2 The reasons for the researcher to choose Song of Solomon include: First, throughout the early to mid-1980s, the novel was the subject of much critical attention and ranked among the most frequently taught of Morrison’s novels; it has greatly enlarged circles of her readers.
Second, the novel won rapturous praise such as:
the Fiction Award of the National Book Critics Circle, the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters Award, the appointment from
In Morrison’s own words, Song of Solomon is a story of “a journey from stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a completeman”(Morrison 1987:124); it is full of spaces that “were planned…[and] can conceivably be filled with other significance”
(Unspeakable 1989: 29). Milkman, the protagonist, slow to start on his way to become a Man, has lived the life of a man without ever being one. He achieves a sense of identity through an understanding of his personal and collective history via a physical experience of journeying.3
The two-part structure of Song of Solomon resembles the “preparation”
and the “adventure”in the universal myth of the life journey. The first part of the novel, set in the North, makes us experience Milkman’s life ofbeing trapped and alienated at home. Several symbolic incidents in his early life mark his separation and brokenness
President Carter to the National Council on the Arts and the elected work to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. And above all, the novel has been labeled as an initiation novel of mythic quest (Harris 1980;
Davis 1982; Smith, 1985; Fabre 1988; Mobley 1991; Lee 1998), which matches the topic of this research.
3 This researcher adopts the sense of
journeying from Joseph Campbell. According to Campbell (The Hero With A Thousand Faces), the stages of the paradigms of the archetypal features of journey are as follows:
trouble in community, the call to adventure, crossing the threshold from the known to the unknown, ordeals that test the hero, and return to the original community. Milkman’s journey conforms to the paradigm except that the
community Milkman returns to is his ancestors’
community rather than the community where he actually starts from.
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
from the local community as well as from his own family. First of all, he is the first black infant born in the all-white Mercy Hospital. In addition, his mother lengthens nursing him, for which he gets the nickname Milkman at the same time losing his real name—and his identity. And before four, he is still convinced that he can fly. But after discovering the impracticality of the flying idea, he loses “all interest in himself” and likewise becomes indifferent or lack of interest in those around him (9). His loneliness and exclusiveness in town is also seen when the other children exclude him from neighborhood singing games, which ironically is a hint to the answer to the mystery of his great-grandfather’s life and identity and, in consequence, his own identity.
And Milkman’s relationships with the woman he is with (Hagar) and his two sisters (First Corinthians and Lena) and his mother (Ruth Foster Dead) are no better than his relationships with the townspeople. He not only refuses to take any responsibility but also gives no commitment to those around him. For example, he considers Hagar his
“private honey pot”and exploits her for twelve years, long after his regarding her as “the third beer…the one you drink because it is there”
(90-91). And his self-centered irresponsibility is manifested when he ends their relationship by merely
writing little more than a business letter suggesting that his leaving her is for her own good. As to his female families, Milkman insists that he has never interfered with the family and his attitude toward their relationship is no more than that “I live and let live”
(216). That’s all. And this is why he is the last to know about the relationship between Henry Porter and his sister, First Corinthians. He has lived with them as if they were strangers because he barely takes any notice of the conditions of their lives, even to his mother:
Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own. (75)
Moreover, when he recounts to Guitar his dream about his mother being smothered by weeds in the garden and Guitar condemns him why not helping her out, Milkman simply confesses,
“he didn’t concern himself an awful lot about other people”(107); besides, it’s only a dream, he says. In fact, he is psychologically and emotionally dead;
as his surname implies, he is DEAD, living all alone in a world of his own, not having anything to do with the world of the living. Such is the case of Milkman’s attitudes toward life, women to him have value only as
“need providers,”just as “his nickname suggests, “he milks women, pilfering their love and giving nothing in return”
(Mbalia 1991: 52). That’s how and why he pisses on Lena, squeals on First Corinthians, spies on Ruth, steals from
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
Pilate, and “murders”Hagar. All these manifest his unconsciousness of his relationship with people and of his identity. And especially his act of urinating on Lena can actually be deemed as an act symbolic of his pissing on all women. As Lena criticizes, he has been “peeing on”the family all of his life.
Milkman’s relationship with the local community is also detaching.
