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The Blues Aesthetic
in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
by CAT MOSES
The blues aesthetic is an ethos of blues people that manifests itself
in everything done, not just in the music. (ya Salaam 2)
Readers of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, are often so
overwhelmed by the narrative's emotional content--the child Pecola's
incestuous rape, ensuing pregnancy, and subsequent abandonment by her
community and descent into madness--that they miss the music in this
lyrically "songified" narrative. [1] Morrison has stated that her
narrative "effort is to be like something that has probably only been
fully expressed perhaps in music... " ("Interview" 408). The Bluest Eye
is the genesis of her effort "to do what the music did for blacks, what
we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that
civilization that existed underneath the white civilization" (Morrison,
"Language" 371). The catharsis and the transmission of cultural
knowledge and values that have always been central to the blues form
the thematic and rhetorical underpinnings of The Bluest Eye. The
narrative's structure follows a pattern common to traditional blues
lyrics: a movement from an initial emphasis on loss to a conclud ing
suggestion of resolution of grief through motion. In between its
initial statement of loss and its final emphasis on movin' on, The
Bluest Eye contains an abundance of cultural wisdom. The blues lyrics
that punctuate the narrative at critical points suggest a system of
folk knowledge and values that is crucial to a young black woman's
survival in the 1930s and '40s and which supports Claudia's cathartic
role as storyteller. The lyrics also illustrate the folk knowledge and
values that are not transmitted to Pecola--information without which
she cannot survive as a whole and healthy human being.
In traditional blues songs, the singer is the subject, the I who tells
her (or his) own story. In The Bluest Eye, however, Claudia tells
Pecola's story. Except for a few fragmented lines of dialogue, Pecola
remains silent within Claudia's narrative. Much of the critical
discourse on the novel has focused on the relationship between voice
and empowerment, and on the problematics of a narrative that silences
its dispossessed protagonist while seeking to empower the dispossessed
and to critique power relations. This essay addresses the apparent
contradiction between The Bluest Eye's silenced protagonist and its
traditionally African American equation of voice with empowerment by
situating Claudia's narrative voice within African American oral
traditions and a blues aesthetic. I posit Claudia as the narrative's
blues subject, its bluest "I" and representative blues figure, and
Pecola as the abject tabula rasa on which the community's blues are
inscribed. I assert that, rather than singing Pecola's blues, Claudia
"sings" the community's blues. Claudia bears witness, through the oral
tradition of testifying, to the community's lack of self-love and its
transference of this lack onto the abject body of Pecola.
In the first section below, I address the initial reference to a
specific blues song in the novel by discussing the lyrics and structure
of "The St. Louis Blues" as representative of traditional blues. I then
lay the foundation for a discussion of The Bluest Eye as a blues
narrative. In the ensuing section, I build upon this foundation to
discern a female blues subjectivity in The Bluest Eye, a subjectivity
constructed through African American oral traditions and embodied in
the three whores' speech, song, and laughter, and in Claudia's
narrative voice. Finally, I position Claudia's subjectivity within a
blues aesthetic and her voice within the oral tradition of testifying.
The earliest reference to a specific blues in The Bluest Eye follows
the scene in which Mrs. MacTeer harangues the girls after Pecola
consumes what Mrs. MacTeer deems more than her share of the milk in the
refrigerator, and it precedes the narrative of Pecola's first
menstruation. This reference to the blues, then, forms a bridge between
childhood (the milk consumption represents Pecola's effort to
consume--and become--Shirley Temple) and womanhood. The blues to which
Claudia refers exemplify the cultural knowledge and values transmitted
orally to Claudia that ease and assist her transition into
womanhood--folk wisdom that is not conveyed to Pecola. The blues are
first represented in the text in Claudia's reminiscence about the
Saturdays when her "mother was in a singing mood." Claudia recalls
snatches of lyrics from "hard times" songs her mother frequently sings,
including the phrase "hate to see that evening sun go down," a
reference to one of the earliest recorded and most popular blues songs,
"St. Louis B lues," by W. C. Handy (25).
Musicians from the early twentieth century to the present have revised,
improvised, and recorded Handy's classic, whose lyrics convey a wealth
of folk knowledge and cultural values. Hearing her mother sing the
blues, Claudia finds herself
longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without "a thin
di-ime to my name." I looked forward to the delicious time when "my
man" would leave me, when I would "hate to see that evening sun go
down..."' cause then I would know "my man has left this town." Misery
colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all the grief
out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only
endurable, it was sweet. (25-26)
The lyrical language in which Claudia describes her mother's singing is
suggestive of the sweet and cathartic tone of traditional blues. The
tone and the positive spectrum of emotion she describes as the colors
of her mother's voice are more powerfully affecting than the pain
signified by the words. Morrison tells us that music was one of "the
most prominent elements" in her own early life ("Interview" 396). Her
mother was a singer, and her home was filled with the seductive blues
yearning that Claudia describes, a yearning at the emotional center of
the "St. Louis Blues" and The Bluest Eye.
In referring to the "St. Louis Blues," Morrison has chosen a blues that
registers all of the central concerns of The Bluest Eye. Both the song
and the novel exhibit a lyrical progression from an initial statement
of loss to a concluding statement of resolve to move on, literally and
figuratively. The song opens on the traditional blues note of loss or
lack: The speaker's man has left her with an empty bed, and
consequently she hates to see the lonely nighttime come. The song then
proceeds immediately, in the second verse, to the suggestion of
resolution through the motion nearly always implied in the blues:
"Feelin' tomorrow lak I feel today / I'll pack mah trunk, an' make mah
getaway."
