Names, names, names. For those of you who were not in African American Lit last year it seems to me as though Toni Morrison has got a bit of a thing going for out of the ordinary names. I doubt I'll ever meet a woman named Pilate, or anyone with the last name Dead for that matter. Yet here these characters are. The interesting thing is though, it seems as though names almost don't matter in the novel. Now, I know that's not really an accurate statement, but just consider how characters get their names--many of them seem to get them almost accidentally. Take Pilate for instance. She got her name simply from her father flipping to a random page in the Bible and selecting a name. Or there's Macon Dead Sr., he got his name accidentally from a drunken clerk. Both of these people seem to have gotten their names almost entirely arbitrarily, yet these names seem to me too original, and the book too finely crafted, for that to truly be the case.
Another pertinent example, however different, could be Milkman and his dubious name. Due to circumstances entirely out of his control he's been branded with a name that as Macon Dead puts it has some "filthy connection" to Ruth (17). It even thwarts the efforts of Macon Dead Jr. to pass down his own name, which he is quite proud of. Instead of being known by his father's name, a name that to his father suggests pride and hard work, he is instead stuck with a name that is a constant reminder of his families strange past. It's a past which he is described often trying to run, or fly, away from. It's a name that suggests a major theme for Milkman, that he's been coddled by his parents his entire life. Not only was he milked to an usually old age, he's now been living in his parent's house well into his thirties.
As I said earlier it does seem as though the manner in which many of characters get their names seems accidental and almost meaningless, but I think they actually serve as reminders, and even in some ways prophecies for who these people are. Macon Jr.'s name relates him strongly to his father and the pride he felt towards his father for having worked so hard for everything he owned. That same hardworking quality is the most defining aspect of his personality even as a 70 year old man. For Milkman it's much less flattering. It was a name given to him not by his parents, but by the general public to reflect on his mothers overly affectionate actions towards him. And now he seems unable to escape from that same strange family history and his own dependence on his parents. For Milkman his name acts not only as a constant indicator of his past, but an indicator of the lifestyle he seems incapable of escaping.
I like the idea of Milkman's name as reflecting a past he's trying to escape: in its origin, and in its sound for someone unaware of its origin, his name seems to undermine the idea that he's a "man." It *sounds* like he's still being weaned, like he's a "milky" or incomplete version of a man. It also maybe implies he's "not quite black enough" (as in milky-white), which is a perception that his family has had to endure at times.
ReplyDeleteThere's the meaning of the name within the book, and what it implies for readers. In this way, Macon's name contains an ambiguous pun: he's either "making dead," as in not quite living, creating a family of people who don't quite live but simply populate their small, vindictive little corner of the world. But, maybe with his father in mind, his name implies his role as a creative force, on who "makes" things happen. The name might seem ridiculous at first glance, the result of a drunken white boy's error, but hear it in the mouths of the Reverend Cooper and the others in Danville, and that same name takes on epic/legendary proportions.
Morrison definitely makes a big deal of the names in this book--and she explicitly links them, at various points, to the fraught issue of naming within African American history. But it's crucial to understand that none of the names "means" any one single thing.