Episode 1: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was, for me, a radical shift in imagination from a female locust to a male one, to get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the sight of my work, to travel, to fly. In such an overtly stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels. A journey then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through Earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like, old school heroic, but with other meanings, opening the novel with the suicidal leap of the insurance agent, ending it with a protagonist's confidential sore and to danger, was meant to enclose the mystical but problematic one, taken by the Solomon of the title. Hello, I'm Alicia Brogge, and I'm Eric Alombaud. We're literary scholars. And this is Literate, the podcast where we go through the New York Public Libraries 1995 list of the books of the century. Each episode we read one of these books, talk about what it means and why it matters, and then try to work out whether it really is one of the books of the century. This time, we read Tony Morrison's Song of Solomon. At the start of the episode, we heard a clip of Tony Morrison reading from the forward to Song of Solomon, which comes courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio. Later on, we'll hear from two experts on Tony Morrison, Dr. Dana Williams and Dr. Tessa Roinen. This is episode one of our very first podcast. Yes. Some background about us. We met at Oxford a few years ago. We were both doing our doctorates in literature. And we found that we liked talking about books together, unsurprisingly. Now we're on two different sides of the world. You are in South Africa. I am in the United States of America. And we both felt like we had some gaps in our reading histories. We had a bunch of books that we wanted to read. So we thought why not do that in conversation with each other, but also with experts who spent years reading these books. We liked the New York Public Libraries, Books of the Century List, because of its selection. Yeah, it was a bit more diverse than a lot of these kinds of lists. We also liked that it is an institution engaged with the public, making these recommendations about what to read. And because talking about a list like this gives us an opportunity to think not just about the world of the book. Yeah. But about the book in the world. With that in mind, let's get into Tony Morrison's song of Solomon. I'm going to start off with a brief introduction to Tony Morrison and the publication of Song of Solomon. And I'll tell you a little bit about the book. Then we'll hear from the experts and have a conversation about it. Tony Morrison was born in Lorraine Ohio on the 18th of February, 1931. She studied at the legendary Howard University and earned an MA from Cornell. After teaching at various universities, she began working in publishing in the late 1960s and became the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department at Random House. The first novel, The Blueest Eye, was published in 1970. Over the next four decades before her death in August 2019 at the age of 88, she published 11 acclaimed novels, several children's books, a couple of plays, a libretto, and several books of essays and nonfiction. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. And in 2012, she received the presidential medal of freedom. If you want to know more about her and get a sense of how groundbreaking and incredible she was, I'd recommend watching the 2019 documentary, Tony Morrison, The Pieces I Am, which is named for something the character Six O Says and beloved about his partner, which is a quote, "The pieces I am, she gathered them and give them back to me in all the right order." Song of Solomon was Morrison's third novel after The Blueest Eye and Sula. She was published in 1977 by Knopf, an imprint of Random House. While her work had been critically acclaimed before Song of Solomon, this novel was a major popular and commercial breakthrough for her. It sold 570,000 copies in its first year. This is huge. It was the first book by a black American woman chosen as a book of the month club main selection, and the first book by a black American writer since Richard Wright's native son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In 2015, it was included on the Guardians 100 Best Novels list. Alicia, tell us what this novel is all about. Okay. So, Song of Solomon is an enigmatic book. It starts by introducing one of its central themes, Flight. On the very first page, a minor character invites the people of Mercy Michigan to watch him fly. It is February 1931. He leaps to his death, a mother goes into labor and our protagonist is born. Milkman dead. 33 years later, Milkman's story ends with him and flight. Between these flying leaps, the novel traces his journey of self-discovery. His story begins at home in Michigan, where we meet Milkman's unhappy parents and sisters. We also meet his free-spirited aunt, Pilot, and her daughter, Reba. But it's her granddaughter, Hegar, who becomes Milkman's lover and especially important in the story. Because later, she becomes his spurned lover, and by the end of the book, the two people closest to Milkman, Hegar and his best friend, Guitar, have committed to killing him. Milkman's journey takes him from the American North to the American South, from Michigan to Pennsylvania, and then Virginia. He retraces family history, encountering transformative revelations along the way. Most notably, he learns that his great grandfather Solomon was a flying African. Someone who refused to remain enslaved and instead flew back home to Africa. The book ends at a place called Solomon's Leap, but now it is Milkman who is in midair in his own ambivalent flight. Now, we will hear from Dr. Dana Williams, Professor of African American Literature and Interim Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She is also President of the Tony Morrison Society. Dana has published widely on contemporary African American literature. She is currently writing a book on Morrison's work as an editor at Random House. She asked Dana to give an extended reflection in response to several questions that we had. So settle in for her very rich words on the significance of Morrison's work. The first time I read Tony Morrison's song of Solomon was as a graduate student at Howard. The novel of course is written in 1977 and I was quite young then, so I didn't read it when it first came out. I did read some Morrison as an undergraduate student at Grandling, State University in Louisiana, but probably just the bluest eye. I mean, it was not until graduate school that I made it a point to read all of Morrison's books. I read the ones that had been released before and then each time a new book came, I read it then as quickly as I could get my hands on it. I started and stopped beloved a couple of