How to Read Literature Like a Professor

(Axel Boer) #1

various implications. Milkman’s great-grandfather, Solomon, flew off to Africa but couldn’t hold on to his
youngest child, Jake, dropping him back to earth and slavery. Flying off, in this instance, suggests casting
off the chains of slavery on one level and returning “home” (Africa for Solomon, Virginia for Milkman) on
another. In general, flying is freedom, we might say, freedom not only from specific circumstances but
from those more general burdens that tie us down. It’s escape, the flight of imagination. All of this is very
good. Well then, what about Pilate, Milkman’s unfortunately named aunt? After she dies, a bird swoops
down, grabs the earring box containing a slip of paper with her name on it, and flies away. Milkman
suddenly realizes that of all the people he’s ever known, Pilate alone hadp. 128the power of flight, even
though she never left the ground. What does it mean to say that someone who remains physically
earthbound has been able to fly? It’s spiritual, we might conclude. Her soul could soar, which you can’t
say about anybody else in the novel. She is the character of spirit and love; her last utterance is a wish
that she could have known more people so she could have loved them all. Such a character is not
anchored at all. She’s flying in a way we don’t need to know the underlying myth of the flying Africans to
comprehend.


So freedom, escape, return home, largeness of spirit, love. That’s a lot for just one work to do with
flying. What about others? What about E. T.? When those bicycles leave the street in the Steven
Spielberg classic, what’s the situation? The adults of the community, representing conformity, hostility to
anything new, xenophobia, suspicion, a lack of imagination, are bearing down on our young heroes.
They’ve even set up a roadblock. At just the moment when things look worst, the bicycles leave the
earth and, with it, the earthbound grownups. Escape? Certainly. Freedom? You bet. Wonder, magic?
Absolutely.


It’s really pretty straightforward: flight is freedom.


It doesn’t always work out that way, but the basic principle is pretty sound. Angela Carter’s Nights at
the Circus
(1984) offers a comparative rarity, a fictional character who actually possesses wings.
Carter’s heroine, Fevvers (whose name paradoxically suggests both “feathers” and “tethers”), is a
woman whose flying act has made her the toast of circuses and music halls across Europe. It has also set
her apart. She is not like other people, cannot comfortably fit into normal human life. Carter’s use of flight
differs from Morrison’s in that it does not emphasize freedom and escape. Like Franz Kafka’s Hunger
Artist, Fevvers has a gift that places her in a cage: her flights are containedp. 129indoors, her world is a
stage where even the fourth wall is a barrier, since she is so different from her audience that she cannot
freely join them. There are a couple of points that should be made here. First, as I have intimated several
times before and will discuss later, irony trumps everything. But irony typically depends on an
established pattern on which it can work its inversions. All of Carter’s irony here, naturally enough, builds
on a foundation of expectations having to do with flying and wings. If flying is freedom, and if Fewers’s
flying represents a kind of counterfreedom, then we have an inversion that creates significance: she’s
trapped by the ability most symbolic of freedom. Without our expectations about the meaning of flight,
Fevvers is simply an oddity on a stage. The second point has to do with different kinds of freedom: just
as Morrison’s Pilate can fly without ever leaving the ground, so Fevvers can find freedom even within the
limitations of her fishbowl world. Her act frees her to express her sexuality in ways not available to other
women in the novel’s highly restricted late-Victorian society. She can dress, speak, and act in a manner
that would be deeply shocking in other contexts. Her freedom, like her “imprisonment,” is paradoxical.
Carter uses Fevvers, with her mix of earthy sexuality and avian ability, to comment on the situation of
women in English society; it’s a strategy that is perfectly normal for Carter, whose novels typically, and
comically, undercut assumptions about masculine and feminine roles, holding up our received notions for
scrutiny and occasional ridicule. Social criticism is the outcome of this subversive strategy, flight the
device by which Carter sets up her ironic notions of freedom and imprisonment.


Characters like Fevvers who possess wings are particularly interesting to us. And why not? How many

Free download pdf