Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Through a Glass Darkly":Typology in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon Judy Pocock (bio) In a 1981 interview, Morrison told Charles Ruas that "the Bible wasn't part of my reading, it was part of my life" (97). In her use of structure, language, and concepts-her use of metaphor, repetition, and reiteration-the Bible resonates throughout Toni Morrison's novel, Song of Solomon. Erich Auerbach describes the Bible as a text "fraught with background" (qtd. in Alter, "The Old Testament" 22); the Song of Solomon is a text fraught with the background of the Bible. Here, I concentrate on Morrison's use of biblical names. The novel's epigraph-"The fathers may soar and the children may know their names"-signals the central role names will play in the novel. Over and over again, characters and places are named, renamed, or misnamed, and more often than not, the Bible is at the centre of this process. The title of the novel and the names of almost all the women and some of the men come from the Bible. Each one of these names evokes complex biblical characters, allusions, metaphors, and narrative cycles that resonate back and forth throughout the text, and each name signals a parallel with, reversal of, or contradiction with a given biblical allusion. Buried in the text is a hint that those who know their Bible well will have special access when they read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. When Pilate goes to the police station to get her nephew, Milkman, and his friend, Guitar, out of jail, she impresses Milkman and the jail guards with her knowledge of the Bible by quoting verbatim Matthew 21.2: "Bible say what so e'er the Lord hath brought together, let no man put asunder" (207). A reader well-versed in the Bible would realize that the verse Pilate is referring to is not the verse she quotes out loud. Matthew 21.2 actually quotes Jesus directing his followers to "Go into the village [End Page 281] and . . . straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them and bring them unto me,"1 a Bible verse implying a far more appropriate metaphorical allusion to the matriarch's demand that the guards hand over the two reckless and selfish young men. In this playful example, we can see how Morrison uses the Bible to juxtapose implied narratives, images, and symbolic motifs to heighten contradictions and conjure up meaning. In the way that she uses biblical imagery and combines this with African and Afro-American folkloric elements, Morrison engages in what African American theologian Osayande Obery Hendricks describes as "guerrilla exegesis": Exegesis, from the Greek term signifying a narrative, a description, an explanation, an interpretation; a process of bringing out/leading out/teasing out meanings and significance heretofore obscured or hidden from view. Guerrilla exegesis, then, is the bringing or leading out of oppressed/suppressed/ don't-get-no-press meanings by sabotage subversion or other non-traditional appropriations of hegemonic renderings. . . . a theology of new categories and old (and emergent) structures of feeling: a double-voiced theology. (2-3) In operating as a guerrilla exegete, Morrison appropriates the methodology of Christian typology, and her primary strategy is to mobilize the typological power of biblical names. Typology, throughout the history of Christian exegesis, has been used as a key to clarifying the meaning of the Bible. This is how Northrop Frye explains typological interpretation of the Bible: The general principle of interpretation is traditionally given as "In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; In the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed." Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a "type" or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament . . . Paul speaks of Adam as a typos of Christ (Romans 5:14) . . . What happens in the New Testament constitutes an "antitype," a realized form, of something foreshadowed in the Old Testament. In 1 Peter 3:21 Christian baptism is called the antitypos of the saving of mankind from the flood of Noah. Typology . . . moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".