Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle

The Novels of Toni Morrison

Gurleen Grewal

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780807126431
• eBook ISBN: 9780807168059
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison— The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz —situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins.
Gurleen Grewal demonstrates how Morrison's novels perform a therapeutic and political function of recovery. What is most compelling about Morrison's fiction, Grewal posits, is its reevaluation of the individual via the complex sociopolitical heritage that bespeaks the individual. Ultimately, these fictive "circles of sorrow" invite the reader into the collective struggle of humankind who are living the long sentence of history by repeating, contesting, and remaking it.

1

THE DECOLONIZING VISION:
The Bluest Eye

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays.
—Emily Dickinson, #997

We became what we saw of ourselves in the eyes of others.
—V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to
Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

In The Bluest Eye, a lyricism of language channels the rage and pain of multiple privations, collusions, and exclusions into a powerful cultural critique. Recalling the pre-civil rights days of her own childhood, Toni Morrison noted that in her first novel, she saw herself as “bearing witness” to that difficult past so quickly receding in public consciousness: “It wasn’t that easy. . . . Some people got slaughtered.” Morrison’s first novel initiates a theme that is taken up with variations in all her subsequent novels and is expressly stated in the fifth novel, Beloved, by Sethe, the ex-slavemother who escapes slavery: “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Claudia MacTeer, the narrator of The Bluest Eye who recalls her own childhood, struggles to claim ownership of her freed self. Her struggle highlights the compromises others have made in the act of self-preservation. The novel questions these compromises, labeling them “adjustments without improvement.” The profound value of this novel lies in its demystiflcation of hegemonic social processes—in its keen grasp of the way power works, the way individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing a dominant culture’s values in the face of great material contradictions. We learn, in Terry Eagleton’s words, that “emancipation thus involves that most difficult of all forms of liberation, freeing ourselves from ourselves.” The novel lays bare the processes of subjectification—of identities formed through mimicry of dominant models inimical to the characters’ interests, origins, and cultures. These misidentifications have a long history in slavery and in the colonization of black people, a history to which the novel makes explicit allusions; in creating these connections, the novel offers an impassioned case for decolonizing the mind.¹

Published at the end of a decade of black cultural nationalism, The Bluest Eye makes clear the necessity of raising the politicized slogan Black is beautiful in opposition to the white monopoly on value. Yet the novel allows us to see that a mere reversing of terms (from the ugliness to the beauty of blackness) is not enough, for such counter-rhetoric does not touch the heart of the matter: the race-based class structure upheld by dominant norms and stereotypes. The novel’s searing critique of domination in its various forms and its confrontation of the racially assigned class positions in the United States make it a troubling reading experience. Diane Johnson’s response to Morrison’s novels is a case in point. According to her, the novels leave the white reader unsure whether to accept at face value Morrison’s presentation of the bizarre and shocking or to consider it symbolically; since the novels are about black people (“the oppressor in the next room”) who victimize each other, they only confirm her white audience’s fears about blacks.² Not surprisingly, while feminist critics have readily taken up Sula, there are fewer studies of The Bluest Eye; the sympathetic portrayal of the oppression of Cholly Breedlove, the poor black male who rapes his daughter, certainly complicates matters. In other words, the novel resists analysis of gender oppression that does not take into account the simultaneous impact of class and race on both men and women.

A remarkable feature of the novel is the foregrounding of its textual identity as the contradiction of dominant culture. The Dick-and-Jane preface and the prologue to The Bluest Eye establish what is certainly the hallmark of Morrison’s writing, which in her own words is “the ability to be both print and oral literature,” that is, to combine the layered quality of metaphoric writing (Roland Barthes’s “writerly text”) with the direct appeal of the narrating voice that engages the reader as listener (a “speakerly text”).³ Through its preface the novel marks its own entry as a writerly text into the print literature of a dominant culture. The arrangement of the three typographically distinct versions of the primer is a trope on writing itself. A richly suggestive metaphor that illustrates and encapsulates the primary thematic conflict in the novel, it also represents literature as the contested ground of representation, since the three versions suggest the conflictual, revisioning field of intertextuality.

The introductory inscription of competing texts is followed by the voice of the narrator juxtaposing one unnatural event of 1941—“there were no marigolds”—with another aberrant event—“Pecola was having her father’s baby”— establishing Pecola as the marigold nipped in the bud (9). From the cultural images of the Dick-and-Jane text, we are led to consider the natural images of seed, flower, and earth. Both are nursery metaphors involving inculcation and cultivation. This move toward a critique of culture is central to The Bluest Eye. A “tragedy of cultural mutilation,” The Bluest Eye is also the portrait of a black woman artist as a young girl breaking through sanctioned ignorance and arriving, through internal struggle, at an emergent consciousness.⁴ If the third-person narratives portray the theme of subjection charting “dilapidation’s processes,” Claudia’s first-person narrative lets us see the possibilities of an individual, and perhaps collective, resistance. This is a novel in which the community (both within the novel and outside it—the community of readers) is meant to register the burden of Pecola’s tragedy. Further, even as the novel implicates its black characters in Pecola’s self-abjection, its formal structure makes the reader see them all as an extended black family caught in and debilitated by a “master” narrative. Morrison achieves this unity by structuring the novel in the (dis)ordering Dick-and-Jane primer, whose model family is offered as a prototype of dominant national identity. If the primer represents the classic Bildungs theme—the progressive acquisition of a normative, sanctioned identity—The Bluest Eye is an anti-Bildungsroman whose project is to dismantle the hegemonic norm of identity acquired through mimicry.

The Bluest Eye is an artful novel whose use of mimicry as a structuring design and a thematic concern serves to interrogate the very model being mimicked, the model that claims to be original. By confronting the negative and partial identities created by mimicry—in which only the norm (the original) can be positive or whole—the novel opens up a space for the exploration of self conceived as different from the norm, since trying to be the same as the norm is not only self-defeating (witness Pecola), but also conservative in its perpetuation of inequity.

The novel opens with a visually disorienting representation of mimicry, with three inscriptions of the Dick-and-Jane text, one “original” and two copies; the Dick-and-Jane primer is replicated with increasing typographical distortion, so that the third (and last) text is practically illegible:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. . . .

Here is the house it is green and white it has a red door it is very pretty. . . .

Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisverypretty

The double-spaced first text, with its capitalized sentence beginnings and standard punctuation, may be read as the “type” of self-formation that is normative in the dominant middle-class white culture. The second text, single-spaced, without the privileging signs of capital letters and the meaningful marks of punctuation, reproduces the first text with a difference that is “almost the same, but not quite.” The third text reproduces the word order of the first without the benefit of spaces and stop gaps; more different from the first than the second, it is still caught in what French feminist Luce Irigaray calls “the economy of the Same.”⁵ Here, in brief, is an allegory of class formations and of the first world’s authorizing of third world identities. The novel’s strategy is to reveal the historic inequity by which the first text assumes its mastery over the third. Further, if the first text/world has set itself as the norm against which the third is judged, the latter must always remain categorized as underdeveloped, caught in the first’s definition of pathology.

Formally, the method by which the singular, primary Dick-and-Jane text organizes multiple, heterogenous identities attests to the homogenizing force of an ideology (the supremacy of “the bluest eye”) by which a dominant culture reproduces hierarchical power structures. Morrison weaves a black story corresponding to each motif in the Dick-and-Jane text, so that Dick and Jane’s house corresponds to the Breedloves’ poor, storefront house and the Breedlove family of Pauline, Cholly, and their children, Sammy and Pecola, correspond to and contrast Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane. Ironically, in place of the pet cat and dog are two black middle-class characters, Geraldine, who loves her cat to excess, and the West Indian pedophile, Soaphead Church (as Elihue Michah Whitcomb was called by blacks in Lorain, Ohio), who hates his dog to excess. That black subjects consent to this reproduction, which leads to psychic violence among them, is also evident from the unintelligible third text. In the preface, Claudia as narrator implies that she cannot determine why the marigolds did not bloom—“since why is difficult to handle”—but it is clear that doing so is central to the representation of her truth. The entire novel explores the forces that lead to Pecola’s desire for blue eyes. Although Morrison does not use the term hegemony, the novel illustrates a hegemonic situation. As Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson point out, “The question to which ‘hegemony’ is an answer is, ‘Why do dominated or oppressed groups accept their position in the social hierarchy?’ Gramsci held that oppressed groups accept the definition of the world of elites as common sense; their understanding of how the world works, then, leads them to collaborate in their own oppression.”⁶

