff
from across the university, and alumni and friends
from the broader community. Over the course of the semester,
faculty from the Divinity School and the faculty
of Arts and Sciences have led lectures and
workshops centered on the religious dimensions
of Toni Morrison's writings. This event is in many
ways the culmination of those conversations. I thank professors David
Carrasco and Stephanie Paulsell for establishing and
leading the series. And I thank all of you who took
the time to participate in it. And of course, I extend
my deepest appreciation to Dean David Hempton for
supporting initiatives to create these types
of learning and teaching communities. Religion shapes
individuals and societies. Its study, whether prompted
by scholarly interests or by the life of
practice, is essential, as is the Harvard
Divinity School. Welcome once again
to the 2012 Ingersoll Lecture on immortality. And now please join me in
welcoming Dean David Hempton. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, President
Faust, for your warm words of welcome, for your
wonderful leadership at Harvard, and for choosing
to be here with us tonight. Each year at the beginning
of the Ingersoll Lecture, it's been our custom to
explain the Ingersoll Endowment and to find thank our generous
benefactor, Miss Caroline Haskell Ingersoll. Tonight, however,
in order to provide as much time as possible
for the lecture itself, we've printed the information
about the Ingersoll Lecture Fund and the program. So I encourage you to
read it and to reflect that while the Ingersoll
Endowment does not in itself guarantee
immortality, [LAUGHTER] it has lasted for over a
century, which at least is a move in the right direction. So if immortality
is on your mind, a Harvard Endowment seems
to be the way to go. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
Just saying. [LAUGHTER] Tonight's
distinguished speaker, Nobel Laureate, Pulitzer
Prize winning writer, Toni Morrison is
the 85th speaker in a long line of
internationally renowned scholars and writers
who have come to Harvard to give the Ingersoll Lecture. The list includes William
James as the second presenter in 1897, Josiah Royce in
1899, Howard Thurman in 1947, Paul Tillich, 1962,
Caroline Walker Bynum, 1989, Karen Armstrong, 2005, and Toni
Morrison's Princeton colleague, Al Raboteau in 2010. So tonight we have the
pleasure of hearing another brilliant
scholar and writer reflect on the theme
of immortality, which, let's be honest, is
not a topic much discussed at Harvard. Toni Morrison has chosen as
her title, "Goodness, Altruism, and the Literary Imagination." It's now my pleasure to call
on my good friend and colleague in the Faculty of Divinity,
Professor David Carrasco, to introduce this
evening's speaker. David, who is himself a
wonderfully imaginative scholar and writer, is a Neil
L Rudenstine Professor of the study of Latin America
with a joint appointment in the Department
of Anthropology and the faculty of
Arts and Sciences. I have to say that without
David's advocacy, initiative, and persuasive
powers, we would not be gathered here this evening. In addition, it
was David's idea, along with my colleague,
Stephanie Paulsell, to turn our annual
Ingersoll Lecture into a semester long
set of workshops culminating in tonight's event. And we had one at
lunchtime today, which was really wonderful. That was a genius
idea and has resulted in one of the most
intellectually stimulating and deeply
humane set of discussions I have had the
privilege of attending at any university anywhere. So tonight then is a culmination
of something very special in the life of Harvard. Before I hand over to
Professor Carrasco, just please allow me
a brief but sincere thank you to everyone at
Harvard Divinity School, to FAS, as well as
here in Memorial Hall, that contributed their time
and work to making this event come true. Now without further ado, I
call on Professor Carrasco to come forward and introduce
his former Princeton colleague, his sometime travel
companion, longtime friend, and our distinguished
speaker, Toni Morrison. David. [APPLAUSE] The final words in Toni
Morrison's Nobel Prize acceptance speech were spoken by
the old woman, blind but wise, to the young people who
have come to challenge her powers of clairvoyance. Toni writes, finally, she
says, I trust you now. I trust you with a bird
that is not in your hands because you have
truly caught it. Look how lovely it is, this
thing we have done together. We learn in this speech
that for Morrison, the bird that is not in our
hands signifies language. Professor Morrison's
range of language usage came clearer to me one afternoon
at Princeton University when we were talking about
the religious dimensions of her novels. I told her I had
identified two ways that sacrality shaped her writings. First, Christian
imagery and meanings appeared in the
Sermons of Paradise, the apocalypse of Sula, and
names like 1 Corinthians, Shadrack, and Celestial. She nodded in interest. Secondly, I spoke
to her of the ways African myths, wisdom, and
magical flight appeared in the Song of Solomon. And the entanglements
of African roots shaped the characters
in her novel, Tar Baby. Toni countered, that's fine. But you've left out
the third dimension. What is that, I
asked with wide eyes? Oh, she said, you've left
out all this strange stuff. [LAUGHTER] Throughout the fall at
the Harvard University, OUR working group entitled Have
Mercy, Religious Dimensions in the Writings
