This research will examine elements of magic realism and what Malcolm Bradbury calls "the paradoxes and ambiguities of human identity" that emerge in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. The research will set forth the pattern of ideas that make Song of Solomon relevant to identity issues in the context of black culture and then discuss the means by which such narrative strategies and devices as magic realism, as well as other features of Morrison's work that Bradbury identifies, such as the power of myth and hidden fables, are employed to reach coherent meaning and sentient effect.
In discussing cultural myth and archetypes that explain collective memory and cultural identity, Eliade (27-8) refers to "acts which presuppose an absolute reality, a reality which is extrahuman . . . created in illo tempore, in the mythical period, by an ancestor, a totemic animal, a god, or a hero." By ritual or custom, the hero's acts may be duplicated in a given culture, thus transmitting it and keeping the paradigm alive. In a discussion that focuses on the figure of the mythic hero, Campbell cites the "successful adventure of the hero" that unlocks and releases the "flow of life into the body of the world" (40). He continues:
For a culture still nurtured in mythology the landscape, as well as every phase of human existence, is made alive with symbolical suggestion. . . . Here and there . . . are special shrines. Wherever a hero has been born, has wrought, or has passed back into the void, the place is marked and sanctified. . . . Someone at this point discovered eternity (Campbell 43).
The mythic world that is the subject of study for Campbell and Eliade can be discerned as well in Morrison's Song of Solomon. However, whereas Campbell and Eliade discuss archetypes and patterns that have been observed in a variety of cultures around the world, Morrison structures Song of Solomon in a way that has the central character discover an archetypal patter...