Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, and Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed: Foreshadowing Emergency
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As I write this, we are in a heartbreaking, enraging, and also potentially transformative moment, confronting the systems that make up structural racism, including state-sponsored and sanctioned murder and the inequities in every system from housing to the job market to health care. When Ezra Klein asked Ta-Nehisi Coates what he saw when he looked at the country, Coates said that he couldn’t believe he was going to say this, “…but I see hope. I see progress right now.” The anguish has been going on for a long time now, but this is the first time we’ve seen it erupt on such a massive, international scale, and in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that underscores our sense of urgency. We are remembering George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and too many more. We remember them in action, in protests, in voting, and in our commitment to standing with the Black Lives Matter movement.
So what is the role, in this moment, of fiction, whether reading or writing? This question sends me back to Toni Morrison’s essay in The Nation from March 2015, which begins “Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.”
I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine—and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election….” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”
Our lives as readers and writers don’t replace our work for justice, and whatever actions we take, but even now, it makes sense to explore the role of reading and writing in expanding our understanding. Fiction tends to be about troubles, sometimes great emergencies, personal or societal or both, and sometimes smaller, quirkier difficulties. And it may be that in looking at emergencies on the page, we get some sense of how we might approach them in life and understand the nuances of how they come about and their consequences, including the damages wreaked by abuses of power.
Sometimes, as the book begins, the emergency has already happened, and we have to figure out what it is and catch up. Sometimes, though, we’re waiting for the trouble to happen or to find out what the nature of the emergency might be. The longer things seem to be going well, especially if they are going well in an intriguing or unexpected way, the more readers may have a growing sense of something unnerving around the corner. And sometimes when a great emergency comes along, in a novel, as well as in life, we can look into the backstory to see its seeds.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Morrison’s 1977 novel takes on the abuses of power and the aftereffects of those abuses, as well as betrayal, empathy, and the centrality of family, history, and myths. The following paragraph comes fairly early in the book: Milkman, the boyish protagonist, son of the town’s only doctor, proud and well off, has just begun to question his idea of his family and has gone to find his estranged, maligned aunt. While we spend the most time in Milkman’s POV, Pilate is the real center of the book. She cannot be bullshitted. She understands when and how one may need to carry the bones of the dead. She knows the difference between the real treasures—stories, song, family—and the false treasure—gold. She carries the song that can lead to flight. She welcomes in Milkman and his best friend, Guitar, feeds them, and tells them the story of her father’s murder, and her flight with Milkman’s father, Macon Dead.
This moment, which seems like a minor incident, a digression for the novel as a whole, is really a subtextual note and warning:
"Now, we lost and there was this wind and in front of us was the back of our daddy. We were some scared children. Macon kept telling me that the things we was scared of wasn't real. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? I remember doing laundry for a man and his wife once, down in Virginia. The husband came into the kitchen one afternoon shivering and saying did I have any coffee made. I asked him what was it that had grabbed hold of him, he looked so bad. He said he couldn't figure it out, but he felt like he was about to fall off a cliff. Standing right there on that yellow and white and red linoleum, as level as a flatiron. He was holding on to the door first, then the chair, trying his best not to fall down. I opened my mouth to tell him wasn't no cliff in that kitchen. Then I remembered how it was being in those woods. I felt it all over again. So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn't fall. He looked at me with the most grateful look in the world. 'Would you?' he said. I walked around back of him and locked my fingers in front of his chest and held on to him. His heart was kicking under his vest like a mule in heat. But little by little it calmed down."
"You saved his life," said Guitar.
"No such thing. His wife come in before it was time to let go. She asked me what I was doing and I told her."
"Told her what? What'd you say?"
"The truth. That I was trying to keep him from falling off a cliff."
"I bet he wished he had jumped off then. She believe you? Don't tell me she believed you."
"Not right away she didn't. But soon's I let go he fell deadweight to the floor. Smashed his glasses and everything. Fell right on his face. And you know what? He went down so slow, I swear it took three minutes, three whole minutes to go from a standing upright position to when he mashed his face on the floor. I don’t know if the cliff was real or not, but it took him three minutes to fall down it.”
“Was he dead?” asked Guitar.
“Stone dead.”
The retold mini-scene helps establish the tension between flying and falling, which runs through the book. The story Pilate tells begins with the flight or running away of herself and Macon. In this moment, they’re following an apparition of their father, a farmer and freed slave. He’d been shot from behind by white men who’d tricked him into signing over his farm because they knew he hadn’t been taught to read. He named his daughter by copying the name “Pilate” from the Bible, the only word he ever wrote, according to his son. The men who wanted his farm shot him “five feet into the air,” a phrase repeated more than once. Later in the book, flying comes to mean freedom. But for Pilate and Macon, their first experience of a kind of human flight was of seeing the men murder their father in front of them. In the passage above, Pilate remembers her own earlier fear and understands the sensation of falling so that she tries to help this stranger. Without being directly connected to the rest of the book, the highly visual and tactile memory she recounts (that linoleum, the heart kicking “like a mule in heat”) inhabits the possibility of empathic generosity and the necessity of holding and being held in moments of danger.
