depend on the reader’s literary associations—his literary experience—which can be as much an impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a writer’s. It is important that what I write not be merely literary. I am most self-conscious about making sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I avoid, too studiously perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary references, unless oblique and based on written folklore. The choice of a tale or of folklore in my work is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or her and provides irony, sometimes humor.
Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others, enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a story about parents who abandon their children to a forest and a witch who makes a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his racial and cultural ignorance, is flagged. Equally marked is Hagar’s bed, described as Goldilocks’s choice, partly because of Hagar’s preoccupations with hair, and partly because, like Goldilocks, a housebreaker if ever there was one, she is greedy for things, unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and Hagar is emotionally selfish as well as confused.
This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm if boring habit with me, not only because they lead to poses, not only because I refuse the credentials they bestow, but also because they are inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of that literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests me. Literary references in the hands of writers I love can be extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t want the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same plane an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.
My beginnings as a novelist were very much focused on creating this discomfort and unease in order to insist that the reader rely on another body of knowledge. However weak those beginnings were in 1965, they nevertheless pointed me toward the process that engages me in 1984: trusting memory and culling from it theme and structure. In The Bluest Eye the recollection of what I felt and saw upon hearing a child my own age say she prayed for blue eyes provided the first piece. I then tried to distinguish between a piece and a part—in the sense that a piece of a human body is different from a part of a human body.
As I began developing parts out of pieces, I found that I preferred them unconnected—to be related but not to touch, to circle, not line up—because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life. The novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another, like the galaxy accompanying memory. I fret the pieces and fragments of memory because too often we want the whole thing. When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the fragment we are remembering may be, and very probably is, the most important piece in the dream. Chapter and part designations, as conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually identified at the last minute.)
There may be play and arbitrariness in the way memory surfaces but none in the way the composition is organized, especially when I hope to re-create play and arbitrariness in the way narrative events unfold. The form becomes the exact interpretation of the idea the story is meant to express. There is nothing more traditional than that—but the sources of the images are not the traditional novelistic or readerly ones. The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context of The Bluest Eye.
Narrative is one of the ways in which knowledge is organized. I have always thought it was the most important way to transmit and receive knowledge. I am less certain of that now—but the craving for narrative has never lessened, and