Inscribing an Origin in Song of Solomon

INSCRIBING AN ORIGIN IN SONG OF SOLOMON Jan Stryz University of Arizona Toni Morrison's statements concerning her own writing express an aesthetic that repudiates the authority claimed by or for certain literary texts. She self-consciously, habitually "avoid[s] . . . literary references, unless oblique and based on written folklore," she says, "not only because I refuse the credentials they bestow, but also because they are inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write. . . ." Her writing involves "a compact with the reader not to reveal an already established reality (literary or historical) that he or she and I agree upon beforehand." Expression of the "received reality of the West" involves assuming an authority that is patronizing to the reader. Instead she seeks to "centralize and animate information discredited by the West . . . information dismissed as 'lore' or 'gossip' or 'magic' or 'sentiment.' " Her text "cannot be the authority—it should be the map" and "should make a way for the reader (audience ) to participate in the tale." Ultimately, her repudiation of traditional literary authority is designed to bring the reader into an innocent relation with the text: "I want [the reader] to respond on the same plane as an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination."1 This mirrors her desire for a process of engendering her own text that is similarly innocent: "I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in ancient Greece, or religious narrative in the Middle Ages, when literature . . . did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the writer's imagination."2 With a formal education in literature that concentrated on canonical texts, included a minor in classics, and culminated in a master's thesis on Faulkner and Woolf, though, she is hardly unfettered by a critical literary history. But Song of Solomon specifically illustrates how she negotiates the obstacles imposed by the task of freeing her own story from a literary past. Pilate is introduced in Song of Solomon singing the song to which the title refers. But she makes a mistake in the lyrics, substituting "Sugarman" for "Solomon," an apparent displacement of a biblical reference that might seem understandable in an illiterate. Thus the reader compounds Pilate's error with traditional literary assump- 32Jan Stryz tions. As Jane Campbell notes, "Morrison lures the reader into expecting a fictionalization of the Biblical song of Solomon but replaces Christian associations with African ones."3 Pilate's mistake stems from a fragmented oral tradition, not an ignorance of a written text. The recovery of that uninscribed tradition is the project that re-generates identity for Pilate and Milkman in Song ofSolomon and is the project inscribed within the text itself. So Morrison in this sense produces an "original" written text that fictionally creates its own unwritten source while also affirming the value oí unwritten tradition. Not that the biblical reference is made merely to tease the reader and be abandoned: Morrison says that in Song ofSolomon she "used the biblical names to show the impact of the Bible on the lives of black people, their awe of it and respect for it coupled with their ability to distort it for their own purposes."4 Literary reference possesses a serious power that is appropriate to play with in the creation of identity. The dynamics of such distortion reveal themselves in Pilate's father 's selection of her name: Confused and melancholy over his wife's death in childbirth, [he] had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees. He had copied the group of letters out on a piece of brown paper; copied, as illiterate people do, every curlicue, arch, and bend in the letters, and presented it to the midwife.5 Macon Dead, Sr. does not merely ignore the traditional...