Houston Baker writes that the notion of resolution of earthly problems
through motion is implied in the sound of the blues:
The dominant blues syntagm in America is an instrumental imitation of
train-wheels-over-track-junctures. The sound is the "sign," as it were,
of the blues, and it combines an intriguing melange of phonics:
rattling gondolas, clattering flatbeds, quilling whistles, clanging
bells, rumbling boxcars, and other railroad sounds.... If desire and
absence are driving conditions of blues performance, the amelioration
of such conditions is implied by the onomatopoeic training of blues
voice and instrument. [2]
Baker
add that, "even as [the blues] speak of paralyzing absence and
ineradicable desire, their instrumental rhythms suggest change,
movement, action ..." (8). This observation certainly applies to the
"St. Louis Blues," a traditional twelve-bar blues augmented with an
eight-bar bridge and an additional twelve-bar blues. Its rhymed
couplets, most of them obeying strict iambic pentameter, develop a
complex iteration of cultural values and direct a black audience to
sources of support and sustenance in times of trouble.
Like many other blues, the "St. Louis Blues" suggests a literal as well
as a tropological resolution through motion: The speaker announces her
intent to board a train and seek her lover who has left for St. Louis,
invoking cultural wisdom that may be interpreted in literal as well as
figurative terms. She suggests that looking up a friend employed by the
railroad lines is the first step toward a way out of troubled times
(verse seven). This is excellent practical advice in a time period when
the railroads employed large numbers of black men in some of the
better-paying, service-oriented positions in the urban North. For black
people negotiating the route of the Great Migration, from the Jim Crow
South to the urban North, friends on the railroad line were
indispensable. A friend on the railroad could be a poor person's only
ticket to ride. In figurative terms this verse suggests that there is a
way out of troubled times and that this way out involves forming and
relying on a close-knit community and making on e's needs known. It
also suggests that the two-timing man may not be the speaker's only
love interest ("mah ol' frien', Jeff / Gwine to pin mahself close to
his side / If I flag his train, I sho can ride"), and that women can
give as well as they get in the field of intimate intrigues.
Figuratively, in referring to the train, the song suggests to the
listener's imagination the sound of the train, echoed in the sound of
the blues, and at this juncture of sound and reference to sound, the
promise of motion and change is magnified and enhanced.
James McPherson, in Railroad: Trains and Train People in American
Culture, notes that to nineteenth-century
backwoodsmen, Africans, and recent immigrants--the people who comprised
the vernacular segment of society ... the [steam engine locomotive]
might have been loud and frightening, but its whistle and its wheels
promised movement. And since a commitment to both freedom and movement
was the basic premise of democracy, it was probable that such people
would view the locomotive as a challenge to the integrative powers of
their imaginations. (6) [3]
Claudia tells the reader twice that Mrs. MacTeer is "all the time
singing about trains and Arkansas" (98). Claudia, with her keen sense
of justice, hears freedom and democracy in what Houston Baker would
call the "trained" sound of her mother's singing voice. The Saturdays
on which her mother does not sing are "lonesome, fussy, soapy days.
Second in misery only to those tight, starchy, cough-drop Sundays, so
full of 'don'ts' and 'set' cha self downs'" (25). The singing Saturdays
are full of possibility; her mother's "voice so sweet and her
singing-eyes so melty" (25) stir her imagination and yearning, and
leave her with a sense of "conviction" (26) that sustains her in times
of trouble.
The singing subject of
the "St. Louis Blues" is a female, [4] and in verse seven she yearns
for the sense of dominion, motion, and freedom represented by the
masculine railroad line ("If I flag his train, I sho can ride"). The
tone and tenor of Claudia's narrative express a similar longing. In
employing the "St. Louis Blues" to provoke and represent Claudia's
yearning, Morrison inverts traditional notions of the masculine and the
feminine and claims for Claudia some of the "masculinity" that she will
later claim for Sula. The notion that there is always somewhere else to
go when hard times hit, and a way to get there, sustains Claudia. The
only somewhere else for Pecola to go is insane. The poverty of her
imagination, an imagination which has not been nurtured by the blues or
any other source of cultural sustenance, is reflected in the
destitution of the Breedlove home.
The traditional progression from cathartic statement of loss to
announcement of the intent to achieve resolution through motion is
accomplished in the first two verses of the "St. Louis Blues." The
remaining eight verses that Claudia would have become familiar with
through her mother's repeated performances affirm cultural values
essential to her growth and development--and the growth and development
of any young, black, working-class person. The third verse of the song
iterates a theme that is central to this novel and that runs throughout
the body of Morrison's work: The glitz of beauty industry consumer
products that reify light skin and straight hair--the make-up and
fashion apparel ruined in the rain on Hagar's fatal shopping spree in
Song of Solomon, for example--can be both powerful and powerfully
misleading. Verse three argues that it is not the St. Louis woman who
has stolen the speaker's man, it is "diamon' rings ... / powder an'...
store-bought hair." The St. Louis woman is not present in this ver se;
rather, her presence is suggested solely by the reified products with
which she adorns herself. Verse four of the "St. Louis Blues"
recapitulates the song's initial sense of loss. It echoes the soulless
emptiness that the speaker asserts (in the third verse) lies beneath
the St. Louis Woman's patina of beauty and success. In The Bluest Eye,
Maureen Peal is more a conglomeration of signifying
products--"patent-leather shoes with buckles ... sweaters the color of
lemon drops ... a brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur, and a
matching muff"--than a presence (62). Her surname may be read as
Morrison's signifying on the word peel to emphasize 'skin,' 'rind,'
'patina,' or 'husk.'
The last two
verses of the "St. Louis Blues" relate cultural values absolutely
crucial to Claudia's survival and Pecola's downfall, and speak to the
sensitive issue at the emotional center of The Bluest Eye: caste
prejudice, or intraracism based upon skin tone. Verse nine describes
the sought-after man as "stovepipe brown" and links his desirability to
his dark-toned skin; and verse ten inverts the caste hierarchy that has
filtered down from the dominant white culture into Lorain's black
community, a caste hierarchy that privileges light skin, blue eyes, and
European features and that is embodied in Maureen Peal. The speaking
subject of the "St. Louis Blues" constructs a striking visual image of
the desired man as "Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce /
Blackest man in de whole St. Louis." She then employs this image in a
direct inversion of the dominant caste hierarchy, closing the verse
with a popular aphorism, passed down through generations of African
Americans, that assigns the highest aesthe tic value to the darkest
skin: "Blacker de berry, sweeter is de juice...." While Claudia is
regularly serenaded--on Saturdays, when her mother was in a singing
mood--with this concise, confident, and lyrical deconstruction of the
Shirley Temple aesthetic, Pecola is rejected by Pauline, who embraces
the "corn-yellow"-haired child of her white employers. One of the
novel's more chilling scenes, rivaled in emotional content only by the
rape scene, is the one in which Pauline slaps Pecola for accidentally
overturning the blueberry cobbler, throws her out of the house, and
then tenderly embraces the white Fisher child, who calls her by her
first name (Pecola must call her mother "Mrs. Breedlove" [107-09]).
Clearly, Pauline has internalized the notion that black is not
beautiful. Pecola and the dark berries in the bubbling cobbler with
which she is associated are objects to be swept out of the way as
Pauline rushes to embrace the rich white child.
Claudia's defiance of and Pecola's internalization of the Shirley
Temple aesthetic are illustrated in the Maureen Peal
"six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie" episode (61-73). In rejecting
Maureen and "calling her out of her name," Claudia rejects the
intraracism implicit in the privileging of Maureen's "high yellow
dream" complexion and her "two lynch ropes" of long brown hair (62).
Pecola desires what Claudia rejects: light skin, straight hair, blue
eyes, and the social status they represent. Claudia's defiance is a
learned and nurtured defiance, encouraged by a severe but loving mother
who sings to her on Saturdays. Pecola internalizes the caste aesthetic
that the "St. Louis Blues" mediates against, an aesthetic that Morrison
argues has insidiously infiltrated not only families like the
Breedloves but whole communities.
Claudia tells us that she comes to embrace this aesthetic tentatively,
reluctantly, and consciously. As IngerAnne Softing notes, "Claudia is
the only character in this novel who consciously makes an attempt at
deconstructing the ideology of the dominant society. This is seen in
her dismembering of the dolls" (90). Describing her gradual awareness
that her violent dismembering of white baby dolls was unacceptable,
Claudia speaks of a conversion "from pristine sadism to fabricated
hatred to fraudulent love.... I learned much later to worship [Shirley
Temple], just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as
I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement" (23).
This awareness of her reluctant capitulation to intraracism seems
remarkable in a child. It is almost certainly the observation of the
adult Claudia, who is engaged in the act of remembering and
interpreting her childhood. Still, it is noteworthy that the child
Claudia seems to stand alone in her critique of a "master" aesthet ic
that is internalized by nearly everyone in her community, from the
adults who give the gift of white baby dolls and Shirley Temple cups,
to Geraldine, to the bully boys who taunt Pecola and whose words
Maureen Peal repeats: "'Black and ugly black e mos'" (73).
Morrison has stated that her purpose in writing the novel was to "peck
away at the gaze that condemns" Pecola's blackness as ugly ("Afterword"
210); Morrison critiques the "racial self-loathing" implicit in the
community's valorization of Maureen Peal and the peel/skin color/caste
hierarchy that she represents. Whereas Maureen Peal and Shirley Temple
serve as icons of the destructive reification of caste and whiteness,
respectively, the "St. Louis Blues" singing subject recognizes the
vapidity beneath the husk of powder, rings, and store-bought hair.
Claudia, too, even as a child, recognizes the self-loathing inherent in
the condemning gaze, and the blues wisdom that fills the house on
Claudia's mother's singing Saturdays has fostered this recognition.
Thus, Morrison implies that the MacTeers have retained a connection to
ancestral knowledge essential to survival in their current situation, a
connection lost to the Breedloves.
