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The Other side of paradise: Toni Morrison's making of mythic history
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Marni Gauthier
Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison's seventh novel and her first since becoming the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), was greeted with the most mixed reviews of the author's three-decade career. Reviewers criticized the unconvincing logic of its "war between men and women" and its "rigid and legalistic" male-female dichotomy that results in "a contrived, formulaic book." A journal review concludes, "Morrison's new novel falls prey to ... one of paradise's shortcomings as a concept": "it's too schematic.... Virtue and vice seem to have been rigorously sorted along the convenient divide of gender; all the women are good, all the men bad." (1) Such comments, however, overlook the novel's self-consciousness of its own dynamic: the gender dichotomy is only one part of a larger series of oppositions that the novel stages and then explodes for its central project of interrogating the processes by which popular national histories are made and sustained. (2) Indeed, through its schematic account of gender and race oppositions, and its strategies of self-referential inversions and displacements, Paradise denotes the unsettling paradox of a nation born as the first modern democracy that excluded whole populations from its citizenry based upon precisely such "rigid and legalistic" constructions of identity. More recently, Katrine Dalsgard has incisively identified this incongruity as Morrison's deconstruction of America's original ideal of exceptionalism, which, Paradise shows, "is inevitably entwined with a violent marginalization of its non-exceptionalist other" (237). Yet Morrison is also deeply interested in the means by which certain versions of history--including but not limited to the exceptionalist paradigm--become master narratives. Thus Paradise deconstructs certain founding American narratives in the service of an overarching design that probes the workings of narrating the nation.
Critics have universally recognized Morrison for redressing the limited perspectives of mainstream United States history by reclaiming the narratives of African American history, particularly from a female point of view. To take only the most famous example, Beloved draws on the little-known story of an escaped female slave and her relationship to motherhood, family, and community during the antebellum and post-Civil War period. Paradise extends this earlier example of Morrison's historical revision, creating a springboard for metahistorical argument about conventional national history and the politics of truth it involves--an argument, that is, that probes the ways that truth is linked to systems of power that produce and sustain it. (3) The title of Morrison's seventh novel evokes various tropes for the US that mainstream literary history has produced: the American Adam--an embodied state of innocence, free from the burden of history; Virgin Land--an uninhabited and unspoiled wilderness; the Garden--a natural, regenerative, agrarian utopia. The title is the novel's first hint that unlike Morrison's previous historical works, this text explores not only a particular historical moment, but also a particular national ideal--and the way that national history itself becomes inscribed in our collective imagination as mythic history. Mythic history is that narrative of national identity that partially represents experience and gains particular currency in the popular imagination. Formulated as much from myth as from historical occurrences, mythic history both produces and reflects collective historical imagination. (4) Paradise scrutinizes the tropes of national mythic history, working not only to reveal its sins of omission and exclusion, but also its narrative processes. Paradise combines factual and experiential truths from African American history to construct an insistent countermemory to national American mythologies in order to investigate the relationship of truth both to history--the complex of actual events as well as that which becomes the sanctioned version of the past--and to myth--those stories we tell ourselves about what has happened. Specifically, Paradise explores the ways that truths are constituted, maintained, and subjugated in the process of mythologizing history, a process Morrison suggests is endemic to national community.
Paradise Inverted: The Genealogist's Counternarrative
Morrison creates in Paradise a microcosm of America in the utopian all-black community of Ruby, Oklahoma. As with Beloved and Jazz--the two other novels in her trilogy of excessive love--Morrison's conception of the novel developed from kernels in 19th-century African American history that center on slaves or descendants of slaves fleeing the rampant, violent racism of the South. (5) Beloved s Sethe flees her Kentucky slaveowner in 1855; and in what becomes a backdrop for Paradise, Morrison writes in Jazz that "The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the 80s; the 90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it" (33). The historical timeline of Paradise, though not the narrative, begins in the "crest" of that flight. By situating the flight this time as a specifically northwestern exodus, Morrison inscribes African Americans in the US mythic history of westward migration. "So far from being the bucolic Utopia of Rodgers and Hammerstein," writes Christopher Hitchens, "[Oklahoma] was the land of heartbreak for the free black citizens who voyaged there, post-Reconstruction, to set up 26 all-black towns" (144). Founded by descendants of southern blacks who were effectively re-enslaved during the postReconstruction era through the sharecropping system and adamant white determination to block them from economic and political enfranchisement by means legal and illegal, Ruby is a paradise for its inhabitants that is also established on the principle of exclusivity. The founding families of Ruby are distinguished by their impeccable dark skin, evidence that they have not been corrupted by "racial tampering." The grandfathers of Ruby's citizens--always referred to by the community as the "Old Fathers"--fled the white terrorism of the South, only to be rejected by a prosperous settlement of light-skinned blacks, appropriately called "Fairly." This rebuff, known as the "Disallowing" by the townspeople, is the historical moment that provides the impetus for migrating westward to found the township of Haven, and later, for moving "farther westward" to found Ruby (194). As the novel progresses, Morrison explores several issues central to African American history of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Booker T. Washington-W. E. B. Du Bois rift, to the rifts occasioned by the Black Power movement of the 1960s and Civil Rights activism, to the Vietnam's War decimation of young black men. (6)
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