Nobody Knows "The Bluest Eye"

"Banned as it's been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That's not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn't care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby.""

"Deliberate spoilers like these force the reader to shift their expectations away from narrative suspense and plot resolution. In other words, if we already already know that the marigolds didn't grow, that the ill-begotten baby died, then we must focus our attention not on what happened or why, but on how it happened, how it felt. Spoilers are a confidence trick, so to speak: a writer must have faith that a mere series of events is less interesting than how it is told."

"Morrison even went so far as to have most of this page of The Bluest Eye -spoilers and all-printed on the cover of its first edition, which came out with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1970. Designed by Herb Lubalin, the cover is all-white and filled to the margins with the text of Morrison's prose. It produces a postmodern trompe l'oeil effect, as if you are looking at a book whose cover has gone missing from misuse or overuse."

The opening of The Bluest Eye discloses central traumas: incest, a child's pregnancy by her father, stillbirth, and death. Those explicit revelations remove suspense and compel attention to the manner of storytelling and the felt experience of events rather than plot outcomes. Spoilers function to reframe reader expectations, insisting that narrative technique and emotional resonance matter more than mystery. The first edition printed much of that opening on an all-white cover designed by Herb Lubalin, creating a trompe l'oeil effect where the text itself becomes the visual focus and the book appears worn or missing.

Read at The Nation