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

In Paradise, the ambivalence pinpointed by Bhabha implies that Ruby's exceptionalist master narrative may be read as an example of "the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation." As such, it is destabilized by the "transitional social reality" of the community's "cultural temporality"; that is, by the many contradictory changes that have occurred in its community since its foundation. This ambivalent tension is most clearly focused in the story of a communal oven. Originally established by Haven's founding fathers as a way of sealing their triumph over hardship, and later carefully cleaned of its many layers of dust and grease--that is, layers of lived experience and cultural temporality--and reassembled in the same way as the original in Ruby, the Oven, in the eyes of the present community, functions as one of Bhabha's "national objects of knowledge ... whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of histori cal continuity." Quite literally, the Oven is to Ruby's members the place on which the community's founding fathers inscribed their exceptionalist aspirations: The ironmonger who made it crowned his efforts by fixing an iron plate at its mouth whose inscription held the key for later generations to redeem the founders' paradisiacal promise (6-7). While Morrison shows the community's young male lions to be involved in an ardent battle against the old patriarchs over the right to define the actual meaning of its ancestral inscription, they fully share their elders' belief in the inscription as the community's final signified." 'No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that,'" one of them argues in the course of their battle. Similarly, the young protesters affirm their elders' notion of Ruby as a covenanted community with a special moral responsibility, offering statements like the following:" 'It's not being Him, sir; it's being His instrument, His justice . As a race--'" and" 'If we follow His commandments, we'll be His voice, His retribution. As a people--'" (83-87). [6]

For all of its mythical tenacity, however, Morrison shows the Oven to be without material anchoring in contemporary Ruby. While originally, we are told, the Oven held the dual function of nourishing the community as well as monumentalizing its pioneers' accomplishments (7), now, at a time when all of Ruby's households have long had their own private ovens installed, it has lost its use-value. As Soane Morgan, one the community members, privately puts it, giving word to a rather non-exceptionalist attitude generally characteristic of the community's women, the Oven figures as" 'a utility ... [become] a shrine'" (103). Reified and canonized, like the community's exceptionalist self-narrative, it has become a signifier emptied of content. By 1976, the community's unwillingness to tolerate any destabilizing elements in its heroic version of history has implied that the community has been emptied of identity. Hence, Morrison explains, ... mythologizing can end up hurting more then helping. These people have an ext raordinary history, and they were sound people, moral people, generous people. Yet when their earlier settlement collapsed, and they tried to repeat it in Ruby ... well, the modern generation simply couldn't sustain what the Old Fathers had created, because of the ways in which the world had changed. (qtd. in Marcus n.p.)