Different Realities

Reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon I kept thinking about things I had read in David Shields Reality Hunger. I wasn’t asked to make this connection, nor did I specifically look out for it, It just happened. 

The boy seems to be intrigued by the lobster, but also slightly scared. So real.

For some time, maybe since Joyce, literature has become increasingly realist. I don’t mean Harry Potter and the like, but deep literature, the type containing philosophical messages, what we might want to call “meta-literature”. Also, I don’t mean realist in the sense of graphical detail or even non-fiction. I see writers as wanting to become more Picasso, more cubist, wanting to alter the ways in which they express themselves so as to offer the reader a more life-like experience. 

Toni Morrison has her own way of doing this, a blend of several techniques. One is crudeness, openly narrating things that are not taboo in real life, at least never inside our heads, but that are usually taken care of delicately when put in print. Another technique is using uncommon ways of detailing an idea that can make its description more precise. A third method employed by Morrison is to focus on the common, unimportant, sometimes unconscious things that authors usually omit when creating a scene.   
An example that contains all three techniques mentioned above is the sex scene between Macon and Ruth: “When Ruth was naked and lying there as moist and crumbly as unbleached sugar, he bent to unlace her shoes, that was the final delight, for one he undressed her feet, he peeled her stockings down over her ankles and toes, he entered her and ejaculated quickly. She liked it that way. So did he” (p.16)

Morrison talks about sex very graphically, even emphasizing on ejaculation, but she does this quite serenely and without giving it any taboo whatsoever. In her descriptions she uses the connotations of words such as “moist” and “crumbly” in depicting, well, a human being. She also dwells into things that are usually not considered when describing such a scene, such as the fact that both enjoyed the giggly foreplay more than the sex and that they preferred fast ejaculation. Real life has so many different components that some of them are probably slightly quirky, Toni Morrison exposes them. 

Song of Solomon is filled with examples of this type of realism, from tense car conversations, to scenes of introspective thinking that work like soliloquies. As a reader, one can feel the tension in the plot because it is richly dense and so real. I empathize with Milkman when, overwhelmed by all that was going on “thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling” (p.54)

Well, I’m not going to faint, but you get the point.