Narrative Structure and Moral Experience
The Narrative of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes
Lina Hsu
Associate Professor, Department of Applied Foreign Languages National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences
Abstract
This paper analyzes Toni Morrison‟s novel, The Bluest Eyes, to manifest the moral implications of narrative structure. Part I justifies the adoption of moral discourse in literary criticism by defining moral experience, discussing the connection between literature and morality, tracing the development of ethical criticism, and delineating the formalistic approach. Part II focuses on the asymmetrical structure, which introduces the reader into the moral situation and elicits moral understanding. Part III points out the contrasting elements in the narrative, which highlight the domination of white culture and suggest moral alternatives. Part IV discusses the narrative tone to demonstrate the narrator‟s role as a moral guide. Morrison‟s work is not didactic. Nevertheless, close examination of her narrative structure shows that she intends to lead the reader into an ethical interrogation of the problem of racism. Most importantly, her narrative suggests a possible solution to the problem by means of recognition and understanding.
Key words: moral experience, morality, ethical criticism, narrative structure
With the opening phrase, “Quiet as it‟s kept,” in The Bluest Eyes, Toni Morrison broke the silence and started to share the secret of African-American culture. She builds a fictional world populated by black people. Her distinctive voice discloses the various aspects of black culture that have never been spoken of publicly. As a result, her novels tend to be understood in the frame of black culture (Holloway 9). For instance, Trudier and Mobley both focus on the folklore and myth in her narrative. Morrison deals with the materials with such strength and artistic skill that her work helps to formulate black culture as well as to represent it. As Madden notices, Morrison‟s narrative is not just expressive. It is “an example of cultural production which produces cultural capital through the power of articulation” (593).
Undoubtedly, Morrison‟s novels have enriched the black heritage and American literature. But, the knowledge she passes to the reader is more than a cultural one. She also examines black people‟s living situation in America and presents the sociological problems of being black in a white culture (Holloway 11). Racism is the theme that dominates all her novels. The black characters experience and react to racism in different ways. Reading about black Americans‟ experience of racism and their reactions inevitably leads the reader to re-assess the values that govern the relationships between the white and the black and between the black and their folk. This opens the ethical dimension of Morrison‟s narrative. Given the devastating effects of racism depicted in the narrative, the dominating power and its agency are certainly held accountable. This is one possible way to link Morrison‟s writing with ethics, mainly in the light of post-colonialism. Some critics have approached Morrison‟s narrative from this perspective. Mbalia sees in The Bluest Eyes the “need for racial approbation” (153). Vickroy‟s “The Politics of Abuse” argues that the traumatized child in the novel provides “poignant metaphors and concrete examples of the neglect, exploitation, disempowerment, and disavowal of certain communities and even uncertain cultures” (204). In this way, Morrison urges readers “to remember and evaluate the wrongs of the past” (219).
In the light of post-colonial criticism, the moral implication of Morrison‟s novels can be easily discerned. Looked closely, however, the narrative seems to lack the poignancy characterizing most texts of anti-oppression. As a matter of fact, Morrison avoids dealing with the black-white confrontations directly. As she said in an interview, “If I dropped that [the confrontation] and just concentrated on what my grandmother would want to hear, you see-that, I thought, was going to be my territory” (Mabe 4). To be specific, she is more preoccupied with sustaining the black than condemning the white. It is black audience that she has been writing for. At 72, she said she didn‟t write to explain black people to white readers. Nor is she bothered by black readers who complain she‟s “hanging out too much of our dirty laundry” (Minzesheimer). Exposing the wound relentlessly, Morrison intends to heal. Her work explores the possibilities for black Americans to obtain a good life in a society dominated by the white. With beautiful language and collective memory, she soothes the oppressed and, in a sense, guides them in spirit. She leads them through an experience that awakes them to the reality of oppression and its impact on the individual. Most importantly, the experience makes the reader realize the necessity and the difficulty of judging people and making a choice between the good and the evil. As Peach points out, “The moral vision underpinning the narrative fuses the reclamation of a black cultural legacy with moral responsibility towards a wider black community” (6).
