Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ Through the ‘Narrative Project’

Kim, Joshua. “Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ Through the ‘Narrative Project’.” Philologia 11, no. 1 (2019): pp. 43–51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/ph.175 RESEARCH Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ Through the ‘Narrative Project’ Joshua Kim Virginia Tech, US In “Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ through the ‘Narrative Project,’” I claim that Morrison critiques the intellectual practice known as modernist purifica tion. This essay complicates earlier studies which simplify The Bluest Eye as a text solely concerned with racism inflicted on African Americans by whites. Rather, modernist purification and mediation shed light on the underlying mechanisms by which characters in the text (blacks and whites) are reduced into ideological abstractions devoid of subjective experiences and worth. This practice allows for the “disinterested violence” to be inflicted on all races seem more permissible. I then assert that the notion of the “narrative project” (coined by Morrison) provides the proper medium by which a critique of purification may be made. However, in order for Morrison to critique purification as afflicted on characters, such as the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, Morrison must engage in a type of scientific inquiry which necessitates the enactment of purification, echoing Émile Zola’s notion of the “experimental novel.” In Morrison’s “scientific inquiry,” however, there arises a paradox: she must enact and reify that which she also critiques. In a fashion that recalls Robert Musil’s juxtaposed discursive modes in The Man without Qualities, Morrison attempts to alleviate the aforementioned conundrum (her own potential for “disinterested violence” in the writing of her novel) by establishing a pair of paradigmatic shifts in the novel’s narrative structure and its ethical/moral aims. Keywords: Toni Morrison; Modernism; Modernist Purification; Narrative; Émile Zola; Robert Musil; The Bluest Eye Name? Age? Occupation? Address? Ulrich was being questioned. He felt as though he had been sucked into a machine that was dismembering him into impersonal, general components before the question of his guilt or innocence came up at all. His name, the most intellectually meaningless yet most emotionally charged words in the language for him, meant nothing here … His face counted only as an aggregate of officially describable features − it seemed to him that he had never before pondered the fact that his eyes were gray eyes, one of four officially recognized kinds of eyes, one pair among millions; his hair was blond, his build tall, his face oval, and his distinguishing marks none, although he had his own opinion on that point. −Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Volume I They were everything. Everything was there, in them. All of those pictures, all of those faces. −Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye I. Introduction Despite its status as a debut novel, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) is at once intricate, complicated, and ambitious in its scope and implications. The novel’s protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, desperately wishes to attain blue eyes despite (and arguably because of) “the unyielding earth” of her status as a black girl (Morrison 3). Her predicament, marked by the unbridgeable chasm between how she wishes to see the world and how she finds it reminds us of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and even Yukio Mishima’s Kiyoaki Matsugae, who dies in pursuit of an unrequited love, an unfulfilled ideal, prompting a grieving friend to lament, “it would unquestionably be wonderful if a man could really make 44 Kim: Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye the substance of the world truly conform to that of his innermost heart” (Mishima 387). The Bluest Eye channels universal themes and in so doing joins a rich literary tradition (broadly speaking, that of Europe but also of world literature) which predates (and informs) American and African American literature. The inclusion of Morrison into a type of conversation between her novels and works of European and/or world literature does not diminish Morrison’s contributions to American and African American literature despite critics’ fears. Nor does it lessen Morrison’s status as an accomplished novelist in her own right. As with any novelist or artist, Morrison inherits from a set of precursors and responds to them, in part, by adapting and applying universal themes to a milieu that has been perhaps until now underrepresented. Valerie Smith notes that despite the “universal” nature of Morrison’s work, “Morrison’s writing is famously steeped in the nuances of African-American language, music, everyday life, and cultural history” (270). Similarly, Timothy Parrish asserts that though Morrison’s novels undoubtedly serve as testaments to “her complex understanding of modernist prose aesthetics … the true achievement of her fiction has been to give voice to an African-American point of view previously unrepresented in American literature” (xxxii). These two points intersect in Smith’s claim: “Morrison uses her fiction to mine the unexplored depths of American culture” (270). Morrison’s work, and specifically, The Bluest Eye, in all its complexity, has generated a number of compelling and diverse readings over the past few decades. Debra T. Werrlein, for example, examines the interplay between childhood innocence in American culture, a national ideology of innocence, and popular culture in The Bluest Eye. Donald B. Gibson reframes The Bluest Eye as a “countertextual” novel that, unlike most works of social critique, engages in a conversation with itself to clarify by complication (rather than by simplification) the social conundrums present in the text. Arguably, Werrlein approaches the novel with an amalgamation of cultural, social, and historical frameworks in mind. On the other hand, Gibson encapsulates his various readings of the novel within the framework of a narrative structure (the “countertext”). Inevitably, a study which emphasizes the cultural, social, and/or historical facets of a novel often sacrifices much-needed commentary on a work’s narrative structure. The inverse is often true as well. I argue, though, that in The Bluest Eye, the narrative form and structure is inextricably linked to the novel’s examination of the cultural phenomenon known as Modernity (which will be used loosely henceforth, for obvious reasons). Narrative structure and notions of Modernity, as critiqued by Austrian philosophical writer Robert Musil, are centered around a notion I would like to term, not unlike Gibson’s “countertext,” counter-paradigms. Though scholars and readers have offered differing suggestions as to who or what exactly “centers” the novel − Pecola, Claudia (Pecola’s friend and part-time narrator), or the titular “bluest eye” that is (...truncated)