Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye（思政融入点：美国的种族歧视）

If any novelist has had a project similar to that of August Wilson in drama, it is surely Toni Morrison (1931–). “For me, in doing novels about African Americans,” she has declared, “I was trying to move away from the unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that was white history and to move it into another one.” Her work 308 The American Century: Literature since 1945 can, in fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric histories of the American experience from a distinctively African American perspective. “The crucial difference for me is not the difference between fact and fiction,”Morrison once admitted, “but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.” That search for truth began with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). It has a simple premise. A narrator, Claudia McTeer, tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl whose hunger for love is manifested in a desire for blue eyes that eventually drives her to insanity. Pecola is driven inward by the norms of white society (the bluest eye, the ideal family): to shame, the destruction and division of the self. Claudia, the narrator, finds herself directed outward, to anger against white society: finding a convenient scapegoat in the “white baby dolls” she cuts up and destroys. The Bluest Eye deconstructs the image of the white community as the site of normality and perfection. It also exposes the realities of life in an impoverished African American community, whose abject socioeconomic status is exacerbated by the politics of race. Coextensive with Morrison’s concern with the psychosocial consequences of racism is her interest in what she calls “silence and evasion”: the gaps and omissions in American history. In her second novel, Sula (1973), for example, she shows how a black community evolves and shapes itself, with its own cultural resources and elaborate social structure. She rescues it from a kind of historical anonymity. Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), sustains her commitment to what is called here “names that had a meaning”: the evolution of a distinctive black identity and community through the habit of language. A complex tapestry of memory and myth, Song of Solomon tells the story of a young man, Milkman Dead, who comes to know himself through a return to origins. Tar Baby (1981) also pursues themes of ancestry and identity, how African Americans come to name and know themselves. It does this primarily through the contrast between two characters, Jadine Childs, a model, and William (Son) Green, an outcast and wanderer. Jadine, brought up with the help of white patrons, has been assimilated into white culture; Son remains outside, in resistance to it. The identity crisis posed by the conflict between her and Son is never really resolved; Morrison adopts her usual strategy, of leaving the narrative debate open. With her fifth and most important novel so far, Beloved (1987), Morrison took the core of a real story she had encountered while working as a senior editor at Random House. It was recorded in The Black Book (1974), an eclectic collection of material relating to more than 300 years of African American history. And it concerned a fugitive slave called Margaret Garner who killed her daughter, then tried to kill her other children and herself rather than be returned to slavery.Morrison took this as the nucleus of her story about Sethe Suggs, who killed her own young daughter, Beloved, when faced with the same threat. Circling backwards and forwards in time, before and after the Civil War, the novel discloses how Sethe and other characters – especially, her daughter Denver and her lover, Paul D – struggle with a past that cannot but must be remembered and named. In other words, it pivots around the central contradiction in African American, and for that matter American, history: living with impossible memories. There is the need to remember and tell and the desire to forget; there are memories here with an inexhaustible power to erupt and overwhelm the mind which must somehow be commemorated yet laid aside if life is to continue. It is a contradiction caught in a phrase repeated in the concluding section of the narrative: “it was The American Century: Literature since 1945 309 not a story to pass on” (where “pass on” could mean either “pass over” or “pass on to others”). It is one caught, too, in the scandalous nature of the act, the killing that haunts Sethe. In that sense, the mother-daughter relationship that Morrison characteristically focuses on here is at once a denial of the institution of slavery and a measure of its power. Beloved is an extraordinary mix of narrative genres. It has elements of realism, the gothic, and African American folklore. It is a slave narrative that internalizes slavery and its consequences. It is a historical novel that insists on history as story, active rehearsal, and reinvention of the past. It weaves its way between the vernacular and a charged lyricism, the material and magical, as it emphasizes the centrality of the black, and in particular black