Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
1970

I really haven't read much of Toni Morrison's work.  (Another good reason for me to sign on for this project.)  I read The Bluest Eye many years ago, I believe -- someone probably made me do it for school -- and that was it, I think, until a year and a half ago when I read Beloved.  Now, Beloved is brilliant, and it also is intriguing to me on a number of levels: i am extremely interested in literature of the fantastic, and in American literature of the fantastic in particular, and this book does a truly fascinating job of balancing the-real with the-symbolic and the-obviously-not-literally-possible.  Anyway, I agree with the general consensus that it is a great book.  Often painful, sometimes disturbing, occasionally moving; and great.

The Bluest Eye is not a great book.  I mean, analyzing it, that is OK; it doesn't have to be.  It was Morrison's first published novel (Beloved wouldn't appear for almost another twenty years), and in many ways the writer seems to be experimenting to see how she can fit her message, her characters, her narrative momentum, her symbolism, her plot -- how she can make them all fit together.  She doesn't succeed in every respect. 

The book is, still, interesting.  And written in prose that is both spare and beautiful (which happens to be a combination that I admire greatly).  It is also extremely painful, which is probably, in retrospect, one reason I have unthinkingly shied away in post-high-school life from Morrison's books: painfully realistic, and painfully... painful.  Can I mention that there is more than one scene in which an innocent must watch an animal brutally destroyed?  That is the most graphic violence -- even the rape is less graphic; the many episodes of psychic and emotional violence are clear and precise but less physical (though I might not say less visceral).  It's not really a pleasant experience, this book.  You feel poverty and it is painful; you feel the frustration of racial discrimination and it is painful; you see how these two elements, prejudice and poverty, bend mothers to hurt their children, bend children to hurt each other, bend young people's developing ideas in ways that hurt themselves.  And it's really... It hurts a lot.  It's a horrible feeling, really.  If the book's prose weren't so well-turned, there wouldn't be enough to keep you invested, to keep you going, and one would only read this, I think, if required to do so in school, or if setting oneself to a project of learning, or as a kind of penance.  That is, if one were like me.

What can I say about this?  This book was difficult to read.  Have I learned the lesson I was supposed to learn?  What was Toni Morrison trying to tell me in this?  What do you think?