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

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Abdellatif Khayati

Put differently, the central problem remains that African American culture and values are depicted as helpless in response to external assimilationist pressure. In The Bluest Eye, black folk culture survives through disparate, single memories, such as when Pauline remembers Ivy, "who seemed to hold in her mouth all of the sounds of Pauline's soul. Standing a little apart from the choir, Ivy sang the dark sweetness that Pauline could not name; she sang the death-defying death that Pauline yearned for" (114). Poland, one of the three prostitutes, is another folk figure in the novel who, we are told, "hummed mostly or chanted blues songs, of which she knew many" (53). In her "sweet strawberry voice," Poland sings of "a boy who is sky-soft brown" (58). Blues and folk tales, the sites of group memory for blacks, will constitute a strategy of re-memory in later novels like Song of Solomon and Beloved, but what seems to be at work here is the contrived and fake ritual of Soaphead, who perversely lets Pecola believe that her eyes have changed into blue!

In the "Afterword" to The Bluest Eye, Morrison, discussing the difficulties that the writing of this novel involved, says that one difficulty was "centering" - an issue that has to do with perspective and narrative construction. Morrison particularly mentions that she was not fully successful in leading readers into "an interrogation of themselves for the smashing" that Pecola undergoes but instead allows us "the comfort of pitying her." Pecola, she says, does not handle effectively "the silence" at the center of the novel, and lacks the "deft manipulation of the voices around her" (215). The two points Morrison mentions here - "the silence" and "the manipulation of the voices around" Pecola - are salient features of her novels and are crucial, in my view, to any critical discussion that takes these novels seriously. They involve language and narrative construction, and display Morrison's persistent interest in what she calls "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (Beloved 199), a phrase that resonates for her with the silence surrounding many things repressed in the African American unconscious, or distorted beyond recognition in the American Africanist discourse. The question becomes how to break off this silence and in what form.

As I briefly noted earlier, the novel as an art form is one of the most important ways to transmit and receive knowledge. The way the novelist organizes this knowledge is socially and politically important. While Morrison is aware that, rather than music, "the novel is needed by African Americans now in a way that it was not needed before," she also insists on incorporating into this traditional genre "unorthodox novelistic characteristics" to create a narrative form which "uses the characteristics of Black art" ("Rootedness" 340). As she is right to point out, historically the novel emerged in Western societies when "there was a new class, a middle class, to read it"; it was an art form designed for this class, not for the lower classes, who "had songs, and dances, and ceremony, and gossip and celebrations" (342). Morrison's reconceptualization of the novel, on the other hand, seeks to incorporate precisely those elements that have been excluded from or repressed in this traditional genre. These elements belong to the oral tradition of African Americans and are, as she reformulates them in the "Afterword" to The Bluest Eye, "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." Morrison seeks, in these ways, "to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture" (215-16) and to produce points of anchorage or rootedness for the author's sense of her black community. (I say the author's sense because Morrison's positionality as a woman writer bears closely on her view of women in this community.)