South in Toni Morrison文档格式.docx

1、Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with F. Its free! Saveit.Song of Solomon, Toni Morrisons third novel in an increasingly varied and rich body of work, is a remarkable narrative. The novels power lies not only in its recovery and representation of African American experi

2、ence in the midtwentieth century but also in Morrisons insistence on the necessity of healing her broken, alienated protagonist, Milkman Dead. Central to both his maturation and his healing is Milkmans recognition that the cultural past of the African American South continues to create his twentieth

3、-century present in ways that are not constraining but liberating. Critics have typically understood Milkmans growth and his healing in the context of the mythic quest or the classic initiation story. To be sure, Morrisons novel reflects archetypal initiation patterns found throughout western litera

4、ture, as Milkman follows a quest, first for gold, then for knowledge about his ancestors. Like his predecessors in the bildungsroman, Milkman moves from a selfish and juvenile immaturity to a complex knowledge of adulthood.2 Yet, Morrison does not merely reinscribe the initiation motif. Rather, the

5、novel subverts the dominant model of initiation found both in American fiction in general and in African American literature in particular, as Morrison rewrites the classic American initiation story. In stories as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineaux and Ralph Ellisons Invisib

6、le Man, the American protagonist usually moves from a rural to an urban area, from the protection and identity of the nurturing family and friends to the isolation and alienation of western individualism. Such a movement allows the youth to escape the confines of the past in order to create himself

7、as an individual acting outside of time and convention. This freedom comes with a price, however: such an initiation typically brings separation, restriction, and a knowledge of evil.3 This trope is problematized in many African American works, such as Frederick Douglasss Narrative and Harriet Jacob

8、ss Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which the protagonist moves from an oppressive, enslaving, agrarian South to an enabling, industrial North. For the authors of these slave narratives, leaving behind family, friends, and even names was often essential for escape. For the African American c

9、ommunity in the twentieth century, however, Morrison suggests that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the South destroys spiritual and moral identity. Thus, the trip to the South is central to Morrisons subversion of the classic American initiation story. For the conventionally po

10、or, naive, sensitive youth from the provinces, Morrison substitutes Macon Dead III, nicknamed Milkman, an emotionally isolated, alienated black man who has grown up in the industrial northern midwest, in a Michigan city on the shores of Lake Superior. 4 As the protagonist, he is youthful only becaus

11、e he has stretched his carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years （Morrison 98）. Still living in his parents home, collecting rents for his father, Milkman has yet to reach emotional and social maturity. His poverty is spiritual, not material; his sensitivity is that of adolescent self-centeredness.

12、His initiation takes him physically from the urban North through a progressively rural and southern landscape to the home of his ancestors in Shalimar, Virginia. What begins as a selfish quest for gold, for material success and escape, becomes a quest for knowledge of his family history and an ident

13、ity based on that history. Song of Solomon is, finally, the story not just of one mans individualization but of the potential for healing of a community. Milkman is indeed naive about himself, his family, and his community, but the very nature of the knowledge he acquires marks Song of Solomon as a

14、different kind of initiation story. The initiates knowledge is typically defined as a loss of innocence and a recognition of restriction. Milkman begins, however, at the point of restriction that comes from separation, from the hyperindividualization that grows out of the American culture of competi

15、tion, capitalism, and racism. Like the traditional American initiate, he must recognize his own capacity for evil, but the knowledge of his familys past and his place in a community that evolved from that past enables Milkman to ascend rather than, conventionally, to fall through knowledge （Fiedler

16、22）. His journey into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family. With his initiation, Milkman moves from a passive, irresponsible ignorance to an active, authentic, and liberating participation i

17、n the corporate life of black community. The American South is crucial to this narrative of healing, because the problem for Milkman and his family concerns not just the relationship to the past, but to a past that is specifically caught up with the history of slavery in the South. Morrison signals

18、the importance of the South with the very name of the section of town where Milkmans aunt Pilate lives. Just as Southside serves as a reminder of the southern origins of the Black people who populate the novel, so Pilate offers Milkman an emotional connection to his southern ancestors. Less directly

19、, the novel predicts the necessity of Milkmans journey to the South with his strange, dream-like walk down Not Doctor Street, in the wake of a disturbing conversation with his father about his mother. As he tries to make his way down the street, on his way to Southside, he keeps running into people,

20、 all going the direction he was coming from （78）. Milkman will have to move against the tide of Black migration north in order to transcend his aimlessness, to live for something other than superficial satiation and pleasure. Deeply connected to Milkmans aimlessness is his namelessness. Morrison use

21、s knowing ones name as a metaphor for knowing ones past, and it is the South that holds the secret of Milkmans family name and family past. The novels epigraph beckons to the power of the ancestral name: The fathers may soar, and the children may know their names. It is a kind of blessing that Morri

22、son bestows on her fictional black community, and, as Linda Krumholz has argued, it captures the tension between black mens mobility. . . and familial and communal responsibilities （555）. Milkmans family has lost its ancestral name, achieving mobility at the cost of intimacy and identity. The origin

23、al Macon Dead, Milkmans grandfather, received his name from a drunken Yankee at the Freedmans Bureau. According to Milkmans father, the first Macon kept the name because his wife insisted on it, because it was new and would wipe out the past （53）. Yet losing the name of the ancestor causes the Dead

24、family to lose history, community, and tradition as well; the past becomes dead, and the loss of name damages the present an understanding of that past. Names in Song of Solomon are, of course, fraught with significance. The novel points, on the one hand, to the importance of names in traditional so

25、cieties of West Africa-the origin of most Africans enslaved in North Americawhere names are identified with the individuals essence, with the core of ones being.5 For American slaves, names provided a link with the African past; in the new world slaves conducted secret naming ceremonies and used the

26、ir African names when they could avoid the presence of Whites. Yet the novel also points to the complicated status of surnames for African Americans in the United States. The denial of a family name, like the denial of marital legitimacy and the breaking apart of families, prevented stable family id

27、entities for enslaved Americans. As historian Leon Litwack points out, many slave holders did not want Blacks, be it before or after the Civil War, to take their own last name, and former slaves in turn rejected the surnames of their White owners as signs of illegitimate claims to ownership. But upo

28、n emancipation, when to be a citizen meant possessing both a first and a last name, freedmen sometimes took their most recent masters name; more often, they claimed the name of the earliest master they could recall, in order to retain a sense of family and identity.6 Others wanted to choose their ow

29、n names, rejecting suggestions from Freedmans Bureau officials and choosing instead names that, although they were of European derivation, allowed them a sense of self-determination. The healing of Milkmans own brokenness-not only as an individual but as a representative of an entire Black generatio

30、n-requires Milkmans restoration to the community of his ancestors, and that requires, literally, the discovery of their names. Because Milkman has lost his name-and his heritage-he can not establish meaningful connections with his family and his community. He grows up feeling excluded and alone. The

31、 first of several symbolic markers of Milkmans separation and his brokenness comes when he is the first Black infant born in the all-White Mercy Hospital. His prolonged nursing also sets him apart. At the age of four, having discovered that he cannot fly, Milkman loses all interest in himself and li

32、kewise has no interest in those around him （9）. His older sisters display only casual malice （10）, while other children exclude him from neighborhood singing games-the kind of game, ironically, that will provide the answer to the mystery of his great-grandfathers life and identity. As he grows older, Milkmans failures come from his sense of alienation. This alienation originates, in part, in his lack of awareness and insight and h