The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Zero to Well-Read

Episode: "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison

Hosts: Jeff O’Neal (A), Rebecca Schinsky (B)
Date: September 30, 2025

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Overview:

This episode dives deep into Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, exploring its literary significance, narrative style, and enduring themes. Blending book-club camaraderie with incisive English-class analysis, hosts Jeff and Rebecca unpack Morrison’s central questions: what does systemic hate do to individuals and communities, and how do the wounds of racism deform love and self-image? A content note: the novel involves depictions of child sexual abuse, which are addressed in the discussion.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights:

1. Toni Morrison’s Place in the Literary Canon

• [02:25] Jeff and Rebecca contextualize Morrison not only as a preeminent American writer but as a “critical nexus point” (Jeff, 02:25) in modern literature.
• She emerges from the confluence of Black literary traditions, directly connected to the Harlem Renaissance and writing just after the Civil Rights Era.
• Morrison’s influence is such that, as Rebecca notes, “She is the signal writer of that era of American novelists.” (Rebecca, 03:46)
• Morrison’s proximity to literary history is personal: “It’s one person between us and the Harlem Renaissance. That’s how close.” (Jeff, 04:52)

2. Style, Structure, and the Novel’s Narrative Approach

• [08:50] The hosts assert that The Bluest Eye is less driven by traditional plot and more by a network of impressions and tableaus.
  • Jeff: “There is a central character, Pecola Breedlove, but the plot is very thin… This is more of a series of impressions and observations tied… to give a literary representation of a group feeling, a group experience, a group subjectivity…” ([08:50])
• Morrison centers Pecola, but “she’s not the outlier. She’s sort of a crystallization…of a wider dynamic.” (Jeff, 08:50)
• Rebecca adds, “the reading experience … is Claudia [narrator] telling us how that happened… How it comes to happen that a man...rapes his child. And what are the societal conditions?... It is complicated. And that is such an understatement.” ([10:16])

3. Self-Hate, Internalized Racism, and the Consequences of Being Hated

• Morrison investigates how the internalization of societal contempt devastates Black identity and family dynamics.
• [12:31] “The book takes its title from Pecola’s longing to have blue eyes, which…are a symbol of beauty and whiteness…and of freedom and of love and being valued.” (Rebecca, 12:31)
• Morrison explores “the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate and as self-evident.” (Morrison, as quoted by Rebecca, 12:31)
• Zadie Smith’s commentary: “The thwarting of human potential was Morrison’s great theme. How do you write about self-loathing without submitting to the same?” (Rebecca, 12:31)
• This idea is explicit in The Bluest Eye: “This was the book where I learned the concept of internalized racism.” (Rebecca, 14:03)

4. Fragmentation, Love, and Narrative Technique

• The fragmented structure mirrors “the characters in this book…do not understand the whole. And I think there’s a degree to which Morrison herself is trying to think through the whole.” (Jeff, 14:50)
• Love in the novel is fraught, often compromised and contaminated by trauma.
  • “I don’t know that anyone has a richer, more complicated, fraught relationship with the idea of love than Toni Morrison herself does. It’s almost a negative.” (Jeff, 15:11)
• Despite complicated love, hope glitters in small moments:
  • “That love is complicated and can be so twisted, is a product of this society…that just pure love, because you’re a person and you’re valuable is not available to them because of the color of their skin.” (Rebecca, 16:42)

5. Systemic Versus Individual Evil & Community Accountability

• The book’s moral positioning:
  • Morrison is “interested in mise en scène, like, the how these things…the how that day happened…if you’re interested in that systemic sort of situation, like individual culpability, it’s there…but the point of the book is not to be like, look at this evil bastard.” (Jeff, 21:24)
  • “What the best art does, is how do we find a way to understand...the very worst things that happen...How do people come to do what they do? She starts at the judgment.” (Rebecca, 21:24)
• Use of marigolds metaphor:
  • “An indictment…of them. They didn’t plant it deep enough…it was just a bad marigold. Like the ground would not support it. Right. There was nothing they could have done. And that’s kind of the book.” (Jeff, 22:07)

6. Outcomes of Being Hated – Character Arcs

• Each character models a different reaction to internalized hate:
  • “Each…is an illustration of a different outcome of what can happen as a result of being hated.” (Rebecca, 25:59)
  • Pecola internalizes hate; her father transfers it onto others; Polly becomes an idealized servant for a white family.
  • “None of those places are good or safe or productive.” (Rebecca, 27:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“There are zero degrees of Kevin Bacon between us and Toni Morrison.”
— Rebecca, 04:59

“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.”
— Morrison (read by Rebecca), 66:26

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room.”
— Morrison (read by Rebecca), 65:46

"We die. That may be the meaning of life, but we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
— Morrison, Nobel Lecture (Rebecca, 59:22)

"[The Bluest Eye] can be read as a pre-therapy speak exploration of what generational trauma is...Morrison's too elegant to say hurt people, hurt people. But that's the idea she's writing into in a much more nuanced way."
— Rebecca, 76:27

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |-----------|-----------------| | 01:34 | Content warning and episode opening | | 02:25 | Morrison’s literary importance and nexus position | | 08:50 | Fragmented structure and Pecola as symbol | | 10:16 | Establishing the narrative frame (Claudia’s perspective) | | 12:31 | Internalized racism, longing for blue eyes | | 16:13 | The role and distortion of love in the book | | 21:24 | Systemic vs. individual evil and the marigolds metaphor | | 25:59 | How different characters handle hate | | 41:10 | Use of Dick and Jane motif; Morrison as audiobook narrator | | 53:40 | Content notes on depiction of sexual abuse; advice for sensitive readers | | 59:22 | Morrison’s Nobel lecture and art-making | | 62:45 | Favorite passages: beauty, pain, and Morrison’s command of language | | 76:27 | Cocktail party takeaways—generational trauma |

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Additional Themes & Takeaways

