New Essays on Song of Solomon.

Valerie Smith, ed. New Essays on Song of Solomon. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 128 pp. $10.95.

New Essays on Song of Solomon sustains a shift in the scholarship of Toni Morrison from readings that focus on thematic concerns of race, gender, history, and culture to how the narrative thematically constructs itself. Perhaps the most readerly text of Morrison's corpus, Song of Solomon seems least conscious of its narrative and linguistic play, especially when compared to her latest novels, Beloved and Jazz, which foreground the inadequacy of narrative structure and language. And yet, as essays in this collection show, Song of Solomon cannot be fully realized unless scholars acknowledge that Morrison's narrative is not a window into African American experience, but into the kitchen of its creation.

As an introductory guide for students of Song of Solomon, this volume provides a brief but sufficient overview of Morrison's life and work, the critical reception of Song of Solomon, and a summary of its plot. The essays offer a substantive review of familiar readings of the novel while making accessible new and difficult theoretical applications of narrative and language. Valerie Smith's introduction appropriately begins by placing Morrison in the struggle over canonicity and valuation, specifically her resistance to the marginalization of African American literature. Smith traces this commitment to Morrison's personal history and shows how the progression of Morrison's novels reveal her concern with African American culture and history. Smith's rendition of Morrison's life is satisfactory as an introduction, but the biographical information on Morrison, a rehashing of well-known and oft-repeated facts, calls to mind the critical need of a comprehensive biography.

The essays that follow the introduction focus on how African American language is embodied in a variety of narrative structures. In "From Orality to Literacy: Oral Memory in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Joyce Irene Middleton analyzes how the tension between orality and literacy generates the narrative in Song of Solomon. Middleton maintains that Morrison, by foregrounding the spoken language in her novels, stimulates the reader's memory to "see how the survival of cultural consciousness, or nomos, is preserved in a highly literate culture" (29). Morrison fosters memory by punning, naming, and stimulating listening skills so vital to African American culture. Most interesting is the way in which Middleton applies Zora Neale Hurston's contention that "the white man thinks in written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics" (25). Middleton cites as an example the occasion of Macon Dead I's choosing Pilate's name from the Bible. Because Macon Dead is more impressed with the image of the word as a sign of strength rather than with its written meaning (`Christ-killer'), Middleton contends that he thinks hieroglyphically. By refusing to accept the white man's textual authority, Macon Dead reveals a "unique creativity that merges oral and written traditions in cultural naming" (27).

Marilyn Sanders Mobley also analyzes orality in Song of Solomon. She contends in "Call and Response: Voice, Community, and Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon" that characterizations of Morrison's black communities as monolithic, speaking in one voice, are inaccurate and that communities in Morrison's fictive world are dialogic, multi-voiced, and dynamic. Drawing on Bakhtin's "Dialogic Imagination," Sanders identifies three voices in the text: the narrative voice of patriarchal discourse; the signifying voice, predominantly male, which critiques the dominant one; and the responsive feminine voice which recognizes and fosters intersubjectivity. By analyzing voice in Song of Solomon, Sanders not only makes a refreshing departure from numerous discussions of how the gaze operates in Morrison's novels, but also articulates the "gendered discourse" of Song of Solomon, the feminine voice of call and response which cultivates interdependency and shared knowing and which ultimately pulls Milkman out of his isolation and individuation into community.

In "Knowing Their Names: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," Marianne Hirsch explores the possibility of a "dual masculine-feminine legacy" in Song of Solomon that negotiates the material presence of the mother in the African American family with the absence of the father. Hirsch deconstructs the two parts of the epigraph "The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names" to illustrate the contradiction inherent in a culture that celebrates the escape of the father into freedom and yet longs for a symbolic father in language. By knowing his father's names, Milkman inherits a legacy from his forefathers and, by extension, his foremothers that unites the physicality of the maternal with the absence of the paternal. However, Hirsch points out in a coda that, while Milkman has obtained critical knowledge of his heritage, the novel "has not done the same for the female children" (90). The final essay, "The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon," by Wahneema Lubiano, identifies vernacular signifying in Song of Solomon as a postmodernist tendency to critique the arrogance of the master narrative. Lubiano points out that signifying, while recognized as a type of postmodernist metafiction, has been a tradition in the history of African American orality and literacy. As an "`on-site' metacommentary" (96) on the dominant language, vernacular signifying is both artistically and politically subversive, ultimately problematizing truth. Lubiano states that in Song of Solomon signifying, with its "plays on double meanings," causes "truths to be withheld" (103), just as Morrison's narrative with its "shifting consciousness" defies closure, and her muddying of the distinction between personal and political history calls into question the significance of the individual act. Lubiano maintains that the truth to be told in Song of Solomon is not revealed in Milkman's lone flight, but in Pilate's multiple lessons of love.

In her introduction, Valerie Smith remarks that Song of Solomon is not so popular as it once was, no doubt a casualty of the author's proliferation and breathless impatience with what she has already accomplished. Beloved and Jazz, with their brilliant technical innovation and thematic experimentation, make it difficult to look back when Morrison continues to astonish. This is all the more reason for scholars to revisit Song of Solomon, a novel that, had it been written by anyone other than Toni Morrison, would constitute in its own right a remarkable body of work.