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Margaret Atwood's (1979) Life Before Man and Toni Morrison's (1977) Song of Solomon are two richly associative, poetic novels which have at their core a strikingly similar central metaphor: the obsession with bones. This would appear to be where the comparison ends, for the two women seem to be forging unique novelistic forms out of disparate materials and concerns. The common preoccupation with bones is no accident, however, but a reflection and concretization of the deep concern with formal presentation, or structure, which is so prevalent in the best of contemporary literature and contemporary criticism. The psychoanalytically trained reader and critic will be aware of an analogous development in our own art and science: the increasing attention to and concern with the processes of internalization and structuralization and, optimally, their psychic accretions and combinations into human identity.
To be haunted by bones, for both Morrison and Atwood, is to struggle with the fundamental and the historical question of what creates and sustains human identity and meaningful living in the latter half of a century marked by increasingly chaotic mobility and the breakdown of traditional structures . Both are concerned with the historical phenomenon of the repetition-compulsion, the recapitulation of one's personal, familial, and sociopolitical history in the present. But both also share an acute contemporary sensitivity to waste and attrition, breakdown, and fragmentation. Morrison works in the