Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

I have affection for masterful use of repetition. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I grew up in a musical and religious household, that I learned early on the power of a chorus to move you on a deeper level of consciousness. Even as I shed the religion of my childhood, I clung to music, trading in devotional tunes for the secular, The King James Bible for Leaves of Grass. I was thinking about this very thing the other day as I sat in Washington Square in San Francisco. I had just visited the Beat Museum and purchased a think paperback copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. I was reading the poem again for the first time in years, noticing more than ever the influence of repetitious Whitman. And now I’m thinking of this moment again as I narrow down my list of topics to analyze regarding Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Her use of repetition as a means to deliver her visual and thematic message is lyrical, worth examination.
In an interview titled, “The Art of Fiction”, Morrison described her work in Song of Solomon as “painterly”. In the first chapter, we can certainly see how the repeated use of color engages us visually in the bizarre suicide that opens the novel and introduces the issue of race. Every page of the first ten pages contains numerous literal (as in “yellow house” (3) ) and figurative (as in “sunshine cake” (10) ) references to the colors red, yellow, and blue. The impact is that it indeed feels like a painting. In her description of the only two patients of the only black doctor in town every admitted to Mercy Hospital, “both white” (5), Morrison begins a repetition of color that will continue throughout the entire novel. The repeated labeling of black and white makes race an issue that the reader can’t ignore.
In her narrative and in the songs included in her narrative, Morrison repeats the ideas and images that are at the heart of her narrative. “O Sugarman done fly away” (6), the rose-petal lady sings as Robert Smith leaps to his death wearing big blue wings. When Milkman experiences transformation in the end of the novel it’s the song of his ancestors that helps him, “Solomon done fly / Solomon done gone / Solomon cut across the sky / Solomon gone home”. Flight and wings are repeated throughout the novel in the songs and in the narrative. Even on a sentence level, Morrison uses parallel structure to “sing” her story, “The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing” (260). Black, white, gold, mercy, justice, deserve: in passage after passage, Morrison repeats words as a kind of chant below the narrative, deepening the overall impact of the story.
Nowhere is this chanting more evident than in Milkman’s transformation from Macon Dead Jr. to a man overflowing with gratitude for life, as in this scene when he comes home to his lover, Sweet:
“He couldn’t get back to Shalimar fast enough, and when he did
get there, dusty and dirty from the run, he leaped into the car and
drove to Sweet’s house. He almost broke her door down from the
incredible high that had begun as soon as he slammed the Byrd
woman’s door…’I want to swim!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, let’s go
swimming. I’m dirty and I want waaaaaater!’
Sweet smiled and said she’d give him a bath.
‘Bath! You think I’d put myself in that tight little porcelain box? I
need the sea! The whole goddam sea!’ Laughing, hollering, he ran
over to her and picked her up at the knees and ran around the room
with her over his shoulder. ‘The sea! I have to swim in the sea. Don’t
give me no itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. In need the whole entire
complete deep blue sea!’” (327).

Alliteration, internal rhyme, and the repetition of swim and sea make this passage like a sermon, moving you with sound and rhythm as much as meaning.
Often I attempt such rhythmic communication in my writing. It’s not easily to pull off consistently. It doesn’t always get the reception you’d want, particularly in a culture of readers who’ve been taught that the repeated occurrence of words in what they write is redundant and who are saturated in punchy, straight-forward prose. Oh, but I love it when a writer lapses into a musical mix of words that elaborate on the moment, that sound good and repeat. Morrison’s Song of Solomon is both painterly and song-like and as we know, painting and song are powerful ways to deliver meaning, to move, if movement is what you’re after.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.