Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy

In this episode of Private Life, the writer and New York Review contributor Namwali Serpell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss her new book, On Morrison, a collection of essays about Toni Morrison and her work. Their conversation covers Morrison’s life as a literary eminence and public intellectual, but the focus is Serpell’s close-readings of her most famous novels—including Jazz (1992), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved(1987), and Tar Baby (1981)—as well as her poetry, criticism, and later books. Earnest also asks Serpell about her essay “The Banality of Empathy,” about the concept of narrative empathy, which was published in the Review’s March 2, 2019, issue.  

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. In addition to On Morrison, she is the author of the novels The Old Drift (2019) and The Furrows (2022) and the essay collection Stranger Faces (2020). She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 2017, when she wrote “Kenya in Another Tongue,” about a new edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1980 novel Devil on a Cross. Serpell is also a sometime film critic for the Review, contributing considerations of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and a bravura essay about Émile Zola and the movie Zola. Her most recent essay, “Toni Plays the Dozens,” adapted from her book, explores humor and the social practice of “signifying” in Song of Solomon.   

Read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

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Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm talking with Namwali Serpell. Serpell is a novelist and essayist who has written for the New York review of books on everything from movies like Black Panther to novels like Nettie Jones's Fishtails. Her provocative analysis of contemporary literary discourse, The Banality of Empathy, was published in the review online in March 2019. She has also written on Toni Morrison, including her essay, Toni Plays the Dozens, about shade and the novel Song of Solomon, which was also published in the February 26th, 2026 issue of The Review. It is also included in her new book, the full-length study titled On Morrison, which is out now. Namwali Serpell. Hi. Thank you for talking with me today.

Namwali Serpell: Thanks so much for having me.

Jarrett Earnest: So in your book, On Morrison, it's grounded in this very close reading of her novels. And it's punctuated both with information about her personal life or life outside of the novels, like a little bit, and also your own experience and some of your own background as a writer and as a reader. And I wanted to know if you could start by talking about the first way that Toni Morrison entered into your consciousness as either an artist or as a figure.

Namwali Serpell: Sure, thank you for the question. I have this situation with this book because it is titled On Morrison, which is in fact a shortening of Lectures On Morrison minus the perhaps too academic sounding word lectures. But it has been read as a biography when Toni Morrison was extremely against biography. And did not want her papers or her life or any details from interviews ever to be compiled into what she called some stupid biography. So she was contracted to write a memoir and then canceled that contract because she said that her life wasn't interesting enough. I think a lot of people would disagree. I think lot of pick up my book thinking it's a biography and there's a kind of attempt to redirect that energy from her life. To her work. One of the reasons I feel justified in doing that is because she was actually born Chloe Wofford and took the name Toni as a baptismal name when she converted to Catholicism at age 12 and Morrison is her married name but she was divorced from her ex-husband by the time she wrote her first novel. So Toni Morrison is a real invention but it is also a kind of name that marks the events of a life. Right, the choices that have been made. She saw Toni Morrison as very distinct from Chloe Wofford. These were two personas for her. And these are bits and pieces of information that I've gathered only from interviews because she never wrote any kind of memoir. Even her little bios for her, like her author blurb on a book, wouldn't have that kind of detail. I came to her as the author of And I found that book on my sister's bookshelf or maybe it was her coffee table. And I was really taken by the cover, which is the old, I think, Putnam version where the titular figure is wearing a high necked white dress and a hat, but you can't really see her face. Morrison talked in an interview with Michael Silverblatt, May he rest in peace, about the fact that... That was such an important aspect of writing that book is that the face would be shadowed, elided, invisible. And so when they made it into a movie, she thought, well, it can never be the book because of that. But I think it's also a really apt symbol for the kind of shadowiness that Morrison had about her own life. So I would say that Morrison as a person or as a figure, as an author, wasn't really. Key point of contact for me. What was the point of contact was the words on the page, which at first completely baffled me. I just had no context for what 124 was spiteful, full of a baby's venom could possibly mean. And how old were you? I must have been in high school. My sister was in college and I didn't read the novel in its entirety until I got to college. So I think I was about 14 years old when I first... Saw this book, opened it, and then closed it again. And it's only when I was taught the novel in a college course, probably two or three years later, that I actually read Morrison.

Jarrett Earnest: And what was it about that encounter with Beloved once you engaged with it as a language experience that has kept you engaged with it for so many years?

Namwali Serpell: I have a proclivity for ambiguity. My first academic book is called Seven Modes of Uncertainty, riffing on William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. And I came into being an English major in college through close reading and through the interpretation of Paradise Lost, in particular, the opening out of multiple meanings in a single word. The sense that the rhyme scheme or the meter of verse could itself contain a whole set of meanings other than what is being expressed by the words semantically. All of that was so revelatory to me and it haunted me in terms of my reading desires. You know, I read Lolita in college and became obsessed with that book. And part of what I was obsessed with was this layered-ness of meaning, and also the inability to kind of pinpoint a single message. I think uncertainty fascinates me because it's so difficult to deal with in real life, and yet I find it so pleasurable in literature. And I think reading Beloved and trying to analyze it, trying to write papers about it, and doing the same with Jazz, her next novel, which I also read in college. It really gave me a way of understanding that ambiguity wasn't just a kind of flourish of modernism to make you seem smart or erudite, that it actually could have an ethos. And that ethos had esthetic affordances, ethical affordances political affordances. I got a lot of that from reading Morrison in relation to history, but also just the experience of reading her work. It's deeply felt, deeply engaging, but it never lands in one particular place. And I find that extremely compelling.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the things that I really love about your book is what you just said is a sort of thesis that recurs in different ways in each chapter.

Jarrett Earnest: And it seems to me like a rescue mission for Morrison right now in the sense that I think at multiple times throughout the book, you evoke her proliferation online and in clips and pictures of her and little quotes. And it's really about Morrison. Toni Morrison has like a figure or like a celebrity that's a symbol. And this book over and over again says, well, let's actually look at the novels. Let's read the books. And it's a way of opening up. The reading experience as like a deeply pleasurable one that can offer things in that form and like only in that. And I wanted to know more about how you see, you know, after her death in 2019, as the monumentalization of Toni Morrison within the culture has continued to emerge, what it meant to you to try and advocate again for a return to reading novels.

