On page 25, Morrison presents the plan of the family home in one paragraph and begins the next paragraph with the words ‘there is nothing more to say about the furnishings.’ Take for example the description of the Breedlove’s sofa. Throughout, Morrison’s evocative style ensures that each sentence is perfectly tuned, lilting between a deft and pithy remark and a flight of imagination and poetry that lends depth and breadth to each and every passage of the novel. She has few options in life, finding a glimmer of solace in the kindness with which she is treated by the three prostitutes who live above her, China, Poland, and Miss Marie, and the friendship of young neighbouring sisters Claudia and Frieda. Her own mother says words to the effect that she was born ugly. Even people in her own community look down upon her.
The local white storekeeper who sells her favourite sweets can barely register her existence, such is his inability to acknowledge a young poor black girl. Pecola is born into poverty and disenfranchisement. Set in the American south, we discover how her parents lived before coming together, reaching back into their individual childhoods and teens, as well as what tribulations ensued along the way. Pecola Breedlove wishes with every fibre of her being to have blue eyes – such is the persuasiveness of the racist white narrative. The narrowness of the arena of ‘the ‘A’ is for apple pie’ American white racist narrative that persists to this day. A device that serves as an equivalent evocation of the key theme of the book, summarised in the title. The process of extracting the breaths from the passage is a metaphor for the suffocating effect of internalised racism. Third, on the next page, she flattens the same passage, cramming the words together with no gaps – they are in the right order but there is no room to take a breath. A kind of literary traffic-jam where no-one can get through.
Second, she removes all hierarchy of punctuation and all capital letters, running each sentence into the one next to it. A green and white house with a red door where a family live – a stereotypically nuclear American white family. Morrison opens The Bluest Eye by condensing a passage from a Ladybird-type book in three increasingly breathless renditions. The post also offers some thoughts on the first novel she published, The Bluest Eye – the shimmering, tragic chronicle of a blameless little girl and her wayward family and how they arrived at their present situation. This post presents a timeline of this extraordinary woman’s life. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was in my opinion, and that of many others across the world, one of the greatest writers in the English language. First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd, 1979. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye ( London: Picador, 1990).
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