Some significant situations reveal that Milkman is alienated not only from intimate people around him but also from the social traditions of his cultural heritage and his distance from his ethnic community. For instance, he is the last one to know about the Seven Days, the black revenge gang. And he strains to figure out the meaning of the black men’s conversation in Railroad Tommy’s Barbershop about the Emmett Till case, which has actually elicited the sympathy of both Europeans and Africans worldwide. He demonstrates his ignorance and indifference when, upon being informed of the vicious murder of the fourteen-year-old Till, he responds:
“Yeah, well, fuck Till. I’m the one in trouble.”(88) This shows not only his lack of his race awareness but also his lack of a shared, common identity with his fellow townspeople. It is the place where he becomes acutely conscious of his “outsider” status in his own community. At this point, Milkman is experiencing exactly what Relph
defines as existential outsideness, an inauthentic attitude to the place where one dwells, with neither awareness of the deep and symbolic significances of it nor appreciation of its identity (1976:
82).4 After this event, Milkman sort of feels alienated, but nonetheless fully realizes the causes of his alienation.
However, he does develop growing dissatisfaction in his father’s urban Eden in the North. Hence, having lived a hollow and meaningless life in his father’s shadow for thirty-two years, he then begins to long for “new people”
and “places”and brews the idea of leaving home for some fortune in another land, i.e., his journey to selfhood. And under the influence of Pilate, his pilot/guidance, and Guitar Bains, his Other, he leaves his father’s perverse garden to gain self-knowledge and to resurrect his “dead”spirit, and through various humiliating and risky experiences, he regains what has been missing in his “early”life.
Milkman’s sense of alienation, originating from this lack of insight and inability to empathize with others has resulted in a lot of failures in life and consequently his loss of identity.
As depicted in the narrative, Milkman barely engages himself in any significant activity, and only spends his
4 In fact, Relph developed the idea
“authenticity,”i.e., a genuine and sincere attitude, from Martin Heidegger’s notion of
“dwelling.”Relph indicates that: “As a form of existence, authenticity consists of a complete awareness and acceptance of responsibility for [one’s] own existence”(1976: 78).
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
time doing odd jobs for his father. As he “avoided commitment and strong feeling, and shied away from decisions”(181), he is nothing more than an emotionally immature adult, a pampered son of one of the town’s wealthiest African Americans, and one who has “stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years”(98).
He actually lives a life of being
“pointless, aimless”(107). That is why at the age of 22, he is still trapped in the symbiotic state of the infant. This purposelessness and lack of coherence in life is reflected in his physical features and characteristics as well. For instance, his demeanor “was all very tentative”like a man “trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back; the decision he made would be extremely important, but the way in which he made the decision would be careless, haphazard, and uninformed”(70). Such a depiction of Milkman in Part I actually serves as a foreshadowing of the “careless, haphazard, and uninformed”journey that he undertakes in Part II in the novel: a journey that proves to be
“extremely important”for his growth and development. In his journey to Pennsylvania and Virginia, Milkman reaches various levels of knowledge, learning first about the history of the Deads and ultimately about himself.
Such “flight”transforms a search for gold at the beginning into a search for a past, and consequently, a meaningful
present. Starting the journey, he wants to “beat a path away from his parents’
past, which was also their present [and]
which was threatening to become his present as well”(180). “In seeking a future of freedom, he unwittingly discovers a redemptive past and a true community”(Otten 1989: 54-55).
Like the protagonist in a traditional Bildungsroman, Milkman leaves Michigan and embarks on a journey that eventually leads to his development and maturity. Yet unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, his journey is the reversal of the usual village to city journey: he goes from a large city where he has lived in all his life, to small villages that he has never been to before. Besides, this time the journey is from the North to the South, another reversal to the one that historically many African Americans took in the massive migration from the rural South to the urban North in the post-bellum era.5 More significantly, in Part II of Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead journeyed through the South, transforming his search for gold to a quest to learn the meaning of a song he had heard Pilate sing at home in Michigan in Part I. Only in the South, Milkman could learn the song that encoded his family history, including the story of Solomon, his parental great-grandfather, who, according to
5 The North was regarded as the “land of promise”then. See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 340.
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
the story in the song, flew away from slavery back to Africa. By then, Milkman realizes that identity is a collective rather than an individual construct (Smith 1987: 136). The second half of Song of Solomon takes us back to the South, where Milkman finds his present life can be related to the past and where he found his integrity of self-realization as he pieced together all the obscurely fragmented stories depicted in Part I to make a single, meaningful narrative (Grewal 2000). And more importantly, it is the place where Milkman learns to care for others. In the first part, under his father’s influence, Milkman commits himself to materialism and thus leads a life of self-alienation and isolation.
However, in the second part, during the trip to the South, his ancestral home, Milkman comes to understand his place in a cultural and familial community. Moreover, his relationships with people around him changed as well: a good example is when he treats Sweet like a lover rather than an object, unlike the way he treats Hagar back home in Michigan:
She [Sweet] put salve on his face.