Namwali Serpell: One of the reasons I wrote the book is that when I was teaching this course on Morrison, I found that her reputation preceded her in a way that was actually occluding my students' ability to read the novels on their own terms. So they had the sense of what Morrison was like or what she stood for or what her politics were that overshadowed in a lot of ways what was happening on the page. And you know, I have one example of this, which is someone sent me a Humans of New York post. And it was a photograph of a lovely black woman and the description of her life involved trauma. It involved, you know just a really rough childhood growing up. And the language was very pithy, very straightforward, in the first person. This is a person telling her story and it's a real person right and the aim of course is to give a sense everybody that you walk down the street has their story and this is giving a voice to that person and this was sent to me and they the person said um this could have been the opening of a Toni Morrison novel and I felt so frustrated because I just felt like but the language is not Like, Morrison rarely wrote in the first person. And the notion that what Morrison wrote about was trauma and that what she did was give a voice to the voiceless, I just thought was such a reduction. It was just so reductive when it came to the incredible complexity of what Morrison was trying to achieve. And so I felt like I was fighting that battle already when I was teaching the class. And when I went to see this... Actually, in retrospect, incredible curated exhibit of Morrison's archival materials at Princeton. I felt the same tension between trying to give people a sense of this masterful writer who did all this in-depth research, had all these diagrams, had all this manuscripts, and at the same time give some kind of memorialization of Toni Morrison, the icon. Who we had lost relatively recently, and who we were looking to mourn in the way that we often do with civil rights leaders or with major artists in the black community in particular. There's a way in which it doesn't quite work, because Morrison is so intractable as a writer. Her work just can't be translated into these single messages, these single slogans, these. Know, we love to quote from Morrison's novels, but then when you actually read the quote in context, you realize, oh, this is coming from like a pedophilic monster, you know what I mean? And it's like, oh the words are beautiful, but that's not all that's happening in Morrison, you know? And so I felt like it was a really important redirection also of our tendency to to treat people as crystallizations of a single identity, especially in American politics right now. So Morrison as a symbol of black excellence, of black womanhood, of, you know, even of feminism, Morrison rejected the term feminism about her work, right? But there's this kind of desire for us to pigeonhole people, even as we are putting them up on a pedestal. And the only way I think to really resist that is not by. Criticizing or countering people when they say, well, she was excellent and saying, well, no, she actually wasn't, but it's actually to be like, the way that she was excellent and the reasons that her work are so important are there on the page and we actually have to read the work and I think that's what she would have wanted. I know that's, what she wanted more than anything else. She wanted to be read.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, in a way, her own book of essays or lectures on American literature, Playing in the Dark, is an argument to read the books. You have to read them. And her particular readings of, whether it's Faulkner's Absalom Absalom or Moby Dick, it makes you go, I have to go back and read this novel. One of the things that I experienced reading it, because I read these books very young, like a lot of people, there was something that you could find as a teenager, I think, because they... Had proliferated in the culture at a certain level. So no matter where you were, they could kind of cross your path. And so I had read the first, maybe four of them, but like as a teenager, I hadn't read them since. And through reading your book, the thing I really wanted to read immediately, which I did, was jazz.

Jarrett Earnest: And I have to thank you for your beautiful essay because it returned me to this book. And I was wondering if you could read something like the last page of jazz that we might talk about it.

Namwali Serpell: And I should say, I always feel completely justified in doing this with Morrison because she often gave away the whole plot on the first page of her book. And she often read from the ends of her books in interviews. Great. So no spoiler alert.

Jarrett Earnest: I wanted, because in this conversation, it's like we're talking about our language. I think it'd be really helpful to have like a concrete example of the language.

Namwali Serpell: It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach grown people for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb, because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there. And who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anyone passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers, both of them have washed and hung out on the line. In a bed they chose together and kept together. Nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary. And the mattress curved like a preacher's palm asking for witnesses in his name's sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering old time love. They are under the covers because they don't have to look at themselves anymore. There is no studs eye, no chippy glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers. But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part the closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley and brushes lint from his blue surge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight. I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secrets. And longed all long to show it, to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all. That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer, that's the kick. But I can't say that aloud. I can tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able, I'd say it. Say, make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look, look where your hands are.

Jarrett Earnest: Wow. Also, you're such a beautiful reader.

Namwali Serpell: Thank you. Well, the words help. No, just I love the, all the, the sneaky little clues where she says, for example, I mean, she's talking a lot about under the covers, which I think is alluding to book covers. And when she says I love, the way you hold me, I like your fingers on and on lifting, turning. That's like what we do with pages. I've your face for a long time, like a book is looking at your face. Talking to you, hearing you answer, and then look where your hands are, right? What an incredible thing. And what's really interesting to me is the way that all of this relies on the materiality of the codex, which we're losing because we're reading things on our phones, online, right. Even on Kindles, it's not quite the same. You don't lift and turn, right, the pages of a Kindle. You swipe them.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, and it also positions the book as the lover, you know, in the love affair.

Namwali Serpell: Exactly.

Jarrett Earnest: The long suffering.

