The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African) American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise.

In her most recent novel, Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison offers us the story of a small western African American community, Ruby, whose contemporary members understand themselves in relation to an historical narrative of ancestral perseverance, idealism, and triumph. According to their self-narrative, they are the descendants of a group of wandering ex-slaves who--at God's command and after having been rejected by a string of already established pioneer communities, black as well as white--eventually succeeded in establishing the perfect, all-black community of Haven in a far-away place in Oklahoma. Though the community was later removed to another secluded place, still in Oklahoma, where it attained its present name, by 1976, the time of the narrative present for most of the novel, it has come to seem the fulfillment of its founding fathers' paradisiacal promise. Having thrived and prospered where other black communities failed, in its own parlance it now appears "the one all-black town worth the pain" (5).

In spite of Ruby's superior self-narrative, however, by 1976 a vast discrepancy has developed between the community's perfect and stable self-image and its actual conditions and cultural practices. As things now are in Ruby, unwanted children are conceived and aborted, wished-for children are born "broken," and the young have begun to react against the conservative lifestyle and authoritarian politics of the community's leading elders. Though at first the community's patriarchs react to this development by launching a series of angry accusations against its young male lions of failing their ancestral responsibility, the novel culminates in a horrific massacre conducted by these two groups of men on a group of unconventional women living in a place called the Convent. In this way Morrison suggests that the price of Ruby's insistence on maintaining a morally superior master narrative may well be the sacrifice of that very narrative. Rather than a perfect paradise, Ruby ends up as a conservative, patriarchal, t horoughly racialized, and violent community.

By molding Ruby's self-narrative in the cast of an ancestral heroic commemoration of the success of the community's founding fathers in establishing a covenanted community in an inhospitable western landscape, by dramatizing the angry accusations made by the community's contemporary patriarchs against the younger generations when the discrepancy between its morally superior master narrative and its actual cultural practices becomes too vast to ignore, and by ultimately having Ruby scapegoat a group of unconventional women for its internal problems, Morrison invites us critically to acknowledge the presence of one of the most canonical European American narratives--that of American exceptionalism, in African American discourse.

Used widely across the whole spectrum of American Studies, this narrative and the ideology behind it defy easy definition. As it appears from Dale Carter's survey article "American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Will Not Die" (1997), the concept has been defined in a great variety of ways, depending on the individual scholar's discipline. Among literary historians, however, there is fairly general consensus about the definition offered by Thomas B. Byers in his 1997 article "A City upon a Hill: American Literature and the Ideology of Exceptionalism": "American exceptionsm ... is the claim that America is ... unique, one of a (superior) kind--and generally that that kind carries with it a unique moral value and responsibility" (86). From this perspective, American exceptionalism resounds the story of the small group of Puritan pilgrims who fled from persecution in England in the early seventeenth century in order to establish an exemplary Christian community-"a city upon a hill," as it was termed by their leade r, John Winthrop--in the new world. Continuing a general European desire for a utopian "place that was not Europe but rather its opposite"--a desire that had preoccupied the European imagination even before the American continent was discovered--this group, according to Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, defined the American utopia in relation to "one source above all, the Bible, and especially its opening chapters, Genesis and Exodus, the tale of the Chosen People and the Promised Land. For the Puritans ... the essential tale was a religious one of travail and wandering, with the Lord's guidance, in quest of a high purpose and a millennial history" (9). On this ideological background, the Puritans believed themselves to make a covenant with God on the voyage over, according to which a successful landing on the shores of the "unknown" western land would imply that He had chosen them for the strenuous task of establishing His Kingdom on the frontier of the New World's natural and religious wilderness. [1] Af ter their safe arrival, the Puritans therefore imagined their community to be endowed with a special moral responsibility and thus themselves assumed a superior position in relation to the rest of the world. This belief in God's approval of their mission was further strengthened in the course of the first generation, as their hard labor resulted in substantial success and prosperity.

Yet, while the Puritans' advance expectations of America as the Promised Land and the American people as God's chosen agents became central aspects of American exception-alist ideology, such millenarian expectations became intricately connected with a sense of failure as the colony developed. Around mid-century, as they began to encounter a series of serious worldly problems such as internal unrest, harvest failure, and trouble with both the British Crown and the Native American population, the discrepancy between their morally superior self-narrative and their actual cultural practices grew. This discrepancy culminated in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-1693 as the Puritan theocracy imprisoned more than a hundred people and executed about nineteen, mostly women, on charges of witchcraft (Tindall 57-58). Imagining impending apocalypse, the Puritans interpreted such destabilizing of their millenarian process as a sign of God's punishment. Calling for a return to the original covenant, in sermon after sermon, th e theocracy began to condemn the community's younger members for having failed the responsibility placed upon them by the founding fathers. And this led to exceptionalism's being redefined in rhetorical terms in the form of the so-called jeremiad. As Ruland and Bradbury describe William Bradford's diary, Of Plimouth Plantation, which was completed in 1650 though not published until 1856, it "testifies repeatedly to the shortcomings of the sons when measured by the dreams of their fathers. As it sounds its call for a return to the primal vision and turns toward jeremiad, its lament for the gap between divine intentions and human fulfillment becomes a fresh assertion of divine selection" (13). Against this background, Ruland and Bradbury conclude that in "that recurrent conflict between the real and the ideal, the Utopian and the actual, the intentional and the accidental, the mythic and the diurnal, can be read... an essential legacy of the Puritan imagination to the American mind" (13-14).

Rather than speaking of "an essential legacy," which seems to imply that later exceptionalist texts were somewhat passively defined by the Puritan original in advance of their being written, I prefer Byers's suggestion concerning the active role of later American generations in the shaping of an exceptionalist literary tradition. According to Byers, a literary phenomenon becomes distinctive "only if its perceivers have an interest in distinguishing it as such." While exceptionalism may well have been generated by what Sacvan Bercovitch calls "the Puritan origins of the American self," it would hardly have attained its canonical status "if the tradition had not itself been constituted by men who saw themselves as heirs to the Puritans and other exceptionalists" (92-93). [2] One way or the other, however, neither Byers nor I disagree with Ruland and Bradbury's basic contention that the Puritans' exceptionalism, as I have described it above, developed into a central American literary tradition insofar as it was carried on in the work of such canonical writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I am aware that arguing that Morrison discerns an exceptionalist strain in African American discourse is risky business. Because of the slave experience, African Americans have always stood in a fundamentally problematic relationship to the exceptionalist narrative. Paraphrasing Vincent Harding, Albert J. Raboteau aptly reminds us of "one of the abiding and tragic ironies of our history: the nation's claim to be the New Israel was contradicted by the Old Israel still enslaved in her midst" (9). [3] it is not surprising that those later American writers, such as the ones mentioned above, who helped re-form and develop the American intellectual canon along exceptionalist lines, were for the most part of European origin. As Europeans, they were more likely to see "themselves as heirs to the Puritans and other exceptionalists." As Byers suggests, if "the first anthologies used in American literature courses had been edited by powerful critics who were also the children or grandchildren of slaves-the canon might have looked a good deal different" (93).

The African American skepticism toward exceptionalism has not been least pronounced in the last quarter of a century, in which African American writers and critics have sought to establish a separate cultural tradition. Rather than being seen as a small and aberrant part of a largely white tradition, the argument goes, African American texts should be studied in relation to the culture patterns and forms of expression developed in Africa, during slavery, and among Southern black folk. Using Morrison as an example in her book American Exceptionalism (1998), Deborah L. Madsen suggests that Morrison's Beloved (1987) is only related to exceptionalism indirectly and by contrast. "By reinstating the history that exceptionalism would forget," Madsen argues-that is, by working within the paradigm of slavery rather than that of the city upon a hill-Morrison challenges the assumptions and exclusions of exceptionalist rhetoric (152). Similarly, Madsen holds, by identifying the Africanist presence in American culture as the hidden referent at the canonical American tradition in her essays in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Morrison "recontextualizes American literature so that classic 'white' texts are seen afresh within the historical moment of their production and reception, uncensored by exceptionalist expectations" (150).

Yet, while the Afrocentric insistence on cultural separatism has generated a wealth of important new knowledge about African American culture, the hegemanic character of European American culture implies that exceptionalism is not so alien a concept to African American culture as Madsen's argument might suggest. On the contrary, Byers argues that, "even in the case of voices from the position of the other, those who seem to have the most powerful impact are figures such as, in the African American tradition, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, and Toni Morrison, who do invoke exceptionalism" (101). To Byers's list, I will add that even Malcolm X, the foremast proponent of black nationalism and African American cultural separatism in the early 1960s, occasionally resorted to the exceptionalist strategy of critiquing his contemporaries by referring to the ideals of the founding fathers. [4] All in all, Paradise is far from the first African American text to narrate the com munity's aspirations in exceptionalist terms.

To say that Paradise narrates the African American community's aspirations in exceptianalist terms, however, is not the same as to say that Morrison accepts such terms. I will argue that in her most recent novel she assumes a position in relation to exceptionalism that is less affirmative than the position taken by mast previous African American writers and texts, including her own. As Byers reads the ending of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), it asserts "that the destruction of Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl, is a failure of the land, and. . . the failure of the land is the failure of the people" (98). Using the form of the jeremiad, in other wards, in this novel Morrison writes from the position of a black outsider who blames the predominantly white nation for its failure to extend its exceptionalist promises to its black population, and by forging her critique in this way, she indirectly reaffirms the exceptionalist narrative. This strategy is even more clearly seen in King's famous "I Have a Dream" address (1963), in which King at first charges the predominantly white American nation with its continued failure to redeem the promises extended to its African American population by one of its ancestral heroic figures, President Lincoln, in the Emancipation Proclamation and then, offering a biblical parable of suffering, exoneration, and ultimate deliverance, he suggests that the nation's destiny is intricately entwined with a redemption of its African American population. More directly than The Bluest Eye, his address interweaves a note of national reaffirmation with a critique of the nation's failure.

In Paradise Morrison does not assume the position of a black outsider criticizing a predominantly white exceptianalist America for excluding her. That is, she does not maintain an exceptionalist ethos in the universalist way of implying that, if only African Americans were allowed full and equal participation in the American nation, the nation would indeed be in a position to redeem its paradisiacal promise. Rather, taking as her starting point the idea that the African American community lives its own version of the exceptionalist narrative, she explores its function within this community. In this respect, she may be understood in relation to Eddie S. Glaude's study of the rhetoric used by African Americans in their nation-building efforts during the nineteenth century. Addressing the problem raised by Harding and Raboteau, Glaude emphasizes the centrality of "the Exodus story," as he calls it:

This contradiction [i.e., the one identified by Harding and Raboteau] does not diminish the fact that the story of Exodus is, in some respects, a national history. Exodus remains the story and history of a people. Its analogical application within the context of African-American politics in the nineteenth century (as in its use among white men in the early republic) amounts to nation building, the construction of a corporate identity distinct from yet implicated in broader conceptions of American identity. (119)

Against this background, Morrison's representation of the African American use of exceptionalist discourse implies that it has a different historical meaning to blacks than to whites. Showing the many rejections suffered by the community's founding families during their original search for a home to be the primary impetus behind their founding of Haven as a separate community, she suggests that, in its origins, African American nationalism-no matter of what its hue- must necessarily be articulated on oppositional grounds. Hence, despite its European origins, the African American exceptionalist discourse she discerns is a counter-discourse that works in the service of a separate black nation. Like Glaude, she acknowledges exceptionalism's usefulness for the community's "construction of a corporate identity."

Morrison's acknowledgment of the counter-discursive function of African American exceptionalism does not lead her to embrace it, however. To be sure, as her dramatization of Ruby's story unfolds, it has close parallels to the Puritan master narrative of the nation's bringing itself to the point of apocalypse through its failure to live up to its founding ideals, and against this background, one might expect Paradise to assume the traditional form of the jeremiad, in which the writer's critical pinpointing of a discrepancy between exceptionalist ideals and practices ultimately leads her to a reinscription of the exceptionalist ideal. Particularly, Morrison's obvious signifying upon the Salem witch trials in her dramatization of Ruby's scapegoating of its women outsiders might invite a reading of her novel as a feminist jeremiad. Yet, rather than launching a feminist critique based on a call for a return to the original ideal, Morrison deconstructs the original ideal, suggesting that it is inevitably entwined with a violent marginalization of its nonexceptionalist other.

This does not imply that Morrison offers an alternative African American national ideal. In this respect, she differs from the feminist black nationalist cultural critic E. Frances White, with whom she might otherwise be fruitfully compared. Though White does not entertain the possibility of exceptionalism as an African American counter-discursive form, but writes from the traditionally Afrocentric standpoint of rooting black nationalism in Africa in her article "Africa on my Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism" (1990), she is "concerned with the way African Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression" (504). Like Morrison, in other words, White is concerned with the way African Americans are engaged in the construction of a national identity on the basis of an historical master narrative. Moreover, in further keeping with Morri son, she suggests that "the traditions revealed in nationalist discursive practices are Janus-faced- turned toward struggle with oppressive forces and contesting for dominance within black communities" (511). Particularly, in regard to the latter, "many nationalists, male and female, remain openly hostile to any feminist agenda" (506). Yet, offering her feminist critique from a basically affirmative black nationalist perspective, White implies that it is possible to redress the problems she discerns from within. She believes it possible to articulate a feminist black nationalist ideal on the basis of a feminist revision of the Afrocentric historical master narrative.

