The Bluest Eye

For Toni Morrison, art cannot be effective without it being political. All good art has been political and the black artist has a responsibility to the black community. In her works, she aims at capturing "the something that defines what makes a book 'black.' And that has nothing to do with whether the people in the books are black or not." She thinks that one characteristic of black writers is a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends. Her novels "bear witness" to the experience of the black community and blacks in that community. Her work suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. In the past, music expressed these things and "kept us alive. Unfortunately music no longer serves this function and other forms of expressions, like the novel, are needed." Morrison wants her prose to recreate black speech, to restore the language that black people spoke to its original power; for her, language is the thing that black people love so much--the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It's a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher's: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language. Marc Conner, author of “The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable,” paints a picture for his readers that shows us just how Morrison writes her novels so that they are “socially responsible as well as very beautiful.” Because of her position and the role she takes on as author of such delicate pieces of work, she demands criticism; not only through literary lenses, but political lenses as well. Conner believes that Morrison wants readers to participate in her novels, to be involved actively. “The scholarship detailing Morrison’s position within a specifically African-American aesthetic