"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone": The Semiotics of Death, Mourning, and Closural Practice in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Abstract

... we think terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with conflict between deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter structure, relations of beginnings, middle, and end. --Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending Closural practice twentieth century African American literature is, to borrow Wallace Stevens's trope, discourse in act of finding what will suffice.(1) The strategies that black writers construct to bring their to a sense of an ending create order out of welter of experiences that shape our collective existence. The apocalyptic significance human beings assign to endings--and their relationship to middles and beginnings--are, as Frank Kermode asserts, fictions shaped by our collective need to assign value to life as well as to death: Men, like poets rush `into middest,' medias res, when they are born; they also die medias rebus, and to sense of their they need with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly preoccupations. (The Sense of an Ending 7) Birth, death, marriage, and aging are universal intermediary that contribute to vast European literary landscape with which Kermode is concerned. The desire to make sense of [our] span is one of many possible primordial sources of human imagination. Human beings find fictive concords that will suffice to living meaningful by connecting seemingly random moments life to seamless geometry of beginnings, middles, and ends. Closure life, then, as closural strategy fiction, emphasizes what David Richter referring to moral fable calls completion, or, as Marianna Torgovnick puts it, a sense that nothing necessary has been omitted from work (Closure Novel 6). Successful closure, however, does not depend on completion any strict structural or thematic sense. Endings that fill gaps or indeterminancies (Iser) text ways that preclude further interpretation, fairy tales for example, or that restrict reader's participation making meaning by such devices as authorial intrusions occur infrequently twentieth century narrative practice. In Torgovnick's view, structural symmetry is far less revealing litmus test for successful closure than the honesty and appropriateness of ending's relationship to beginning, middle, not degree of or resolution achieved by ending (Closure Novel 6). This important point is virtually an article of faith modern and postmodern closural practice African American novel.(2) Most twentieth century African American novels general, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) specifically, resist finality or resolution achieved by ending expressed as organic wholeness, i.e., structural unity, or themes that mirror prevailing social mores, or cultural constructions of preoccupations such as death and mourning. Song of Solomon accomplishes this by its dependence on narrative fragments that ultimately form interconnected circles within circles that resist simple or closure by stressing familial, experiential, and human ties that bind constantly changing ways. The broad cultural resonance of this teleology is implicit, for example, traditional African American aphorism, goodbye ain't gone, every shut eye ain't sleep. As trope of resistance, goodbye ain't gone is textual site for any number of possible political, physical, and metaphysical struggles that form an historical map of universal particularity of African American experience, including slavery, migration, racism, religion, and family. …