Professor Amy
Hungerford: So,
today we will talk about The
Bluest Eye.
This novel has a lot to do
with the questions that John
Barth was thinking about,
in a very different register,
in Lost in the Funhouse.
This is,
of course, the story of a
little girl who is totally
remade by a story that's told to
her,
and I just want to point this
out to you, on page 182 of
The Bluest Eye.
This is the letter that
Soaphead Church writes to God
explaining his action.
He has, remember,
tricked Pecola in to thinking
that if something happens to the
dog that he sends her out to
feed,
it will be a sign that God has
answered her prayer for blue
eyes.
And, of course,
what he has given her to give
to the dog is poison.
So of course the dog dies,
and this convinces Pecola that
her prayers have been answered,
and it pushes her over the edge
in to something like
schizophrenia.
But Soaphead is very satisfied
with his work,
and this is how he describes
that work:
"I looked at that ugly
little black girl and I loved
her.
I played You," he says to God,
"and it was a very good show.
I have caused a miracle.
I gave her the eyes.
I gave her two blue eyes,
cobalt blue,
a streak of it,
right out of Your own blue
heaven.
No one else will see her blue
eyes, but she will,
and she will live happily ever
after.
I, I have found it meet and
right so to do." 
That last line,
"meet and right so to do," is
from the Anglican liturgy,
or may also occur in the
Catholic liturgy.
It refers to the Last Supper;
"It is meet and right so to do"
to commemorate Christ's last
supper with his disciples
through the sacrament of the
Eucharist.
So, he makes that story he
tells her, one,
into a sacramental story,
as if he is giving her God's
gift.
But it is very patently a
story, and we get that because
he says "she will live happily
ever after."
So, what he has invited her
to do is to fully inhabit the
dream of the white aesthetic
that her mother has absorbed
through the movies and has used
in naming her.
Remember, in the novel we're
told that Pecola's name is close
to a name from the 1934 movie
Imitation of Life,
which has a complicated story.
But it's about race relations,
and it features a little girl
named Peola who ends up passing
for white because she so hates
the blackness of her mother.
So, Pecola's mother absorbed
that white aesthetic,
projected it on to her
daughter,
and her daughter finally so
longs to inhabit that story that
she goes to Soaphead Church.
And this is how she ends up,
and the cost of inhabiting that
story is derangement.
If John Barth's characters
inhabit stories,
stories that precede them in
the world-- Remember,
this is why it's important that
the narrator of the first story
in that collection is the sperm.
The sperm comes already stocked
with the phrases and patterns of
prior literature.
Well, Toni Morrison advances an
analysis that is not so
different.
Pecola came into the world,
essentially,
through her mother and the
society that surrounded her,
stocked with the story of white
aesthetics, the story that told
her that she and her family were
ugly and irredeemable.
The quality of Morrison's
fiction could not be more
different from the quality of
Barth's fiction,
and I want to suggest to you
that that's because in
Morrison's fiction--this is her
first novel begun in the early
'60s,
published in 1970--in this
novel, she is absorbing
something from that '60s
culture,
reflecting on it,
that Barth kept very much at
arm's length.
So, the abstract question of
what kinds of narratives produce
the identity of a person becomes
for Morrison a political
question.
Remember that divide I was
describing in the 1960s
political world,
where some activists by the mid
'60s began to drop out of
activism because they were
convinced that it was more
important to know themselves
than to actually go and try to
promote a positive program in
the world.
And there was the
counterculture gaining steam,
advocating a playful engagement
with the world that would be
uninterested in questions like
the Vietnam War.
"Turn your back on the war,"
says Ken Kesey.
Drop out.
Drop acid;
that's the thing you should be
doing.
Well, the cultural politics of
the late '60s try to merge these
two kinds of resistance to
convention.
So it merges the cultural focus
of the counterculture--that's
why it's called the
counterculture;
it produces a culture against
the prevailing culture--and that
politically activist body of
thought coming out of the Civil
Rights movement and the Black
Power movement in the '60s.
So, this produces a cultural
politics, the cultural politics
of the late '60s and into the
'70s,
and I would say even up through
the culture wars of the 1990s.
This is the legacy of the
1960s in literature.
So, Morrison takes the insights
of Barth, and she turns them to
political purpose.