Morrison as Teacher, Editor, and Literary Figure

• The hosts outline Morrison’s simultaneous roles as a groundbreaking editor (first Black woman editor at Random House), award-winning novelist (Pulitzer, Nobel), and teacher, reinforcing her massive cultural impact.
• Career timeline and editorial influence on Black literature (Angela Davis, Gail Jones, Toni Cade Bambara).
• Morrison’s writing aimed to be “indisputably Black,” even while many readers would be white—an explicit attention to audience and intended “insider-outsider” reading experience. ([32:33])

The “Bluest Eye” as Metaphor; Cultural Objects and Whiteness

• Use of Dick and Jane primers and Shirley Temple as symbols for oppressive ideals of beauty and acceptance.
• Polly Breedlove learns what beauty is at the movies (pop culture as religious substitute).
• “Pecola…can’t get enough milk…her little Shirley Temple cup…she’s gorging on whiteness…” (Jeff, 43:28)

Morrison’s Prose Style

• Extensive discussion and admiration of Morrison’s careful, poetic, and layered sentence structure.
• “She rewrote each sentence seven times…” (Jeff, 61:03)
• Language at the heart of the art: “You cannot film Morrison.” (Jeff, 61:00)
• Noted for balancing humor with bleakness: e.g., Polly’s rants about milk (“genuinely funny…she can shift into beauty from profundity or trauma…” Jeff, 47:11)

Reading Experience & Advice

• Fragmentary structure invites confusion; “If you find yourself not sure how things fit together, that is okay.” (Jeff, 18:08)
• Morrison is “always willing to let us be a little unsure about what ground we’re standing on.” (Rebecca, 18:15)
• Morrison as both accessible and challenging; “Some discomfort as a reader is an essential part of Morrison…” (Rebecca, 51:40)

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For Whom is This Book?

• Lovers of layered, poetic language who are open to ambiguity and discomfort
• Readers interested in social critique on race, identity, and systemic oppression
• Those wanting to understand Nobel-level literary achievement
• For those sensitive to accounts of child sexual abuse: the scene occurs late and can largely be avoided if needed; much of the novel’s work is in the “how,” not the act itself ([54:24])

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Passages & Language Highlights

• “They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly.” (Rebecca, 62:45)
• “Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.” (Rebecca, 63:52)
• “Their slim black boy wrists made g clefs in the air as they executed the toss.” (Rebecca, 63:52)
• “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry and I see summer, its dust and lowering skies.” (Jeff, 63:52)
• “We were not strong, only aggressive. We were not free, merely licensed...” (Jeff, 65:39)
• On white dolls: “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.” (Jeff, 67:27)

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Comparisons, Influences, and Further Reading

• Strong influence from William Faulkner (multiple perspectives, nonlinear narrative)
• Connections to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Legacy: Morrison’s imprint is seen in nearly every Black writer of the contemporary period (e.g., Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day)
• Zadie Smith’s essay, “Morrison, Toni’s Daughters,” recommended for further exploration.

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"Zero to Well-Read" Scorecard

| Criteria | Score | |----------------------------------|-------| | Historical Importance | 7 | | Readability | 6 | | Current Relevance (Central Qs) | 8.5 | | Book Nerd Read Cred | 7 | | “Oh Damn” Factor | 8 | | Total (out of 50) | 36.5|

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Cocktail Party Crib Sheet

• The Bluest Eye explores the psychology of generational trauma and internalized racial self-hate, showing how racist systems twist love, sexuality, and community.
• Morrison’s writing is formally experimental yet emotionally direct; she deploys poetic language, shifting perspectives, and metaphors (blue eyes, marigolds) to dramatize the cost of hate.
• You can read this novel to better understand generational trauma, “hurt people hurt people,” and the foundations of Black American literary achievement.
• Not for those seeking a plot-driven read; instead, expect vignettes and emotional tableaus.
• The book is as much about what cannot be said as what is spoken aloud—a meditation on trauma’s psychic effects, and a masterclass in literary style.

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In sum:
"The Bluest Eye" remains a necessary, devastating, and technically masterful work—impossible to reduce to summary, but vital for understanding American literature, the toxicity of white beauty standards, and how a community’s wounds can fester across generations. Morrison’s debut is both a warning and a reckoning, and in the words of the hosts, “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.” (Rebecca, 52:23)

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Transcript

[A]

Hey everybody, Jeff here. Couple quick things before we get into the episode for the day. First of all, a lot of new people are finding the show. That's so exciting. Welcome and thank you for listening. Really appreciate you listening along with us, reading along with us. Follow up to that to keep the momentum going. We've concocted a little challenge here. We were going to take a couple weeks off. No new episodes over the Christmas time holiday. But if we get to 150 ratings on Apple Podcasts, we're gonna do a bonus episode. Record it before then, but we'll drop it over the Christmas break. For your holiday listening pleasure, go to Apple Podcasts, leave a rating 5 stars and once we get to 150, we'll let you know that we made it there. But thanks so much for listening. Really excited. We're having a great time. I hope you can tell that. And without further ado, let's get into the show.

[B]

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[A]

Welcome to Zero to well, read a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[B]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. In this episode, we're discussing Toni Morrison's stunning debut novel, the Bluest Eye. Before we jump in, just a warning for folks. The Bluest Eye does include depictions of child sexual abuse and we're gonna have to address those parts of the book. So if that's a sensitive topic for you, just please take care with your listening.

[A]

It is not an easy novel, the easiest of the Morrison novels, but that does not mean it's an easy. Well, I don't know. We can give you.

[B]

I think that's a great place to start the conversation. I think it is the most stylistically accessible of Morrison's novels. It's the reason, besides it being the first to start your Morrison reading with the Bluest Eye, the reason that, you know, we've both loved her entire oeuvre basically, but that we chose the Bluest Eye for this first season of the show. Not the easiest in terms of subject matter, though.

[A]

No, you can get through it. Even though it starts out with this very, like, strange pastiche of a dick and Jane book, which we'll get into here in a minute, but let's do. Let's do this. Morrison's place in the canon. Right. Why zero to. Well, read our first. Our first experience with Morrison. You could start Morrison, like, depending on how you want to orient or center your canon. Right. Do you want to be more modern, more American? There's a version of a modern canonical formation where Morrison might be the center. Not because she has 200 years of sort of Twain or Shakespeare or other people behind her, but, like, she takes a lot of literary history in and then transmutes it into a new perspective, a new experience, and then brings her own sauce to the party. So there's a very. Wish. She's a critical nexus point, I guess, is another way of putting it. And depending on how you want to look, that nexus point could be the center. And it's a fascinating situation we talk about all the time when we're thinking about this show and thinking about classics and reading. Well. And literary history and what it means to, like, engage with literature. Like, Morrison does all those things, like, the reason you care that you may know what Faulkner is, that you may know your Bible, that may, you know, you're Dante. It's so that you can access the kinds of writers that are also interested in what literature can do. And you can only really do that if you know what the hell's going on and what's already been tried before.

[B]

Right. And she, like Zora Neale Hurston, sits at that nexus of change between slavery and Jim Crow. One of the critical writers of the Harlem Renaissance era, Morrison starts writing just after the civil rights era. This book comes out in 1970. She's writing into yet another moment of new American understanding. And the conversation about race is evolving in a really significant way that impacted everything, including art. And she is the signal writer of that era of American novelists.

[A]

It's so fascinating because when she was at. She was an undergraduate at Howard in the early 50s, and some of the. The elder. Well, not. I mean, I don't actually know how old Sterling Brown and Elaine locke were in 1953, but they. They had shepherded the Harlem Renaissance through. Come through the 40s and the war. And so, like, she had a direct connection to sort of that generation. And, you know, not. Not to put too fine a point, she. She lived into the modern era. You and I met her.

[B]

We did. We went to a sign, tongue tied, oh, my God, I love your work moment ever.

[A]

Yeah. But, like, it's just not that, like, it's one. It's one person between us and like the Harlem Renaissance. Right? Like that. That's how close.

[B]

There are zero degrees of Kevin Bacon between us and Toni Morrison.

[A]

Yeah, right. I'm sure she she remembers us right in the in the line stammering to say we love you.

[C]

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[A]

Okay, so what's it about? We'll do a little bit more Morrison here in a minute, but what is Bluest Eye about Rebecca? What? Well, let's. Let's do this first.

[B]

Do you want to start with the what happens or the what the ideas.

[A]

I think let's start with the reading experience in this regard, because it may. It helps understand what's going on. This is not a story, right? It is and it isn't. Right. There is a central character, Pecola Breedlove, but the plot is very thin. There's like one thing that happens that that sort of is the linchpin of the whole book and that comes relatively late. Right. This is more of a series of. I think one of the critics I was reading called a series of impressions and observations tied. Because one thing, Morrison, maybe the thing Morrison is trying to do here is give a literary representation of a group feeling, a group experience, a group subjectivity, maybe, to put it a different way. And that it centers around Pecola is useful to write 100 with mine's 205 pages, that's. But we move through these scenes, these tableaus, through other characters, through experiences they have. And I think together they're trying to explain what ultimately happens to Pecola, which is a descent into madness formed around a specific. A specific desire. But it is not. She is not the she. She is not. I don't think she's. She is quite a scapegoat here, but she's not the outlier. She's sort of a crystallization, I guess, more than anything of a wider dynamic.

[B]

Yeah, we know from the very, basically the very beginning of the book what the big thing is that is going to happen. So as you said, the scene doesn't take place until very close to the end, but we know from like page two, because the narrator, Claudia, who is a fellow kid, Pecola is 11. Claudia is her friend. She's nine. Claudia narrates this, looking back on their childhood, tells us that Pecola is pregnant with her father's child. And what the book is, is. Is Claudia telling us how that happened. And she even says this in the opening. There's really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. And Morrison spends the 200 pages of this book unfolding for us through these scenes of Pecola's life, but also her parents lives and Claudia's lives and other people in their town. This is set in lorain, Ohio, in 1941. How it comes to happen that a man in Cholli breed love Pecola's father in his particular situation. How it comes to happen that this person rapes his child. And what are the. What are the societal conditions and the impact of race, the impact of class, the impact of hate, and really the manifestation of self hate that can result in something like this? It is complicated. And that is such an understatement.

[A]

Yes. And it's. It's also. It's Kali's act. But also alongside of that, I think just as important as the act is the community's reaction to it and the community's reaction to Pecola, who is damaged. I mean, she. She was already having a hard time, I guess, to put it. To put it mildly. But her way of dealing with unspeakably bad thing is to. I go nuts. I mean. I mean, I don't know what else to say. Rebecca, like, she loses. She's walking around flapping her arms. She's. She's talking to an imaginary person. And she's so outside of her body that she thinks she has blue eyes. That's the bluest eye of the time. She believes she has blue eyes so that it's been granted to her by so pet Church with this is another pedophile charlatan.

[B]

The book takes its title from Pecola's longing to have blue eyes, which we are given to understand very early, are a symbol of beauty and a symbol of whiteness. And because they're a symbol of beauty and whiteness, they're a symbol of freedom and of love and being valued. Like Morrison was doing intersectionality here before we had the term intersectionality. And she's working in all of these levels. My edition has an introduction that Morrison wrote in 1993, where she said that she was interested in what being hated does to people. Not resistance to the contempt of others, ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate and as self evident. And then Zadie Smith, in an essay called Morrison, Tony's Daughters, says the thwarting of human potential was Morrison's great theme. How do you write about self loathing without submitting to the same? Or demonizing the habit, or handing the power a victor precisely to the culture that has created the feeling. All of it had to be thought through. And Morrison is doing that here, showing us. Pecola is so hated. She's not the only hated person. Many of the black people in this book feel hated simply for their blackness. But Pecola is our lens into what happens when you internalize. When you believe that. That you are an object of hate and that you deserve to be an object of hate, and you internalize the message. This was the book where I learned the concept of internalized racism.