Morrison's deconstructive approach, in contrast, implies a skepticism toward any national historical narrative. She is in line with the Foucault-inspired British critic Catherine Belsey, who rejects the notion of history as "an irrecoverable experience" in favor of a history "of meanings, of the signified in its plurality." According to Belsey, history is not objective, authoritative, neutral, or true. It is not outside history itself, or outside the present. On the contrary, it is part of history, part of the present. It is irreducibly textual, offering no place outside discourse from which to interpret or judge. It is explicitly partial, from a position and on behalf of a position. (405)

Destabilizing (African) America's past along this line, Morrison opens the possibility of herself assuming an active role in the construction of (African) American history in the form of addressing such pressing contemporary problems as racism and sexism. But at the same time, as she herself acknowledges, Morrison, too, operates in an open-ended, endlessly productive textual terrain in which her historical production is discursively embedded and subject to change: "I know I can't change the future but I can change the past. Insight and knowledge change the past. It is the past, not the future, which is infinite" (qtd. in Bigsby 29).

In Paradise Morrison's approach to history is already evident in her narrative structure, which emerges as "a tissue of quotations," to use Roland Barthes' expression (170). Rather than being linear and monovocal, as would befit a master narrative, it is an open-ended fabric woven by Ruby's multiplicity of fragmented and sometimes competing narrative voices. Moreover, the fact that Morrison's individual chapter headings are named after different characters makes clear that her narrative is without a unifying protagonist. And rather than offering the narrative's many stories chronologically, Morrison jumps back and forth between various points of time. As she explains," ... even though we live chronologically, our consciousness works quite differently. We constantly think about yesterday, or 20 years ago, or the future, as we go about the day. Our minds are always moving back and forth, planning, remembering, regretting" (qtd. in Marcus n.p.). Altogether, Morrison's narrative mode assumes the patchwork qualit y that has come to be the hallmark of much contemporary African American women's fiction. Open-ended, fragmented, and multivoiced, it works in the service of subjective and collective memory and against the notion of a totalizing master narrative.

Within her narrative framework, Morrison's deconstruction of exceptionalism as an (African) American national narrative may be further understood in relation to Homi Bhabha's preface to his anthology of scholarly articles on the cultural significations of the "nation's" foundation, Nation and Narration (1990). In this book Bhabha suggests that the concept of "the nation" is haunted by an ambivalent tension between "the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation as a sign of the 'modernity' of society," on one hand, and the "transitional social reality" inscribed by the nation's "cultural temporality," on the other. Following Benedict Anderson's suggestion that "nationalism has to be understood," not in relation to "self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which--as well as against which--it came into being," Bhabha proposes to undertake a study of the "nation's 'coming into being' ... as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity." Such a study emphasizes this ambivalence insofar as it "displays a temporality of culture and social consciousness more in tune with the partial, overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the articulation of difference in language; more in keeping with the problem of closure which plays enigmatically in the discourse of the sign" than with "the 'political rationality' of the nation as a form of narrative." As such, Bhabha's method "contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge--Tradition, People, the Reason of State, High Culture, for instance--whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of historical continuity" (l-3). [5]

In Paradise, the ambivalence pinpointed by Bhabha implies that Ruby's exceptionalist master narrative may be read as an example of "the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation." As such, it is destabilized by the "transitional social reality" of the community's "cultural temporality"; that is, by the many contradictory changes that have occurred in its community since its foundation. This ambivalent tension is most clearly focused in the story of a communal oven. Originally established by Haven's founding fathers as a way of sealing their triumph over hardship, and later carefully cleaned of its many layers of dust and grease--that is, layers of lived experience and cultural temporality--and reassembled in the same way as the original in Ruby, the Oven, in the eyes of the present community, functions as one of Bhabha's "national objects of knowledge ... whose pedagogical value often relies on their representation as holistic concepts located within an evolutionary narrative of histori cal continuity." Quite literally, the Oven is to Ruby's members the place on which the community's founding fathers inscribed their exceptionalist aspirations: The ironmonger who made it crowned his efforts by fixing an iron plate at its mouth whose inscription held the key for later generations to redeem the founders' paradisiacal promise (6-7). While Morrison shows the community's young male lions to be involved in an ardent battle against the old patriarchs over the right to define the actual meaning of its ancestral inscription, they fully share their elders' belief in the inscription as the community's final signified." 'No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that,'" one of them argues in the course of their battle. Similarly, the young protesters affirm their elders' notion of Ruby as a covenanted community with a special moral responsibility, offering statements like the following:" 'It's not being Him, sir; it's being His instrument, His justice . As a race--'" and" 'If we follow His commandments, we'll be His voice, His retribution. As a people--'" (83-87). [6]

