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  • Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities
  • Lydia Magras (bio)
Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities. Ed. Shirley A. Stave. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. 258 pages. $29.95 paper.

To read Toni Morrison's work is to engage in a study of intertextuality. Her novels and essays reflect connections to classical, historical, cultural, and spiritual texts. Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities addresses itself to spiritual interstices. Edited by Shirley A. Stave, the collection of eleven essays engages Morrison's canon, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Paradise (1999), through varying perspectives based on Judeo-Christian formations, syncretic or hybridized religions, and alternative practices such as Womanist Christology and Gnostic writings. The overall ecumenical approach of the book presupposes some knowledge of theology, philosophy, history, and cultural mores, as it proposes more openness to the primacy of spirituality. Visiting topics as divergent as the Haggadah, Candomblé, funerary traditions, and classical tragedy, each of the contributors interrogates and deconstructs biblical scripture, most notably the Psalms, Song of Solomon, and First Corinthians 13. The [End Page 198] essays often spring up from analyses of Morrison's own positions; not only her novels, but glosses of her critical commentaries are also used to buttress arguments. For example, Stave's essay, "The Master's Tools: Morrison's Paradise and the Problem of Christianity," positions magical realism against Christianity, drawing on Morrison's statement of intent for the novel as a study of "organized religion and unorganized magic as two systems" (216). Examining these two systems, Stave writes, results in an understanding of how Morrison "challenges Christianity" (213) and its foremost text, the Bible.

In a more formal discourse of intertextuality, Ágnes Surányi applies the theory of signifying and the revision of antecedent texts developed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. From within a study that includes references to the Hebrew Bible, the book of Ruth, and First Corinthians, Surányi notes Morrison's tradition of biblical epigraphs and titles. David Z. Wehner continues this acknowledgment of Morrison's biblical titles and reinforces the implication that the Bible is in fact Morrison's important received tradition. In "To Live This Life Intensely and Well: The Rebirth of Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Wehner sharpens his focus on the concept of Christian rebirth by drawing on Michel Foucault's theories of self as background for Morrison's depiction of an "alternative mode of rebirth" (91).

These first three essays are presented out of chronological order and as a way of introducing one of the more interesting aspects of the collection as a whole—the intertextuality of the essays themselves as they engage in the sort of call and response that several of the contributors assert is central to Morrison's narrative representation. Approaching her analysis of Beloved (1987) from the perspective of the Haggadah, the "tellings" that recount "acts of divine grace which afford redemption" (27), Nancy Berkowitz Bate offers a comparison with both Psalm 124 (which she ties specifically to the house at 124 Bluestone Road) and the scriptural Song of Solomon. Her essay revises the story of the Israelites as chosen people into a reading of slaves in America. In the clearest parallel between the two scriptural references, Bate offers what she defines as the three Eucharists of the novel: the blood of her sister that Denver drinks as a baby; Paul D's stolen meals of living animal flesh while on the run; and, of course, Baby Suggs's feast. Beth Benedrix, on the other hand, sees the "covenantal relationship" (105) between Guitar and Milkman as an example of the kind of space "marked by absence of the divine" (107) that is sometimes attributed to The Song of Solomon (1977).

Several of the essays treat the topic of syncretism. In privileging the role of ancestors, Sharon Jessee's "The 'Female Revealer' in Beloved, [End Page 199] Jazz and Paradise: Syncretic Spirituality in Toni Morrison's Trilogy" constructs a spiritual genealogy. In her evaluation of religious formations beginning with the Gnostic writings, Jessee points out similarities with African American religions in a revision of the concept of the divine to encompass a "female knowledge bearer...

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