The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

25:56Jeff:I think really at its heart, each of the characters in this book is an illustration of a different outcome of what can happen as a result of being hated. That this was Morrison's project in this book, what happens to people when they understand themselves as the subjects of hate And Pecola gets the worst of it. But her father, we understand, we get to see the scene where his origin story fundamentally, where he is having sex or about to have sex with a young girl when he's also young, like in his teens or 20s. and white men find them and harass him in this moment. And he can't turn his hate on them because it wouldn't be safe to respond, to turn his anger onto them.

26:41Jeff:And he doesn't turn it on himself. He turns it onto that girl. And later he turns it onto Pecola's mother, Polly. And eventually he turns it onto Pecola. And the line is, hating her, he could leave himself intact. But this is what happens. He takes his anger and his shame and directs it at basically all of the women, all of the girls in his life. Pecola takes her anger and her shame and the products of feeling hated and turns them inward. Her mother, Polly, becomes the ideal servant to a white family. And that's how she deals with the same thing. The whole book is what happens to people? What do we do to people?

27:22Jeff:And when they cannot express anger safely at the real sources of it, at the systems and at the white people, it has to go somewhere. The anger has to go somewhere. And none of those places are good. Like none of the options are good or safe or productive. And this book illustrates one of the ways that can go. yeah i mean it's it is a bit of a tour of different reactions and experience but all under the same dynamic right like what are the different manifestations of how that happens and you know for as morrison proceeds she will continue like this continues to be continued but she'll also look for other she'll she'll start to explore modes of resistance right or modes of like escape some of them are fantastical like as the end of song of solomon some are you know different ways of being in the world.

28:14We see certain previews of that with the prostitutes that live in this town. Like they have a different attitude. It's one of the great scenes when Claudia and, or I guess Pacola is sort of talking with them and Morrison is narrating their way of being in the world. It's sort of, they're outside of any sort of epistemological construct that this world of 1941 Lorraine has. And there are consequences to that, but there's a freedom to that as well but most of that is not here we do get a sense that claudia's consciousness by the end has had some kind of bare reckoning with picola's story right so sort of grief or recognition that we we did her dirty because not it's not all our fault but like we could have we were part of it and there's some there was something else that was going on it wasn't just her there was something

29:04Jeff:else going on with us that she is starting to wonder by the end of it how come when this happened nobody said that poor girl yeah an emergence of a critical consciousness i guess is the the easiest way to put it there let's talk about morrison for a second we did a little bit more of bluest eye before but that's how we do with morrison morrison what is there to say right i mean this this starts a run of three but sula bluest eye song of solomon tar baby paradise and beloved i'm just trying to think of the the I think of the first tier I think is those three between three and five and then the order of course won the pull the pull it's sorry the Nobel Prize in 1993 largely off the back of beloved but also I mean that was the critical work in 1987 she there is no big Morrison biography there's a lot unknown about more or has yet to be written about Morrison.

30:02She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorraine, Ohio. So she was a child of Lorraine. She's about the same age of these girls, I should say, in Lorraine.

30:12Jeff:She would have been 10, 9 or 10 in 1941 when this book starts. Her own parents have not... They came from the South. They worked. Her mother became a domestic and her father did odd jobs. They were burned out of a home by a landlord because they couldn't pay rant. Interestingly, their reaction was different, which is they laughed at the landlord. That was an interview where like that was our sort of way of countermanding this whiteness and this oppression. Her father was so traumatized by interactions with white people that he wouldn't let him in his house, like that no one could, no white people could come in his house.

30:49She was the first of her family to go to college, went to Howard, studied literature there. She was a reader from a young age, Jane Austen and Dostoevsky, among her favorites in junior high and high school. Not a surprise there. There is an element of crime and punishment to this in terms of the multiple versions of what happens if you think the different possible beings in one situation here. Then there began a literary career that we could go through. I think it's, I don't know really the story and I haven't seen it printed. There's more out there, but I just didn't find it where she makes the move from teaching to editing in the mid 60s.

31:25Jeff:Yeah. I don't know how that change happened. I don't know how that happened either. If people know. Yeah, she becomes the first black woman editing fiction at Random House in 1967. And she edited some names, Angela Davis, Gail Jones, Tony Cade Bambara, just to name a few. She was really integral in bringing black literature into the mainstream. And she worked there through the publication of her first four books. She left in 1983. so just really just also mind-blowing like we've talked on the Book Riot podcast about how many working writers are teaching and that you could have the first run that Morrison had and really she wasn't leaving Random House until Beloved was in process but a total of 11 novels in her career when the Nobel recognized her they awarded it to Toni Morrison who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.

32:26Jeff:I don't know how you try to boil down Toni Morrison into one sentence. That's a brave challenge, but that's pretty good. Yeah, that's, if that's what you have, that's a pretty good one sentence to do it in. And that I think her career as an editor and her career as a writer was about writing that she described as indisputably black. That's what she was in pursuit of. When I first read Morrison in college, one of the very first things that I remember the professor saying was like, this, most of the kids in the class are white, this is writing that's not for you, you need to understand that the audience of this book is not the person that you are here and trying to understand who Morrison was writing to and what it meant to be in pursuit of writing that was indisputably black is a really key piece of this.

33:10Jeff:But man, she goes on a run, she won the national book critics circle award in 1977 for song of solomon that's a real turning point for her pulitzer in 1988 for beloved and then of course the nobel in 1993 but then a bunch of other like after that she just goes and wins big honors like you win the nobel she becomes tony morrison the icon pretty i mean we win the nobel but like she has a she has a figure and a presence and a persona and a way of being in the world that lent herself to sort of this there are the uracular tony which is really what happens to her after the 1993. She keeps publishing individual novels after that, but they stop getting nominated for things like the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

33:51Jeff:She just goes straight to 96. It's the Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution. Just medals, just ribbons, medals, plaques, statues. We know you've got decades left to go, but we're going to give you the whole career recognition now. In 2012, Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she gets the Penn Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. And then in 2020, posthumously, the National Women's Hall of Fame. But just that, I was so astonished to look and see that after the Nobel, there are still good novels after the Nobel, better novels than almost anybody else's writing.

34:31Jeff:But people just, like we just moved on, as you said, to medals and ribbons and just a really marked life of incredible literary achievement. Today's episode is brought to you by Eleven Reader, through which you can reimagine audiobooks. So we've got something special for you today. It's a bit of a discount. But before I get to the money, let me tell you about The Honey. Okay, so there's a new award-winning audiobook app, right? Comes with more than 200 ,000 premium titles and, emphasis on and, and the ability to turn any text you bring into natural sounding audio. Anything can become an audiobook.

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36:38Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stock up on ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I think when Paradise came out in 98, I want to say, that was i'm not sure i'll ever have a feeling of this is it right because she i had read her in high school i'd read beloved and i went back and i read all the morrison i was in college at this point studying american literature and that paradise was a fully formed top shelf triple a morrison it's my favorite i was like i can't believe i got to do this sort of in real time I will say from my own experience, I like the books that come after Paradise, but I don't ever know that we reach the heights of sort of a more, they're shorter.

37:27They're not experimental, but they're more focused. They're more slices. God help this child, love, mercy. They're all interesting, but they don't quite ever have a sense of event reading that Paradise had. I agree.

37:45Jeff:I think Beloved is like the signal work, but Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, which were published like successively, they read, they can be read as a trio. They're not set in the same times. They don't have any of the same connecting characters, but they can be read as a trilogy of sorts. And I think she had said most of the things that she needed to say by the time she's done with Paradise. And then there are, she's continuing to think and continuing to work, but I agree. I think Like Beloved Jazz Paradise is the run and after Paradise, it's worth reading to finish out Morrison's body of work. Yeah, it definitely is.

38:22Jeff:But that's the apex, that Beloved Jazz Paradise run. So you said you first did this in college. I first did this in high school. Beloved was required reading as part of an AP English course. That is such a book to put in front of teenagers. That fried my brain in a good way. Like I got scrambled and I had to reckon with it And kind of like what you said, I took it very seriously and tried to understand it. And then I was like, well, there's more of what? What? There's more Morrison. I read it again in college. And I think I read it again in grad school. I can't remember. This is either my third or fourth go around with the Bluest Eye, though, to be honest, it's been 20 years.

39:00Yeah, it had been a decade for me.

39:03Jeff:That first experience I had in college was I minored in English and we had to do a capstone course senior year. And just like you picked one of the ones that was available. and I don't remember what else was available, but one of them was Toni Morrison. And I don't know what I knew about Toni Morrison before that, but something possessed me to sign up for an entire semester where we were going to read every, we read everything she had published up to then. Love had just come out. So we read all of Morrison up through Love in one semester. It was like a book every 10 days. It's a lot. It was one of the, I think the most formative educational experience that I had.

39:39Jeff:And then about 10 years after that, I did a summer of Morrison reread for Book Riot and wrote about it. And it's been about 10 years since then. So this was my third time with The Bluest Eye. The, I mean, we've talked some about the reading experience. Let's talk about Morrison, Morrison doing Morrison things as expressed here. One of the things I've always loved about Morrison is she's she really for i guess i shouldn't be surprised who's someone who renamed herself but she really cares about names and the names are strange and befitting uh and disorienting at the same time sometimes people have multiple names they have what people call them what they go by what they call themselves name using a super important part of of the work too i also was struck this time by maybe it's because we just talked we've just talked about their eyes were watching god but morrison maybe even more than her maybe in more naturalistic way loves to do people on the porch talking she loves to do the people gossiping or talking shit about other people like and i think it's it's less folky than hurston and i enjoy hurston's it feels broader Morrison might be better at anything maybe I'm just a more modern sensibility in the subtlety but I found myself like oh yes you can do that too better than anybody else and being shocked by that and the book you said at the very top of the episode the book has this framing device of these Dick and Jane stories so the first page of the book starts here is the house it is green and white it has a red door it is very pretty here is the family and you go into it and she just gives you the text of this.