The characters’ ignorance of the partisan and constructed nature of social reality leads to a consciousness turned against itself rather than the social structure. In the case of most of the characters, this “ignorance” is “smoothly cultivated,” and “self-hatred” is “exquisitely learned” (55). Morrison’s thematic and structural use of the Dick-and-Jane primer calls on the various meanings of primer. There is the obvious definition, “an elementary book for teaching children to read.” But the derivation of the term cannot be ignored. A primer is a “person or thing that primes,” the verb to prime being defined as follows: “to prepare or make ready for a particular purpose or operation”; “to cover (a surface) with a preparatory coat or color, as in painting.”⁷ The reader is meant to see the debilitating effect of priming on the characters in the novel. There are repeated references to the various characters’ miseducation, such as the following passage from Soaphead’s letter to God: “We in this colony took as our own the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white masters’ characteristics, which were, of course, their worst. In retaining the identity of our race, we held fast to those characteristics most gratifying to sustain and least troublesome to maintain. Consequently we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious, we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school” (140). This passage is similar in tone to Claudia’s admission at the novel’s end: “We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. 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” (159). Likewise, in the third-person account of the petit-bourgeois Geraldine, the narrator situates her among the “sugar-brown” southern girls whose education in respectability makes them wary of their own black “funk”: “They go to land-grant colleges, normal schools, and learn how to do the white man’s work with refinement: home economics to prepare his food; teacher education to instruct black children in obedience; music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here they learn the rest of the lesson begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart: how to behave” (68). The project of the novel is to disrupt the educative process by which cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical values specific to the formation and interests of a socioeconomic class or group are universalized.

The difference between the second text’s mimicking the first and the third text’s mimicking the first are apparent in the different material situations of Geraldine and Pauline. What they have in common is an aspiration to the norm—the social, cultural, and material privileges of the first text. Because privileged class status in America has been historically coded in white terms, the accession of black people to that status is predicated on a disavowal of their race. Whatever the rhetoric of a pluralistic, democratic society, the pressure to assimilate is real. Thus, Geraldine’s achievement of class security and respectability is accompanied by the repression of black “funk.” This repression is reflected typographically in the second text. In the third text, there is nothing but irony—the gross distance between ideal and reality. Pauline’s attempts to be Jean Harlow only alienate her further from her own home and family.

In “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” Irigaray notes that “the feminine is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex.” The “feminine,” denied any “specificity” of its own, “provides male sexuality with an unfailingly phallic self-representation.”⁸ In other words, she is supposed to mimic the role of the feminine in order to shore up a masculine identity that does not recognize female difference. The above discussion of Geraldine and Pauline’s mimicry of the white norm of femininity only goes to complicate Irigaray’s formulation of mimicry based on the single axis of gender. Female mimicry in The Bluest Eye has to do with the construction of a gendered and racialized class hierarchy. If Irigaray’s feminine subj ect (a universal feminine subject) is defined as lack, as absence, then the black woman is doubly lacking, for she must simulate or feign her femininity as she dissimulates or conceals her blackness. As Pecola demonstrates, this socially mandated charade of being something one is not (middle-class white girl) and of not being something one is (working-class black girl) makes one invisible, while the split mentality it entails approaches insanity.