Namwali Serpell: The unrequited lover who can never quite reach you, but that longing being precisely the deliciousness of the blues, right, or of jazz itself, I just, I adore it.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, because I'm doing that thing where it's like, I just read this book and want to talk to you about it. Um, to your point about the complexity of Morrison's world within the novel, one of the central characters, it starts by him shooting an 18 year old girl, and it ends three quarters of the way through the book, you get this kind of inner life of which does not explain or justify anything that happens. It does connect you very deeply with it and then at the end there is no punishment or resolution and neither for his actions nor his wife who also assaults the girl but then in the end they kind of I don't want to say they end happily ever after but like in a It's like

Namwali Serpell: there's a reconciliation. What I find really interesting is knowing the origin story of... Right, she wrote an introduction for a new edition of photographs by James Van Der Zee, the Harlem Book of the Dead. And she was obsessed with this one photograph of this girl and the story behind this photograph of the corpse is that this girl was shot at a party by her lover and people kept, and with a silencer, and so no one knew it had happened, she just slumped over. People asked, kept asking her who did it, who did, who did and she kept saying, I'll tell you tomorrow. And this is what fascinated Morrison was that this was someone who loved someone other than herself so much that she was willing to die rather than get him in trouble. The novel is not really about that at all in the end. That girl, Dorcas, is kind of one of Morrison's, I think, shallow, callow, beautiful young women who hasn't really lived enough to really come to terms with who she is or what she's come from. Where she's come from. And what Morrison ends up being much more interested in is the man that shoots her. I mean, I found that so spooky.

Jarrett Earnest: Because look, when I read this book when I was 17 years old, didn't go that deep. But I mean, I remember stretches of the language very powerfully when I reading it. But the fact that that's the deepest place of this book is her inhabiting him and what it meant for him to fall in love with this girl.

Namwali Serpell: And Violet, I think, also.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, she, she's very empathetic towards Violet, who's a complex. Violet's violent, right? Like she's got.

Namwali Serpell: Right? Like she's got this two sides to her and like what I think that everybody is beset with, I say in my analysis, they're all orphans and she's more so than obsessed with orphans. She's very obsessed with the hunger, the insatiable hunger of orphans, this comes up in beloved, it comes up a mercy as well. And the sense that Joe has been abandoned by his mother, the sense that Violet has been. Kind of cast out by both her grandmother and her mother or neglected. And Dorcas herself has lost her parents, right? There's a sense that this is both a kind of awful tragedy and a way that they've been set free, but that that freedom is too untethered from other people or from some sense of grounding, some sense of self. And this is why. This is why we have jazz, right? Jazz is, you know, as the opening of the book says, this low-down, spooky love. It's this highly contradictory admixture of violence and pleasure that I think she's constantly playing with. And these characters are in this moment where they have been set free, but that freedom has distorted their ability to connect with people or to love in an honest, ethical way. What I love about The fact that the book started with this girl and then ends up with the man who shoots her really being at the center of it, is that that is Morrison allowing the book to take her there. That she allows that unexpected, unpredictable quality of life to enter into the contingency of the writing of the book. Again, I just think it's remarkable.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah, it's like finding its own conditions in real time and you are just following along where it's going. It's so beautiful.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, it's a remarkable book. And it's one of those things where it would be very hard to draw jazz into any kind of respectability politics. Be really hard even to talk about it in the terms that we talk about, beloved, where it's like this horrible tragedy and it's about that time. It's like, these are just very flawed people doing very flawed things. And as you say, there's no comeuppance. There's no vengeance. There's nothing actually here, but survival, right? A kind of way of making a life after this rupture, but it has that quality. I was talking with Cathy Park Hong about an early passage in the novel where everybody believes that history's over, and it's just the future. We're just looking ahead, and this is the energy of the jazz age that she's trying to capture. And I say what's wonderful about this passage is it's like. In the first person because we have the narrator saying this, but she's sort of channeling what everyone around her thinks or what everyone around it thinks. But we know that we're on the precipice of like the Great Depression and World War II and Holocaust, like things are about to get hella worse. History is not over, but we have that perspective. And so the book has this kind of enclosure to it, but it always has this kind of ironic distance with regard to what it's recounting. Yeah, I just think it's marvelous.

Jarrett Earnest: What I loved about your essay, and why I felt so urgent to reread this book, which I just finished this morning, I have to say, so I'm already, I'm in that post book glow, is the, you identify this as being her greatest meditation on reading and writing, and that this voice at the end of this book is in fact the voice of the book itself, speaking to the person who's reading. And I wanted to know if you could talk a bit more about the role of reading in Morrison's writing, like her as a reader, and how that relates to the arguments that you made in your book.

