The Discourse of Double-Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

Henry Louis Gates, Jr, in 'Race', Writing and Difference (1986) has called black people as 'masters of the figurative' and their penchant 'for saying one thing to mean something quite other' has helped them in their survival in oppressive monolithic discursive drives of the Western culture. He further argues that all black texts are necessarily 'two toned', or 'double-voiced' and this' leads to' a kind of discourse 'which is duplicitous, potentially subversive, one that undermines the universalizing and essentializing tendencies of hegemonic white discourse' (Bennett and Royle, 1995: 203). This tendency has earlier been identified by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk ([1903], 1994) who claimed that ' the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line' (v) and related this problem to the ' double consciousness' of the black psyche, the 'twoness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body'. The descriptive-analytical approach is adopted.The paper examines how this 'double-consciousness', 'two-ness' of 'unreconciled strivings', 'this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge [his] double self into a better and truer self' has been represented through the aforesaid central tension of the text in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977).