For all of its mythical tenacity, however, Morrison shows the Oven to be without material anchoring in contemporary Ruby. While originally, we are told, the Oven held the dual function of nourishing the community as well as monumentalizing its pioneers' accomplishments (7), now, at a time when all of Ruby's households have long had their own private ovens installed, it has lost its use-value. As Soane Morgan, one the community members, privately puts it, giving word to a rather non-exceptionalist attitude generally characteristic of the community's women, the Oven figures as" 'a utility ... [become] a shrine'" (103). Reified and canonized, like the community's exceptionalist self-narrative, it has become a signifier emptied of content. By 1976, the community's unwillingness to tolerate any destabilizing elements in its heroic version of history has implied that the community has been emptied of identity. Hence, Morrison explains, ... mythologizing can end up hurting more then helping. These people have an ext raordinary history, and they were sound people, moral people, generous people. Yet when their earlier settlement collapsed, and they tried to repeat it in Ruby ... well, the modern generation simply couldn't sustain what the Old Fathers had created, because of the ways in which the world had changed. (qtd. in Marcus n.p.)

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]

Thus, Morrison, in Paradise, destabilizes the exceptionalist paradigm at a very basic level. To return to my initial description of the exceptionalist tradition, Byers suggests that "in many ways our canonical literature has served as part of the conscience of exceptionalism, and of the nation." Hence, he points to a "critique from within the ideology" (100). More importantly, in his classic study The American Jeremiad (1978), Sacvan Bercovitch explains that "the dream that inspired ... [classic American writers] to defy the false Americanism of their time compelled them to speak their defiance as keepers of the dream. ... What distinguishes the American writer--and the American Jeremiah from the late seventeenth century on--is ... [the writers'] refusal to abandon the national covenant" (180-81; my emphasis). It follows from Bercovitch's emphasis on the traditionally exceptionalist critique of the discrepancy between ideal American visions and actual American practices that, for all of his acknowledgment of this discrepancy, he maintains the theoretical possibility of an ideal America based on an ancestral, pedagogical model.

According to his paradigm, some pure, holistic "America" exists. In Paradise, Morrison follows this paradigm to the extent that she dramatizes how contemporary Ruby's efforts to maintain its notion of itself as Paradise eventually bring about the exact opposite. In this way she pinpoints a discrepancy between African American ideals and practices.

Taking place in July of 1976, the time of the American bicentennial and thus presumably a time of national celebration, the community's massacre of the women at the Convent figures as a tragic inversion of American ideals. Hence, Morrison might be expected to share the old midwife Lone's subsequent use of exceptionalist rhetoric: "How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?" (292). I want to argue, however, that while Morrison holds much sympathy for Lone she does not embrace her exceptionalism. As the writer explained in an interview in connection with the publication of Paradise, she takes a dual view of America's founding narrative, insisting that the nation's ideal desire to build a perfect community necessarily implies a violent repression of what it constitutes as its imperfect other. The problem, as she sees it, is not to be located in a discrepancy between exceptionalist theory and practice, but within exceptionalist theory itself:

I was interested in the kind of violent conflict that could happen as a result of efforts to establish a Paradise. Our view of Paradise is so limited: it requires you to think of yourself as the chosen people--chosen by God, that is. Which means your job is to isolate yourself from other people. That's the nature of Paradise: it's really defined by who is not there as well as who is. (qtd. In Marcus, n.p.)

By insisting on the inextricable connection between the exceptionalist striving for perfection and a repressive and ultimately violent isolationism, Morrison emphasizes the process of supplementarity at work in exceptionalist discourse: An apparent plenitude, the paradisiacal (African) American community is revealed by the imperfection outside and/or beyond its limits and against which it seeks to define itself, the women at the Convent, to lack this very imperfection and thus not be a plenitude, after all. Because of the supplement's dual function, this lack is inhabited, and thus the paradisiacal (African) American community is rendered unstable by its imperfect other. On this background, Morrison may follow the canonical American tradition of speaking her defiance of the false Americanism of her time, but in contrast to the tradition she rejects rather than keeps alive the dream of a "true" (African) Americanism in Lone's sense of a "'clean and blessed mission'" to replace it. As Morrison has it, no such t rue (African) Americanism exists, for the small community's--and the larger nation's--violent attempt to preserve itself by destroying its other is not in conflict with, but is an inextricable part of, its ideal vision. While nation discourse may have been an important means of survival for the African American community's founders, she therefore suggests, the narrative of ancestral heroism is not, and was never, perfect.

Hence, her critique of (African) American practice is not accompanied by a reinscription of (African) American historical ideals.

