I Like Her Vulgar Paint

One thing bringing me pleasure in the text positive light shed on vulgar events. The happenings of this book are horrifyingly uncomfortable at times if you don't understand their purpose: giving the book a very piquant flavor. In order to establish the complexities of her characters in her novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison includes a lot bizarre events. For example, Milkman, the protagonist, is really named Macon, he gets the nickname Milkman because Ruth, his mother, used to breastfeed him long after he was able to eat real food. This can easily be viewed as very perverted and weird but Morrison delineates that the pleasure she is receiving from this act was not a perverted pleasure. At first, Milkman experiences "shame and impotence"(23) at this memory. but as we follow him along his quest we realize the extension of her motherly care is a result of love. On the day of her dad's funeral, Ruth is described, by her husband, as laying naked on the bed alongside his dead bloated body; even though Ruth states she was fully clothed. But it is these to contradicting details that describe the rift between Ruth and her husband.By using an outrageous event to grap the attention of the reader and eventually using it to develop her characters, Morrison makes the Song of Solomon a very pleasurable text.
Morrison's aggressive use of magical realism is also bringing me a lot of enjoyment. Milkman sees his mother getting suffocated by bloody, red, tulip buds. Freddie, the family's janitor, told Milkman his mom died after seeing a girl turn into a white bull. Also, Freddie constantly chats about ghosts as if they're as real as people. This motif of magical realism continues through the book with "men and dogs talking to each other" and other fantastical occurrences(277). Within the book you can feel Morrison's efforts to bring back the culture of the people she's describing. By adding magical realism she taps into a deeper layer of this culture. It adds depth to the development of the story; adding color and uniqueness. In the book the, motif of identity keeps showing up. Morrison uses magical realism to paint Milkman's journey. For example, she describes a fall day with meticulous detailing, "on autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind from the lake brings a sweetish smell to shore. An order like crystallized ginger, or sweet iced tea with dark clove floating in it... This heavy spice-sweet smell made you think of the East and striped tents and the sha-sha-sha of leg bracelets"(184). This combination of the realistic lake, wind, and shore with the suggestive, redolent characteristic of sweet ginger creates a specific painting in the minds of the reader while allowing the reader to still have control over what sweet ginger does to the image of autumn nights. This aspect of her writing is very enjoyable because the events in the story are so vividly illustrated while still being somewhat customizable by the reader; allowing an infinite amount of colors into her writing.