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 further destabilizes the (African) American exceptionalist ideal by questioning the Oven's original meaning. As the Oven's inscription now appears, it begins with an empty space followed by the fragment of a sentence apparently suggesting patriarchal, even divine, authority: "... the Furrow of His Brow." But what does the inscription's opening absence signify?

As is suggested by the fact that Morrison offers no clue as to what the correct answer might be--indeed, that she has the community leaders' authoritative version turn out to derive from a highly dubious source--the ancestral inscription turns out to be as enigmatic as the grandfather's riddle that haunts the length of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). Having no "fixed origin," to use Derrida's expression, it remains unstable and open-ended ("Structure" 35). As the coldly rational, mixed-blood chemistry teacher Pat Best eventually realizes after having spent years empirically researching the histories of Ruby's leading, blackest families--the so-called 8-rock families--for condemning evidence, Ruby's contemporary members have no way of grasping their history in pure form, and hence no way of verifying the correct meaning of their central icon. Instead, the prefatory empty space of the Oven's inscription implies that, like the scarlet A attached to Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), the Oven is endlessly productive of new meaning, hence the ardent political battle between Ruby's leading elders and the community's young lions, and hence, also, the many fragmented and conflicting stories involved in Morrison's narration.

Morrison's destabilizing of the original meaning of the Oven suggests an even more basic skepticism on her part concerning the (African) American exceptionalist narrative than her unveiling of the Oven's contemporary uselessness. The question her novel ultimately begs is this: Was the (African) American vision of a national paradise ever as perfect as its proponents have traditionally suggested? In this respect, Morrison is once again in keeping with Bhabha, whose ambivalent view of the nation leads him to suggest that "the 'locality' of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as 'other' in relation to what is outside or beyond it" (4). Following Derrida's theory of the supplement as being both a completion of and an addition to an original plenitude, Bhabha holds that what he calls "minority discourse"--that which is beyond or outside the national master discourse--destabilizes the master discourse insofar as it insinuates itself into its terms of ref erence, antagonizing its "implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological validity." An apparent plenitude, the national master discourse is revealed by minority discourse to contain a lack--otherwise, no supplementary discourse would exist. Since this lack, moreover, is inhabited by the minority discourse, this discourse disturbs the apparent fullness of the master discourse (305-06). [7]