Within her text, Morrison's deconstruction of her fictitious African American community's exceptionalist ideal is at work in several more ways. First, in her emphasis on Ruby's deliberately remote location--" 'Ninety miles from the nearest O for operator and ninety from the nearest badge"' (13)--she suggests the community's apparent plenitude: To retain their notion of themselves as pure, they literally went to extremity to protect themselves from their impure others. Yet, recalling writers like William Faulkner, Ralph Bison, and herself in The Bluest Eye, she provides at the same time strong hints that incest is the overarching determinant of her small and isolated community's culture. Bear in mind, for instance, the fact that two of the community's leading elders, the twin brothers Deacon and Steward Morgan, are married to a pair of sisters, Soane and Dovey. Then note the narrative's strong emphasis on the many "broken" children in the community. Apparently a logical result of Ruby's self-enclosure, incest- -and hence, ingrowth and degeneracy--corroborates in the exceptionalist community's perfect aspirations. In keeping with the process of supplementarity, in other words, Morrison shows the community to be inhabited and rendered unstable by its impure others.

Secondly, while Morrison shows it to be a central part of Ruby's exceptionalist self-identification that only two people have ever died in the community-a strange fact which lends it an air of immortal perfection--she also emphasizes the lack of new life in the community, offering numerous instances of miscarriages, provoked abortions, and women who can't conceive, in addition to the many "broken" children. Turning the community's sense of its own perfection inside out, she shows it to be inherently connected with and inhabited by its negative other: stagnation and closure.

Morrison's dramatization of the relationship of the Morgan twins more or less incorporates what not only Frances White, but also Bhabha, refers to as "the Janus-faced discourse of the nation" (3). Belonging to the absolute inner circle of the leaders of the community, the twins function as Morrison's metaphor of its narcissistic claims to perfection par excellence. This is particularly clear when at one point Steward is asked what it feels like to be a twin and he answers, "'I guess it feels more complete...like...superior'" (116). Yet, at the same time, Morrison suggests an underlying disunity in their relationship; on several occasions she draws the reader's attention to the fact that their physical similarity is least pronounced when they are most spiritually similar and vice versa. As a result of this disunity, she has the brothers'--and hence, the whole community's--superior selfsameness become destabilized when one of them, Deacon, embarks upon a love affair with Consolata, the longest-residing and most central woman at the Convent who, in the course of their affair, gives Deacon a bleeding love bite (237). A gap is revealed and inhabited by Ruby's supplement not only in Deacon's own apparent plenitude, but also in the apparent plenitude of the twins and in that of the community as a whole.

Ultimately, the twins' disunity is evident at the massacre: Only Steward pulls the trigger, while Deacon tries to prevent him (289). In the period after the massacre Steward continues his exceptionalist business-as-usual while Deacon walks barefoot and in deep anguish to Reverend Misner, the community's new liberal minister, to repent and ask forgiveness for his participation in Ruby's exceptionalist venture and to renegotiate his relationship with his twin brother (300-03). Steward comes to function as a representative of Ruby's politically rational self-narrative, while Deacon continues to represent the ambivalent, Janus-faced boundary between the nation's inside and outside. Together, the twins' disunity suggests a basic instability in their seemingly perfect community.

That Morrison doesn't simply render an accusation against Ruby for failing in its exceptionalist mission, but destabilizes the very concept of exceptionalism, also implies that she does not offer an exceptionalist alternative. To do so would imply a reinscription of the community's politically rational belief in holistic categories.

It is true that, echoing the contrast so frequently recurring in her fiction between a community defined by an authoritarian male culture, on the one hand, and a house of women outcasts living on the community's margins, on the other, the Convent in important ways seems to function as Morrison's ideal alternative. Tended to by Consolata, who functions as some kind of head priestess, the place serves as a refuge for hurt and rejected women; in addition, and in contrast to Ruby's thoroughly racialized criteria of acceptance, race is not a criterion of differentiation at this place. Thus, the Convent would seem to incorporate some of the most central, ideal standards of Morrison's and of our own day and age. As Morrison explicitly points out, however, Paradise is neither to be found at the Convent, nor at any other location in her textual geography: "The title isn't an accurate description of the town or the Convent or any other place in the text" (qtd. in Marcus n.p.). [8]

Rather than being posited as exceptionalist Ruby's binary opposite, the Convent functions as Morrison's most radical dramatization of the "transitional social reality" inscribed by the nation's "cultural temporality." Contesting whatever politically rational narrative might be made of it as much as it contests the political rationality of exceptionalist Ruby, it is in line with the French feminist Helene Cixous' definition of the feminine other as that which perpetually escapes definition: "If it is truly 'the other,' there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The 'other' escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn't settle down" (71). Along such lines, the Convent's perpetual indefinability is suggested in its changing history from a decadent embezzler's mansion to a Catholic boarding school for Indian girls to its present function. Even more to the point, to suggest the slippery relationship between the Convent's signifier and signified, at no point has it served the function sugg ested by its name. Also, the endless comings and goings of its present residents suggest the place's almost total lack of structure.