female, experience. This is a novel that reorients history, American history in particular, to the lived experience of black people. It is also a passionate novel that sets up a vital circuit between historical events and emotional consequences, and then connects up that circuit to any one, black or white, or whatever, who reads it. “Did a whiteman saying make it so?” Paul D asks himself at one point. The immediate answer turns out to be “yes”; the ultimate answer is “no.” The novel and its characters turn out, after all, to offer another form of “saying,” a more authentic way of seeing and telling the personal and historical past. That is why the last word of Beloved is, precisely, “Beloved”; because the whole aim of the story, and its protagonist, has been to name the unnameable. After Beloved, Morrison published two books that, with it, form part of a loosely connected trilogy, Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). Morrison has said that the three novels are about “various kinds of love”: the love of a mother for her child, romantic love, and “the love of God and love for fellow human beings.” The three might equally be described as charting the history of African Americans. Jazz, set in Harlem in 1926, was inspired by Morrison reading in a book she was editing, The Harlem Book of the Dead, about a young woman who, as she lay dying, refused to identify her lover as the person who shot her. Paradise is set in 1976. In describing the intimate contact between two communities, though, one a black township and the other a refuge for women, it circles as far back as 1755. It also supplies another example of Morrison’s characteristic strategy of giving voice to the silence while initiating its own forms of silence. That is, it brings those traditionally exiled to the margins, for reasons of race, gender, or both, to the center of the stage; it allows them to name themselves and narrate their history. But it quietly intimates its own lack of authority, the blanks and absences detectable in its own account, and the responsibility that this imposes on the reader. In Beloved, for example, the reader never knows who the young girl is who returns to Sethe during the course of the story. Is she the ghost of the two-year-old daughter Sethe killed twenty years earlier? Does she recall Sethe’s nameless mother, since some of her dreams and narrations seem to recall the horrors of the Middle Passage? Is she a myriad figure, a composite of all the women ever dragged into slavery? Or is she a very singular young woman who has been driven mad by her enslavement? We cannot know, for sure: all we can do is allow these possibilities to feed into our own retelling of an intolerable, impossible past, our own project of naming the unnameable. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain what happens at the end of Paradise. The pivotal act of this novel is the shooting, and apparent killing, of the women at the refuge by nine men from the township. Paradise closes, however, with the “marvelous” disappearance of the bodies 310 The American Century: Literature since 1945 of the women and the reappearance, then, of four of them. One of the several, unresolved puzzles of this story is, therefore, what they return as, ghosts or human beings who somehow survived the attack. But just as Beloved, for all its push beyond realism, leaves no doubt as to the monstrous fact of slavery and its central place in the story of America, so Paradiseleaves no doubt about the necessityfor the reappearance of women like these, in some form or another, for the survival of the republic. Paradiseis a book about the failures of American democracy (hence its setting in the bicentennial). It is about the strengths and fatal flaws in the black community (hence its complicity in the shootings). It is about the core meaning of the African American story to American history (hence the narrative connections forged with key events since 1776). And it is also a book about the failure of patriarchy. Morrison has resisted the description of herself as a feminist. She is right to do so because Paradise, like all her novels, is so much more than a polemical statement of a position. But, in its own way, it registers a fundamentally optimistic belief in the recovery of the American republic – a belief that all her work tends to share – and, in this case, at the hands of women. Apart from the occasional excursion into drama (Dreaming Emmett (1986)) and critical and social theory (Playing in the Dark, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)), Morrison has focused on the writing of novels, her most recent being Love (2003) and A Mercy (2008). By contrast, Alice Walker (1944–) has written seven novels, on which her reputation rests, but she has also produced many volumes of poetry, collections of short stories, volumes of essays, and children’s books. All her work, in different genres, is dedicated to what she has come to call “womanism.” In fiction, Walker inaugurated her career with The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), a realistic novel describing three generations of a family whose history is marred by racial oppression and sexual