From "The Roman Actor" to "Scream": Postmodernity in the Early Modern Era

What exactly is postmodernism? This is a difficult question to answer since one of the characteristics of postmodernism is that nothing can be known absolutely or apprehended fully. This means that postmodernism itself is indefinable. However, according to Dr. Mary Klages of the University of Colorado at Boulder, postmodernism shares the same qualities as modernism and that it is the attitudes toward those qualities that differentiate the postmodern from the modern (Klages). The main difference in attitude is that modernists see, for example, a fragmentation in perception in a negative way while postmodernists see it positively. In her online article “Postmodernism,” Klages identifies seven defining characteristics of modern/postmodern thought. It can therefore be reasonably posited that by examining a text for these characteristics and the attitudes it conveys about them a determination can be made as to whether or not the text is a modern or postmodern work. What is surprising however is that the results of doing so suggest that modernism (and more importantly postmodernism) began much earlier than the twentieth century. It began in fact during the early modern period.

The first characteristic that Klages notes is “an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing . . . an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived” (Klages). When a poet, for example, writes not about the beauty of an object but about how that beauty made the poet feel, that is modern. When the poet writes about the multiple and contradictory feelings that beauty aroused and the apparatus through which it was perceived, that is postmodern.

As a corollary the second characteristic is a shift away from single narrative structures with a simple black and white moral perspective to one that incorporates a multiplicity of perspectives and shades of gray. The villain of a piece isn’t simply evil but has complex motivations that render the evil understandable.

The next two characteristics are “a blurring of distinctions between genres” and “an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials” (Klages). Perhaps these qualities are the most apparent in early modern texts; how many narrative plays come to mind that are written in verse, utilize song, music and dance and rely equally upon comedy and tragedy? Likewise the fifth quality Klages identifies, “a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness” could prompt volumes of analysis on early modern playwriting in itself.

The sixth distinction, “a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs . . . and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories” illuminates a curiosity when juxtaposing modernism/postmodernism with early modernism. Whereas modernists/postmodernists chose to reject traditional aesthetics early modernists failed to employ them because they largely did not exist. The only true aesthetic theory of the time was that articulated by Aristotle which for the most part was not applicable to early modern works.

The final characteristic is “a rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture” (Klages). Again the irony here in relation to the early moderns is that that distinction largely did not exist. While there were some conflicts regarding class, education and language use ideas about “appropriate” content in cultural products had not been formulated.

Although Klages only identifies these seven defining characteristics of modernism/postmodernism there are two others that are commonly associated with these types of thought whose distinctions clearly delineate the differences between them. The first of these two concerns the use of technology. As film director Wes Craven points out in the DVD commentary track to his film Scream (which will be discussed here):

I think what the modern age was conceived to be was . . . where everything’s going to be alright through technology and postmodern in the loosest sense I think can be that that dream, that illusion is over and we’re sort of moving into something where we’re having a much more realistic view of the way mankind is going. And it’s not all going to be solved by technology . . . The technology is not bringing peace and love.

Modernism is thus typically marked by a faith in technology while postmodernism displays a distrust of
technology.

The other issue separating the modern and postmodern is authority. Modernists show a great reliance on authority figures while postmodernists are typically cynical of authority if not completely afraid of it. In an analysis of the films Scream and The Blair Witch Project, Andrew Schopp explains, “They embody the postmodern fear that some unidentified force works behind the scenes, authoring our lives, our worlds, and, in this case, our deaths. They also signify that rules are made to be followed only by those subject to the rules, not by those who create them” (Schopp 132-33).

It is fairly easy when examining a postmodern text to see why it is postmodern. It is not as easy to see how a text not usually believed as postmodern fits into that mold. Therefore in order to show the early modern roots of postmodernity I shall here compare point by point the film Scream with Philip Massinger’s 1626 play The Roman Actor. The uncanny similarities should become readily apparent.

The first criterion of postmodernism, the emphasis on multiple ways of perceiving and experiencing an object, is clearly displayed in Scream. The premise of the film is that killers employ the conventions and clichés of horror films (specifically the subgenre of horror known as “slasher” films) in order to commit their crimes. The sensationalistic nature of the killings results in intense interest by the news media. One tabloid reporter in particular is concerned with manipulating the events to her own ends by boosting her ratings and the sales of a book she has written. The subtext here is that visual media influences our perceptions of reality and in fact constructs reality, an idea reminiscent of that behind Jean Beaudrillard’s work. Part of what Beaudrillard says is that our sense of reality is determined by others mediating it for us. At one point in the film, while the characters are watching horror movies on video, they are being watched by the killers and by a hidden camera placed by the reporter while the film’s audience watches it all in the theatre or in their homes. As director Craven puts it:

This is fun for me because you’ve got a situation where you’ve got about four types of media working at once . . . It’s like this wonderful sort of layer cake of realities and various versions of the truth that I think does make it kind of postmodern if that means anything. It’s very much a new
way of constructing a film where you acknowledge all of the different media that’s involved in our lives right now.

Furthermore the film conveys the postmodern sense that such mediation is dangerous because it is only an artificial form of control. In Schopp’s essay he points out that films like Scream and The Blair Witch Project “[reflect] contemporary fears that the presumably ‘safe’ world we inhabit is rendered so only through cultural narratives that mediate our experience and, much like Heather’s camera [in The Blair Witch Project], filter reality, providing a false sense of safety that loses its potency when one loses control over the mediating device” (126-27). Instead of allowing people to control their own realities mediation controls them and can be used against them.