times. I must admit before I had to read it for class. The experience of reading it with others and talking about it with sophisticated readers made a big difference. And this is the same with Song of Solomon. When reading this book with my peers, we paid more attention to style, to language, to themes, to narrative and character development. It was the difference between reading for pleasure and reading to pay attention to what the writer was doing. Then of course, we put Song of Solomon in conversation with other books that came out around the same time, other Morrison books and then other books by Black women writers and then other books that tried to deal with mythology. The same is true for other people that I know who fritz on the Solomon. We all agree about how readable the book was in relation to other Morrison novels on the plot is relatively linear. While the character source has no naval, otherwise the character is a pretty relatable. The setting is recognizable. So there are many things I think about the book that work especially well for readers who are perhaps a little bit intimidated to get to Morrison. I think my favorite part of the book is the reinterpretation of the flying African myth, which I think is just such a beautiful story. There's something so seductive to me and so hopeful about even the possibility of people's ability to escape enslavement. A Solomon isn't to be admired exclusively of course because he did after all leave his family, but his insistence on returning home was I think a radical act. He refused to remain enslaved. And we know that there was a cost to pay, but you have to admire his outright rejection of enslavement. In San Marcello Menos, I'm also struck by the idea of ancestry and how important it is to the text. It's a book about a lot of things, but at its most base level, I think it's a book about family and resilience in the face of the ubiquitous fallout of white supremacy, which we're still dealing with today. Morrison matters to me as a reader, as a scholar, as a thinker, because she wrote stories about the black experience from the perspective of a black person. I love that she was deliberate about writing from within the community. There's a difference in storytelling that's related quite literally to the community from or out of which you write. You love your reader. You respect your reader, and you take seriously a voluntary responsibility to give language to people's experiences. And I love this about Morrison, especially. This is so important for people who are hamstrong with the English language, which is so limiting when you think about the cultural legacy of African people. And I'm thinking about it just in terms of people in the US not having the language to express sentiments that are sometimes for into this reality when we find ourselves. Because I think African Americans especially have a legacy of cultural ancestry with Africans. And sometimes they are just aren't the right words to be able to capture it. And Morrison tries to give language and thought to grapple with some of these complicated realities. And when you can get someone else to do that work for you, it's just wonderful. What I think Morrison's main contributions to contemporary literature are, once she challenges the idea of the mainstream on all fronts and shifts the focus for those who are at least willing to see these mythologies related to American exceptionalism and to think about the possibilities for a different world. And then the second thing I think in terms of her contribution is she really focuses us on how to read people without making the stranger and other or the foreigner something that is to be feared and then to be oppressed. When I think of categories or descriptors like books of the century, I think a lot about books that change the reader's perspective or that teach the reader things that the reader might not have otherwise known. When it's really good, it doesn't in a way that doesn't seem didactic or trite, but in a way that's very imaginative or fresh. And I think Song of Solomon does this work. So it would be one of those books for me. It helps us think about these complicated realities of flight, abandonment, joy, alienation, family, revenge with the seven days, which I've been thinking a lot about lately, greed, and then so many other things. Still, it's hard for me to choose one book by Morrison because they're all so different and they do different work. I do think though that Song of Solomon is my favorite. And it certainly is one of her most important, perhaps along with paradise. And then I also really admire her nonfiction, especially those texts included in the source of self-regard, some essays, meditations, and speeches. In those texts, we see just how contemplative and how smart Toni Morrison was as a thinker. I think part of this for me is because she makes it look so very easy in the novels. It's that notion of making sure that the scenes don't show as though somehow this is a whole piece of cloth that just always was. Whereas in the nonfiction, you get to see how hard it is to think and what it means to write about things that you have thought long and hard about. And that's important to me because that hard work is the only hope for our progress. [MUSIC PLAYING] What was your experience of reading this novel? Yeah. I liked some of the qualities of the book, but I didn't find it as powerful as beloved or the bluest eye. And I didn't like it as much as Sula. And those are-- I don't know if I've read much more than that. That's double as much as I've read. But part of that is because I'm American. And beloved was assigned in high school, advanced placement classes, and then it became a controversial topic. Yeah, you know what? I found out that Song of Solomon got banned a number of times by various school boards. Parents were complaining because first of all, they said it had derogatory depictions of black Americans in it. And then it was like about the language. And then it was like, oh, it's obscene in some way. I guess Morrison is on set works the way that James could see as on set works in South Africa. Like we read disgrace for our finally at high school. So I imagine that that beloved has a similar kind of a place in certain respects. Yeah. And I do-- I was thinking through that controversy because I read one defense of Song of Solomon, like some blog post that a fan had written, where the defense was sort of that the protagonist milkman is exemplary in some ways. And I actually found that a really off-putting defense. I don't think we should all go out and try to be like milkman. And it's-- That's how it's like we should emulate him. Yeah. He's a good example for young black men. He's figuring out his history and he's taking a non-violent approach, which I thought was funny, because the book ends with him going toward his friend in a potentially violent encounter. I