Reading and insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Linda J. Krumholz

Now hear this and, beyond all doubt, believe it: the good of grace is in exact proportion to the ardor of love that opens to receive it. (Dante, Paradiso XXIX)

I once was lost but now I'm found, Was blind but now I see. ("Amazing Grace," spiritual)

In the novels of her trilogy, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, Toni Morrison uses repetition with a difference to create multiple versions of stories, to revise dominant history, and to represent processes of healing, transformation, and insight. (1) In Beloved, the former slave woman Sethe's freedom from the past comes not when she crosses the Ohio River, nor when her desperate and murderous act takes her beyond the reach of slavery. The potential for freedom comes from a ritual repetition of the trauma itself, this time with a significant difference; she aims her weapon not at her own children, but instead at the white man who threatens her children. In Jazz, the entire plot, structured like jazz music, repeats with a difference when the murderous triangle of Joe, "Violent," and Dorcas is transformed into the familial love of Joe, Violet, and Felice. The repetition of the story with a significant difference also forces the narrator of Jazz to reconsider assumptions. Morrison's recapitulation of the murder scene in Paradise again employs the narrative trope of repetition with a difference; the novel also contains numerous doublings of scenes, characters, and points of view that generate a constant process of repetition with a difference for the reader. But in Paradise, Morrison also considers what the danger of repetition without difference might be; what happens if difference is rejected in order to maintain the utopian harmony of paradise? The irony of Paradise is that repetition without a difference maintains itself through rigidity and exclusion and thus destroys the ideal it seeks to preserve; an unchanging Paradise inevitably loses its paradisiacal nature.

In Paradise Morrison guides the reader into the volatile conjunction of race and gender; within it she constructs a process of revelation or insight that is best understood not as an unveiling but as a vision of the many veils of history, ideology, and desire through which we see the world. Paradise begins on the significant date of July 1976 as nine men from Ruby prepare to kill five women who live in the nearby Convent. The Morgan twins, Deacon and Steward, epitomize unified authority; they share one memory, one purpose, and one belief until the murders that July day divide them. They interpret the words inscribed on the sacred Oven according to their privileged relationship to the originator of the inscription: "The twins believed it was when he discovered how narrow the path of righteousness could be that their grandfather chose the words for the Oven's lip" (14). As the men stalk the unarmed women, Morrison makes abundantly clear the dangers of both narrow interpretations and a belief in one's own righte ousness. The description of the women at the end of the first chapter clarifies the irony of the men's actions:

Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary. they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.

God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby. (18)

From the men's perspectives, the women, like Eve, embody a loss of innocence and an ejection from the Garden of Eden, the earthly Paradise, a loss the men fear and wish to prevent. But as hunted does anointed with "holy oil," the women are also Christ-like sacrificial victims and the men their executioners. In a further irony, the men's act of hubris exceeds Eve's original sin; while Eve succumbed to the desire for divine knowledge, the men of Ruby act as if they actually know God's will. The men become what they wish to destroy, and thus they destroy their Paradise.

As the women leap and the men take aim, Morrison freezes the action; she will return to this moment in the eighth and penultimate chapter after the histories of the people of Ruby and the Convent are told. Between the first account from the men's perspectives and the later account from the women s is the space of insight, of new knowledge, the potential for a work of art to change the way we see. Morrison calls this insight "grace" in the chapter by that name. When Connie discovers Gigi's given name is Grace, she says, "Grace. What could be better?" and Morrison writes:

Nothing. Nothing at all. If ever there came a morning when mercy and simple good fortune took to their heels and fled, grace alone might have to do. But from where would it come and how fast? In that holy hollow between sighting and following through, could grace slip through at all? (73)

The description of mercy and fortune taking flight recollects the doe-like running women, the "bodacious black Eves" caught in mid-leap and arrested there for 250 pages. Morrison's novel occurs in "that holy hollow between sighting and following through," as the men take aim but have not yet fired. The text of Paradise expands that moment into a space of insight, revision, and grace, a grace period for the reader. The leaping women signify a new point of departure, a leap out of the known into new possibilities of representation and imagination.