The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye

Abstract

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, 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 is be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music... (Interview 408). Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort to do what the music did for blacks, what we used be able do with each other in private and in that that existed underneath the white civilization (Morrison, Language 371). catharsis and the transmission of cultural knowledge and values that have always been central the blues form the thematic and rhetorical underpinnings of Bluest Eye. narrative's structure follows a pattern common traditional blues lyrics: a movement from an initial emphasis on loss a conclud ing suggestion of resolution of grief through motion. In between its initial statement of loss and its final emphasis on movin' on, Bluest Eye contains an abundance of cultural wisdom. blues lyrics that punctuate the narrative at critical points suggest a system of folk knowledge and values that is crucial a young black woman's survival in the 1930s and '40s and which supports Claudia's cathartic role as storyteller. lyrics also illustrate the folk knowledge and values that are not transmitted Pecola--information without which she cannot survive as a whole and healthy human being. In traditional blues songs, the singer is the subject, the who tells her (or his) own story. In 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 empower the dispossessed and critique power relations. This essay addresses the apparent contradiction between 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. 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. assert that, rather than singing Pecola's blues, Claudia sings the community's blues. Claudia bears witness, through the oral tradition of testifying, the community's lack of self-love and its transference of this lack onto the abject body of Pecola. In the first section below, address the initial reference a specific blues song in the novel by discussing the lyrics and structure of The St. Louis Blues as representative of traditional blues. then lay the foundation for a discussion of Bluest Eye as a blues narrative. In the ensuing section, build upon this foundation discern a female blues subjectivity in 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, position Claudia's subjectivity within a blues aesthetic and her voice within the oral tradition of testifying. earliest reference a specific blues in 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 the blues, then, forms a bridge between childhood (the milk consumption represents Pecola's effort consume--and become--Shirley Temple) and womanhood. …