I am a little at loss as to why this book is on the reading list in a course about postmodernism. Or even, why this book was chosen from among all those written by Tony Morrison. Clearly, as many of the blogs have pointed out, Song of Solomon is a text in which names and naming are important. Names have societal as well as personal value, and due to a communal tendency to name people according to defining characteristics, several of the characters have two names. But apart from Milkman’s unfortunate and somewhat embarrassing nickname, and even a general indignation over the fact that white people had the power to (utterly carelessly!) inscribe the very symbol of what was both a new identity and a new existence for the freed slave, the names of the characters do not seem to signify any radical (postmodern) fragmentation of identity. When thinking about the story of how his grandfather first got the solemn name that is passed down through the generations, what Milkman seems to ponder most is why his grandmother encouraged him to keep it.
In portraying black experience, the text takes an ex-centric perspective. Yet in comparison with the ex-centricity of Joann Russ’s (ultra-)feminist text, Song of Salomon reads like a male Bildungsroman. Its attacks on white society (its mention of unprovoked, random violence) seem to me more of a historical back-drop than an important force in the narrative. Similar to the way Frantz Fanon’s account of the white-male-colored-female relationship focused on criticizing the colored woman for wanting the white man, Song of Solomon seems to launch heavier attacks on the coloreds struggling to pass for white, than the position of the whites themselves. Likewise, Milkman (because he is his friend) reacts more strongly to Guitar’s involvement in the Seven Days than to the white killings of black Americans that trigger these acts of vengeance. (Of course, as the plot develops, he has every reason to…). But perhaps this is the point. Why should black narratives center on whites? Would that be subversion?
Time, which postmodernism is generally so eager to twist, thwart, and fragment, does in Song of Solomon align itself in neat chronology: we follow Malcom Dead from birth to what is either death or some kind of symbolical re-birth. Although history is an important theme, the book distinguishes itself from most postmodernist texts in that history can be recovered. The past can be understood and connected to the present and the future, and a sense of belonging and rootedness can grow. So albeit feeling a little bit like the white snobbish critic bell hooks criticized for barring black Americans access into the ‘intellectual high sphere’ of postmodernism, I remain questioning as to what in this particular text (which the author herself claims to be “very saga-like”) is postmodernist. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been working on Pyncheon the last week, but I must say I’m very curious as to how this text aligns with the others we have worked on so far.
When that is said, I must admit that as homage to the figure of the father, the description of Jake, the first Macon Dead, is one of the most beautiful I have read.