The Breedloves follow a trajectory away from the values of the black,
poor, rural South and toward values that serve the interests of a
privileged, white upper-middle class and of capitalism itself. This
trajectory serves to instill in the Breedloves' own family a sense of
worthlessness and lack. Morrison makes it clear that Cholly and Pauline
Breedlove, and particularly Pauline, were once connected to a community
that embodied the cultural values expressed in the blues. In Pauline's
italicized narrative fragments concerning her girlhood in the rural
South, she recalls a delicious yearning and pleasure associated not
with consumer products but with community and with the associated
fruits of the earth [5]:
When I
first seed Cholly I want you to know it was like all the bits of color
from that time down home when us chil'ren went berry picking after a
funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they
mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple,
and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that
purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap
came in out the fields. It be cool and yellowish .... And that streak
of green the june bugs made on the trees the night we left from down
home. All of them colors was in me. (115)
Pauline's use of the word colors to name an abstract emotional yearning
recalls the blues yearning instilled in Claudia by the sound of her
mother's voice. The above passage is, in essence, Pauline's blues, and
it expresses a longing for home and community and a choice to move on,
to "go down to the crossroads," as Robert Johnson put it in his
historic blues, and head north. In lyrically expressing a longing for
the rural Southern community that revolved around church ("Sunday
dress") and ritual ("berry picking," "funeral"). Pauline accomplishes
what the blues singer accomplishes: She recreates that which is lost
and for which she longs, transforming lack into poetry. Unfortunately,
the transformation is temporary and exists only in her memory.
Pauline's narrative traces her movement toward the white bourgeois
values represented by the Hollywood films that seduce her, and by the
flawless home of the Fishers. The lure of the material supplants her
memories of community, even though she can never hope to posses s what
she longs for.
Pauline seeks
acceptance and success in terms defined by a white power structure that
excludes her, whereas Claudia possesses an altogether different
understanding of social structures. She seems intuitively to understand
a central tenet of blues wisdom embodied in the "St. Louis Blues": Seek
alternative forms of knowledge and understanding within the community,
not in the white power structure. These forms are represented by the
song's reference to the "gypsy," [6] a figure who has a long history in
African American literature and oral culture. [7]
The "gypsy" fortune teller or root doctor figure is negatively
personified in The Bluest Eye by Soaphead Church. Claudia understands
that Soaphead Church may reside within the community, but he is not of
the community. She seems instinctively to understand that Church
despises blackness and lives in thrall to a value system that excludes
him. Because Claudia is part of the community, she is privy to
information circulated orally about Church's "nasty" habit of molesting
young girls. But Pecola, because she is treated as an outcast, is not
privy to this knowledge. She sees in Church an outcast like herself,
living on the fringes of the community, and in her first visit to him
she is made to understand that he despises blackness just as she
despises her own blackness. Pecola visits Church hoping for some magic,
but Morrison twists the root doctor/fortune teller figure into a
self-loathing, obsessive-compulsive child molester in order to
underscore the dangerous nature of the only alternative sources of
knowled ge and succor available to children like Pecola, whose families
and communities are not looking out for their well-being.
The cultural values and knowledge embodied in the blues and transmitted
orally to Claudia enable her to develop what would much later come to
be called a black aesthetic. [8] Claudia does not, however, passively
absorb this body of cultural knowledge and draw strength from it. She
not only hears the blues, but she listens to and, more importantly,
"sings" the blues. Indeed, the blues define her storytelling voice and
style. Claudia is a blues subject engaged in what Kalamu ya Salaam
calls the act of "reclaiming the black blues self."
As a singing subject, Claudia has some talented and versatile models in
The Bluest Eye. Mrs. MacTeer and Poland serenade the reader with only a
few lines, but these lines constitute a rich variety of blues
expression that reflects the range of techniques Claudia employs as a
blues narrator. Like Mrs. MacTeer singing the "St. Louis Blues" and
Pauline reconstructing the rural South in blues prose, Poland
transforms lack into poetry:
I got blues in my mealbarrel
Blues up on the shelf
I got blues in my mealbarrel
Blues up on the shelf
Blues in my bedroom
'Cause I'm sleeping by myself. (51)
The transformation of lack, loss, and grief into poetic catharsis is
the constitutive task of the blues singer, and it is the labor that
Claudia accomplishes in narrating The Bluest Eye. Central to the
transmogrification of lack into poetry in Poland's "Mealbarrel Blues"
is an assertion of subjectivity: In singing to affirm not having
(blues, not meal, fill the mealbarrel), Poland establishes a desiring
self. In desiring, she exists, and in naming her desire, she acts to
fulfill it.
In the act of naming
the blues (which Poland does five times in the verse above, in every
line but the last), she calls down the power of Nommo, defined by
Angela Y. Davis as a "West African philosophical concept ... 'the magic
power of the word' ... the very basis of music" (6). In naming the
blues, Poland activates the catharsis that holds the promise of
ameliorating the blues. Davis goes on to assert that, in keeping with
the tradition of Nommo, black women blues artists historically have
shaped and interpreted a female blues subject who yearns for freedom.
She emphasizes that the yearned-for freedom is not to be confused with
Western notions of symbolic freedom; rather, given the material
conditions of blues production, freedom must be understood first as
literal--ownership of one's body--and, later (in history), as
material--control over the means of production, and freedom from
poverty, discrimination, debt, and disenfranchisement. Davis asserts
that the sexual desire expressed in African American wome n's blues
lyrics is a "camouflaged dream of a new social order" (14). It is also
an assertion of women's control over their bodies.
When a woman is living in desperate material conditions, with nothing
but the blues in her pantry, her body is all that she owns and
controls; thus, assertion of ownership and control is a courageous
political statement. Women blues singers from Ma Rainey to Koko Taylor
have boldly and boastfully asserted their sexuality. When Mr. Henry
molests Frieda and Frieda explains to Claudia the nature of his
transgression, Claudia attempts to insert her voice into this
tradition, and Morrison emphasizes the humor and naivete in the
guileless child's attempt. Claudia enthusiastically asks, "'Really? How
did it feel?'" (99). She then asks if it didn't feel good, and displays
an innocent jealousy at Mr. Henry's choosing Frieda instead of her,
aligning herself with the blues singer who complains of an empty bed.
The three whores embody the blues singer's assertion of sexuality,
desirability, and ownership of their bodies. Nowhere in the novel is
this clearer than in the paragraph describing their laughter:
All three of the women laughed. Marie threw back her head. From deep
inside, her laughter came like the sound of many rivers.... China
giggled spastically. Each gasp seemed to be yanked out of her by an
unseen hand jerking an unseen string. Poland, who seldom spoke unless
she was drunk, laughed without sound. When she was sober, she hummed
mostly or chanted blues songs, of which she knew many. (52-53)
Inger-Anne Softing writes that Poland, in addition to carrying "on the
old tradition of blending the sweet and the sad," introduces into the
text "true carnival laughter... nonauthoritarian and nonhierarchical"
(88). Softing points out that all three of the whores in The Bluest Eye
laugh with their whole bodies, from the depths of being, constituting
"true carnivalesque" in "a novel which, on the whole, is not filled
with the liberating force of laughter" (88). The whores' laughter is
the quintessential blues utterance: It wells up from within, with the
force and rhythm of a freight train, and it erupts into pure catharsis.
It is a public communication of emotions that are both private and
shared.
Although the blues
typically feature a first-person singular subject, and exhibit a
concern "with the problems and/or experiences of the individual"
(Southern 335), Davis observes in women's blues a "public communication
of private troubles" that "allows for the development of a collective
social consciousness within the black population" (14-15). Houston A.
Baker, Jr., describes the blues as "an anonymous (nameless) voice
issuing from the black (w)hole" (5). Poland's "Blues in my bedroom /
'Cause I'm sleeping by myself" may be read as a sensual and a political
expression of collective need. Her "Mealbarrel Blues" conflates the
language of sexual desire and the desire for freedom from poverty.
The conflation of material lack and sexual desire is humorously
developed, in storytelling rather than singing form, in exchanges
between Marie and China as China attempts to insert herself into the
legend of John Dillinger. Marie and China enact a tradition that blends
call-and-response, an erotic blues sensuality, and tongue-in-cheek
humor--signifying. Miss Marie responds to Pecola's earnest "'How come
they [men] all love you?' " with, " 'What else they gone do? They know
I'm rich and good lookin'.' " Marie proceeds to tell a tall tale of how
she came to be rich, the story in which she claims to be the mysterious
Lady in Red who turned John Dillinger in to the " 'F. B. and I.' "
China responds with guffaws and interrupts Marie's story, first with
questions mimicking Pecola's earnestness (" 'Yeah.... Where you get it
from?' "), then with affirmations (" 'We know that' "), and finally
with goading insults, to which Marie responds playfully and
aggressively:
"I was little and cute then. No more than ninety pounds, soaking wet."
"You ain't never been soaking wet," China said.
"Well you ain't never been dry. Shut up ...." (53)
China hoots, " 'She makin' like she's the Lady in Red that told on John
Dillinger. Dillinger wouldn't have come near you lessen he was going
hunting in Africa and shoot you for a hippo' " (54).
China and Marie engage in the black vernacular tradition of signifying,
which Geneva Smitherman defines as "the verbal art of insult in which a
speaker humorously puts down, talks about, needles--that is, signifies
on--the listener" (118). Signifying has been enacted in musical forms
from blues to rap; it is a component of some of the earliest recorded
blues, and it has remained a staple in the blues repertoire. Pecola
hears Poland singing, and she listens to China signifying on Marie's
story, but she lacks the cultural knowledge necessary to understanding.
She is exiled from the collective consciousness; it is as though she
doesn't speak the language of the blues, although she most certainly
lives the blues. Although she is close in age to Claudia and Frieda,
she lacks Claudia's sense of irony and humor and both sisters' mastery
of language.
Throughout the novel,
Claudia's observations are guided by a sharp-edged humor. Her narrative
is characterized by the adaptive laughing-to-keep-from-crying
perspective that is central to the blues and that Bernard Bell, in his
study of the African American novel, terms "double vision." Some of the
most humorous moments in The Bluest Eye occur in the scenes following
Frieda's molestation by Mr. Henry. Claudia and Frieda's unwitting play
on the meaning of ruined and their misinterpretation of vague and
confusing adult speech leads them to believe that the only cure for the
ruination that has been wrought on Frieda by Mr. Henry is for Frieda to
become an alcoholic. Their youthful logic and the examples of China and
Poland lead them to conclude that drinking whisky will prevent Frieda
from getting fat, the ruinous result, they believe, of molestation.
When Claudia and Frieda signify on Maureen Peal and play a child's
version of the dozens when Maureen goads them, Pecola "fold[s] into
herself, like a broken wing, " because she is ashamed and lacks the
double vision necessary to participation in this ritual (73). [9]
Listening to China and Marie signifying, Pecola misses the humor and
the innuendo; she responds with guileless earnestness: "'You rich, Miss
Marie?'" (53); "'But what about the money?'" (54). Her responses to the
whores' language play foreground her focus on the lack and need ("
rich...?...money?'") that always marks the first verse(s) of a blues
song--in this case it is material, a material desire, later reified in
her desire for blue eyes. But Pecola's development as a blues subject
stops at the first verse: She is entirely defined and consumed by lack.
It is as though she is entrapped in the opening lines of a blues song;
her character is never developed, as blues subjectivity is always
developed, to the point of agency.
In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the narrator's mother
explains "'the difference between mad people and sane people'": "'Sane
people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one
story that they talk over and over'" (159). By the closing pages of The
Bluest Eye, Pecola has only one story, the story of her beautiful blue
eyes. Her identity is hopelessly fragmented; and, as Madonne Miner
notes, "tragically, even when combined, [Pecola and her 'imaginary
friend'] do not compose one whole being....she no longer exists as a
reasonable human being" (181). Claudia's voice gathers strength as
Pecola fragments. Guided by a blues aesthetic, Claudia constructs a
wealth of stories and a variety of perspectives from which to interpret
her childhood experiences and Pecola's story. Even as a child, Claudia
subverts the consumer culture and the outside gaze that seek to impose
impossible standards of beauty on her community; she subsumes the
master narrative into a blues narrative.
Central to Claudia's narrative style is the oral tradition of
testifying. Geneva Smitherman defines this oral tradition that came out
of the traditional black church as "a ritualized form of black
communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the
efficacy, truth and power of some experience in which all blacks have
shared" (58). She adds that "to testify is to tell the truth through
story"; testifying is not "plain and simple commentary but a dramatic
narration and a communal reenactment of one's feelings and experiences"
(150) Testifying is a tradition which, like call-and-response, is
rooted in African American religious practice and can be traced to West
African sons and speech. The testifying utterance is a chronicle
initiated by an individual--a registering of emotion rather than an
outpouring of emotion in response to a call. In Song of Solomon, when
Pilate stalks into the church at Hagar's funeral and calls out
"'Mercy'" and Reba sings out "'I hear you,'" and they continue in this
vein, s inging back and forth," In the nighttime. / Mercy/ In the
darkness. / Mercy ...," they are performing call-and-response (317).
Moments later, in the same scene, when Pilate repeats, "'My baby
girl,'" as she gazes into the coffin, and then speaks these three words
to the audience, she is testifying. Yvonne Atkinson observes that the
emotional impact of this scene is the result of the layering of
call-and-response and testifying, and that the layering of these two
and of other residually oral forms throughout Morrison's fiction is
central to her artistry.
The
accomplished blues singer blends these two oral forms, as does Claudia
in The Bluest Eye. When she offers up Pecola's story, she is testifying
to the community's failings and the community's unspoken desire, which
Pecola vocalizes. Morrison places Claudia in a position similar to that
of Pilate gazing into the coffin. Claudia is gazing, in the novel's
final pages, at Pecola picking among the garbage, and she turns her
gaze outward toward the reader and testifies that Pecola is the site of
inscription of a communal shame. This act of testifying is a narrative
act that is central to Morrison's work. Morrison asserts that her
... work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived
under what circumstances and why....All that is in the fabric of the
story in order to do what the music used to do. The music kept us
alive, but it's not enough any more. Whenever I feel uneasy about my
writing, I think: what would be the response of people in the book if
they read the book? That's my way of staying on track. Those are the
people for whom I write. ("Language" 371)
Inherent in testifying is the assumption of commonalties between the
testifying subject and her audience (Atkinson). Claudia skillfully
bridges the dramatic distance she has constructed as a blues
narrator--just as Morrison bridges that distance as a blues writer--and
she assumes crucial commonalties with the community she speaks from,
to, and about, critiquing it firmly but lovingly and absolving its
guilt and shame.
Throughout The
Bluest Eye, Claudia sets herself up as an individual who questions the
community's tastes and judgments and often finds them suspect; but she
is not outside of or in opposition to the community--she critiques the
community from within. Morrison places her in a call-and-response
dialectic with a community chorus. [10] The traditional blues singer
did not speak for the community, but she did speak from the community.
As Giles Oakley puts it,
Many
black people would have been ... offended by the idea that the blues
singer "spoke" for them, in much the same way that others would reject
the spokesmanship of the preacher. Nevertheless, there did exist what
almost amounted to a blues community. Its significance was in the
process of communal creation and participation in a shared
culture....the idea that the blues were an expression of deeply felt
emotions made the music more than simply entertainment. (47)
In addition to Claudia's voice, we hear Pauline's, an omniscient
narrator's, and fragments of dialogue representing nearly every quarter
of the community, from the three whores to Geraldine and Junior to
Soaphead Church to unidentified gossips. Claudia develops an individual
voice that taps into the community's repressed racial self-hatred and
its deeply concealed guilt at displacing that self-hatred onto Pecola.
Hers is not what Robert Cataliotti calls "a traditional country blues,
which were most frequently performed by solo artists."
The country blues was thought of and enacted, for the most part, as a
masculine tradition. Claudia's blues are what Cataliotti and others
before him have termed a "Classic Blues ... performed by a female
singer with accompaniment provided by a pianist, possibly augmented by
a small instrumental combo. Nonetheless, the singer certainly remained
the dominant personality in the performance" (75). Claudia's is the
dominant voice in the novel, and Frieda frequently responds in the
affirmative to Claudia's blues" call," as do Mrs. MacTeer's and
Poland's blues and China's signifying. They are the blues chorus that
mediates against the buzzing of voices that condemns Pecola.