Indeed, Morrison is concerned about the moral implication of black people‟s situation, but she doest not state it explicitly. She creates a highly complicated structure to involve the
reader and makes him feel the moral urgency by himself. Her narrative technique strengthens the power of the story. When asked what obstacles she is trying to overcome in her writing, Morrison answered, “Technical things, the way in which I want to tell a story, which is not in that sort of fast-food way . . . but a way in which a reader can relish it, pause, dwell, enjoy the meal, as it were, but at the same time to have a very strong historical and cultural base in describing what impacts on people, especially, maybe exclusively, African-Americans” (Smiley). Reading her novels, therefore, one should pay close attention to the structure in order to realize both its beauty and the moral vision. As Wagner contends, “For Morrison, each book is a new arena, a place to choose structure and craft to achieve a total effect” (191).
In her first novel, The Bluest Eyes, Morrison started the moral inquiry with the story of a little black girl --Pecola. Her suffering and destruction trigger ethical considerations of human relationships, both inter-racial and intra-racial. This theme is expressed not only through the story but also through the structural pattern. This paper will analyze the narrative structure to demonstrate its relation to the formation of moral experience. As one will see, some of the narrative strategies and structural patterns also appear in Morrison‟s later novels. Altogether, they exemplify her pursuit of an effective form to articulate her concern with the suffering of black people and the kind of good life for them.
I. Moral Experience, Literature, and Form
According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the word “moral” means “concerned with the judgment principles of right and wrong in relation to human action and character.” Moral philosophers have investigated the principles and their validity only to get diversified conclusions, such as relativism, consequentialism, contextualism, universalism, etc. Instead of leading to a consensus, these theories nourish skepticism. Nevertheless, the difficulty of justifying moral principles did not stop philosophers from looking for other alternatives. After surveying the theories, Robert L. Holmes finds that increasing numbers of recent writers have started “to emphasize the uniqueness of particular situations and what they see as the inadequacy of a rule-oriented approach to morality” (207). Holmes himself also proclaims that the ultimate justification of our judgments “must be moral experience.” “If we do not just see that certain acts are right and others wrong in some situations,” he writes, “no amount of rational argument is likely to convince us of the validity of principles prescribing or prohibiting them” (228).
As moral experience provides the opportunity to testify principles, it is more meaningful to individuals than abstract moral norms. In such experience, the individual is involved rationally or imaginatively in a specific situation which requires him to judge or choose
between right and wrong. The value of the experience is not the outcome of the judgment. In the process, the person becomes aware of all the factors that need to be considered, including human motivation, personal interest and so on. He/She usually faces the conflicts among these factors. In a word, it is an experience of uncertainty, confusion, and hesitation. Eventually, the person learns the difficulty as well as the necessity of moral evaluation. At the postmodern age, when the hopes and illusions wrapping the social process and personal lives are fading, this experience has come to mean “facing the ambivalence of good and evil” (Bauman 2).
Moral experience is important for people today because we bear more moral responsibilities than our ancestors. As Bauman describes, at the postmodern age, “With universal principles and absolute truths dissipated or kicked out of fashion, it does not matter much any more what personal principles and private truth one embraces ... and follows ... ” (6). Under such circumstances, “the choice is blatantly left to the moral person‟s own device” and “With choice comes responsibility” (7). He, therefore, calls for a “greater awareness of the moral character of our choices, of our facing our choices more consciously and seeing their moral contents more clearly” (7).
Bauman has pointed out the significance of moral consciousness for a person living in a dissolving world. But, how can one breed this consciousness? For this purpose, modern moral philosophy is considered inadequate because it “ is governed by a dream of a community of reason that is too far removed ... from social and historical reality and from any concrete sense of a particular ethical life ... ” (Williams 197). This limitation drives some philosophers to literature. For them, literary writings are more effective than philosophical discourse in dealing with moral issues since they involve the reader emotionally with concrete details to produce moral experience and understanding. For instance, Martha Nussbaum argues that the novel, through the character‟s feeling and imagination, embodies a sense of life and that the readerly activity is built into its form, which not only provides aesthetic pleasure but also facilitates moral understanding (225-226). Another philosopher, Jane Adamson, contends that literature achieves ethical effects because the artistic text enables the inquirer to “mix[ed] up in the subject of inquiry, immersed, implicated, participating in it and imaginatively becoming one with it” (106). She argues that such a process, rather than being a detached investigator, will lead to the real moral experience, which can mean “plunge into an abyss of ambiguities” (98). According to these philosophers, moral experience is not a matter of observing principles rationally. Instead, it stresses emotional factors and seeks to achieve understanding and recognition.
Speaking of morality and literature, one may think of the traditional moral-philosophical approach. The approach, starting from Plato to Dr. Samuel Johnson, emphasizes the
instructive function of literary text to society. Under the argument that “the larger function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues” (Guerin 29), literary work is interpreted based on the moral or philosophical thought of a period of time. Since this approach views language as a transparent medium for ideas, it is no longer convincing today. Although the traditional approach has declined, that doesn‟t mean literary criticism has ceased to concern itself about man‟s moral sensibility and his pursuit of the ultimate good. Since discussing the whole way of life in the human society always involves value judgment, moral issues are actually an integral part of culture. As Benhabib observes, “Morality is a central domain in the universe of values which define culture” (55). As long as the concern about the cultural and social significance of literary texts remains, morality is always implied. It can be suppressed, but not be escaped. In the 20th century, as the post-structuralists fervently related literary texts to the social, cultural, and historical context, their emphasis on the marginalized and the oppressed showed a moral bias despite their attempt to rule out moral interest from literary criticism.
To be specific, morality has been the overtone of literary criticism for the past few decades. What the neo-Marxist, anti-racist, and feminists proclaimed during the seventies and eighties can all be called ethical. As Parker points out, “It is hard to see how a concern with such evils as „subordination and domination‟ is not at least implicitly oriented towards a conception of a good life centering around goods such as freedom, self-expression, and self-realization” (“Introduction” 3). Such moral concerns finally got a voice in the late 1990s, when the so-called “ethical criticism” emerged. Since the late 20th century, “there has been a significant and recent turn to the ethical in literary studies” (David Parker, “Introduction” 8), but the approach is varied. Other than the moral philosophers, many critics started to talk about ethics. Some focus on the moral implications of critical theories. For instance, Siebers discusses how “literary criticism, [from Plato to Lacan], affects the relation between literature and human life.” (2). Some critics deal with ethics in its relation to current topics in literature, such as history, identity, the Other, etc. (Rainsford and Woods). Some critics argue for the necessity of evaluative criticism, such as Booth and Parker. As for those concerned about reading, both Booth and Newton stress the relationship between author, reader, and the text and their responsibilities. Miller, on the other hand, questions reading ethics by claiming that the text has the responsibility to inform the reader of the impossibility of getting any knowledge from it.
As the foregoing paragraph shows, moral criticism is becoming a critical trend today. The present study is inspired by this trend but calls for an equal attention to the aesthetic value of the literary text. While many critics have successfully linked literary practice to ethical concerns, they tend to emphasize the moral propriety of theories (general critical
theories, queer theory, post-colonialism, etc.), genres (autobiography and testimony), and critical or evaluative activities. Even if the attention is directed to a work, the focus is primarily the narrating and reading activities. Sharing the concerns about morality with ethical criticism, this study, however, takes a different approach. It explores the moral connotation of the text rather than that of theories or relationships. With an emphasis on narrative structure, the study intends to show that any social, cultural, or ethical implication of a text cannot be separated from its formalistic design.
Speaking of morality in literature, one has to face two challenges derived from formalistic consideration and political assumption. The first challenge has been weakened with the decline of formalism today, but the second is still formidable. Moral principles are generally considered an invention of the ruling class to secure its dominating status. As David Parker points out, Marxists seek to deconstruct ethics because “it legitimates by universalizing into a system of binary moral oppositions the characteristics of one group or class versus another, so that „evil‟ inevitably denotes imagined characteristics of those who are Other to the hegemonic group.” “Thus ethics is an ideological mask of the will-to-power of the dominant class, ... or race or gender,” he adds (“Introduction” 5). Such an assumption generates distrust on moral norms. Discussing the moral aspect of a novel, therefore, might be interpreted as assisting the ruling class in its ideological control.