Namwali Serpell: I mean, Morrison loved reading and she identified as a reader way before she ever identified as writer. I love quoting her on reading. She says, writing for me is a slow and advanced form of reading. She says I wrote a book because I wanted to read it and it wasn't there. It didn't exist and in order to read, I had to write it. She says sort of reading and writing. But the literary experience basically for her, she says, is one's own mind dancing with another's. There's these beautiful articulations of what reading is. The basis of my relationship to her, right? Not only is it, I never met Toni Morrison, it's the only way that I knew her is through reading her, but it's also the way that her descriptions of reading are so resonant with what reading feels like to me and why I do it and also why I write. And she talks about being a very early reader and I also was a very earlier reader. That it's a kind of company and that it also this incredible relationship that you can have with another mind where everything else is. There's your body as you're reading, but the body of the person who wrote isn't physically present with you. What you have is the body the book, right? And I think the textuality of reading is very important to her. The physicality, the materiality, as we can see in that passage, which I'll talk about. But I also feel like this notion that your mind can be in relation with another mind through language was so important to hers, so quintessential. To everything that she did and everything she wanted to do with language. So for me, it's just sort of, it's so constitutive of my relationship with her, it's almost hard to think outside of it. But I think she was a very good reader and she called herself a good reader and gave me the confidence to call myself a good read. And she said that that was one of the reasons she felt like she could write. And what that has to do, I think, with is paying attention. Close attention to what's there, close attention to what possible, to what lurking, to, what's available. That's another word she used about, for example, multiple readings of the same character. She said, well, it's available that it's this, or it's a available that is that. So that openness to ambiguity that I was talking about earlier also is very key to how she read. My sense of close reading, is really indebted to the way she close read, not just writers like Faulkner and Wolf and in her master's thesis, but also Melville and Poe in Playing in the Dark and Unspeakable Things Unspoken, but also the way close read herself, right? So she tells us more about her own use of language than a lot of critics have. And that I think is really, I think it was very inspiring for me as I wrote the book.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the ways that I interpreted your book and the thing I appreciated about it is we're going through this kind of moral panic around the state of reading in the culture. And what I liked about what you demonstrate and what you engage in in this book is to show that first of all, there's nothing that compares to reading these kind of books. And it's not something that you need to have someone waving their finger at you and telling you you need do like you need eat your vegetables. It's actually something that could be very pleasurable and that you might really want to do. And I wonder if you could give me a sense of, because you start off the book by framing Morrison's books as quote unquote difficult. And I want to know how you see the kind of difficulty of the form of these books Earth. These kind of more experimental coming out of a trajectory of modernism and relationship to language, how that intersects with your experience of contemporary reading habits and teaching when you teach people, young people these books.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is that the attribution of difficulty to Morrison's work was there from pretty early on. There was a kind of sense that her work was not forgiving and it was not explanatory. And there was a refusal to placate or explain things to the reader. You see this in interviews, you see this reviews, in Oprah's book club, the readers of Paradise complained about this as well. Often when people say, what is it like to teach students now? Like they don't read. I say, well, we've been saying that as professors for decades, they said that about us too, you know what I mean? And so I think there's an extent to which there's a kind of, I would say a hyperbolic hysteria about the literacy crisis. I do think we have a literacy crisis, I think that probably it's not. Attributable to just a kind of like mass slide into stupidity. You know what I mean? I think really what it comes down to is we're not expecting young people to read or we're not expecting them to rise to the challenge of reading in the way that we used to. There's a lot of talk about meeting students where they are and or meeting people where they are, which is like essentially a state of total distraction all the time and inability to focus on more than one sentence at a time. And I just think, you know, it's just a matter of will. It is actually just a manner. I mean, when I assign reading in my classes and I give them little reading quizzes, they all do the reading. I do teach very bright students and very motivated students and any student that's gonna sign up to take a class on Toni Morrison is gonna wanna do the writing. But I also feel like their ability to read once they have read is not in decline. I think there's a lot of talk about, well, they can't even parse sentences. They don't even understand what's going on. I actually think that's not illiteracy. I think that is a dearth of historical knowledge. What I find with students is that they don't understand what things are referring to because they don't t know the history. And I think the erasure of history is something that a lot people with a lot power are very bent on pushing. In order to keep an uneducated populist. It's not a problem of not being able to understand the words on the page. It's about not knowing what they actually refer to in historical terms, or even being able point out reference, right? And that, I think, is something that Morrison is very good at presenting things to us without context. So you kind of always have to reread Morrison. You know, it doesn't matter if you come to her books with a full understanding of what's gonna happen if it's already been spoiled, it does matter. You still have to read the whole thing. And most of the time you have to reread to understand what was going on. That's just her way. So it sort of obviates some of these larger questions, if that makes sense. People are like, well, how do you make sure that students don't just read the AI summary? I'm like, well, she already gives you a summary of the plot. So it's like, it doesn't actually matter, you still have to read the rest of the book.

Jarrett Earnest: The canon plays such a complicated role in Toni Morrison's thought and also in our ability to engage with her books. And I think in some ways it cuts against the ways that certain ideas about her work are being shorthanded or made simplified. And, I also think that idea of publishing. In-depth scholarly account of her books isn't in and of itself part of this kind of canonization of her. It's like the recognition of her ascendancy to be an essential American artist. And so I wonder if you could kind of sketch out her relationship to the canon as such and how you think that this relates to it.

Namwali Serpell: Sort of grew up with a respect for the canon and a desire to engage with the canon that was marked by I think a lot of early readers desire to wrestle with the cannon, which is not the same thing as cancel the canon, right? So one example and this is a this is sort of you know throw away line from an interview she gave when she was an undergraduate student at Howard University. She was in the, I think it's called the Howard Players Club, and they were performing Shakespearean plays and she was in them. She cast as Queen Elizabeth, for example. And there's this beautiful picture of her looking very regal. But she was also reading Shakespeare and she talked about how she had wanted to write. An essay about the black characters in Shakespeare, of which she's, you know, there was Othello, but there was also, she felt, you know, this nurse Barbary of Desdemona was a black character as well. And her teacher at the time, and she doesn't say which teacher. And so, and because it was Howard in the, I think in the fifties or maybe even the forties. It could have been a white professor or a black professor, it could have been a Caribbean professor or an African-American professor, I don't know. She was told that's a minor topic, right? So she's at a historically black university, she's a black woman who is playing, you know, a role originally written for a white person and she wants to write about, just say, a fellow, a black character, and is told that that's minor subject, right. But you can see how there's something that's being foreclosed there. Is almost the inverse of the argument that gets made now, which is that we shouldn't actually perform a fellow anymore because it's too racist. Do you see what I mean? There's like on both sides, there's this kind of like refusal to engage with the actual thing, whether it's coming from a white supremacist perspective or a black politics power perspective, black empowerment perspective. It just feels, I think in both cases, like a total waste, right? An incredibly rich part, an incredibly rich work of literature, an incredible rich occasion. And I think you can see Morrison's education and her work as a teacher, her work as a critic, and then I think even her work as a writer as simply a continuation of that desire to write about the Black characters in Shakespeare, Which is to say... Desire to engage with the political implications of works of literature that are great even with their blind spots even with some of their often extremely racist or sexist or homophobic tendencies that actually that is not a reason not to read them that's not a reason to get rid of the canon. Really despaired at the number of times that I've seen people complain about the destruction of the university, the destruction of the humanities, as the fault of the attempts to diversify what we read and study in the university coming from black and brown scholars and critics and female and queer scholars and critics. There's a sense of, like literally I think the phrase uses, the barbarians at the gate, right, have destroyed the university from within. And this is why we have no education anymore. What frustrates me to no end is, you know, Angela Davis wrote her dissertation about like Immanuel Kant. You know what I mean? It's like Toni Morrison wrote her master's thesis about Faulkner and Wolf. These were not people who were trying to destroy the canon. What they wanted us to do is engage with them, read them, criticize them. You can criticize what you love. That's not actually a form of an act of aggression or destruction. If you follow Harold Bloom, that's how the canon gets made. So the sense that it's actually the fault of, you know, these diversification efforts. That that's what destroyed the canon. I think it's been a very pernicious aspect of Morrison's legacy. And I felt it was very important for me to push against that and quote her saying, I don't want to do without Escalus or Shakespeare. I'm not giving it up. This is mine. This is my and I belong here too. I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. That's Du Bois. He's not saying we need to get rid of Shakespeare, kill Whitey. That's not what he's saying. He's saying, we are equals. And we can all just be included in this larger scale thing called an education. It doesn't actually have to be excluding anybody.

