By Alice Su Special Writer
On Tuesday afternoon (March 1) Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize- winning author Toni Morrison spoke at Princeton University about the art of reading as a personal interaction with what is left intentionally unsaid.
“Invisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden, until the right reader discovers it,” Ms. Morrison told a capacity crowd of more than 450 faculty, students and local residents in McCosh Hall 50. “It’s the way in which a reader participates in the text.”
Nestled in a squat blue armchair in the middle of the stage, she explained the reader’s dual role as both reader and writer.
“It’s not how (the reader) interprets it, but how she helps to write it,” Ms. Morrison said. “Like singing. Here are the lyrics, here’s the score, and then the performance — which is the reader’s individual contribution to the piece.”
Ms. Morrison rejects the idea that books involve only the relationship between reader and text.
“The text is not always the quiet patient that a reader brings to life,” she said. “I want to introduce a third party into this equation: the author.”
Authors intentionally leave gaps of hidden knowledge or suspense in their writing, Ms. Morrison said, as “invisible ink” for the reader to find and interpret.
“They design their fiction to rattle and engage the entirety of the reading experience,” she said.
“The gaps that are deliberate and deliberately seductive, when pursued by the right reader, produce the text in its entirety.”
Ms. Morrison highlighted the importance of identifying this “right reader.”
“Certain books are not for every reader. It’s possible to admire, but not be emotionally or even intellectually involved in it,” she said.
“The reader who is made for the book is the one who is attuned to and can see, discover and unveil the invisible ink.”
Other readers, according to Ms. Morrison, fail to discover the full experience of reading the text.
“Even the reader who loves the book may not be the best,” she said.
“For the not-right reader, such strategies are just annoying. Like withholding butter from toast. For others, it’s a gate — a little bit open — and somebody is back there, begging the reader to come in and do some work.”
Ms. Morrison said that she has written almost all of her novels with this challenge in mind.
“It is the reader whom I summon in invisible ink, destabilizing the text and reorienting the reader,” she said. “I make overt demands that the reader not just participate in the narrative, but specifically to help writing.”
Tn making these demands, though, Ms. Morrison denied that she was being exclusive.
“I’m not interested in some special group of 15 perfect readers,” she said. “I write to everyone. Simple sentences, simple words. Very little jazz for its own sake. Conversational. Colloquial, even.”
Ms. Morrison also read a few pages from an unpublished manuscript. In the excerpt, she experimented with recognizing all the separate roles of author, reader and character as integral to the reading and writing experience.
“This thing just now is total inversion for me. It may turn out to be really crazed,” she said.
“To write 30 pages about something that’s going on with the character and have the character comment not just on what was written, but on the person who’s actually producing his stuff.”
Whether the author was acknowledged in the text or not, she said, the reader remains in control of how he reads.
“The right reader is free,” Ms. Morrison said, “They can do whatever comes out of the text for them. They ought to be free to do that.”
The “invisible ink” of her writing would lead to varied interpretations of her writing with each generation of new readers, Ms. Morrison hopes.
“They may activate themselves with the text entirely differently,” she said. “When I’m dead and when you’re dead, there will still be readers of my books. So it will always be fresh, always be new.”
