Presence and Absence in Song Of Solomon

The contradictory, paradoxical, interplay of presence and absence runs through Song Of Solomon. It’s a postmodern interplay of signifiers, and the interplay between  symbolic and actual presence and absence gives a distinctly Lacanian characteristic to the Oedipal dramas of the novel, but it’s a (psycho-analytic) feminist reading that is best able to synthesize these various interpretations. Motherhood is a central, recurring, theme of Morrison’s work, and it could seem at first glance, that Song Of Solomon is an exception to this theme. On the surface the novel is dominated by patriarchal presence, but also, paradoxically, the absence of fathers. This paradox is a key component of the perpetuation of patriarchy. The novel explores contradiction of the symbolic presence of the Father with the actual absence of fathers. However, the novel doesn’t abandon the theme of Motherhood, the presence of which the novel explores in often Oedipal terms. The interplay between absence and presence is a characteristic of patriarchy, and is explored in various ways throughout the novel.

Early in the novel it is revealed that a watermark on Ruth’s kitchen table is, for her and one else, imbued with heavy significance. For Ruth the watermark symbolizes nothing less than the will to live. It acts as “a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that the world was still there”(Morrison 11). It is the watermark’s presence that fascinates Ruth, and the word is deliberately repeated. She is always looking for the watermark; even though she knows that it will be where she left it she compulsively feels the need to “confirm it’s presence”(11). Even when she sleeps “without thinking or dreaming she felt it’s presence.”(11). Paradoxically, however, the presence of the watermark symbolizes absence: “The cloudy gray circle identified the place where the bowl filled every day during the doctor’s life with fresh flowers has stood.”(12). The watermark symbolizes the absence of her Father’s bowl. The placement of the watermark was created by the bowl above it. The watermark signifies an absent bowl, and, when present, the bowl had also taken on a great signifying presence in Ruth’s mind. It is the object that comes to signifier for Ruth her Father. The bowl, her Father’s bowl, the bowl itself, contains contradictory symbolic impulses towards presence and absence. (That the bowl is the object of her Father’s that she attaches special significance to is, in itself, a subtle play on sexual/gender signifiers and inversion those of binaries, especially psychoanalytic, ones. A bowl is a container; in some sense a deliberate absence designed to hold another’s presence. In vulgar Freudian terms a bowl is womblike or a vaginal yonic signifier, and would thus be categorized as feminine, it’s absence placed in contrast to the presence of phallic symbols.  That binary is subtly, but utterly, undermined by the contradictory phallic significance of the bowl and/or the contradictory yonic signification of the patriarch: that the bowl, which serves as a Lacanian symbol of the Father is, here, in crudely Freudian terms, so motherly. The symbol of patriarchal authority is not phallic authority but turned inside out into a yonic bowl.)

Ruth becomes deeply attached to these symbols of her Father, and she remains deeply invested in his patriarchal authority, even after his death. This is most strikingly and explicitly demonstrated in the scene of Ruth laying undressed next to her Father’s corpse, sucking on his fingers. “The striking image of the naked daughter sucking at the fingers of the town's black patriarch can be read as her last ditch effort to be close to the authority that her father embodied[…] her attempt to suckle the dead fingers represents her desperate need to desperate need to associate herself with patriarchal authority.” (Murray 125). It’s a dramatic scene, and it’s explicit in its symbolism: Ruth is unable to let go of her Father. Fingers, especially when being sucked on, are an explicitly phallic symbol, and the sexual significance of the act at least implies necrophilia and incest (the latter of which is a theme that runs through the novel). Macon, even if he’ll never know the actuality of what happened that night, immediately grasps the abject symbolism of the encounter, and is immediately repulsed. His distaste for the bowl is subconscious, and he allows the bowl into his life, into his house, onto his kitchen table, where it served as the centerpiece of his domestic world. His discomfort with the bowl is far less than that of his discomfort of finding Ruth sucking her Father’s fingers, yet the bowl serves most of the symbolic functions as Dr. Foster’s fingers. The bowl also represents Ruth’s inability to let go of her Father. The bowl also represents her undying attraction to her Father’s symbolic identity, and the patriarchal, bourgeois power of that identity. The bowl also represents how dependent her identity has become on her Father. It represents these things in a subtle way, and so is allowed to enter Macon’s home. However, besides the obvious shock of witnessing such an encounter, there are other differences between the bowl and Dr. Foster’s fingers that would make Macon more inclined to allow the bowl into his home. The obviously phallic nature of the fingers could present more of a threat in Macon’s mind than does the paradoxically phallic nature of the bowl. The fingers both signified presence and actual presence the bowl contrasts signified presence with actual absence.

