Naming as an expression of love, akin to a love song (like the Song of

Solomon from the Bible)v.

Naming as an expression of ownership, akin to branding

How do you feel about your name?

Names=both the essence of language and the limit of language. Morrison wants to expose and explore this paradox

Epigraph:“The fathers may soar

And the children may know their names.”

• A novel about fathers who fly and thereby both gain and pass along their names.

• So to get a name for oneself is not just for oneself but for posterity. • It also seems to be primarily the prerogative of men; why? What’s the

woman’s role in this equation?• The question of how characters get their names, the function of naming,

and the role of gender relations in this, is a theme of the book as a whole, and but is particularly prominent in the first two chapters

Sacred (loving) Namingv.

Profane (possessive) Naming

• Akin to the distinction in Frankenstein between sympathetic and tyrannical adoption

• Examples of naming in the first two chapters: not doctor st., no mercy Hospital, Guitar, Milkman, “sonny’s shop,” Pilate, Macon Dead Sr., President Lincoln, General Lee

1. Naming in ownership=naming as a way of controlling

• “own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too.” 55 Macon Jr effectively “buys” Ruth on the strength of the houses he owns. 22-3

• Milkman 11-14• Watermark as “mooring”; Ruth’s morbid attachment to her father 23• Magic power of names: Rumplestiltskin

2. Naming in Love = Creatively Misusing Names in ways that

integrate them in organic sensual life, like songs

° Not doctor st. (4-5). No mercy hospital. Both names testify to pervasive racial segregation which at least begins to end with (if not because of) Robert smith’s leap.

Pilate (“sonny’s shop,” and the mythical properly named ancestor):17-19

• Guitar: creative name but unattached to love/organic sensual life: 7; 45. (The guitar he’s named after is one he just sees not plays; an unplayed instrument, not a song but merely an idea of a song; connected to Reba as symbol of impotent desire: “funny kind of luck ain’t no luck at all”47)

• president Lincoln, macon dead 51-4.

To name with love is to make the name a song

• Macon’s contempt for Pilate = contempt for singing 20 (disguising a love for singing: primal community reminiscent of mythical ancestor 28-30)

• Embodied truth/magical realism: “if she had been younger and had more juice” 21 (feeling tall 50; Pilate’s lack of navel; flying; the rose as symbol of love)

• The Song of Solomon/The Song of Songs: Guitar remembers the song; song as historical bridge. Milkman falls in love to the song. 49

Becoming oneself=owning rather than being owned

by one’s history 76. memory, history = knowing what you’d rather not know: “if you want to be a

whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth”Macon’s self-deception: his contempt for Pilate = contempt for singing (20) disguising

a love for singing: primal, natural community reminiscent of mythical ancestor (28-30)

Being owned by one’s history:Guitar’s name: 45; Divinity: 61mm’s waking dreams69. mm can’t see himself as a “total self”120.mm felt like a garbage pail for other people’s actions126. mm caves to the weight of history, hopes hagar murders himOwning one’s history:51-2. lincoln’s heaven

“five or six kinds of black” • 40-1: “May as well be a rainbow.”• Remember Bartleby: “happiness courts the light, so we deem

the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.” (31)

• So when Macon says who need to know the whole truth to be a whole man, it’s still not obvious what “the whole truth” is and what it means to know it. 76: “couldn’t I be a whole man without knowing all that?”

• MM remembers who he is (77-8)

Sex and Violence as means of expressing historical pressures

without facing them; i.e., ways in which we don’t own our history

but are owned by it

Being owned by the past gets expressed in sex & violence

• Emmett Till: 80. we the readers are reminded of our own historical past at the same time milkman is reminded of his past

• Macon dead and ruth: 64-7 ruth’s power of powerlessness• 132: mm is “the plain on which they fought”• 67: MM and macon dead: violence enables mm’s self-discovery to begin• Hagar’s stalking mm: “when she could not get his love she settled for his

fear” 128 • Language as a form of violence: mm’s violence to hagar: 99, 130

Being owned by the past gets expressed in sex & violence

• 128-9: graveyard love: “she could not get his love so she settled for his fear”

• Between ruth and macan; ruth and dr. foster, ruth and mm: 124-6• 131: mm is born of this inexplicit communication• empire state and wife.• 137: “anaconda love”

Two ways of ‘owning’ one’s past, of making history explicit:

1. Making it a possession (an arbitrary thing that just demonstrates your power to

possess)v.

2. Making it a uniquely your own story/song/name

Gold & Seven DaysNames & Categories

• Seven days: the “ratio;” making the world not “a zoo” 155; “reasonable”157

161 name v. category: categorization is implicitly already murder: ‘not no I can’t touch you, milkman, but we don’t off negroes;’ Guitar doesn’t care about individual names:

• 160. ‘x, baines—what difference does it make? I don’t give a damn about names.‘

• 88. “niggers get their names the way they get everything else—the best way they can”

• 192. at the sound of Corinthians Dead she hired her on the spot: what does this indicate about how this book should be read??

