{"id":10632,"date":"2020-02-07T19:12:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10632"},"modified":"2020-04-27T19:23:06","modified_gmt":"2020-04-28T02:23:06","slug":"the-bluest-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/02\/07\/the-bluest-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bluest Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Toni Morrison\u2019s Profound and Unrelenting Vision<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d which was published fifty years ago, cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Hilton Als<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Morrison in 1970, the year that her intellectually expansive, spiritually knowing first novel, \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d was published. <\/em>Photograph from Chester Higgins Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause for a few final images and thoughts framed by regret, shame, and horror. The book? Toni Morrison\u2019s d\u00e9but novel, \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d which turns fifty this year. As the story ends, one of its protagonists, the blighted Pecola Breedlove, has been more or less abandoned by the townspeople, who have treated her with scorn for most of her life; now she\u2019s left to wander the streets in madness:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on her shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach\u2014could not even see\u2014but which filled the valley of the mind.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Spectacular even alongside other early novels bathed in the blood of gothic dread\u2014William Faulkner\u2019s \u201cAs I Lay Dying\u201d (1930), say, or Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s \u201cWise Blood\u201d or Ralph Ellison\u2019s \u201cInvisible Man\u201d (both published in 1952)\u2014Morrison\u2019s book cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing young black girls at the center of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all the principal characters in \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d Pecola lives in Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison, who died last August, was born in 1931. When we meet Pecola, she is eleven years old but already ancient with sorrow. Her only escape from the emotional abuse that her family and her classmates heap on her is to dream. And the dream is this: that someone\u2014God, perhaps\u2014will grant her the gift of blue eyes. The kind of blue eyes Pecola has seen in pictures of the movie star Shirley Temple. The kind of blue eyes that she imagines lighting up the face of the girl on the wrapper of her favorite candies, Mary Janes. Pecola feels, or the world has made her feel, that if she had blue eyes she would, at last, be free\u2014free from her unforgivable blackness, from what her community labelled ugliness long before she could look in a mirror and determine for herself who and what she was. Not that she ever looks in a mirror. She knows what she\u2019d find there: judgment of her blackness, her femaleness, the deforming language that has distorted the reflection of her face. Eventually, Pecola does acquire, or believes she acquires, blue eyes. But in those harrowing final images, Claudia MacTeer, Morrison\u2019s spirited nine-year-old narrator, sees what Pecola cannot, what her madness, the result of all that rejection, looks like to the rest of the town: \u201cGrown people looked away; children, those who were not frightened by her, laughed outright.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this short, intellectually expansive, emotionally questioning, and spiritually knowing book, the act of looking\u2014and seeing\u2014is described again and again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker Toni Morrison\u2019s Profound and Unrelenting Vision \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d which was published fifty years ago, cut a new path through the American literary landscape by placing black girls at the center of the story. By\u00a0Hilton Als Before closing the book on that town and those people, the author has us pause […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}