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318 pages, Paperback
First published December 24, 1997
Both Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Don DeLillo’s Underworld came out in 1997, the year Paradise did. Both addressed historical eras and themes, as Morrison does, but both spoke directly to contemporary anxieties in a way that Paradise did not. Roth and DeLillo were nostalgic for an old American consensus and alarmed at its disintegration, and both used voices resonant with modern paranoia and neurosis. In contrast, Morrison still seemed to be in cross-racial dialogue with the same long-dead Modernists on whom she’d written her thesis in the fifties.This is both right and wrong: Morrison does reject any nostalgia for postwar consensus (whether or not Roth and DeLillo express this nostalgia is another matter), but in so doing she very much speaks to "contemporary anxieties"; the problem is simply that many readers did not like either what she said or how she said it. They are entitled to their opinions about the "what," but once you have allowed such opinions to cloud your view of the "how"—for example, none of the above critics show any awareness that Paradise is often supposed to be funny—then you have lost critical control.
See? The execution of this one solitary black man propped up on these two intersecting lines to which he was attached in a parody of human embrace, fastened to two big sticks that were so convenient, so recognizable, so embedded in consciousness as consciousness, being both ordinary and sublime. See? His woolly head alternately rising on his neck and falling toward his chest, the glow of his midnight skin dimmed by dust, streaked by gall, fouled by spit and urine, gone pewter in the hot, dry wind and, finally, as the sun dimmed in shame, as his flesh matched the odd lessening of afternoon light as though it were evening, always sudden in that climate, swallowing him and the other death row felons, and the silhouette of this original sign merged with a false night sky. See how this official murder out of hundreds marked the difference; moved the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one? The cross he held was abstract; the absent body was real, but both combined to pull humans from backstage to the spotlight, from muttering in the wings to the principal role in the story of their lives.All the same, the definition and defense of female divinity comes into view as the novel's theme. To the men of Ruby, the women they hunt are "[b]odacious black Eves, unredeemed by Mary." But Consolata tells us that "Eve is Mary's mother," and the novel ends, very beautifully, with Consolata in the arms of black madonna, presumably like that worshipped in her native Brazil:
In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.In other words, don't divide Eve from Mary, whore from madonna, but adopt a holistic spiritual view capable of embracing flesh and spirit, capable of leading us away from domination based on or justified by difference.
There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.
When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.
Playing blind was to avoid the language God spoke in. He did not thunder instructions or whisper messages into ears. Oh no. He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself. His signs were clear, abundantly so, if you stopped steeping in vanity's sour juice and paid attention to His world.Read the clues, try to assemble the narrative, but accept in advance your defeat even as you press forward in trying to understand. I accept—there is so much more to say about Paradise. About characters and their names ("His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason"), about twins and doubles. I have merely alluded to Morrison's parody of the Biblical Exodus and its American re-creation by the Puritan settlers, and I have not even mentioned how the novel emphasizes that both Ruby and the convent exist only because the land was cleared by the state of its prior Native American inhabitants. I have not mentioned the novel's love of nature, its endless invention, its food (the hot peppers that grow only at the convent).
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.The killers are men who are prominent figures of Ruby, a purposefully isolated, peaceful all-Black town in Oklahoma with a population of 360 people – (white) outsiders are strictly excluded to the point where the town's leaders decide they must eliminate the nearby Convent which in fact is not a convent but rather a former embezzler's mansion now inhabited by a group of women with troubled pasts.
Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.The women came to the Convent by accident, in flight from fraught lives (and abusive husbands and dead babies; parental betrayal or neglect; abandonment by lovers and violent pasts), but one by one they were drawn into staying permanently. The first was Mavis; Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas then followed. They did not all get along – Mavis and Gigi in particular often clashed. However, they seemed to find in the Convent an escape from troubled circumstances (often related to men) where they were listened to and cared for without judgment. Throughout the novel, the women of the Convent provided a safe haven for all those who came to its doorstep. However, they were perceived as a corrupting influence – the men of Ruby were both frightened and disgusted by the idea of women who do not need – and, in fact, actually, shun – men. It is a frightening ending, but one that seems, unfortunately, realistic.
God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.
"Exclusivity, however is still an attractive, even compelling feature of paradise because so many people--the unworthy--are not there. Boundaries are secure, watchdogs, security systems, and gates are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves separate from crowded urban areas of proliferate. Thus it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned let alone built in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just a realized dream for the wealthy; it is a popular yearning of the middle class."
"Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do. An open, borderless, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis is no paradise at all."
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplation – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it […] if you are a good and dilligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma… conferring certain privileges: th[at] of expressing love and [that] of receiving it.Could any speech be more carefully designed to terrorise people for and out of their feelings?
Billie Delia was perhaps the only one in town who was not puzzled by where the women were or concerned about how they disappeared. She had another question: When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town? A town that had tried to ruin her grandfather, succeeded in swallowing her mother and almost broken her own self. A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in the lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them. She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors.But the novel doesn’t end with this… I think its answer to Ruby’s violence is that paradise is in us & between us in all the ways of love (which is easy and natural and a gift). It’s heartening that one of the perpetrators, one of twins, realised he was in the wrong, and found the will to change. Here is work to be done…
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.These first two sentences are - I think - a strong entry into a novel. Together with the blurb they have convinced me to buy the book. The crime is described in the first chapter, and the rest deals not so much with the question who committed it, but why. Why did the nine men from the small town of Ruby decide to savage those women in the out-of-town convent? What are their motives?