The playwright August Wilson has said that the blues provide "a way of
processing information about Black life, particularly information about
the nobility ... the beauty ... and the resiliency of Black life."
Claudia's embodiment of the blues aesthetic enables her to "process"
precisely the "information" to which Wilson refers. The Bluest Eye does
not appear to be a novel about beauty and nobility; it seems largely
bereft of these elements. Even marigolds fail to grow in this fictional
world.
"Beauty" is a deeply
problematic concept in Morrison's work. In fact, the omniscient
narrator of The Bluest Eye asserts that "physical beauty" and romantic
love "are probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human
thought" (122). [11] As Morrison interrogates a master narrative of
beauty, her blues aesthetic lends structure, style, and form to the
interrogation. The emphasis in Claudia's blues narrative is on
resiliency, and the resiliency she develops as a blues subject allows
her to appreciate the beauty and the nobility even in a community that
fails its most destitute resident. At the novel's close, after blame
has been assigned ("we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not
free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not
good, but well behaved" [205]) and limited absolution granted ("I even
think now that the soil of the entire country was hostile to marigolds
that year"), Claudia is able to look "among the garbage.., of [her]
town" and focus, in the novel's final l ine, on beauty: "sunflowers"
(206).
Morrison constructs Claudia
as a blues subject: sensuous, brutally honest, poetic, ironically
humorous, and adept at call-and-response, signifying, and testifying.
She learns to sing from her mother, and her blues is The Bluest Eye.
Her storytelling mode is a blues mode in its sensuality, honesty,
lyricism, ironic distance, humor, dialectic with the community, and
open-endedness. Blues narratives, like blues lyrics, never end on a
closed note, and The Bluest Eye is no exception. At the end of a
"typical" blues there is affirmation, as there is in "St. Louis Blues"
(of the beauty in blackness), and there is movement, or a statement of
intent to move, but there is no closure, no neatly wrapped-up ending.
[12]
The subjects of blues
narratives achieve, by their narratives' close, an ironic distance--and
often a physical distance--from the lack and loss expressed in the
narratives' beginnings. Indeed, the construction of ironic distance and
open-endedness is a primary function of the blues, which codify a means
of resistance to oppression and a call to "move on" up and out.
Claudia's blues narrative may be understood as a sustained signifying
on the master aesthetic of physical beauty and the racial self-loathing
that this master aesthetic produces. Hers is a complex and polyvocal
signifying, involving a call-and-response dialectic with her community.
Claudia could not carry on this dialectic, could not "sing" this blues
without first living the blues. As Janie in Hurston's Their Eyes Were
Watching God puts it," 'It's uh known fact. ... you got tuh go there
tuh know there'" (183). Claudia's narrative traces a trajectory from
the childhood experience and naming of lack--her community's lack of a
sense of the intrinsi c beauty of blackness and hence its scapegoating
of the Breedloves and of Pecola, in particular--to a sense of
resolution through movement.
At
the novel's close, Claudia claims membership in the community ("my
town"), but she has achieved sufficient distance from her subject to
enable her to reconstruct Pecola's story. She sees Pecola in her mind,
or on the streets of her present-day community, "searching through the
garbage--for what?" but she also sees across the dramatic distance
between the blues subject and her narrative (206). Claudia does not see
this traversing of distance as unequivocally positive, but she sees it
as necessary. She has stood at a blues crossroads and resolved to
assert her independence. She has distanced herself from Pecola and from
her community in order to engage the community in a dialectic, but she
looks back upon this move with a nostalgia for a time and place that no
longer exist. Claudia can look back in time and see clearly because she
has achieved a metaphoric distance, albeit at a price. The novel closes
with a sense that Claudia has moved on while Pecola remains frozen in
time--a child, trapped in the tragic first verse of her own blues, with
her imagined blue eyes and the lack and self-loathing they signify,
"frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye" (206). The loving eye
is Claudia's, and The Bluest Eye is her testifying to Pecola's pain and
the community's shame.
The "Eye"
of the title may refer to Pecola's disastrous longing for blue eyes,
but it also refers to the eye that takes Pecola as its subject, and to
the J who narrates her story. The Bluest Eye is Claudia's blues for
Pecola and her community. The novel's central paucity is the
community's lack of self-love, a lack precipitated by the imposition of
a master aesthetic that privileges the light skin and blue eyes
inherent in the community's internalization of this master aesthetic.
Claudia is the voice for the community's blues, and Pecola is the site
of the inscription of the community's blues.
Cat Moses is an independent scholar living and working in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. She has published essays on the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston
and David Bradley, among others. Her book Sabotage and Subversion,
Then, Are This Book's Objectives is currently in press.
Notes
(1.) Geneva Smitherman uses the term songified, which she attributes to
the poet Eugene Redmond, to describe the speech patterns of Black
English (3).
(2.) Morrison is
aware of the train as a blues syntagm. In an interview with Robert
Stepto, she discusses it as a gendered phenomenon. Stepto observes that
most "of the major male characters in black literature are in motion."
