The past coming back to haunt

A common approach for a novelist to try and introduce their characters is to put the reader in a position in which they can hear the characters own thoughts. This generally considered to be the most effective way to develop a character I believe, and certainly the most widespread. It's true there's something very personal about listening in on a persons thoughts as they live--you get to feel like you really know them. It's a skill that Virginia Woolf perfected. She's described as "carving caves out behind her characters", and she does this by sticking us in their heads and listening to the impressions and thoughts they make of their own lives. If you look at this as the epitome of the character study driven modernist movement, which almost completely disregards the notion of plot, then you might look at Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the antithesis to this model.

I don't mean to say that  I think that Song of Solomon isn't a character study, quite the opposite. I think though that she incorporates plot into her work in a way that we see lacking from almost every other novel we've read thus far (Wide Sargasso Sea was fairly plot driven I suppose). In addition to that there's much less self contemplation by the characters in  Morrison's work than in Woolf's. I suppose I'm using Mrs. Dalloway as the staple modernist novel, which may or may not be entirely fair, but I do think it's a great example of a character study that disregards plot as a literary device. Morrison's goes an entirely new route here where instead of letting each character explain themselves we get the story told from other characters.

When Mr. Mitchell asked us if we considered this to really be a story about Milkman my answer was, "well yes and no." Most of the dialogue in the novel comes from different characters than Milkman himself. It feels like we spend most of the novel listening to people in Milkman's life tell their own stories. For example the last half of chapter 5 is Pilate recounting her own story to Ruth. This is pretty typical for many of the chapters actually. It's not the case however, that we never get anything from Milkman's point of view, most of the classic plot development that happens is when we're with him. It's the other parts of the novel when we're not with that I find most interesting. Those are the times when we get the extensive and exciting backstories on the other characters. As was pointed out in class Pilate is an infinitely more interesting character in her own right than Milkman, yet supposedly this is a story about him and not her. It's definitely true though, that Milkman's story is made so much more interesting by getting the backdrop on the other people who make up his life. This is what I mean when I say I think Morrison uses plot in a way no one else so far has. She doesn't necessarily make a huge amount happen in terms of time passing (the novel seems to almost not progress at all time wise) but that she draws hugely on the idea of the past coming forward to effect his life now. It repeatedly seems as though these stories he hears might as well have been plot devices because with each knew revelation they thoroughly refocus the way in which we view the cast of characters. I think that through these stories and the history surrounding him, Morrison turns Milkman from a boring character into a fairly interesting and complex one, and she does it without really hearing from him all that much.