Constructing cognitive scaffolding through embodied receptiveness: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.

I. Truth in Timbre

In a passage close to the beginning of The Bluest Eye, Claudia, the narrator, and her sister Frieda, are dutifully washing jam jars while their mother chats with her friends in the kitchen. Claudia compares the experience to a

 
   wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. 
   Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two 
   circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move into lofty 
   spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it 
   punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter--like the throb of a heart 
   made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is 
   always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meaning 
   of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch 
   their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen to truth in 
   timbre. (10) 

The wealth of understanding that Claudia is able to glean from this seemingly passive act of observation is remarkable. First, Morrison endows her child-protagonist with a highly developed receptiveness, a keen sensibility, acute musicality and vivid imaginative powers that translate female prattle into images of dance, abstract geometrical shapes, and sensuous representations such as a heart made of jelly. Claudia is unable to understand the meaning of the adults' words, but she is able to ascertain the ambience of the conversation, and its significance, by converting its emotional "thrust" into mediums she can understand. Then, she projects herself into the action, so that she is effectively participating in it.

I wish to suggest in this article that the kind of empathetic projection described above, and the concomitant sensation of participation in observed action, constitute a powerful epistemological tool that is facilitated by the biological architecture of all human beings who are not disabled by neurological impairment. Through exercising her potential for receptiveness, Claudia is able to surmount the linguistic barrier between herself and the others and to gain valuable knowledge. As she explains in her testimonial narrative passages, recounted with such vividness they are rendered in present tense: "Adults do not talk to us--they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information" (5). Her knowledge base, therefore, is accumulated gradually, in fragments, and relies overwhelmingly on embodied knowledge. She learns to "read" gesture, expression, eye movement, (1) body odor: to feel the ambience and cadence of a conversation through attunement to its physical and emotional thrust. Thus she listens for "truth in timbre" (10). Through repeated practice and increasing refinement, Claudia reaches a level of understanding that enables her in later life to articulate, with subtlety, sensitivity and captivating poetry, the constellation of events that lead to the tragedy recounted in The Bluest Eye.

Claudia may be modeled on Morrison herself, and there are certainly many autobiographical elements in the book, so that it is difficult to make a decided distinction between Claudia's first-person accounts, and the third-person omniscient narrator passages. Naturally, narrator and author are not identical, and Claudia does not define herself as the writer, but I read the novel as the product of the adult Claudia, a stylized expression of her personal history, and that of her community. (2) The Bluest Eye traces the process of Claudia MacTeer's self-construction, and of Pecola Breedlove's (self)destruction. The novel recounts a year in the lives of the two girls, and reflects upon the dramatic differences in character and circumstances that enable one to become a defiantly independent individual, while the other is abused, marginalized and finally driven to insanity.

In the first haft of this article I aim to demonstrate that Claudia's breadth of vision, grounded in her natural intelligence and creative abilities, is absorbed from her direct environment by a process of cognitive interaction. This kind of interaction has been the focus of many recent neuropsychological studies. Research shows that human perception of actions is influenced by the implicit knowledge of the central nervous system concerning the movements that it itself is capable of producing. To a great extent, we are able to interpret the actions of others because we share their motor schemata--we share a bodily knowledge of them. The neurologist Vittorio Gallese terms this "motor equivalence" (47). Gallese argues that humans are endowed with a mirror-matching capacity, an inborn inclination to imitate, indeed simulate, actions they observe others perform. Mirror-matching, appears to be "a basic organizational feature of the brain" (46).