The bowl, in both it’s presence and absence, is heavy with significance to Ruth. She attempts to describe its meaning to her husband, Macon. “Most people overlook things like that. They see it, but they don’t see anything beautiful in it. They don’t nature has already made it as perfect as it can be. Look at it from the side. It’s pretty isn’t it.” (Morrison 12). When Ruth instructs Macon to appreciate the bowl, to look at it from a different angle, he responds with a contemptuous non-sequitur about her cooking. The assertion of patriarchal power in this gesture is twofold. By focusing on, and demeaning, her cooking Macon reiterates her subservient, domestic, role while also also suggesting that she inadequate in the role. By undermining Ruth’s praise of her Father’s symbol Macon undermines her Father’s symbolic power, cutting her off from him and asserting his own control over Ruth. When Ruth asks Macon not to overlook the bowl she asking him not to overlook multiple things. She’s asking him not to overlook her Father’s symbol, the symbol of his bourgeois, patriarchal status, status that she attempts to remain close to. In doing so, she’s also asking Macon not to overlook her, as her identity is still so closely tied to her Father’s. Macon rejects Ruth’s request, and overlooks both the bowl and Ruth. 

Ruth is only able to confirm her sense of self in relationship to something outside of herself, such as the watermark, a symbol of the absence of her Father’s bowl. When she looks at the watermark she knows that “she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged only to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.”(11). Macon, cruelly and explicitly, calls attention to Ruth’s inability to signifier herself outside of her father, saying “you by yourself ain’t nobody. You your Daddy’s daughter.”(11) Ruth doesn’t deny this, but instead responds defiantly: “I certainly am my Daddy’s daughter.”(67). She is still signifying herself through her Father, though his death has diminished his presence to a watermark of an absent bowl.  Ruth remains “perniciously invested in the symbolic force of the bourgeois patriarch […and…] overwhelmed by the powerful symbols of the doctor's ‘strutting’”(Murray 123).  The bowl signifies her Father, and it is signifies his status, status she still wishes to signifier for herself. The bowl is a holdover from her old life, a childhood that she believed to have been surrounded by “affectionate elegance”. The bowl, a “Waterford bowl from England” was something that “was for her Father a touch that distinguished his own family from the people among whom they lived.”(12). The bowl was a bourgeois status symbol that Ruth’s that symbolically reinforced authority as a landlord over the rest of the Black community of his town. Ruth becomes attached to that power and is unwilling to let go of its symbols.

The bowl and the watermark left by the bowl and revealed in its absence foreshadow the paradoxical interplay between absence and presence that runs thematically through the novel. This theme is especially apparent in regards to motherhood and fatherhood under patriarchy.The role the paradoxical interplay between symbolic presence and absence has in upholding patriarchy has certainly not gone unobserved by feminist psychoanalytical theorists. Tabitha Freeman writes that

Patriarchy is founded upon the symbolic power of the father and yet there has been a long-standing cultural silence shrouding men’s parental roles and relationships in experiential terms. The subsequent tension between the symbolic presence and substantive absence of fathers is built into the heart of orthodox psychoanalytic theory, being enshrined in Freud’s foundational concept of the Oedipus complex. (Freeman 113).

Morrison explores this patriarchal contradiction throughout Song Of Solomon, especially as it manifests in the Black community. Morrison identifies the feminist-psychoanalytic concern, the contradiction of the material absence of Fathers with their overwhelming symbolic presence, as as one that acutely affects Black communities. While on the surface the novel, and the lives of the characters within it, are dominated by a patriarchal presence, but as the novel unfolds it becomes clear that that presence of patriarchy is often achieved by the absence of Fathers. Morrison outlines this before the novel proper begins, in the epigraph: “That fathers may soar/ And the children may know there names.”(Morrison). This quote anticipates on of the main thematic developments of the novel: the liberation of a Black man that comes at the price of his absence. This is seen in the journey of the protagonist, Milkman Dead, as well as the titular Solomon. Absence is a recurring criticism the novel has towards patriarchal figures (fathers or not) but the presence of those men can be just as disrupting, like in the case of the violent Macon Dead, who is announced to the novel as a disruption of peace: “the quiet that suffused the doctors house then, broken only by the murmur of women eating sunshine cake, was only that: quiet. It was not quite peaceful for it was preceded by and would soon be terminated by the presence of Macon Dead.” (10).