I’ve reread this book a lot, and it’s one that changes over time, as we change. When I was quite a bit younger, I left the country I was then living in (Burundi) and my marriage of fifteen years and went wandering back to California by way of Nairobi and Kathmandu, then lived on various family couches for some months. In my duffel bag, I carried a small, idiosyncratic library: Song of Solomon, Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated City, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman, William Kennedy's Ironweed, and Carolyn See’s Golden Days. Though Beloved is probably indisputably Morrison’s greatest novel, and I have taught it many times, there is something that I love, that so many people love, in the strange inventiveness, rage, and hope of Song of Solomon.
Our central books change over time, and I might make a couple of switches in the duffel bag. Here’s another book that now belongs in there, another fierce and inventive examination of power and betrayal in intimate relationships and at the level of society:
Dara Horn, A Guide for the Perplexed
Dara Horn’s fourth novel is, among other things, a reimagining of the Biblical story of Joseph (here Josie Ashkenazi, a brilliant, gorgeous, somewhat arrogant, successful software designer who has invented a way of recording every moment of a human life) and his brothers (here Judith, her emotionally volatile and unsuccessful sister, constantly relying on Josie’s bounty). There’s also a story that drops back to 1896 to follow Solomon Schechter (Schneur Zalman), a scholar taken on by a pair of British sisters, amateur scholars who bring him into an attempt to rescue/raid a medieval Egyptian archive. But the great drama of the book has to do with Judith’s betrayal of Josie and Josie’s journey afterwards. The book builds to this slowly, depicting the complexities of their relationship in the present, and in the past.
Early on in the book, Josie, whose life is about creating the circumstances in which everything can be remembered, tells her young daughter Tali about her software. She’s proud of her project, but Tali, who’s very different from her mother, pushes back against the idea of remembering things as they were, instead of as we would like them to be. This paragraph is part of a central large memory, a passage that begins “This is what Josie would like to forget.” As an asthmatic thirteen-year-old, who knows more than all the others, Josie irritates the other children with her passion for knowledge (“She felt it starting, the wave of information building to a crest within her, rising behind her diseased lungs and her slight suggestions of breasts, and she knew it would do nothing but hurt her more, but she couldn’t help it, she could never help it.”)
On a hike in the woods, the other kids wind up stealing her inhaler, then throwing it into a pit. They insist she go get it, and lower her on a rope, with Judith helping. And then they leave her for the night. Along the way, as her oxygen thins, she has an extended vision of the walls of the pit. Here is a small piece of that vision:
The doors weren’t quite large enough for a person to pass through, even crawling; they were like the doors of kitchen cabinets, and many were even smaller, stacked one above the other until they covered all the walls of the pit. They were made of bark, or clay, some even of acorns or leaves. Josie remembered – for one can remember, within delirium and dream – the children’s discovery room at the natural history museum, which she still loved, where there was an entire wall full of drawers and cabinets just like these, each filled with a different treasure: a geode, a starfish, a glass-encased tarantula, a bone. She thought she might be able to climb out of the pit by standing on the doors, once they were opened. Near the bottom were what looked like drawers. She approached the nearest wall and tugged at a pinecone handle. The pinecone nearly came off in her hand, but then the drawer sprang open, bursting out of the wall until it banged against her waist.
As she’s gasping for air, she has a vision that will become the basis for her life’s work, an imagined list of things which could be real (were real in the museum) but here are delirious. This wonder cabinet will open its drawers to reveal, among other treasures, all the members of her family, and her understandings of them. It’s a formative moment for Josie, a foreshadowing of what’s to come, and it helps to show her remarkable mind along with her vulnerability.
Lists, facts, and accumulations of detail can be a way of containing emotion in writing about extreme events. As in Song of Solomon, sometimes a book foreshadows the most intense material, as a way of preparing the reader emotionally. In this book, Horn reimagines the past, borrows from Torah (not retelling the story and filling in the gaps, in the classical tradition of Midrash Aggadah, but using both the story and our knowledge of the story in inventing new characters). It’s an inquiry into the nature and consequences of a passion for knowledge as well as for love and power. The pit incident is a small preparation for Judith’s eventual betrayals, which are understandable from Judith’s view of the world, but also shocking. This vision also depicts the delights of the intellectual wonder cabinet, through the entrancing details of Josie’s imagining.
In a Jewish Book council interview, Horn told Miriam Bradman Abrahams:
I have always been interested in sibling relationships, both biblical and personal. I think siblings share a past but not a future. However, the past shared is so different based on individual memory…The novel also came out of my interest in the Genizah, the repository of hundreds of thousands of stored documents written in Hebrew from 870‑1880. I had the opportunity to view some of them during the year I studied in Cambridge and was especially interested in documents which inadvertently recorded the daily existence of the people of Fustat. I have kept journals since I was a child and am fascinated with the idea of recording and preserving things.
There’s a value to telling stories about emergencies, not always as we live them, when we are caught up in the urgent and immediate narrative, but later, or in other ways. Reading imagined emergencies may even help us figure out our part in moving through them in real life, bearing witness on the spot, helping each other out. What are the endless news stories, opinion pieces, letters from every organization we’ve ever supported, if not storytelling, sometimes nuanced, sometimes clumsy? But we often can’t see what we’re in the middle of, not when we look at it too directly. So these novels, their lists, their depictions of emergencies, have a role to play as we wrestle with how to live in, and through, this present moment.