One of our questions today is
going to be: Why does Toni
Morrison, in 1970,
sit down to write a novel,
instead of a tract?
Why is she interested in
literature, as opposed to
something like sociology?
She has such a strong and
passionate desire for justice
for African Americans.
Why is literature her chosen
venue?
Now, I'm sure there are a
thousand reasons,
but we're going to--I'm going
to--bring some of them out of
the novel that we can read right
there.
Just without going into
biography or psychology,
we're going to think about how
the novel presents itself as
doing a kind of work in the
world that Barth's writing never
tries to do.
So, that's where I'm going to
go today.
Let me also point out that,
like Pynchon,
Morrison wants to imagine the
novel as a medium that can hold
the human within it.
So, a second question that I
want to get at today is,
given that
commonality--Remember,
I ended my lecture on Pynchon
by arguing that sentiment
remained important in Pynchon's
work;
despite all that word play,
all that self-conscious irony
of the story,
all that humor at the level of
names,
what really finally mattered
was not that search for meaning,
but the moment when you could
touch another human being.
And Pynchon is interested in
certain kinds of essences--like
dandelion wine,
or tears, or the sailor's
mattress--that hold in them,
in suspension,
the cycles and movements of
human life.
Morrison has that same
desire to hold the human in her
fiction, and so this is one
reason why Morrison chooses the
novel.
This is the first of the
reasons: to hold the human in
suspension in the novel.
Now it takes a very particular
form, and if you think to the
passages about Pauline,
there is the section on
Pecola's mother,
Pauline, where we see large
blocks of italics of her voice
coming to us.
This is a very obvious example
of how that works in Morrison's
fiction.
This is an effort to let the
voice of the unheard speak
through her fiction.
So, why write a novel instead
of writing a tract or becoming a
sociologist or a politician?
One reason, for Morrison,
is that the novel allows the
voices of the oppressed to speak
in a way that they could not
otherwise.
This entails a certain
assumption about her own
position as a writer.
She writes from within a black
community she knows well.
This novel is set in Lorain,
Ohio, her hometown,
and so she takes on that task
because she feels she is
equipped for it;
she can speak in a communal
voice or she can make her voice
available for the voices within
the community that she knows.
Now, how many of you have
read Beloved?
Ah, great.
I usually don't put it on the
syllabus because I assume most
people have read it.
But, if you recall,
this effort to recover the
voice of the unheard is
absolutely central to
Beloved;
it is the premise of
Beloved.
Toni Morrison found an
account of a woman in a
newspaper in the mid nineteenth
century who tried to kill her
children instead of allowing
them to be recaptured into
slavery,
and she thought about what kind
of story that woman would have
to tell about her life,
or what kind of story could be
told about that woman that the
papers, that historians,
would never know and would
never be able to recover.
Fiction, because it is
imaginative, gives you a way to
get at what academics of the
traditional kind cannot transmit
about the past,
but also, in this novel,
about a life that is closer to
her current moment,
the moment of writing.
So, by including Pauline's
voice, she allows Pauline to
begin to tell her own story of
how she became married to Cholly
Breedlove and how she evolved in
to the fairly hateful woman that
we see her to be when we see her
as Pecola's mother.
You might find,
and I have to admit I myself
find, that particular example
quite clunky in a literary
sense.
Why did Morrison suddenly turn
to those italicized blocks?
And, I don't know if you read
the-- I think you have the
postscript, the afterword,
that Morrison appended to this
edition of the novel.
If you haven't read it,
I would suggest that you do.
It's quite interesting.
She notes there that she
herself is very unhappy with
that section of the novel.
She herself finds it clunky
from the perspective of twenty
years later.
She writes the afterword in
1993.
So, it's unsatisfying to her,
but there are more successful
versions of it.
And you see that,
for example,
when the women are gathered
around Aunt Jimmy's bed,
and they're talking as she is
in her final sickness.
And they're talking with one
another about their aches and
pains.
That's one example of how those
voices come into the novel.
There are just many dozens of
these examples,
so any time you hear a
character begin to speak,
you have that sense that you're
hearing something that you
wouldn't otherwise hear if
Morrison was not there to open
your ear to it and to embody
those voices.
It's one of the great strengths
of her writing is that ability
to embody the voice.
So, that's one reason why you
write a novel instead of being a
sociologist.
