Toni Morrison’s Blues

The style in which Toni Morrison writes in The Bluest Eye is very similar to the structure and feel of blues music. Morrison’s amalgamated style of first person and third person omniscient, her metaphoric logic, and her use of call and response combine to create a blues feeling in the novel.

The blues can’t be defined in just one way, it covers too much of the human condition to have only one definition. However, a certain definition of the blues corresponds to the feeling that Morrison’s style conveys. Ellison defines the blues as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism (Bell, 83)”. In The Bluest Eye Claudia delves deep into the terrible misfortune of the Breedelove’s past, and the story that is told brings tragedy, comedy, and a myriad other feelings. Just as the blues can turn tragedy into comedy, so can Morrison’s writing. Despite the depressing feeling of most of the text, the reader can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of some of the characters. This is the genius of Morrison’s writing, she truly expresses all aspects of life, from the hardships, to the beauty that is squeezed from the hardships. Through the story Morrison wishes to the present an answer to her question, she wishes to find out why such terrible things can happen to people. Whereas the blues is and outlet for the musician to deal with adversity and tragedy, The Bluest Eye is a way to cope with the things that caused the tragedy in Pecola’s life, a way for Morrison and her readers to cope with detrimental effects of racism.

In musical terms the standard blues is twelve bar blues, with three sets of four measures, and a lyrical rhyme scheme of AAB (Weissman, 8). The structure, lyrics, and chords of blues music combine in a from that lends itself to a sense of cycling through itself, the end echoing the beginning, that can either feel reassuring or ominous depending on the tone (Weissman, 8). This sense of a circular motion used to convey some sort of feeling is present in The Bluest Eye through Morrison’s use of the first-person narrative. The first person narrative is divided into sections from a nine-year old Claudia, and sections from an adult Claudia. The adult Claudia as a narrator serves as a point of reflection for Claudia, and has an insight that a child could never have. It is through the insight and wisdom of an adult that Claudia realizes that she and her sister were really using Pecola as a scapegoat, and that they could have loved her more. For example Claudia says, “ More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live-just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals”(Morrison, 192). In the blues the end echoes the beginning through a phrase, or musical lick. In The Bluest Eye Morrison uses the adult Claudia to echo the nine-year old Claudia, in order to create the feeling of a flashback. Morrison also uses third-person omniscient perspective in the novel in order for the reader to understand the events and paths that led the Breedlove’s and other characters to their depressing state of extreme self-loathing. By using the third-person omniscient, Morrison is making the novel a flashback in an even larger sense. Also, Cholly and Pauline’s self-loathing and condition coupled with Pecola’s own doomed future and self-loathing creates the sense of the end mimicking the beginning that is usually present in blues music.

In Whiteness and Trauma Burrows says that through flashback, “Morrison deliberately structures the story to ensure an interactive and creative relationships between author and reader”(Burrows, 164). The reader must interact with all of the types of narration in the novel, and must think creatively in order to envision the novel as a whole, in order to achieve a sense of greater meaning within the novel. This relationship between author and reader is extremely similar to the relationship between the musician and the audience in the blues. The creativity and interaction that is deliberately inculcated within Morrison’s style is not readily apparent, it requires some thinking, or maybe even experiences in one’s life that can parallel or relate in someway to the events of the novel. On the blues Bernard Bell says,

“ When performed for nonmembers of the ethnic group or those with little or no intimacy with the music, it is generally considered mere entertainment; but when performed among black Americans, especially members of the working class, it is a social ritual: a ceremonial residual oral form whose recurring performance reinforces a sense of order in life and preserves the shared wisdom of the group” (Bell, 84).

Just as the blues can mean different things to different people depending on how it is interpreted, so can The Bluest Eye. If the reader does not pick up on the creative and interactive structure of the novel they will derive a completely different meaning and feeling than the reader that does. Also, just as blues music is more widely enjoyed by, and more crucial to African American culture than any to any other culture, the message and meaning of The Bluest Eye is most valid and applicable to African Americans. The Bluest Eye is a novel about growing up poor, black, and female in a male dominated society, and is an answer to the inferiority that is instilled within African Americans at such a young and fragile age (Bell, 178). A deeper meaning and a greater relevance will be derived from The Bluest Eye by somebody who has actually experienced the horrors and injustices of institutionalized and societal racism and prejudice than by somebody who has never experienced such things.

W.C. Handy said “the blues come from farthest down. The blues come from nothingness, from want, from desire. And when a man sang or played the blues, a small part of the want was satisfied from the music”(Weissman, 9). The interaction between performer and audience implies that while a singer is satisfying a small part of his want, he is also satisfying the desires and wants of the audience. In A Bad Woman Feeling Good Buzzy Jackson said that with the introduction of DuBois’s “double consciousness”, blues music was made even more important because its performance became an “exorcism of repressed emotion shared between performer and audience”(Jackson, 11). The same is true with The Bluest Eye. When the novel is read by somebody who can relate to the topic, than perhaps they will answer some of the same questions that Morrison wanted to answer while writing the novel. Also, the story itself portrays the African American “double consciousness” perfectly by telling the story of a little black girl growing up in a world where white equates to beauty, a world where everybody agrees that “a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasures”(Bell, 179). So, both the blues and The Bluest Eye contain some profound connection within the African American community that in some ways can never be experienced, or can never gain as much relevance outside of the community or culture.

The Dick-and-Jane story at the beginning of the novel captures another aspect of blues music. The Dick-and-Jane story starts out normal, then transforms into an unintelligible mess of words to contrast the ideal white world and the actual black experience(Bell, 179). The Dick-and-Jane story presents an ideal world which was totally foreign and inaccessible to young black children living in the inner city at the time. It was stories like these that were one of the factors in inculcating the feeling of immense inferiority within young blacks. The transformation of the Dick-and-Jane text is comparable to the steady increase of intensity and feeling in a blues song. When and instrumentalist is performing a solo, the intensity and speed of the solo will increase at the climax of the song, or at a turnaround. A singer will sing his lyrics or a familiar phrase such as “oh lord” with increased raw intensity as the piece reaches the climax. It is at this time that the blues musician truly plays from the depths of his soul, he plays with unbridled wildness and spontaneity, and manages to tell the world of all the troubles of his condition. The same is true for the Dick-and-Jane story, for when the text becomes an inarticulate conglomeration of letters Morrison is really expressing the confusion and ambiguity that a young black feels when subjected to the concept of ideal white life. The contrast between the ideal white world described in the Dick-and-Jane story and the black experience is presented by breaking the story into several headnotes for the minichapters (Bell, 179). Using the Dick-and-Jane story as divisions for the minichapters is synonymous to blues musicians repeating a familiar phrase in a song. Each time the reader sees the Dick-and-Jane headnote he is reminded of the contrast between the ideal white world and the actual black world conveyed in the chapter, and thus realizes the pain and hardship of the characters. When a blues musician repeats something throughout the song, such as B.B. King repeating “the thrill is gone”, the audience is reminded of the root of his blues, and a common theme is produced in the song.

In The Bluest Eye Morrison uses the marigold-planting analogy to set the tragic mood of the novel (Bell, 179). Morrison uses the poetic metaphor of the seeds failure to grow to signify the difficulty for a little black girl to mature and grow healthily while they are constantly being compared to the white standard of beauty (Bell, 179). Describing Pecola’s terrible fate Claudia says, “Certain seeds will not nurture, certain fruit will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say that the victim had no right to live”(Morrison, 206). Blues music also uses metaphors and symbolism. The most common metaphor in blues music is oddly enough, to be “blue”. “Blue” is a metaphor for the anguish that the musician is feeling due to the adversities in life. Blues music had created countless connotations for the word “blue”, usually meaning a sense of deep yearning or want. It is an ironic and genius use of symbolism on Morrison’s part that what Pecola yearns for most, the source of her blues, are blue eyes.

In Whiteness and Trauma Burrows says,

“The powerful metaphoric logic inherent in Morrison’s literary fiction offers, I believe, a particularly imaginative conduit between repressed traumatic experience(s) and an awakening into consciousness of the previously exercised experience of black historical trauma” (Burrows, 122).

Blues too can be seen as a conduit between traumatic experiences. Blues is a conduit from the traumatic experiences and hardships of the musician to the audience. The blues can establish an extremely deep connection between the musician and the audience through hardship. Again, this sharing of hardship and trauma is mostly within the African American community. In describing this connection Bernard Bell says, “the blues and gospels are secular and sacred lyrical expressions of hard times and the possibility of overcoming personal misery through toughness of spirit”(Bell, 84).

Claudia sums up the redemptive and healing power of the blues by saying, “Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet”(Morrison, 26). The Bluest Eye is similar to blues music in style, structure, and use of metaphor. More importantly though, The Bluest Eye and blues music both shed light on the tragedy in life, and both offer a way to cope with that tragedy, a way to transcend.



Works Cited
Bell, Bernard. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literacy Branches. Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Burrows, Victoria. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Jackson, Buzzy. A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2005.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 1970
Weissman, Dick. Blues: The Basics. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2005.

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