[A]

Yeah. And it's. It's pretty explicit. And I'll get to this a bit later. She's more explicit about the ideas in this book than she's elsewhere in any of their novels. And that's sometimes a hallmark. I'm stepping on. My hot take here is that even Morrison has debut novel syndrome a little bit. And that's like not quite being in a place where she either trusts the reader to get it or not care if they don't get it right away like that. If some slippage or some effort needs to get put into it, or that those that with ears to hear will eventually get it. But she. She really is working through a set of ideas that are so interconnected that the fragmentary nature of the book starts to make. Actually, it has a logical. It has an artistic reason for being fractured.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Because the characters in this book, then they themselves do not understand the whole. And I think there's a degree to which Morrison herself is trying to think through the whole. Like how are. How does where someone came from in Alabama or getting thrown out that one day or having a disability with their foot affect their self image and how someone might see that. And looking back on it now, and it's been a while since I've read Olive Morrison, so I may be remembering things quite differently. One of the things that really strikes me in this book and thinking through the book, certainly in Beloved, Certain, in Song of Solomon, certainly in Love A little bit later, and certainly in this book is. I don't know that anyone has a richer, more complicated, fraught relationship with the idea of love than Toni Morrison herself does. It's represented sort of a slithering molasses like goo that is almost. It's almost a negative. I mean like we see so few represents so uncomplicated or even large. It gets twisted. And that's, I think, where she's coming from. From this idea of like internalized racism being subject to interdational trauma. These people are so subject to that even the purest, the best of human emotion is contaminated and turned against itself.

[B]

We get that with Claudia a little bit when Claudia's talking about her mother and how when she gets sick, her mother is like very short with her and frustrated. And that Claudia hates this feeling of the way her mom is chastising her for something that's outside her control, for just getting a cold like people do. But a page later Claudia comes around to saying, but basically I felt loved and I knew that my mother loved me. And even while she was.

[A]

That's what autumn felt like. The leaves turning in hands, not wanting me to die, basically. That's very strange.

[B]

Yeah, that like I got sick and my mom was mad at me. But she also was coming in with a Vicks VapoRub, fundamentally. And that love is complicated and can be so twisted, is a product of this society that these people live in that tells them that just pure love, because you're a person and you're valuable is not available to them because of the color of their skin.

[A]

Even Pecola's name, Breed Love, kind of a creepy ass name, right? Like the love and then breeding side by side, like the very sort of biological, animalistic, chattel slavery idea of black people's sexual relationship each other put next to, I don't know, all you need is love. Like we know we are subject to the same cultural representations there. And that name of Breed Love, like I think captures this. I don't know, there's a. There's a tension is not quite. Quite the right word, but some sort of compromised relationship. And all the relationships these people can have with each other are compromised. And even the greatest, even the greatest of these is love is still compromised. It is not sufficient to get out of this miasma more than a miasma that they find themselves in. So if you're reading Bluest Eye or really any Morrison, but Bluest Eye, especially coming to it, if you think, okay, this is where I'm going to get on the Escalator and you find yourself not sure how things fit together. That is okay.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You are not missing anything. Yeah, well, you may be missing something, but that is part of the process, maybe is a better way of putting it.

[B]

Yes. That Morrison is always willing to let us be a little unsure about what ground we're standing on. It's least true in the Bluest Eye of all of her books. Like this is more grounded, more clear. But it's not bad in the rest of her works that there is a lack of clarity. Sometimes that's. With her, it's intentional. You're in good hands. She knows that she is confusing you, or she knows that she's dropping you into something that doesn't make sense right off the bat. But she is such a master, and she, I think, really just had confidence that she could guide a reader through the experience, whether she trusted the reader or not. I do believe in my reading of Toni Morrison that she was like, I can get you to the place I need to get you. And so if you find yourself in a moment with Morrison of like, don't give up because you think you're not getting it. If you get to the end of the book and then you've given yourself like a week to process it, and then you think you're still not getting it, I think that's when you start doing your additional homework and your additional reading. But part of reading her, especially if you go past the Bluest Eye, is the discomfort of, wait, what. What's happening? Or why is she taking us into this place? And it will pay off. She will make it work.

[A]

The other discomfort, and I think it's. I think it's related, is the outside of racism is bad, which, you know, is built in. And we see that other value or moral judgments on people's actions are much more held in abeyance than you may expect. And this is a bit of a warning, right? Because in Beloved, you know, we get the traumatic act there. I don't want to spoil that for people. There's. There's a central traumatic act there. There's multiple acts in this book that through a reasonable care of other people lens, you'd be like, why is this book doesn't come down harder on Kali? Why didn't it come down harder on Soped Church? Why not come out on other people? Frankly, that and other actions that happen here. And I think the reason for that is Morrison is interested in mise en scene, like, the how these things. The how. Right. Like you said, the how that day happened. And if the source of that is ultimately somewhere else, then it's almost. It's almost kicking them while they're down to be overly or overtly, like, judgmental. Right. Because it's shocking, I think, to a modern reader or. And I'll include myself with a sort of a conventional sensibility, that the book is not like Kali Breedlove in jail, and that's, like, where we end. Like, the story is not Pecola's, like, the persecution, the ostracization of Kali Breedlove. That's not what this story is. Because Morrison, she's not saying it's good, but she's not as interested in that as how the thing came to be. How can these things really happen? And if you're interested in that systemic sort of situation, like individual culpability, it's there. Like he's from. He dies in a workhouse. Later, we learn. So he's like. He doesn't roam free and have a great life or something like that. But the point of the. Of the book is not to be like, look at this evil bastard.

[B]

That's just not the point, right? It's taken as read from the beginning that this is an awful situation, right? That no child should be pregnant with her father's baby. Like, that should not happen. We know it. Morrison knows it. This is as bad as it gets in human experience. And if she's interested in how. And I think this is what the best art does, is how do we find a way to understand this world that we live in and the very worst things that happen in this world? How do people come to do. Do what they do? And so she starts at the judgment. Like, she starts with, this is clearly a bad place that we're all in, rather than other. I think lesser works end at the judgment. Or it's all just about the process of getting to the judgment.

[A]

It's simplistic, right? Because usually they're like, that was just a bad egg, right? They're just. They're just a bad person. And they're sort of like, we need to root out the bad people. And there's. The two central metaphors of the book are the bluest eye, of course, but the other one are these marigolds right in the soil. And this is where we start. And Claudia and her sister, whose name eludes me right now, Frida. Frida, are. They're trying to make their own kind of magic happen, right? Like, they're like, okay, what can we do to help Pacola? Well, we can try to Be good for a whole month. Well, what if we aren't good? Blah, blah. Well, what if we do a good job planting the marigolds? Then we'll know. And they plant the. They get these marigolds. They were on a mission to sell enough to get a bike, but they sort of repurposed that energy into sort of in kids, magical thinking. You know, plant marigolds and that will help a cola. And they don't come up and they think that's an indictment of them. They didn't plan it deep enough. They didn't want it hard enough. Which I think is essentially a metaphor for black people not being quote, unquote, good enough. Right. If they were quote, unquote, good enough, they could. They could make do with bad soil. But the narrator tells us, or Claudia realizes later, I can't remember one of those two. There's some switching back and forth that it was just a bad marigold. Like the ground would not support it. Right. There was nothing they could have done. And that's kind of the book. Right. There's nothing that the characters in this book could have done to combat the soil in which they're trying to grow.

[B]

Right. Morrison doesn't absolve any of her characters of the bad things that they do, but she's interested in the systems. You said the word systemic a few minutes ago, and that's what she's really trying to get at. Like, the most difficult scene in the book is near the very end where we see the moment that Chali rapes Pecola and we see it through his point of view. Morrison centers us with him. And it's as hard a scene to read as I have ever read. And the choice to put us in his experience of that moment is not about sympathizing with him, but about understanding the system that this person is inside of and how harmful racism and poverty and just continued oppression can be. And I think fundamentally that those can explain. They do not excuse. Morrison doesn't excuse any of this.

[A]

Both Soped and Kali's attraction to girls. Kali seems to be Pecola. Like there's the family dynamics there. Soped is more. You know, multiple encounters were given to both of them are presented as redirections from other. Like Morrison does some explanation. In a different life, Soped would have lived in a different world. So Soped would have lived a different life. He's not conventionally heterosexual. He's got some other things that there's no place for him really. And so he ends up in a strange job and what sexual desire has. Is pointed at girls for reasons that are. She tries to explain them, right. Like there's reasons for it. They're not good, they're not warranted. And then that terrible scene with Kali she is trying to work through. How could he get this place where he sees his daughter as a sexual object? And it's because it's not about. It's not only about sexual attraction, maybe not even principally about sort of straight up sexual attraction. There's so much more. And we're not going to try. That's why you read the book. We're not going to try to explicate that here, but I think that's something to. To wrestle with. And wrestle with is the right term, both for Morrison and your reading experience here. There is no clear outside. Outside of racism is bad. But beyond that, there's so many questions, so many dynamics that are unresolved intention and emanating from the ether that it's hard to wrap your. It's hard to wrap your arms around.

[B]

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. The scene where his. Like his origin story, fundamentally where he is having sex or about to have sex with a young girl. He's. When he's also young, like in his teens or twenties. 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. And he doesn't turn it on himself. He turns it onto that girl. And later he turns it on to 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. The same thing. The whole book is what happens to people, what do we do to people? And 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.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it's. It. It is a bit of a tour of different reactions and experience, but all under the same dynamic.

[C]

Right.

[A]

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. We 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, or I guess Pecola, 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 Hyle has. And there are consequences 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. Of bare reckoning with Pecola's story. Right. So some 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 something. There was something else that was going on. It wasn't just her. There was something else going on with.

[B]

Us that she is starting to wonder by the end of it, how come when this happened, nobody said that Poor girl.

[A]

Yeah, wow. 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. I mean, what is there to say, right? I mean, this. This starts a run of three. 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, as those three and five. And then the order, of course, won. The pull. The pull, 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. She was born CLO Dart Ardelia Wofford in Lorraine, Ohio. So she was. She was a child of Lorraine. This is. She's about the same age of these girls, I should say, in Lorraine.

[B]

She would have been 10, 9 or 10 in 1941 when this book starts.

[A]

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 rent. Interestingly, their reaction was different, which is they laughed at the landlord. That was an interview. Like that was our sort of way of countermanding this. 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. She 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. The multiple versions of what happens. If you think that different possible beings in one situation here, then there begin a literary career that we could go through. I think it's in. I don't know, really the story, and I haven't seen it printed. There's. 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.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know how that change happened.

[A]

I don't know how that happened either. If people know.

[B]

Yeah, she becomes the first black woman editing fiction at Random House in 1967. And she edited some names. Angela Davis, Gail Jones, Toni 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.

[C]

Like we.

[B]

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. I don't know how you try to boil down Toni Morrison into one sentence. That's a brave.

[A]

That's not bad.

[B]

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 person, Pursuit of writing that was indisputably black is a really key piece of this. 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.

[A]

She becomes Toni Morrison, the icon.

[C]

Pretty.

[A]

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 oracular Tony, which is really what happens after the 1990s.

[B]

She keeps publishing individual novels after that, but they stop getting nominated for things like the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards. 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.

[A]

Like just medals, Just ribbons, medals, plaques, statues.

[B]

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 Salbello 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. But people just, just like we just moved on, as you said to. To medals and ribbons and just a. A really marked life of incredible literary achievement.

