SOURCE: Wong, Shelley. “Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye.” Callaloo 13, no. 3 (summer 1990): 471-81.

In the following essay, Wong isolates a two-fold process in Morrison's narrative method in The Bluest Eye that transgresses conventional boundaries of signification and then reconfigures the material to form a new order of signification.

In the opening pages of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes that since the “why” of Pecola and Cholly Breedlove's situation is “difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how” (9). This admission, hardly the admission of a lack of technique or craft, is, instead, Morrison's admission that she is interested in, not questions of final causes, but questions of process, questions about how process comes to be shut down. Not surprisingly, then, The Bluest Eye opens with a tuition in closure. In a passage rendered in the style of the Dick and Jane series of primers, the novel...