  As a black women, Ruth sits at the nexus of the double oppression of patriarchy and white supremacy. The effects of white supremacy on her are addressed in the novel, but racism is explored more explicitly by other, mostly male characters. The gendered difference is not incidental: it’s one way that “Morrison’s novel outlines a counter history of black patriarchy- one which suggests that that the bulk of emancipatory politics since the fall of Reconstruction has had a detrimentally patriarchal focus”(Murray 123). Figures like Ruth’s father and husband face outward from the black community and interact directly with the white one. Ruth’s role within her community is domestic and inward facing. Ruth acknowledges the effect the patriarchy has had on her, saying “the fact is that I’m a small women. I don’t mean little, I mean small, and I’m small because I was pressed small.”(124). However, she is a complex character, and Morrison is not content to simply characterize her as a victim. The novel’s view of fatherhood, and patriarchal masculinity more broadly, is not favorable, and motherhood is a recurring theme throughout Morrison’s work, so it might be expected that Song of Solomon, would simply flip the binary, but this isn’t the case. The novel seems to approaches motherhood with the same apprehension it approaches fatherhood, tempered by the recognition in the power disparity between the two roles under patriarchy. Morrison subverts the patriarchal binary of absence and presence, but then continues to subvert that subversion. This can be seen in the confrontation between Ruth and her son, Milkman Dead. It’s this confrontation that inspires Milkman to begin the quest that drives the second half of the novel. The confrontation hinges on one of the most significant lines of the novel. Ruth finishes explaining her life to Milkman, and she admits that she overnursed him, and then says “And I also prayed for you. Every single night and every single day. On my knees. Now you tell me. What harm did I do you on my knees?”(126). What harm did Ruth do on her knees? To be on one’s knees is a submissive position, one with both sexual and religious implications. The submissiveness of the position shows Ruth’s subjugated role in her community, as a Black woman. This act demonstrates that she is subjugated not only to Dr. Foster, who is both her actual father and her symbolic Father, but to Milkman, who, while her actual son, through this role becomes, at least momentarily, her symbolic Father. Roles and relations are perverted by the paradoxical logic of patriarchy. Morrison attempts less to invert the binaries of this paradoxical logic, but rather to refract them, subverting her own subversions. Ruth is complex character, and is neither as submissive nor as blameless as she appears in (her telling of) her actions in the this scene. She, in this telling of her story, plays down her own agency for the sake of playing down her own culpability. It is, of course, true that over the course of her life she has been “pressed small” by the double oppression of patriarchy and anti Black racism and that because of this she has less agency than her son. However, she has far more agency than she claims, and, like any agent, she is as culpable as she is agent, the two being inextricably linked. Ruth rejects her own agency in order to reject her culpability. Morrison does not allow Ruth to be without agency but, in doing so, does not allow her to remain blameless. Hers in an agency like any other, and as such an agent, she has done harm, whether on her knees or off them. 

Morrison explores the contradictory impulses towards absence and presence are a key component of patriarchy, especially Black patriarchy. However, she often contrasts the vertiginous absence of the flying Fathers to an incestuous presence of the Mothers on the ground. Ashley Tisdey cautions against a purely Freudian reading of Ruth’s relationship with her son, saying 

Milkman’s anxiety is provoked, for instance, not by the absence of maternal figures but by the stifling and hovering proximity of Ruth and Hagar. Because maternal origin with Ruth is marked for Milkman by conscious and unconcious sensations of maternal choking, it is a space to which he will not want to return.”(Tidey 58). 