He washed her hair. She sprinkled talcum on his feet. He straddled her behind and massaged her back. She put witch hazel on his swollen neck. He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please
come back. He said I’ll see you tonight. (288-89)
Such understanding of reciprocity is also demonstrated when he guides Pilate to Shalimar to bury her father’s bones, just as she had guided him to bury the Dead in him. This consciousness of egalitarian and mutual affection turns Milkman into a true pilot of his own life as well as one of others’lives. At this point, his name
“Milkman”is transformed to signify the milkman who carries milk, the source of life, for those in need, instead of one who milks others’life resources.
And, Milkman thus moves beyond self-healing to “other-healing”(Mbalia 1991: 62).
By the end of his journey, Milkman also learns to “read,”to look for the symbolic meaning and history of the names of people and places,
“wondering what lay beneath the names”of the road signs (333). His initial disinterest in things and people outside of his limited egoistic self gives way to the recognition of the interconnectedness of all things around him. This can be seen as Milkman returns home from the South when he looks out the bus window and read the road signs with interest:
How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as “Macon Dead,”
recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning.
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear…He closed his eye and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg…
on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness. (329-30)
Here Morrison uses knowing one’s name as a metaphor for knowing one’s past, and in the story, she arranges that
“it is the South that holds the secret of Milkman’s family name and family past”(C. Carr Lee 2003: 46). It clearly manifests that Milkman’s aimlessness is deeply connected to his namelessness.
Adding up to the Deads’losing their family name due to a drunken mistake of a white bureaucrat, Morrison presents this not only as a “joke”but also as a historical brand throughout the novel with a mockery (like: “You can’t kill me. I’m already Dead.”), impugning tone:
Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor…who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. (17)
Besides, Pilates carries her name with her in the earring just like she carries a rock from every state in which she has lived, “to provide continuity in an otherwise random and dispossessed existence”(Barbara Rigney 1991: 42).
The family name “Dead”also strongly suggests that Milkman’s family dwelling is, a place full of the Deads
--death, a sense of lost identity. And the nickname of Macon Dead III also suggests that Milkman has to liberate himself from false values and confront the truth of identity so as to transcend the infantile condition indicated by this name.
Milkman’s condition reflects what the Blacks have experienced in American society. They are home-outsiders. And for some reasons, they are trapped in their native place where they fail to develop relationships as insiders. Milkman’s journey to selfhood hints that African Americans must undergo a similar journey to their selfhood like Milkman: going back to the South to their ancestral homeland to connect the past with the present so as to pave the way to the future. 6 Milkman’s materialistically abundant life in his “home” in the North indicates he is living nowhere, only hanging out. The South, being figuratively spiritual homeland for African Americans’diasporic souls, is the place they should turn to. When they travel physically from the urban North to the home of their ancestors in the South, their past comes into existence and their present becomes significant and thus shape up their coming of being. Like Milkman,
6 Similar viewpoints can be found in some Morrison’s predecessors. James Baldwin: “the past is all that makes the present coherent”
(Notes of A Native Son, 4); Pauli Murray: “The past is the key to the present and the mirror of the future”(Proud Shoes: The Story of An American Family, v).
NSC95-2411-H-179-001 國科會人文處補助專題研究計劃成果報告
Afro-Americans can move from a juvenile immaturality to a complex knowledge of adulthood.
As Lee suggests, “the trip to the South is central to Morrison’s subversion of the classic American initiation story”(2003: 44). With this quest journey for identity, Morrison shapes up her tropic conception of the South. Unlike the White protagonists’
escaping from the community to find freedom and self, Morrison’s heroes return to the community in their quest for self-authenticity (Atkinson & Page 1998). And the community is the South.
The return refers to returning to an imaginative homeland, the South, the down home, the place where the Blacks resided upon their first arrival at this land. The South may have offered the Blacks the worst racism and oppression, but it is the roots of Black culture,history and ‘home.’” In a word, the South is the source of authentic Afro-centric culture—the keeping room for Afro-Americans’
“true and ancient properties” (Fultz 1998).
As Morrison asserts that Afro-Americans seek redemption by returning to the community to resolve their inner/outer fragmentation, her arrangement of Milkman’s journey to selfhood implies leaving the white’s (i.e., his father’s) materialistic urban Eden to gain self-knowledge. Milkman, a home/outsider (as in Part I of the book) or an away-insider (as in Part II
of the book), as his name suggests:
of the book), as his name suggests: