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

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Philip Page

Central to this rigid unity is a refusal by the ruling fathers to tolerate divergent interpretations of the town's past. The men seek to preserve the town's identity by freezing its past, allowing only their own official reading of the treks, the Disallowing, and the establishment of the town. As Storace argues, they "claim the perpetual overarching authority of the creator at the moment of creation." In this formulation, creator can be taken in the sense of author as well as divine creator, for the townsmen are convinced that their past and their single interpretation of the past have divine sanction, and, unlike Morrison, they "want to stop the life of their work at the moment of writing" (Storace 66).

As a result of such tensions, the town is ripe for a shake-up. Richard Misner, an outsider with a critical perspective on the town who thus parallels the reader's likely position, senses the trouble well before the disrupting raid: The painting of the fist on the Oven makes him think that "it was as though something valuable had been pawned and the claim ticket lost" (117). Later, with Patricia he discusses the problems the Poole family is having, sensing that it, like the town, is disintegrating: "Something's tearing that family apart." He knows that "this community used to be tight as wax" but can't figure out what is happening to it, and Patricia Best, who also takes a critical view of the town, responds that "it still is" tight but that it also is "in a crisis" (207). After the raid, Richard renders his judgments against the nine men: "They had ended up betraying it all," "their selfishness had trashed two hundred years of suffering and triumph in a moment of such pomposity and error and callousness it fr oze the mind," and "soon Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret" (306).

Nevertheless, just as Morrison has stayed with this town and these men and just as she wants the reader to stay with them, Richard knows, even as he passes judgment on them, that he must stay. Yes, Ruby "was an unnecessary failure," and its people are "outrageously ... flawed and proud," but they are at the same time "outrageously beautiful" (306). The closed door that Anna senses suggests that one phase, one life, is over, but simultaneously the open window that Richard senses suggests a new chance and new life: "He saw the window in the garden, felt it beckon toward another place--neither life nor death--but there, just yonder, shaping thoughts he did not know he had" (307).

As Richard's epiphany implies, the raid resembles a fortunate fall, a necessary loosening of the repressive bindings of the town's ideology, a needed jolt from the town's complacency. The raid changes Ruby drastically ("something seismic had happened" [296]), leading Rubyites into healthy disarray and therapeutic soul-searching: They wonder "how could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?" They are "bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people" (292), but such feelings drive them toward long overdue reconsiderations of who they are and who they want to be: "The difficulties churned and entangled everybody: distribution of blame, prayers for understanding and forgiveness, arrogant self-defense, outright lies, and a host of unanswered questions that Richard Misner kept putting to them" (298). Such confused pondering is only human--and fundamentally healthy. It valorizes multiple perspectives, allows room for varying interpretations, and provides room for change and gro wth. Lone DuPres, whose intuitive knowledge is repeatedly privileged, knows that "God had given Ruby a second chance" (297). The pattern of loss and recovery is suggested earlier in the novel by three passages presumably taken from hymnals: "Something within me that banishes pain; something within me I cannot explain" (211), "I once was lost but now am found" (212), and then "Was blind but now I see" (213).