Denise Heinze, The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels, University of Georgia Press: Athens and London, 1993.
135-137:
While Song of Solomon is generally seen as a myth of the male maturation, it also contains the subtext of Pilate's rite de passage and the ritual of cultural immersion. In her history is the process by which she acquires the values that will sustain Milkman and by extension, the black community. Pilate's initiation occurs much earlier than Milkman's. Having been raised in relative isolation in the edenic Lincoln's Heaven, Pilate is abruptly and cruelly cast out as an orphan into the greater reality. Her quest for acceptance, however, turns into rejection, her navel-less belly a semé of exclusion. Thus, in a reversal of the male myth, her initiation does not result in integration into the community but isolation from it. She must reach an individual, though parallel, level of maturity: "When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First, she cut off her hair ... Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her" (p. 149). Pilate must first deconstruct herself - symbolized by cutting off her hair - before she can reconstruct truth which in addition to her two maxims - that she does not fear death and she has "compassion for troubled people" (p. 150) - include traditional values. In her wanderings, Pilate has engaged in the hard work ethic: "Hoeing, fishing, plowing, planting, and helping out at stills" (p. 147). Formal education was not a waste. "I didn't mind it too much," she says, "matter of fact, I liked a lot of it. I loved the geography part. Learning about that made me want to read. And the teacher was tickled at how much I liked geography. She let me have the book and I took it home with me to look at" (p. 142). Had it not been for the child-molesting preacher, Pilate would have stayed in school. Instead, she takes her education on the road, learning geography and life through experience.
In addition, and more important than acquiring traditional values, Pilate, isolated from an uncomprehending society, develops compassion, a respect for people's privacy, generosity, and unrestrained laughter. "She gave up ... all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships" (p. 150). That concern leads her back to community, the natural and inevitable completion of her maturation process. Ironically, then, isolation from community inadvertently provides the means for Pilate to develop antistructure.
When Pilate returns to Southside she again endures rejection even though she eventually becomes the answer to Macon Dead's example of a good life. ... She represents the antithesis of her brother's way of life, though they essentially share the same values: hard work, education, and family. The difference, however, is again the motive behind these values....
Pilate's otherness is not initially welcomed by Southside residents who see Macon, though begrudgingly, as the natural leader. However, her presence redefines for Southsiders first the meaning of woman and second that of community responsibility. Pilate revivifies black American womanhood because she is so tied to her African heritage, unlike the impure Mrs. Dead who epitomizes the extent of Western influence" "They were different, these two women. One black, the other lemony. The one corseted, the other buck naked under her dress. One well read but ill traveled. The other had read only a geography book, but had been from one end of the country to another" (p. 139). ... Still, they are both women who share a commonality that transcends their socio-economic differences. "Their similarities were profound. Both were vitally interested in Macon Dead's son, and both had close and supportive posthumous communication with their fathers" (p. 139). Their common concerns bridge the synaptic gap of difference that still exists, but which shows promise in Southside.
That transformation will occur through the character of Milkman, whose education in value begins with his aunt's arrival. Because Pilate is indifferent to most of the social mores, she is initially perceived as by Milkman and the community as demented: "She was the one who was ugly, dirty, poor and drunk. The queer aunt whom [Milkman's] sixth-grade schoolmates teased him about and whom he hated because he personally felt personally responsible for her ugliness, her poverty, her dirt, and her wine" (p. 37). But Milkman's perspective changes dramatically as he is drawn to the spiritual force that suffuses her being. ... Once Milkman disabuses himself of these artificial considerations - cleanliness and physical beauty - he is able eventually to comprehend the most valuable lesson of all - loving thy neighbor."
149:
The previous chapters have emphasized the highly negative impact of double-consciousness on the black community as it is manifested in Morrison's works... By using fantasy in her literature, Morrison is able to some extent to mitigate the problem of double-consciousness and articulate a spiritual response to life in which human beings are treated to possibilities for growth and development denied in their real lives.
The double-consciousness or multiconsciousness that compels Morrison to use fantasy is a result of transculturation, or as Henry Louis Gates says of the black vernacular tradition and Standard English, her "Symbiotic relationship between the black and white."
