Orality, Literacy, and Memory in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tuetal," but such criticism overlooks the extent to which her fiction draws on the oldest literary tradition of all, that of oral storytelling. Morrison's achievement has been to illuminate the values of an ancient form within the modern novel. By using this highly literate and literary genre, she privileges oral memory and the oral culture of the African-American community and dramatizes the cultural conflicts between oral and literate traditions. Morrison herself emphasizes the traditional elements of her work and distinguishes herself from the lineage of the modern novel, asserting in an interview with the African-American literary scholar Nellie McKay, I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense. . . . I am not experimental, I am simply trying to recreate something out of an old art form in my books. (426-27)Toni Morrison's novels are especially rich in participatory oral forms such as songs, poetic language, formulaic features, the language of ritual and oral epic, which appeal for audience involvement and do not support an aesthetic view of art for art's sake. Furthermore, a central concept in her work is that of oral memory, highly valued in an oral culture but ignored and devalued in a highly literate one. Observing how her characters use their memories, readers gain insight into the psychology that sustains an oral tradition and into the implications of the loss of oral memory. Toni Morrison's fiction encourages literature and language scholars to reexamine the relationship between the narrative structures of traditional oral storytelling and those of the modern novel, to analyze the

Toni morrison’s poetics of intertextuality or the supreme art of borrowing

“…Magic realism is one of the adequate tools that Morrison is equipped with to limn these troubled psyches. Morrison 47 weaves then her poetics of intertextuality with magic realism to render to its fullest the effects of segregation on her community (Middleton, 1993;1977;2004).…”