mean, it's left ambiguous. I find that strange, because actually one of the things I really felt as I read the novel was how much I disliked milkman for most of the story. Interesting. Why was that? I found him kind of like entitled in a way that was off-putting and self-absorbed and kind of-- Yeah, I just-- I found him troublesome how he treated other people, how he saw them only in terms of what they could give him. That's part of his journey, right? I mean, he comes to a great understanding of himself in community over time, but also kind of-- the people around him and his family-- he finally kind of realizes the awful thing that he does by treating Heigar like a-- like used chewing gum. He uses that image. But of course, it's too late by then. Yeah. When I've read that blog post about like in defensive song of Solomon, I tended to think, well, if these are the defenses, if that were-- which I don't know, and hopefully it's not, you know, the way that this book was being taught in an English class, then I can see why someone would protest that. Yeah, I just think that the novel is making a much more complex-- giving us a much more complex story and portrait of-- I mean, I appreciate that I don't like Milkman for a bit. Yeah. I mean, I think that there are aspects about him that I can understand for a lot of the novel. Like you'd know that he's been shaped by this particular kind of family that has been shaped by-- we don't know all the details until later. And as you learn more and more about it, it becomes-- you know, it draws you into a kind of an empathetic relationship with him. But I don't think we need to defend him as being exemplary in any way. You know, even just the central kind of image of flight, right, is ambivalent. That song, the song of Solomon, or Sugarman at first, it's like escape, transcendence, but it's also abandonment. Yeah. That's the case, right? Do you remember when he goes back? There's that moment where he's realized that the kids in Shalimar are singing-- Milkman is watching these kids playing this game. And they sing the song that's like, "Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone, Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home." And that's a variation on a-- well, that is the original, I think, of the song, that pilot sings earlier when she sings Sugarman done fly, Sugarman done gone. But that song, itself, turns out to be about Milkman's family. And he has this kind of exultant moment, this feeling of identification with his ancestor, Solomon. And he runs back to Sweet, who is this woman that he strikes up some kind of a relationship with in Shalimar. And he reports this to her really excitedly, because he's feeling this kind of moments of transcendence, like the pieces are falling into place. I know who I am. And there's something kind of free and wild about this ancestor. And he loves that. And she's like, who did he leave behind? Even in that moment, there's the kind of undercutting of it. Because at the same time, there's-- is it Reiner, his wife, whom he left, who apparently became inconsolable and went mad after he literally apparently flew away. And now there's a place called Solomon's Leap and a place called Reiner's Gulch. And it sounds like a woman crying or wailing the sound through the trees when the wind moves. So if anything, I think Morrison is always calling us two. to see multiple sides of the same set of events. - Yeah, 100%. That song stood out to me so much across the novel and Pilot first uses that refrain, but with Sugarman in like Page Six of my book, the very start when Robert Smith jumps. And so from that very start, that theme of flight where Robert Smith, I mean, he doesn't fly, he dies. - He's the insurance salesman. - The life insurance agent who can't protect life, he dies. (laughs) But then like, I love what you said too about the way that Morrison refracts that like a central theme, like this one, like flight through the different characters' perspectives. And I traced that song across. And my favorite moment or episode in the book was actually Hagar's funeral. And I loved how this song gets replayed through the character pilot that you were talking about, through her voice and not just the song, but like it's this desolate church funeral where only the winos seemed to be in attendance until she just comes bursting in and pilot that is. And she comes in and she's shouting mercy. As though it were a command, my book says, you know, I want mercy. And then she's going toward the coffin of this granddaughter whose life is taken kind of as a consequence of milkman leaving her first, just leaving the relationship and then going south. And then it turns into a song where it's like call and response, where pilot shouting out, well, we don't know who's doing which role, but she's shouting, someone's shouting out in the nighttime. And then the daughter presumably is responding mercy, you know, in the darkness, mercy. But it crescendos up and it's very much this like, the choir of an African-American church singing out to the audience or like resonant of a great chorus, but punctuated yelling out some line of, that describes the loss, the nighttime, the darkness, the morning, the bedside, and then just punctuated by mercy, mercy. But then what's interesting to me that connects with the theme of the sugarman song or the Solomon song is that it's really that focus on the one who's left behind, my baby girl. And then at the very end, she just proclaims out and she was loved. And it's this subverting of the gaps that are shaping the lives, the lovelessness, the lost identities. And then at the very end of the book, pilot and milkmen are together at Solomon's leap and guitar has accidentally shot pilot. And she's dying, milkmen's leaning over her and she asks for a song. And the only song he can sing is Solomon's song, but he changed it so the focus isn't a man, leaving his community in pursuit of transcendent freedom. It's sugar girl don't leave me here, cotton balls to choke me. Sugar girl don't leave me here, bugras arms to yoke me. And even after that, he can't stop singing these words. And he says, and it says, now he knew why he loved her so, without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. So it kind of flushes out that flight theme from a different perspective. She doesn't fly away and leave people. She's the one who mothers everyone and is therefore people she doesn't even like who don't like her. Yeah, yeah, she takes them in. Yeah, she makes family. She's a really interesting figure, probably the most interesting for me in the whole novel, pilot. This woman who delivers herself and has no naval, she's got this kind of immaculate conception thing about her, right? She is uncreated in some way, or otherworldly and yet very, very human. That's one of the things I love about Morrison is her attention to kind of embodied details. So like, pilot is always like chewing something. She's always got a little bit of piece of grass or she gets a little splinter from the windowsill and kind of is biting. Like those kinds of details that kind of anchor these characters in something that's really embodied and yet also kind of otherworldly. I mean, she's also just so self-assured, right? Compared to her daughter and her daughter's daughters. So compared to Reba and Hegar and all the other women in the story, like she's got this kind of anchored self-confidence that is pretty incredible. Wonder where that comes from. Do you think it comes from her being rooted? Or is it the relationship with her father? There's something about fathering all over the place in this novel. It's about fathers and children, maybe fathers more than anything. The first epigraph, or not epigraph, but is it a dedication? It's just daddy. I have a version with a forward by Morrison where she says that she wrote this novel after her own father died. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, have you read that? I think I heard it in the documentary on her. She says this thing, which so struck me. She said, each, there were no kind of fights over mementos or things like that after her father died among her siblings and her. And that in part, I guess, this is because every single one of his children knew that they were his favorite, which is this most incredible thing. And she said something like he spoke to each of them in a language that was cut to them. And I think about that a certain kind of, if this is a work of mourning of a sort, the mourning of her own father, Tony Morrison's father, that is. And we're seeing a lot of bad fathers in this novel. And what is it to be fathered? What does a father give one? Because there's a lot of fathers who fly away. And others who stay aloof. But even pilot, if it's a kind of a counter example of mothering or of flight that doesn't leave, her offspring don't fare much better. And somehow I think you're 100% right. And but it's also, I think one of the things that strikes me about Morrison's writing is it doesn't feel individualistic in some of the ways that I expect of America or an American writer, because everyone is an individual, but they're all seen to be connected to this collective history, collective trauma. And it's on the one hand very constraining almost. Like no matter what pilot does, Reba and Hagar are still shaped by, or plagued by an enormous sense of, well, different things actually for them, but Hagar and enormous sense of lack that all of the love and beautiful home life that pilot gives her can't undo. So the history, and I don't know if that's, a deeper history of the fathers, like pilot is inadvertently carrying around this bag of her father's bones, which on the one hand is very, has pious inflections of, you know, filial piety or like inadvertently honoring the father almost. But on the other hand, it's clearly a burden. And the burden of the past is so heavy across the novel. - There's these kinds of interesting relationships. And maybe it all goes back to some sort of moment of abandonment, that is kind of, you know, Solomon leaves his 21 children. He flies away and he leaves his 21 children. And I think that that for me is kind of a really compelling shift, right? So that moment of transcendence that I was talking about earlier, milkman kind of goes through this process until he can recognize his own leaving of Hagar and the pain, the injury of that. And then he kind of thinks back, it flips back and he's thinking about Solomon leaving, behind those children. And in some ways, there's a kind of a break there that reverberates in certain ways. - I think that's right. But then in my mind, there's also always that deeper background of slaves being brought over to America and family lines being cut. I think that's one of the arguments for Tony Morrison's accomplishment and greatness as a novel that she can connect the individual plight and she doesn't excuse it away by a bigger history. But you can never tell where the bigger history ends and the individual agency of characters begins in a way. So that milkman gains more compassion for his parents whose choices never look more savory, in my opinion, as the book goes on, like each of his parents are really, you know, unsettling in their different ways. - I like that diplomatic description. I think that's exactly right they are unsettling. - Yeah. - And they don't make a home for him. - They don't make a home. And the place that they make has deforming effects on all of its children. But I think that comes out of what we see, what he comes to see over the course of the book is the way in which they've been deformed by their own histories, psychically. But there's always, to me as an American reader, a bigger backdrop of, you know, well, the slave trade, It's severed family ties. it created this huge loss for so many people. And that's part of the enduring legacy in burden than that descendant, you know. I don't know, you don't know how to connect. Like who bears what extent of this burden? Like you can't say those things. They're not, I don't know, empirically traceable in a concrete, defensible way necessarily. And also whose place is it to say? I mean, I don't think it's mine, but it's interesting that Morrison seems to, I think, hint toward that background. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think that is the kind of code that sort of thrums underneath this entire novel is that bigger history, right? And I think you're exactly right that that's what Tony Morrison kind of charts, but not in a way that feels didactic to me and not in a way that says, this is what I'm doing. It's more kind of like she's saying, this is the context. This is the environments in which these people are moving. And this is how it shapes them in certain ways. And if we go, we can go back and it's incredibly enriching and enlightening to go back and to understand where these things come from. But at every point, I feel like she insists upon the autonomy of the individual within that kind of environment as well. So it's not explaining a way ever. Yeah. And I think that that's one reason her strategy of juxtaposing perspectives without reconciling them is effective because even in my summary, I arguably overdrew the connection between Hagar and guitar and then guitar pursuing milkman. But she sets these things up so that you can draw connections or you cannot. And you may be correct and you may be incorrect. And there may be a whole spectrum of truth between those poles, like an element of correctness and falsity and maybe guitar doesn't know its own purpose, like its own motivations. And that's very much like life. You don't know exactly how history informs the present. You know that it does, but you still have agency. And yeah, there's messiness and slipperiness too, right? There's