Ultimately, Morrison makes clear the Convent's indefinability, as in the last chapter, all of which is set after the massacre, though at various points she refrains from assigning any other textual function to the women than that of supplement. In a central scene in this chapter, Reverend Misner and his woman friend Anna are searching the ruins of the place in the hope of finding some kind of meaning in the women's death. Yet, as they realize while going through the debris that has been scattered around, all that's left of the massacre are a few traces. What might supposedly have been its central sign, the women's dead bodies, have disappeared (303-05). In relation to Ruby, the absence of the women implies that the story of the massacre--and hence the story of the community as a whole--is rendered impossible to close. However, as Misner and Anna discover, the Rubyites subsequently attempt to fill the gap with a host of incomplete, mutually conflicting, and rarely disinterested explanations; like the story of the Oven, the story of the massacre emerges as intangible and not susceptible to one final meaning (296-98). In relation to the women, though, their disappearance implies a lack of positive identity not compatible with the position of paradisiacal other. This reading is further substantiated a few pages later in the narrative, as the women reappear in spectral form, each more or less deliberately searching out and then again immediately sliding away from the relatives by whom she has once been rejected and from whom she ran away (309-17). Real and unreal, the women may be said to inhabit a gap in other people's narratives, though not in the way of filling it up and closing it. Rather, they once again function as a destabilizing supplement with no distinct identity of their own.

For all of her postmodern thinking, however, Morrison's rejection of Ruby's exceptionalism does not imply a rejection of the possibility of attaining Paradise. On the contrary, Morrison explains, "I wanted this book to move towards the possibility of reimagining Paradise" (qtd. in Marcus n.p.). Similarly, James Marcus observes that, while in "a lot of contemporary fiction, questions of God or divine love or forgiveness are handled with ironic tongs ... these issues are matters of life and death" in Paradise (n.p.). Yet, Morrison differs from traditionally exceptionalist writers in that her paradise is constituted in the form of a personal, non-national inner experience of bliss and solace. [9] Moreover, her postmodern skepticism toward closure implies that, rather than being permanent, the paradisiacal experience, as she envisions it, is temporary. It is a moment of wholeness in the midst of a fragmented everyday life. As such, it is also this-worldly:" ... an earthly paradise is the only one we know," Morris on explains (qtd. in Marcus n.p.).

Such a paradise is most clearly visualized in the last passage of Morrison's novel. Set on a geographically--and hence nationally--unspecified ocean beach, this passage is centered on Consolata's specter, as she is comforted by the old, black woman Piedade, a real or imagined figure who represents a blissful childhood memory to Consolata and whose singing is generally held to render solace to shipwrecked survivors. In the very last sentence of this passage--which is also the very last sentence of the narrative--Morrison specifically identifies this scenario as Paradise. At the same time, in contrast to the everlasting peace promised by the Biblical Heaven, this paradise offers but a limited rest period in which its newcomers may recuperate before they will once again have to struggle:

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 un-ambivalent 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. (318)

In this Pieta-like tableau, Morrison lends an almost mythical quality to her paradise. For all of her ultimate emphasis on their supplementary function, in the story of the Convent women as it unfolds in a scene prior to the massacre, Morrison offers a less abstract version, suggesting Paradise may also be attained and experienced in everyday terms. In this scene Morrison has the women undergo a collective healing ritual in which one by one they confront and transcend the trauma of their individual pasts.

Preceded by a meal that has been carefully prepared by Consolata, who functions as a kind of high priestess, the ritual has almost sacramental proportions. Going through it, the women arrive at a state of spiritual and erotic ecstasy:

Gathered in the kitchen door, first they watched, then they stuck out their hands to feel. It was like lotion on their fingers so they entered it and let it pour like balm on their shaved heads and upturned faces. Consolata started it; the rest were quick to join her. There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had the enchantment not been so deep ....(283)

Clearly, this is a paradisiacal moment to the Convent women. Although to be sure, it is only a moment, for, as we've known from the beginning of the narrative, the women are soon to be massacred. As Morrison explains, "It's interesting and important to me that once the women are coherent and strong and clean in their interior lives, they feel saved. They feel impenetrable. So that when they are warned of the attack on the Convent, they don't believe it" (qtd. in Marcus n.p.). Still, while the moment lasts, the women have an intense experience of the kind of bliss and solace prophesied by Piedade--or, more precisely in this instance, by Consolata, Piedade's textual incarnation.

That Morrison ascribes the possibility of attaining temporary salvation to a group of homeless women outside the boundaries of her narrative's exceptionalist community suggests that she considers this possibility independent of African American national aspirations. People attaining the kind of salvation offered by her narrative may come from everywhere, including, as Consolata's example shows, places beyond African American boundaries. Likewise, their salvation may be attained outside those boundaries. This does not mean that Morrison considers salvation unattainable within African American boundaries, however. In addition to focusing on the disappearing Convent women, as she negotiates her relationship to post-massacre Ruby in the last chapter of the narrative, Morrison ends up reaffirming the possibility of the African American community's salvation as well.

