The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

Morrison's deconstructive approach, in contrast, implies a skepticism toward any national historical narrative. She is in line with the Foucault-inspired British critic Catherine Belsey, who rejects the notion of history as "an irrecoverable experience" in favor of a history "of meanings, of the signified in its plurality." According to Belsey, history is not objective, authoritative, neutral, or true. It is not outside history itself, or outside the present. On the contrary, it is part of history, part of the present. It is irreducibly textual, offering no place outside discourse from which to interpret or judge. It is explicitly partial, from a position and on behalf of a position. (405)

Destabilizing (African) America's past along this line, Morrison opens the possibility of herself assuming an active role in the construction of (African) American history in the form of addressing such pressing contemporary problems as racism and sexism. But at the same time, as she herself acknowledges, Morrison, too, operates in an open-ended, endlessly productive textual terrain in which her historical production is discursively embedded and subject to change: "I know I can't change the future but I can change the past. Insight and knowledge change the past. It is the past, not the future, which is infinite" (qtd. in Bigsby 29).

In Paradise Morrison's approach to history is already evident in her narrative structure, which emerges as "a tissue of quotations," to use Roland Barthes' expression (170). Rather than being linear and monovocal, as would befit a master narrative, it is an open-ended fabric woven by Ruby's multiplicity of fragmented and sometimes competing narrative voices. Moreover, the fact that Morrison's individual chapter headings are named after different characters makes clear that her narrative is without a unifying protagonist. And rather than offering the narrative's many stories chronologically, Morrison jumps back and forth between various points of time. As she explains," ... even though we live chronologically, our consciousness works quite differently. We constantly think about yesterday, or 20 years ago, or the future, as we go about the day. Our minds are always moving back and forth, planning, remembering, regretting" (qtd. in Marcus n.p.). Altogether, Morrison's narrative mode assumes the patchwork qualit y that has come to be the hallmark of much contemporary African American women's fiction. Open-ended, fragmented, and multivoiced, it works in the service of subjective and collective memory and against the notion of a totalizing master narrative.

Within her narrative framework, Morrison's deconstruction of exceptionalism as an (African) American national narrative may be further understood in relation to Homi Bhabha's preface to his anthology of scholarly articles on the cultural significations of the "nation's" foundation, Nation and Narration (1990). In this book Bhabha suggests that the concept of "the nation" is haunted by an ambivalent tension between "the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation as a sign of the 'modernity' of society," on one hand, and the "transitional social reality" inscribed by the nation's "cultural temporality," on the other. Following Benedict Anderson's suggestion that "nationalism has to be understood," not in relation to "self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which--as well as against which--it came into being," Bhabha proposes to undertake a study of the "nation's 'coming into being' ... as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity." Such a study emphasizes this ambivalence insofar as it "displays a temporality of culture and social consciousness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of difference in language; more in keeping with the problem of closure which plays enigmatically in the discourse of the sign" than with "the 'political rationality' of the nation as a form of narrative." As such, Bhabha's method "contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge--Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance--whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of historical continuity" (l-3). [5]