violence. It is notable for its stark account of a repetitive cycle of abuse, wife beating and sexual exploitation, within the black family and community. Meridian (1976), Walker’s second novel, concentrates on the civil rights movement and the fight for social change. It is, however, centered on the experience of women. Its central character, Meridian Hill, lives in the North but returns to the South to help in a voter registration drive. Meridian, the reader learns, is “held by something in the past” that includes, above all, her mother and a church that is both her mother’s church and – whether she likes it or not – her mother church. Meridian never comes to personal terms with her mother but, by returning to her mother’s history and ancestry, she does experience a symbolic rapprochement. “Mama, Ilove you. Let me go,” Meridian is able to whisper to the figure of her mother she sees in a dream. She has made peace with her, and can move on. Meridian is also able to make her peace and come to terms with the church, and in a less purely symbolic way. For the church she encounters in the South is one transformed by the civil rights revolution. Her return to origins has initiated change, but change that is contiguous with the earlier experiences of her community. In that way, she has come back to her own history only to transcend it, and become a whole woman. Change, a purely secular salvation involving the discovery of identity and community, is also at the heart of The Color Purple (1983). At the center of this novel is Celie, the victim of racial and sexual oppression. Raped by the man she believes to be her father, she is battered and abused in a loveless marriage. Nevertheless, she gradually learns “how to do it,” how to grow into being and companionship. Her mentors here The American Century: Literature since 1945 311 are three women. One, called Sofia, teaches her by example the lesson of resistance to white and male oppression. Another, her sister Nettie, offers her a more complex lesson, primarily through her letters. A missionary who goes to work in Africa, Nettie discloses to Celie the ancient cultural and spiritual dimensions of the African American tradition: the proud inheritance they share. Through her encounters with white colonists and developers, she also quietly links the story of racial oppression in America to a larger history of imperial adventure and conquest. The third mentor Celie encounters is a blues singer, Shug Avery. The first person for whom Celie feels a definite physical attraction, Shug teaches Celie about her body, offering the possibility of sexual pleasure. She also unpacks the cultural forms that she and Celie share as African Americans: the sensual promise of jazz, the tragic melancholy of blues. And, like Sofia and Nettie, she leads by example. She is a powerful illustration of selfhood, a person who positively fills the space she occupies. More than anyone, Shug encourages Celie to believe in herself. Everything, Shug suggests, is holy. Everything is worthy of respect and wonder. The divine is to be found, not in “the old white man” worshipped in church, in this place or that, but in everything. Even the color purple. Even, and especially, Celie. It is a profoundly American sentiment, this belief in a democracy of being, a divinity that informs every individual. And it allows Celie to flower from absence into presence: to become herself. Since writing The Color Purple, Walker has written several books that push at the formal boundaries of fiction while developing themes and revisiting characters first encountered in this seminal 1983 novel. The Temple of My Familiar (1989), for instance, explores a wide variety of subjects from a womanist perspective. It reintroduces Shug Avery; it introduces us to the granddaughter of Celie; it is, perhaps, not so much a novel as a collection of loosely related tales. In turn, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) picks up the issue of female circumcision, touched on in The Color Purple as a symptom of male cultural violence; By the Light of My Father’s Smile(1998) explores the thin boundaries between different ethnic traditions, and between life and death; and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004) describes a woman’s quest to accept the ageing process. No subsequent book, however, has matched The Color Purple or Meridian as an account of the discovery of being. And none has matched The Color Purple in its revelatory use of form. The Color Purple is not just a story of personal growth that happens to be written as a series of letters. It achieves its meaning precisely by being an epistolary novel: returning to one of the oldest forms of prose fiction and using that as the key to opening up the self. Celie writes herself into existence, into contact with herself and communion with others. And those others include the readers, since the letters are ultimately addressed to us. 

Preview questions:

1. What is the theme of the novel, TheBluest Eye?

2. Explain the connotation of the title The Bluest Eye? Why did the author use the singular form of the word“eye"?

3. Talk about the narration of the novel,The Bluest Eye.