of Toni Morrison, has explored these and
other religious dimensions of her writings. And we've learned
of the multiple ways she writes, and teaches,
and has revitalized areas of American literature, and
how she reveals our own ways of being human and inhuman. We learned that she spent
many years of her life among students and colleagues
on college campuses, at Texas Southern, Howard
University, Albany, Yale, and Princeton, where she is
still the Robert F Goheen Professor of
Humanities Emeritus. We learned that the power
and appeal of her writings resulted in the
National Book Critics Award for Song of
Solomon, the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, and in 1993,
the Nobel Prize in literature for all of it. But do you know that
she's also written plays, one called Dreaming Emmett
about Emmett Till, a black youth from Chicago who was
brutally beaten and shot to death 30 years ago during
a visit to Mississippi, apparently because he
whistled at a white woman. And she wrote another
play called Desdemona, an interactive
narrative of words, music, and song about
Shakespeare's heroine, who speaks to the audience from
the grave about the traumas of race, class, gender, and war,
and the transformative power of love. She wrote a libretto for an
opera called Margaret Garner. Students, go look up the
name Margaret Garner, but not this minute. [LAUGHER] She co-edited books
for children with her son, Slade Morrison, two
of which are called The Book of Mean People
and Peeny Butter Fudge. We learned that she was awarded
the Legion of Honor in France. And she's recently been
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I like that last word for
her and for us, freedom. When we learned that this
immortal writer was coming to Harvard to talk
about immortality, we began to pay more attention
to the unspeakable things spoken in her writings, and then
the lives of her characters. You know them. Pecola Breedlove, Baby Suggs,
Milkman, Shadrack, and Paul D, Pilate, and Hagar challenged
us, puzzled us, criticized us. And we felt that
Morrison's language helped us hold together
those pieces of our lives that are the hardest
to hold onto. We discovered that
Cornel West was correct when he celebrated
her Nobel Prize by claiming that she had, quote,
shattered black invisibility. We learned in our dialogues
about Beloved and Home that she has unmasked
the lethal lie of the myth of American
innocence, its tenacity and its damage. She showed us that
for the politics of storytelling to be
deep and sustaining, it had to touch the sacred
in African American life, or better, the
sacred and profane of being black in America and
the miracle of black thrivings. The critic John Leonard
said it this way. Out of the gospel of the Middle
Passage, the blues of slavery, the jazz of big city
ghetto nights, mother wit, and children's riddle, she had
made radiant world literature. We marveled how she
maintained the flights of her birds of language. And we felt motivated when we
found this earlier reference to the theme of life, death,
and perhaps immortality. Toni writes, we die, she said. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the
measure of our lives. So I say, students take
heed not only of her novels, but all her writings, including
her literary criticism in a book called Playing
in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,
for on this darkening eve in the year 2012
with strange stuff all around us, she has come
to be together with us here at Harvard, entre
nosotros, to speak on the topic of
goodness, altruism, and the literary imagination. Please welcome Toni Morrison. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. On an October morning
in 2006, a young man backed his truck into the
driveway of a little one room schoolhouse. He walked into the school. And after ordering the
boy students, the teacher, and a few other
adults to leave, he lined up 10 girls along the
blackboard, ages nine to 13. And he shot them. And the really mindless
horror of that attack drew intense and sustained
press, as well as, later on, books and even film. Although there had been
two other school shootings only a few days before, what
made this massacre especially notable was the fact
that its landscape was an Amish community,
notoriously peaceful, and therefore the most unlikely
venue for such violence. Before the narrative
tracking the slaughter had even been
exhausted in the press, another rail,
surfaced, one that was regarded as bizarre
and somehow shocking as the killings themselves. The Amish community
forgave the killer, refused to seek justice,
demand vengeance, or even to judge him. They visited and comforted the
killer's widow, the killer's of children, who were not
Amish, just as they embraced the relatives of the slain. And there were a
number of explanations for their behavior, their
are historical aversion to killing anyone at
all for any reason, and their separatist
convictions. But more to the point
for me, the community had nothing to say, or very
little, to outside inquiries. They said it was God's
place to judge, not theirs. And as one grandfather cautioned
to some of the younger people, do not think evil of this man. They held no press
conferences or submitted to television interviews. They quietly buried their dead,
attended the killer's funeral, tore down the old schoolhouse,
and built a new one. Their silence following
that slaughter, along with their very
deep and sincere concern for the killer's