Although moral discourse always suggests an ideology, the purpose it serves can be interpreted quite differently. While George Lukacs believes realism can be used against bourgeoisie by incorporating a recognition of the contradictions in bourgeois society, Adorno and Walter Benjamin consider it a form of compliance by being consumed merely by the bourgeois audience. Another example is the canonical texts. Interpreted as bearing the values of the ruling class, the texts, according to David Parker, are actually “the most powerful demystifiers of the ideologies they have been said to promote” because they “subvert the ethical binary oppositions” (Ethics 63). Like fictional form and canonical work, moral discourse does not necessarily serve Europeans, the middle class, or the male. On the contrary, it can be used against the dominant ideology as well as supporting it. For instance, Dickens‟ The Hard Times urges the reader to reflect on the moral of political economy rather than succumbing to it (Nussbaum 232). For minority writers, the novel can be a suitable form to question existing values and induce a reflection on the fact of dominance in a subtle way.
Whether a literary text promotes or subverts an ideology depends on its form as well as its content. Neither formalistic nor political consideration should stop the pursuit of the moral in literary criticism. On the contrary, it can blow new life into the study of form and avoid rendering literature a servant to philosophical thought. The fact that the pure formalistic approach to literary text is no longer convincing today doesn‟t mean form is not important.
Given its function to create a special experience for the reader and account for the meaning of the work, its value should not be overlooked. All form, as A. C. Bradley says, is expression. The writings of modernism and post-modernism have testified to this statement. It might not be an exaggeration to say that all writers are preoccupied with formalistic innovation. Since form is significant while pure formalistic analysis is considered aimless, the best way to rediscover its value is by placing it in the context of culture and society. Linking form to morality helps fit the study of form into contemporary critical trend. As Fredrick Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, “ ... structural analysis should thus finally open out onto the third term of what I have ... called „the logic of content‟: the semantic raw materials of social life and language, the constraints of determinate social contradictions, the conjectures of social class, the historicity of structures of feeling and perception and ultimately of bodily experience ...” (147). While Jameson stresses social determinants in the literary text, he also touches on the moral dimension by using such words as “constraints” and “conjectures.”
Meaning is closely related to expression and some critics have noticed the connection between literary form and its moral function. For instance, Scheick writes, “ ... fictional structure shares with architecture and the primacy of the observer (reader), for whom it is ideally simultaneously aesthetic and instructive” (xii). He bases his analysis of the turn-of-the-century English novels on an argument that “within the characterization-structure dialectic in the novel a positive correspondence frequently exists between authorial emphasis on fictional architecture and authorial interest in ethical concerns per se” (23). Also focusing on the English novel, Larson investigates the connection between aesthetics and ethics. She was inspired by moral philosophers‟ ideas about the function of literature and returns to aesthetics for support. Her book manifests “how the writers shaped what they considered a new ethics by telling traditional stories in a new way, and the methods and details of those narratives construct alternatives to conventional Victorian morality even as they reveal the residual hold that such a morality has on late-century writers” (12).
Among Toni Morrison‟s critics, those who pay attention to her form usually regard it as a contribution to the presenting, preserving and shaping of black culture. Not many have stressed its ideological connotation. Linda Dittmar is an exception. She examines Morrison‟s rich syntax, resonant imagery, dispersed chronology, and shifting viewpoints in The Bluest
Eyes to demonstrate how her “contradictory claims of form and content ... raise questions of
narrative strategy and ideology to her work as a black woman writer and, by extension, to minority and female writing in general” (124). The present study will push the issue further from ideology to morality.
The following analysis of the text will exemplify how narrative structure aids the formation of moral experience in The Bluest Eyes. To avoid confusion with current ethical
criticism, the word “morality” will be used more often than “ethic,” though the latter is sometimes related to the former. Morrison does not teach morality directly in her novels. What she does is providing an experience to elicit moral understanding and reflection from readers. Her strategies include (1) building an unbalanced structure on the victim and the oppressing forces, (2) utilizing the principle of balance, and (3) manipulating narrative tone. Treating the narrative as an artistic form, the following analysis refers to aesthetic theorist, DeWitt H. Parker‟s, The Principles of Aesthetics for the structural principles, such as unity, dominance, and contrast. As for the structural existents to be examined in the narrative, they are based on Seymour Chatman‟s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Chatman divides the structure of the fiction into two planes—the story and the
discourse. Although the division might not fully reflect reading dynamics, it provides a convenient basis for analysis.