Another reason is to push
the boundaries of what's
credible, to push those
boundaries so far that you can
see the abject very clearly in
front of you within a literary
form,
and so she chooses Pecola as
the ugly child.
She seems to have no redeeming
intelligence.
She has no one who really loves
her, except maybe a few whores
who live above her house.
She has no conversation that we
really recall.
She doesn't say anything
particularly witty.
Probably what we remember her
for is simply that desire to
have blue eyes.
We don't really get inside her
head, even, and so this is a
place where Morrison's desire to
speak for those who can't speak
for themselves runs up against a
wall.
But she's very interested in
what happens when the
imagination hits up against that
wall.
How far can we go towards
inhabiting the subject position
of an abject person?
That's what she's testing in
this novel.
And she herself speaks of a
silence at the heart of it,
and that silence is in part the
silence about Pecola's
experience of the rape,
when she's raped by her father.
We don't really get a sense of
what she thinks,
what she experiences.
If you think again back to
Barth, remember that quotation
of silence at the very center of
Menelaiad. So,
Morrison is again engaging a
problem that other writers are
engaging at this time,
but she's setting it in a very
specific historical moment with
very specific historical and
political connotations and
implications coming out of her
examination.
So, silence is at the
heart, but it's hedged around so
that we can see it as a silence.
So, extremity does that for her.
I would argue that the third
reason she uses the novel
instead of a tract is to
generate sympathy.
And this, again,
I was arguing,
is part of Pynchon's project.
Usually, someone like Morrison
is separate in people's
categories of contemporary
fiction from writers like Barth
and Pynchon.
I am going to argue that they
actually occupy much of the same
space.
What does sympathy look like in
Morrison?
Well, she sets herself a task
that, I would say,
is almost as hard as the task
that Nabokov has set himself,
and in fact maybe it's even
harder.
Nabokov set himself the task of
making us like Humbert Humbert.
Now how many of you liked
Humbert in the end?
He's getting less popular as
the weeks go by.
More of you seemed to like him
when we were in the throes of
reading his seductive voice.
But Nabokov set himself the
task of seducing us with
Humbert's voice.
Morrison,
as part of this novel,
sets herself the task of making
us sympathize with a drunk who
has no verbal capacities who
rapes his own daughter.
Now, does she succeed?
Well, let's take a look.
On page 146,
we're a little ways into the
story of Cholly Breedlove,
and this is in the scene where
he has just left the funeral of
his aunt with a girl named
Darlene.
And they're playing and
flirting and making out in the
field.
She's gotten her clothes dirty: 
"You ain't dirty," he
says to her.
"I am too.
Look at that."
She dropped her hands from the
ribbon and smoothed out a place
on her dress where the grape
stains were heaviest.
Cholly felt sorry for her.
It was just as much his fault.
Suddenly he realized that Aunt
Jimmy was dead,
for he missed the fear of being
whipped.
There was nobody to do it
except Uncle O.V.,
and he was the bereaved too.
"Let me," he said,
and he rose to his knees,
facing her, and tried to tie
her ribbon.
Darlene put her hands under his
open shirt and rubbed the damp
skin.
When he looked at her in
surprise she stopped and
laughed.
He smiled and continued
knotting the bow.
She put her hands back under
his shirt.
These little gestures that
Morrison grants to Cholly in
this scene--tiny gestures of
tying the girl's bow,
leaning over her,
concerned for her looks as she
goes back to her mother,
telling her--reassuring
her--that she's not dirty,
and in a novel that is so full
of demonized cleanliness his
gentle assurance that her dress
though stained,
is not dirty in the moral
sense--this is a mark of
kindness, the mark of humanity.
So, Morrison begins with small
details like this to build up
our sympathy for Cholly.
It gets more intense when he
meets his father in the city.
This is on page 155.
This is when he first sees him
playing craps in the alleyway:
A man in a light-brown
jacket stood at the far end of
the group.
He was gesturing in a
quarrelsome, agitated manner
with another man.
Both of them had folded their
faces in anger.
Cholly edged round to where
they stood, hardly believing he
was at the end of his journey.
There was his father,
a man like any other man,
but there indeed were his eyes,
his mouth, his whole head,
his shoulders lurched beneath
that jacket, his voice,
his hands, all real.
They existed,
really existed,
somewhere, right here.