41:27Jeff:And over the course of a page and a half, the words get closer and closer together until it's, here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, father, Dick and Jane live in the green and white house. And it just goes on. You get into this sort of like mesmerizing rhythm where this is repeated. I listened to the first couple chapters on audio, which Morrison reads herself. And her doing that is like an incantation. Like she's casting the spell. before we come into this. Of all, I mean, in a live reading, like one of the best readers ever.

42:03Jeff:I bailed from the audio book because I knew what was coming. And my heart - It was like putting your finger in the electrical socket. Yeah, like my heart, I just knew my heart couldn't take it. I was not gonna make it through the Cholly stuff at the end if I had to hear someone read it out loud to me. But if you can do it, or even if you just wanna listen to the first part, listening to Toni Morrison do the first part of this on audio was really incredible and helped me understand what she was really doing with these Dick and Jane excerpts. And then any chapter that is going to focus on the Breedlove family starts with one run together section of it.

42:38Jeff:So it might just be like, here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, they live in the green and white house there. And then it just cuts off. And you jump right into what's happening in the Breedlove's house that day, or in one of their personal histories. And those only show up at the top of those chapters. So like, as an intro for readers, I think what's happening there is the Dick and Jane stories are indisputably white, and very idyllic, and present this mode of life that was not available to black people in Lorain, Ohio at 1941. And she's making us bump up against like, what is this ideal presentation of life?

43:17Jeff:What is the story of what a family should look like and how nice their home should be? And then here's what happens inside this one house because of what these people have experienced. One other thing, the Dick and Jane book is probably the most overt and certainly thorough going example of it, but she does bring in objects, cultural material objects of whiteness and show how they permeate and influence. And just their mere presence infiltrates these characters' understanding of beauty, goodness, virtue, value. It's the Dick and Jane books. We're given to understand they probably have, like they have in their house or they had at school.

43:59When Mr. Henry, their border comes, he flatters the young girls by saying they look like Garbo. And I can't remember the other white actress's name right now. And they take that as a real compliment that they're compared to these white actresses. Pecola finds this obsession. Pecola, who's staying with Claudia's family because she has been put out. She has nowhere else to go. She can't get enough milk, right? I mean, she can't get enough whiteness. She literally can't. And she's drinking out of her little Shirley Temple cup. Like she's gorging on whiteness in these modes. And it's hard to remember for a modern reader now.

44:30Even harder, I sort of consider myself a modern-ish reader because I did read these 20, 30 years ago. But even Bluest Eye, when I was reading, was 25 years old. In 1970, we didn't have the same kind of taken as read that non-art cultural objects mattered, right? Cultural studies as an academic pursuit really was getting its fledglings in the late 70s and 80s of taking pop culture seriously, to take the children's primer seriously as an artistic and cultural force, not just Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or Rachmaninoff or something else. to take the movie seriously right that's where polly learns what beauty is yeah polly learns what beauty is at the movies and she goes there and and morrison says you know de facto it sort of poisons her mind about how to ascribe value how to see value and then also the refuge it gets her right you know the the opiate of the masses thing of religion that's that's really now it's phones but like popular culture has been one manifestation of people seeing this as a sort of substitute for a kind of religion and that's her going to her church and seeing you know hearing from the pulpit what value and everything looks like but Morrison placing these elements in it without having sort of white characters sort of directly impose themselves on the narrative because that's there I mean she's not saying that's not what happens but it's everything else too even when

45:54Jeff:they're not there they're in the room yeah I think the most interesting use of one of those cultural objects to me but also one of the debut novel things of this book is the obsession that claudia and her sister piccola have with shirley temple yes frida claudia's sister is a little bit older frida has come around to loving shirley temple and thinking that she's just the bee's knees but claudia hates her like hates the way that people admire shirley temple kind of just wants to like punch her in the throat and tells us directly that she hates her because she hasn't basically because the world hasn't beaten it into her yet that she should admire.

46:33Jeff:Yeah, that's, that's a, I have this in my hot takes that that's a Morrison debut thing. And later, I don't think she writes that. So like, there's like two sentences that don't appear there, but you know, I, this, I don't think I wrote this down, but the milk reminded me that Claudia. So when Polkola comes to stay with them and she's drinking all this milk, we get a longer than you would think, the longer than you would think series of examples of Polly talking to the room about how so much milk is being drank. And it's hilarious. I mean, it's really bad for the kids, but she's really funny. She's genuinely funny and talking like, I don't know, who needs to drink that?

47:08What is this, a dairy? It's a hilarious, it's a really funny sequence. And it's totally,

47:12Jeff:like, it's totally believable, especially in the, like, pre-millennial parenting model that your kid's friend comes over and drinks all your milk and you are just sort of ranting in the background about it morrison i think that's an underrated thing about morrison the books are so serious but she was so funny and the parts of this that are funny are funny i do think about if she'd ever been interested in writing a genuinely comic novel right like what was her harlem shuffle yeah you know what she's you know maybe playing a little bit more Or maybe she wasn't interested in that. But I think that's another thing that strikes me too is she can shift into beauty from profundity or trauma.

47:58She's got all the tools. She can do it all.

48:00Jeff:All the multitudes. Yeah. And very famously, one of the things we do know about Morrison is that she was very close friends with the comedian and writer Fran Lebowitz. Yes. And those are dinners I would pay money to have been a fly on the wall for. but after she died, Leibowitz wrote and spoke about her a little more openly than she ever had before with so much love and so much admiration, but talked about how funny Toni Morrison was. And you do get little glimpses of it in these books, but it is almost always like this moment with Polly in The Bluest Eye, where it's just a side moment. It's not a key point of the plot.

48:36Jeff:It's just a little glimpse of this character when they're at home and they're feeling really comfortable and it's a safe place that they can let that come out. So, and we proceed. So we get a lot of vignettes like that. You know, we get the, you know, Pocola drinking all the milk. We get Polly's exposure to movies. We get Maureen Peels, who is the new kid in town, who's high yellow, which if you don't know what that means, she's black, but she's very light skinned. And all the ramifications that come along with that if a i wouldn't be surprised if that some of these interactions were short stories and minutes by themselves because it's almost a standalone sort of encounter with maureen peels where she's an object of fascination for boys and girls at the school because of her she has money she's quite beautiful and she's light-skinned or because she's light-skinned i think that's left to be determined that they could be subs like maybe she's not particularly beautiful but she's light-skinned so she's de facto beautiful it's a little unclear there and then a series of of confrontations with the other kids and a friendship that seems full of potential turns sour very quickly for super complicated reasons that are not explicitly nailed down the girls do not understand why they're reacting to Maureen Peel that way.

50:00Maureen Peel herself doesn't really understand the signification of what she's doing, like walking and getting ice cream without them and talking about things they don't know about. But there's a lot of sequences that are not plot germane, but each one of them adds richness and depth and a valence to the overall feeling. So that's one experience you're going to have there. And we're going to have time to get through all of those. But if you find yourself like, I'm not really sure what that one was contributing like that's okay like you know it has its own reason for being and they stand alongside of each other and they speak to each other these vignettes but it's not a near it is not a abc primer book i think it even reorders some of them interestingly in ways that i think

50:43Jeff:that's right different results that morris center has this collection of illustrations about this community and these families and she's laying them out for us and there's i believe she had strategy and reason for the order that she lays them out. But it's really about the sum being, like the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Yeah. And I think, I guess we can move on to the, if it's for you, maybe you've already gotten this already. I took a look at some of the Goodreads reviews, which I'll talk about in a minute. Just again, I'm not trying to take them as face value, but sometimes it's a good way to see like what people bump on.

51:15And if like people, there's not much of a story here. I'm like, yeah, you're right. If you're a plot reader, if that matters the most to you, I don't think this is going to be a wonderful, I still think it's going to be worth reading. I'm never going to say don't read that. But if you find yourself saying what is going on, what's the plot, what's going to happen next, that may be not the most generative way to experience this particular text.

51:40Jeff:Yeah, I think it's for you if you like layered and poetic language. And if you don't mind, or if you do enjoy the experience of a book where you're not always totally sure what's happening or what's going to come next. Like some not knowing, some discomfort as a reader is an essential part of Morrison. And I think we would both argue a good skill to develop as both a human and a reader. And Morrison offers you a lot of opportunities to do that. It's inherently political, but not overtly political in a preachy kind of way. Like these books are about race and class and gender and how those things and color and how those things intersect to produce...

52:20Cultural politics, if not politics, politics.

52:22Jeff:Right. And honestly, like, just if you want to understand why Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize, why is she considered to be a master of modern fiction? Like, this book would be the signal work in just about anyone else's body of work, and it's her first one. And she only gets better from there. Well, I'll talk about it in a minute when we get to passages, and maybe we've underplayed to this point what Morrison can do with words. Because that is the, for me, the subject matter is super important. But when I come back to it, the thing I am struck by is how she uses her felicity with language intersects with her subject matter.

53:06Just hypnotic. Elevate to, you know, this is one of the peaks in my reading life to see this. And I think it is worth looking at some of the sentences and some of the passages that we highlight here. We're not going to be able to capture it. They do exist in context, but we'll do the best we can here in a minute to talk about some of the writerly things and how we experience them as readers. You have here, maybe not, the child sexual abuse is presented directly, evocatively and poetically in its own way, but it does not fade to black. It's very disturbing. And I can imagine people that are especially sensitive, we all should be sensitive to this.

53:46I'm sensitive to it because I have a beating heart and soul. But if you, because of your own experience or just your own makeup, find that, I don't know. I could see it being a deal, but I really could see it where you get to this. Like, I just can't proceed. I do. I do.

54:00Jeff:I do think that's maybe this is something to put in the hot takes, but I, because that scene happens so close to the end of the book. Yeah. You could really read most of the bluest eye without encountering it and get, well, you would, But you know you're going to get, you know it's about that, but you don't know how, yeah, you're right, how visceral, how direct, how unblinking the depiction of it is going to be in the end. But since most of what Morrison is doing here is unwinding for us how these people ended up in this situation, if you're interested in what it looks like for her to do that, you could read 90 % of it and get basically what you need to get of the Morrison experience and skip that section.

54:41Jeff:or even you could honestly, you could just skip those couple of pages. Yeah. I mean, you protect yourself. You all know yourself better in thinking about it. I remember at one point I think, did she really have to give us it through their eyes? Like the perpetrators have to is debatable, but I understand it now. If she's really trying to get in quote unquote side, the heads of these characters in these moments, she's trying to tackle it herself. What, what could they be? Exactly. What could they be? what what might this be like this is not the dream Charlie had for himself either so how does a person end up at this place in life yeah uh oh immortal immortal questions time uh let's see here here are candidates what is the good life what do I owe my neighbor how do I know what I know is this all there is how to deal with the uncertainty of death what else might there be and what's the deal with good and evil?

55:37Rebecca, it doesn't neatly fall into most of these. It doesn't. So what are we going to do with this?

55:43Jeff:Well, I think the closest it comes is to what's the deal with good and evil, not as concepts, but as how do people come to do evil things? I think that one is, what are the ramifications of badness in the world? How does badness come to be? So it's not beyond good and evil in a Nietzschean sense, but it does not locate evil as like a guy with horns and a pitchfork that we almost sort of take up swords against. It's an embedded thing. And there are some shades of what do I owe my neighbor as Claudia, especially as reckoning from her grown up narrator vantage point with the fact that the town did not respond to Pecola's situation in the way that she comes to believe they should have by by outright saying that poor kid that poor baby that should never have happened and then you know excising chali from the community like the community's response initially is a lot more complex and unsatisfying and so what do we what do we owe people but those these are connected for morrison right that like the community doesn't fully respond because they're also shaped by these systems that have produced people who are doing bad things that they never would have wished they were doing.

57:02I think how do I know what I know is also involved here? Like, how do I come to feel and understand my sense of self-worth? Where does that come? Where does culture come from? Right? How does it actually penetrate my existence and affect my worldview? And how subject we are to that is part of that there. So I think it certainly is related, but I think it is coming from a Morrisonian cultural entanglement and then an experience of oppression that many of the great works, if not most of the quote unquote great works of Western literature do not wrestle with directly. Right. As I think you said before, you had it in the notes before, like one thing Smith, Zadie Smith says about Morrison is like, it's, it's hard to remember now how much we needed this work to be done because it hadn't been done yet.

57:50So there's that. When you're 7-Eleven's hottest fire chicken sandwich people think you're intense well yeah i'm hot oh yeah intense i want to see if you can handle the heat then try me with pickles or spicy mayo and jalapenos oh and it's all just 4.99 that's a deal almost as hot as i am almost sweets no spicy see for yourself 4.99 and only at 7 11 valid through 8 25 46 participating stores only while supplies last visit store for full terms Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? You have a pull quote here, and I've got a thought, but you do your pull quote.

58:27Jeff:Well, from Morrison's Nobel lecture, she says, we die, that may be the meaning of life, but we do language, that may be the measure of our lives. I think Morrison is always writing about art and writing, and this book is explicitly concerned with what is beautiful and what is ugly, and there's no way to have that conversation without having a conversation about art and creation and the artistic act. And in this case, these characters are robbed of access to any of that sort of expression. And even their attempt to plant flowers is thwarted. And they wonder why they can't create something beautiful.

59:06Jeff:But I mean, the short answer is yes. This book is about art. What's your take? And I think this is a book that at its core is sort of about the character's inability to articulate their situation, right? their inability to see, give language and voice to, not just that they don't have a soapbox to stand upon, but I'm not even sure they'd know what they'd say if they had that soapbox, how to describe the feelings. And so the project here of the bluest eye is to give articulation, even if it's a hypothetical or subjective one, to give words and language to feeling. And what else is that? I mean, what else is art but to try to give language and specificity to our humanness?

59:47So I don't think it's directly about that in sort of a fundamental way, but the overall project is very much a, this is something that, I mean, here's another Morrisonian thing. My take is Morrison is one of the great practitioners language and does things that only language can do on its own. Yes. Right? Yes. Like you cannot film Morrison. I'm sorry, you cannot. Yeah, don't go watch the Oprah adaptation of Beloved.

1:00:10Jeff:Just don't. you may be able to use the characters and scenarios to make something else but if the goal of an adaptation is to translate that thing she is choosing exactly the word she wants and exactly the right order she wants and any emendation or reconfiguration thereof impoverishes the experience I remember I went to a lecture when I was in high school that she gave and she said she rewrote each sentence seven times. And to someone who was just trying to meet word count in Microsoft Word, that was like saying, I eat a whole armadillo on the hour, every hour. It seemed impossible. Like an act of will, stamina, and creativity that seemed impossible to me.

1:00:55And even now, I can't imagine ever being that. But like that's the amount of care given to this. And as a creature of language and one of the great wielders of it, it is not befitting of it to try to make it into something that's not language.

1:01:08Jeff:Yeah, that's one of the things that Zadie Smith says about her in her essay also, is that all of it had to be thought through. And she had thought about all of it as a working novelist, but also as a critic and academic. That Morrison is not just working as a writer. And most writers, and that's hard enough to just be working as a writer, but she's experiencing everything that she is writing through multiple lenses. And she is reading and then rewriting as a critic and reading and rewriting as an academic. And I think that's how she's able to make this so rich, but also what a rare and singular talent to be able to do those things.

1:01:45Yeah. Let's do some sentences. Where do you want to go? We don't have to do these in order. Where do you want to start?

1:01:50Jeff:This is such a hard book to do like best sentences for because so much of the book is painful, but she is so succinct and able to capture things. Talking about the Breedlove's house, which is not, it's just awful. It's a bad place to live. It's not beautiful. It's uncomfortable. But she says they lived there because they were poor and black and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly. And that in other books, I think might seem too overt and direct, but it works in the way that she's saying it. Pecola and her siblings sleep in the same room as her parents. And so they hear them.

1:02:29Jeff:They're aware of it when their parents are having sex and it's not a good experience for her mother and so she says maybe that was love choking sounds and silence but then a more beautiful depiction when there's a complicated scene with a bunch of teenagers sort of like tossing stuff around in a field and teasing each other but this the image of their slim black boy wrists made g clefs in the air as they executed the tosses just like who else thinks of that you know i one one of my favorite bits of emerson is when he talks about getting pissed off when he reads a line from somebody else. Oh, that's so what I feel.

1:03:05And I don't get pissed off, but I do mark those moments of someone capturing something I couldn't, I felt, but hadn't given specificity to. This is just about eating a strawberry. I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry and I see summer. It's dust and lowering skies. Like, yeah, when you bite a strawberry, there is a tightness is a really good way of describing what that is. And when strawberries in season, it is usually really hot and dusty and you know the the the feeling of heat and lowering skies I don't exactly know what she means that but I feel it more than I understand it and that's just a a moment of sort of unnecessary beauty like that's not really germane to the main threads or topics or rivers that the she's she's pouring water into and I think sometimes the heaviness of the subject matter can overwhelm those kinds of moments that Morrison will give us because they're there yeah they're there like so when I think of autumn I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die let's see where else the so we get these poetical structures too like presented differently some of these passages could be poetry we were not strong only aggressive we were not free, merely licensed.

1:04:21We were not compassionate. We were polite, not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect. We switched habits to simulate maturity. We rearranged lies and called the truth, seeing a new pattern, an old idea, the revelation, and the word. Hot damn.

1:04:43Jeff:Woo, baby. I know. I know. From the very end of the book, when we're getting Soaphead Church's backstory. Yeah. And he's like, we're getting a letter that he wrote to someone explaining his life. He's writing about this former lover of his who had left him. And he says, she left me the way people leave a hotel room. So she goes on to explain that a little bit more. She could have just left. You could have just left it. What a great line. It says everything you need to say. And it is so funny. And I think the most quoted line from this that I see on the internet, you know, put on like a flowery background that is really an abomination is 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 that idea that when Kali is described as free in that sequence that's there's a whole page there's a whole section on we could do a whole episode on what's going on you could go to close reading corner for like five hours on that paragraph oh my god but i see love is never any better than the lover like presented as this aspirational thing and in context morrison is talking about like how love gets so twisted yes and and perverted in the in this community because of the things these people have experienced and it's like well it can't be any better than right and that's kind of what i saying before is like love is like if you this idea is like you can just if you just find a love and grab onto it, it'll transmute and transform all that's wrong with you.

1:06:13It'll save you. It'll save the world and everything else. But we're still people, right? Love is not sort of a supernatural force beyond us that we get to wield like Thor's hammer. That passage is like fundamentally

1:06:22Jeff:Morrison doing hurt people hurt people decades before we had a way of saying it that way. Generational trauma before we had that term. If there is one line that maybe captures the project a little bit, maybe Morrison's underlying project, it's this. I had only one desire to dismember it, to see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that escaped me, but apparently only me. So this is Claudia, I believe, ripping apart dolls when she's ripping apart white dolls. Like this sort of aggressive curiosity that tries to construct understanding, even as it has to tear down the thing it's trying to understand in order to get at its root.

1:07:08Jeff:She innately has this violent response to this presentation of white beauty and doesn't understand why it makes her feel violent. And then ultimately is trying to reckon with, does she need to transmute this into admiration the way that her sister and Pecola have? Should she also want blonde hair and blue eyes? Or is this violence and anger a justified and natural response? Right. All right. Some trivia adaptations, rumors, other things. Kind of a grab bag here. You mentioned the audio book. Very little initial review coverage, but there was a signal review in the New York Times. It got the ball rolling a little bit.

1:07:47I have to believe that Morrison would Morrison, but you never know. You never know. I mean, the New York Times was so singularly influential that other people start picking it up. It gets put on college syllabuses. I know there was some pickup amongst academics as well, especially the growing class of black women intellectuals, many of whom Morrison published, picking up the bluest eye. But she got the big New York Times review, and it was super positive. I don't know. Culture is hard to predict. That was a butterfly. Was that all that was needed? Maybe other butterflies would have flapped to get the hurricane of Morrison going.

