Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of The Grapes of Wrath One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn Great Expectations Solitude The Age of Innocence The Great Gatsby Persuasion Alice’s Adventures in Gulliver’s Travels Portnoy’s Complaint Wonderland Hamlet Pride and Prejudice All Quiet on the The Handmaid’s Tale Ragtime Western Front Heart of Darkness The Red Badge of As You Like It I Know Why the Courage The Ballad of the Sad Caged Bird Sings Romeo and Juliet Café The Iliad The Rubáiyát of Omar Beloved Jane Eyre Khayyám Beowulf The Joy Luck Club The Scarlet Letter Black Boy The Jungle A Separate Peace The Bluest Eye Long Day’s Journey Silas Marner The Canterbury Tales into Night Song of Solomon Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Lord of the Flies The Sound and the The Catcher in the Rye The Lord of the Rings Fury Catch-22 Love in the Time of The Stranger The Chronicles of Cholera A Streetcar Named Narnia The Man Without Desire The Color Purple Qualities Sula Crime and The Metamorphosis The Tale of Genji Punishment Miss Lonelyhearts A Tale of Two Cities The Crucible Moby-Dick “The Tell-Tale Heart” Darkness at Noon My Ántonia and Other Stories Death of a Salesman Native Son Their Eyes Were The Death of Artemio Night Watching God Cruz 1984 Things Fall Apart Don Quixote The Odyssey To Kill a Mockingbird Emerson’s Essays Oedipus Rex Ulysses Emma The Old Man and the Waiting for Godot Fahrenheit 451 Sea The Waste Land A Farewell to Arms On the Road Wuthering Heights Frankenstein One Flew over the Young Goodman The Glass Menagerie Cuckoo’s Nest Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Song of Solomon—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-392-9 1. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. 2. Domestic fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. African American families in literature. 4. African Americans in literature. 5. Michigan—In literature. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. 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Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Song of Solomon 5 Trudier Harris Song of Solomon: Reality and Mythos Within the Community 35 Patrick Bryce Bjork Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison 57 J. Brooks Bouson Song of Solomon, Narrative Identity, and the Faulknerian Intertext 87 John N. Duvall Justice and Citizenship in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 119 Dana Medoro Toni Morrison’s Revisionary “Nature Writing”: Song of Solomon and the Blasted Pastoral 133 Wes Berry vi Contents William Faulkner Reprised: Isolation in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 151 Lorie Watkins Fulton “Through a Glass Darkly”: Typology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 167 Judy Pocock Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 183 Judith Fletcher Chronology 199 Contributors 201 Bibliography 203 Acknowledgments 207 Index 209 Editor’s Note My introduction pays aesthetic tribute to Song of Solomon, while refraining from endorsement of Morrison’s cultural politics. Trudier Harris proceeds to cheer for that cultural uplift, while Patrick Bryce Bjork also joins in the communal spirit, as does J. Brooks Bouson in his reflections on “black masculinity.” Faulkner, as the intertextual father, is transcended, in the true belief of John N. Duvall, after which Dana Medoro summons the ghost of Sena- tor Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who scarcely seems relevant in the era of President Barack Obama. Wes Berry meditates on a possible ecological Morrison, while Faulkner is restored to something like his relevance by Lorie Watkins Fulton. Biblical names in Song of Solomon are usefully studied by Judy Pocock, after which Judith Fletcher concludes this volume with a Circean account of the quasi-Homeric theme of naming in what continues to be, for me, Mor- rison’s best novel. H A R O LD B loom Introduction Toni Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), seems to me her mas- terwork to date, though Beloved (1987) has even more readers. A superb, highly conscious artist from her beginning, Morrison is also a committed social activist. Exemplary as it is, her African-American feminist stance is the prime concern of nearly all her critics, which makes for a certain monot- ony in their cheerleading. Morrison is scarcely responsible for them, though I detect an intensification of ideological fervor when I pass from rereading Song of Solomon to rereading Beloved and then go on to Jazz and Paradise, the novels that followed. A novelist’s politics are part of her panoply, her arms and armor. Time stales our coverings; fictions that endure do so despite the passionate commitments of their authors, while claques, however sincere, do not assure literary survival. The very titles of many of the essays in this volume testify to political obsessions: “black cultural nationalism,” “myth, ideology, and gender,” “race and class consciousness,” “political identity,” “competing discourses.” Morrison, far cannier than her enthusiasts, at her most persuasive transcends her own indubitable concerns. Her art, grounded in African-American realities and concerns, is nevertheless not primarily naturalistic in its aims and modes. Morrison has been vehement in asserting that African-American literature is her aesthetic context: she has invoked slave narratives, folklore, spirituals, and jazz songs. So advanced a stylist and storyteller is not likely to celebrate Zora Neale Hurston as a forerunner, or to imagine a relation between herself and Richard Wright, or James Baldwin. Her authentic rival is the late Ralph Waldo Ellison, whose Invisible Man remains the most extraor- dinary achievement in African-American fiction. Morrison subtly wards off 1 2 Harold Bloom Invisible Man (1952), from The Bluest Eye (1970) on to Paradise (1999). Though she has deprecated the “complex series of evasions” of modernist literature and its criticism, no one is more brilliant at her own complex series of evasions, particularly of Ralph Ellison, unwanted strong precursor. This is not to sug- gest that Ellison is her prime precursor: William Faulkner shadows Morrison’s work always, and inspires even more creative evasions in her best writing. I am aware that I am at variance with nearly all of Morrison’s critics, who take their lead from her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, one of her most adroit evasions of the central Western literary tradition that, in mere fact, has fostered her. But then, as a professional literary critic, I must declare an interest, since my argument for the inescapability of what I have termed “the anxiety of influence” is contested by the cultur- ally correct. There is no anguish of contamination or guilt of inheritance for black women writers in particular, I frequently am admonished. Patriarchal, capitalistic, phallocentric notions must be swept aside: they are racist, sex- ist, exclusionary, exploitative. If even Shakespeare can become Alternative Shakespeare, then Toni Morrison can spring fullgrown from the head of Black Athena. Every strong writer welcomes the opportunity to be an original, and Morrison’s literary achievement more than justifies her sly embrace of Afri- can-American cultural narcissism. Her critics seem to me quite another mat- ter, but my Editor’s Note is an appropriate context for commenting upon them. Here I desire only to discuss, rather briefly, the genesis of Song of Solo- mon’s authentic aesthetic strength from the creative agon with Faulkner and with Ellison. Morrison deftly uses Faulkner while parrying Ellison: out of the strong comes forth sweetness. Song of Solomon exuberantly is informed by the creative gusto of Morrison’s sense of victory in the contest that is inevitable for the art of literature. Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche both pioneered in reminding us that the Athenians conceived of literature as an agon. Nietzsche admirably condensed this insight in his grand fragment, “Homer’s Contest”: Every talent must unfold itself in fighting . And just as the youths were educated through contests, their educators were also engaged in contests with each other. The great musical masters, Pindar and Simonides, stood side by side, mistrustful and jealous; in the spirit of contest.

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