I,I have Caused a Miracle: The Textual Politics of the Fantastic in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye

This research examines critically Toni Morrison s use of the fantastic in her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970). This aspect of Morrison s text did not receive due attention in the critical reception of the novel. In fact, the term fantastic appears nowhere in the ever-expanding bibliography of Morrison s oeuvre in general and The Bluest Eye in Particular. This aspect, instead, is treated under other headings like characterization or dialogue and epistolary elements. This research, therefore, addresses Morrison s fantastic in The Bluest Eye through the critical methodologies of the leading contemporary theorists of the fantastic, notably; Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson. Because these theorists align the fantastic with the act of reading, this research invokes a wide range of reader s response, deconstructive, and phenomenological approaches in its reading of the inherent, and subversive, ambivalence of Morrison s fantastic. Morrison uses the fantastic in The Bluest Eye as a textual space where reader s response and expectation are negotiated to break the passive pattern of the process of reading and pushes her reader to actively engage in the production of meaning.