1:08:30but I just wonder about that. Have you ever seen the first edition? Have you looked at it before I dropped the link in here? No, I'm looking at it right now

1:08:36Jeff:because you put it in the notes and yet, wow, what a flex to put the first two paragraphs of this book. It's just the text. It's just the text. Just the text of the first two paragraphs printed right on the cover, which also reminds me to say, Morrison, a real master of first lines. This one is quiet as it's kept. There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. Beloved, you get one, two, four. It was spiteful. paradise we killed the white girl first like morrison just knows what she's doing but the second paragraph of this text tells you the thing that happens this is where we learn it the second line we thought the second line is we thought at the time that was because picole was having her father's baby there it's right there imagine somebody trying to get this done today i was thinking about this this is so publishing is not this brave today i i i don't know who there's so much about this I don't know.

1:09:28And maybe the stories have been written, but there is no giant Morrison biography. And I hope there's somewhere. Her papers are at Princeton and I know she was a great letter writer.

1:09:37Jeff:Now, Wally Serpell has a book on Morrison coming out in January, but it's also not like a, okay, not a comprehensive biography. Yeah, I have it. I got a copy and I was looking through it and it's mostly criticism. I haven't read the whole thing. So maybe there's more biographical stuff. I don't know. I'd welcome that. But I found myself wanting in preparation for this and just to have like, go back and like here's the chapter on morrison's publication of bluest eye and here's the quote from the editor and here's their like the tick tock of how it all got done i don't think i've ever seen a book like this rebecca have you no it's just the first 200 words and it's on this like beige background and whatever like it's just it's just the words like it doesn't say tony morrison in big letters it has the title but it's just a slightly bigger font size than everything else like i've never seen this done where they were like you know what we're gonna to let people pick this up in a bookstore and read these first two paragraphs and make their decision.

1:10:28Jeff:But I think honestly, that's the way you go with this book. It's such a vote in confidence of the strength of Morrison's writing and the strength of this start. I wonder how many first couple paragraphs would be different if this is how books were marketed. Like this is just like we instead of having like, you better really tighten that up, friend, like get those first two paragraphs. You know, you buy a Snickers bar, there's like the nutritional like it has to be on there like what if we said like on every book on the cover there has to be the first 150 words just right there on the sprayed edges up with having to put your first graph on the cover show me the goods baby uh this can this edition just in case people are curious maybe we'll do this we'll do some book collectors mini corner on this this is not a great condition edition of this and it on abe books is 3600 to go by right now first edition which i don't know i It's been a while since I've been in the book collector's game, but I'm like, for a first edition of Toni Morrison's first book, it doesn't seem insane to me.

1:11:27I don't know. It's a lot of money. Yeah, she was still supporting herself. She would teach throughout the rest of her life. I'm not clear that she needed to do it for cash. She never, I mean, she sold well, but it was never going to be Emily, Henry, or Colleen Hoover money.

1:11:43Jeff:Yeah, she had the seated lecture titles. at like, I think Stanford was the last place she was teaching Princeton. And she did, I heard rumors of this when I was in grad school that she didn't do a lot of teaching for that title. That's what I heard. You know what? Good for her. Listen, grab that bag. The Bluest Eye has the second highest Goodreader rating 4.3 of her novels behind only Song of Solomon with a 4.15. That's so interesting. I wonder how significant that 4.15 versus 4.13 is. I don't think it's that different. I'll give you two. Here's my case for it. Bluest Eye. I think if Song of Solomon was 100 page shorter, it'd have a much better rating.

1:12:30But it's weirder. Yeah, it's weirder. It's stranger.

1:12:33Jeff:But it's not about child rape. And it has a more hopeful ending. And it was an Oprah pick. Song of Solomon was an Oprah pick. Yeah. Yeah. An omnibus collection of three of the novels has a higher rating than any of the individual novels do, which is a weird. Which three? Is it the Jazz Paradise? I don't remember. My sense of that is the real heads get that, so they're inclined to give it a better rating anyway. Again, take it for what it's worth. I just thought it was interesting to see where this ranks. Takes, you did your Mind Blowing's debut novel. It would be anyone else's masterwork. We already did some debut writer things about just adding a couple of extra sentences after doing the Morrison thing that we don't need.

1:13:15Yeah. We don't.

1:13:16Jeff:She did get so much better at this. The last couple novels especially are so short and so spare that it's by the end, it's Toni Morrison being like, you're going to get me or you don't. Yeah. And if you're going to get me, this is all you need. I don't think, I think you're right. Right. This could be a different game for a different day. But like, is there an Instagram quote from Morrison that you're like, yep, you got it. That's fine. The closest one is, I think, from Song of Solomon. It's, if you want to fly, you've got to give up the shit that weighs you down. But even packaging that as like self-improvement is not true to the spirit of what's happening in that scene of the book.

1:13:55read-alikes books inspired by this one i feel i mean i remember this i had read faulkner first and there's so much faulkner uh in this so it's not reading backwards they're side by side very very influenced by faulkner and some of it's about the subjectivity right trying to collect you know in um sound in the fury is is the the the one that i remember the best and probably the most recognized other people these multiple perspectives to try to get at the truth of something that eludes any one individual's character ability.

