Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ Through the ‘Narrative Project’

In “Toni Morrison’s Experimental Novel, The Bluest Eye: Tempering ‘Disinterested Violence’ through the ‘Narrative Project,’” I claim that Morrison critiques the intellectual practice known as modernist purification. This essay complicates earlier studies which simplify The Bluest Eye as a text solely concerned with racism inflicted on African Americans by whites. Rather, modernist purification and mediation shed light on the underlying mechanisms by which characters in the text (blacks and whites) are reduced into ideological abstractions devoid of subjective experiences and worth. This practice allows for the “disinterested violence” to be inflicted on all races seem more permissible. I then assert that the notion of the “narrative project” (coined by Morrison) provides the proper medium by which a critique of purification may be made. However, in order for Morrison to critique purification as afflicted on characters, such as the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, Morrison must engage in a type of scientific inquiry which necessitates the enactment of purification, echoing Emile Zola’s notion of the “experimental novel.” In Morrison’s “scientific inquiry,” however, there arises a paradox: she must enact and reify that which she also critiques. In a fashion that recalls Robert Musil’s juxtaposed discursive modes in The Man without Qualities , Morrison attempts to alleviate the aforementioned conundrum (her own potential for “disinterested violence” in the writing of her novel) by establishing a pair of paradigmatic shifts in the novel’s narrative structure and its ethical/moral aims.