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

"... we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and elaborate peripeteia. And we concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relations of beginnings, middle, and end." --Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending Closural practice in twentieth century African American literature is, to borrow Wallace Stevens's trope, a discourse "in the act of finding what will suffice."(1) The strategies that black writers construct to bring their work to "a sense of an ending" create order out of the 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 the middest,' in medias res, when they are born; they also die in medias rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. (The Sense of an Ending 7) Birth, death, marriage, and aging are universal "intermediary preoccupations" that contribute to the the 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 the human imagination. Human beings find the "fictive concords" that will suffice to make living meaningful by connecting seemingly random moments in life to a seamless geometry of beginnings, middles, and ends. Closure in life, then, as in closural strategy in 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 a work" (Closure in the Novel 6). Successful closure, however, does not depend on completion in any strict structural or thematic sense. Endings that "fill the gaps" or "indeterminancies" (Iser) in the text in ways that preclude further interpretation, fairy tales for example, or that restrict the reader's participation in making meaning by such devices as authorial intrusions occur infrequently in twentieth century narrative practice. In Torgovnick's view, structural symmetry is a far less revealing litmus test for successful closure than "the honesty and appropriateness of the ending's relationship to beginning, middle, not the degree of finality or resolution achieved by the ending" (Closure in the Novel 6). This important point is virtually an article of faith in modern and postmodern closural practice in the African American novel.(2) Most twentieth century African American novels in general, and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) specifically, resist the "finality or resolution achieved by the ending" expressed as organic wholeness, i.e., structural unity, or themes that mirror the prevailing social mores, or cultural constructions of intermediary 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 finality or closure by stressing the familial, experiential, and human ties that bind in constantly changing ways. The broad cultural resonance of this teleology is implicit, for example, in the traditional African American aphorism, "every goodbye ain't gone, every shut eye ain't sleep." As a trope of resistance, "every goodbye ain't gone" is a textual site for any number of possible political, physical, and metaphysical struggles that form an historical map of the universal particularity of African American experience, including slavery, migration, racism, religion, and family. …