Morrison concurs and comments, "Trains--you hear those men talk about
trains like they were their first lover--the names of the trains, the
times of the trains! And, boy, you know they spread their seed all over
the world. They are really moving! Perhaps it's because they don't have
a land, they don't have dominion" (391). On the road, on the railroad
lines--in motion--black men, in Morrison's literary imagination,
experience dominion. She acknowledges that in sociological terms that
is described as a major failing of black men"--that black men have been
faulted for not being stable, for not always being "in place" or at
home with their families, but she asserts that "that has always been to
me one of the most attractive features about black male life ... the
fact that they would split in a minute just delights me." Morrison goes
on to talk about how she endowed Sula with this predilection for
motion, how Sula "is a masculine character in that sense" (392). I
suggest that Claudia, too, is endowed with a predilection for motion,
and that this is a central characteristic in her construction as a
blues subject.
(3.) Houston Baker
cites McPherson in his discussion of "Blues and Vernacular expression
in America" in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (11).
Giles Oakley, in his history of the blues, provides an opposite,
outsider's (he is British) reading of the travel theme in the blues:
"Over and over again the theme of [blues] songs was travel.... In this
respect the bluesman [sic] reflected a tendency to be found in American
society at large and in black society in particular, where, especially
since Emancipation, movement had symbolized freedom. Notions of
'boundlessness' have often been taken to be a part of the American
Dream, but the constant migrations, over long or short distances, over
all parts of the Southern states and increasingly to the North were
more a reflection of the arid and sterile quality of life for most poor
blacks. Trapped into a kind of economic servitude by sharecropping,
with few opportunities to break out of those limitations, travel could
itself be a assertion of independence" (57). In Morrison's work, travel
is nearly always a form of or a means to independence. The quality of
life for poor black folk in her fiction, however, is rarely "arid and
sterile"; aridity and sterility tend to come with the trappings of
middle- and upper-class success in her oeuvre.
(4.) I am assuming a heterosexual subject. The many recorded versions
that I am familiar with feature a female vocalist singing about the man
who has left her.
(5.) The
third-person narrative of Cholly's journey from boyhood to manhood
later in the novel provides a counterbalance to this idyllic view of
the rural South. Cholly's post-funeral romp in a wild vineyard with
Darlene stains her Sunday dress with purple juice, but Cholly and
Darlene's adolescent lovemaking is interrupted by the white men with
the lantern. Both Cholly's and Pauline's narratives, however, construct
a rural South in which black people shared what they had and lived by a
value system that privileged community over the accumulation of
individual wealth and consumerism.
(6.) The "gypsy" fortune teller of mixed race or exoticized ethnicity
who dispensed advice and alternative remedies that often blended
African, European, Christian, and secular knowledge systems was a
significant figure in (or on the fringes of) many communities like the
one Morrison depicts in The Bluest Eye's Lorain, Ohio, of 1931.
(7.) The fortune teller/root doctor figure appears frequently in
African American literature, most famously in Charles Chesnutt's The
Conjure Woman stories (1899); in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative in
the person of Sandy, who empowers the enslaved Douglass successfully to
resist the brutality of Mr. Covey; and, more recently, in lshmael
Reed's neo-hoodoo fictions.
(8.) I
refer to the Black Arts Movement's foregrounding and naming of a
distinct aesthetic sensibility during the 1960s and 1970s that nurtured
radical African American creative and artistic production.
(9.) Playing the dozens, a black vernacular tradition, involves the
exchange of explicit insults about one's adversary's parents, usually
the mother. When Maureen shames Pecola for having seen her father
naked, Claudia responds, "'Who else would she see, dog tooth?'" and
suggests that all Maureen thinks about is her own naked daddy (71-72).
(10.) See, for example, the "fragments of talk" condemning the pregnant
Pecola that Claudia and Frieda overhear and to which Claudia then
responds in her narrative (188-90).
(11.) Claudia's narrative is intertwined with an omniscient narrative
voice. I focus primarily on Claudia's voice.
(12.) Even blus that "end" in death typically, and comically, explore
an afterlife with its own blus moments.
Appendix
"St. Louis Blues"
I hate to see de evenin' sun go down
I hate to see de evenin' sun go down
Cause mah baby, he done lef' dis town
Feelin' tomorrow lak I feel today
Feelin' tomorrow lak I feel today
I'll pack mah trunk, an' make mah getaway
St. Louis woman wid her diamon' rings
Pulls dat man aroun' by her apron strings
'Twant for powder an' for store-bought hair
De man I love would not gone nowhere
Got de St. Louis blues, jes as blue as I can be
Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in de sea
Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me
Been to de gypsy, to get mah fortune tol'
To de gypsy, done got mah fortune tol'
Cause I'm most wild 'bout mah jelly roll
Gypsy done tol' me, "Don't you wear no black"
Yes, she done tol' me, "Don't you wear no black
Go to St. Louis, you can win him back"
Help me to Cairo; make St. Louis by mahself
Git to Cairo, find mah ol' frien', Jef
Gwine to pin mahself close to his side
If I flag his train, I sho can ride
I loves dat man lak a schoolboy loves his pie
Lak a Kentucky Colonel loves his mint an' rye
I'll love mah baby till de day I die
You ought to see dat stovepipe brown o' mine
Lak he owns de Dimon' Joseph line
He'd make a crosseyed 'oman go stone blind
Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce
Blackest man in de whole St. Louis
Blacker de berry, sweeter is de juice ... (Donalson 13-14)
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