Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye: A Novel

My husband and I have great fun in art galleries, and only partly because our interests so rarely converge. I?ll yawn my way through the Impressionist section while he heaps scorn on the Eschers that so catch my fancy.

While there are those among our friends who take great amusement from our spirited disagreements, I can?t help but think how dull our trip would be if we completely agreed about what was beautiful and artistic.

Neither does it surprise me that we would take two divergent views on the writing of Toni Morrison and the style of her first novel, The Bluest Eye. I am captivated by it. From the very first line on the first page I was drawn into this tempest of a novel and was unable to put it down until I was done with it. I became caught up in the winds of the words and the incredible power behind the simplest of words. She employs such images as mouths that ?go triangle? to describe a frown and describes someone belching ?softly, purringly, lovingly.?

You won?t need a dictionary to get through this novel, yet while every word may be familiar, the way in which they are strung together are not. Morrison is poetic about even the crudest and plaintive of images. Indeed, on every page she seems to be challenging us to redefine beauty and to recognize power and strength in the everyday things that we might typically scorn or pass over.

Forget about plot, characters, and setting for a moment

The Bluest Eye is not a book where the plot is important. She tells you in the second chapter what will happen at the end. Even the first chapter is meant to give away the ending to a very perceptive reader (or, to not-so-perceptive readers like myself who picked up on it after going back to read it a second time).

Even the characters, while well-defined, are not the point of the novel. They are present as vehicles, as voices, not as ends in themselves. It doesn?t matter what happens to the characters once we close the last page of the book. It matters only what happens within the 164 pages of the book.

I can?t even say the setting is particularly important or memorable. It takes place in Ohio, but it could have just as easily taken place in Oregon, West Virginia, or Georgia. Morrison evokes specific images without ever tying her story to one place so strongly as to make it irrelevant to other locations.

So what is important?

It is the way the story is told that makes The Bluest Eye stand out from the other books on my shelf. It is the rhythm of the words that captivated and mesmerized me. Morrison, in an afterword written 20 years after the first publication of the book, spends several pages trying to describe why she chose the language she did and what her choices meant. She wrote, ?My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture.?

It is hard to walk away from this novel without a greater appreciation for the complexity of the language and the culture she is portraying. Her narrators are innocent pre-teens who are struggling to decode the world around them and why the world?s definition of beauty excludes them. They make us co-conspirators by revealing their confusion and their strident demands for us to make sense of what is going on.

The theme is also important. Morrison compels us to try to fathom the importance beauty plays in the life of an 11-year-old. On every page we must ask what beauty means and whether we can recognize it. Morrison shows us what is considered ugly and what is considered beauty and then challenges whether we have our definitions straight.

She starts out one chapter telling us about ?they? and how even the words ?they? speak are beautiful:

They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian. And the sounds of these places in their mouths make you think of love. When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say ?Mobile? and you think you?ve been kissed. They say ?Aiken? and you see a white butterfly glance off a fence with a torn wing?.You don?t know what these towns are like, but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out.

She goes on to describe these women, these brown girls who are calm, quiet, sweet, and plain. They do all the things that the so-called ?good? girls do. Morrison tell us they work hard at getting rid of funkiness: ?The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions. Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies.?

She then demonstrates how they find their beauty only through a self-imposed shallowness and a fear of feeling or experiencing anything outside a very narrow strata of acceptableness.

Beginnings are important

But I can?t escape the language in this review, because for me, this was where the beauty of the book lay. I find beginnings important. It?s the job of a writer to grab readers from the very first sentence. Morrison entices her readers with the beginning of her book. The first page begins with a recitation of an elementary reader. She then repeats the paragraph, removing the punctuation. For the next repetition, all the spaces are removed and we sense we are about to witness a journey from the clear and simple to a blur of half-understood emotions.

In her afterword, Morrison spent a fair amount of time explaining the next page, the page that begins ?Quiet as it?s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.? She then tells us the entire story of the book in three paragraphs, ending with, ?There is really nothing more to say?except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.?

Of course, there is a lot more to say, and Morrison continues with her expressive language. The first three pages are really prologue, a beginning that will be understood only once you?ve reached the end. The first ?real? chapter starts with the designation ?Autumn? and I thrilled with the imagery of the very first sentence:

Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel.

I liked it so much that I made my husband listen to me read it aloud. He thought it was contrived and stilted. He was more tolerant of the next sentence I felt compelled to read to him several pages later:

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter?like the throb of a heart made of jelly.

A Rare Treat

I read my first Toni Morrison book earlier this year, another Oprah Book Club selection, Paradise. Although many of her techniques are the same in both books, Paradise is definitely the work of a more mature author. The Bluest Eye is Morrison?s first novel, written in 1970. Yet, if I had to tell you which book I preferred, it would be The Bluest Eye. For this shorter, much less complex novel has more power because of its simplicity, because of its expressiveness, and because of the honesty that?in Morrison?s own words?hits ?the raw nerve of racial self-contempt, expose(s) it, then soothe(s) it not with narcotics but with language that replicated the agency I discovered in my first experience of beauty.?

This is a book that I will re-read when I seek inspiration on how to find a rhythm in my writing and an imagery that is fresh and original. It is a book that I will re-read when I want a reminder that novelists can break out of the standard molds and present us with something that is different and compelling.