Song of Solomon

So, I was reading "Song of Solomon" a couple weeks ago.  Quick, which Toni Morrison novel is an episodic narrative concerning an ensemble of eccentric and pseudo-mystic African-Americans living in the colored ghetto part of a post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights Midwest town, and includes an open and frank discussion on bodily functions and gender relations?  The answer of course is "All of them."  After trudging through "Sula" and "Beloved," Morrison was precipitously close to being yet another one of those important-sounding-authors that I respect more than I actually like.  Nothing personal against her, maybe I'm just too white or too male, or even too 21st-century to totally get what she's doing.

Of course, I used to say that about Victorian novels, too--I read "Middlemarch" you see, and I found the whole affair to just be so dreadfully stuffy, petty, and foreign to my American sensibilities to feel accessible.  Who cares if understanding English class-structure might help me comprehend the book better, bollocks on the whole thing, good-riddance to England and viva la revolucion! 

But then, "Great Expectations" and "Jane Eyre" were both written in that era--indeed, neither of those novels could be written today, given how much has changed since then.  But there is still something hauntingly personal, something distractingly familiar, about these characters, that cause self-reflection and  an aching longing, so that even though they are thorough products of the Victorians, they've long outlasted them.

I had a similar experience once I breached the second-half of "Song of Solomon."  Now, doubtless there are simply certain facets of the novel I still haven't comprehended simply because I haven't experienced being Black--just as there are doubtless parts of "Great Expectations" I don't get because I'm not a Victorian Englishman.  Nevertheless, somehow the character of Milkman Dead, as he engaged on that most banal of plot-devices--the buried-treasure hunt--transcended the text in that second-half to become something far more real, a character who was alarmingly familiar, one who both condemned by association the worst in me while mapping out the best of our potential. 

He doesn't transcend his circumstances, oh no--he transcends because of his background, his family, his roots, the whole, strange, wild, eccentric, sordid, mad, lunatic pageantry that produced him.  The book made me consider how much more I should value my own strange family-ties, in a manner that no mere greeting-card salutations or maudlin-Hollywood-celluloid could ever do.  No, "Song of Solomon" has blood and guts to it, it feels, it strikes, it's as messy as life--it's head and shoulders above "Beloved."  And in the climactic, self-destructive finale, I'm tempted to thinnk that Milkman really does fly away.