Here is an interesting interview with Toni Morrison on Song of Solomon.
Towards the end of the video she mentions why she wanted Milkman to be obsessed with escaping and flying, and that was what I found most interesting because she tells us why she wanted to write the story in the first place.
One thing I love about listening to interviews with authors is that you get to understand why they wrote what they did, and what they were thinking when they wrote it. You find out why it is significant to them and their lives. Sometimes I feel like we over analyze things in English classes, and I often find myself wondering what the author really was thinking and whether or not we interpret it completely differently.
That's the cool thing about any creative art form--everyone has their own interpretations based on how they connect to the book and sometimes these interpretations differ from the author's. That doesn't mean that we're wrong, but I do like getting to know the author's perspective on their work. (Too bad Shakespeare is dead because I would have had loads of questions for him about his plays.)
This goes really well alongside Morrison's excellent (and concise!) foreword to the novel. Not all authors are so articulate about what they're doing in their work--often critics and readers do draw out meanings and implications that authors themselves are unaware of, but which clearly do enhance and deepen our understanding of their work. But I always pay close attention when Morrison starts talking about her own intentions. Check out her own close reading of the opening sentence of _Song of Solomon_ in the foreword: it goes on for a long paragraph, and does a better job of drawing out an impressive range of aspects to the seemingly simple sentence. And they're precisely the kind of insights that some skeptical readers *might* complain are "over-analyzing."
ReplyDelete