Song of Solomon, Narrative Identity, and the Faulknerian Intertext

Abstract

As the title of this chapter suggests, I believe that Morrison’s intertextual engagement with canonical white modernist writing tells us something about her ongoing construction of authorial identity in her first four novels. Although I have speculated on Morrison’s relation to Virginia Woolf in the previous chapter, I have waited until this moment to consider more fully the implications of what it means to read an African-American writer in the context of white writing. My reason for doing so is largely pragmatic. Since completing her master’s thesis in 1955, Morrison has had much more to say about William Faulkner’s fiction than about Woolf ’s; the very quantity of Morrison’s commentary on Faulkner, therefore, provides the source material for developing an understanding of her relation to high modernism.