II. Asymmetric Structure—Victim vs Victimizer
The Bluest Eyes (to be represented by “B” in quotations) tells about how a little black
girl, Pecola, is devastated by the forces from within and without. The reader is introduced into the moral situation and urged to think of morality by perceiving Pecola‟s victimization. Morrison shapes Pecola as a “perfectly innocent victim,” as she says in an interview (LeClaire & McCaffery 254). The girl faces the formidable force of coercion formed by other characters--her parents, the school boys, a white store owner, the black middle-class woman and his son, and the black minister. Such a relationship is portrayed not only by expository but also by structural means. Morrison makes the reader experience Pecola as a marginal element threatened to be erased from the narrative while other characters dominate the structure as an overwhelming force against the girl. The result is an unbalanced construction which awakens the reader to the injustice involved in the situation and the various sources of inhumanity. Morrison violates the principle of dominance to highlight the girl‟s marginality and insignificance. According to DeWitt Parker, dominance is the second great aesthetic principle, next to unity. “In an aesthetic whole the elements are seldom all on a level; some are superior, others subordinate” and “the attention is not evenly distributed among the parts, but proceeds from certain ones which are focal and commanding to others which are of lesser interest,” he states (76). As the title suggests, Pecola is the center of the novel and deserves most attention from the reader. The narrative goes against this rule, however. The center of the novel is a void due to Pecola‟s “unbeing” (Morrison, “Unspeakable” 220).
Pecola is marginalized, first of all, by hardly having a voice. Dittmar has noticed that the novel “counters the muting of Pecola‟s voice with the empowerment of other voices in her
community” (134). Claudia and an omniscient narrator tell the story and determine the reader‟s perception of Pecola. They report her physical actions and occasional utterance. According to Morrison, she uses a narrator in order to create “the intimacy between the reader and the page” and avoid too much emotional impact on the reader (“Unspeakable” 219). Her concern is understandable. Nevertheless, Pecola‟s silence has another effect. In structural terms, it alienates the character from the reader and diminishes her image in the reader‟s mind. This effect corresponds with Pecola‟s image as a small, unimportant figure in the community.
The reader rarely hears Pecola‟s voice. Even if he does, it‟s some fragmentary sentences and a conversation in madness. In the first case, the low frequency and short duration of her utterance suggest her aloofness. The utterance takes the form of questions mostly, which lack the consistency to build her as a central character. “Am I going to die?” she asks Claudia and her sister (B 28). “How do you do that? How do you get someone to love you?” (B 32). “How come you got so many boyfriends, Miss Marie,” she asks one of the whores befriending her (B 52). “How come?” she insists (B 52) Pecola‟s voice is scarcely heard, broken, and indeterminate. It fails to claim much of the reader‟s attention. In the permeating silence, there is one exception. Near the end of the novel, the reader unexpectedly hears the girl talk to her hallucinated self following the mental breakdown. The twelve-page conversation certainly creates a dominant effect. In view of its content, however, this structural highlight just reconfirms Pecola‟s role as a victim. As a voice is usually associated with power and self-integrity, the meager voice turns the girl into a less dominating element in the narrative structure. Her position in the story, as that in the community, is highly jeopardized. .