these beautiful kinds of patterns that you find in the novel and in Morrison's writing, even just like images of flytor, or this person who is kind of his most intimate friend or lover who also wants to kill him or tries to kill him. And these things can happen. But they're also not exactly the same. Yeah, there was a quite specific. Yeah, I think that's really great. I think that's one of the things that I feel when I read Morrison's work is just how crafted it is, how she has worked and reworked her structure and how she has done it. Her sentences, you know, like the language of it all is just so wonderful. I love how she puts a sentence together. There's a kind of a cadence to how she does it. Yeah, and that, okay, I love that. Because I was thinking about why did Morrison call this the song of Solomon? It could have been a song of anybody if she wanted to focus on song. And obviously, you know, a song of Solomon is this book in the Bible that's really about love. And I almost felt like this book was a love letter to maybe to her father in a way, but also I think she writes in a way in service to the African-American community. She takes these stories that are pieces. They're fabricated pieces. They're not even real history or that, you know, they're fictionalized based on history at times in certain ways, like the love it. Yeah. But she takes them and she crafts pieces and puts them together and she doesn't explain them away. But she does it. I feel when I read it, you know, in a way that leaves the rough edges and the unsavoryness of what is also recognizable in real life, but with a kind of compassion. And I don't hate any of her characters. I hate things about them and then something gets revealed and I feel sympathy and recognition. And that's why I feel like the pieces I am is that, right? I almost feel like that fits really well with this idea of her writing as an act of love and her writing these stories as kind of reclaiming the pieces that she is that, you know, that are part of American history, that are part of African-American history in a particular way. And then the title of the Song of Solomon or of Song of Solomon feels like it really speaks to that. Like these novels feel like a love letter to me almost. No, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I feel the same way. I was just reminded actually thinking about the pieces I am as an idea that there's this moment where, is it when Milkman is just decked as father? (laughs) He slaps his father and then he's looking at himself in a mirror. It says, he was as usual, unimpressed with what he saw. He had a fine enough face. Eyes women complimented him on a firm jawline, splendid teeth. Taken apart, it looked alright. Even better than alright. But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self. It was all very tentative the way he looked, like a man peeping around a corner of some place he's not supposed to be trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back. Yeah, this kind of idea of like looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing your features as being kind of not integrated, right? Lacking coherence. And like he then kind of finds these little scraps of his history and the story and his epic kind of journey, the saga of him going back down to the south. And he finds a kind of coherence by kind of going through and then learning the story. It's always about narrative, right? There was a thing that I saw in this book called Conversations with Tony Morrison. It's an interview with Thomas LeClair where he asks her, what do you think is distinctive about your fiction? What makes it good? And she says, the language, only the language. It is the thing that black people love so much, the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It's a love, a passion. It's function is like a preaches to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. So I'm thinking about this idea of this being this kind of love song. And it's so beautifully wrought. I think that idea of giving a language is also part of what she seems to do in being a novelist, in viewing her craft, like in her Nobel prize lecture, she really talks about the power of language and coming from a background where it was illegal for slaves to read. Yeah, it puts a fine point on the power of language. Why would people be so afraid that someone would become free, that they wouldn't be able to be held down if they just learned to read? There's something about the language thing that she does. How she uses non-standard English and she also loves the sound of it, right? So you get Solomon, and then you get Sugarman, and Shalimah, and Shalimone, and these different ways in which these names and words get morphed and listened to and passed on. And it's very biblical, too, right? I mean, all these people with these biblical names, first Corinthians and Magdalene and Pilate and Solomon. And hey, Gar, I mean, everything is kind of steeped in a certain kind of language, and it's a language that she's not making from scratch. She's kind of drawing on the stories that she's heard, 'cause Morrison says that her family just told lots of stories she came from, like, story in people. And the language of Christianity of the Bible, that's also been so, so, so central and important to African-American kind of stories and kind of conceptions of freedom and history. - Yeah, 100%. That centrality of the Christian scriptures and the kinds, like, the view of freedom that it enabled people to speak to and share and also to argue for, but also, I think the rality, like, as a, like, the spoken nature, but also the heard nature of the stories and the sound of the language in Morrison, but also the way that she describes language as a spoken thing that carries identity from, you know, mouth to mouth person to person. And I think the Christian scriptures give, oh, oh, a shared narrative that people could, could refer to and name themselves from as we see in this book. - But, and then riff on into songs, right? - Yeah. - And so, so that there's the church aspect to it as well. And church is not necessarily about the scriptures, although it's, that's like the, the medium, but actually the content is something way more profound and way more about kind of community and belonging and. - Which maybe also goes to that theme of homes that the church becomes a, you know, another kind of home, a communal home, a spiritual home, where people can sing the songs and say the words that can hold together a fractured identity. But not in this novel so much, right? Like the church is really really. peripheral, right? Except for that one moment that that pilot's, she breaks in. She kind of shatters it. And in fact, there's like wine bottles that get shattered on the ground. The wine is like wine falls and there's like the emerald glass and the red wine. There's a deeper kind of level at which that's going