Harper's 'Readings' imitation

[Memoir]

From an October 10, 1987 memoir of George Mavroyenis, a retired Chicago Public School janitor who emigrated from Crete, Greece in 1974. In his memoir, “The Light of Suffering,” published this month by BlackPowder Press, Mavroyenis recounts the anguish of pride and honor in a small village on the island of Crete. At age 12, Mavroyenis tells of an execution of a convicted rapist and murderer in 1954. The memoir was co-written by his nephew, Markos Mavroyenis, who taped many conversations between himself and his uncle.

The Wall

A fresh coat of paint on the wall meant an execution occurred. From the dirt road the wall was poised among the jasmine flowers and lemon trees. Bedraggled and weathered for so long, its edges were round and smooth, the white paint faded and flaking – all except for the small section where the short man in overalls worked. He stamped out his cigarette and wiped his forehead then dropped the brush in the pail. There was no more trace and with that no more memory. Far from the wall, on the road, I could see the painter’s dark fuzzy face as he sat against the wall with an arm on his knee eating an apple.

The wall, separating the prison from an ancient lemon orchard, was composed of stones densely packed a little higher than a man, fit and mortared like puzzle pieces long ago and re-mortared many times over. I waited for the painter to leave but he wouldn’t. Finally I hiked up to the wall. The dirt was light and dry and I could not find the shell casings. The wall stood ominously before me as I searched the painted area, any secrets of murders or executions withheld; the wall was solemn and proud and stubborn, as if the only struggle was its defiance against gravity to keep it rooted in the earth.

“What’d you lose,” the painter said picking at his teeth.
“The shell casings,” I said.
“You’ll find hundreds of them. But you got to dig.”
“I’m looking for the ones this morning.”
“Oh,” the painter said. He spit from his tooth whatever he was picking. “The yellow bastard’s hand shook so much he missed twice before he finally put him out of his misery.”
“I just want the brass,” I said.
“Then you keep looking, kid.”

The painter left. I scrounged on hands and knees by the freshly painted section of the wall, looking for the cursed bullets.

Nothing could be found. I walked a few yards along the perimeter of the wall, touching it gently as if feeling for a pulse. The dirt popped under my hard shoe-leather. It was as though every rock and pebble on the island of Crete has been sprinkled with blood, each with a story of terror and triumph and in no particular hurry to be told. Just this morning, twelve rifles pointed at Evangelos, who stood gnarled-teethed against the wall. His beard long and filthy, his face bruised from the officers’ unique interrogation, the saliva and bloody slobber coagulated in the corners of his mouth.

The lieutenant asked for twelve volunteers. If no one stepped forward then twelve men would be ordered to do it. Luckily, men from the village of Sfakia were always game for an execution. These people observed archaic laws unerringly, as if together the ways of ancient Greece and the Bible mutated and spawned the Sfakiani people, who stood like taciturn pillars, proud and broad shouldered, with thick moustaches and guns in their belt – God’s avenging angels. A cantankerous clan who laughed and danced and played with Death, all of them adorned in black shirts because a father or brother or uncle had been killed in a blood-soaked vendetta.

The lieutenant got his volunteers. Six guns were loaded with blanks, all twelve pointed at Evengelos’s chest. By the time of the execution, all of Greece had heard the name Evangelos, but only in Crete, where he was transported from the mainland and incarcerated, was he to be dealt with. The Greek people were relieved to know Evangelos was is in Crete. Crete is the land where impunity dies. All debts are paid to the earth with prejudice and every wrong is righted - that is why Crete’s soil is of the most fertile in the world.

When the prisoner arrived the warden was furious simply by the sight of him. Evangelos was found curing intestines and other body parts that hung from a sapling to dry. His twelve-year-old daughter sat under the tree, her face in a peaceful disposition. Her abdomen was splayed open and festooned the grisly site.

“How could you do that to your own daughter?” The warden asked.
“When you plant a tree and it bears fruit, do you not want to be the first to eat it?” Evangelos said.

The warden ordered his execution immediately; a prison cell was not even assigned to him. Evangelos refused the blindfold. Any prayers from Father Michael where met with curses and spit. At dawn the Sfakiani fired their rifles and Evangelos slammed back into the wall then slid down and slumped to one side.

