Reading and insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise

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

Despite these examples, Morrison demonstrates that art is not necessarily created to bring insight; art can be used to reinforce blind acceptance of the status quo. In Paradise the school Christmas play becomes a secret conveyance of the ruling beliefs of Ruby. The story of the Nativity is intertwined with a significant event in Ruby's history dubbed the Disallowing. The historical rejection of the Ruby ancestors from other black communities after Reconstruction because of their darker skin is reenacted as the rejection of Joseph and Mary on their way to Bethlehem. Instead of three wise men, the number of wise men correlates to the number of founding families in Ruby, but the number changes when a family falls out of favor with the ruling elite of the town. The conflation of stories dramatized by the children's play makes Ruby's history a sacred text of community martyrdom, and as a sacred text the story is God-given truth. Thus the play performs an historical erasure that reinforces the authority of the fami lies currently in power while it masks its own revisionary processes. In this case an artistic representation is meant to foreclose historical knowledge and relations of power.

Through her art, Morrison attempts to reveal the invisible presences of history, subjectivity, and divinity. History is inscribed as the invisible repercussions of the past in the present, such as the "lingering inheritance of racial slavery, the unfinished project of Reconstruction" (Gordon 139). In her novels, Morrison exposes the hand of the past in contemporary political, geographical, economic, and social relations, and in the more deeply hidden psychological, emotional, and spiritual lives of slavery's inheritors. But, as Avery Gordon argues in her discussion of Beloved, Morrison also teaches the reader to see the invisible structures of ideology and power described by Marx and Freud, structures that interpellate us and resist our attempts to change ourselves and the world. Morrison exposes these structures in part through history. The Convent itself represents history as a densely layered palimpsest, a history simultaneously hidden and revealed. The Convent is thus also a metaphor for Morrison's novel and for her trilogy, in which she adds layers of revelation and revision onto an historical text whose original is as irretrievable as the burnt pages of Patricia Best's historical accounts.

The past also lives in the present through literary and artistic texts. In Morrison's trilogy, Milton's Paradise Lost is rewritten as an alternative North American history; the New Eden is lost through the founding fathers' original sins--the murder of the indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans--and through the very desire to relinquish history, to erase knowledge of the past. In Paradise, one can see Dante's Divine Comedy, Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, stories of origins, migrations, and the writing and interpreting of Laws, the Gospels, as well as African creation myths of "Paradise Lost" of the Nuer, Tutsi, Lugbara, Dinka, and Yoruba people, rewritten from African American perspectives. (13) Morrison's literary dialogue with these sacred and canonical texts both reveals their power in the present and loosens their grip as unquestioned truth and supreme knowledge.