Song of Solomon’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

The critical history of Morrison’s third novel unravels itself as a conundrum in more ways than one. The writer confesses to snubbing the writing process in her foreword to the 2004 Vintage edition, which also reveals that her father’s death during the creative blackout that occurred after The Bluest Eye and Sula brought her muse to life. Having “long despised artists’ chatter” about those “‘voices’ that speak to them and enable a vision,” Morrison found no access to Song of Solomon until her dead father, to whom she had felt closer than she did to herself, answered her deliberate quest for advice: “‘What are the men you have known really like?’” Having been blessed by his inspiration, the author trusted her “‘bright angel’” thereafter (xi–xii).

His response led to yet another conundrum: “The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work. To travel. To fly” (xii). Known to inform her creative writing students that she wasn’t remotely interested in reading about their “little lives,” Morrison often declared her personal story uneventful. Since she didn’t swim, ski, or skydive, she lived vicariously, and most intensely, through the characters she created, locating her most vital self when she was with them. As a black woman writing about the causes and significance of the “traveling Ulysses scene, for black men,” Morrison had to turn her own psyche inside out to dislocate her typical mode of disruption: “I couldn’t use the same kind of language at all. And it took a long time for the whole thing to fall together because men are different and they are thinking about different things. The language had to be different” (Gates and Appiah 387–91).

Time and place had to be different, too. With Song of Solomon, Morrison interrupts her previous zigzaggy structures, opting for a straightforward chronology and traditional literary realism as she accompanies her archetypal hero on his call to epic adventure.