The lieutenant looked at prisoner. The blood trailed from the wall and soddened the earth beneath Evangelos. The lieutenant then turned to the warden.
“Do I have to?” he asked.
“You must put a pistol round in his head. We can’t leave him half-dead,” the warden said.

The Sfakiani roared with laughter as the lieutenant’s gun trembled in his hand. I can only imagine that as he stood over Evangelos he did not aim at his head, but at the dirt behind it. That’s the only way he could do it. Still, he missed with the first and second shot. Evangelos’s leg jerked three or four times and the lieutenant jumped back. His career in the military was over. The Sfakiani would never let him live down his cowardice.

The third shot from the lieutenant’s pistol met its mark and Evangelos was dead.

Dreams of Eating Dirt

I happen through the forest into a fertile steppe
across a murky river frothing against its banks.
Sunken within, a man is seated on a horse,
his hands bound by obsidian strands of her hair.

Beside the river she is knitting hymeneal
crowns of jasmine alongside the rider’s grave.
Her hair-long (less one chunk), blankets his plaque,
her eyes sodden the soil beneath her veiled gravidity.

I see these things and bend to eat the earth,
where the fecund taste brings resolve
to my barren visage, so impotent to her,
and is there - a monolith - when I wake.

The Tragic and Agonizing Lives of People I Once Knew

We each hated him for different reasons. He was odd, spewed from the sporogenous loins of parents whom I only knew of from riding passed their house. It was a small chipped-white house that sagged on the corner of Delaware St. and Chenango Ave., where a large tree canopied the entire property. When it was cut down it revealed the home as if it were just unclothed and violated.

Not a damn thing stirred in that house, and I only knew Elmer Peatry lived there because I saw him booting home one day as I was riding my bike. The site’s dilapidation made sense to me when I discovered it was the Peatry’s, the dried grass and tree stump, the cracked walkway, flat roof top, and vinyl sided structure, were all props that explained Elmer Peatry, and Elmer Peatry explained them.

The boy had no friends. He was content though, parading around with his mouth slightly opened in an inward smile. He’d wander around the playground of Clayton Elementary talking to himself, throwing his hands in the air as if twirling an invisible baton. He did not simply walk as much as stride with deliberation; his back and arms rigid and straight, his neck and head motionless. Only his legs kicked out high in front of him as he patrolled the grounds or hallways.

Bobby Mattheson always yelled at him about his peculiar gait, and like an angry mob, we’d wind Bobby up so tight he’d punch Elmer in the back, his face fanned into rage by our hysteria. Elmer’s simpering sustained all through the teasing and bullying and up until the punch. The smile, now completely its own and detached from Elmer’s face, would hold back the tears for a couple of seconds, then cry. The teachers would stroll up to us and ask what happened, but they hated him too.

One day I told the boys in class to invite Elmer to play touch football during recess.

“Screw that, who wants that pussy on their team?”

“Who cares?” I said, “Just give him the ball. Then cream him.”

The trick was to convince him, to interrupt his hermetic baton twirling and explain that we wanted him to play with us, even with Bobby Mattheson on one of the teams. Because I never initiated Elmer’s ridicule I was the perfect candidate to recruit him. I did, however, participate in the disparagement of Elmer Peatry. He never changed, as if each time we chased after him he’d hole up somewhere in his head, hiding and waiting from us to leave, which incensed us further and further until we looked like slavering imps. At that exact moment I’d feel sick and wish to God he’d fight back, that he’d punch me in my mouth and shut me up. But he’d let me wallow in it and I hated him for that.

It was like trying to get an alley dog to trust you. I finally persuaded him to play when I let him hold the football and he tossed it in the air replacing the imaginary baton. We picked teams and Elmer was on mine. On the first play I threw a pass to him as hard as I could and it zipped right through his hands and dug into his chest. “Keep your eye on the ball!” I said, “Just keep your eyes on it and you’ll catch it.” Elmer took the advice to heart and it cured his tears.