on. It's not like an obvious literal thing. I think it's true that it's not central in the novel. And I don't even remember it being central in any of her novels. No, she has alternative kinds of church movements, right? There's baby sugs, healer in beloved and the clearing gatherings in that novel here. I think that the side of the sacred is like in the in the games that the kids are playing. You know, it's sacredness is there and the cave is a place as well. Yeah, I don't disagree. I think that's true. But I also think it's interesting that the moment when you know, this lost life, Hagar's life, which is in a way peripheral compared to milkman is the main character. It is, it becomes, it takes center stage and its value is affirmed. And it's just such a redemptive proclaiming the value of something that was discarded a moment. And I don't think it's insignificant that that takes place in a church. And especially that pilot who is not like she makes wine, she's viewed, everyone talks about her, you know, is, you know, she's not a Puritan by any standard. And and I don't think she's a religious character at all. Like we don't, I mean, not in a conventional way. But she's deeply spiritual. She's always communing with the spirit of her father and morally ambivalent in some ways. But at the end of the day, she, she manifests this commitment to love and to the value of life. And so, yeah, I don't know. I think it's significant that it takes place in a church, but it's also significant because of that juxtaposition. I mean, she's named pilot, the person who, you know, condemns Jesus to death. But in this novel, she's the one that gives that affirms life. Yeah, I wonder about that like the significance of her name, because I'm wondering the whole time, like why is she pilot? Yeah, there's the pun with like PILOT, you know, piloting. But why pilot the one who washes his hands and the last-age efforts to save Jesus, he, you know, throws up his hands and says, do do with them what you will. Hey, God, who was hey, God? She was, was she Abraham's wife? No, because of Sarah. Like, Sarah couldn't have kids, so he took another wife, wasn't that he got? Oh, yes, you're right. It's the maid servant who gives birth to Ishmael, but then they get excised. And, and in the biblical tradition, they are viewed as outcasts and in, or in the Christian tradition. And in the Muslim tradition, they are viewed as forefathers and central. So different, different tellings of that story, put different ancestors on who's the outcast. And another question about it's another, it's another story of, of fatherhood, right? Of like, birthrights and. And abandonment. And abandonment as well. Yeah. She's clever, man. And I think also with the pilot name thing, because her name doesn't map on her, her actions in a clear, obvious way, it creates that continual friction and dissonance and questioning. And about how do names relate to the things they're purportedly describing. And that's so important across the book in a more general sense. So it's like an acute moment of this more general aesthetic. We interviewed Dr. Tessa Roinan about Song of Solomon. She's a research fellow at the Rodermeer American Institute at the University of Oxford. Tessa is the author of two books on Tony Morrison, the Cambridge introduction to Tony Morrison and Tony Morrison and the classical tradition, which won the Tony Morrison Society book prize for best single authored book in 2015. Thanks so much Tessa. We're so delighted we get to talk to you about this novel. So the first question is when did you first read Song of Solomon and what made you want to study the work of Tony Morrison? Well, I can remember when I first encountered Tony Morrison because that was as an undergraduate at Cambridge where I was studying English. And I first read Beloved and was really kind of blown away. I think I read it in a vacation actually not as part of the syllabus, but then I went on to do an undergraduate dissertation on Beloved and Greek tragedy, which it's a very kind of Cambridge thing to do because they have this tragedy paper where you spend a little time thinking about whether everything in the world is or isn't tragedy. So I had to go at thinking about whether Beloved could be read as a tragic novel or not. And to be honest, I can't remember exactly when I first read Song of Solomon, but I assume it was after that during my master's degree when I read more broadly in her and when I was in the US at that time. Speaking of tragedy, we noticed, while we invited you because of your fabulous book, Tony Morrison and the classical tradition. And we noticed that in your introduction, you mentioned Tony Morrison having spoken to the way that Odysseus has handled in Black American writing and in the Black American community. And we wondered if you could speak about that in relation to Milkman's journey in Song of Solomon. Yeah, that would be great. So I think it's a really political issue that I'm sure will be discussing sort of Morrison and Greek and Roman tradition. And as with most of them, she has a really ambivalent perspective on it. So this Odysseus myth like the wondering man is really useful for her in some ways. And Milkman's journey kind of pays you this idea of sort of being parapetetic and having various encounters and being an episodic novel. And also, I guess that relationship between the Odyssey and the building's Roman that she's really interested in and the kind of formation of the individual. But of course, Milkman is really a bit of an idiot and makes all the mistakes and isn't a very appealing character at all. And it's a sort of anti-buildings Roman really and anti-Odyssey in lots of ways. And she would feel extremely ambivalent about this, but in some way she's in a tradition of Ralph Ellison from Invisible Man where lots of scholars like Patrice Rankin have looked at how the Invisible Man is kind of in this complicated relationship to the Odyssey. But, you know, so while she wants to kind of distance herself from European traditions in some ways, in other ways she's keen to kind of reclaim them and revisit them because there are interviews where she talks about the kind of social and cultural appropriation that comes to Black men who are the kind of wandering type or the not-state at home type. I guess this is a kind of Moynihan report era where the Black man is always coming in for criticism from the dominant culture. So she's interested in exploring that experience of the wandering male kind of the wandering man, not necessarily in a negative way. And of course, I guess we'll talk more, but there are lots of other classical traditions that she's playing with as well. Do you mind elaborating a little bit on what role female characters then have and how she engages with myth in this book? Yeah, definitely. That's incredibly important. So first of all, it's a really strange book in terms of