[C]

Today's episode is brought to you by Harlequin, a leading publisher of romantic fiction delivering feel good high stakes and heart pounding stories across every kind of love, no matter what kind of romance you love to read Harlequin has it for you. And in one of their latest books, Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor, we've got some snowed in goodness. We've got some small town and some unusual residents. So when a snowstorm hits during her travels, Luna Stack finds herself stranded in Clawhaven, Alaska, a cozy small town with more than a few unusual residents. Well, things go from bad to complicated when Luna accidentally drinks a potion that tethers her to Oliver Musgrove, the local grumpy innkeeper who also happens to be a werewolf. Now these two opposites are stuck spending the winter together while they wait for the antidote. And although they might not want anything to do with each other, the bond says otherwise. Make sure to pick up Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor. And thanks again to Harlequin for sponsoring this episode.

[B]

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[A]

Learn [e-mail] 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 AAA Morrison.

[B]

My favorite.

[A]

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 reached the heights of sort of a they're shorter, they're not experimental, but they're more focused, they're more slices. God help this child. Love, mercy. Like they're all interesting but they don't quite ever have A sense of event reading that paradise had.

[B]

I agree. 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 Beloved Jazz, paradise is the run and after paradise, it's worth reading to finish out Morrison's body of work.

[A]

Yeah, it definitely is. But.

[B]

But that's. That's the apex, that Beloved Jazz, paradise run.

[A]

So you first. You said you first did this in college. I first did this in high school. We were. Beloved was required reading as part of an AP English course.

[B]

That is such a book to put in front of teenagers.

[A]

It 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. So this.

[C]

My.

[A]

This is either my third or fourth go around with the bluest eye. Though, to be Honest, it's been 20.

[B]

Years since I had been a decade for me.

[C]

My.

[B]

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, 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. 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.

[A]

The. I mean, we've talked some about the reading experience. Let's talk about Morrison. Morrison doing Morrison things is 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 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. 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 it, even maybe 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.

[B]

And the book, you said at the very top of the episode, the book has the. 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. 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. House. And it. 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.

[A]

One of the readers of all. Yes. I mean, in a live reading. Like what?

[B]

One of.

[A]

One of the best readers ever.

[B]

I bailed from the audiobook because I knew what was coming and my heart was like.

[A]

Putting your finger in the electrical socket. Like, my heart.

[B]

I just. My heart couldn't take it. I was not going to 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 want to listen to the first part, listening to Toni Morrison do the first part of this on audio is 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. 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 that the Dick and Jane stories are sort of indisputably white and very idyllic and present this mode of life that. That was not available to black people in Lorraine, Ohio at 19:41. And she's making us bump up against like, what is this ideal presentation of life? 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.

[A]

One other thing, the Dick and Jane book is probably the most overt and certain, certainly thoroughgoing example of it. But she does bring in objects, cultural material, objects of whiteness and show how they perm. 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 her in their house or they had at School. When Mr. Henry, their border comes. He. He flatters the young girls by, you know, saying they look like Garbo. And I can't remember the other white actress's name right now. But like. 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, you know, she can't get enough whiteness. She literally can't. And she's drinking out of her little Shirley Temple cup like she's literally. She's gorging on whiteness in these modes. And it's hard to remember for a modern reader now. Even harder. I sort of consider myself a modern niche reader because I did read these 20, 30 years ago. But even Bluest Eye, when eye reasoning was 25 years old in 1970, it didn't. 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. The children's primer seriously as a. As an artistic and cultural force. Not just Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or Rachmaninoff or something else. To take the movie seriously. Right.

[B]

That's where Polly learns what beauty is.

[A]

Polly learns what beauty is at the movies. And she goes there and. And Morrison says, you know, de facto, sort of poisons her mind about how to ascribe value, how to see value, and then also the refuge it gave 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. 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. Narrative, because that's there. I mean, she's not saying that's not what happens, but it's everything else too. Even when they're not there, they're in the room.

[B]

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 Pecola have with Shirley Temple. And 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.

[A]

Yeah, that's. That's a. I have this in my hot takes.

[C]

That.

[A]

That's a Morrison debut thing. And later. I don't think she writes that. She's 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 Pacola comes to stay with them and she's drinking all this milk, we get a longer than you would think. Longer than you think series of examples of Paulie talking to the room about how so much milk is being drank. And it's hilarious. I mean, it's. Somebody'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? What is a dairy?

[B]

And it's totally 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.

[A]

I do think about if she'd ever been interested in writing a genuinely comic novel. Right. Like, what was her Harlem shuffle?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You know what she's, you know, maybe playing a little bit more. Maybe she wasn't interested in that. But she, she. I think that's another thing that strikes me too is she can shift into beauty from profundity or trauma or simply like, she's got all the tools. She can do it all.

[B]

All the multitudes.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And very famously, one of the things we do know about Morrison, she was very close friends with the comedian and writer Fran Leibowitz. And like, 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. 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.

[A]

So. And we proceed. So we get a lot of vignettes like that. You know, we get the, you know, Pecola drinking all the milk. We get Paulie's exposure to movies. We get Maureen Peels, who is the new. The new kid in town who's high yellow, which, if you don't know what that means, she's. 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 vignettes 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 subsequent. 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 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 Peele that way. Marine 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 that that's. So that's one experience you're going to have there. We've time to get through all of those. But if you find yourself like I'm not really sure what that one was. 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 is not near it is not a ABC primer book. I think you'd even reorder some of them interestingly in ways that would reveal different results.

[B]

That Morrison sort of has this collection of illustrations about this community and these families and she's laying them out for us. And the. 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.

[A]

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 and if like people. There's not much of a story here. Like. Yeah, you're right. If you're a plot reader. If that matters the most to you. I don't think this is gonna be a wonderful. I still think it's gonna be worth reading. I'm never gonna say don't read that. But if you find yourself saying what is going on? What's the plot what's gonna happen next. That may be not the most generative way to experience this particular text.

