Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon was about this sort of political problem that young adults have, which is trying to combine upward mobility--middle-class, bourgeois, upward mobility--with some kind of respect and reverence for their ancestors. There's always this conflict, as though if you go to college, you can't go back to Lorain, Ohio; or if you stay in Lorain, Ohio, you have to despise everybody who went on. Not quite that simple, but you understand what that tension is. So I was trying to figure out how somebody who's in his late 20s or 30s got educated ... and what would help inform him to learn how to be a complete human being, without these conflicts, without these self-destructive impulses for material things.... I try to figure out what kinds of people can manifest that for me ... and set that up. Then I have to fully realize the characters and sort of love them, without approving of them necessarily, but really love them, and my earnest desire is whomever they are ... to do them justice" (Morrison in a PBS interview with Charlie Rose).

"Here the depths of the younger work are still evident," contends Reynolds Price in the New York Times Book Review, "but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives. The result is a long prose tale that surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges upon a single family. "With an intermixture of the fantastic and the realistic, Song of Solomon relates the journey of a character named Milkman Dead into an understanding of his family heritage and hence, himself. Lee writes: "Figuratively, [Milkman] travels from innocence to awareness, i.e., from ignorance of origins, heritage, identity, and communal responsibility to knowledge and acceptance. He moves from selfish and materialistic dilettantism to an understanding of brotherhood. With his release of personal ego, he is able to find a place in the whole. There is, then, a universal--indeed mythic--pattern here. He journeys from spiritual death to rebirth, a direction symbolized by his discovery of the secret power of flight. Mythically, liberation and transcendence follow the discovery of self." Blake suggests that the connection Milkman discovers with his family's past helps him to connect meaningfully with his contemporaries; Song of Solomon, Blake notes, "dramatizes dialectical approaches to the challenges of black life." According to Anne Z. Mickelson in Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women, history itself "becomes a choral symphony to Milkman, in which each individual voice has a chance to speak and contribute to his growing sense of well-being.

Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. It was also the first novel by a black writer to become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection since Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940.

From "Toni Morrison," Contemporary Authors, Gale Research, 1993.

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