gender politics because she always talks about it as this was the book I wrote when my father died, which is very kind of moving and draws you in. But then nearly every man in the book is a really horrible character as far as I can see with a few rare exceptions. And all the way through she's really vested in the kind of difficulties that women have had and exposing the complicated predicaments they've been put in. So, you know, there's that first of all, I don't think the relationship between women characters and classical tradition is anything like as kind of clear as the one between milkman and Odysseus or milkman in Icarus, by the way, which is another one she's talked about as equally present but equally complicated because the myth of the flying African is just as important if not more than the myth of Icarus. But in terms of the women characters, there's definitely kind of mythical echoes. So hey, Gah is sort of goes completely insane with her kind of love, her obsessive passion for milkman. And in some way she's transformed with desire in in a way that's very similar to many characters in the metamorphoses by Ovid. And then even at one point when milkman's in the woods, he hears this echo and there's a big pun on the kind of echo and narcissism myth, which really brilliantly constructs milkman as narcissists because he is pretty narcissistic. And kind of implies through the generational mirroring that hei gore is a kind of echo and of course echo in the Ovid is very diminished and reduced to nothing. So there are those mythical resonances, but at the same time with a character like pilot, I think it's really important that the kind of West African traditions are really part of who pilot is in kind of a strong female ancestor figure. And other characters as well like Cersei. So that's a Homeric name, Cersei, the sorcerer in the Odyssey. But actually that one really confuses a lot of people because they try to map Cersei onto the Odyssey and it doesn't really work at all. And I think she's, even in a far more complicated way than someone like Joyce with his messy relationship with the Odyssey and Euricees. Scholars have looked at how Cersei was one of the days taken from West African tradition and kind of appropriated by Greek tradition and the that Morrison's quite interested in almost undoing that process of appropriation. I've even seen a vase in the Ashmolean that a scholar called Levinia Jennings showed me where there's a vase in which Cersei is clearly a West African figure. So I think it's really important not to kind of re-berry, to recognize that those classical myths are there, but also not to kind of re-berry the African traditions by too much soul focus on the classical tradition. So to shift slightly, but maybe connected to this, how would you characterize the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Morrison's works more generally and in this novel specifically? - I think that relationship's probably the most important thing about her work or the thing that she seems to believe in most unconditionally from the very get-go. And she's talked about the art politics fake debate. And she absolutely sort of rejects both in her speaking and in her interviews, but also through her literary practice. She sort of rejects any kind of idea of a division between the two. So she, a bit like James Baldwin, is post dates that debate about whether black fiction should be protest, fictional, whether it should be experimental fiction. And she sees that as a really nonsensical dichotomy, I think, and there are loads of beautiful quotations that you can bring out like she writes an ethical rootedness and she says, I'll try to get this right. She says, the best art is political and it ought to be unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time. So that's her mantra for what literature is. It is a political thing and that doesn't mean propaganda and it doesn't mean polemic. And I could talk about some ways that manifests itself in this novel if you like. One of the key ways goes back to what I was just saying about West African traditions and the classical traditions and the critics, you know, tussle over, no, she's more weak in Latin than she is West African or no, no, no, you can't mention any classical myth in relation to this, but I think she determinedly takes from both of those traditions at the same time. And others as well, obviously, the Judeo question one. And she's very much against the kind of either all and binaries and polarities. It's more than both with her. It's multiplicity always. And I think that's a really political move. So in some of the tournaments, she's taking from all sorts of resources and traditions. And that's a real kind of characteristic of her work as a whole, I think. And maybe a second issue there would be the indeterminacy of the ending. So milkmen apparently flies or jumps from this cliff. And we don't really know what kind of ending this is. Is this a suicide jump? Is it a sort of a fantastical moment? Is milkmen going to fly? Is he going to survive? Is he going to die? And so she puts the owners back on the reader to make decisions and take responsibility and do this kind of interpretive work. And I think that's how she manages to be political without being polemical. And she is this idea that the meaning and the responsibility is in our hands. That's a quotation from her Nobel lecture where she says, in our hands, we need to take these works of art and also the politics of the world around us and do what we can with them. That's right. Coming back to just a closer focus on the book, do you have a favorite part of Song-A-Song? Is there a really interesting question? I think the beginning is completely intriguing because it's so strange. And again, that's typically morassonian, I think. Her books are really strange. And I think people who don't know them very well are often surprised by just how strange she is considering-- how strange the books are considering how well known they are. And I think they come to them with different expectations. But there's this character who turns out not to be at all important in the plot when the novel unfolds. Putting up a noticing, he's going to fly from this building. So he's a slightly irrelevant character. But on the other hand, flight is this absolutely central image because of the myth of the African-to-Flu-back and escape slavery because of the connotations of flight and individualism and freedom and all the rest. And then that notice that he puts up the date that he's going to fly is actually Morrison's own birthday, the little date, 18th of February, 1931. And it's the day before Milton was birthday. And it's just not clear why she would do that. It's not easy to think of a clear obvious reason why she'd want to bring in the date at that point unless it's to do with her father again. So I really love the strangeness of that. And then