〈言若無物〉：東妮茉莉森《樂園》中的〈干預〉策略

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(1)Gogo. Intro. 1. Introduction. Four years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Morrison finally published her seventh novel, Paradise. Acquiring the title of the Nobel laureate, and also the first African-American woman to win the prize, Morrison feels “representational” than ever.1 Deeply concerned about cultural issues and especially the role of language in constructing everyday reality, she has authored Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), edited Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992), co-edited Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case (1997) with Claudia Brodsky Lacour, written literary/cultural critiques and also commented in various lectures and interviews including those on websites. In her Nobel lecture, she accentuates the predicament of language deprived of its plural and heterogeneous features, and the bleak conditions once it is put into service of certain despicable purposes: The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Keenly aware of the accessibility and in particular the widespread abuse of language, she explores from her very first novel how it is employed as “the instrument through which [the exploitative] power is exercised” (“The Bird in Our Hand”). In The Bluest Eye, it is the white’s oppressive discourse that the black people adopt and even internalize to white out their own shame, or.

(2) Gogo. Intro. 2. “racial self-loathing” (“Afterword” 210), which they “learn,” paradoxically, from the white’s prejudiced assessments of them. By stigmatizing a frail black girl, Pecola (who, in turn, internalizes that discourse and passively disclaims herself), the black community as a whole tries laboriously to secure its self-esteem but only brings about its own (moral) deterioration. Out of ignorance or narrow-mindedness, it just repeats what is the most pitiable about the white, that is, mercilessness and short-sightedness, and willingly vents its anger on its neighbor, trying to avert its gaze from its self-pitying body. Standing out as a renowned African-American woman writer raising her voice against the inequities that (still) cast down the black and women, Morrison has chosen a rather distinctive position in her professional life. Whether as editor at the Landom House or professor teaching fiction writing at Princeton University, she helps ethnic and many marginalized (potential) writers publish works that are written in their peculiar language telling their individual train of thought, as a dissent against the mainstream discourse that endorses the privileged or the “majority,” and the hierarchized social structure. Aiming at unmasking and altering “the policing languages of mastery [which] cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas,” Morrison draws attention to the exigencies of accommodating different or discordant voices, opening up spaces for the ambiguous, repressed and “unsayable, transgressive words” (“Bird”) that, as a point of departure, enable us to sympathize with one another and make a less biased, but more human world. I quote a phrase from Morrison’s Nobel lecture—Language’s “force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable”—as part of my title to suggest that her politics of language, especially her narrative strategy (i.e. stepping in) that.

(3) Gogo. Intro. 3. complicates her latest novel, Paradise, is grounded on a sense of human interrelatedness. Demanding as it is, the compassion for distinct individuals, above all, for those who are muffled by “representational” or “monumental” discourse, is what Morrison tries to gesture toward in her works. With acute imagination and insightful compassion, she not only voices and makes the “trivial,” “insignificant” or “negligible” things engaging enough to be juxtaposed with the “grand,” but also employs them to “step in” unconventionally and transform the rather rigid, unreceptive idea of traditional literary paragon. Rather than founding a particular ethnic or gendered canon (or hierarchy) to counteract the already predominant, it seems that Morrison appeals to transcend those fixed barriers by releasing the ambiguous, paradoxical and inspiring properties of language, and at the same time, paying deference to diverse, ineffable human differences and experiences. For Morrison, the need to re-imagine or re-present histories—in which no single race, gender, religion or politics is superior to any other—via writing about diverse experiences from disparate perspectives, is imperative. Without sacrificing her intelligence to a mere assault on the dominant (white) criteria, she invents in her novels a drastically different form of narrative, that is, “race-specific yet race-free prose…. [which is] free of racial hierarchy and triumphalism” (“Afterword” 211). Always setting her stories in black communities, she writes about ethnic clashes—not only black against white, but more often black against black (or mulatto), and the effects on the individuals as well as the whole community. But as she reveals to Zia Jaffrey in the Salon Interview that she is “not casting blame” or demonizing anyone in her novels; rather, she is “just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to.

(4) Gogo. Intro. 4. do with the way we live now.” For Morrison, “[n]ovels are always inquiries.” Rather than seeking to replace one (racial) paradigm/hegemony with another, or “tak[ing] positions that are closed” in her novels, she is more interested in “expand[ing] articulation,” inviting “reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity” to allow “equitable access, and ope[n] doors to all sorts of things” (qtd. in Jaffrey 1). As she remarks, [t]he vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie…. Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word or the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. Language, so far as writing/reading’s concerned, should be interrogative, productive and able to generate meanings, or knowledge that “[secure] our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life” (“Bird”). It is almost Morrison’s distinctive feature of narrative to portray her characters by piecemeal and in a deferred manner without giving her reader, in an omniscient stance, an overall picture of their personalities. She leaves clues and eavesdropping2 from time to time, sometimes even contradictions in the accounts, for the reader to piece up their own versions of story. As the story unfolds back and forth in the space of time, we perceive inch by inch not only twists and turns in the characters’ inner recesses, but the weight of the past (which often appears in discursive form) impacting on their later lives. And.

(5) Gogo. Intro. 5. by intertwining the present with memories of the past—not to mention there are diverse renditions of memories by the characters—and in the meantime weaving folklore, endemic myths, biblical stories and/or vernacular histories into her stories, the characters become appealingly accessible to our imagination, and even able to court our empathy. Yet, as Morrison explains in the “Afterword” to The Bluest Eye, she does not want her (intended) fragmentized narrative to “lead readers into the comfort of pitying [Pecola],” but “into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing” (211) of the girl’s small mind. In other words, she wants to expand the reader’s percipience of language, and to open up a space of dynamics—between her and the readership—for reading, interpreting, rewriting or even transforming literature. At the same time, she wants to challenge his/her capacity for a kind of “unmolested language,” which is not imbued and manipulated by certain ideologies (racism, sexism, classism or any self-important discourses) and hence become exclusive and narcissistic with its self-sufficiency and conclusive words. It is, however, not maltreated precisely because its user recognizes its “nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties” (“Bird”) that enable meanings to expand. Instead of seeking for its “purity,” it is “stepped in” continuously and thus extended by the ambiguous or heterogeneous qualities of language that return multi-dimensions, differences or even discordance, to the human world. In Morrison’s latest three novels, especially Paradise, the reader has been challenged even more demandingly than by her previous ones. Originally conceived as a three-volume work but later appeared separately as Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997),3 the so-called trilogy has continued her “routine experiments” on the reader’s capacity for reading (or.

(6) Gogo. Intro. 6. reading/rewriting imaginatively and inquisitively), but dealt in different dimension or intensity. The story(-telling) in Beloved soaks the reader, all at once as it begins, in a mother’s unfathomable (or excessive) love for her dead child and the traumatic slavery past she wants to forget. The narrative sounds so sober and consistent through the novel that one virtually starts to wonder if Morrison deliberately writes Beloved as a probingly documentary novel.4 Jazz, on its part, opens with a neighborhood gossip tattling a sad story about a young woman murdered by her middle-aged boyfriend and nearly defaced by his seemingly jealous or unhinged wife on the dead girl’s funeral. Though the novel’s setting, Harlem in the 1920s (the Jazz Age)—where numerous Southern blacks swarm in to find their dreams shattered, e.g. freedom and more opportunities after the First World War—intensifies the pathetic existence of the main characters, many critics believe that the unidentified yet lively narrator plays a more significant part in this novel.5 For me, the narrator is indeed a catching “character,” but s/he is just like every reader—you and me. S/he argues and falters alternately, and sometimes becomes so arrogant as to imagine that s/he can write anybody into the assumed plot, or stereotype them, and then saves the burden of having to read the subtleties in one another’s minds. Complicated as s/he seems, the Jazz narrator is definitely different from the one(s) that “dances” in Paradise. Paradise opens with a massacre in the Convent, which nine armed Ruby men invade to storm off the five women taking shelter there. But the reader cannot ascertain the number of the Convent women until the “Lone” section, almost the end of the book, where the slaughter is depicted again yet with a more panoramic account. The reader will find by then, if s/he shall remember, the arithmetic mistake in the second paragraph of the opening “Ruby” section:.

(7) Gogo. Intro. 7. “[the gunmen] are nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill” (emphases added). More ridiculously, the following sentence reads, “they have the paraphernalia for either requirement: rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, Mace and sunglasses” to attack the five women! What do “a palm leaf cross…Mace and sunglasses” have to do with the men’s hunting mission? There are even two of the men “wearing ties” (Paradise 3) in the time of killing! It looks more like they are preparing for an exorcism! The seemingly omniscient narrator even depicts the total nine of the Ruby posse, for eighteen pages (i.e. the full length of the first section), in a way as if they thought and acted as one, as if God built them in one uniform, if not godly, image.6 The weirdness or contradiction thus keeps oozing from the narrative on and off as the story evolves. Together with supernatural episodes such as revised biblical stories, apparition emerging in the sky or in one’s garden, “forever-fucking” lovers in the desert, women’s magic disappearance after the slaughter, etc., the narrative wavers between a self-righteous, God-at-their-side (18) voice and one which is subtler, tentative or ambiguous. Sometimes it seems to waver between an apparently vested, immovable history and an oral, mythical story-telling. More probable, it plays among polyphonic voices with “the dance of an open mind…engag[ing] another equally open one—an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in” (Dancing Mind 7). As an active reader, Ron David comments, “Paradise is a myth about the relationship between myth and truth—or, on a less lofty level, about the relationship between story telling and reality. It is a myth about how myths are formed, changed, and DE-formed” (174). I agree with parts of this interpretation. Indeed, P/paradise itself is one of the alluring mythical.

(8) Gogo. Intro. 8. concepts that humans construct, deconstruct and reconstruct through all ages. As Morrison remarks, “We all want safety and love and freedom.... We want a place where we can be. It’s just most of the paradigms are exclusionary, are defined by their borders and by those who are not there” (qtd. in Italie). Those paradigms, or idea(l)s of paradise, in Morrison’s sense, should not be immutable and restricted but open to different or hybrid elements, inviting arguments, interactivities, and acknowledging interrelationships among one another. She draws on a biblical story to illustrate her perception: The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven…? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life. (“Bird”) In this novel, with hundreds of characters, there are disparate attitudes toward life, and hence diverse ideas about paradise. Roughly speaking, two opposite views on P/paradise are in the core: one, generally adopted and internalized by the Ruby inhabitants or the 8-Rs,7 is understood as orthodox (Christian), but closed and exclusive; the other, embraced by the Convent women (after their transformation in both mind and body), seems bizarre but liberating, sometimes even like a parody of the former.. For example, the. seemingly immortal Ruby townsfolk, in creating their Paradise, have as their.

(9) Gogo. Intro. 9. spiritual leaders rivaling priests. There are, respectively, Senior Pulliam the Methodist, who is very stern, puritan and punitive; Reverend Misner the Baptist, who is a protestant, progressive minister; and Reverend Cary, in charge of the Pentecostals, who holds a similar but milder view on God and His people with Pulliam’s.8. The Convent women, however, have their “revised [or. parodied] Reverend Mother” (Paradise 265), Consolata. She “teach[es them] what [they] are hungry for” (262) and tells them, “[n]ever break [body and spirit] in two” (263), i.e. never go to the extremes of idolizing bodily or spiritual matters because nurturing such a split is just like cutting a part off a person and cannot make one complete and wholesome. Besides, there are two kinds of baptizing ritual: one orthodox, the other “heretic” or, again, parody. As Soane Morgan recalls “[b]eautiful baptisms. Baptisms to break the heart, full of major chords and weeping and the trill of being safe at last…. [T]he pastor…lower[s the girls] one by one into newly hallowed water…. Hair and face streaming they [look] to heaven ….Then the reassurance: ‘Daughter, thou art saved’” (103). The Convent women, on the other hand, have their exotic “baptism.” On the night just before the slaughter, the long-awaited rain finally comes, and the women “[enter] it and let it pour like balm on their shaved heads and upturned faces…. [T]he thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain” (283). Though Morrison portrays the Ruby townsfolk as isolated and unproductive, their ancestors are described as amazingly imaginative, and Zechariah Morgan (known as Big Papa), among others, is the most talented. He re-imagines tribal myths and biblical stories, and then fuses and revises them, making them into a “spectacular [racial-purity] history” (14). Like every fanatic racial or religious party in the world, Zechariah and the 8-rock.

(10) Gogo. Intro. 10. people invoke the Scriptures, blend them and their traumatic past into an unyielding clannish history in which shame/hatred is inscribed to become paramount. They handle language by “[s]pecifying it, particularizing it [and] nailing its meaning down” (93) in order to legitimate/immortalize (and hence unwittingly fossilize) themselves and expel others from their strictly-defined paradise. As I have stated earlier, Morrison’s politics of language intends, first and foremost, to examine the callous, monolithic narratives and re-imagine the hushed-up and ineffable (hi)stories of numerous men and women. She opens Paradise by constructing a black community based on a traditional, unrelenting patriarchal discourse which appears to be subverted by a rather trivial, private or “feminine” talk represented by the outcast Convent women. Such binary oppositions resurface in the novel and are further intertwined with various genres Morrison draws from myth, fairy tale, romance, biblical story, folklore, vernacular (hi)story, etc. Nevertheless, while elaborating those literary genres and antagonizing sexes, races and classes, she parodies and “molests” them with stereotyped but paradoxical, or contradictory narrative. In effect, it is a spectacular, swirl-like narrative that steps in cunningly the construction of the paradisal paradigms Morrison elaborates (and also caricatures) in the novel, and thereby interrupts the reader’s habitual reliance on the clear-cut narrative. By hybridizing the allegedly incorruptible histories, sneaking contradictory accounts into the text now and then, and rationalizing bumpy parts (which she must have known perfectly well that most readers will expediently ignore) in the story, Morrison complicates and, more significantly, revitalizes the seemingly organized but actually paralyzed, unproductive world of language. Moreover, by fusing and infusing opposite elements into concepts such as stern.

