In Praise of a Line, 3: Sula

Toni Morrison, Sula

As a writer, I tend to read for both form and content. Thus when I thought up this essay series, I had the idea to take beautifully written lines out of their context so language could be appreciated in its purest form. But reading also allows me to create context for an increasingly abstract world; I often have a lot to say about what I read! So of course, I strayed slightly from the initial concept.

I’d like to shift the focus back to language. That’s not to say the book in question—Toni Morrison’s Sula—is not one of the most beautiful and complex tellings of a female friendship, ever. It holds space for the complicated truths that coexist in love and friendship, and how the constraints of a society can injure them both. Much has been written about the relationship between Sula and Nel. They are gloriously jealous, bad, beautiful, loving, sincere, and ugly. (The story is very much a meditation on "goodness" as well; reference my most recent In Praise of a Line essay, here.) It’s an important and refreshing novel for our times because it refuses to deduce anything or anyone. And are we not in an age of tireless deduction?

Toni Morrison and her ability to write a sentence is unparalleled, it was difficult to choose just one. She is of course renowned for her narrative—the novels, short stories, and essays she penned in a lifetime; she was a most prolific writer. But if we abandon content for the moment, it is evident that Morrison’s writing is one of pure craft. More than any other writer, her language has the ability to stop me dead in a reading. Almost every other sentence is so striking it calls to be read again.

It might seem lazy to choose the last line of a novel. But a closing line is often one of the most difficult to write. How does one complete such a body of work properly? Tie everything up with just the right string? Behold a line that closes Sula in the most haunted and poignant aura, one that stays with you long after you close the book:

“It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” (p. 174)

How better to describe grief but boundless? This touches on its circular nature, how sorrow moves beyond any familiar earthly construct. It was a fine cry belies its sincerity—a proper, long time coming kind of cry. The language encompasses the endlessness of loss, how it overwhelms because it is so ungrounding. The structure of the line itself has a rhythm, especially when read aloud—it flows almost similar to stanzas plucked from poetry. For me, it’s a line that illustrates the power of Morrison’s writing: beautiful, meaningful, direct. Upon finishing the sentence (and thus the novel) one is left content. Despite any inherent sadness, it's a satisfying end, and leaves nothing left to say.