I snapped the next play and lobbed the ball to Elmer. He caught it and looked at it. “Run!” I pointed towards our end zone. He marched up the field swerving to miss the tags. He was in the open when suddenly the entire field converged upon him. Even his own teammates, even me. He ran right, left, then right again but everyone was rushing him. He dropped the ball and braced for impact. We fell on him, kicked him, pulled his hair, punched and kneed him. He absorbed blow after blow without making a sound and I thought we killed him. He laid there flat and bloodied. His eyes opened large and bright and his mouth gaped wide and dark like a graveyard in the middle of his face. But still no sound came from him. We walked away knowing no one would call after him, his parent’s wouldn’t talk to the school about the cuts and bruises, the teachers wouldn’t spend a breath.

I barely remembered him in middle school and I don’t even know if he made it to high school. We turned from chasing Elmer Peatry to chasing girls and making sure we didn’t care about a damn thing.

Incidentally, one day Bobby Mattheson was, what one would call, walking through our high school commons, lips cotton-mouthed, when he collapsed and died in front of the lunch crowd. His freckly arms were bruised and punctured with numerous intravenous attempts to inject, and his head split open where he hit the corner of the metal bench and gushed red all over the linoleum.

I did find out, however, that Elmer Peatry was born with the umbilical chord wrapped around his neck, apparently that way for many months, restricting proper blood flow that weakened then under-developed his legs. In the incubator he was going through methamphetamine withdrawal and constantly cried and jittered. At five-years-old he taught himself to walk again.

Now, late at night in bed, falling asleep with the tv on, I think of him twirling those invisible batons to the sound of the infomercials, and he grinning at me. Grinning, because maybe all along they were grenades.

Downtown Starbuck's sketch

She didn't order anything. That's why she sat by the window near the door hoping not to be noticed. It was as if the act of not buying coffee exposed her rather than her appearance: dirty slippers, dingy pajama bottoms, a frayed wool cap covered her oily hair that once must have been a blaring obsidian mane, now tangled into strands of silver, twisted and knotted like a mop.

She wore a fleece jacket with tags hanging from the sleeve. This new garment was ineffective, the mix-matched fresh fleece only further defined her impecunious disposition. She glanced around the coffee shop, then stared out the window, sitting sideways in the chair, her elbow on the table, waiting and clutching a plastic bag in her fingers that swung like a pendulum clock.

Outside a bus rolled to a stop and she started to stand, then sat back down. Her gaze shifted from the window to the door. A white-haired man walked in. He was neatly trimmed, beard the same length as his hair, thick and scholarly. He joined the woman and also sat sideways in the chair, resting his leather-patched elbow on the table while unbuttoning his Tweed jacket. He also had a plastic bag. He reached in and set a boxed juice drink and an orange on the table. The homeless woman looked at the objects.

"Did you spend all the money?"

"What do you think, man?" she replied suddenly and violently aggravated. He put the the two items back in the sack. "Do you want McDonald's?"

The woman did not answer. She stood up and followed the man out.

City Sketch

The baby's carriage was too heavy for him to push, too hard to steer through the billowing crowd of people massing around the bus stop. The city buildings hulking over the small boy moaned; the steel beams expanded and retracted under so much swelter, the massive structures swaying ever so slightly, like a monk praying during vespers. He kept pushing though, and as his mother held the hand of his little sister, and she the hand of an even younger sister, the boy's faced was mortared into that ancient rage, that old indomitable determination and will of even Achilles himself, to complete the task set before him: to push his baby brother through downtown Chicago.

The boy's mother craned her neck to read the bus route numbers on the sign, tugging at her little girls, scolding them for dragging their feet, not out of etiquette, but from the pure need for speed, to not miss the bus heading towards Uptown. She realized her bus stopped two blocks further north. She yanked on her child's arm as if it were a cord directly attached to some lever deep inside the bowels of the earth, suspending its rotation and pausing time just enough for her to catch her breath, to warrant the pedestrians and traffic cessative, to get to where she so dearly needed to be.

The girls tripped but couldn't fall down as their mother dragged them along, frenzied, chasing after a bus. The boy was trying to keep pace with his mother, unable to push and steer fast enough, his head lollipopping just above the stroller. He pushed on, still with that stern look on his face of that puritanic and stoic diligence to finish what was asked of him. He could no longer hear his sisters crying, he began to confuse his mother with other people, until finally she was lost in the herd. He pushed on, slicing through the rush-hour commuters who were chasing their own buses. After a while he did not know where to go.