159-160
For Morrison, to create ghosts and witches is not her attempt at the sensational, but an almost mimetic impulse. In her own upbringing,
she absorbed the black lore, music, language, myths and rituals that give her prose its special flavor and tone. "We were intimate with the supernatural," she recalls. Her parents told thrillingly terrifying ghost stories. Her mother sang constantly. Her grandmother kept a dream book and played the numbers off it, decoding dream symbols to determine what number to bet on. Morrison's world, like the world of her novels, was filled with signs, visitations, ways of knowing that reached beyond the five senses.14
When Morrison recreates these elements in her art, she purposely departs from consensus reality, not to foreground the supernatural as a unique expression of the black community, but as a way to Signify the difference between culturally imposed ways of seeing. Morrison's assumption in her writing, her consensus reality, is very different from Kathryn Hume's because the supernatural does exist, outside of literature and, in a revisionist fashion, presumes a truth that is unassailable. The most compelling evidence of Morrison's belief in the supernatural is her conviction that she maintains a relationship with her dead father. In her oft-quoted Newsweek interview, she told Jean Strouse about her father's run-in with racist whites. Strouse's recorder did not pick up that segment of the interview, and Morrison explained to Strouse: "I know why. I told you something I wasn't supposed to tell you. So my father took care of it. I'm not surprised. He's done that before." 15 But Morrison's ultimate purpose in using the supernatural in art is not to prove its existence -- her novels intentionally represent it ambiguously -- but to create this ongoing dialectic between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknowable, the signified and the Signified -- the supernatural as a trope on reality. The effect of this is a redefinition for some and reaffirmation for others of a consensus reality that dilutes the debilitating effects of double-consciousness, racism, and oppression.
164-168:
While Morrison implies that the evil assigned to Sula is more psychological than supernatural, in Song of Solomon she further blurs the lines between mimesis and fantasy. In this novel Morrison uses myth as a form of transcendence, a device that mitigates double-consciousness by collapsing the dichotomy between black and white. Myths are "the prototypes of all narrative, the ancestors and models of later developments." According to Jack Zipes, myth, placed in the context of history and culture, redefines the existing order while it gives rise to a new one.
By relocating the historical origins of the folk and fairy tales in politics and class struggle, the essence of its durability and vitality will become more clear, and its magic will be seen as part of humankind's own imaginative and rational drive to create new worlds that allow for total development of human qualities. The utopian impulse has its concrete base. "The magic in the tales (if magic is what it is) lies in people and creatures being shown what they really are," and one could add, in being shown what they are really and realistically capable of accomplishing.22
Myth, as it is used in Solomon, is not only a metaphor but a course of action that, as it muddies the distinction between spiritual and physical flight, provides fuel for the collective imagination.
Solomon is based on several myths of flying. According to De Weever, "In presenting the evolution of a song in the possession of a particular family, the author uses a variety of myth and folk tale: Biblical and Greek myth and European fairy and folk tales." 23 It is also based on the Icarus story:
In classical myth Icarus is clearly a hero of the phallic type -- the youth attempts to break free of the earth; intent on self-gratification and overestimating his own potential, he rejects his father's guidance; his wings are melted by the fiery, masculine symbol -- the sun; and he falls back into the sea, earth's watery element, feminine symbol of change and rebirth. Thus, the Icarian mythic pattern is one of personal quest, sensual and egocentric, to test the individual's potential. It is a flight in the double sense of the word -- a flight from authority and repression and a flight towards freedom; it is also a flight which ends in a fall.24
Myth often operates on the principle of binary opposition, "a narrative sequence," Greimas says, "which embodies this mode by the employment of two actants whose relationship must be either oppositional or its reverse; and on the surface level this relationship will therefore generate fundamental actions of disjunction and conjunction, separation and union, struggle and reconciliation."25 Binary opposition constitutes Song of Solomon's mythic structure "following the clear pattern of birth and youth, alienation, quest, confrontation, reintegration common to mythic heroes as disparate as Moses, Achilles, and Beowulf. Such a mythic chronology emphasizes the hero's rejection and eventual assimilation into his society."26 Morrison emphasizes less this reintegration into society, suggesting that Milkman is taking a more important step by realigning himself with his history.
While this pattern traditionally involves a male, it is appropriated by Morrison for her female characters as well. Pilate, in her youth, is alienated from society because she lacks a navel; the guilt she harbors retards reintegration into society until just before her death when she is confronted with the knowledge that Macon did not kill the white man after all. Morrison also varies the mythic structure by delaying the initiations of Corinthians and Hagar into society until late in life thus depicting "the extreme difficulty of the black woman's search for self-determination, and certainly the results of these initiations underscore that point."27 Thus even within the mythic structure, binary opposition is at work, contrasting the relative ease of Milkman's transcendence to the near impossibility for most women in the novel of achieving a similar transformation.
By drawing on and manipulating a variety of mythic patterns, Morrison hopes to achieve, in the final analysis, a new world. When Morrison chose a myth to base her story on, she did not do so for its charm or allure, but to present the reader with an alternative to modern society. As she says, "We have to acknowledge that the thing we call 'literature' is pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked."28 In a pluralistic society many different realities exist and truth becomes relative. According to Damian Grant, there are two kinds of truth, correspondence and coherence. Correspondence, where "truth proposed is truth that corresponds," is whatever the majority of people perceive truth to be, based on empirical and scientific observation. Coherence or intuitive perception is "created in the very act of perception." 29 While Morrison exhibits both truths in Solomon -- Pilate's intuition and Macon's pragmatism -- she is obviously wary of the select group that dictates truth to others and attempts to shape their reality with the force of an iron cast. The inhabitants of Southside often rebel against the empiricists with intuitive truth: a hospital of Mercy does not exist in the black community; the supernatural does constitute a reality; letters can be sent to a street that was never mapped; and men and animals do talk to each other. Macon Dead has forfeited his coherent truth for correspondent truth and it is that condition Morrison wishes, by showing its effects on Milkman and Macon, to reverse in the reader.
In Solomon Morrison disorients what Grant terms the conscientious realist who looks for scientific, not romantic, truth. By doing so she directs the reader to a conscious realism: "Truth in art: which is therefore a kind of 'knowing,' not an abstract or scientific kind of knowing that expresses itself not in description, repetition, or imitation, but in making, making new."30 The world of Southside is an old one recognizable to the conscientious realist. However, when reality elides into allegory, the reader must employ conscious realism to share in the epiphanic ending and all of its ramifications for contemporary society. Because Solomon refuses to defer to a preconceived reality, the reader is faced with the genre of the fantastic, which "manifests itself in ambiguity, in the hesitation felt by someone who knows only natural laws, when faced with an event which is apparently supernatural.''31 These events are so numerous in Solomon that reality and fantasy are indistinguishable and the beleaguered reader has little recourse but to accept the fantastic as an established corollary to the real world. Pilate can talk to her dead father, Ruth's watermark does grow each day, and Shalimar and Milkman can fly. By casually mingling the real and bizarre, Morrison "has achieved a subtler and more satisfying synthesis between those crude abstractions reality and imagination, and those equally crude adjustable spanners of criticism, objective and subjective."32 Readers cannot approach Solomon armed with a reality as if it were a geometric given; they must seek a reality in "a continuous process that never allows the concept to stabilize or the word to offer a convenient mould of meaning."33
Once readers can accept this, they, the real audience, can merge with the fictive one, its writer, and with the text to recognize with Milkman at the end of the novel that the impossibility becomes the stunning probability. Milkman learns this sporadically from different characters as part of his maturation process. Pilate tells him, when he is only twelve, of the man whose imagination was responsible for his own death. When Milkman asks how she explained to a jealous wife her life-saving grip on the man, Pilate responds, "The truth. That I was trying to keep him from falling off the cliff" (p. 41). To Pilate it is the truth since the cliff in his mind was just as real and fatal as any ledge that existed outside his imagination. This parable strikes a chord in Milkman whose own imagination creates conflicts in him. When he witnesses his mother and the surreal dance of the tulips, "he called it a dream because he didn't want to tell [Guitar] it had really happened, that he had really seen it" (p. 105). Later, despite his faith in his own altered reality, he laughs at Freddie's tale that a white bull killed his mother. Freddie scolds, "But they's a lot of strange things you don't know nothin' about, boy" (p. llo). With Pilate's help and his own experiences to deal with, Milkman permits the possibility of the fantastic. When he meets Circe, dreams and reality fuse in a spectacular array of color and sound; Milkman has cracked the facade of civilized truth and can tap the intuitive knowledge that says if "out of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old girl" (p. 213), then anything is possible: Ryna still bemoans the loss of Shalimar; Macon Dead I lives; Shalimar flies.
Morrison's world is apocalyptic in vision, and ancient in its suggestion of remedy. Love and freedom replace oppression as the only beliefs worth adhering to. Males do not control females or whites blacks for " 'otherness' no longer functions as an extension of domination,"34 and communities nurture rather than starve their members. If readers can accept the validity of the world in Solomon, Morrison asks that they take one more step -- the application of literature to life that will transform the dirge of America into a psalm.
197-198:
14 Interview with Jean Strouse, "Toni Morrison's Black Magic," Newsweek, 30 March 1981, 54.
22 Jack Zipes, " Breaking the Magic Spell: Politics and the Fairy Tale," New German Critique 14 (1968): 118-19.
23 De Weever, " Toni Morrison's Use of Fairy Tale," 131.
24 Diane Kim Bowman, " Flying High: The American Icarus in Morrison, Roth and Updike," Perspectives in Contemporary Literature 8 (1982): 10.
25 A. J. Greimas quoted in Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, 90.
26 Leslie A. Harris, Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," MELUS 7 (Fall 1980): 70.
27 Jane Bakerman, " The Seams Can't Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison," Black American Literature Forum 12 (Summer 1978): 56-60.
28 Toni Morrison quoted in the Strouse Newsweek interview, 53.
29 Damian Grant, Realism (London: Methuen, 1970; rpt., 1978), 9.
31 Tzvetan Todorov quoted in Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, 101-2.
34 Susan Wilis, " Eruptions of Funk," Black American Literature Forum 16 (1982): 41.