a brief thought concerning The Bluest Eye as a post-modern text

This is not meant to be a “blog post” but just a quick note.

I was thinking about our effort near the end of class yesterday to read Morrison alongside Pynchon rather than on the other side of Pynchon. How, though, can we claim her as participating in the post-modern endeavor?

One possibility is to examine intertextuality. While Morrison seldom makes direct allusion to other works – or at least they are hard to find because of the oddly timeless setting of her novels – I’m going to try to claim a pop culture reference in “The Bluest Eye.”

We get a character named Sammy and a character named Samson Fuller. Sam(uel) Fuller was a prominent American film director whose career spanned the 50s-80s. While often disregarded for meddling in pulpy genre fiction, Fuller often used “low art” genres and infused them with “high art” ideas, most notably in “Shock Corridor” and “The Naked Kiss.”

In addition, Fuller is retroactively admired for his acknowledgement of race issues through cinema when other white directors were either ignoring them altogether, or offering light and moralizing family dramas (ala Stanley Kramer’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”). But from early in his career, most notably with “The Crimson Kimono,” Fuller seemed to be trying to shift the white gaze upon other other races in order to move them to greater sympathy. In the fifties, he offered portrayals of Japanese-Americans and their relations with white America post-WWII, for instance.

Most eerie, and possible most detrimental to my argument, is his film “White Dog” about a white dog who was trained to attack and kill black people and the efforts of a black dog trainer to break the dog of this aggression. This would of course fit too nicely, and “White Dog” was not released until 1982, a decade after “The Bluest Eye.”  But, I think Morrison was on to and appreciative of Fuller’s love of low budget genre fiction (he even cast Burl Ives in a film and made several cameos in other films, including “A Return to Salem’s Lot” and “Pierrot Le Fou” by Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of juxtaposing high concepts with “low art” in cinema) and how it can address controversial themes, especially racial ones.

Methinks Pynchon would be a Fuller fan, too.