Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

In Song of Solomon, Morrison recreates what might be termed as a black and culturally specific bildungsroman, or an adventure story which has a black male as its central protagonist. European models of this genre, realized most specifically in the genre of narrative fiction, actually begin with epic examples like the Aenid, and grail stories like Parsifal.  They include Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, The Sorrows of Young Werther, David Copperfield and the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as the The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 

 My contention in this paper is that Morrison creates a dialogue between the  “dominant” and “muted” of culture by fusing the specificity of black experience with a narrative model that is European. If she is capable of producing in Gates’s terms a “speakerly” text, she is also superbly capable of fusing “speakerly” with scripted traditions, and actually taking narrative to the borders of both the oral and the scripted.

In this novel, a young Black man, Milkman Dead, unwittingly goes in search of his origins as he looks for a treasure that his father and he believe lies buried in some cave in the South. Macon Dead, the father, was wedded to the American dream of power through material acquisition. In this context, it is important to say something about the name Dead, that Milkman and his family all bear. The name “Dead” stuck as a result of a drunken whim of a Yankee.  In a conversation with Thomas Le Clair Morrison talks about how black people lost their names and its psychological impact: