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South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home, The
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Lee, Catherine Carr
Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees-he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. (341)
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This conclusion raises the question of whether Milkman really flies in the triumph of individual will, or if he plummets to his death in a statement of existential despair, by what Susan Blake calls a "solitary leap into the void" (79). Both possibilities, however, invite mistakenly individualistic readings. Milkman does offer his life to Guitar, but Morrison writes that "it does not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother" (341) Milkman's flight, the final parallel with Solomon, is not away from something but to his "brother" Guitar, a member of his present community. Milkman, who by his initiation into community now embodies that community, leaps not into the void but to the "arms of his brother" 14 Such a death would be a healing sacrifice of love for Guitar.
Yet this leap may not bring Milkman's death at all. Many critics have failed to note that just before Milkman leaps off the plateau, Guitar sets his rifle aside. Perhaps, then, Guitar no longer wants to kill Milkman, and the "arms of his brother" may not be killing at all (341).'5 In this conclusion, Morrison continues to overturn the conventional initiation story that previous generations of literary scholars have described. Northrop Frye, for example, claims that the "central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero" (81). Morrison, however, transcends this dialectic. It does "not matter," she writes, "which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother" (341). Significantly, the pronoun "his" refers not to Milkman or Guitar alone, but to both.
Thus, where the classic American initiation story takes the youthful initiate from the bosom of hearth and family, leaving him isolated and alone, Morrison begins with a twentieth-century modern man, alienated and fragmented, and ends with that man's successful connection with a people. Through his initiation into the Southern community of his ancestors, Milkman gains not the typical knowledge of limitations, or the knowledge that comes through the fall into evil, but rather the understanding that the past continues to constitute the present in ways that are not constraining but liberating. He discovers both the fact and the meaning of his African American heritage. Morrison reverses not only the structural pattern found in the typical American initiation story but the ontological pattern as well. Song of Solomon addresses the need for the contemporary African American psyche to embrace community, the community that comes from a shared culture and history, and so she denies historical discontinuity and transcends the postmodernist impulse toward despair."16 The novel ends with the triumphant hope of continuation for an interconnected African American culture and heritage.