family, seemed to me at the time characteristic
of genuine goodness. And so I became fascinated
even then with the term and its definition. Now there are thinkers, of
whom none is as uninformed and I am who have long analyzed
what constitutes goodness. What good is good, and what
its origins are or may be. The myriad of these theories
that I read overwhelmed me. And sort of to
reduce my confusion, I thought I should just
research the term altruism. But again, I quickly found
myself on a frustrating journey into a plethora of definitions
and counter definitions. I began by thinking of
altruism as more or less faithful rendition
of its root, alter other, selfless compassion
for the other, the stranger. But that root was
not just narrow, it also led to a swamp
of interpretations, contrary analyses and doubt. Now a few of the major
theories or arguments posited about altruism are three. One, altruism is not
an instinctive act of selflessness. There's nothing
about instinct in it. It's taught. And it's learned. Another or second view was
that altruism might actually be simply narcissism,
ego enhancement, even a mental disorder made
manifest in a desperate desire to think well of oneself,
to erase or diminish what may fundamentally
be self loathing. But some of the most
thought provoking theories came from scholarship that was
investigating the DNA, if you will, scientists
seeking evidence of an embedded gene
automatically firing to enable the
sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of others. It was a kind of
brother or sister to Darwin's survival
of the fittest. Examples of confirmation
or contradiction to the Darwinian
theories came primarily, as you might imagine, from the
animal and insect kingdoms, you know squirrels
deliberately attracting with their squeaks
attention to themselves by the predators in
order to warn the others. Birds as well, and
especially ants, as you know, bees, bats, all
in service to the colony, the collective, the swarm. And such behavior we see
replicated among humans. But the question
being put seemed to be whether such sacrifice
for kin, one's own relatives, or for the community
at large, is innate, built, as it were,
into our genes, just as individual
conquests of others is held to be a natural
instinctive drive that serves evolution. Is there a good gene
along with a selfish gene? The further question
for me at least was an unspoken inquiry
about the competition between the gene and the mind. And I have to confess I
was unable to understand a great deal of that
scholarship on altruism. But I did learn something
about its weight, its urgency, its relevance, and
its irrelevance in contemporary thought. Keeping those Amish
in mind, I wondered why the narrative of that
event, the press, visual media, quickly ignored the killer
and the slaughtered children and begin to focus
almost exclusively on the shock of forgiveness. As I noted earlier, mass
shootings at schools were perhaps too ordinary. There had been two elsewhere
during just a few days before. But the Amish
community's unwillingness to clamor for justice, or
vengeance, or retribution, or even to judge the killer
was the compelling story. The shock was that the
parents of the dead children took pains to comfort
the killer's widow, her family, her children,
to raise funds for them, for the widow and
her children, not for themselves, of the
victimized community's response to that even classic, I
suppose, example of evil. In addition to their
refusal to fix blame, the most extraordinary
element was their silence. It was that silence to refuse
to be lionized, televised, that caused me to begin to think
a little bit differently about goodness as it
applies to the work I do. Of course, thinking
about goodness implies, indeed requires,
a view of its opposite. Now I have to tell you, I've
never been interested in or impressed by evil itself. But I have been confounded by
how attractive it is to others. I am stunned by
the attention given to its every whisper,
its every shout, which is not to deny its
existence and ravage, nor to suggest evil does
not demand confrontation, but simply to wonder why it
is so worshipped, especially in literature. Is it its theatricality, its
costume, its blood spray, the emotional satisfaction that
comes with its investigation more than with its collapse? You know, the ultimate
detective story, the paradigm murder mystery. Perhaps it's how it
dances and the music it inspires, its clothing, its
nakedness, its sexual disguise, its passionate howl,
and its danger. The formula in which evil reigns
is, of course, bad versus good. But the deck is stacked,
because goodness in contemporary literature seems always to
be equated with weakness, as pitiful, sort of like a
little girl running frightened and helpless through the woods
while the pursuing villain gets more of our attention
than her saviour. Evil has a blockbuster audience. Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has vivid speech. And goodness bites its tongue. Who is it? It's Billy Budd who stutters. It's Coetzee's Michael
K with a harelip that's so limits his speech,
communication with him is virtually impossible. It's Melville's Bartleby,
confining language to repetition. It's Faulkner's Benjy, an idiot. Rather than rummage through
the exquisite and persuasive language of religions,
all of which implore believers to rank goodness
as the highest and holiest of human achievement,
and many of which identify their saints and