Much later, this story will be rattled off to some judge overseeing the boy's prosecution of some petty crime. The small boy, now a man and a criminal, will cheapen that memory of travail into a puny plea (one the judge has already heard from him) to save himself from jail. But at that moment, in the heat of the city, the boy was triumphant, full of courage and terror.

Thanatopsis

“I’ll tell you solemnly that I wished to become an insect many times. But not even that was granted. I swear to you, gentlemen, that being overly conscious is a disease, a genuine, full-fledged disease.”
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

It’s showing worrying symptoms. Utterly disoriented, it travels upwards and clenches the branch with its mandibles, the final resting place. The infected ones are carried and dumped away from the colony. The fruiting body of the cordycep erupts from its head and the deadly spores burst from its tip – so virulent it can wipe out the entire colony. David Attenborough’s voice narrates this scene as the inflicted bullet ant’s head is impaled by the budding cordycep fungus, a species that parasitizes insects and arthropods, on the BBC series Life in the Undergrowth. Cordyceps manipulate the behavior of its host to increase their chance of reproduction, often disorienting the afflicted to suicide by leading them away from their terrestrial habitat.

Since Aesop’s fables, animal behavior has been transmuted to human meaning, and I found the idea of insect suicide disconcerting. The human condition of suicide is typically explained as an illness, the ultimate form of depression. If insects consciously terminate themselves, I could see suicide as something natural, part of the cycle of life. For me, and I think for all of us, the question of living infects our thoughts when we don't want to face our faults or mistakes, big or small. On one of those nights I Googled “I want to die” and the first query’s page read, “suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain.”

David Hume asserted that superstition, regardless of creed, prolongs humans into "a miserable existence from a vain fear left he offend his Maker" (On Suicide and the Immortality). Combined with humans' natural timidity of death, the fear of suicide "quite deprives men of all power over their lives." Can insects offer any insight to this human condition of pain versus fear, to the idea that humans are seemingly not the only species able to wield this awesome and terrible power? As quick as I viewed the two minute clip of the BBC special, I found the story of the suicidal scorpion.

Ancient Egyptian legends describe the scorpion’s suicidal behavior when surrounded by burning embers. After drastic attempts to cross the fire, the scorpion stings itself to death. However, Christian Legros, Marie-France Martin-Eauclaire, and David Cattaert proved that scorpions are resistant to their own venom. On top of that, scorpions are cold-blooded and exposure to intense heat induces a metabolic breakdown, causing it to erratically sting and strike, sometimes landing blows on its own body.

I called Dr. Darryl Gwynne, an entomologist at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. I asked about arthropods such as the grasshopper, beetle, and locust, who jump into a pool of water and drown themselves. I asked about the male redback spider’s complicit behavior when the female devours him after copulation. And, I asked him about the bullet ant.

Horsehair worms, a common parasitic animal found in damp places across the world, burrow larvae into aquatic insects like the mosquito or mayflower. When the cricket, beetle, or locust eats carrion it picks up the worm, which requires water to survive. The worm parasitizes the nervous system of the arthropod and steers it zombie-like towards water, where they jump in. “But they were being killed more by the worm than the water. It’s sort of suicide in the sense that they are jumping in the water,” Dr. Gwynne explains.

Coital rituals of the Australian redback spider end with sex as suicide. The male-spider performs an acrobatic dance before inserting his sperm-carrying organ, the pedipalp, into the female. At the exact moment of climax, the spider somersaults, his organ still inside, ripping himself in half and landing beneath the fangs of the female, who fatally mauls him. The act of self termination permits the pedipalp to become indefinitely lodged within the female, ensuring successful impregnation. Also, it acts as a blocking mechanism deterring other males.

“Ultimately, it’s a game of passing on genes,” says Dr. Gwynne, explaining that natural selection favors a genealogical pattern that promotes a desire to survive and produce healthy off-spring. Insects like the bullet ant are social, working on behalf of the whole colony. When hosting the cordycep fungus, they remove themselves as to not infect the queen and other workers, ensuring the survival of the nest. Dr. Gwynne explains, “Nature is selfish. Animals survive and reproduce. Reproduction is the final end. It’s getting genes passed along. That’s why suicide seems like a puzzle at first. When you realize that animals commit suicide as a consequence, its reproductive interests are really increased. Then suicide can evolve as a strategy.”