Cholly had always thought of
his father as a giant of a man,
so when he was very close it
was with a shock that he
discovered that he was taller
than his father.
In fact, he was staring at a
balding spot on his father's
head, which he suddenly wanted
to stroke.
While thus fascinated by the
pitiable clean space hedged
round by neglected tufts of
wool, the man turned a hard,
belligerent face to him.
[And then assumes that Cholly
has come at the behest of a
woman that he's slept with to
squeeze money out of him.]
So, in this scene,
we once again see that humane
touching impulse.
He wants to touch his father's
head, touch the sign of his
father's mortality,
the fact that his father is
growing older.
He sees in his father's body
his own face,
hands, voice,
and we can feel that with him.
And then, when he flees from
that scene, finally,
and soils himself,
he becomes another one of those
abject characters.
And he goes to hide under a
pier, finally bathes in a river
at night.
This kind of detail gives us
two things: both the beginnings
or another iteration of the
reason why he becomes who he
becomes,
the drunk, the rapist,
but it gives us more than that.
It gives us a sense of his
complexity.
It makes us want to like him,
and, in fact,
by this point I would argue
that probably most readers do
like him at this point in the
novel.
Can Morrison sustain this to
the very end?
Well, in a way I want you to be
the judge, but if we look on
206, I would argue that we're
beginning to see that effort.
This is at the very end of the
novel, speaking of Pecola:
Oh, some of us "loved"
her [and that "love" is in
quotations]
the Maginot Line and Cholly
loved her.
I'm sure he did.
He, at any rate,
was the one who loved her
enough to touch her,
envelop her,
give something of himself to
her.
But his touch was fatal,
and the something he gave her
filled the matrix of her agony
with death.
Love is never any better than
the lover.
Wicked people love wickedly,
violent people love violently,
weak people love weakly,
stupid people love stupidly,
but the love of a free man is
never safe.
There is no gift for the
beloved.
The lover alone possesses his
gift of love.
The loved one is shorn,
neutralized,
frozen in the glare of the
lover's inward eye.
For one thing,
Morrison endows these sentences
with a lyrical quality that
makes us feel their power.
But there's one line she uses
to describe Cholly that I think
trumps all the others,
and that's this one about the
love of a free man:
"The love of a free man is
never safe."
Safety is not exactly of value
in this novel.
If it were, the safe white
household in which Mrs.
Breedlove works would look a
lot more appealing than it does.
There is a certain safety for
Frieda and Claudia in their
intact household,
but there, too,
it is fraught with suffering.
Their mother is cruel to them.
She yells at them.
Safety is not really to be had
there, and the safety that is
had comes at great cost.
When Cholly is described as
having freed himself,
earlier in the novel,
part of that story which we
don't get explicitly is that he
has learned to turn his hatred,
finally, against the white men,
symbolized by the white men who
discover him making love to
Darlene in that earlier scene.
We're told that initially he
hates her instead of the white
men, because hating the white
men would undo him to such an
extent he was not ready to see
that oppression for what it was.
Later in his life,
we're told, he kills three
white men.
We don't know the
circumstances,
and at that moment,
we're told that he's a free
man.
Freedom,
when applied to a black man,
cannot be a wholly negative
quality.
In the context that Morrison
evokes, of a society still
plagued by the remnants of
slavery, to call Cholly free
can't be to dismiss him.
It gives a certain honor and
weight to his anger.
And to re-evoke that word,
to come back to that word,
in describing his love for the
daughter he rapes,
I think, is quite
controversial.
It suggests that there was some
value in the thing of himself he
gave to her.
Now, this is not exactly what
you'd want to call a feminist
position, although Morrison
certainly is I would say a
feminist writer in the largest
sense of that word.
But what she has tried to do
here, in keeping with the
challenge that I think she must
have set for herself,
is to make us see Cholly
complexly enough to sympathize
with him even after he commits
this crime.
So she takes a certain kind of
risk, but that's why she does
it.
She wants us to see him in a
sympathetic light.
This is what a novel can do.
It requires that lyrical
quality of voice;
it requires the buildup of
history, and it requires,
in this scene,
the return to that precise
language.
So, a very common literary
technique--we see it all the
time in the things that we read
together--is to return to the
terms you used in an earlier
moment to ring the changes on
those terms again,
to use that word.
Well, that's what Morrison uses
to produce this sense of value
in Cholly at the end of the
novel.
In this sense it participates
or is in conversation with a
tradition of the
nineteenth-century novel in
America.
So, one of the most prestigious
novels of the nineteenth century
is of course Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin,
a hugely successful novel,
abolitionist novel whose aim
was to create a sense of the
slave's humanity for white
readers so that white readers
would become inspired to the
abolitionist cause.
What was repulsive about that
novel to someone like Morrison
is the starched white virtue and
the starched white culture to
which the African American
characters in the novel were
recruited.
So, in that novel,
their humanity and the sympathy
that that would evoke from the
reader depended on their looking
as white as possible,
and therefore there was this
great privileging of the
light-skinned black in that
novel and a sense of Christian
value redeeming the
darker-skinned characters.
They needed it--more,
it seems, than the
light-skinned characters--so the
darker your skin is in Uncle
Tom's Cabin the more
religious you are.
So it's a whitewashing of the
African American figure.
So, Morrison takes something of
the sympathetic project of
Uncle Tom's Cabin and
that tradition of the
nineteenth-century novel,
but she transforms it by making
us sympathetic to someone like
Cholly who Harriet Beecher Stowe
would put so far outside the
pale of humanity we wouldn't- he
wouldn't even be visible on her
screen.
So, this is her project.
Sympathy,
however, relies on some darker
and more ambiguous techniques
that Morrison is also committed
to,
and one of those is what I'm
going to call negativity.
Morrison is very careful--in
this novel, especially--to talk
about what people are not.
And you see an example of this
on page 55, when she's
describing the prostitutes.
This is after she's been
telling stories--Miss Marie has
been telling stories--to Pecola
about her husband.
They did not belong [This
is at the bottom of the page].
They did not belong to those
generations of prostitutes
created in novels with great and
generous hearts,
dedicated because of the horror
of circumstance to ameliorating
the luckless,
barren life of men,
taking money incidentally and
humbly for their understanding.
Nor were they from that
sensitive breed of young girl
gone wrong at the hands of fate,
forced to cultivate an outward
bitterness in order to protect
her springtime from further
shock,
but knowing full well she was
cut out for better things and
could make the right man happy.
Neither were they the sloppy,
inadequate whores who,
unable to make a living at it
alone,
turned to drug consumption and
traffic or pimps to help
complete their stream of
self-destruction,
avoiding suicide only to punish
the memory of some absent father
or to sustain the misery of some
silent mother.
Except for Marie's fabled love
for Dewey Prince,
these women hated men,
all men, without shame,
apology or discrimination.
They abused their visitors with
a scorn grown mechanical from
use: black men,
white men, Puerto Ricans,
Mexican, Jews,
Poles, whatever.
All were inadequate and weak.
All came under their jaundiced
eyes and were the recipients of
their disinterested wrath.
They took delight in cheating
them.
On one occasion the town well
knew they lured a Jew up the
stairs, pounced on him,
all three, held him up by the
heels, shook everything out of
his pants pockets and threw him
out of the window.
Neither did they have respect
for women who,
although not their colleagues
so to speak, nevertheless
deceived their husbands
regularly or irregularly.
It made no difference.
Sugar-coated whores they called
them, and did not yearn to be in
their shoes.
Their only respect was for what
they would have described as
good Christian colored women,
the woman whose reputation was
spotless and who tended to her
family, who didn't drink or
smoke or run around.
These women had their undying,
if covert, affection.
They would sleep with their
husbands and take their money,
but always with a vengeance.
Nor were they protective and
solicitous of youthful
innocence.
They looked back on their own
youth as a period of ignorance
and regretted that they had not
made more of it.
They were not young girls in
whores' clothing or whores
regretting their loss of
innocence.
They were whores in whores'
clothing, whores who had never
been young and had no word for
innocence.
"Whores in whores' clothing."
That's the negativity,
one version of the negativity.
It refuses all those
conventional stock stories of
what whores can be in the novel.
So, the very first instance of
it singles out the novel:
"They did not belong to those
generations of prostitutes
created in novels with great and
generous hearts,"
and so on.
But all those other versions
are equally fictional types of
prostitutes.
So she rejects the stock
literary cupboard of stories
about prostitutes.
"They were whores in whores'
clothing."
There is an assertion of their
opacity right there.