(11) Gogo. Intro. 11. religious beliefs and one-sided, self-righteous morality, Morrison liberates literature, or language, in a way that it “is both the law and its transgression” (“Bird”). In so doing, she blurs ingeniously the division between myth and reality, and in the meantime, exemplifies a great performance of liberating language in the dynamic world of reading and writing. Many commentators of Paradise state that the novel’s opening sentence, “[t]hey shoot the white girl first” (3), is immediately frightening yet apathetic. They either go on investigating Morrison’s intent to launch the story this way and induce a rather startling conclusion,9 or perusing the text to find out which of the Convent girls is white and then claim various “answers.”10 Nevertheless, both sides adopt the same premise that Paradise, as Morrison’s preceding novels, must be a story centering on a black community and its traumatic black characters. Yes and no. Undeniably, the novel begins with a description of a people from a black community, as it reveals early on the fifth page that Ruby, “the one all-black town,” does not permit any nefarious force inside or outside (i.e. the Convent women) to disrupt its hard-won peace (although we learn little by little that the disquiet in the town is not due to any outside evil, but the men’s distorted minds). However, in my opinion, the black people or black community in Paradise, as in her prior novels, is just a point of departure. Morrison, in her artistic strategy to “reach toward the ineffable” (“Bird”) human subtleties, has already crossed the boundary/hierarchy made ignorantly and/or arrogantly by any particular race, class, gender or religion. As I have explicated earlier, whether in writing or remarking on social issues, Morrison never wants to take a closed position “[i]n order to be as free as [she] possibly can” (qtd. in Jaffrey). She composes “race-specific yet race-free” (“Afterword” 211) work only to liberate her.

(12) Gogo. Intro. 12. characters, as well as her readers, from the circumscription of monumentalizing languages, of paralyzing myths or (hi)stories of a person’s or race’s traumata. Regardless of her artistic competence for “limn[ing] the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers” (“Bird”), Morrison does not allow her novels to stop at arousing the reader’s admiration for it and sentiments about the characters. She wants s/he to step in as what the pious Consolata (a character in Paradise) compassionately and “transgressively” does, knowing that if she uses her “magic”—i.e. “stepping in” to revive other people’s lives when they are dying—she will be offending God and even banished from (the Catholic) Paradise that she endeavors to be qualified for. With the compassion and courage to “derail” (or transcend) that invigorate the act of “stepping in” (Paradise 247), the reader is expected to penetrate the “trick” of the novelistic language and its “reason,” as well as to step in to transform the “the ‘trick’ of life[’s language] and its ‘reason’” (272)—the “molested” language manipulated by egocentric and pitiless people, that is. Eager to question, or expose hidden stories behind the unspoken or the unspeakable, Morrison is aggressive in a way that she has been working so hard trying to envision an individuating, rather than a universalizing, human world. Inspired by Jung’s notion of individuation process—which, in short, is a drive toward the reconciliation of opposite forces in one’s psyche, and an active connection with the world without sacrificing one’s uniqueness—I will demonstrate in my thesis a little individualized, but not individualist, “truth” about Paradise. That is, aside from her anticipation of the reader’s intellectual engagement, Morrison is telling us that in seeking happiness and/or constructing paradise, each individual should always interrogate him/herself if his/her mind and body remain open to the different and the alternatives,.

(13) Gogo. Intro. 13. because narcissism or “[i]solation kills generations. It has no future” (210). As she says, “[t]he paradise that anybody could get would be no paradise at all, but it’s in that direction people have to think. Anyway, it’s a more exciting proposition to me than the old paradise, the one where somebody wins by dint of some effort of the will, of some purity they maintain” (qtd. in Italie). The words, I presume, reveal something with which she has crept into the novel when contriving it: an earthly paradise that needs to be “found at [our] feet” (“Bird”), where (sexual, racial, cultural, etc.) differences, discordances, the interim and the incomprehensible are investigated but also accommodated..

(14) Gogo. Intro. 14. Notes 1. As Morrison remarks in an interview about her winning the Nobel prize: “Nobody was going to take that and make it into something else. I felt representational. I felt American. I felt Ohioan. I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever. I felt all of that, and put all of that together and went out and had a good time.” Qtd. in Italie.. 2. It is a distinctive device with which Morrison makes her reader “complicit” with, but as smattered as, the narrator or the characters. 3. The trilogy plan was abandoned afterward. After working on Beloved for three years, Morrison thought she could not make it into a trio that she initially planned, and gave the manuscript to Bob Gottlieb, her editor at Knopf, with apologies. But “he read it and said, ‘Whatever else you’re doing, do it, but this is a book.’ [Morrison] said, ‘Are you sure?’” Qtd. in Caldwell. Yet, over ten years later, when Donahue interviewed her, Morrison told that she intended to explore in a series of books—the trilogy—“the various kinds of love” Donahue. 4. And “life-sustaining” indeed. Dedicating Beloved to the “Sixty Million and more” who died as a result of slavery, Morrison has written a story about lives of individual ex-slaves so convincingly and breath-takingly. Her engrossing words in this novel, as she mentioned in the Nobel awarding ceremony, are actually striving to “[refuse] to monumentalize, [disdain] the ‘final word,’ the precise ‘summing up,’ acknowledg[e] their ‘poor power to add or detract’…[and] signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns [sic].” 5. For example, Carmean has remarked on the Jazz narrator, “where is the narrative voice located? In a real character? The author? The living pages? Morrison’s apparent answer is that the narrator is to be found in all three, plus in the imaginative mind of the reader.” Carmean 103. Another emphasis on the narrator or feature of the story-telling is that it is composed of “multiplicity of voices, both garrulous and censorious, fascinated and penetrating.” Harding and Martin 168. As for Morrison herself, she once remarks, “I ha[ve] to keep in mind, and I think readers should keep in mind, that all of [Jazz] is artifice….The narrator [i]s designed to be unreliable and to have only part of the story and to be the one that [i]s most inaccurate by the time one reaches the end, but at the same time, the narrator learn[s] about its own vulnerability. I [want] to explode the idea of an all-knowing, omnipotent, totalitarian, authorial voice and to parallel the democratic impulse of jazz ensembles.” Qtd. in Timehost. 6. Ron David has pointed out, really vehemently, a large number of.

