{"id":1880,"date":"2019-08-06T22:48:01","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T22:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/08\/06\/a-tribute-to-the-beauty-and-power-of-work-by-novelist-toni-morrison\/"},"modified":"2024-03-05T16:15:24","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:15:24","slug":"a-tribute-to-the-beauty-and-power-of-work-by-novelist-toni-morrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/08\/06\/a-tribute-to-the-beauty-and-power-of-work-by-novelist-toni-morrison\/","title":{"rendered":"A tribute to the “beauty and power” of work by novelist Toni Morrison"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was shared, with thanks and permission, by our friends at The Poynter Institute<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>

AUTHOR’S NOTE: <\/strong>American author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison died August 5, 2019, at the age of 88. \u00a0I studied her writing and wrote about it in my 2016 book “The Art of X-ray Reading<\/a>: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing.”<\/em>\u00a0 This tribute is adapted from a chapter in that book.
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S<\/span>ome writers are great storytellers; others are great lyricists.\u00a0 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is both, of course, but when reading “The Bluest Eye,” I find myself wanting to stop the narrative so that I could rest and savor the beauty and power of her prose. It\u2019s like that rare occasion when you stop the car trip for a minute so you can watch the sun set behind the mountain.

There are countless passages that deserve our close attention, but there is one Morrison move that stands out. For lack of a better word, I will call it repetition<\/em>. I don\u2019t mean repetition in its common sense, using a word or phrase over and over again until it gets tedious or meaningless. Morrison\u2019s texts might look like that at first glance, but upon X-ray inspection it turns out that each signature word changes with repetition, like an echo in a valley.

A simple distinction might be useful: In literary terms, there is a difference between repetition and redundancy. The first tends to be intentional, purposeful, reinforcing. The latter is needlessly repetitive, a waste of words or space. No one told the Beatles that \u201cShe loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah\u201d didn\u2019t need all those \u201cyeahs.\u201d But when we use the clich\u00e9 \u201cvarious and sundry,\u201d it\u2019s not hard to recognize that both words mean about the same thing. (\u201cPlease go sit on that sofa or couch,\u201d said the redundant shrink.)

Before we look at passages from Morrison, a plot summary would be helpful. The book, set in 1940-41, tells the story of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is obsessed with white images of beauty. In an act of racial and personal self-loathing, she dreams of having the bluest eyes.\u00a0 She suffers the cruelties of poverty, rape, a pregnancy that ends in stillbirth, sustained only by the fantasy of blue eyes \u2014 fulfilled only when she becomes possessed by mental illness in the end. Written in 1962, Morrison\u2019s work anticipates decades of attention to racial beauty, diversity, feminism, body image, and sexual abuse.

R<\/span>ight words in the right order\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>

Let\u2019s begin by X-raying a single narrative sentence that is central to the thematic action of the story:
Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes.<\/blockquote>
As I\u2019ve done so many times with the line from Macbeth (\u201cThe Queen, my lord, is dead\u201d), I\u2019ll begin by creating alternative versions of the original. Morrison could have written:

    \t
  1. Without fail, each night she prayed for blue eyes.<\/li>
    \t
  2. She prayed for blue eyes each night without fail.<\/li>
    \t
  3. She prayed for blue eyes without fail each night.<\/li>
    \t
  4. For blue eyes she prayed each night without fail.<\/li>
    <\/ol>
    When I study the work of a Nobel Prize winner, I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.\u00a0 So let\u2019s X-ray the parts of Morrison\u2019s version: