The Bluest Eye

Nederlands (English below)

Winter tightened our heads with a band of cold and melted our eyes. We put pepper in the feet of our stockings, Vaseline on our faces, and stared through dark icebox mornings at four stewed prunes, slippery lumps of oatmeal, and cocoa with a roof of skin.

This is my third Toni Morrison, and Beloved is still my favorite so far, but it’s clearly always going to be a good book when I pick hers up.

The main thing I’d say I didn’t enjoy as much about this book is the fact that we explore multiple character perspectives and stories. It’s almost more a collection of related short stories than a novel. I prefer sticking with a smaller cast, BUT, I will say she does a lot with each of them all the same. It’s not a shallow dip into multiple characters, you are getting right into their deepest secrets and shames.

The use of the Dick and Jane type story was striking. I don’t think I have to be all that insightful to see the contrast she’s drawing between the children’s story with the perfect little white suburban family and the lives of the Black people in the novel.

I guess in the end, Pecola’s really the protagonist even though you don’t get her perspective until the end. It feels like a lot of the story ultimately revolves around her even though she not the viewpoint most of the time.

There’s a lot of humor in this book when the focus is on the little girls. Morrison captures kid talk well. But it’s far outweighed by the really dark passages. There are a few nearer the end of the book that are pretty repulsive. It’s bizarre to read such expressive, beautiful writing describing such awful things.

Given the title, I was a little worried someone was going to poke their own eyes out. I don’t think that’s too far fetched for Morrison to write.

“Public fact becomes private reality, and the seasons of a Midwestern town become the Moirai of our small lives.”

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a clever novel that from the outset makes its intentions clear: its purpose is not to tell you what happened or how it happened—though it does this as well—but to explore the explosive question: why? Apparently this book has been controversial and on numerous banned books lists, and I can see why; despite being required reading for schoolchildren, Morrison does not shy away from heavy topics and ‘adult’ themes. More than a few times I was surprised by the details she had included in the text. Yet nothing is done gratuitously or to shock the reader; everything follows seamlessly from what has been established, and the reader can do nothing but nod along sympathetically as the story unfolds before them.

The novel’s primary concern is Pecola Breedlove, though we see her primarily through the perspective of others—the MacTeer sisters, her parents, neighbors, strangers, etc. Of course, race is a huge theme of the novel, with Pecola’s insecurities lying not only with her apparent ugliness but also her blackness. Hence the title—she wishes she could have ‘blue eyes’, what would then become a panacea for all of her social ills. There are a lot of metaphors in this book, both heavy-handed and subtle ones, but the blue eyes are of course the most significant. I particularly loved how Morrison framed the novel; usually, having multiple perspectives can bog down a story, resulting in a weaker plot. But the novel already told the reader that the plot is not of consequence here, since we know it in its entirety from the outset. Rather, the novel introduces characters slowly, or in the background; then, it gradually takes us through their perspectives and histories, without immediately making it clear whom the book is referring to. This kind of storytelling is brilliantly done, as it beguiles the reader into feeling sympathy and understanding for a certain character before revealing the inner moral complexity of the character, and what role they play in Pecola’s grievances.

However, some of the more literary aspects of the novel were difficult to get through. I am primarily plot-oriented when I go through novels, and I knew it would be an uphill battle for me reading this; but I also appreciate philosophically heavy themes, and Morrison does not shy away from that. However, she does at times cloak these thoughts in repetitive inner monologues or seemingly abrupt textual insertions. Other times, she spends a great deal of the page describing the setting or how a character looks; having aphantasia, I find such passages utterly dull in any book. I can appreciate the lyrical and picturesque language that Morrison employs with such ease, but my brain wanted to speed through to find out what actually happens.

This book is certainly a classic for a reason, and I am glad this was my introduction to Morrison’s corpus. Hopefully, it is the first but not the last!

Trickle-down works — just not in the way the plutocrats would have you think. It works through the countless daily cruelties, microaggressions to monstrous ones, cascading down from each wounded person down to whomever is ever-so-slightly lower on the status ladder, from the weak to the weaker because you can’t lash back up so violence is displaced down to the smaller and more vulnerable. It works because there’s always someone smaller and more vulnerable, all the way down until the lowest bottommost child, and who but Morrison really cares about her anyway? It works by fostering an atmosphere so thick with resentment and bitterness that there's scarcely room for anything else, or even the awareness that there could be anything else.

This is a haunting book. Morrison writes with such tenderness; with understanding for her characters and how they got that way. No cookie-cutter heroes or villains, and it’s so much harder to judge or dismiss people with backstories. Morrison also writes so beautifully, such powerful sentences and images. It took me a long time to read because so many paragraphs begged me to read them again.

I don't give a lot of five stars. But this one deserved it, if only for the poetic flow of her prose, the imagery. I fell madly in love with the metaphors- the blue eyes for a universal beauty that the ugly black girl Pecola Breedlove could never have, clean/white things for white people, beauty. In one passage she writes the character Claudia been cleaned, scrubbing "the ink" (blackness) off of her. There were other metaphors as well but these are the ones that stood out.

We don't get to see much of the sisters, Claudia and Freida who befriend the subject of the story, Pecola Breedlove, the girl who felt so unnoticed and ugly that she wanted Blue eyes. Pecola comes from a poor, broken home, where her dad and mom physically fight each other in one turn and make love the next. Kids pick on Pecola. There was even a girl, a Mulatto girl, who pretends to befriend Pecola after Pecola was picked on in the school yard by several boys. The Mulatto girl is pretty with green eyes. She takes Pecola, Claudia and Freida for ice cream but doesn't treat the two sisters. She treats Pecola, and then sneakily puts in a jab, the same jab the boys had before they left for the ice cream shop, "Pecola seen her daddy nekked" only she did it on the sly.

I felt that Pecola's life was so miserable- there wasn't anything happy about her existence. At all. The catalyst for her was just awful. Her father rapes her and impregnates her. But Morrison handles this with a deftness I don't think any other writer could pull off. It is in the chapter where we get to know about the past of Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's father. There is a section break and the rape happens. Because we know why Cholly is a drunk, violent, nobody, and because Morrison explains Cholly's motives, which aren't good but they make you empathize with him, at least for a moment, the whole rape scene is not as painful as it could have been. Pecola is 11 and has already had her period, which there is a scene of this earlier in the novel. We don't know how old Cholly is.

I really wish there was more, something happier for Pecola other than the prostitutes whose home she hung out in. The whores gave her soda and candy, told her stories. But we were only introduced to them briefly. I would have liked to have seen more interaction between Pecola and the prostitutes.

Also, although I liked the imagery and metaphor, it got a bit heavy handed in the second chapter. I was starting to get weary of it. I don't know. Maybe I was tired but I would read lines and think, "What the fuck is she trying to say?" But I didn't feel that way at all during the rest of the book. 5 stars.