Barbara Hill Rigney, The Voices of Toni Morrison, Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1991.

25:

Clearly, the significant silences and the stunning absences throughout Morrison's texts become profoundly political as well as stylistically crucial. Morrison describes her own work as containing "holes and spaces so the reader can come into it" (Tate 1989,125), testament to her rejection of theories that privilege j the author over the reader. Morrison disdains such hierarchies in which the reader as participant in the text is ignored: "My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and I think that is what literature is supposed to do. It's not just about telling the story; it's about involving the reader ... we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience" (Tate 1989,125). But Morrison also indicates in each of her novels that images of the zero, the absence, the silence that is both chosen and enforced, are ideologically and politically revelatory.

28-31:

Morrison's male characters ... imagine themselves in flight and are almost all in love with airplanes. ... In the tradition of black literature since Richard Wright's Native Son, however, the privilege of flight, at least in airplanes, is mostly reserved for white boys. Black males, in Morrison, fly only metaphorically, and then only with the assistance and the inspiration of black women. According to Baker, in his aptly titled "When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith," "flight is a function of black woman's conjure and not black male industrial initiative" (105). ...

Song of Solomon opens with the image of attempted flight, as Robert Smith, ironically an agent of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance company, promises to "take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings" (3). Pilate (Pilot?) does not save him (as the reader always hopes she might and believes she could), but she sings him to his death: "O Sugarman done fly / O Sugarman done gone," and he, at least, "had seen the rose petals, heard the music" (9). And Milkman Dead, born the next day in Mercy Hospital, the first "colored" baby ever to claim that distinction, must, Morrison says, have been marked by Mr. Smith's blue silk wings, for "when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and airplanes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself" (9).

Years later, Milkman and his friend, Guitar, are amazed by the mysterious, even mystical appearance of a peacock over the building of the used car lot where they stand. As the bird descends, Milkman mistakes it for a female, but Guitar corrects him: "He. That's a he. The male is the only one got that tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch." Milkman, in all his innocent conviction of male superiority, asks why the peacock can fly no better than a chicken, and Guitar, who wants to catch and eat the bird, answers, "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down" (179-80).

Morrison permits Milkman at least one experience of actual flight, if only on a plane, but even then "the wings of all those other people's nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him" (222). Mostly, Milkman's flight fantasies are in the form of dreams, and they evoke womb images more than an idea of freedom:

It was a warm dreamy sleep all about flying, about sailing high over the earth. But not with arms stretched out like airplane wings, nor shot forward like Superman in a horizontal dive, but floating, cruising, in the relaxed position of a man lying on a couch reading a newspaper. Part of his flight was over the dark sea, but it didn't frighten him because he knew he could not fall. He was alone in the sky, but somebody was applauding him, watching him and applauding. (302)

In order to truly fly, however, Milkman must give up his male vanities, "the shit that weighs [him] down"; it is necessary to placate the violated female essence of his universe, atone for his mistreatment of Hagar, apologize for his failure to recognize the humanity of his sisters and his mother, exorcise the influence of his father, and embrace the teachings of Pilate, who is surely the one applauding and watching in Milkman's dream.

Whether or not Milkman fulfills these requirements, becomes a better human being, and actually flies as a reward on the last page of the novel is a subject for a great deal of critical controversy. According to Cynthia A. Davis, Milkman truly flies, and he represents the traditional mythic hero:

Milkman's life follows the pattern of the classic hero, from miraculous birth (he is the first black baby born in Mercy Hospital, on a day marked by song, rose petals in the snow, and human "flight") through quest-journey to final reunion with his double. And Milkman largely resolves the conflict between freedom and connection . . . he finds that his quest is his culture's; he can only discover what he is by discovering what his family is. By undertaking the quest, he combines subjective freedom with objective facr and defines himself in both spheres.... Only in the recognition of his condition can he act in it, only in commitment is he free. (333-34)

But even among classical heroes, there is the possibility of failure in flight, and Icarus always looms as example. At the opposite extreme of interpretation from Davis's analysis is that by Gerry Brenner, who argues that Morrison's treatment of Milkman is purely ironic, and that her attitude toward his search for his "gene pool" is one of disdain. Even the image of flight, in Brenner's analysis, is pejorative, representing "man's prerogative --to escape domestication, to fly from responsibility, in the name of self-fulfillment or self-discovery or self-indulgence ... he flies, indeed, from the burdens of doing something meaningful in life, preferring the sumptuous illusion that he will ride the air" (119). Morrison herself indicates that her rendering of myth in this novel is indeed ironic: "Sotto (but not completely) is my own giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the journey to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western fable, they are in deep trouble; but the African myth is also contaminated" (1990, 226). Also evidence that Morrison's rendering of Milkman's character is ironic can be found in her own statement: "I chose the man to make that journey because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have" (McKay, 428).

Certainly women suffer as a result of the male desire for flight. Milkman's ancestor, Solomon/Shalimar, was one of numerous slaves from Africa who could fly; according to the story Milkman is told, Solomon launched himself into the air from a cotton field one day, leaving behind his wife and twenty-one children. The cry of the abandoned woman, another primal scream from the jungle of female discourse, still echoes throughout the land in Ryna's Gulch, a testament to the irresponsibility of men and the proclivity of women to love them. Milkman, too, has abandoned every woman in his life, including the convenient Sweet, who warms the bed and bathes his body in the last sections of the novel. Pilate alone is the woman/mother who commands Milkman's respect and his love, for "Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly" (340).

Whether or not Milkman "rides the air" in the last lines, or whether he reenacts the suicide of Robert Smith on page one, jumping into space and delivering himself into "the killing arms of his brother," is, finally, ambiguous. Were Morrison to resolve this novel so neatly with Milkman's complete regeneration and reward, the reader's expectations about her recurrent and pervasive use of paradox, her refusal in every novel to adopt novelistic conventions about closure and resolution, would be disappointed. Significant to Morrison's great strength as a writer is the fact that her style is imbued with contradiction and saturated with breaches of narrative continuity. And, according to Irigaray, a feminine style of writing, is "always liquid," always "resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea, or concept" to the point that "linear reading is no longer possible" (1985, 79-80).

As we shall also see in a later chapter on Morrison's rendering of history, concepts like linearity, progress, chronology, even development, are not primarily valuable in an analysis of her works, nor do they form a pattern for the structure of her novels. Morrison's structures are almost always circular, diffuse, organized by a radical standard of that which constitutes order. (This study, too, is deliberately arranged thematically rather than chronologically, in deference to Morrison's style and in an attempt to discount linearity as a value.) It would be worse than useless, for example, to talk about "plot development" in Morrison's novels; there is plot, certainly, but its revelation culminates or evolves through a process of compilation of multiple points of view, varieties of interpretation of events (and some of these contradictory), through repetition and reiteration. As there is no "climax," in the usual sense, so also there is no resolution, no series of events that can conveniently be labeled "beginning, middle, end."

37:

As she has made clear in a number of interviews, Morrison does not write autobiography.² As the author has no self that is manifested in her fiction, so also Morrison's narrators are most often unidentifiable, anonymous, vehicles to transmit information and convey emotion rather than to provide moral interpretations or represent a personality.³ Often these narrators disappear completely as one character or another steps forward to tell the story, from a different point of view. But even these speaking characters reflect multiple and fragmented selves, which are sometimes undefined, inevitably amorphous, always merging with the identity of a community as a whole or with the very concept of blackness.