These some thoughts I have four chapters into Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.
1. It seems like I am reading Beloved again.
The time periods Morrison depicts in the two books are almost a century apart and the story lines are completely different, yet these two books have the same kind of tone. I can't really put my finger on why, but the books just feel the same. It has something to do with Morrison's prose, and the way she focuses on relationships between a small group of people. Also, the idea of the past being inescapable and secrets being hidden from others are consistent across the two books. The other people I talked to who were in African-American Lit also felt this way, so I wasn't alone in making this comparison.
2. This feels more like a biography of Milkman than a story.
A marked difference between Song of Solomon and Beloved is the time scales. Although it drifts back into the past, Beloved takes place in a relatively short timespan. Here, we skip over years or even a decade of Milkman's life between chapters with no recounting what happens in between. This is kind of annoying to me because it seems like we never get to see how anything finishes. I hope Morrison is going to pull everything together, but it comes off like she is just telling us selected episodes from Milkman's youth. The chapters work pretty well independent of each other as short stories, and so far they don't always seem connected. Sure they mention what happened in the other chapters, but each seems centered around a different incident that the next chapter doesn't depend upon. For example in chapter 2 it was the stop at Pilate's house, but then in chapter 3 it was his push of his father. It almost seems like a biographer is pulling what he or she thinks is most important and then skipping the other parts than like a narrative where everything is closely connected, especially on the timespan.
3. Morrison says that time passes, but it doesn't seem to
In the scene where Milkman "clips" his father, Milkman is 22 and his sisters in their mid 30s. Sure doesn't seem like it, does it? Macon is in his 60s but doesn't seem to be thinking about retirement or anything. The three kids are well into being adults, and yet they still live at home with no husbands or wives or kids or anything. In chapter 4, Milkman is 31 so his dad is 70-something and Pilate is only a little younger. Milkman's sisters are in their mid 40s and Hagar is 36. But none of the kids seem any more independent than earlier. I realize there are different standards for growing up, but this seems somewhat unreal. Milkman is 31 but still only searching for the next party? Milkman's generation (him, Guitar, Hagar, Lena, Corinthians) seem to have few qualms about sleeping around, but none of them have any kids? The way they act makes them still seem like teenagers.
While I agree with many of your statements, I have to disagree and say I don't see Beloved in Song of Solomon at all. Song of Solomon seems much more realistic than Beloved did to me. Beloved was very supernatural, and had a style of prose that was very different than that of the more grounded Song of Solomon. Sure, there's some absurdity in Song of Solomon, but it's the kind where you have to go back and go, "wait what?" rather than the overt absurdity in Beloved. Beloved felt more like literature that was telling me that it was "literature" on every page, whereas Song of Solomon feels more like a story that happens to be "literature," but it doesn't scream this fact out. Sure there are some stylistic similarities to the two books, since they have the same author, but I've found Song of Solomon much easier to get into, and would hardly notice they were the same author had I not known it ahead of time.
ReplyDeleteTo your third point about Milkman's generation still seeming like teenagers: first off I notice the same thing. Second I would say that was a clear intention of Morrison to show a group of people from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood chronologically but not emotionally. People don't really age the way that our societal stereotypes say they do, and as Morrison is showing, if your life doesn't change you then you won't really change. What I find interesting about this is that death is a very present thing in Song of Solomon, and we normally think of the death of someone as maturing a person beyond their physical age. Here, we almost see the opposite where the deaths of people in actual time or the recounting of their importance (like Dr. Foster) help to stagnate people in their maturity. This may be one of the closest resemblances to Beloved, the notion that time is operating on many levels and that death affects that on some but not all levels (think when Baby Suggs dies).
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your third point. I think Milkman and his whole family are in a weird sort of slowed down maturity. When Guitar starts growing up (quits drinking, starts fighting for causes he believes in) Milkman is kind of resentful and doesn't understand why he's doing it. Having had Ruth as a mother, who Mr. Mitchell pointed out seems to suffer from arrested development, his father, who never seems to change at all, and his two sisters who stay at home and don't get married, Milkman hasn't had the best role models and I think it's understandable that he's not quite on the same page as other people.
ReplyDeleteAs I have been reading the novel, I have definitely been having thoughts similar to your 2nd point. If the characters were changed (as well as the background information), each chapter or so could very well be compiled into a collection of short stories. As it is right now, I have taken it as a linear collection of events happening around Milkman. I still haven't exactly figured out with the main storyline is... Some significant event to connect all these stories we now know.
ReplyDelete