Okay
Since we've begun Song of Solomon, I'm sure that it's become an expectancy that Morrison loves to throw us random plot twists almost every chapter.From things like the breastfeeding scene, the bones/"gold"- stealing scene, and all the unsettling discoveries about Milkman's family past, there's a bunch of messed up shit going on in this book, for sure. Yet the characters keep living, and continue pushing on.
Every time I consider the above concept, this quote from The Stranger comes up in my mind:
When she was at home with me, Maman used to spend her time following me
with her eyes, not saying a thing. For the first few days she was at the
home she cried a lot. But that was because she wasn’t used to it. A few
months later and she would have cried if she’d been taken out. She was
used to it.
Shmoop summarizes the quote well, saying "After a while one can get used to, or accept, almost anything."
When we first encountered that line in The Stranger, it struck me pretty hard. The concept of "getting used to"-ness seemed weird to me, but at the same time made perfect sense. Obviously, we adapt and become comfortable in our situations. Is that within itself an integral part of existentialism? I believe it's a key part of understanding The Stranger, which is essentially a novel written through heavy philosophy and thought experiment. But to stretch and say it helps explain Song of Solomon feels if-y, but I'm gonna try to do it any way, lol watch me
There's a lot of weird emotional manipulation, as well as potentially traumatic events and weird "happenings" without too much explanation, within SoS, and the way we learn about most of these things is through characters telling each other about them. Namely, it's Milkman who finds out all the weird stuff. One of the first things Milkman learns that could be potentially gross or traumatic to him, of course, is in the scene shortly after he hits his father, wherein his father explains the whole doctor-finger-sucking incident. Here, Milkman gets pretty shaken, and even has to leave the house for a while. He's deeply bugged by this (also by remembering breast feeding at four), and tries to tell Guitar, but it just doesn't happen.
After a few more weird reveals and twists and turns in his life, we find Milkman simply not wanting to hear about any more weird shit, to be frank. He's a 30-something living at home with parents who keep opening up about secrets he had no idea were even things, and he's come to not wanting to hear about them anymore, rather preferring to be out on the town away from his family. This, I believe, could be him "getting use to" his family's weird sneakery and secretive persona, and coping in a way he's been taught to. Milkman is absolutely the kind of kid that has been raised learning how to supress emotion, so it comes as no surprise that he would deal with confrontation of trauma or honesty from his parents by just wanting to brush it off.
However, I would say there's a bubbling up point for almost all characters. In Meursault, this may come with the beach scene, or his breakdown in front of the priest. With Milkman, though, I would argue there are a few breakdowns, but not his. He gets in quarrels, and when Guitar and Lena tell him straight, it sort of pushes him over the edge and out into the daunting unknown, aKa the east coast. Milkman is taken out of his place of "used to," and confronted directly and without a place to run twice, and these sequences make him begin to think (or at least I'm pretty sure they do). He realizes once he's been moved out of his usual partying-and-ignoring-his-weird-family-problems dynamic that he is genuinely dependent on so many people, and decides he finally wants to do something alone. This, as I see it, is a direct subconscious response to the removal of his comfort zone, or as Meursault puts it, his sense of "used to."
I'm still trying to work through the point I want to make here, but I think the concept is pretty cool; apathy (I'm using the term loosely hear KEEP THAT IN MIND) and adaption to situations is always inevitable. Who are we to blame when Milkman stops wanting to hear about his family's weird incest-breastfeeding-human bones-murder past? His sense of push back is the way he survives while maintaining his personally favored amount of sanity. Who are we to blame Ruth for sucking on her father's finger after his death? She was used to him being the only person to love and care for her, to show her she was important; when that was taken away, she broke down, and who are we to judge? I think we're quick to conclude sweeping generalities in class, like this family is just "craziness" or the characters do random shit, but it all makes sense; we get used to our lives, even if it's in a bad twisted way, and when that starts to change we tend to get really uncomfortable and desperate.
I think there's something about existentialism (and most philosophical concepts for that matter lmao) that really goes against human nature. We tend to want to sort of discredit other people's choices and ideas by saying "that's wrong for that situation" but, as I've said many a time before, who are we to judge? We weren't there. I think this idea was introduced really well in The Stranger and continued in Song of Solomon in an equally interesting way. I hope to expand on this a little more next week like I said once I've maybe consolidated my thoughts some more -- but for now, that's all !!
(I'll pretend I didn't just read you quote "Shoomp" in order to gloss a line from Camus that you are perfectly capable of glossing on your own--or, you could just quote Meursault himself, who attributes the same line to his mother at one point in the novel.)
ReplyDelete"Apathy" implies a lack of engagement with public, social, political life--things that matter and that we believe people should engage in. And Guitar is right to call Milkman out on his disengagement from the political and racial-justice issues of his day--and this apathy is something he's born into, as his family has aspired precisely *not* to think of themselves as part of this larger racial struggle in America.
But his apathy toward the "weird shit" he keeps hearing about his family is more understandable, and less obviously a problem. When he asks, rhetorically, what the hell he's supposed to DO with this stuff, I don't have any good answer. (Go talk to a good therapist?) It's not at all clear how Milkman's life, identity, or circumstances are in any way affected by this story about his mom and grandfather on his deathbed--other than to offer some context for the perpetual animosity between his parents. But he doesn't even want to see this as connected to him in any meaningful way. The more they figuratively pull his arms in opposite directions, the more he just wants not to be pulled at all.
This particular kind of apathy (I agree, that's a loaded term that isn't quite right here) is harder to argue with, and is maybe essential to self-definition. (I'm thinking of Joyce in _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, where the coming-of-age hero wants nothing more than to distance himself entirely from his family, nation, and religion.)