I also really like the scene where Milton meets the local people in Damville, Pennsylvania before he goes out to the Lincoln's heaven homestead. And they're all remembering his father and grandfather. And it's just a fantastic kind of rendition of a community gathering of people speaking and sort of chorus working. And she just captures this kind of oral quality really well in her writing. So Tessa, what makes Song of Solomon more than simply an American book? I think it's probably safe to say that this idea of an individual's search for their own history and identity is a universal story in all sorts of different cultures. So partly it's kind of the applicability of that I suppose to a range of cultures. Secondly, I think that in the traditions that Morrison uses or the sense of history, it's absolutely a diasporic experience that she's talking about. So in the song, where the words Song of Solomon come in, is the folk memory going back to the middle passage and the transportation of the slave from West Africa. There's also a really important Native American character, which you can see is quite sort of anti-American I suppose. And then perhaps this idea of home and where is your home in the world is really one of the questions at the center of world literature probably isn't and certainly of the modern condition. So I think it's just that kind of a, she goes out of her way to sort of show the interconnectedness of experience in a way that Paul Gilroy or many, many others would want to do. But then also those themes are relevant in a US setting but also have a huge importance in world global experience. I think this idea of home and belonging and who we are. Is this one of the books of the century? And would you pick this out of Morrison's body of work? That's such a difficult question. And it's probably the best known in some ways, not used because Barack Obama famously said it was his favorite book. Obviously, how do we define one of the books of the century? I think it's an incredibly important novel and everyone should read it. But if I had to pick the Morrison novel that I think is the best, I'd probably go for jazz. And I'm always telling everyone that jazz is the best and they should read jazz because I think it's really overlooked even in the wonderful, wonderful documentary they've just made about Morrison called The Pieces I Am. It kind of ends with beloved and then that's the end of the film. As if that's the end of the story. But jazz to me is a really perfect work where the form couldn't be more inseparable from the ideas. It's about individualism and freedom and the city in the 1920s and how you negotiate your relationship to a group. And to use this kind of jazz form of different narrators and the community and it's, it kind of says so much about American history and human experience, I think. But maybe because it's about a sort of not so fashionable era as beloved, it gets really, really overlooked or because it's much more complicated than people realize possibly on a first read. I don't know, I just wish people would give jazz much more attention and make that one a book of the century. The New York Public Library named Song of Solomon as one of its books of the century. Do you agree, Elisha? And do I agree? You go first. Well, I went to a tribute to Tony Morrison earlier this year in which the literary scholar, Addo Kwasin, claimed very memorably that to be an educated American one must read Tony Morrison. And he didn't just mean one book by Tony Morrison, even all of her books. And what he was really getting at was the way her novels give voice to you. But also, I think when you talked about the embodied aspect of her characters and of her world, you know, they don't just give voice to you, but these novels create worlds that feel real and fill in parts of our national history as Americans that we must not forget. So, Addo Kwasin's comment has stuck with me. And I feel, you know, inspired or compelled even to go back and read the rest of her works. I think that sentiment is part of the reason that listing Song of Solomon makes sense on the New York Public Libraries, books of the century, because an encounter with Song of Solomon may lead other Americans, may lead other readers to go on and read the rest of her works. And to go on their own journey of discovery through their own history. Yeah. If you were to choose one Morrison for the list, if there's only one space for Morrison, is Song of Solomon the one that you would choose? That's tricky for me to answer, because my reading of her works is so limited. And having read the two works prior to Song of Solomon, I can. see the development in her capacities aesthetically. Or at least this book, it's wider ranging in its characters. They come together and take you through perspectives in ways that were the form and the content meld really compellingly. So I think it's more accomplished than Sula and the Bluest Eye, even though I really like those books. And then when it comes to beloved, that raises whole other question. And I haven't read the books that that are guests recommended, Paradise and Jazz. Yeah, neither of I. So it's a tricky question that I don't want to answer. Fair enough. I think this is a brilliant novel. It's fantastic. And if she hadn't written Beloved, maybe I would, maybe I'd go with it. But Beloved is incredible. And I go back to it again and again, its imagery, its language. And what it's doing kind of historically and with literature, it's been world-chaping for me. And I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm coming to this novel at a different time. It's beautiful. It's rich. It's wonderful. But if I were to choose between this and say, "beloved," I would choose beloved, I think. I think it got chosen because it was a breakthrough novel for her because it was so commercially successful. And it made people sit up and take note. It was a popular success, right? I think that's really important because before that, Morrison's work had been critically acclaimed and she'd been noticed within critical circles. But this really made her work accessible and accessed by a much broader range of readers. Okay, so that's Song of Solomon. And that's our first episode. Yay! We'd like to thank Dana Williams and Tessa Reunin for talking to us for this episode. I'd like to thank Erica for creating and producing this episode's music. It was my pleasure. On the next episode in two weeks time, we'll be reading Jorge Luis Borges and Fixionés. Want to read along? Please do. We'd also love to hear from you. Please get in touch with your thoughts on the novel or this episode. You can read more about the podcast on literatepodcast.com or you can find us on Twitter on @literatepodcast or email us at [email protected]. If you like this episode, please rate, review and subscribe and please support your local library and your local independent bookshop.