This same issue of control, mediation and the way reality is perceived is on display in The Roman Actor. Here the character of the Emperor Domitian forces the miserly father of his servant to watch a play. The intent is to cure the father of his miserliness by enacting a scene that reflects his situation. The scene fails to cure the man, possibly because it is not an accurate enough representation of reality; as Domitian says, “Can it be / This sordid thing, Parthenius, is thy father? / No actor can express him” (2.1.259-61). When this mediated reality fails to work Domitian steps in to effect the cure by executing the man. Likewise Domitian kills Paris, the actor of the play’s title, in a “staged” murder. The mediation fails as the killer becomes actor and the play becomes real.

Just as the film and the play blur the lines between reality and the illusion of reality so too do they blur the lines between genres. One notable result of Scream’s success is that it revitalized the horror movie genre, resulting in a series of movies that directly lampoon the genre and Scream itself. These parodies were able to be made because the genre is rife with absurdity, as Scream points out. As the film’s female protagonist Sidney says, she doesn’t like horror movies because “They’re all the same: some stupid killer stalking some big breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.” Of course when she is attacked shortly after uttering these words she unthinkingly runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. When discussing the film’s murders another character, Randy, a video store clerk and film buff well-versed in the clichés of horror films, obliviously offends female customers by blurting, “There’s always some stupid, bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend. That’s the beauty of it all: simplicity.” The film’s director Wes Craven, well-known as one of the greatest directors of the genre for creating such franchises as A Nightmare on Elm Street in the 1980’s, takes several self-deprecating shots at himself. A character who dies early in the film says in reference to the Nightmare on Elm Street series that the first one was scary, “but the rest sucked.” Sidney’s friend Tatum says at one point, “You’re starting to sound like some Wes Carpenter flick or something” (conflating Craven’s name with fellow horror film director John Carpenter’s) and Craven himself makes a cameo as a school janitor dressed in the famous costume of the killer from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. While Scream is unmistakably a horror film it contains a great deal of satirical humor in and about itself that blurs the distinctions between horror and comedy.

The Roman Actor likewise blends tragedy and comedy freely. While the structure of the play, in which its world moves from order and harmony to chaos, is clearly tragic a great deal of humor is incorporated into the dialogue. Frequently when an offstage Domitian is referred to it is with such over-the-top hyperbole as to be absurd: he’s called “Our god on earth” (1.2.20) who possesses the “height of courage, depth of understanding, / And all those virtues and remarkable graces / Which make a prince most eminent” (1.3.6-8). Indeed the senator Aretinus says “I can never / Bring his praise to a period” (9-10). One scene that is especially funny is act three, scene two when Domitian has Rusticus and Sura tortured. The shifting tones of their dialogue could have been taken from a Monty Python skit. The imperious Domitian becomes a petulant schoolboy when he says, “I was never / O’ercome till now. For my sake roar a little” (84-85). When he asks if Rusticus and Sura are dead Sura replies matter-of-factly, “No, we live” and Rusticus jumps in with a boastful “Live to deride thee, our calm patience treading / Upon the neck of tyranny” (89-91). The blending of the funny with the tragic in the play makes it difficult to define its genre, making it quite postmodern.

The postmodern “tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness” is obviously evident in both of these works. The subject matter of Scream is the very horror film conventions upon which it relies to structure its story. As the character Randy says:

There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, number one: you can never have sex . . . Sex equals death, okay? Number two: you can never drink or do drugs. It’s the sin factor . . . It’s an extension of number one. And number three: never, ever, ever, under any circumstances say “I’ll be right back,” ‘cause you won’t be back.

After outlining these conventions the film systematically breaks them (for the most part). The heroine of the film Sidney breaks the horror film cliché of virginity by having sex (without the genre cliché of nudity) and not only surviving but besting the killer in the end. As for not drinking or using drugs the irony lies in the fact that Randy the horror film expert is holding a beer as he gives this speech. He escapes as well (thanks to being a virgin, he claims) although not without injury. And although the character that utters the line “I’ll be right back” (not once, but twice) does eventually die his death is not as immediate as the cliché demands. By pointing out the conventions of the genre and simultaneously negating them the film’s “formal techniques disrupt the filmic conventions that provide narrative safety, and they do so as a means of reinforcing structurally what the film’s content examines: anxieties that our nation and culture are predicated upon a set of constructs that themselves provide merely an illusion of safety” (Schopp 126).

Naturally The Roman Actor displays its own sense of self-awareness. One of the themes that it explores is the social obligations and effects of the theatre. The actor Paris is brought before the senate and charged with treason for satirizing the ruling class.

You are they
That search into the secrets of the time,
And under feign’d names on the stage present
Actions not to be touch’d at, and traduce
Persons of rank, and quality, of both sexes,
And with satirical and bitter jests
Make even the senators ridiculous
To the plebeians. (1.3.33-40).

The actor’s response--both as Paris and as the actor playing him and by extension as Massinger himself--is that the function of the theatre is to punish those that deserve it and to prevent vicious behavior by showing the negative consequences of such behavior. “When do we bring a vice upon the stage / That does go off unpunish’d?” Paris asks (97-98). The Roman Actor is thus a play like many of those of the period, one in which playhood itself is examined.

