Furrowing all the Brows: Interpretation and the transcendent in Toni Morrison's Paradise - Critical Essay

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Philip Page

Lone's and Connie's actions are extensions of the act of interpreting. For by stepping in or seeing in to another person and spiritually pulling him or her back to life, Lone and Connie engage in acts of extreme self-projection, of ultimate empathy, of total transfer of the self to the other. Reviving the dead goes beyond ordinary interpretation in at least two ways. First, the practitioner is the active agent, not passively reacting but becoming a new creator, almost literally breathing new life into the dying person. Thus, the practitioner approximates both the powers of the divinity and the powers of the author who has originally breathed fictional life into the characters. Second, the practitioner transcends the rationalistic sense of interpretation as factual or theoretical knowing and instead mystically unites herself with the other person. With such complete identification with the other comes complete understanding that transcends ordinary experience. Interpretation and creation become inseparable.

Consolata also extends the novel's exploration of interpretation when she helps heal the four Convent women through her use of "templates" (263) and "loud dreaming" (264). The templates--the outlines of themselves that Connie has the women draw on the basement floor--become self-representations through which they are able to gain much-needed perspectives on themselves and each other. Getting outside their hitherto closed, self-destructive egos enables them to see themselves, to interpret themselves, and thereby to begin to cure themselves. The templates are analogous to fictional selves, doubling the self and thereby allowing each woman to "see in" to herself, to interpret herself, and thus to find a viable identity. The other ingredient of the healing process is loud dreaming, through which Connie engages the women in sharing their life-stories. In loud dreaming they not only unburden themselves of their traumatic pasts, but as each one talks, the others enter into her story, in full empathy with her, in int uitive fellowship akin to Lone's and Connie's reviving of the dead: "In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer's tale." Just as Lone steps in to a dying person's body and soul, so Connie teaches the four women to step into each other's. Each loses herself in full identification with each other, in acts of total interpretation: With Mavis "they enter the heat in the Cadillac," with Pallas "they kick their legs underwater," and with Seneca each "runs up and down the halls by day, sleeps in a ball with the lights on at night." In this mutual therapy and transcendent group interpretation, they pass beyond the boundaries of individual and other, life and death: "In loud dreaming, monologue is no different from a shriek; accusations directed to the dead and long gone are undone by murmurs of love" (264). As they do so, they heal themselves, achieving individual harmony as they acquire communal harmony. They gain self and community: "They understood and began to begin," and the chan ges are soon evident, for they have "a markedly different look," something "sociable and connecting" (265), "an adult manner" (266), a calmness, a lack of being haunted.