1:14:27Jeff:I believe she wrote her thesis on Faulkner. Yeah. Morrison was a scholar. Her master's thesis at Cornell was on Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, who, yeah, you can see some of those things there. Very modern sensibility there. I think you... In Their Eyes, we talked about that. Yeah, you go back to Their Eyes Were Watching God when we, in the episode about Their Eyes Were Watching God, a few episodes back in this feed, Morrison talks about what an inspiration Hurston's writing was for her. And I think you can see the evolution of the some of those same concerns running through both books and then like what do you read contemporary writers influenced by morrison there's i mean i mean there's so many now like almost any black writer writing and i don't want to say all but almost any has has morrison in their artistic consciousness so it's almost even if it's not a direct even if they wouldn't cite Morrison as a direct influence.

1:15:17Jeff:She's in the stew that has shaped most modern writers, I think. A contemporary like Gloria Naylor's Mama Day. I really like her. So that's another one if people are interested in another contemporary. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. I like yours. Do yours first. Oh yeah. This is just a, I think The Bluest Eye can be read as a pre-therapy speak exploration of what generational trauma is and the way that racial hatred produces violence. Morrison's too elegant to say hurt people hurt people but that is the idea that she's writing into in a much more nuanced way yeah uh you talk about scapegoating all of us all of us scapegoating all of us all of us who knew her felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her that's that's a rough idea man that's a tough i mean and there's there's claudia's consciousness right claudia has to get yes to that claudia gets there and and so many of the vignettes in the book can be read as basically like a parade of moments that picola has where she is the receptacle just the container for someone else's hatred of themselves or of blackness or of the feeling of being ugly and for reasons that no one is capable of understanding and that could not be like fully explicated in a 200 page novel picola becomes the target of all of that that the people of the community sort of silently come to an understanding and agreement that this is what they're going to do with these feelings that they have.

1:16:44Jeff:And that Claudia comes to be able to recognize it as that they were cleaning themselves or ridding themselves of things that were difficult to carry by trying to externalize them. Yeah. Zero to well-read score. Each one of them gets one to 10, 10 being the highest tier of the five categories, historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. Historical importance. So since this was written in sort of a living person's lifetime, it really can't be a nine or 10. It just doesn't, it can't be, but I think, I think it'd be a six or seven, six and a half.

1:17:19Jeff:Yeah. I struggle with this. I think Morrison is a 10 on historical importance, but this being, that's what we're doing here. I know. I know this being her first book. I think probably I'm going to go with seven or an eight. So let's go in seven. I think that's the number in between there. I think beloved is an eight, but I don't think this can be an eight to readability. Interesting one this is an interesting one i'm gonna go six six yeah that this the language the language is pretty direct but she's a little seven she's a little experimental there are some weird things like the framing with the dick and jane story is not you know it's not over about what it is i'm more if you're coming to this cold it's gonna to have some vertigo.

1:18:08It's more of a six. Vertigo is a good word. Central relevance, current relevance of central questions. That's an interesting one.

1:18:19Jeff:I think it's a 10. This is a nine or a 10 that what happens, like the products of being hated look different in 2025 than they looked in 1970. But these are dynamics that are still present and inextricable from American culture and might not be extricable ever. Right. I think, yeah, I think it's way up there. I might do eight and a half or nine only because it is a work of historical fiction. Even at the time, it was still sort of 30 years in advance and like the cultural world is different. So, you know, it can't be, it can't be 10 out of 10 because it had to be about now in our own, in my thinking, it had to be about now.

1:19:01I'd go eight, eight and a half, something like that.

1:19:03Jeff:um book nerd read cred pretty high pretty high seven yeah i would go seven eight i want you to have read some morrison yeah but that you've read the bluest eye isn't as much reader cred to me as like beloved would be so yeah i'm gonna let's go seven oh damn factor pretty high too pretty high seven eight seven eight we'll go eight okay yeah so that's a seven that's a 13 uh 21 and a half 28 and a half. 38 and a half. 36 and a half, I believe. Yeah. Is that right? Oh, yeah. 36 and a half. So there you go. Out of 50, pretty good. Pretty good. Show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. Email us, zero to wellread at bookriot.com.

1:19:50Zero to wellread is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. And I don't know where we are in our actual chronology, but the next two we're doing um are going to be a whiplash experience for me yeah this is and we're

1:20:09Jeff:about we're coming up on halfway through the season if you are enjoying the show we sure would love and appreciate a rating a review on apple podcast spotify whatever your player of choice is sharing the show with friends anything that gets the word out and helps us grow we would like to continue doing this series. We will have recorded all of these, I think, by the time any of them come out. Is that right? That is a lie. We will have recorded half of them. Well, this first batch, at least, to this point, they're not out in the world. So feedback on one episode or the other, but in general, we'll be very happy.

1:20:41We really want to do, this is something when I do first edition, when I've asked for feedback, what do you like? What would you love more of? What less of? People give real, honest, constructive feedback that I have taken to what I use as an excuse for a heart as we talk about these things. Rebecca, a joy, a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks you all for listening.

1:21:01Jeff:Always a delight to pick up these books.