They are opaque to literary
embellishment.
They are what they are;
they just are whores.
But the negativity,
the repeated "nors"--neither
were they this,
nor were they that,
they were not this,
they were not that--it is a
kind of engine of narrative.
And it limns the place where
they might come to stand in and
of themselves,
without embellishment.
So, the effort to help us to
sympathize with marginal
characters--Cholly Breedlove,
prostitutes--is an effort at
limning a space where they can
stand in and of themselves,
and it creates narrative for us
to sympathize through.
It creates a credibility for
her voice;
it creates a sense of where
they can occupy a space,
these characters.
What's more,
Marie, as we know,
is the one person who really
tells stories in this novel.
So Morrison also gives her a
special gift as a character,
a gift that Morrison's own gift
echoes.
She's allowed to tell stories
for Pecola's delight.
She's the only one who does
that sort of thing for this
child.
Pecola herself,
though, is the ultimate
negativity, and this is on 205.
You can see how this works.
This is in the middle of that
page.
All of our waste which we
dumped on her and which she
absorbed, all of our beauty
which was hers first and she
gave to us,
all of us, all who knew her,
felt so wholesome after we
cleaned ourselves on her.
We were so beautiful when we
stood astride her ugliness.
Her simplicity decorated us.
Her guilt sanctified us.
Her pain made us glow with
health.
Her awkwardness made us think
we had a sense of humor.
Her inarticulateness made us
believe we were eloquent.
Her poverty kept us generous.
Even her waking dreams we used
to silence our own nightmares
and she let us and thereby
deserved our contempt.
We honed our egos on her,
padded our characters with her
frailty, and yawned in the
fantasy of our strength.
Pecola is the embodiment of the
negative, so she represents all
that the community does not want
in itself: the excess blackness,
the ugliness that the white
aesthetic says can't be changed
or redeemed.
She represents the poverty that
they all strive to escape,
or at least keep a bit at bay.
So, Pecola as the negativity
is--through the whole novel,
in the structure of the whole
novel--the absence that keeps
the narrative engine working.
It has to keep working because
she's always there as the
negative pole waiting to be
touched--even in the least
bit--by the narrative's
revelation.
So she embodies that,
the desire to know another
person, which,
in Menelaiad, if
you'll remember,
is Menelaus's undoing.
He diddles on and on,
his voice asking,
"Why?
Why?
Why'd you choose me, Helen? Why?
Why do you love me?"
He can't take any answer,
and it makes him ridiculous and
it ruins his marriage.
That effort to know another
person is much more than a
diddling on, in Morrison.
That effort to know another
person isn't by definition put
off limits, in Morrison.
The effort at trying is far
more honored.
The alienation from self which
produces a kind of irony and a
pleasure in humor in both Barth
and Pynchon,
that self-consciousness that
you see in both novels,
is not a source of humor in
Morrison because the alienation
is produced by an unjust
society.
It's not a laughing matter.
It's not so much the universal
human condition as it is in
Barth, to be alienated from
yourself.
The self-alienation that Pecola
embodies as the negative is the
product of oppression,
racial oppression.
If there is an opportunity for
humor in Morrison's work,
it's not going to come from
that fountain of irony.So,
is irony dead in Morrison?
Well, maybe.
If we see irony in Morrison's
work, it's in the specific local
language of the characters,
and I would submit to you that
where we see something funny,
it's always with a tinge of
darkness,
as in Claudia and Frieda's
mother when she complains.
I don't know if you remember
this scene when she complains
about Pecola drinking all the
milk.
She goes on and on and on in
this baroque aria of indictment
and it's funny,
and what we're told about this
mother is that on her grumpy
days this is what she does.
She complains about the whole
world until she's got everything
covered, she's covered every
complaint she could possibly
have, and then she sings.
And the fact that she turns to
singing after having done that
suggests a kind of continuity,
that there is an operatic,
artistic quality to the
complaining.
And Morrison gives it to us in
her voice, and that is the kind
of pleasure that Morrison's
novels give us;
that's the kind of humor that
her novels give us.
It's not going to be the funny,
sad situation of the
perpetually alienated Ambrose.
It's going to be a woman in her
kitchen who's out of milk now,
doesn't know where she's
getting the next quart,
and yet, and yet,
uses that verbal facility to
make something in its place,
in the place of the milk that's
not there, something to
entertain her daughters as they
listen.
