Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: the language of metaphysics and the possibilities for poetic thinking

Abstract

This essay seeks to illuminate the essential thinking which as the unsaid of The Bluest Eye forms the metaphysical structure and presuppositions by which what is comes-to-be in language within the particular freedom and limitations of the novel. That is to say, the essay seeks to bring to light the metaphysics of the vision of the bluest eye with respect to the vision's mostly unclarified concepts of appearance, becoming, freedom, and time. At the same time, the essay demonstrates the largely unacknowledged possibilities of the language of The Bluest Eye for poetic thinking, for that free opening in the working of the art of the novel in which things linger and abide in their essence as they are. The critical approach of the essay is markedly "philosophical," relying mostly on the thought of Martin Heidegger. However, "philosophy" is not to be understood as a system or a doctrine but as constitutive of man's essential being, his resolve on what constantly calls on him to think. As such resolve, the present essay inquires into the possibilities for a new grounding of our understanding of a work of art, its critique, and art in general.