Representation, race, and the "language" of the ineffable in Toni Morrison's narrative

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Abdellatif Khayati

Susan Willis, in "Eruptions of Funk," suggests that the "problem at the center of Morrison's writing is how to maintain an African American cultural heritage once the relationship to the black rural south has been stretched thin over distance and generations." Willis goes on to say that "Morrison's aim in writing is very often to disrupt alienation with what she calls 'eruptions of funk' "(265). Willis interprets "funk" as "nothing more than the intrusion of the past in the present," such as juxtaposing "a not so distant social mode to those evolved under bourgeois society" (280). While Willis's interpretation is relevant to the different places the novel depicts and to their social and cultural implications, it tends to idealize the culture of common black life: "Reification, while never attained by any of Morrison's characters - not even those drawn from the white world - is, instead, embodied in a number of figural images. These are the celluloid images of Shirley Temple or her 'cu-te' face on a blue-and-white china cup, and the candy-wrapper images of Mary Jane"(267-68). It seems to me that Willis uses reification to mean a commodity object, an ambient aspect of American consumer values. However, Willis's reading does not ground Morrison's politics of culture so much in a popular African American tradition as in an idealized version of the working-class ethos, and so fails to deal with the complexities and difficulties that Morrison's writing raises. One of these difficulties is the absence or, at least, the difficulty that Morrison has with grounding The Bluest Eye in an African American group memory.

Certainly Morrison uses Claudia as an oppositional voice in this novel; Claudia can even be seen as a center of double-consciousness. The novel has a double structure: On the one hand, there is the dominant codification of reality whose legitimacy is asserted through the Dick-and-Jane school primer, and on the other hand an alternative re-presentation of this rosy reality is developed through Pecola's story. Irony in the novel stems from the contradiction and discrepancy between these two discourses, often accompanied with comments from Claudia about the racial victimization of Pecola, which creates a space for dual signification. Morrison uses Claudia to identify the injustice at work and to elicit some understanding for Pecola's cause: "I felt a need for someone to want the black baby [Pecola's baby] to live - just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals" (Bluest Eye 190). Early in the novel, Claudia refuses the idealization of girlhood or motherhood through the culture of dolls, and resists the indoctrination of white standardized values. She reflects that "all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured," but she "had only one desire: to dismember it" (20). However this insurgent need to counter the oppressive forces of assimilation is not only short-lived but is not extended to the rest of the community. Morrison stresses the failure of perception: "We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word" (205-06). In this sense, what the parable about Claudia's marigolds - a botanical aberration - stands for is the lack of a life-sustaining sense of community for black Americans. In the social world that this novel depicts the cultural values of American consumer industry are totalized to a degree that what we are left with are various ways in which the distortion and denial of the black self are produced. As a result of this, The Bluest Eye is built upon a dualistic perspective of the "dominant" versus the "dominated," leaving little space for resistance.