Jarrett Earnest: Actually, in a way, it's even more radical, which is the only way to save this thing. The only way move this forward is to let this complexity come through, is to engage with it because an artwork is complicated. Otherwise it's not an artwork. Exactly, it is not human. Yes, so I loved the way that you moved through that in your book. And there's also a thing, I mean, going back to structure as the argument. I felt, and correct me if this isn't your intention, but I felt like you have this construct where you write, so the essays have this kind of mounting level of intensity and you say Sula has my heart, Beloved has my soul, and Jazz has my mind. One of those essays, more dazzling than the other. And then we get to Paradise and I'm convinced by the essay but I thought it was a little cooler and I thought, oh she didn't like this one as much. And then the last few books all get collapsed into one essay. Yes. And they are not engaged with in the same rigorous way. And I thought, oh, this is really interesting. Because in a way, it's saying, I don't think these books are as good, but not wanting to fully go there. And I felt there was a real conflictedness. And I feel that the highest form of critical writing is conflicted writing. To go back to what we were just saying about Toni Morrison's relationship to the canon. And so I wondered if you could give me a sense of that, of how to deal with the parts, of course, you know, the places where you have a real feeling for the novel, it's incandescent, and what it is like when you're dealing with an artist's entire body of work, and there are places where are not necessarily you want to go.

Namwali Serpell: You know, I wrote out entire chapters about Morrison's late works, her four last novels, but really only A Mercy, which is the one I teach, was one where what I had to say about what she was doing was interesting, if ambivalent. The others were just sort of, I'm a little disappointed here, or I don't really get it, or I... Really wish Bob Gottlieb had edited it differently, you know what I mean? And I really, there was a point in my editorial process where we really just thought, well, it's not worth going on at length about that, because it's boring, actually. You know, she said many times, I am not a poet, and I do not believe I'm a poet. She exhibited a lot of anxiety about ever being perceived as a poet and so I felt like justified in doing it. But I also felt Like. What I have to say about her attempts to write poetry give me at least some insight into what I admire in her prose. So I felt like it was very important when I'm in this kind of conflicted relationship with a text where I admire some parts or I don't admire others. It's only when that criticism is interesting, when that critique is interesting that it felt worth pursuing. It also, I thought, I wanted to try it out for a few pages as a kind of homage to her own flair. I call her someone who's practicing critical shade. And I was like, I wanna know what it's like to do that. I had done it in a couple of different places in my own criticism, but doing it with her, I thought this could be more fun. I have no idea if she would have been furious about it. I kind of imagine she would have chuckled and been like, yeah, I know poem's not really my thing.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, it's funny that they even exist. I mean, the thing is, you said that she had this really strong aversion to biography, but the only way to protect the history of literary executorship will tell you the only way to keep that stuff from coming out and being used and abused is to destroy it. And if you don't destroy it, but you put it in your fancy collections in Princeton, people are going to access it and do with it what they will. So either you believe that it should exist or you don't. And I think that that already is a kind of contradiction. And what is so great about your book is that you allow for this kind of contradiction in Morrison to exist in the work, but also in the way that she thought about her own work in her life.

Namwali Serpell: I think the thing about Morrison that people don't realize because she was so incredibly successful was that she had this willingness to fail. She was really fine to experiment with things and have them not work out. She didn't like it when she collaborated with people and things didn't work out because then she felt like she had no control. But one of my favorite quotes from her is failure is just information. You can see her reflecting back on things that she wished she had done differently in her work. And those failures, you know, self-perceived or accurate, sometimes resulted in really exciting experiments, right? I mean, to write a book from the perspective of the book itself, right, that's an experiment and it is risky and it's risky in precisely the way she thought jazz, the musical form was, right. She was going to try it anyway. And I think that willingness, you know, she often said about Tar Baby, for example, which I think of as her surrealist book, and is actually a book that is quite remarkable, but it's not one of my favorites of her books. But what I admire is the is the risk taking. And she often set about it, you know, I love that book, nobody else seems to like it, but she didn't care. And it's like, there's something really inspiring about that, like the willingness to fail on purpose. I try to get my students sometimes to write badly on purpose, just to get a sense of what that feels like, but also like what it affords, what it gives you, what it grants you. And she says about a poem that she had written, I believe it is the poem that I analyze in the book called Black Crazies. She's asked an interview and she said, I did recently write a poem. She said, I'm not a poet. I did, recently write poem in order to figure something out about a novel. Writing in a form that was not one she felt that comfortable with, that she wasn't that sure about, still allowed her to pursue something. What I find really admirable, and again this is one of the reasons why I didn't want to just write whole chapters saying why I didn't like certain of her later books, is that I find it very admirable that she never stopped pushing herself. All of the later books are also experiments. Formal experiments, she's doing new things in those books that she had never done before, that she'd never tried before. And in a lot of ways, I read them as also reprisals of previous books, where she's picking up older themes, and she's working out new problems with them. She never stopped, she never, you know, got to a point of just complacency, right, where she's just like gonna write whatever book you're expecting. None of those books, in any way, were expected. Like, Mercy in particular, she's gonna write about, you know, the new world before it's even America. She's gonna right about this whole cast of characters. It's this kind of remarkable thing where she just never, she never took her foot off the gas pedal when it came to her own vocation. I find that really admirable.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, the thing that made me really think about this kind of structural shift within the position of her as not just a writer, but a cultural figure, was in that moment, that chapter that's sort of a hinge in your book, the playing in the shade, where you then lightly throw some barbs, or at least open the door to that. And then also kind of back away and say, I don't know. It's complicated to want to criticize Toni Morrison. But you you do fairly damningly discuss her poem about 9-11 like written two days later and what's kind of so effectively laid out but not necessarily said is like why does one feel that they are in a position that they must address this particular historical circumstance right now? And you know, it isn't necessarily like a writer, you know just a novelist who's in their study writing, but it's like I have to say something about this world event.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I think, you know, I have this quote of hers that I say all the time, which is I read books, I teach books, I write books, and I think about books. It's one job. And I say it about myself when people try to understand how I'm a professor and a critic and a fiction writer. I also say it when I'm thinking about Morrison's kind of vocational let's just say plenitude, right? She was an editor, she was a teacher, she was critic and a writer, and a professional reader in a lot of ways. Recently, someone was listing those jobs and was saying that I also had those jobs and they added public intellectual. And I was like, that's true for Morrison, that's not true for me, and I don't want to be a public intellectual, but I think that is the role that, as you say, is the least. Connected to her being a reader and writer of books. And it is the one that I think led to certain kinds of, I'm just going to call them genres, speeches, almost sermons that she would Thank you. That is very in keeping with who she was. You can see it from early interviews. She's just extremely good at expressing herself and she's really good at counterintuitive rhetorical moves that we associate with public intellectuals. I learned recently that when she was an undergraduate at Howard, she ghost wrote political speeches for people. I don't know who, but I'm like, it would be an amazing thing to find those speeches. I did not see any of them in the archives, but she originally wanted to be a journalist at Howard before she became an English major with, I think, a classics minor. So that tendency in her to want to engage with the world in that more public political way I think was there from the start. I do think that it doesn't lend itself to... The kind of writing that she was doing as a novelist. And I think she said as much. She said all the time, all great literature is political unless you find yourself, you know, beating people over the head with slogans, right? She understood there's a difference between propaganda and literature, but the politics in her work were much more complicated than that in a speech, right, that might be given on a pulpit. And there's that tension between Morrison, the public speaker, public intellectual, weighing in on things like Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, weighing in on OJ Simpson, weighing on Bill Clinton, all of those things that there's that tension and between her in that impulse in her and her as a private citizen with political views and then as an incredible... I think, masterful writer. And it's an interesting tension to explore. I am more interested in her as a writer, I think.

Jarrett Earnest: The voice it's such it's so hard to disentangle because even that little I guess it's like a monolog from the point of view of the book that you read at the end of jazz the voice is so amazing and the dialog in the the kind of feeling like found real voices coming out of her novels and at the same time I love her her essay voice and it is sharper and funnier because you have a sense of who. Is speaking, which is different than you have in the novels. And I wonder how you relate to her as a literary critic and how you think about your voice as a extremely stylish essayist in relationship to, or as different from the work that you do as a novelist and how Toni Morrison fits in the way you think about that.

Namwali Serpell: Oh, thank you for the compliment. I think that Morrison as an essayist has, as you say, a kind of authority of voice. You know who is speaking and you know what her opinions are. I do think there's the same kind of careful noticing of the world that is there in the fiction. And I think that when it comes to the politics of the texts that she's reading, she's very careful not to attribute that to the individual authors themselves, right? She does a lot of what we call symptomatic reading, although not that many critics have spoken about her in that way, where she's looking at what the text is exhibiting about the culture in which it's written, maybe about the person and their personal experiences, like Willa Cather's. You know, mother issues she gets into. But there's not a kind of, again, she's not casting aspersions and she's, not saying we must cancel this person. And I think that's a very important difference between her critical writing and what I was referring to earlier as like her more political speechifying, where she's much more willing to have very strong opinions about actual people, right, because, you know, it's important that she assert that. But I think this kind of care that she takes with the literary in her criticism is part and parcel of the side of her that Keats described in Shakespeare's negative capability, right? The ability to be in uncertainty without the irritable reaching for fact and reason, right. This ability to kind of understand the ambiguities, the possibilities, the affordances latent in a text. Without narrowing them to a single figure. And she does the same in her work and in her fiction. She is very interested in the way that a single event can be perceived by many people in ways that don't reduce it to a signal message. That multiplicity of point of view, the Rashomon effect as we call it, is so crucial for her. And it's, you know, in paradise, This is why you have. Debating, competing preachers who are giving sermons that are counter to each other but are both equally about God. And one of my favorite things, it's also true of Sula, where you have a friendship between Sula and Nell who are extremely different people. And one of the favorite things about those two books is that people always assume that Morrison identified with Sula. But I don't think she did. There's a fan letter that she's responding to. In the archives where she says, I think you like Sula better than I do. Sula, I think, scared her, that kind of person. And I think in Paradise, people always assume that her Christian faith was more in keeping with the sermons of Reverend Misner, who is the outsider who has come into this all-Black community. And in an interview, she's like, actually, I more believe what Reverend Pullman says. You know, and says this interesting way that... She's able to write outside of herself. And I think that's also true in her criticism. She's not simply, you know, her opinions are polyvalent. I'll just put it that way. And I find that very important as a critic. It's like what Ian Forster called seeing in the round. You're not just seeing something straight on or from behind. You have to actually walk around it and see what's possible in all of these different respects. If you're going to be able to write about it in a... Accurate way.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, it's also, I hear in like playing in the dark or in the lectures that were just released as Languages Liberation, where she's like, we're not like saying, oh look, Ernst Hemingway is a racist because he wrote this thing in this novel. It's like okay, we'll look at the thing in the novel and see how it's working. And it's, but what I hear in that is an artist saying, in my work, I have to be free. And I don't want anybody coming at me and saying, you believe this because your character did that. Exactly. And I think that's a particular position, an intimate position that an artist has of understanding, which is like the space between whoever they are in the world and what they want to be accountable for and then what they need to be able to do in the space of creating.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I think to infuse your ethics and politics into a character is a huge disservice actually to the work of literature. You have to be able to project into other people. This is the thing that when she says, I didn't want to write a memoir because my life is not that interesting, people are always like, oh, she's wrong, her life was so interesting. And I think, but I totally identify with that. The interest for me in writing is about other people. And I'm not trying to say I'm narcissistic or solipsistic like every writer is, every person is, but I just feel like there's something so exciting about unselfing, to use Iris Murdoch's term, about being completely in another, including all of the darkness that is available to me in that other that might not be available to be in myself. I might not know myself well enough to write my dark secrets and shadows, but I in another person can see exactly what those crevices and corners might be. And trying to work out what it is to live a life and make choices that are different from the choices I would make, I think it's just, I don't know, I just find it endlessly fascinating. And it's very hard for me when people have this like one-to-one correlation. It's like the author is the The narrator is the character. Those all must be relatable to the reader. I'm like, that's so same, same, same, you know, so matchy matchy as we used to say about clothes.