In my research I came across Jean-Henri Fabre, a French entomologist from the 1800s, who wrote, “When we lack the society of our fellow-men, we take refuge in that of animals, without always losing by the change.” I don't like bugs, and I am in agreement with Mr. Hazlitt in regards to his spider visitor, "I bear the creature no ill-will, but still hate the very site of it" (On the Pleasure of Hating). What troubles me is the resolve of nature, where man can choose to destroy himslef, suicidal strategies of insects promote their inheritance of this earth. Some cockroaches survive through lethal doses of radiation. Like Fabre, Dostoevsky’s protagonist in Notes wanted to become an insect and spoke of man’s self-awareness with disgust. I confused the context in which insects commit “suicide.” My need to perceive suicidal behavior in insects is, in fact, an anthropomorphism thrust upon nature, to burden them with the ills of man.

Told by an Idiot: Post-Modern Inadequacies of Religious Practice and the Failure of God

The Christian myth is perhaps the most influential agent in all of literature and the focus of much critical analysis. In many of his university lectures, William Faulkner denied the deliberate use of religious symbolism. Instead, they were “tools” to be used if needed. Toni Morrison uses religion as another form of a master narrative to be deconstructed. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury reduces the pre-modern dichotomous view of a benevolent God to the level of man, and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye perpetuates that inversion to introduce an inadequate God, incapable of alleviating the suffering of its character.
Pre-modernism is roughly dated between 1865 and 1914. According to Daniel Singal, this belief system involves a distinctive set of values which included an axiom that a “predictable universe presided over a benevolent God and governed by immutable natural laws, a corresponding conviction that humankind was capable of arriving at a unified and fixed set of truths about all aspects of life, and an insistence on preserving absolute moral standards based on a radical dichotomy” (Singal 3). This dichotomy is essential to the pre-modernists and forced them to view the world in a bi-polar state: good and evil, human and animal, white and black. Modernism holds at its core the belief of androgyny, alienation, fragmentation, instinct, regression, and history, dealing with marginal and liminal characters in the attempt to fuse together what the dichotomy of pre-modernism separated.
The modernist thought highlighted a shift from the disenchantment associated with the crisis of the myths and objective truths of modernity, and emerged as an antithesis to the westernized Christ myth. But Nicoletta Pierddu, in her essay, “Gianni Vattimo,” maintains that Vattimo’s philosophy of post-modernity explores the radical belief that the dismissal of myth, is a myth itself. In Vattimo’s argument, “the return of the religious in the post-modern world can be explained as the most faithful accomplishment of nihilism because, by re-presenting a kernel of sacred contents which were abandoned and are now recalled in a distorted and reduced version, it exemplifies a weak approach to tradition” (Pierrdu 307). This “return” voids religion of any mystical, ethereal characters and elements in its practice, where the Bible becomes a transmission that reduces the Lord of the Bible to the text, instead of its origin. This weakness in the Western Christian doctrine is “interpreted as an enfeeblement – a ‘reduction’ or ‘kenosis’ – of God to the level of man” (Pierrdu 307).
In reading The Sound and the Fury, an anagogic, that is, a Scriptural interpretation, can be viewed in the mode of synecdoche – the examination of the parts that make up the whole. An anagogic analysis, arguably the highest level of critical literary interpretation, can be viewed through the separate parts that constitute The Sound and the Fury as a whole, unified, organic text. According to James M. Mellard, in his essay, “Faulkner’s Commedia,” Faulkner employs a single image as a unified representation of the whole. The Christ story assumes a synecdoche of parables, miracles, and teachings that make up Christianity. Similarly, Benjy’s, Quentin’s, Jason’s, and the last section, commonly referred to as Dilsey’s, are the lenses through which to view any religious interpretation of the novel. As a whole, Nietzsche would marvel at the absence of God within the text. But in the mode of synecdoche, the presence of God can be analyzed through the skewed view of each character’s section.
Faulkner’s narrative primarily takes place during Easter week, dividing the novel into four sections, or perspectives. Benjy’s section opens with “April Seventh, 1928” (Faulkner 3), the day before Easter Sunday. Benjy, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, turns thirty-three years old on this date, which was the age of Christ at his death. Faulkner assigns Benjy a Christ-figure role, although through a transposed set of values. Where traditional Christian texts portray Christ as articulate with his divine thoughts and words, Benjy is mal-literate, although clairvoyant in his sensory perceptions of Caddy. The inversion of the Christ-like Benjy is incongruous to the Christian myth.