While readers have commented on the novel’s critique of consumer capitalism, the wider connections that the text makes between capitalism and colonialism, between a hegemonic institution of education and colonization, have not received critical notice.⁹ Surprisingly, in the majority of criticism, Soaphead Church, the character who enables such a connection, has been glossed over. The presence of Soaphead Church implicates the mimicry of Geraldine, Pauline, and Pecola as part of colonial oppression. Homi Bhabha has situated mimicry in the context of the colonizer’s project of disregarding the “cultural, racial, historical difference” of the other while securing value and priority for its own culture and race history. Education was instituted in the colonies to produce a native elite whose interests would coincide with those of the colonizers. Soaphead Church is an example of such production. In the novel, he is much more than a mere function of plot, more than an agent who will grant Pecola her blue eyes and who will substitute as the dog in the Dick-and-Jane primer. We are told that “his personality was an arabesque: intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed”! 131), the very words we might use to describe the novel’s narrative structure. His story, the last of the novel’s studies in alienated consciousness, places the other accounts into perspective, for he brings from the West Indies an anglophilia and a consciousness both informed and deformed by a history of colonization. The connection between colonialism and the economic institution of the American South—domestic colonialism—was often made during the 1960s by radical analysts of black history. In the words of social critic Harold Cruse, “The only factor which differentiates the Negro’s status from that of a pure colonial status is that his position is maintained in the ‘home’ country in close proximity to the dominant racial group.”¹⁰ The novel suggests a similarity of predicament between a colonized West Indian black subject and an African American one; both are inheritors of complex social/historical formations that vex their identities. However, the difference between Soaphead and Cholly replicates the difference between the second and third texts. Soaphead is the educated colonial gentleman who has internalized the alleged superiority of the colonizer—of his great-grandsire, the Englishman who whitened the race. Cholly is the poor, uneducated black American male doomed to the underclass who thus remains outside the hegemonic apparatus of education and class privilege. Soaphead Church’s counterpart, then, is not Cholly Breedlove. A man of breeding, of metropolitan learning, the “lightly browned” Soaphead has much more in common with the “sugar brown” Geraldine. Soaphead’s and Geraldine’s common identity formations relate the colonies abroad and at home.

Soaphead Church, “a cinnamon-eyed West Indian,” is a descendant of the Enlightenment: “A Sir Whitcomb, some decaying British nobleman, who chose to disintegrate under a sun more easeful than England’s, had introduced the white strain into the family in the early 1800’s” (132). We are told that the ancestral Sir Whitcomb, Jr., had a mulatta wife who, “like a good Victorian parody, learned from her husband all that was worth learning—to separate herself in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa . . .” (132). Elihue’s father, a schoolmaster, took on the white man’s burden by schooling his son in “theories of education, discipline, and the good life” (133). The effect of “his father’s controlled violence” was that Soaphead “developed] . . . a hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of disorder and decay” (134): “He abhorred flesh on flesh. Body odor, breath odor, overwhelmed him. The sight of dried matter in the corner of the eye, decayed or missing teeth, earwax, blackheads, moles, blisters, skin crusts—all the natural excretions and protections the body was capable of—disquieted him. His attentions therefore gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children” (131). In Elihue Micah Whitcomb’s alienation from his body, home, and nation, we are meant to see the epistemic violence and displacement wrought by the colonial project.¹¹

Morrison’s characterization of Soaphead invokes another West Indian protagonist, Ralph Ranjit Kripalsingh, the narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men.¹² Their similarity is worth discussing because Ralph Ranjit Kripalsingh is a loaded symbol of the kind of mimicry Morrison describes. Living in hotels and boarding houses—places that suggest profound displacement—both characters’ dis-ease is acquired in part by colonial education, which has rendered them homeless. Naipaul’s character is a failed politician of East Indian origin who has to leave his isla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Decolonizing Vision: The Bluest Eye
• 2 Freedom’s Absent Horizon: Sula
• 3 Redeeming the Legacy of the Past: Song of Solomon
• 4 Prospero’s Spell and the Question of Resistance: Tar Baby
• 5 On the Rocking Loom of History, a Net to Hold the Past: Beloved
• 6 A Hearing of History: Jazz
• Selected Bibliography
• Index