Jarrett Earnest: In the matchy-matchy, it also seems like such a dominant mode of contemporary fiction where it's like this person in the travails of middle age on the Upper West Side, you know, it's like, oh, okay, like that took a lot of imagination.

Namwali Serpell: I mean, and I, if you do it well, it doesn't, but you can do anything. If it's good, if it's interesting, you can do anything and that's the thing is like, also, I also am very aware that the long history of literature includes authors playing with the relationship between their experience and their characters experience, changing things, but also knowing that the reader expects. That there's gonna be some correlation. And so then they play with that and they mess with you with that, right? And then you have Kay in all of Kafka's stories and you're like, is that him, you know? And I love that. I think that's, it's an infinite source of interest and excitement as well to think about the self in relation to these things. I'm teaching a course right now on auto-fiction and Garth Greenwell, a dear sweet friend of mine from graduate school, zoomed in to give his rant against auto-fiction. Which is a term that has been applied to his work a lot. And what he said instead is that he's working in a tradition of the novel of consciousness. And he's interested in that articulation of what is it that happens in the mind? And you can only know that from inside a mind, right? So there are many different ways to think about the self in relation to fiction that isn't just same-same, right. And so I don't, and some of my favorite fiction is, I mean, Proust. I mean come on, right, this is someone who's basically like writing about his life, but he's writing about it in this beautiful way. Morrison said this about her students. She said, you know, I try to get them to write about anything but themselves. And she says, even if they end up writing an autobiography, at least they'll be treating themselves as strangers. What an incredible way to think about it, right? It's not so much like self versus text. It's more about that same, same, same, it's about the isomorphism, is a word that I like to use about the notion that the content has to match the form, that the rhythm has to match. The feeling that the person has to match your class position, that you can only write from your standpoint. I just feel like it's such a inhuman way of thinking about things. It's so smooth and it doesn't have that quality of differentiation or even difference, which I love, that I think is actually much more true to what life is.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, also, I feel really strongly that art isn't about, and you can't reduce it to a useful tool. But if art had an about, it would be that, the evacuation, expansion, complication of inner life. In order to open that up a little bit, I wanted to ask you about the essay that you published in the review on the banality of empathy, because it also seems like some of these cross currents that we're trying to sort out, you are tackling from a different perspective in that essay. And I wonder if you could like talk about what led you to make that particular argument and how we could situate it in this conversation with Morrison.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah, I mean, the connection really comes from my work as a graduate student writing a dissertation that was, as I mentioned earlier, about uncertainty in relationship to ethics. And what I learned as I did research on the history of literary considerations of of the ethics of fiction in particular. Is that there were these two main strands. One is the strand that I think we're most familiar with, which is the model that we call empathy and that used to be called sympathy, which is idea that when you read books that are filled with characters, as most novels are, you're engaged in a process of relating to those characters and empathizing with or sympathizing with having compassion for people that you might not have those feelings for in real life. For George Eliot, this was a way to bring people into a Christian model, actually, of understanding what it is like to be a poor person, what it was like to a woman, what it's like to have suffered in a particular way, and in so doing, treat people in your real life in a better way, right? But there's also another model, which is a little bit more recent, although you can really find elements of it Nietzsche as well, when he's analyzing literature. That is about what's called alterity, or the otherness of people. And there, what literature is doing is it's exposing you to the opacity of other people. It's helping you understand that you actually don't have the authority to determine what someone else's life is like, because they are so different from you and their otherness is what you're really accessing when you're reading literature. And what it produces is instead of this desire to have compassion or help, it gives you a kind of respect for them. And for some people, even a kind of tolerance of otherness. This is a way to understand that I can't project my feelings onto you. I have to respect your feelings. And we have to figure out how to negotiate those in a society, right? So these two different paths. And what I came to in writing my dissertation and also in analyzing Morrison's Beloved in particular. It seemed to me that the best kinds of literature were very interested in negotiating those two impulses, not just making one or the other. So I had already been thinking about this a lot in my scholarly work and in my book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, I'm really talking about how we negotiate those two different impulses in books that are specifically interested in ethical impasses, binds that are not easily solved by a court case or a single judgment. And then I was thinking about, you know, how this relates in contemporary culture. And I was reading and watching things. And I came to realize that there was a kind of new hegemony of the empathy model. This was just what everyone was saying about every book or every film that came out, which is like, how relatable is this character? How likable is this characters? Like, what does it mean that I'm being made to feel for this character. And doesn't it make me a good person that I read so many books and things like that. And I thought it's very interesting that this is like really kind of picked up and become this almost mantra. A lot of it as a way to defend literature in the face of incredible hostility from market forces and from fascism, frankly, people who don't want us to read or think about other people at all. And so I understood the impulse, but I also thought There is something here that is foreclosing political solidarity by requiring that people be, as Muhammad Al-Kurd's book puts it, perfect victims, that we have to empathize with these people in order to grant them rights. And I thought, when did this become the kind of litmus for whether people have rights? Shouldn't it just be that they're human beings, right? And so this need to. Perform victimhood, which then got really co-opted by the right, and now we see all these people just being like, not all rich people, and not all rapists, and you know what I mean? And it's become this thing where it's like, I have to prove my victimhood. My sense of being oppressed, so that you empathize with me, and in so doing, you then grant me some measure of rights, but then also power. And this particular... I want to call it the liberal boomerang, has I think really wrecked our politics, you know? And part of it is because of the same sameness, right? We call it identity politics and it is about being identical, right, it's about, oh, I can understand your pain perfectly and therefore I can deem you worthy of my compassion and therefore can say, yes, you too should have the right to vote. You know what I mean? Like to me, it just like completely forecloses a politics based on mutual interest. Which doesn't have to require that you're the same. It just means that you have mutual interests, right? And so I think this was part of what I was trying to draw to people's attention is that this model had calcified. It had turned into a kind of ideology, as you said earlier. It was foreclosing genuine politics, but worst of all, it was leading to really bad literature. Just so bad, bad art. Bad art. No excuses. Like so boring and so self-pitying and so pandering. And I just thought, okay, I need to just say something. And I think it was a pretty controversial title to say the banality of empathy. I'm obviously citing Hannah Arendt, but it's because Arend actually offers a model that I think is much more oriented toward genuine politics. So it just, it became an occasion and what's very interesting to me is published in the review online, actually not in the print, and there are parts of it that I think when I republish it will change because I want to bolster the argument, I now have more evidence, I have people that I wish I had cited that I didn't like Baldwin on sentimentality for example. It is the essay that people who have read me cite the most. When I meet someone and they say I loved your essay in the review, what they mean is the banality of empathy. And I found it very interesting that it has caught so many people's attention, given the hegemony of that position in the literary world at least.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, the other thing that made me interested in your turn to Hannah Arendt in that essay is she wrote an essay that I think about often, which is called Thinking in Moral Consideration. And it's linked to the Eichmann and Jerusalem argument too in a way, which she's wondering if there's something in our ability to think that predisposes us to do good or make different choices than the easy choices that like the structures that produce evil or like enable violence or whatever can produce. And that the work of art in and of itself is not set up as a space of empathy, but it's of a space.

Namwali Serpell: Of thought. Yes, absolutely. So it's representative thinking rather than empathy or sentimentality, which is like, you know, putting yourself in someone's position, but not trying to like feel their feelings, right? Just like, and it's perspective, which is part of what I was saying Morrison is doing in her own work, right, is like characters viewing something from these perspectives, that itself. I wouldn't say it has like an ethical valence as such, but it is more useful for getting to a political argument than simply trying to feel for others, like feel what other people feel. Right. This is absolutely why I feel like her line of thought took me directly to Brecht, right? Because this is what Bertolt Brecht says, right, is that the space of theater is going to interrupt that emotional catharsis or catexis that we are. Prone to doing, through reminding you that this is just a stage, this is just a performance, in order that you think, right? Because emotion can foreclose thought. It doesn't always. I think emotion and thought are often very conjoined. But what we know about the way we even talk about it. I'm zoning out by watching a Netflix show, or I needed to cry out my feelings. How you feel when you leave the theater is a really I think good index of whether that play has made you think or has made you feel. And thinking is the only way that we're going to actually have a political future. We can't feel our way into freedom. I'm sorry, but we can't. We actually have to think through these questions which are profoundly difficult and sometimes intractable. As you say, like, they're not easy. The idea that it's just a very easy battle and we just have, the Dems just have to win and therefore things will be good again. It's just, that's not actually how it works in real life. Human beings are too complicated for that.

Jarrett Earnest: And it's another reason to go back to structure as argument, which is if it doesn't have or a formal reading is that that's the thing that opens the space of thought and how you navigate it, how you try and figure it out and work with it and against it in real time. I guess like one takeaway, like if I had to reduce against in a potentially violent way, like the takeaway of your book, which it's like if you actually read Toni Morrison, it's funnier, more fucked up and more beautiful than you thought.

Namwali Serpell: Yeah. And it will make you think. And the thing that I love about this, and this is one of the reasons why, even though I'm not that familiar with podcasts, I've been doing a lot of podcasts, is because it makes you want to talk to people. I have had so many conversations with people where they say. So I finished her baby and I immediately called my friend or I finished jazz and I wanted to talk to someone. I got you in the room. And this is exactly what Morrison wanted, right? And the fact, and it really like touches my spirit that she said that this was her attempt to replicate a form that she saw as African, that the African folk tale at the end of the story, you don't get the, and the moral of the story is what you get instead. Is the storyteller turning to the audience and saying, what do you think? And I just love that as an ethos to try and embed into my own work. I want people to argue with me. Like I love argument. I mean, not everyone loves argument. I get that. But even with my own fiction, what I love is having conversations about what possibilities are there in what I wrote. I don't, I know that people really, They're like, life is difficult. I have to think too much at work. I don't want to have complexity in my art as well as in my job. But I actually feel like there's pleasure to conversation. There's pleasure argument, there's a pleasure to disagreement. This is how we work out what it is to be alive. And if we don't continue to have those conversations, if we just treat books as vehicles for emotional release, we're never going to actually perpetuate one of the things that makes us most human, right, which is language. And, you know, Morrison's Nobel Prize speech, I love because it befuddles everyone. She tells a story. She claims she's heard it before from multiple cultures. Nobody ever has heard the story before. She seems to have invented a story, but it's a story that is about a confrontation between these children and this old woman who is blind and there's no resolution. And I just, I'm like this, that she chose her Nobel Prize speech, which is like the pinnacle of accomplishment for her as an occasion to give us yet another riddle that we can endlessly debate that is itself about debate. I just think it's incredible. I just that is, that's where you see her true commitment to what literature can do, not just what it can.

Jarrett Earnest: Now, Molly, I don't think we're going to get better than that. Thank you so much for this. This was so fun.

Namwali Serpell: This was such a delight. Thank you so much.

Jarrett Earnest: Next week's episode will be an audio recording of Namwali Serpell's 2019 essay, The Banality of Empathy. But you can read it now, along with many others by her, with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants full access to our archive since 1963, searchable on our website. Subscribe at a discount at nybooks.com slash PL Sub. N-y-b-o-o k-s dot com slash p-l-s-u-b. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.