(15) Gogo. Intro. 15. contradictions and discrepancies in the novel’s narrative, although some listed “mistakes” are not what he finds as evidence of incongruity, but just his misunderstanding or a slip of memory! For instance, he says it does not make sense at all that Haven “collapsed in ’34, after the men came home from World War II. The implication is that World War II, which took place in the 1940s, caused the collapse of Haven in 1934!” (173). Yet, as I find out, on page five of the novel, the narrative reads, the citizens of Haven “[drop] to their knees in 1934 and [are] stomach-crawling by 1948.” And on the next page, it says, “[o]ne thousand citizens in 1905 becom[e] five hundred by 1934. Then two hundred, then eighty….” So it is not inconsistent at all that the New Fathers of Ruby, after they survive the war and return home in 1945, “s[ee] what ha[ve] become of Haven” (Paradise 194) and resolve, in 1949, to found a new town. 7. This is a term inferred by the schoolteacher in Ruby, Patricia Best. 8-R is “[a]n abbreviation for eight-rock, a deep deep level in the coal mines.” It represents the skin-color of the “[b]lue-black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes g[i]ve no sign of what they really fe[el] about those who [a]ren’t 8-rock like them.” They believe they are shooed out of white-collar work by whites and cannot get less influential mental labor as the other black people do, in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, because of “the one and only feature that distinguish[es] them from their Negro peers. Eight-rock” (Paradise 193). But what strikes their minds most seriously, is the “Disallowing.” It happens when the 8-rocks reach the outside of Fairly, Oklahoma, “the communit[y] that [is] soliciting Negro homesteaders” after the Reconstruction. The fair-skinned colored people of Fairly deny them entry because the 8-Rs are “too poor, too bedraggled-looking to enter, let alone reside” (14). However, Zechariah and the other forefathers of Ruby believe it is “[t]he sign of racial purity they ha[ve] taken for granted” (194) that induces the destructive humiliation. 8. For instance, as he preaches, Cary evokes sympathy in his congregation but Pulliam does not, or will not. 9. In answering such questions, Morrison mostly says that she does that on purpose. “[M]y point [i]s to flag raise and then to erase it, and to have the reader believe—finally—after you know everything about these women, their interior lives, their past, their behavior, that the one piece of information you don’t know, which is the race, may not, in fact, matter. And when you do know it, what do you know?” Qtd. in Farnsworth. 10. For example, Allen concludes that “Pallas, [is] a…privileged white girl whose parents have failed her miserably.” And Menand believes that “…Seneca, a white runaway” (79), is the first woman shot by the Ruby gunmen..

(16) Gogo. Chp.1 16. Chapter 1 P/paradise. Without designating the source, Toni Morrison quotes as the epigraph to Paradise the last section of “The Thunder: Perfect Mind,”1 the most unique poem in the codices of the Gnostic tractates known as the Nag Hammadi Library.2 Rather than proceed with what she does in Beloved (whose epigraph is a brief excerpt from the “Romans” Book of the New Testament),3 and Jazz, to which she has drawn a rather small section from the same Nag Hammadi poem as its epigraph,4 Morrison seems to want to write in a “prophetic” way—that is, to make such an impression on the reader that the book may be a prediction about P/paradise and hence contains an implicit “revelation.” The reason why Morrison inaugurates Paradise with a quotation of such an occult religious work may become even more impenetrable when the reader notices that the novel teems with mottos from the (orthodox Christian) Bible and various characters’ interpretations of them. Yet, if one goes further to interrogate the states of mind behind those religious words or thoughts conveyed by the characters, s/he may find that almost all of them are apt to refute (only at different levels) other people’s beliefs (and thereby to strengthen the speaker’s self-righteousness or indignation), or try to exclude others from their gated paradise. Then, is it true that Morrison is advocating an alternative of religious belief in the novel, such as what is indicated in the riddle-like epigraph extracted from a heterodox scripture? Or, is she imitating the prescriptive, biblical style prevalent in the religious canons only to sabotage it amid the novel’s text? A close reading of the epigraph may be an effortless start to approach the.

(17) Gogo. Chp.1 17. above questions. For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins, and incontinencies, and disgraceful passions and fleeting pleasures, which (men) embrace until they become sober and go up to their resting place. And they will find me there, and they will live, and they will not die again. To clarify the esoteric passage, first of all, one may divide it into two parts right in the extract’s middle, where the second part proceeds with “until they become / sober.” The opening word “For” in the first part is like a “because” conjunction which probably responds to questions raised by the reader considering the novel’s title, namely, questions related to ideas of P/paradise. For example, “is there really a promised land?”; “for whom?”; “what should a person do or believe to deserve it?”; “why cannot people attain ultimate bliss in this world?”; “what does it feel like to be in the (one and only) paradise?”; “is there just a Paradise or are there various paradises attainable?”; “who is/are qualified to answer these questions?”; etc. Questions like these have been brought up incessantly for centuries, and no doubt will keep being put forward henceforth. With the evolving of time, the “literal” meaning of the poem seems to convey, that the human world is getting more and more confounding because “numerous sins,” “incontinences,” “disgraceful passions” and “fleeting.

(18) Gogo. Chp.1 18. pleasures” disguising themselves as “pleasant forms” have become increasingly evasive to the human senses. What is inscribed in this part of the epigraph, perhaps, is that it is ineluctable for the human races to go through the reckless obsession with everyday “sins” “until they become sober”—that is, before they acquire epiphany to the “fact” of things’ capricious nature. However, the poem may also suggests that it is pointless to discriminate too hastily between right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and sin or any forms of dichotomy “invented” by human limited intellect. In addition, the prophetic speaker here, unlike the traditional godly figures demonstrated in so many religious books, does not condemn or forbid people’s transgressions, but points compassionately to a way of “salvation.” To reach this state people do not have to convert to a certain monolithic religious faith, renounce any of their present beliefs or live an ascetic life. All they have to do or undergo is to “become sober”—to reach the transformed, “unbridled, authentic self” (Paradise 177) by means of wisdom, and perhaps more importantly, by their willingness to set free their stubborn, fettered mentality. The second part of the epigraph seems to picture a state of paradise, where people finally reach sobriety: no longer are they fixated on transitory desires, they thus “go up to their resting place” where “they will find” (emphasis added) the guide/god(dess)-like speaker and be exempt from the exhausted, endless transmigrations of life and death. As a whole the tone in the epigraph is hortatory, for the speaker does not cast thunder on those who cannot get rid of daily indulgence in various forms of obsession, or bid the hearers regard themselves as the chosen or gifted people and thus have “the nerve to say who could live and who not and where” (Paradise 308). All that foretelling voice gives is a promise for the hearers to go “up” to a higher, tranquil state or place.

(19) Gogo. Chp.1 19. after they liberate themselves from the ignorant state of mind. The “me” revealed in the third line from the bottom declares that s/he will be found in the sober people’s “resting place.” That is to say, aside from possessing the power of transcendent knowledge, this divine persona represents prospects of peace and infinity, where bewildering ideas or any forms of binary opposition deafening in everyday life seem to dissolve and be understood as inevitable but pardonable fatuity resulting from the narrow yet conceited human mind. People who aspire to attain this blessed condition, “their resting place” or their paradise, are not required to do something earth-shaking but only, and more subtly, to reach the stage of serenity, all by themselves. Nevertheless, neither the vision of the place (paradise) nor the identity of the speaking deity are further revealed to the reader, not to mention that the source of the epigraph is deliberately left out by the novelist. We may thus presume that Morrison does this on purpose to baffle the reader/rejoinder lest they should fall into the habit, or inertia, all too fast and conveniently, of adhering to any authoritative or orthodox ideologies. As she talks of the “active readers” she anticipates when being asked about what she hopes for the reader to gain from reading Paradise, I would like for [the readers] to enter into the discourse, the argument, the various arguments in the book…and to begin to participate not just as passive readers, but as active readers who have a vested interest in the survival of this point of view, or who are willing to open their minds to another point of view…. All of those things which are on the menu for discussion now are approached in the book, and I hope there is an active, even argumentative response to the book. (Qtd. in Borders.com) In other words, Morrison is making painstaking efforts to avoid her novels.

(20) Gogo. Chp.1 20. being reduced to propaganda for any immovable, incontestable triumphalism. She wants her works or their subtext to become arenas for interrogations, or a space for accommodating differences, heterogeneity or nuance. Hence, it may be feasible to regard the above questions—e.g. what (the) paradise is abundant in, or who the speaking divinity is—as less significant than those about how and whether the hearer/reader will “become sober.” To be precise, the reader is the “chief” conscious subjective in the reading process, whereas literary works, to some extent, depend on his/her (mis)readings/rewritings in order to broaden their “meanings” and “vigor.” In this way, any closed or encoded dogmas inscribed in any texts will not disturb and thus hamper the “development” of language, provided that the reader is “independent” and eager to question, to scrutinize the prescribed or orthodox discourse. Impatient with the conventional way of quoting religious teachings, Morrison cites, and then “suspends,” such an “aberrant” (in terms of the early Christian bias) religious work probably because of three motives. In the first place, the epigraph does not point to any definite, “clear-as-daylight” (Paradise 86) admonitions and therefore, becomes the “pioneer” of inviting ambiguity in the novel. Second, it echoes the novel’s theme—which, as Morrison puts it, is an “interrogation of the whole idea of paradise, the safe place, the place full of bounty…. But…it’s based on the notion of exclusivity” (qtd. in Farnsworth), or of preserving a certain group of people’s “integrity” (or sameness) by excluding other “impurities.” Also, it is because the poem is heterodox and hence proffers an alternative to, or argument against, the enduring but rigid notion of paradise. In other words, Morrison wants her reader to ponder over the traditional concept of P/paradise, as well as the appealing “idea of isolation, of safety and bounty” (qtd. in Timehost) that always accompanies it, before.

(21) Gogo. Chp.1 21. s/he involves her/himself in piecing together “the whole” (in an imaginary sense, that is) picture of an old story about founding a paradise/heaven/haven, about “[h]ow exquisitely human [i]s the wish for permanent happiness and how thin human imagination bec[omes] trying to achieve it” (Paradise 306). With respect to the reader’s “obligation,” Paul Gray further remarks, the “hunger for security, [or] the desire to create perfection in an imperfect world” dissected in Paradise is so universal and embedded within us that “[t]o read the novel is to be pulled into a passionate, contentious and sometimes violent world and to confront questions as old as human civilization itself.” Morrison has constantly pointed out in interviews that “paradise itself is a gated place…. [for] it always has boundaries, and it is defined pretty much by who is not there.” The “religious fervor and devotion” incited by longings for “a solace, a guide, a kind of protection against sin and evil” are often in danger of “freez[ing] and becom[ing] arrogant and prideful and ungenerous”—a pitfall Morrison considers “all religions and all people are vulnerable to” (qtd. in Borders.com). As depicted in the novel, the African-American Christianity of Ruby—which provides the town’s official history with “an amalgam of the Old Testament exodus and search for the promised land and the New Testament story of the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem” (Bouson 198)—serves as the mainstay of the collective Ruby consciousness. However, despite its apparent monumentality, the official history of Ruby (which resumes that of Haven, i.e. Ruby’s predecessor) is actually created by the (self- appointed) prophet and the town’s leading forerunner Zechariah Morgan, and is often betrayed by the townsfolk’s small talk of the past, especially the elder women’s version(s) of it. Primarily recalled by the Morgan twins (who are said to have powerful memory and who are the chief leaders of Ruby), the legitimate Ruby.

(22) Gogo. Chp.1 22. history begins to falter when Patricia’s history project on the town’s genealogy shows several critical discrepancies about Zechariah’s (disgraceful) past and the implicit, forbidding meaning behind the forged words on the Oven (both Haven and Ruby’s symbolic architecture). While Ruby has been prospering for over twenty years on material wealth, justifying its unadulterated rightfulness of making itself “unique and isolated” (Paradise 8) on “God’s earth” (18), this all-black-town is at last deluded by its “immensity,” partly because of its refusal to adapt to differences or changes, and partly—perhaps most remarkably—because the narrative “digresses” smoothly to so many “little” personal anecdotes that it deflates the formal one’s massiveness. In the meantime, its devout religious faith gradually diminishes to a high-sounding pretext for stigmatizing and even persecuting the different, “the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange” ineligible to enter their “hard-won heaven” (306). Eventually, the former orderly, God-loving black community turns into a pompous, selfish town “justifiably pleased with itself” (8) and, paradoxically, with its tough but callous people. Although some of the Ruby townsfolk, particularly the female inhabitants, perceive the accelerating degradation in their neighbors’ minds, they either retreat to the wishful thinking that the town is governed and well-protected by intelligent and industrious men, or are too stuck with their own personal traumas to extend a helping hand to those who have once distressed them. Morrison contrasts this seemingly organized Christian community with another secluded place, the Convent, which is occupied by four “[b]odacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary” (18) and an irreligious white girl, as the Ruby patriarchs suppose. But the lawless Convent turns out to be more like a paradise, especially for the lost and the outcast, since it provides a soothing and.

(23) Gogo. Chp.1 23. un-judgmental haven/heaven for those who “dra[g] their sorrow up and down the road between Ruby and the Convent” (270). Even though its apparent hostess, Connie/Consolata, has at one time despised her boarders as the Ruby leaders do, she eventually realizes that “the enemy is within, as opposed to being on the outside” (Morrison, qtd. in Verdelle). At the time when her custodian or foster mother, a Catholic nun, passes away, Consolata finds herself “wishing she ha[s] the strength to beat the life out of the women freeloading in the house” (Paradise 248). The four young women (Mavis, Gigi, Seneca and Pallas) drifting to the Convent should have repelled and enraged her so much probably because she worships Mary Magna and spends most of her life, up to this phase, following the nun’s stern teaching: to bring God and language to [those] who [are] assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that [have] once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. (227) In other words, Consolata has been taught, since she was rescued from a deserted corner at the age of nine by Mary Magna, to disdain not only O/others should they not be Catholics, but also herself—who suddenly loses her (subjugated) Catholic identity, “[faces] extinction, [and waits] to be evicted, wary of God” (247) upon the old nun’s death. Not until she undergoes the process of individuation, or self-realization, can she come to have another look at her former eclipsed self, which has been blindfolded and beset for decades by other people’s beliefs (e.g. the precepts instructed by the Catholic nuns or principles held by her lover). Since she was a little girl, Consolata has been taught to believe in an intensely gated religion in order to acquire a language.

(24) Gogo. Chp.1 24. which is not hers—that is, the norm embedded in the language shows no interest in her individuality and inclines to make her a nameless or undistinguished pious Catholic. Nevertheless, deep in her heart, the religious creed cannot really convince her. The doctrine teaches her to regard her soul above body, although she admires Mary Magna’s kindheartedness (or the nun’s partiality for Consolata, it seems) as much as her bodily parts: …[Mary Magna’s] beautiful framed face watch[es] [Consolata]. It ha[s] lake-blue eyes, steady, clear but with a hint of panic behind them…. Consolata love[s] those hands: the flat fingernails, the smooth tough skin of the palm. And she love[s] the unsmiling mouth, which never need[s] to show its teeth to radiate happiness or welcome. (224, emphases added) For thirty years, Consolata “form[s] no attachments to” people other than the nuns who bring her up, living a quiet, devout life as contentedly and “completely as if she ha[s] taken the veil herself” (225) till Deek/Deacon Morgan appears. The young man’s pleasing body soon arrests her long-repressed part—a fragment of the self that hungers for fleshly, or edible matter. Thinking that she has finally found “her mind’s home” (233), she indulges herself in lovemaking with Deacon, reactivating her “stone-cold womb,” associating sex with experiencing “the darkness,” “the unforeseeable” and “the original” (229), and abandons the nuns’ forewarning against “disorder, deception and…drift” (221-2).5 But still, this time, Consolata just fluctuates from one extreme to the other—from an appetite for the spiritual to the physical, to be exact. And when this affair comes to an end, she retreats to a more closed and private manner of religious commitment than her early one, further “separate[s] God from His elements…. divid[es] Him from His works…. unbalance[s] His world” (244) and, to be worse, despises herself..

(25) Gogo. Chp.1 25. Consolata finally loses contact with the world after Mary Magna dies. But just before that fatal blow, she has been “tricked” to practice magic that “seem[s] nasty to her” (246), but that, beyond her expectation, is really helping her (though in an imperceptible manner) reintegrate her ripped self. Despite of the fact that she feels revolting against her gift for “stepping in” other people’s minds, she has undergone a process of integrating oppositional elements first in the body and then in mind. The transformation commences with Consolata’s “bat vision, and she beg[ins] to see best in the dark” (241, emphasis added): “[t]he dimmer the visible world, the more dazzling her ‘in sight’ bec[omes].” When Mary Magna becomes ill, Consolata uses her light-blinded eyes to “[r]eviv[e], even rais[e], her from time to time” (247). At last, as the Reverend Mother lies dying, Consolata raise[s] up the feathery body and h[olds] it in her arms and between her legs. The small white head nestle[s] between Consolata’s breasts, and so the lady ha[s] entered death like a birthing, rocked and prayed for by the woman she had kidnapped as a child. (223, emphases added) From orphaned helplessly to mothering the old lady who has kidnapped/adopted her; from having good eyesight but blind in mind to acquiring bat vision that can “s[ee] … clearly … what t[akes] place in the minds of others” (248); from clinging to “the living God” and “the living man” (225) to “raising the dead” (242); and finally, from being a vulnerable, self-pitying woman to becoming one who finds a male God mirroring her amused self in the garden—Consolata has gone through so many changes to have her mind and body gradually transformed. Namely, she is progressively capable of appreciating both “[b]odacious black Eves” (18) (as the Ruby men dub the Convent women) as well as the (extolled) pure and holy Mary,.

(26) Gogo. Chp.1 26. disregarding conventional or arbitrary assessments of them (or any insensitive dichotomies), and finally reconciles outward opposites in her body and soul. Now contented with the in-between state, she soberly realizes that “Eve is Mary’s mother” (263), and no longer allows herself to be suffocated by one-sided assertions or doctrines, but proceeds to develop a more complete self; a self that is competent for transgressing/transcending banal, collective norms and boundaries but is still concerned about them. Consolata does not alienate herself from people any more; instead, by conjoining opposing things and hence exploding the dichotomized groove of thought, she teaches the other women in the Convent to reach beyond their self-imposed stalemate—to no longer fix on one particular (often aggressive or victimized) standpoint and hence, to learn to tolerate others’ differences with imagination and compassion. In the meantime, as the bat vision that enables Consolata to read minds as well as pity those who suffer, “the loud dreaming”—also a kind of magic “stepping in” Morrison craftily conceives to make the Convent women look even more fairy or witchlike!—makes the women able to step in, and relive one another’s (painful) past, dreams or memories.6 Though the compassion growing thereupon also engenders sorrow and agitation in them, “accusations directed to the dead and long gone are undone by murmurs of love” (264). While “the loud dreaming” evolves, Consolata instills images of an open (rather than an enclosed) place and a woman singing solacing songs by the seashore, and her followers get so immersed that “[t]hey ha[ve] to be reminded of the moving bodies they w[ear], so seductive [are] the alive ones below [i.e. their inner, liberal selves]” (265).7 Gradually, the former social outcasts let go of their traumas and “become less defensive and more open to the experimental, unknown, and synchronistic,.

(27) Gogo. Chp.1 27. more aware of unconscious potentials that are still preverbal” (Lorenz and Watkins). Now “like a new and revised Reverend Mother,” Consolata guides the lost ones into sobriety, via hearing, perceiving or welcoming their own heterogeneous and multidimensional selves. Eventually the deserted women gain in self-esteem as well as become “sociable and connecting” (Paradise 265) with people coming from outside the Convent. Just like what happens to an individual when s/he undergoes the individuation process—the central concept of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology—all of the five Convent women experience, at the start, the development of psychological differentiation from the rigid and restricted collective consciousness, and then, more notably, a deep interrelatedness with the world. Individuation, as Jung defines it, “is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology” (CW 6 par. 757). In addition, individuation has two essential aspects: in the first place it is an internal and subjective process of integration, and in the second it is an equally indispensable process of objective relationship. Neither can exist without the other, although sometimes the one and sometimes the other predominates. (CW 16 par. 448) He further accentuates the individual responsibility for engaging one’s differentiated personality with the social milieus, “[i]ndividuation does not shut out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” (CW 8 par. 432): As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his [or her] very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation. (CW 6 par. 758).

(28) Gogo. Chp.1 28. Hence, with the women’s self-realization and revitalization of meanings of life, they are now likely to “become capable of new ideas, utopian dreams, and healing insights” which may have led to the ability to “creatively participate with culture, imagining and enacting alternatives to the status quo” (Lorenz and Watkins). And their initial impression of the Convent, that it is “permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too” (Paradise 177), has turned into more than a pleasant, safe haven. Since they are “no longer haunted” (266), the previous runaways will not permit any formal agenda—despite the original good intention—on building an enclosed place of safety, or paradise, to enslave and fossilize not only their bodies but their minds. What they will endeavor to realize, instead, may be a more tolerant, all-embracing earthly paradise (which I will specify in the next chapter). Because there are “endless work they [are] created to do” (318) waiting right here in this world, the women will not make themselves “scared all the time,” “trying to look out every minute” (84) in case the hunters should break in and blow off their sanctuary. In the first Knopf edition of the book in 1998, the final word of the novel is “Paradise”—with the first letter P in capital. Later, at Morrison’s request, the P is corrected to a lowercase, as she clarifies to her audience, I wanted the book to be an interrogation of the idea of paradise and I wanted it to move it from its pedestal of exclusion and to make it more accessible to everybody. Thus, I meant, but forgot, to make the last word begin with a small letter. (Qtd. in Timehost) In another occasion, when asked about her proposal for the outline of a paradise, she simply answers, “It’s not my place to define paradise for anyone else…. It’s not anyone’s place to do that” (qtd. in Gary). What is implied in.

(29) Gogo. Chp.1 29. this reply, and also what is at stake, then, is that when thinking of making something helpful or beneficent, we should at least be aware of one thing. That is, we are not to be easily contented with any historical, religious or mythological constructions, but remain highly open to the ambiguous, marginalized or dissonant, lest we unwittingly endorse oppression and leave our original goodwill unproductive or even destructive..

