Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison Picador $85 TONI Morrison's novels about the black experience in America won her this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Her award follows a trend set by the award committee over the past few decades of honouring those writers who champion and defend the victims of oppression. The prize has gone to dissident writers from Soviet Russia and its satellites, and to Latin American writers living under tyrannical right-wing regimes.
In this sense, the motherlands of Nobel Prize-winners might justifiably feel that the award to one of its citizens is an implicit condemnation of the nation's political system or cultural imperatives. Morrison's Playing in the Dark falls into this category.
This is not a novel but a series of three lectures delivered at Harvard. The slim volume, only 91 pages, however, presents one of the sternest challenges to the literary community and to general readers that I have read in many years.
During an era when criticism has been more interested in theory than in literature, Morrison's book opens the path to a new field of investigation, one which requires a careful consideration of literature, history, and race.
She attacks the notion that literature and criticism can be ''race-free'', that liberal critics, politically correct critics, open-minded readers can consider characters and themes as if race made no difference.
Race, she argues, makes all the difference even when authors and readers wish to agree that racism is evil, that our underlying humanity is always more important than our ethnic identity.