icons of worship as examples many times of pure altruism. I decided not to focus on
the religious language, but on the role goodness
plays in literature, in fiction, to use
that as a kind of test. In the 19th century,
novels, regardless of whatever acts of
wickedness or cruelty, or indifference
controlled the plot. The ending was almost
always a triumph of goodness, of reconciliation,
in Dickens, in Austin, in Hardy. And those readers let
their-- those writers left their readers with a sense
of the restoration of order and the triumph of virtue. Even Dostoevsky
remembers Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment. The world's most evil
man becomes exhausted by his own evil and the language
that supports it, and then turns to doing good deeds
and becomes so bored with the terminal
acts of charity that he commits suicide. He can't live with
the language of evil, nor within the
silence of good deeds. There are famous, of
course, exceptions to what could be called this
19th century formula which is invested in identifying
clearly who or what is good. Obviously Don Quixote and
Candide, both of which mock that search
for pure goodness. And other exceptions
to that formula are still puzzled in
the literary world. The criticism about Billy
Budd by Melville, and even Moby Dick, both of which
support multiple interpretations regarding the rank,
the power, the meaning thank goodness is even
given in these texts. The consequence of Billy
Budd's innocence is execution. Is Ishmael good? Is Ahab a template for goodness,
fighting evil to the death? Or is he a wounded,
vengeful force outfoxed by indifferent nature,
which is neither good nor bad? Innocence represented by Pip
is soon abandoned and swallowed by the sea without a murmur. Generally, however, in
19th century literature, whatever the forces of malice
the protagonist is faced with, redemption and the triumph of
virtue was his or her reward. Now 20th century novelists
were unimpressed. [LAUGHTER] The movement
away from happy endings or the enshrining
of good over evil was very rapid, very stark,
particularly after World War I. That catastrophe
was too wide, too deep to ignore or to distort
with a simplistic gesture of goodness. Many early modern novelists,
especially Americans, concentrated on the
irredeemable consequences of war, the harm it
did to its warriors, to society, to
human sensibility. In those texts, acts
of sheer goodness, if not outright comical, are
treated with irony at best. Or they're sort of covered
with suspicion or fruitlessness at worst. I think of Faulkner's A
Fable and the mixed reviews it received, most of which
were highly disdainful of the deliberate armistice
in the center of that book between soldiers
and trench warfare, the Germans on one side,
the Americans on the other. And the armistice is provoked
by a Christ like figure. The term hero is sort
of limited these days to the sacrificing
dead, first responders running into fiery buildings,
mates throwing themselves on grenades to save
the lives of others, rescuing the
drowning, the wounded. Clearly Faulkner's
character in the fable would never be seen
or praised as a hero. Evil grabs the intellectual
platform and all of its energy. It demands careful examinations
of its consequences, its techniques, its motives,
its successes, however short lived or temporary. Grief, melancholy,
missed chances, or personal happiness often seem
to be contemporary literature's concept of evil. It hogs the stage. Goodness sits in the
audience and watches, assuming it even has
a ticket to the show. One of the most
compelling, for me, examples of this obsession with
evil is Umberto Eco's-- I was calling it The Prague Graveyard. It's not. It's-- what did we say? I misquoted the
title [CLEARS THROAT] then looked it up. Now I don't remember it. But anyway, Umberto Eco,
Prague, death, destruction, consequences. It's really brilliant,
but oh, my god. It ends up with a man who faked
the Jewish, pro Nazi protocols of Zion. The character in Umberto
Eco's book writes them. And when you read them, I swear
to you, you feel very stained. I mean, you know it's fake,
but you nevertheless-- it's so awful, you like
you've touched something really, really bad. In any case, that's an
example that was very, very, I don't know,
deeply, deeply disturbing to me because
of its fascination with the nature of evil. And the disturbance
I felt was precisely because it treated as
thrilling intelligence and was scornful of the
monotony and the stupidity of good intentions. Contemporary literature is
not interested in goodness on a large or even
limited scale. When it appears, it's always has
a note of apology in its hand. And it has trouble
speaking its name. For every To Kill a Mockingbird,
there is Wise Blood, or A Good Man is Hard to
Find, striking goodness down with a well honed literary act. Many of late 20th century
and early 20th century heavyweights, Philip Roth,
Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and so on, and many
others, are masters at exposing the frailty,
the pointlessness, and the comedy of goodness. Well, I thought it be
interesting to you, certainly to me, and probably informative
to examine this thesis I've been struggling
through on the life and/or the death of
goodness in literature by using my own work. I wanted to measure and
clarify my own understanding by employing the definitions
I gave you earlier of altruism and my work. And I chose to look at three
versions, goodness taught and learned, you know, habit
of helping strangers, or taking risks for them. Two, goodness as a
form of narcissism, ego enhancement, or
even a mental disorder. Goodness as instinct,
a result of genetics, protecting kin or one's group. As an example of one, this
habit of learned goodness, I think learned. Anyway, in Mercy,
there is a priest who at some danger to
himself teaches female slaves to read and write. Now in case this
is misunderstood as simple kindness,
here is an exam of punishments levied on white
people who risked promoting literacy among black people. Quote, "Any white
person assembling with slaves or free
Negroes for purpose of instructing them
to read or write, or associating with them
in any unlawful assembly shall be confined in jail
not exceeding six months and fined not exceeding $100." And some of them, of
course, were simply lashed. But that text was in
criminal law as late as 1848. The priest doesn't speak. He simply takes what
he has been taught, or learned, or possibly simply
feels and feels obliged to do, hides in the marshes, and
spends time, time, time teaching the mother and the
children slaves to read. An example of three, this sort
of instinctive kin protection is the most common and
representative of goodness. And there were
several areas in which I do not-- they have no
articulation in my own work. In Sula, the mother
sticks her leg under a train to get
the insurance money. And she says sets her
son fire to spare him and others I suppose, the
sight of his self destruction. Now this is the same mother who
throws herself out of a window to save her daughter from fire. These acts seem to me far too
theatrical and are accompanied by no compelling language. On the other hand, there is
a giving away of one's child to a stranger in
order to save her from certain
molestation and a mercy. The motive that impels
Florens' mother, [INAUDIBLE], seems to me quite
close to altruism, and most importantly, is
given language, which I hoped would be a profound and
little definition of freedom. And she says, "To be given
dominion, given dominion, over another is a hard thing. To wrest or take dominion
over another is a wrong thing. To give dominion of yourself
to another is an evil thing." Another example of three,
unquestioning compassion and support not just
of kin but of members of the group in
general, the collective. In Home, for example,
women provide unsolicited but
necessary nursing care to a member of
the collective who has spent a lifetime
despising them, their reason being their
responsibility to God. They did not want
to meet their maker and have nothing to say when
he asked, what have you done? A further instance of
innate group compassion is the healing of Cee, the
girl, in A Mercy-- excuse me, Home-- physically
as well as mentally. It was important to me to
give that compassion voice. "Look to yourself,"
Miss Ethel tells her. "You free. Nothing and nobody is
obliged to save you but you. You young and a woman. And there's serious
limitation in both. But you a person, too. Somewhere inside you
is that free person. Locate her and let her do
some good in the world." An example two, goodness as a
form of narcissism and perhaps mental disorder, really
occurs in the very first book I wrote, in The Bluest Eye. Determined to erase
his self loathing, Soaphead Church, a
character in The Bluest Eye, chooses to give or pretend to
give blue eyes to a little girl in psychotic need of them. In his letter to God, speaking
of speech, a long, long letter to God, he imagined
himself doing the good that God has refused,
and misunderstood and diabolic as his
motives, because he is part of that group of
narcissists, I suppose. Nevertheless, there is language. Over time, really
these last 40 years, I've become more
and more invested in making sure acts of goodness,
however casual, or deliberate, or misapplied, or like
the Amish community, blessed, produce language. But even when not articulated,
like the teaching priest in A Mercy, such acts must have
a strong impact on the novel's structure and on its meaning. Expressions of goodness are
never trivial in my work and never incidental
in my writing. In fact, I want them to have
life changing properties, and to illuminate decisively
the moral questions embedded in the narrative. It was important to me that
none of these expressions of goodness be handled
as comedy or irony. And they are seldom mute. Allowing goodness its own
speech does not annihilate evil. But it does allow me to
signify my own understanding of goodness, the acquisition
of self knowledge. A satisfactory or
granding for me is when the protagonist
learns something vital, and morally insightful,
and mature that she or he did not know at the beginning. Claudia's words at the
end of The Bluest Eye, "I even think now that the
land of the entire country was hostile to
marigolds that year. This soil is bad for
certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds, it
will not nurture. Certain fruit, it will not bear. And when the land kills
of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the
victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course. But it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of
my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers
of my town, it is marching, marching,
marching too late." Such insight has nothing to
do with winning and everything to do with the acquisition
of knowledge, knowledge on display in the language of
moral clarity, of goodness. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