Quentin, in contemplating his suicide, says, “Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister” (Faulkner 79). Here, Quentin inverses his sister’s sexual indiscretion into his own Christly Passion, taking on her humiliation and suffering upon himself. Perversely, he is willing to die for Caddy’s sins, seemingly abolishing them through the Christian myth logic; death for the remission of sins, where he says, “it wont take but a second just a second then I can do mine I can do mine then” (Faulkner 152). But Quentin’s concern is an obsessive control over Caddy, and not for religious salvation. Again, this inversion of the Christian myth reduces the Christ figure into a single, unstable, non-Messianic figure.
Jason’s anagogic interpretation is found in his sacramental concept of blood.
Similar to Benjy and Quentin’s non-religious imagery that is embedded within the Christian myth, Jason’s concept of blood has no other connotation than “heritage” and “kinship” (Mellard 222). Blood is a direct relationship between family lineage, family, name, and pride – it is Compson blood (Mellard 223). Faulkner antithetically sets the Eucharistic meaning for blood into Jason’s misanthropic view of the world.
Furthermore, Mellard claims that “these images, rather than focusing upon Christ as the great synecdoche, focus primarily upon blood, voices” (Mellard 220). In looking at “voices,” which are separated into four sections, we find that religious practice and the Christian God is reduced to a human level, as posited by Vattimo. This would suggest a post-modernist reading of The Sound and the Fury, but one that bring fruition to an anagogic analysis. Interpretation of the novel’s namesake most commonly references Benjy as the idiot calling and re-telling the tale of Caddy. But as Faulkner has remarked during his lectures, “I tried to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried it with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried with a third brother…and that failed and I tried myself – the fourth section – to tell what happened, and I still failed” (Gwynn 1). The assertion is that the tale of Caddy, which is the same story told four different times, from four different perspectives, is one told by idiots – in the sense that all the characters’ narratives are limited, one way or the other, in their story-telling. Most obvious is Benjy’s crippling narrative due to his mental retardation. But Quentin and Jason’s voices are just as liminal as Benjy’s, if not more so, being that Benjy’s recount is somewhat reliable because of the lack of any subjective opinion, pursuing his thoughts only by sensory observations, guiding the reader in an honest, yet muddled portrayal of Caddy’s story.
Dilsey’s section, ignored until now, culminates all the previous imagery into a fictionally realized Christ figure. Best known as the most “readable” and sentimental section of the novel, Dilsey is the nurturer and caretaker of the Compson’s and their demons. Her treatment of Benjy resembles that of the Pieta, nurturing and hushing him in church during Reverend Shegog’s sermon. But more than that, she endured the Compon family’s pain, seemingly more sympathetic than her own family’s. After the sermon, Dilsey says, “I’ve seed de first en de last…I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (Faulkner 297). Here, Dilsey comments on the disintegration of the Compson family and her witnessing it from the beginning. But looking at the Compson’s as the embodiment of Original Sin, Dilsey sets out to save the members from themselves. Mellard states that, “Dilsey stands to the novel’s characters as Christ stands to humanity” (Mellard 231).
An anagogic analysis shows a synecdoche of religious imagery in each voice, inversing their voice into the incarnate Word. In line with Vattimo’s post-modernistic philosophy, the Word is reduced to a human quality, fraught with the incomprehensible bellowing of Benjy, the neurotic and self-obsessed thoughts of Quentin, where his voice, now the Word, reflects death, not life, as the Gospel of John suggests; and Jason’s misanthropic view, where his voice, now the Word, resonates alienation and anguish within the Compson household. In Dilsey’s Word, we see the face of piety and pity for the Compson’s, and the nurturer who can redeem the misery in human terms.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye perpetuates Faulkner’s reduction and humanization of God by exposing Western religious practice in a racial community. Morrison’s novel begins with the recreation of the typical nuclear family myth, then interrogates it with a diverse group of characters that fall outside the normative, constructed culture of American society. When Specifically looking at religious practice among the African-American community in a small town of Ohio, the Westernized pretext of Christianity falls short in the salvation of its characters, most memorably, Pecola Breedlove. Allen Alexander, in his essay, “The fourth face: An image of God in Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye,” asserts that Morrison includes a fourth face to the Trinity myth, that of evil – a redesigned Satan in the face of the traditional omnipotence of God in African American culture. Going further than Faulkner, Morrison totalizes God into a single race group and “her depiction of the deity is an attempt to humanize God, to demonstrate how God for her characters is not the characteristically ethereal God of traditional Western religion but a God who, while retaining certain Western characteristics, has much in common with the deities of traditional African religion and legend” (Alexander).