[B]

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. Not always totally sure what's happening or what's going to come next. 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. Things and color and how those things.

[A]

Intersect to produce cultural politics, if not politics politics.

[B]

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.

[A]

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. 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 use her felicity with language intersects with her subject matter. Hypnotic elevate to. You know, this is one of the peaks that I In my reading life life to see this. And we'll talk. 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. The writerly things and how we experience them as readers. You have here maybe not the child sexual abuse is. Is presented directly, evocatively and poetically in its own way. But it is. It does not lead to.

[B]

It's very disturbing.

[A]

And I can imagine people that are especially sensitive. We all should be sensitive to this. I'm sensitive to 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. You're like, I just can't proceed.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I do think that's maybe this is.

[B]

Something to put in the hot takes. But I. Because that scene happened so close to the end of the book.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You could really read most of the Bluest Eye without encountering it and get.

[A]

Well, you would. You know, you're gonna get. You know, it's about that, but you don't know how. Yeah, you're right. How visceral, how direct, how unblinking it's gonna. The depiction of it is gonna be in the end.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But you can. 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 this, that you could read 90% of it and get what you. Basically what you need to get of the Morrison experience with and skip that section. Or even you could. Honestly, you could just skip those couple of pages.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, you protect yourself. You all know yourself better. In thinking about it, I remember at one point thinking, 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.

[C]

What.

[A]

What could they.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

What could they.

[C]

What.

[A]

What might this be like?

[B]

This is not the dream Charlie had for himself either. So how does a person end up at this place in life? Yeah.

[A]

Oh, immortal. Immortal. Questions. Time. 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?

[C]

Death.

[A]

What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil, Rebecca? It doesn't neatly fall into most of these. So what are we gonna do with it?

[B]

Well, I think the closest it comes is to what's the deal with good and evil? Not as concepts, but is how do people come to do evil things?

[A]

I think that that one is what are the ramifications of badness in the world? How does badness come to be so. 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.

[B]

And there are some shades of what do I owe my neighbor? As Claudia especially is 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 Cholli 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. Systems that have produced people who are doing bad things that they never would have wished they were doing.

[A]

I 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 to somehow subject we are to that is part of that there. So. 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, or you had it in the notes before. Like, one thing Zadie Smith says about Morrison is like, it's hard to remember now how much we needed this work to be done because it hadn't been done yet. So there's that. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas. There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.

[B]

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[A]

Are we sure this isn't about art and writing? You. You have a pull quote here and I've got a thought.

[B]

But you do your poll 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. But I mean, the short answer is yes, this book is about art. What's your take?

[A]

Yeah, and I think this is a book that at its core is sort of about the characters 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. One to what? 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? So 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. I. My take is Morrison is one of the great practitioners language that and does things that only language can do on its own.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Like you cannot film Morrison. I'm sorry, you cannot.

[B]

Yeah. Don't go watch the Oprah adaptation of Beloved. Just don't.

[A]

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 in exactly the right order she wants. And any emendation or resources configuration 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. And even now I can't imagine ever being that bold. 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.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah, 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?

[B]

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. 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. 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 toss, just like who else thinks of that.

[A]

You know? One of my favorite bits of Emerson is we talked about getting pissed off when he reads a line from somebody else. Oh, that's so what I feel. And 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 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 moment of sort of unnecessary beauty. Like that's not really germane to the main threads or topics or rivers that she's pouring water into to. 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. 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. We 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.

[B]

I know, I know, know from the very end of the book when we're getting Soap Head Church's backstory.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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.

[A]

So good. She goes on to explain that a little bit more. She could have just left.

[B]

Yeah, you could have just left it. What a great line. It says everything you need to say and it is so funny. Then I think the most quoted line from this that I see on the Internet at. 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.

[A]

That idea that when Kali is described as free in that sequence, there's a whole page. There's a whole section on. We could do a whole episode on what's going on.

[B]

You could go to Close Reading Corner for, like, five hours on that.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

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.

[A]

Right. And that's kind of what I was saying before is like, love is like. If you. This idea of, 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. It'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.

[B]

And that passage is like, fundamentally, Morrison doing hurt people. Hurt people decades before we had a way of saying it that way. Generational trauma, before we had that term. Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

And 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?

[C]

Right.

[A]

All right. Some trivia, adaptations, rumors, other things. Kind of a grab bag here. You mentioned the audiobook. Very little initial review coverage, but there was a signal review in the New York Times. It got the ball rolling a little bit. I have to believe that Morrison would. Morrison. But you never know. You never know if this one, I mean, The New York Times was. 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 in the. Of many of whom Morrison published Picking up this Bluest Eye. But she got the big New York Times review, and it was super positive. I don't know. I. Those culture is hard to predict. That was. That was a butterfly. Was that all that was needed? Maybe other butterflies would have flapped to get the hurricane of Morrison going, but I just wonder about that. Have you ever seen the first edition? Had you looked at.

[B]

No, I'm looking at it right now. 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.

[A]

It's just the text.

[B]

Just the text of the first two paragraphs printed right on the COVID 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 1, 2, 4. 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 at the time.

[A]

The second line. We thought at. The second line is. We thought at the time that it was because Picol was having her father's baby.

[B]

Right there.

[A]

It's right there.

[B]

Imagine somebody trying to get this done today.

[A]

I was thinking about this.

[B]

So publishing is not this brave today.

[A]

I don't know who the. There's so much about this I don't know. And maybe the stories have been written, but there is no giant Morrison biography, and I hope they're somewhere. Her papers are at Princeton, and I know she was a great letter writer.

[B]

Namwali Serpell has a book on Morrison coming out in January. But it's also not criticism. Okay. Not a comic book. Comprehensive biography.

[A]

Yeah, I have it. I got. 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 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, the Bluest Eye, and here's the quote from the editor, and.

[B]

Here'S their talk of how it all got done.

[A]

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.

[B]

You don't. It's just the words. Like, it doesn't say Tony Morrison. 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 let people pick this up in a bookstore and read these first two paragraphs and make their decision. 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.

[A]

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 the.

[B]

You better really tighten that up, friend. Like, get those first two paragraphs.

[A]

You know, you buy a Snickers bar. There's like the nutritional info. Like, it has to be on there. Like, what if we said like on every book on the COVID there has to be the first 150 words just.

[B]

Right there on the COVID Sprayed edges up with having to put your first.

[A]

Graph on the COVID Show me the goods, baby. 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 $3,600 to go by right now. First edition, which I don't know. It's been a while since I've been the book collectors game, but I'm like, for a first edition of Toni Morrison's first book. Doesn't seem insane to me. I don't know. It's a lot of money. Yeah. She was still supporting herself by. She would teach throughout the rest of her life. I'm not clear that she needed to do it for. For cash. She never. I mean, she sold well, but it was never going to be Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover money.

[B]

Yeah, she had like, you know, the seated lecture titles at like. I think Stanford was the last place she was.

[A]

Princeton.

[B]

Princeton.

[A]

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?

[B]

Good for her.

[A]

Listen, get. Grab that bag. The Bluest eye has the second highest Goodread rating, 4.3 of her novels behind only Song of solemn with a 4.15.

[B]

Interesting. I wonder how significant that 4.15 versus 4.13 is.

[A]

I don't think. I don't think it's that different. I'll give you two my. 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.

[B]

But it's longer. Yeah, it's weirder, but it's not about.

[A]

Child rape and it has a more hopeful ending.

[B]

And it was an Oprah pick. Song of Solomon was an Oprah pick.

[A]

Yep. An omnibus collection of three of the novels has a higher rating than any of the individual novels do, which is a weird.

[B]

Which three is it?

[A]

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.

[C]

Was.

[A]

I just thought it was interesting to see where this ranks takes. You did your mind blowing debut novel. It would be any Wells's masterwork. We already did the. Some debut writer things about just adding a couple of extra sentences after doing the Morrison thing that you. We don't. We don't.

[B]

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 gonna get me or you know, you don't.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And if you're going to get me, this is all you need.

[A]

I don't think. I think you're right. We could. 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.

[B]

The closest one is I think from Song of Solomon. That'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.

[A]

Read alikes. Books inspired by this one, I feel. I mean I remember this. I had read Faulkner first and there's so much Faulkner 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 sound. And the fury is. Is the. The one that I remember the best and probably the most recognized other people people, these multiple perspectives to try to get at the truth of something that eludes anyone.

[B]

She wrote her Thesis on Faulkner, like Morrison was.

[A]

Master's thesis at Cornell was. That was on Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, who.

[B]

Yeah, you can see some modern sensibility there.

[A]

I think their eyes we talked about.

[B]

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 some of those same concerns running through both books. And then like, what do you read contemporary writers influenced by Morrison?

[C]

I mean.

[A]

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 Morrison in their artistic consciousness. So it's almost.

[B]

Even if it's not a direct. Even if they wouldn't cite Morrison as a direct influence, like she's in the stew that has shaped most modern writers.

[A]

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.

[B]

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. 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.

[A]

Yeah, 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 place.

[B]

Claudia gets there. And. And so many of the vignettes in the book can be read as basically like a parade of moments that Pecola 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. Pecola becomes the tart of all of that. That the people of the community sort of silently come to an understanding, an agreement that this is what they're going to do with these feelings that they have 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.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Zero to well read score, each one of these one to ten, ten being the highest here. The five categories. Historical importance, Readability, Current relevance of central questions. Book NE Reed Cred. An O dam factor. Historical importance. So since this was written in sort of a living person's lifetime, it really can't be a 9 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.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I struggle with this. I think Morrison is a 10 on historical importance. But this being.

[A]

Well, that's not what we're doing here.

[B]

I know, I know. This being her first book, I think probably I'm gonna go with seven or an eight. So let's go on seven. I think that's. That's the number in between there.

[A]

I think beloved is an 8.

[C]

8.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But I don't think this can be an 8. 2. Readability. Interesting one.

[B]

This is an interesting one. I'm gonna go.

[A]

Six.

[B]

Six. Yeah. That. This. The language. The language is pretty direct, but she's a little.

[A]

7.

[B]

She's a little experimental. There are some weird things. Like the framing with the Dick and Jane story is not. Not. You know, it's not over about what it is.

[A]

I'm more. If you're coming to this cold, it's going to. There. You're going to have some vertigo. That's. It's more of a six. That's.

[B]

Vertigo is a good word.

[A]

Central relevance. Current relevance of Central questions. That's an interesting one.

[B]

I think it's a ten. This is a nine or a ten. That.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What happens. Like, the products of being hated did 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.

[A]

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. In our own. In my. It had to be about now. I'd go eight, eight and a half. Something like that book. Nerd read cred. Pretty high.

[B]

Pretty high.

[A]

Seven.

[B]

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 let's go seven.

[A]

Oh damn factor. Pretty high too.

[B]

Pretty high. Seven. Eight.

[A]

Seven eight.

[B]

We'll go eight. Okay.

[A]

Yeah. So that's a seven. That's a 13. 21 and a half. 28 and a half.

[B]

38 and a half.

[A]

36 and a half, I believe.

[B]

Yeah. Oh yeah. 36 and a half.

[A]

So there you go.

[B]

Out of 50. Pretty good.

[A]

Pretty good. Show [e-mail] listen email us zero to well read bookriot.com zero to well read 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 are going to be a whiplash experience for me.

[B]

Yeah this is and we're about we're coming up on halfway through the season. If you are enjoying the show we sure would to love love and appreciate a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, 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.

[A]

We will have recorded all of these I think by the time any of.

[B]

Them come out is that is a lie.

[A]

We will have recorded half of well this this first batch at least to this point we'll have they're not out in the world so feedback on one episode the other but in general general would be very happy. We 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. Thank you all to listening.

[B]

Always a delight to pick up these books.