Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison It’s a song for the ages. This is the first book by Toni Morrison that I discovered, and for more than two decades I have returned to it repeatedly. He has cast a magic spell on me ever since, and has been my best introduction to modern literary works. His narrative never fails to invigorate and captivate.
The language is rich, apt, deliberate, uninhibited and seductive. The novel is a reflection on family, community and nationality. It is about the torment of dispossession, limitless power and the ugly face of fanaticism. It is also about survival, human resilience and the indestructible search for identity. The narrative is carefully crafted and wonderfully lyrical, a song almost without equal.
We travel with the main protagonist of the story, Macon (Dairy) Dead Jr, from his birth, through the empty, stupefying and even grisly terrain of his teenage life. We finally witnessed his life or death encounter with a world, a repellent landscape, which sought to drown him when what he wanted was to find meaning in his life. His story, his metamorphosis and his flight are the foundations of the song.
Dairy he is the son of Macon Dead Sr, a rapacious, hot-tempered but successful entrepreneur. The father suffocates and poisons his family, and his son’s, with his rage, his contempt and his disappointment. His tormented spirit becomes the swamp into which the Dead family plunges daily. His success is not a balm for his bitterness. His wife, Ruth (Forster) Dead, the main object of her outrage is reduced to a pathetic creature that exists only in the shadows, daily reproached, slandered, despised and humiliated by the husband she loves.
The dead Magdalena and the dead First Corinthians of her daughters wither from the isolation that their life in the closet grants them. Her father’s wealth, tainted with his contempt and pomposity, breeds for them a life of loneliness and disappointment. Her friends are afraid to even touch her silk stockings and expensive dresses. Like their mother, Ruth, their souls are drained of all emotion, rendering them incapable of loving or being loved. They are frustrated, whining spinsters whose fury for their father rages like a flooding river.
His contempt for his selfish brother, Dairy, it is irrepressible. ‘You’ve been laughing at us all your life, Corinthians. Mother. Me, using us, ordering us and judging us: how we cook your food; how we keep your house… Who are you to approve or disapprove of anyone or anything?… When you wanted to play we entertained you, and when you grew old enough to know the difference between a woman and a tow-colored Ford All in this house stopped for you.’
The world that Toni Morrison describes is bleak. in dante hells the gates of hell are flung open, and in Song of Solomon the reader is plunged into a world that has an unsettling reek of slavery, with depravity looming in the background. It is a pernicious domain that produced men and women whose souls were warped by loss and suffering.
dead milkman narcissism is juxtaposed against the nihilism of his friend Guitar. Guitar responds to the chaos that surrounds him with rage. Throughout the book he sizzles, like a piece of bacon burning in his own fat. It is with violence that he tries to claim his own freedom. The guitar has all the destructive feelings that an organically dysfunctional society imposes on its inhabitants. However, DairyIn order to move beyond his father’s quest for more wealth, he embarks on an odyssey to his ancestral home of Shalimar. It is the discovery of these roots that ultimately leads him to discover his inner self.
Professor Morrison raises the bar very high again with this novel. The reader is enchanted with the characters in the story, and falls in love even with minors. There are long passages of dialogue in the vernacular unique to the time and people he depicts, and they are mostly written in simple but jarring language. This book is a portrait of the world, a time that can be hidden but not forgotten, through his gaze and that of his family.
song of solomon it is a work of extraordinary beauty and integrity… a true masterpiece.
