Morrison's Language In The Bluest Eye And Sula

Language is the novelist's medium and art. Morrison acknowledges that there is something in writing she cannot do without returning to her Black English and, what makes her works black is language, language that is most culturally-fraught. Black language, the symbol of a culture and the mark of black people's identity, serves as a creative and expressive instrument. Morrison's use of black vernacular is different from that of Hurston's. While Hurston makes extensive use of the pronunciation spellings of Black English, Morrison's representation of black vernacular is mainly restricted to its grammatical level. Morrison believes that what makes the language black lies in the way words are put together, the metaphor, the rhythm, the music, not in using "dis" and "dat". Leech's observation may be an apt note to Morrision's disclamation of non-standard spelling, which is supposed to suggest the non-standard speech, in her representation of black vernacular in her novels. Black vernacular in The Bluest Eye and Sula, though used within a limited scope, plays a crucial part in setting up the cultural and social background, as well as in revealing the theme and characterization. Elements of black folk speech find their way into the novels. Morrison also infuses her works with the rhetorical tropes of the black community, such as signifying. Signifying, a specific term in Black English that refers to a rhetorical strategy, characterized by indirection and ambiguity. In The Bluest Eye, Mrs MacTeer is signifying in her three-quart-of-milk soliloquy.Morrison has a sharp ear for the nuances of human utterance. In The Bluest Eye, Claudia and her sister Frieda are deeply attracted by the rhythmic conversation of women, though they cannot comprehend the meaning of the dialogue because of their age. For them, the sound of the conversation is more important than the senses. Marvelous is Morrison's ability to make seemingly banal, sloppy, ill-organized daily dialogue bear a great deal of meaning. It is the inference drawn from the dialogue that makes Morrison's fictional conversation enchanting. Dialogue may be presented in five basic ways. In Sula, the choice of a particular form of speech presentation is significant, as the scene in the kitchen between Sula, Nel and Jude makes clear. To make the characters apparently speak to the readers more immediately, without the narrator as an intermediary, Morrison is fond of omitting the reporting clause and makes use of free direct speech in fictional conversation. The power of the dialogue lies in the inference we can draw from it, which is crucial to the understanding of the characters and the theme of the novel. In the dialogue between Sula and her grand mother Eva, their clash on the issue concerning Sula's nonconformity is presented through free direct speech. Sula's independence, arrogance and orneriness she has partially inherited from Eva are inherent in the dialogue. The novel Sula is a story in which Morison discusses the women friendship, and the relationship between good and evil; the artistically constructed dialogue is a forceful vehicle in revealing the theme.Morrison's survey of Cholly's life in The Bluest Eye may be a testament of her aspiration to attain the status of music in writing. For Morrison the cadence of language is as crucial as the meaning of words. The rhetorical strategies of black preaching tradition and the device of the compressed sound used by some black writers come into her first two novels. A very good preacher usually makes use of a variety of rhetorical strategies in expectation of a successful arousal of the audience's feelings and emotions. Hence, the way a black preacher makes a sermon is usually as important as its content. A casual survey of The Bluest Eye and Sula may provide us numerous cases in which we may find some similarities between a black preacher's rhetorical strategies as mentioned above, and the methods by which Morrison manipulates her words. Her exploitation of a black preacher's device...