Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She received her B.A. from Howard University and her M.A. from Cornell, where she studied the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two modernist authors who greatly influenced her later writing style. After a long and successful career in publishing, Morrison turned her attention to writing her own works and immediately became recognized as one of the strongest voices in contemporary American fiction.
Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye (1970), her first novel, while raising two children and teaching part-time. The preoccupations that Morrison manifests in this novel persist as themes throughout her career. In The Bluest Eye, as elsewhere in her ouevre, Morrison is concerned with representing the extremes of human affect and the collision between history and private life that characterizes American existence. The Bluest Eye is just one example of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers' work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved, her neo-slave narrative about Cincinnati's Margaret Garner, won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works, to Paradise and her recent novel, A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
On beginning to read The Bluest Eye, I found it odd, to say the least. Thestringedtogethersentencesforseeminglynoreason. Those threw me off. Still do. So I'm hoping the significance comes out at some point.
ReplyDeleteI actually started enjoying the odd nuances like that though. I really enjoy reading about the same timeframe from multiple perspectives. And nothing seems to be in chronological order, which I suppose could be frustrating to some, but I like it. It keeps my attention. Getting bits of information here and there, and piecing together parts of the story one clue at a time.
I also found myself laughing aloud at parts, where afterwards, I thought maybe its morbid to find humor in those things I'm laughing at. The way she [Claudia] describes her mother's rantings, or the banter between her and her sister. The darker parts seem to be punctuated with abrupt moments of humor....maybe that's just me. Well whatever, I'm enjoying it anyhow.
I felt the same way about the opening of the novel with the stringing together of words, but after that I actually found myself very engaged in the reading. The detail Morrison goes into is really impressive and helped me to understand exactly what was happening. I thought the entire fighting sequence between the Breedloves was depressing but hilarious at the same time because of the way Morrison presents it. The racial connotations are definitely evident throughout, from both points of view given so far.
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