So, there is a deeper,
even darker side,
I would suggest,
to the generation of sympathy
in Morrison's novels.
And that's the last point I
want to make for you today,
and I think we can see it
most--well--I'm going to show
you one example,
and then quick flip to the more
important one.
On 176, when Soaphead reaches
for his ink to write his letter
to God, a bottle of ink,
we are told,
was on the same shelf that held
the poison.
Writing and poison are
extremely close in this novel,
and--what's more--something
like reading and being raped are
very close to one another.
And you can see this on 200.
In the conversation between
Pecola and her alienated other
self, that other voice keeps
prodding her about a second
rape,
the second time,
keeps saying "the second time."
We are not shown that in the
narrative, so why is this
something that enters in to it
here?
The other voice says to her: 
"I wonder what it would
be like," [referring to the
rape.]
"Horrible," [says Pecola's
voice.]
"Really?"
"Yes.
Horrible."
"Then why didn't you tell Mrs.
Breedlove?"
"I did tell her."
"I don't mean about the first
time.
I mean about the second time
when you were sleeping on the
couch."
"I wasn't sleeping.
I was reading." 
This is a weird moment.
You could read that as an odd
detail.
She really means that there was
a second rape and it happened
not when she was sleeping,
although she had said that
before, but when she was reading
on the couch.
But I think there is a darker
meaning to this,
that it's actually the act of
reading that is folded into the
act of being raped.
And this is not,
I think, foreign to the whole
setup of this novel,
that reading of that little
passage,
because of course,
as you will have noticed,
you have the Dick and Jane
primer at the beginning of each
chapter made into nonsense by
being run together.
So, remember in the first few
pages of the novel you have
"Here is a house.
It is green and white.
It has a red door.
It is very pretty" and then
mother, father,
Dick and Jane.
This is the white aesthetic
embodied in the primer.
The message is that when you
learn to read you are imbuing
yourself, imbibing the white
aesthetic.
If you are a young black girl
learning to read,
you are bringing into yourself
a deadly kind of poison,
and it's the poison that
destroys Pecola's mother and
Pecola herself in her desire for
the blue eye.
The primer is run together so
that we can see how it becomes
nonsensical in the context of
Pecola's life.
But there is a profound
indictment of reading,
and so you have to ask yourself
what kind of reader does
Morrison want?
And this, I think,
has a complex answer.
It is not just that Morrison
wants to indict a certain kind
of reading on the Dick and Jane
model.
It's deeper than that.
In her Nobel-Prize-winning
speech, she writes about her
ideal reader.
Actually, I think it's either
in one of her essays,
or in that speech.
She writes about her ideal
reader being what she calls "the
illiterate reader."
By that she means the reader
not stocked up already with the
imaginative inventory of the
Western canon,
a reader who instead has some
sense of an oral tradition.
But there is more to it than
that, to imagine a reader who is
that poorly prepared to meet a
novel of the ambition that
Morrison's novels embody.
If you read Beloved
without knowing how to close
read the way we do in class,
it's extremely hard to get a
lot out of it.
There are very difficult
passages in that novel.
She learned a lot from Faulkner.
That's one of the ways that she
learned to incorporate voices
into her novel in a way that
they would sit by themselves,
seemingly unmediated by a
narrator.
She learned a lot from Virginia
Woolf.
She wrote her MA thesis on
Woolf and Faulkner,
on suicide in Woolf and
Faulkner,
so she herself is highly
educated, deeply trained in the
modernist avant-garde,
and yet she looks for a reader
that has rejected all of that
that she calls on so skillfully.
Reading is such a vexed
activity for Morrison that she
represents both reading and
writing as something like the
equivalent of being the victim
of rape.
That pushes the idea of
sympathy into another register
altogether.
It's a text that is essentially
theorizing itself as reaching
out to you--not in the sense
just of making you feel like
Cholly's an okay guy,
that he's human and not some
monster--but actually reaching
out to you and doing to you what
Cholly did to Pecola.
That's an odd thing to do to
your own book,
so I want you to think about
the kind of reader that Morrison
imagines,
and what her novel is trying to
do with and to that reader.
I will come back to some of
these themes when we talk about
Woman Warrior on
Wednesday.
 