The deprivation of the voice might not necessarily make Pecola elusive. The limited presentation of her consciousness pushes her further away from the reader. As the girl seldom speaks for herself, the narrator‟s record of the character‟s physical action and her thought, especially the latter, is critical for the reader to understand her. As Chatman points out, the presentation of “free direct thought” has long been a commonplace in Western fiction (182). Under the influence of modernism, novelists nowadays place more emphasis on the exploration of human consciousness, including perception and cognition. Structurally speaking, this record of thought slows down narrating pace, prolongs narrating time, and detains the reader in a certain situation. As a result, his experience of the character‟s motivation and emotional reaction is intensified. This is also an effect of dominance. The reader of The Bluest Eyes seldom experiences Pecola in this way. For such a central figure, the only chance to peer into her mind is the six-page (44-50) narration on two episodes. One is about her reaction from witnessing family violence: “Letting herself breathe easy now, Pecola covered her head with the quilt. The sick feeling she had tried to prevent by holding in her stomach, came quickly in spite of her precaution” (B 44-45). Her wish to escape is
frustrated by her perception of her own ugliness and generates the desire to change. The desire is reinforced by the other episode at Mr. Yacobowski‟s store, where she suffers from the lack of recognition. Although the psychological depiction in the two episodes allows the reader to see the character in depth, given the length of the book (206 pages), the six-page presentation is too limited to sustain the impression of Pecola.
The third structural feature of Pecola is the minimized role she plays in every chapter. She is not only rarely heard but also seldom seen. If this is Pecola‟s story, the reader may expect the narration to be composed mainly of her actions since her feeling and thought are often concealed. At this expectation, Morrison frustrates the reader again. The narration on Pecola is fragmentary and scattered in every chapter that focuses on other characters. She usually shows up near the end and silently endures their cruel treatment. In the first chapter, as Claudia mentions how her family shelters Pecola, the narration is primarily on herself--how she is treated as a child in the house or how she destroys white dolls. The attention is finally shifted to Pecola due to her menstruation. In the long chapter about Pauline‟s life, Pecola is seldom mentioned. Neither does she play any role in the deliberate exploration of Cholley‟s incoherent life, except at the very end when she appears only to be raped by him. While the reader expects this character to be the center of the book, what he actually perceives is her marginality.
Pecola‟s absence is also noticeable in the chapters about Geraldine and Whitcomb. Morrison confuses the reader by providing historical detailed accounts on the two characters who seem to have no connection with Pecola. In both chapters, the girl is almost forgotten. She appears only at the end to show how black middle-class people deal with the poor folk. Geraldine rejects her ruthlessly while Whitcomb exploits her self-righteously. As Linda Wagner notices, “Much of the novel concerns episodes and scenes that relate to Pecola only peripherally” (195). She regards it as the way Morrison forces the reader to see the child‟s inseparable fate with the family and the community. As far as structure is concerned, being peripheral usually indicates a decrease of significance. This is just how the girl is perceived by the reader as well as her community.
By depriving the protagonist of her structural privilege, Morrison assures the reader of the girl‟s marginality. As the reader is about to ignore this character, however, the two functions she performs bring her back to the center. An elusive part of the narrative she may be, Pecola is nevertheless a unifying force of the novel. Since the episodes concerning other characters are so dominating, they threaten to disrupt the narrative. It is Pecola‟s participation, no matter how limited, that holds them together. The second function of the child is to highlight the theme of victimization. All the events related to her are variations on the theme. She is bullied by school boys, patronized by Maureen, ignored by the teacher and Mr.
humanity. As a reviewer says about her eighth novel, Love, “But the novel is less about segregation and integration than it is about the most basic of human emotions: love and hate, or, as the author puts it, “how we got so far from what we came here with, which is a tendency to love” (Minzesheimer). At an age when the progress in our life is also about “fast and efficient killing, scientifically designed and administered genocide” (Bauman 193), literary writings may suggest a good way to fight indifference and cruelty. They put to practice the philosophers‟ solutions such as “the reversibility of perspective” (Benhahib 8) and the recognition of “the commonness of humanity” (Gaita 286). As Morrison‟s narrative testifies, the novel can produce a life experience from the perspective of other cultures. Such an imaginative experience will lead to understanding and recognition, making people treat one another more humanly.
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[45] Thomas, Leester. “When Home Fails to Nurture the Self: The Tragedy of Being Homeless at Home.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 21.1(1997). Rpt. in Bloom 225-37.
[46] Vickroy, Laurie. “The Politics of Abuse: the Traumatized Child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras.” Mosiac 29.2 (1996). Rpt. in Bloom 203-19.
[47] Willis, Susan. “Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.” Specifying: Black
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[48] Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