To become oneself is to make one’s name/history a story/song

• 138. wilderness where there’s system v. wilderness where there’s none (zoo, peacock)

• 179. too much tail; all that jewelry weighs it down

• 183-4. LIVING=being unreasonable, but in the name of what? Gold?• to become real—to taste life--is to become part of a story: it’s not yet

necessarily to fly, but it is to become part of a story about flying, or potential flight, even if the peacock doesnt know it yet.

Man = actor, birdWoman = background,

nest/launch-pad• 234: contrast between the men and the women in the reverend's stories

• Does the conclusion of Morrison’s novel sustain or subvert this contrast?

MM recognizes himself in what he isn’t: a flightless bird

• 233: “sometimes you can do something:” MM’s hollowness as an individual = the hollowness of his story

• 234: “his was the genuine emotion he had faked…the more they talked the more his missed something in his life.”

• 235: MM was “ignition that fired their memories” but his is himself a nothing, a ‘fake.’ Their stories indicate the hole he has to fill.

• Macon dead sr.’s death was “the beginning of their own dying,” his farm was like “a paintbrush that colored their lives.” He gave a license to live

• 235f. “looking at milkman during those nighttime talks they yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream, stop the death they were dying….he bragged a little and they came alive.” Again the peacock figure signals both what MM has to do and that he hasn’t yet done it.

MM finally recognizes the depth and emptiness of his lust to own

• 257. he realized that all his fine reasons for wanting the gold—i.e. fulfilling the dreams of macon dead’s old acquaintances, proving himself to guitar—were lies; he just wanted to own it. And this realization allowed him to think clearly for the first time.

• The reader already knew this about MM; MM’s self-insight merely catches up to the reader’s insight into him.

• MM’s self-insight here is something other and more than just seeing himself in what he lacks: this is recognizing the whole principle that made he life empty. Even if he had flight, his attitude of ownership would have made that empty and meaningless too.

• So the aim to gain not flight per se but a new non-possessive attitude towards everything he has and is.

MM finds himself by losing himself, ‘surrendering’ himself to

the environment• 276ff. the cocoon that was his self gave way: his sense dissolves of being

an independent operator who ‘deserved’ this and didn’t deserve that.• “the men and the dogs were talking to each other”• 278: it was what there was before language. To communicate with the

animals and the earth.• this is what guitar missed about the south; something maimed him,

scarred him.• 280-1. he laughed and walked the earth and did not limp. The rhythm of

laughter, of walking, of singing.

Whatever the dead & the earth ask of us,

they ask us to sing• 243. Sing: “she made him keep that name.”• Charlemagne, Shalimar, Solomon, Sugarman• 294. Sing: “he wouldn’t speak it after she died, and after he died that’s

all he ever said.” Whatever the dead ask of us, they ask us to sing.• 333. pilate’s double misinterpretation of the ghost: Hamlet.

MM’s transformation

• 296. MM’s past behavior—including his behavior in dreams—constitute both the truth of what he was as well as the measure of how he’s transformed.

• If Selfishness (just wanting to own the gold) = being nothing more than something you invest in, making yourself just another possession,

• Then Selflessness = loving attention to particulars (in other words, naming with love: naming to preserve individuality instead of owning it, monetizing it, turning it into just a unit of wealth and power)

• Guitar is not wrong that this selfishness had utterly defined MM; but Guitar is wrong to fail to recognize that MM could outgrow it; i.e., could become an individual rather than a mere possessor/possession. This is due to Guitar’s own possessive mentality: “you ripped us off” 297.

Hagar’s love vs. Pilate’s love

• 311. hagar’s self-objectifying makeover: Hagar = Ryna = all modern women

• 336. Pilate: “I wish I knowed more people….if I’d a knowed more I would have loved more”

• The contrast between hagar and pilate parallels the contrast between the selfish MM and the selfless one, which suggests that gender difference might not be as absolute as it seems.

The many flights of the novel’s conclusion: Pilate’s, MM’s, the

novel’s, yours• 336. “without ever leaving the ground she could fly.” how does she fly?• 337. “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.”

• Return to the question with which we began: in this novel is the woman’s role merely that of launch pad? Or, maybe even worse, is a woman’s crying the necessary correlate of a man’s flying?

• But who makes the clearest appeal for singing, for home (& domestic fidelity) and against flying away??? The original Macon Dead, the unwilling flier.

Self-Reliance

• Emerson’s message is apparently the opposite of Morrison’s; ie., to be an utter individual sui generis, without precedent: “the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.”

• But the aim of emerson’s individualism arguably converges with morrison’s memorializing: making history: “all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.”