(30) Gogo. Chp.1 30. Notes 1. The “Thunder” poem Morrison quotes for Paradise’s epigraph is in fact drawn from George W. MacRae’s translation of the poem’s Coptic version, which was excavated in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, along with the other manuscripts, in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts are generally recognized as the scripture for the early Gnostic Christian in Egypt, but some of them do not preach exceptionally the Gnostic or the Christian doctrines. Instead, heritage from Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy and/or Judaism is resonant in these texts (as the “Thunder” text does). The Nag Hammadi collection is also regarded as an invaluable trove in the field of the early heterodox Christianity historiography. 2. In terms of its content and form, the text “is virtually unmatched in the religious and philosophical literature of antiquity,” as Anna McGuire suggests, [its] imagery resonates with a variety of sources, including Jewish and Christian Wisdom, Isis traditions…. Thunder may profitably be read in relation to all of these texts and traditions as a revisionary poetic work that puts forward a distinctive perspective on the nature of the divine and her relation to humankind. Cf. G. W. MacRae’s introduction to his translation of this work, and also Douglas M. Parrott’s comments on it. Both are included in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 295-6. 3. The three novels Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, in Morrison’s design, make a trilogy which is to deal with “the various kinds of love”: in sequence of the books’ published year, there are “the love of a mother for her child,” “romantic love” and “the love of God and love for fellow human beings.” Qtd. in Donahue. 4. But in Jazz, she gives a clear indication of the epigraph’s source, specified (according to its 1992 Penguin edition) as: “Thunder, Perfect Mind,” The Nag Hammadi 5. The sisters have taught Consolata that “[t]he three d’s that pav[e] the road to perdition, and the greatest of these [i]s drift” (Paradise 222). 6. Following the process of “mind-training” (my phrase; and I believe Morrison is making fun of the “ritual,” or “spiritual therapy,” conducted by Consolata!)—that is, Consolata teaches the younger women to control their unruly minds by instructing them to “undress and lie down ….on the cold, uncompromising floor” before she “paint[s] the bod[ies’] silhouette[s]”; after that, she tells them to remain in “the mold[s] they ha[ve] chosen,”.

(31) Gogo. Chp.1 31. “[u]nspeaking,” “[n]aked in the candlelight” (263)—the women become able to observe and appraise both the interior and exterior soberly. Hence, as “the loud dreaming”—which is to recall and relate one’s traumatic stories, dreams or memories without being demanded for “the truth,” by his/her listeners or “co-dreamers”—begins, the women are sympathetic and tolerant to the dreamers and dreams that are “alluring and corrosive as cocaine” (264). 7. Paradoxically, before Consolata leads them to change psychosomatically, it is “the moving bodies” (265) the women are concerned about all the time. For example, even when fighting with Mavis, Gigi “d[oes not] want bruises or scratches to mar her lovely face and she worrie[s] constantly about her hair” (168). And Pallas, always worries about her weight, is humiliated even poignantly when her boy friend’s betrayal takes place in the time of “her thinnest” (178)..

(32) Gogo. Chp.2 32. Chapter 2 “Unmolested” Paradise. In comparison with the nine preceding sections (respectively “Ruby,” “Mavis,” “Grace,” “Seneca,” “Divine,” “Patricia,” “Consolata,” “Lone,” and “Save-Marie”)1 whose narrative stages Morrison’s piecemeal and “to-and-fro” style, the last section of Paradise, or the epilogue,2 is not only the shortest in length and the most uncluttered (or straightforward) in narrative, but also untitled. The five Convent women massacred by a posse of the Ruby patriarchs in July 1976, suddenly emerge in an ethereal, or rather, composed manner before their family. There is no explanation in the narrative of how the women survive the genocide or where they have been, but there are Gigi’s daddy Manley, Pallas’ mother Dee Dee, Mavis’ daughter Sally and Seneca’s mother Jean—each is somewhat astonished by his/her daughter’s or mother’s sudden appearance. In addition, there is Piedade, who consoles Consolata on her lap like a loving mother and whose “black [as firewood] face” (Paradise 318) the latter adores. Despite their amazement, it is clear that each of the Convent women appears tangibly real to their family; one is even bleeding while her friend is taking care of her. Contrary to the Ruby heads who have long since deemed the women either nuisances or malicious witches, the women’s family members showing up here (who do not see their daughter or mother for years and therefore are in total ignorance with regard to the women’s changes) sense “the nicest thing…[s]omething long and deep and slow and bright” (314), even though they have to give way to a sort of regretful feeling about this transient encounter. Confounded as each is by the accident and its evanescence, the main characters in this section3 are nevertheless.

(33) Gogo. Chp.2 33. impressed with and even assuaged by the winsome poise of their female folks, who now seem to be on a journey to somewhere but still, savor profoundly each moment they “live” in. Unlike what Billie Delia predicts at Save-Marie’s funeral—that the Convent women will “reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and…. pointy teeth” (308) as female warriors to tear down the deceptive façade of order and peace in Ruby—the Convent women do not return to Ruby to take revenge on its rulers/assassins. Instead, they (Gigi, Pallas, Mavis and Seneca, to be exact, not including Consolata) reappear before someone who loves but might have hurt them before, to reach, perhaps, a certain kind of reconciliation with him or her. Despite their shaved heads and army clothes, and with Pallas (does her name refer to the Greek goddess Athena or a species of cat?) oddly carrying a sword, the women are not as militant as what we might stereotypically assume warriors to be, but “beatific” (311) and vigorous as if they had revitalized from past traumas and found their “unbridled, authentic sel[ves]” (177). As Morrison claims in the Salon interview that she is not casting blame on any “wrongdoer” in her novels, and that she aims to investigate, together with the reader, how the pinned-down “reality” is formed into everyday existence and what else we can do about it. Nonetheless, “the supernatural machinery” she embeds in the epilogue is not to reduce the killers’ sin and/or shame, either. It can be a perfect exemplification, by the cunning Morrison, of how a grim event becomes a niched myth or “play for anybody’s tongue” (297), or to be exact, how people change “facts” to wipe out their disgrace or further, achieve some despicable aims. Moreover, it can be a looking beyond the circumscription of guilt/shame/trauma, for Morrison molds her work on “race-specific yet race-free prose” (“Afterword” 211). That is, although the crux in her text.

(34) Gogo. Chp.2 34. seems (always) to revolve around the effect of racism on colored people’s status quo—they shoot the white girl first” (Paradise 3), after all4—her anticipation, I presume, is of a realm “free of racial hierarchy and triumphalism” (“Afterword” 211). The renewed women in the coda, in Morrison’s strategy, may have transcended earthbound obsessions or excessive love for stubborn beliefs “and go up to their resting place” (“epigraph” to Paradise). After studying and reconciling opposite ideas (mostly derived from one-sided, paralyzing knowledge of themselves) that have thwarted their psychosomatic harmony and self-realization, the transformed women step soberly, it seems, into an in-between space where people neither renounce connection with the world nor occupy themselves with worldly or egocentric cravings. Unhurriedly, they progress onward to an open place (or state) in which they are obligated, perhaps, to learn/respect divergence between one another and to read/recognize the contingent, ambiguous or ever-changing elements “in life, after it and especially in between” (307). Advancing from an isolated haven (the Convent) to a dynamic heaven, they welcome differences between them and relish “unambivalent” “company of the other” (318). Yet, it is noticeable that they may not necessarily go in the same direction or stop at any final destination, since they are not “concluded” in the novel’s closing moments—after all, the four women (and Pallas’ infant “Divine”) are absent in the paradise in which Piedade and Consolata rest. It seems that Morrison wants the reader to “develop” these women’s respective paradises, and probably also his/her own version(s) of paradise. The mysterious figure Piedade, before coming out in the end of the novel and introducing to the readers a seascape Consolata has envisioned (and which may also be the “resting place” promised by the deity who reigns in the.

(35) Gogo. Chp.2 35. epigraph), is only referred to twice. The first time is when Consolata recounts to her boarders in the ruined Catholic church a paradise, in which “a woman named Piedade…s[ings] but never sa[ys] a word” (264). The second is just before the day of murder when Consolata, at the young women’s request, tells of Piedade’s magical songs and their incredible soothing power (284-5). It is curious that the narrative tells so little about Piedade meanwhile leaving this character so significant a place, i.e. the very last page of the novel. After all, Piedade is always related to a heavenly (though unconventional) realm—the book is titled Paradise, at any rate—despite the fact that Consolata and the narrator mention that she is a woman. Then, is it possible that Morrison is pointing to a specific paradise in which a god(dess)ly figure—the black, singing Piedade—presides and consoles everyone? But why is there so little about Piedade who does, arguably, nothing at all except singing and “troll[ing] [Consolata’s] tea brown hair” with her “[r]uined fingers” (318)? To take a closer look at Piedade, we may find that her name alludes to something expressive. According to Hanks and Hodges’ A Dictionary of Surnames, Piedade is a “religious byname from Port.” which means “compassion, pity…[and is] an attribute of the Virgin Mary, Maria da Piedade” (419).5 In accordance with this definition, Piedade may signify a religious icon of maternal comfort and pure goodness, though the narrative (or Morrison) does not indicate specifically that this name is in direct junction with Catholicism or Protestant Christianity (and it seems that Morrison obscures the meaning from common readers on purpose, for the name is derived from Portuguese). On the other hand, Piedade seems to be an imaginary figure evoked, solely, by Consolata—the “new and revised Reverend Mother” (Paradise 265) who, however, is deemed by the Ruby men a Salomé-like,.

(36) Gogo. Chp.2 36. sacrilegious witch who gathers “members …of some other cult” (11, emphasis added) in the Convent. In Consolata’s imagination (or Morrison’s parody of the biblical myth), Piedade is a complex figure shimmering with religious comfort, which may be due to her lifelong acquaintance with stories of Jesus Christ and His Mother. Before her spontaneous “conversion” to a lifestyle that enables her to balance between body and mind, Consolata has devoutly believed in Catholicism for almost fifty years.6 She devotes herself completely “to [Virgin Mary] of the bleeding heart and bottomless love…. [and to Jesus Christ] whose love [i]s so perfectly available it dumbfound[s] wise men and the damned” (225). Hence, it is likely that Consolata “models” Piedade out of Catholic teachings for, undoubtedly, Catholics worship Mother of God or Maria da Piedade, and believe her to be a medium between God and humans, whereas Piedade is portrayed as a being between goddess and human (she is said to be a woman, as I have stated earlier). In addition, it is natural for Consolata to give the “revised” divine being, Piedade, a Portuguese name for maternal compassion, since she was born in Brazil whose official language is Portuguese and whose people believe, mostly, in Roman Catholicism. She tells the younger Convent women that Piedade’s solacing songs “ma[k]e proud women weep in the streets [and c]oins f[a]ll from the fingers of artists and policemen…” (284-5), just as Christ’s love transfixes the arrogant and the wicked. But unlike what is inscribed in the Church lessons, Piedade emanates pity, simply and effortlessly, by singing, rather than by exemplifying pure virtue or discipline. That is, she cannot be considered a paragon of goodness in a religious sense, since, in contrast to accounts of God’s or Jesus’ work in the Bible, there is no description about her deeds in the narrative. Besides, the.

(37) Gogo. Chp.2 37. gesture of Piedade’s singing by the sea evokes the image of the sirens, but her songs are not to bring about shipwrecks, nor are they meant to “tell [people] to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more” (Beloved 88). While Piedade’s songs have implausible power as Omnipotence does, they are not to legitimate “narcotic narcissism…exclusivity and dominance” (“Bird”) but to inspire fecund imagination that “deformalizes the situation [or the unquestionable fact]….[and] makes it easier to grasp as a human point” (Baraka, qtd. in Smith). Moreover, the novel’s finale even portrays Piedade in a mock pietà gesture. The scene—in which “[a]ll the colors of seashells” reflect in Consolata’s face as she rests her head on the lap of the singing, “black as firewood” Piedade (emphases added)—seems to mimic the picture or statue of Mother Mary dolefully holding Jesus’ body on her lap. In other words, Morrison makes Piedade assume the role of Virgin Mary and Consolata of Jesus Christ! To expand the parody, if there shall be one, Jesus has twelve disciples and Consolata has Mavis, Gigi, Seneca and Pallas (one of whom is white) adhering to her but not attending alongside as Consolata lies adoringly on Mother Piedade’s lap. And there is Jesus/Consolata having all colors fusing in his/her face while black Mother Piedade “troll[s] [her son/daughter’s] tea brown hair” with her “[r]uined fingers” (318). Is Morrison writing a revised, “race-specific yet race-free” myth to caricature the delusion in the conventional adaptation of biblical stories? Is she re-creating a parodied version of P/paradise just to expose the misleading, unyielding notions frozen in the traditional ideas of paradise? In the ordinary Christian conception, for instance, there is great emphasis on Christ’s atoning death as a revelation of God’s grace through which the human race is redeemed and justified from sin. Through a variety of religious.

(38) Gogo. Chp.2 38. rituals, believers achieve proper work or expiate themselves from transgressions in this life and ascend to paradise or heaven. Furthermore, the state of being in the paradise is envisaged as an ultimate condition of everlasting bliss—that is, the delight of enjoying perfect communion with God. Aside from these, it seems that no obligation is demanded for the blessed because everything up there is already too good to invite further changes or developments. As in City of God, St. Augustine imagines the blissful circumstances in its most typical imagery—of tranquility and the purest goodness. In other words, it is so splendid as to disassociate itself from any forms of evil and misfortunes: We conclude then that man lived in paradise as long as his wish was at one with God’s command. He lived in the enjoyment of God, and derived his own goodness from God’s goodness. He lived without any want, and had it in his power to live like this for ever. Food was available to prevent hunger, drink to prevent thirst, and the tree of life was there to guard against old age and dissolution. There was no trace of decay in the body, or arising from the body, to bring any distress to any of his senses. There was no risk of disease from within or of injury from without. Man enjoyed prefect health in the body, entire tranquility in the soul. Just as in paradise there was no extreme of heat or of cold, so in its inhabitant no desire or fear intervened to hamper his good will. There was no sadness at all, nor any frivolous jollity. But true joy flowed perpetually from God, and towards God there was a blaze of ‘love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a faith that was no pretence’. Between man and wife there was a faithful partnership based on love and mutual respect; there was a harmony and a liveliness of mind and body, and an effortless.