Postmodernism rejects ideas of “high” and “low” cultures. Scream does so by referencing popular culture, most notably movies, and playing with its themes and conventions. Works of popular culture are traditionally seen as being “low.” However what that perspective fails to take into account is the fact that what was once popular culture (the plays of Shakespeare for example) becomes “high.” Today’s high culture was yesterday’s low. By incorporating these references and examining them Scream helps to enshrine them as worthy of study. Divisions of high and low culture disintegrate.

Once again the same is true of The Roman Actor. The play makes many allusions to other plays and literary works. The effect of doing so is to place the play into an historic and cultural continuum by connecting it intertextually with its more celebrated predecessors. Perhaps the most obvious connection is to the story of Julius Caesar most famously told by Shakespeare. The foretelling of Domitian’s death and his assassination at the blades of conspirators is a direct echo of the death of Julius Caesar. Another parallel between the play and Shakespeare is in act five, scene one when the ghosts of Rusticus and Sura enter to trouble the dreaming Domitian. The action and the ensuing soliloquy are lifted practically whole from Richard III. The story of Lucrece, a popular legend that informed many Elizabethan and Jacobean works, is also referenced and some of Domitian’s lines recall Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (the speech in which he condemns Domitia to death echoes Herod’s indecision about executing Mariam). By making these allusions the play places itself within the context of a proud literary tradition, erasing distinctions between high and low or popular culture.

The issue of technology comes up in both works although admittedly in The Roman Actor it is raised obliquely, considering the technological limitations of the time. As noted Scream deals in many ways with the problem of how technology influences reality through visual media. One concern the movie acknowledges is the effect such visual technology has on people. Similar to the charges directed at the theatre in The Roman Actor the question of promoting negative social values comes up. Craven says,

. . . everybody’s looking for one interpretation or another of what scary films do to an audience. You have those that think the more scary a picture is the more the audience is going to go out and duplicate that. And then [there are] others which I would include myself among that think they’re a
great release of a lot of things including pent-up fear rather than pent-up violence.

In The Roman Actor Paris says that the theatre cannot be held accountable for what people ultimately do.

When we present
An heir that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, if there be
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould, we cannot help it. (1.3.105-09).

In the end Scream says the same thing. This message is summed up by one of the killers who says, “Don’t you blame the movies! Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!”

The film also addresses another facet of technology which directly contradicts the view of the modernists. Modernists believed the dictum “Better living through technology.” Scream shows that belief to be fallacious by showing how technology fails. The instrument of technology the film focuses on is the telephone. While the telephone is commonly regarded as a means of connecting with the outside world and of summoning help when necessary in the film it becomes a means of torment as the killers use it to harass their victims and prevent them from calling for help. As Schopp puts it this abuse of technology violates the “safe space” of the traditional horror narrative (depicted as the home, the family, and other means of shutting out the outside world) (125). Scream shows how the technology upon which you rely can be used against you and that nothing is safe.

As noted regarding The Roman Actor technology is limited in the world of the play though there is one use of something that can be construed as technological for the time frame: astrology. The character of Ascletario uses astrology--which was regarded as a type of science back then--to accurately predict Domitian’s death. Ironically he is also able to accurately predict his own death, showing how even this primitive form of technology can be turned against its user.

The final mark of postmodernism seen in both of these works is a distrust of authority figures. In Scream traditional authority figures, parents, teachers and the police are perceived as inept and suspect (literally, as they all are suspected of being the killers). In a postmodernist view authority figures are seen as oppressors concerned with control and the consolidation of power. This is how the killers are able to achieve their goals. “They can do what others cannot: they control a revision of convention and thus cross from consumer to producer, but they do so by producing death and destruction” (Schopp 134).

Here the parallels between the killers in Scream and Domitian in The Roman Actor are astounding. In the film the killers employ horror movies to kill. Domitian employs plays. The killers become the actors in their own horror movie; Domitian literally becomes an actor when he kills Paris. In both instances these authority figures exert their authority over others by using playacting as a means of control.

It is readily apparent from examining early modern texts that postmodernism really began then. This revelation though if it can be called such should not come as a surprise. The early modern period is so-called because that is when the world we recognize began to emerge from the mists of medievalism. Since postmodernism is so closely linked to modernism it simply stands to reason that its origins would occur at the same time.

Works Cited
Craven, Wes, dir. Scream. Writ. Kevin Williamson. Dimension Films, 1996.

Klages, Mary. “Postmodernism.” English 2010: Modern Critical Thought. 21 April 2003. University of Colorado, Boulder. 12 December 2004. http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html.

Massinger, Philip. The Roman Actor. London: Nick Hern Books, 2002.

Schopp, Andrew. “Transgressing the Safe Space: Generation X Horror in The Blair Witch Project and Scream.” Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. By Sarah L. Higley and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004.

“No Place You’d Want to Go to”: Place-Memory and Mythology in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

The American novelist Henry James was known for exploring how a story’s setting influences a character’s development. Many of his characters such as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer are single American women transplanted to Europe where they are forced to deal with the pressures of European cultural mores. These characters frequently end up jaded and/or dead. Similarly the American novelist Toni Morrison uses physical geography as the basis of her characters’ psychological and spiritual evolution. “In the three novels that have earned Morrison an indisputable prominence in contemporary American letters, the author enlarges and completes many previous attempts to show the importance of both place and person in the development of Afro-American culture” (Dixon 116). Specifically in Song of Solomon Morrison employs the idea of place-memory as the basis for a mythology that would reflect the African American experience and provide for them a sense of community and a connection to their common past.

Place-Memory and Character and Story Formation
It is unlikely for anyone to argue that ideas of place are not important to writers. Indeed as already noted ideas of place are integral to Henry James’ stories. Of course writers of James’ generation as well as those that followed were very much influenced by psychological and sociological ideas about personality formation that became prominent at the time. As Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “in or about December, 1910, human character changed” (qtd. in Hawthorne ix). The change that was wrought was brought about largely by two men: Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

Freud’s work in psychoanalysis and the mapping of human consciousness gave rise to a belief that personality is determined by complex psychological negotiations between desires and drives and the demands of society. Marx’s economic theories are rather similar, holding that human activity is the product of social and economic reality, that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 392). Moreover as literary theorist David Richter explains Marx believed that “individuals can only think the thoughts that are thinkable in their society” (Richter 387). Freud contended that human action involves compromises between the Id, the Ego and the Superego; similarly Marx held that social action is a dialectical synthesis of thesis and antithesis. These theories had a monumental impact on the arts and politics that make up human culture. “One of the commonplaces—or clichés—associated with literary modernism is that the human individual is neither unitary nor internally consistent, but complex, contradictory and divided” (Hawthorn ix). All we can ever know about personality is what we can speculate on how a certain environment might affect personality. “This view, held by some structuralists and many post-structuralists, insists that the ‘privileging’ of character reflects a distorting bourgeois bias that stresses individuals and their choices rather than the world they live in” (Hochman 15). The world is the important thing to modern writers and thus they will create characters that are products of their environments. Notions of place are therefore of paramount importance to such writers. Before characters can be created or a story can be told the setting must be established. Even as the Bible begins with God creating the world modern writers imagine place into literary being; in the beginning there is the place.

At least as important, in writing fiction the novelist is engaged in doing an audacious thing: creating fictional life out of language, inventing entire characters, endowing them with consciousness—and doing this in a very precisely delineated setting, against which the authenticity of the fictional characters can be readily measured. It is not enough that Leopold Bloom, Stephen
Dedalus, Molly Bloom, and the others be made to live in Dublin; they must be of Dublin. It is something like building a bridge, or creating a platform that will reach out from a recognizable substantial place into what until then has been empty air. (Rubin 19).

Authorial ideas about place however are not only important for the sake of creating a nurturing environment in order to establish or explain a character’s behavior. Place is an important component of storytelling itself. Place goes a long way toward determining the type of story that is told. Dark forests and graveyards are the clichéd environs of horror tales and mansions and courtrooms set up readers to expect stories of mystery. While it is possible to exchange locales across genres—to set a ghost story in a shopping mall, for example—the place will not resonate with the story as strongly or as memorably. The disjunction created between that which is presented and that which is expected becomes too noticeable, breaking the literary illusion and exposing its own artifice. The result is a story that is very different from that which would be told using a conventional arrangement. A story about interracial love set in 17th century Venice is quite different from one set in 1960’s Georgia.

The reason that place determines story to such a large extent lies in the fact that place suggests so much more than merely itself. Places exist on several levels other than the spatial and are loaded with metaphorical, historical, and mythological meaning.

As with all literary materials, place has a literal and a symbolical value, a function serving both geographical and metaphorical ends. But the literal and geographic aspect of place is always under the strain that all literature feels to attain the condition of poetry, of symbol, and it is difficult to avoid the proposition that in the final analysis all places in literature are used for symbolical purposes even though in their descriptiveness they may be rooted in fact. Repeated association of some generic places with certain experiences and values has resulted in what amounts almost to a system of archetypal place symbolism. (Lutwack 31).

Consider the above example of an interracial love story. Although Shakespeare borrowed the story of Othello from Cinthio he chose to keep the Italian setting at least partly because of the ideas his audience associated with Italy and its people. Italy was a suitably exotic place for the average Londoner of the period (and for many people today, for that matter) so it was reasonable to assume that people of different races would be found there.[1] Also the common stereotype about Italians was that they were ruled more by passion than reason and that they were given to lascivious behavior. The story of Othello would have been seen as highly romantic and any negative reactions would have been and still are tempered by the fantastic nature of the story. By contrast if the story was set in the American south at the height of the Civil Rights movement the “transgressiveness” of the lovers’ relationship would have been emphasized or the seemingly racially motivated violence of the antagonists would have provoked outrage. The change in place would have resulted in this alternate story because America’s racial history is vastly different from England’s or Italy’s and therefore vastly different ideas are associated with different places. “Social attitudes shape conceptions of places for masses of people; Indians, Spaniards, and Anglo-Americans had altogether different responses to the American Southwest; political ideology in the eighteenth century and racial prejudice in the twentieth century made the city appear as an evil place to millions of Americans” (35).

The ideas, emotions, and reactions that are associated with particular places has come to be referred to as “place-memory.” Coined by philosopher Edward Casey place-memory is one of the forces that tie people together as a community and is a factor in forming an individual sense of identity and selfhood.

It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experiences that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability. An alert and alive memory connects spontaneously with place, finding in it features that favor and parallel its own activities. We might even say that memory is
naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported. (qtd. in Hayden 46).

In other words people tend to remember in terms of place and make memories in relation to places. Such place-memory is evident for example when people recall traumatic or momentous events. People who remember the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion or the September 11 terrorist attacks do so by recalling where they were when those events transpired. “Thus, Casey argues that body memory ‘moves us directly into place, whose very immobility contributes to its distinct potency in matters of memory . . . what is remembered is well grounded if it is remembered as being in a particular place—a place that may well take precedence over the time of its occurrence’” (48). Place-memory connects us to history and defines generational identity.

Place-memory as we see in Song of Solomon is of particular importance for African American communities whose histories are marked by transience. Under the institution of slavery African Americans frequently underwent forced relocation both from Africa to America and from master to master. Even in the post-Civil War era many African American communities experienced voluntary relocation from the south to the north, from the rural to the urban, in the hope of attaining social or economic benefits. Such transience resulted in a profound sense of personal and cultural rootlessness or place-loss that was alleviated through the application of place-memory and the formation of what we can for lack of a better term call “imagined communities.”

For some time ‘place’ has been the imagined linkage between the present and the what-had-been for African Americans. After all, place connected a diverse creolized population to an ancestral homeland that few had seen or would see, and that ultimately never existed. Long before African Americans were colored, or Negro, or black, or any of the names they were to be called, they
were Ewe, Yoruba, Asante, Ibo, and Wangera. It was the imaginings of place that molded those disparate experiences into a corporate identity in the United States. (Lewis 348-49).

These imagined communities based on place-memory provide a cohesive force for African American communities that lack a stable common history. While it is true that any social group can use place-memory to unite itself, and many groups do, its use is seen most clearly and frequently within African American groups as those are the groups that have experienced arguably the greatest sense of place-loss in America. Other groups possess some unifying cultural memory such as a common folklore or mythology on which they can rely which has historically been denied African Americans. To compensate for this denial African American communities have forged a mythology for themselves, one that is based on place-memory.

The Uses of Myth
In order to begin a discussion of mythology and its uses it is necessary to define what mythology is. The idea of mythology is one that seems self-evident. We intuitively understand myths and recognize them when we see them. But the idea of mythology tends to go unexamined; we take it for granted that we know what it is.[2]

Psychologists and mythologists such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell tell us that myths are an expression of unconscious drives, desires and fears. Jung in particular, famed for his theories of “racial memory” and the “collective unconscious,” examined myths and their attendant archetypes as remnants of experiences from humanity’s collective prehistoric and lesser-evolved past. This concept of racial memory explains for example humanity’s instinctive fear and distrust of reptiles. This fear and distrust finds frequent manifestation in our myths: consider the serpent in the Garden of Eden or that in The Epic of Gilgamesh which deprive the heroes of their chance at gaining and retaining immortality. While these myths present an aetiological explanation for the natural conflict between humans and reptiles Jung claims that what these myths are striving to express is a genetic memory of the prehistoric rivalry between mammals and reptiles for evolutionary dominance and control of the food chain. Mythology therefore becomes a narrative that explains our relationship to the natural world and to each other. Campbell draws on Jung’s theories and applies them in a more sociological way. Campbell suggests that myths are structured according to paradigms that express stages of social development. His famous examination of the "Hero’s Journey,” a paradigm that is clearly seen in Song of Solomon, shows that it is a reflection of social rites of passage symbolizing the transition from childhood to adulthood, youth to maturity and folly to wisdom. Mythology for Campbell serves to teach us truths about ourselves while orienting us within our social communities.

From Jung and Campbell we see that mythology is composed of highly structured narratives that give us a means of understanding ourselves and the universe in which we live. But that is only part of the richly textured tapestry that is mythology. Both Jung’s and Campbell’s ideas address only how mythology pertains to the individual. Mythology also plays a larger role in the formation of larger social constructs, notably religions.

In the first place, myths are stories . . . Of these, perhaps the most captivating have been the sacred stories handed down as a part of religions, as well as the narratives that explain and define the great acts of nations and peoples: mythology in the strict sense refers to these. Usually these accounts are so old that their origins are shrouded in mystery. For us modern readers, part of their appeal is in their evocation of a long-gone era in which members of communities shared the same values and guided their lives by the stories they told. (Thury and Devinney 4).

Mythology and religion share many characteristics and in fact religion and mythology appear to be formed in the same way. Mircea Eliade’s work examines mythology in relation to ritual and ceremony and finds that religious customs are mythological and that it is the religiously ritualized nature of myths that gives them their potency. Religion and ritual are a means of connecting people to their mythological heroes and gods.

There are different ways to think about rituals. Mircea Eliade describes their origin in archaic terms, saying that rituals arose because they ‘deliberately repeat . . . the acts posited [by] gods, heroes and ancestors.’ By this he means that through ritual, primitive human beings tried to recapture the primordial act of creation, the center, which is ‘pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality.’ Thus, through rituals even today, the religious man is able to return to ‘mythical time’ in illo tempore . . . (374).

The function of ritual is to repeat sacred acts so that the participants become part of a larger spiritual community, one that follows in the steps of its predecessors. Many Christian rituals for example serve this purpose. The sacrament of Communion is a repetition of the Last Supper whereby the participants reenact that drama; those receiving Communion fulfill the roles of the Apostles and by ingesting the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ they become one with God. The actors become members of the larger Christian community, members of the elect who have been saved and redeemed.

The common denominator of all of these perspectives on mythology is that they all look at memory and the past. It is that relationship of mythology to history that provides us with our definition of mythology. Mythology is a constructed history that unifies a people by expressing their common origins and embodying the values that they embrace. In many ways all histories are mythological; what is history but a narrative that tells the story of a community’s past? The difference between these two perspectives on the past, or so we think, is that one is an artificial reality based on the imagination whereas the other is a true reality founded on fact. Yet our factual events often attain mythic status; they are presented to us in a streamlined form that smoothes their rough edges and is loaded with special significance. “As Northrop Frye puts it, the stories of mythology are often ‘charged with a special seriousness and importance.’ Some stories are associated with a living religion still being practiced at the time the myth is told; others are more secular in nature, but still include values and perspectives that inform the society and culture of the storytellers” (4). Consider the official story of the United States: “Pilgrims” came to this country to escape religious persecution and then a boy named George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was praised for telling the truth about it and then a Civil War was fought over slavery and then that war ended when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. This is the story that we teach our children about how our nation came to be. And yet none of it is true. Our history is a collection of artificial stories that present the ideals for which we as a society are supposed to stand. Our collective history is a myth.

Because the line between mythology and history is so ill-defined it is understandable and even expected that both perspectives be predicated upon the same things. This leads us to the roles that place and place-memory play in the formation of mythology. The connection between place-memory and history is obvious and undeniable.

Place memory encapsulates the human ability to connect with both the built and natural environments that are entwined in the cultural landscape. It is the key to the power of historic places to help citizens define their public pasts: places trigger memories for insiders, who have shared a common past, and at the same time places often can represent shared pasts to outsiders who might be interested in knowing about them in the present. (Hayden 46).

Place is an integral part of history because it provides the locus genius for historic events. Actions occur both in time and space and the places in which those actions occur often become memorialized as markers of cultural identity. Places become associated forever with the events that occurred there; they gain mythic status and become sacred spaces. Since mythology is a form of history place must contain necessarily the same significance from a mythological perspective.

To orient himself in the world, man seems to require a sense of the deployment of persons, things, and places around a center, and this center thus acquires paramount importance over all around it. For groups of men such a place—a city, a temple—is sacralized in the terms of Mircea Eliade, because at that spot
there is a ‘break in plane’ between heaven and earth; around it revolves the spiritual life of a traditionalist society. (Lutwack 42).

In both mythology and history place is the force that generates the stories that ripple out from that space. Mount Olympus, Jerusalem and Mecca serve ultimately the same purpose as Boston, Gettysburg and Pearl Harbor. All stories radiate from place and tracing stories and traditions backwards leads us to place. Place is the source and the repository of cultural identity and memory is the key that allows access to that place. As historian David Thelan explains it, “People develop a shared identity by identifying, exploring, and agreeing on memories” (qtd. in Lewis 353). Place-memory is history and mythology.

Mythological Landscapes in Song of Solomon
Place as we have seen is the basis of modernist storytelling. Place-memory is the basis of history and mythology. Modernist storytelling therefore which privileges place can be used to create and explore history and mythology. After all storytelling is a social act and can be seen as a form of history. Storytelling is the means by which history and mythology fulfill their purposes of creating and uniting communities around common experiences and a common system of beliefs. As urban historian Earl Lewis puts it, “. . . a society’s cohesiveness hinges on its ability to create national or group memories, which enlist the support of large segments of the population” (348). This cohesiveness is dependent on storytelling for it is through stories that people share themselves with others. In her book The Power of Place Dolores Hayden recounts how a social historian researching Baltimore’s local history became frustrated by hearing people tell stories about things that had happened in their neighborhoods. She was more interested in specific information on how the neighborhoods were structured and how immigrants became assimilated into community life rather than learning about neighborhood events. “Yet stories about places could convey all these themes,” Hayden points out, “and memories of places would probably trigger more stories” (47).

Unlike that social historian Toni Morrison pays attention to place-memory and the stories of places. Morrison’s fiction is marked by a great fascination if not a preoccupation with place and the way place affects African American communities. This fascination likely stems from Morrison’s own experiences with place. She was born in Lorrain, Ohio, a place that she describes as a blend of both northern and southern sensibilities where disparate and divergent communities coexisted (Dixon 115). Her home impressed upon her the possibilities of place, an impression that is expressed in her writing. “From a home that is neither typically North nor South, Morrison . . . freely explores new physical and metaphorical landscapes in her fiction. She envisions space with fewer historically or politically fixed boundaries and endows her characters with considerable mobility” (115).

In Song of Solomon Morrison examines the connections between place-memory and mythology. Specifically she looks at how place-memory can be used in constructing a mythology that would unify or provide direction for African American communities. Morrison shows an awareness of the rootlessness and sense of place-loss that has affected African American communities in the northern United States. With Song of Solomon Morrison offers a corrective for the failings of the Great Migration, claiming that African Americans need to reclaim the memories of the places from which they came. The quest of her protagonist Milkman is the quest of the African American community itself.

There is no denying that Morrison is writing from a mythological perspective. The novel is replete with allusions to Greek mythology. Perhaps the most obvious allusion is to Circe the witch of the Odyssey who helps guide Odysseus home to Ithaca but just as thematically important is the Icarus myth. Icarus died while attempting to fly just as Robert Smith does at the beginning of the novel. Morrison also incorporates elements of American mythology into the novel; the Dead family farm in Danville, Pennsylvania is named Lincoln’s Heaven in honor of the man whom many people think freed the slaves during the Civil War.[3] Morrison is writing deliberately on mythological themes.

Toni Morrison’s novels have attracted both popular and critical attention for their inventive blend of realism and fantasy, unsparing social analysis, and passionate philosophical concerns. The combination of social observation with broadening and allusive commentary gives her fictions the symbolic quality of myth, and in fact the search for a myth adequate to experience is one of Morrison’s central themes. (Davis 7).

As noted earlier Song of Solomon is structured according to Campbell’s paradigm of the “Hero’s Journey.” This paradigm has three basic components: the Departure, the Initiation and the Return. In the Departure phase the hero is called upon to leave his home in order to resolve a social problem; during the Initiation the hero enters an alternate realm of magic and danger; finally in the Return the hero has a confrontation with death and is resurrected with the ability to bestow boons that bring new life to his community. On some level each of Morrison’s previous novels have dealt with this paradigm. Song of Solomon however is the first to embrace it fully and explore its consequences for the African American community:

At first the familiar cold hero, he comes to ask the cost of the heroic quest—‘Who’d he leave behind?’ (Song, p.336). He learns not only that the hero serves a function for society, the exploration of limits it cannot reach, but also that it serves him . . . More, he finds that his quest is his culture’s; he can only discover what he is by discovering what his family is. (16).

Campbell’s paradigm is organized very loosely in terms of place. The hero goes simply from the real world to the fantasy world and then back again. In Song of Solomon however Morrison ties the Hero’s Journey to specific places. She presents Milkman in relation to three locales: an unidentified city in Michigan, the town of Danville, Pennsylvania and the fictional town of Shalimar, Virginia. Each place affects Milkman in very different ways and represents the different phases in the Hero’s Journey.

Michigan
Although the conventional interpretation is that the unnamed city is Detroit it could actually be any one of Michigan’s several urban areas with large African American populations (Saginaw, Muskegon, etc.). The only place in Michigan that the text specifically identifies is Flint which Milkman calls, “Jive. No place you’d want to go to” (Morrison 254). Considering his disdain for it this could well be the place. However Morrison’s deliberate refusal to name the city suggests that she feels that identifying it is not important. The unnamed city is a generic representation of the industrialized North to which many southerners, black and white, journeyed during the Great Migration. The important idea about the place is that it is a harsh environment that dehumanizes the individual, alienating him or her from a community identity. It stunts emotional growth and encourages the commodification of people. It is cold, hard and unnatural.

The great northern cities have been a favorite setting for American writers of the twentieth century. Naturalist writers, the successors to James and his generation, were fascinated by the tension that existed between the urban environment and the rural mentality. “Naturalism made capital out of the clash between a beautiful earth and an ugly earth, between nature and city, between a happy adjustment to surroundings and entrapment” (Lutwack 11). The people that migrated to the industrial North did so in hopes of finding social and economic opportunities. This migration and the hopes attendant on it have been well-documented by naturalist writers like Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. Equally well-documented by those writers is the failure of those hopes to bear fruit: ”The ultimate result of a century or more of naturalistic writing has been that the sense of place inherited from Renaissance exploration and romantic identification has yielded in the twentieth century to a sense of place-loss and a sense of placelessness” (11).

In Morrison’s work one of the lasting effects of such place-loss is the loss of mythology. The separation of the community from its place of origin breaks the continuity of the mythic narrative. “It destroys the myth and denies characters entrance into it . . . it destroys the links between generations that are the foundation of a mythos. The finding of a myth in these novels is a choice that is made in spite of a dominating culture that would deny it” (Davis 18). The threat to society that the hero must resolve in his journey is therefore the problem of place-loss that threatens to re-enslave himself and his people.

Danville, PA
Like the Michigan city and unlike Shalimar, Danville is a real place. It is a small town (current population: 4,947) and although it too is industrialized it is a rural place as well (“Danville, PA”). Similar to Morrison’s birthplace of Lorrain it represents a middle ground between the industrial North and the rural South. Originally a mining town Danville is connected to the earth in a way the nameless Michigan city is not. It is in the world, not of the world. To borrow a term from Campbell it is the “world navel” of Milkman’s journey, conflating the oppositions of the womb and the tomb. It is the birthplace of the navel-less Pilate who crawled from her dead mother’s womb just as the dead Jake is later taken from the living earth’s womb. It is a mystical place of birth and death, beginnings and endings, a liminal space between worlds. It is a place where the stories of the dead/Dead come alive, providing a connection to history.

The liminality of Danville is personified in the characters of Macon Dead, Milkman’s father, and Pilate. It is in Danville that the two siblings separate, one moving North to become alienated from place and the other moving South to become immersed in ancestral place. The conflict between these two mentalities is borne out in Macon and Pilate’s divergent relationships to place: “They also compete over their relation to the dead father and to the farmland that was as fertile as it was generous . . . Their different relation to the land inversely determines how they function in the novel to help or hinder Milkman” (Dixon 134). Macon seeks to own land, to gain a reified mastery of place and tries to teach his son to be like himself. Pilate by contrast is free to move through the world because she is connected to it spiritually. “Pilate, on the other hand, a restless wanderer, owns only those objects that implicitly direct her search for place (and for refuge from pariah status): rocks, a sack of human bones, and a geography book . . .” (135). Pilate gains freedom to roam because she carries the artifacts of place with her, a lesson that she tries to instill in Milkman: “You just can’t fly on off and leave a body” (Morrison 208). Pilate’s experience reflects an anecdote that Earl Lewis relates in his article “Connecting Memory, Self, and the Power of Place in African American Urban History.” He recounts an interview he conducted of an elderly woman regarding domestic life in Norfolk, Virginia during the Great Depression. The woman describes in great detail the experience of losing her family’s house to creditors but is unable to describe a series of momentous visits that Marcus Garvey made to Norfolk at the same time. Lewis concludes that “. . . the example forces us to ponder how memory rewrites the meaning of place. Place, after all, is a location on a map, an imagined belonging, the scene of a bitter memory or beautiful happening; place, though often fixed, was always transportable” (351). Pilate displays the transportability of place. Carrying memories of place with you keeps you rooted to that place. Pilate is therefore an embodiment of place-memory.

For Milkman’s journey Danville marks his crossing of the first threshold into the world of mythology. It is here that he meets Circe the threshold guardian who initiates him into this world by identifying the path he must follow to complete the journey.

Shalimar, VA
In contrast to the other two places Shalimar is fictional. It is also completely rural where the people live close to nature and where there is a strong community identity complete with a folklore and a sense of rootedness. It is therefore a place of myth in multiple ways. It is the archetypal place of quest containing the elixir of life. It is where the dead/Dead ancestors were born and where they still live through memorials. Thus it is a fecund center of generation were Milkman is reborn by reclaiming his ancestral identity.

By having Milkman journey to Shalimar Morrison moves in the opposite direction of the Great Migration thereby reversing its effect. “She alters the direction of cultural history away from simple chronology and toward a single, charged moment of multiple discoveries by emphasizing Milkman’s embrace of cultural and familial geography. He arrives at the ancestral ground to become rooted in it as deep and as high as Pilate’s father’s bones” (Dixon 138). By following the story back to its source Milkman is able to almost-literally come into contact with his ancestors and regain his cultural identity; “Shalimar” is a corruption of “Solomon,” Milkman’s family’s true name. It is a name that is tied to memory in multiple ways such as through the children’s song but especially through place markers like Solomon’s Leap and Ryna’s Gulch, names for geographical features that contain powerful archetypal resonance.

She [Morrison] extends the geographical imagery and enriches the acts of deliverance established so far in Afro-American letters. Her novel encompasses the three principal landscapes of retreat and regeneration already present in black American culture: the wilderness, the underground, and the mountaintop. Taken as part of Morrison’s assessment of geography and
identity in fiction, they exceed earlier attempts to fix or promote one region over another. (139).

The one geographical place in Shalimar that is most important to the Hero’s Journey here is the woods. It is here that Milkman encounters death in the guise of his friend Guitar. This ordeal in the woods represents the last threshold that Milkman must cross in order to complete his journey.

Milkman has to earn kinship by enduring the woods, the wilderness. Like the fugitive in slave narratives, he has to renew his covenant with nature to secure passage out of the wilderness that had invited him in. Only through the initiatory trial in the woods of Blue Ridge County will he encounter those figures of the landscape that will give definite meaning to the otherwise
confusing names and places in the children’s song . . . (140).

In order to be resurrected the hero must die and so Milkman surrenders to death. In doing so he is reborn into the world of his ancestors and regains the lost connection to place.

As a work of literature Song of Solomon participates in many literary traditions not least of which is the slave narrative. Slave narratives come in two varieties: narratives of ascent and narratives of immersion. Narratives of ascent depict the struggle of slaves escaping to the North. Narratives of immersion tell the story of a free but ignorant northerner who goes South to become an “articulate kinsman” of an oppressed community (Kubitschek 80). Song of Solomon moves both ways. The generations of the Dead are at odds with each other until the family journey comes full circle just as the novel comes full circle by both beginning and ending with a leap into space. Milkman, who is always looking behind himself and walking in the opposite direction from the people around him, must move geographically backwards in order to move forward. This paradoxical movement is an articulation of the importance of place-memory and mythology. We cannot know where we are going without knowing from where we have come. Place-memory and mythology provide us with that necessary knowledge.

Works Cited
“Danville, PA.” DanvillePA.com. 14 June 2004. Press Enterprise, Inc. 12 Feb. 2006 http://www.danvillepa.com/.

Davis, Cynthia A. “Self, Society and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.

Hayden, Delores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.

Hochman, Baruch. Character in Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Kubitschek, Missy Dean. Toni Morrison: a Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood 1998.

Lewis, Earl. “Connecting Memory, Self, and the Power of Place in African American Urban History.” Journal of Urban History 21 (1995): 347-71.

Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1984.

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Richter, David H. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “Thoughts on Fictional Places.” Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. Ed. H. L. Weatherby and George Core. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Thury, Eva M. and Margaret K. Devinney. Introduction to Mythology: Contemporary Approaches to Classical and World Myths. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

[1]It must be remembered that England at the time was extremely homogeneous in terms of race, partly because of xenophobia but also because England was still widely regarded as a backwater nation and not of particular interest to travelers. Also the fact that the British Isles are separated from the rest of Europe by water contributed to its insularity.

[2]For the purposes of this study the terms “myth” and “mythology” are not being used interchangeably, as they frequently are. “Myth” is used here to mean the equivalent of “story” while “mythology” refers to a collection of myths or a system whereby myths are composed and told. The story of Odysseus for example is a myth that is part of a larger Greek mythology.

[3]It is pertinent to note here that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free anyone. It was addressed to the Confederacy which was legally regarded as a foreign power and not under the Union’s jurisdiction and completely ignores the slaveholding states that remained part of the Union during the war.