from October 26, 2013
Toni Morrison and The Novelist’s Characters

Toni Morrison: Conversations (Edited by Carolyn C. Danard, 2008) was also my source for the post, “Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Morrison makes various remarks in these interviews that are relevant to this blog, but I prefer to limit myself to passages which lend themselves to quotation—so Morrison can speak for herself—which leaves only the following, from a 1985 interview:

“[Sula] came as many characters do—all of them don’t—rather full-fleshed and complete almost immediately, including her name. I felt this enormous intimacy. I mean I knew exactly who she was, but I had trouble trying to make her…into the kind of person that would upset everybody…And, by the time I finished the book, Sula, I missed her. I know the feeling of missing characters who are in fact, by that time, much more real than real people” (p. 26).

“…the people I would call on to help me to verify some phrase or some word or something would be the people in the book. I mean I would just conjure them up and ask them, you know, about one thing or another. And they are usually very cooperative if they are fully realized and if you know their name. And if you don’t know their names, they don’t talk much” (p. 27).

Thus, for Toni Morrison (and perhaps most other novelists):

1. many characters come rather complete, almost immediately, with a feeling of intimacy,

2. by the time the book ends, characters may be much more real than real people,

3. characters would help Morrison with things that she didn’t know or wasn’t sure about,

4. but if you don’t know their names, characters don’t talk much.

Comments:

1. Novelists don’t consciously construct many of their characters. They spring fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. 

2. I’m not sure what it means for characters to be “much more real than real people,” perhaps only that while the novelist is immersed in writing the novel, her focus on everything else is reduced, but another possibility is that the world of the novel is absolutely more real to the novelist than real life.

3. To the novelist, characters are like autonomous people, with minds of their own.

4. The fourth point is the same as my clinical experience when I would try to talk to my patients’ alternate personalities. Knowing the name of the personality was often the key.