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Essay on Song of Solomon vs. Song of Songs
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon specifically illustrates how she negotiates the obstacles imposed by the task of freeing her own story from a literary past. Pilate is introduced in Song of Solomon singing the song to which the title refers. But she makes a mistake in the lyrics, substituting "Sugarman" for "Solomon," an apparent displacement of a biblical reference that might seem understandable in an illiterate. Thus the reader compounds Pilate's error with traditional literary assumptions.
As Jane Campbell notes, "Morrison lures the reader into expecting a fictionalization of the Biblical song of Solomon but replaces Christian associations with African ones." Pilate's mistake stems from a fragmented oral tradition, not an ignorance of a written text. The recovery of that uninscribed tradition is the project that re-generates identity for Pilate and Milkman in Song of Solomon and is the project inscribed within the text itself. So Morrison in this sense produces an "original" written text that fictionally creates its own unwritten source while also affirming the value of unwritten tradition.
Not that the biblical reference is made merely to tease the reader and be abandoned: Morrison says that in Song of Solomon she "used the biblical names to show the impact of the Bible (1984) on the lives of black people, their awe of it and respect for it coupled with their ability to distort it for their own purposes." Literary reference possesses a serious power that is appropriate to play with in the creation of identity. The dynamics of such distortion reveal themselves in Pilate's father's selection of her name: “Confused an melancholy over his wife's death in childbirth, [he] had thumbed through the Bible (1984), and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome..............