An anxiety that in vulgar Freudian terms would be born from maternal absence is instead a result of an overwhelming maternal presence. Without ever fully completing an irrefutable act of incest, Ruth’s actions are heavy with incestuous implication. This is true of her relationship with her father and it’s true of her relationship with her son, Milkman Dead. His name arises from such an act. Freddie the janitor walks in on Ruth Foster breastfeeding Milkman (young Macon) at an age far too old to be breast feeding and proclaims “a milkman. That’s what you’ve got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come.”(15). Freddie’s warning to the “womens” of Milkman’s coming sexual appetite, based on this act of maternal nourishment, implies an incestuous confusion between sex and Motherhood, and demonstrates the ways in which this confusion is socially conditioned. This Oedipal confusion in Ruth’s relationship with her son echoes the incestuous symbolism of her relationship with her father. However, the overweening of Milkman is ambiguous act. The only sense that it is wrong comes from Ruth’s uneasiness towards her own action. It’s not taboo or immoral and yet Ruth still feels uneasy about it. This is due in some part to the pressure of social codes, but that doesn’t account entirely for way she feels. After all, she faces no serious social consequences from over-nursing Milkman. When Freddie discovers her he doesn’t chastise her. He seems, at worst, bemused by the situation, and stands there grinning. Ruth is, of course, discomforted by this, but it’s unlikely she would be significantly less discomforted if the janitor had walked in on her breastfeeding young Macon when he was an infant. Freddie laughs at her, but that is the extent of the social stigma she faces from Freddie for over-nursing. Freddie even goes on to acknowledges that his surprise has as much to do with the changing customs than it is a moral judgement, saying “used to be a lot of womenfolk nurse they kids a long time down South”(14) and acknowledging the changing of culture from one generation to the next and from the South to the North. He immediately goes to gossip about how the newly christened Milkman got his name but aside from gossip there are no explicit social consequence. The ramifications are instead psychological. There still lingers for Ruth the sense that there is something shameful in her actions. She’s embarrassed when Freddie walks in, largely due to his intrusiveness, but his audience has effect of “confirming for him what he had already begun to expect- that these afternoons were strange and wrong”(14) and even before Freddie’s arrival she averted her gaze so as to “avoid having seeing his legs dangling almost to the floor.”(14). Even before she is observed Ruth feels, at least subconsciously, that what she is doing is wrong.

  Complicating the act of nursing for Ruth and Milkman is the almost sexual nature of the pleasure that she takes in breastfeeding him, which foreshadows the further entangelment of sex and childbirth throughout the novel. Ruth views childbirth as the symbolic culmination, the completion, of a sexual act after she was “long deprived of sex, long dependent on self-manipulation, she saw her son’s imminent death as the annihilation of the last occasion she had been made love to.”(134). Milkman’s death would lead to the total, both actual and symbolic, absence of sex in Ruth’s life. Though actual sex has long been absent from her life, through Milkman sex is still symbolically present. Milkman, to Ruth, his mother, signifies sex. Childbirth for Ruth is described as “the one aggressive act brought to royal completion”(133) and it is one that someone (first Macon and then Hagar) is trying “deprive” her of. She is already deprived of actual sex; the murder of Milkman would deprive her from symbolic sex. In this way, the death of her son would deprive Ruth of sex, underscoring a symbolically, if not actually incestuous relationship. (The incestuous family dynamics are further underscored by the relationship of Milkman to Hagar, who is his cousin, his lover, and his would be murderer.) For Ruth childbirth is not the result of a separate sexual act nine months prior, but rather something, at least symbolically, still intimately enmeshed with the initial sexual act, a continuation of that act as. This positions childbirth itself as an incestuous act, a sexual act between a mother and child. The morality of childbirth, as well as the question of whether it was right or wrong for Ruth to nurse Milkman for as long as she did, are ambiguous, and ultimately irrelevant. What is more relevant is that its sets up the symbolically incestuous nature of their relationship, and continues the incestuous interplay of absence and presence between mother, fathers, sons, and daughters. 

Ruth returns to the watermark as a mooring checkpoint, as “some stable visual object that assured her the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream”(11). The dizzying play of symbols in the novel can create for its characters a dreamlike world, detached from reality. The watermark is a simulacra, a signifier of a signifier (the bowl) of something that no longer exists (Dr. Foster), and Ruth, at times, becomes lost in these symbols, unmoored from the actual. The symbolic Father and symbolic Mother at times overshadow the actual mothers and fathers, leading to characters viewing each other as ideas and not real, actual, people. The challenge for the characters, even as they seek out flight, is to remain grounded in reality while dealing with the paradoxical interplay of absence and presence.