The Bluest Eye asserts that a major part of a character’s self-actualization is in the discovery of the inadequacies of Western Christian models for marginalized members of a dominant white culture. Geraldine, a black woman who suppress her identity through years of “careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners” (Morrison 83), perceives a difference between “colored people” and “niggers” (Morrison 87), in appeasement within the white gaze. She looks upon Pecola with disdain and disgust, which perpetuates Pecola’s self-hatred and ultimate demise at the end of the novel. As she is thrown out of her house, Pecola sees and Anglican portrait of Jesus in the living room that is incapable of alleviate her suffering.
Likewise, because of Pauline’s fallen tooth and unappealing appearance, she cannot be like Geraldine, who fades her “funk” away to appeal to a white-type of male gaze. Pauline, instead, falls back into a linear history of teachings from slave masters, noting that glory is to be held in a “white” way of life. As Alexander states, Pauline “still looks to white society-through films produced for and religion constructed around the tastes of the white majority-to provide the guidelines for her manner of living” (Alexander). Pauline also disconnects with her identity and later in life turns to the church for meaning. She punishes Cholly, through their frequent fights, for his sinful transgressions, which have no room in the Christian myth established.
Pecola falls prey to the false white notions of superiority. At every turn she is exposed to attitudes and images in media and is further espoused by her mother and Soaphead Church, who allows her to believe, through the works of God, that she has been granted blue eyes. This reinforces the failure of the Western model of religious practice because of its acceptance of allowing marginalized racial groups to experience evil and suffering amidst the myth of an omnipotent, loving God. For example, Soaphead Church, a self-professed misanthrope, embodies the worst of “white” religion in that he rejects his African-American heritage and assumes a delusional identity that he is in some sense God. Geraldine, Pauline, Pecola, and Soaphead Church affirm that it is impossible to adapt to white society without sacrificing one’s true self.
Alexander references Michael J. Jones, who maintains that African-American theological influence views God as “neither a threat nor rival…God is…the very basis or ground of the creature’s fullest possible self-realization…Black religious experience…is about being and becoming more human under God” (Alexander). Morrison attempts to show that God is much more than what Western religious practice has produced for African-Americans. Much of this is based on what Faulkner built, that God is humanized, and is partly responsible for the evil and suffering that he allows characters like Pecola to experience. God, in Morrison’s text, is an agent behind human suffering. Therefore, her God is Africanized. The traditional African culture view God as folky, and playful, with the notion that evil has a place in the universe, not to be feared, but to be played with. Yet her characters respond to him in “white” ways.
Thomas B. Hove, in his essay, “Toni Morrison,” claims that, “self-centered figures display some form of altruistic or communal concern, it is a sign of their potential redemption, which most often lies in a closer state of communion with their geographic or ancestral African-American roots” (Hove 257). Cholly embraces the assertion of the fourth face of God, which is evident in his childhood years where a watermelon is smashed on the ground. Morrison writes, “He never felt anything thinking of God, but just of the idea of the devil excited him. And now the strong, black devil was blotting out the sun and getting ready to split open the world” (Morrison 134). It is apparent that Pauline’s belief in the Westernized God clashes with Cholly’s – who does not attempt to alter his identity to disconnect from his own authenticity. Morrison, along with Faulkner, humanize God, according to Vattimo’s post-modernistic conception of religion. Morrison further interrogates the normative values constructed in a white society and exposes the failures of Christian religious practices among the members of the African-American community. Where Faulkner’s characters voice a synecdoche of religious imagery, Morrison attacks the fabric of Christianity, and the characters that split from their identity are ultimately lost from themselves. Moreover, characters like China, Poland, and Ms. Marie, and the MacTeers are true to themselves because they hold no one’s judgment except their own.


Works Cited
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