Morrison focuses the negotiation of her relationship with Ruby in the aftermath of the massacre in a scene in which Misner presides at the funeral of the small girl, Save-Marie, the first, but presumably not the last, of the community's many "broken" children to die. As this focus suggests, the community has lost its claim to immortal perfection as a result of the massacre. Like other fallen communities, it is now governed by chance and human imperfection. Save-Marie functions as a symbol of the entire community: Like the "broken" and degenerate child, the people of Ruby have been expelled from paradise, damned from thebeginning by their leaders' exceptionalist belief in perfection. But when in the course of Misner's sermon he has a vision that he interprets as a sign of God's affirmation of the small girl's salvation, it is a way for Morrison to suggest that the community has been given another chance. This suggestion is further substantiated in the scene in which Deacon walks barefoot to Misner to repent an d ask forgiveness for his participation in Ruby's exceptionalist venture. Obviously undergoing the same kind of self-scrutinizing process as the women at the Convent, Deacon is aware that he has " 'got a long way to go.'" Yet Misner's consoling answer- "'You'll make it.... No doubt about it'"--renders hope that salvation will be available not only to innocent Save-Marie, but also to this central perpetrator of Ruby's exceptionalism (303).

Morrison's willingness to acknowledge the possibility of a second chance for Ruby is further implied, in the final instance, when she has Misner, who has for a long time seriously questioned his willingness to remain in the conservative community, decide to stay. Her rejection of her community's exceptionalism notwithstanding, in the final instance Morrison chooses African America as her focus of identification:

Soon [Misner thinks,] Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret. The sermons will be eloquent but fewer and fewer will pay attention or connect them to everyday life. How can they hold it together, he wondered, this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved, the unworthy and the strange? Who will protect them from their leaders?

Suddenly Misner knew he would stay. Not only because Anna wanted him to ... but also because there was no better battle to fight, no better place to be than among these outrageously beautiful, flawed and proud people. (306)

By thus envisioning the possibility of another chance for Ruby, Morrison might be said to be in line with the exceptionalist tradition of reaffirming God's original covenant with America. In contrast to the exceptionalist tradition, however, she does not affirm the Ruby leaders' dream of a superior community. Rather, she makes her covenant with the Ruby people, with all their flaws and imperfections. One could hardly expect an exceptionalist to share Misner's rationale for choosing Ruby: that the community will soon be "like any other country town." Like Misner, Morrison chooses (Africa) America not because it is perfect or superior to other communities, but because it is the community that she has come to know and to love: "... there was no better battle to fight, no better place to be."

Regardless of the extent to which Morrison employs a conciliatory tone at the end of the narrative, however, Paradise represents a new take on both the tradition of American exceptionalism and the African American cultural tradition. In relation to the former, her deconstruction of the self-conscious perfection underpinning the exceptionalist tradition implies that, unlike other writers of the tradition, she doesn't reinscribe the national American dream theoretically. In relation to the latter, her deconstruction of Ruby's exceptionalism figures as a warning that the mechanisms of violence and marginalization are also at work in counter-discursive national historical narratives. As in her previous work, in Paradise Morrison complicates a sacred (African) American myth.

Katrine DaIsgard has been Assistant Professor of American Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark since 1996. Previously, she taught at Copenhagen University and Odense University. She holds an M.A. and M.Phil. in English from Copenhagen University and an M.A., dist., in African American Studies from Yale. Her research interests center on African American culture and American women's literature. Professor DaIsgard currently serves as President of the Danish Association for American Studies.

Notes

(1.) "Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with him for this work. We have taken out a commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles....Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, [and] will expect a strict performance of these articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with out God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us; be revenged of such perjured people and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant" (Winthrop 111).

(2.) See also Bercovitch, Puritan.

(3.) See also Harding 829-40.

(4.) "If George Washington didn't get independence for this country nonviolently, and if Patrick Henry didn't come up with a nonviolent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes, then it's time for you to realize that I have studied your books as well" (Malcolm X 49).

(5.) See also Anderson 19.

(6.) In both oases the protesters are interrupted before finishing their sentence. However, it takes little imagination to finish it for them, for instance, "As a race, we have a special responsibility to ensure justice"--or, "As a people, we have a special responsibility to be on the side of God."

(7.) To elaborate, in "Structure, Sign, and Play" Derrida writes of "two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile from the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of all of his history--has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin, and the end of the game" (50). While the Ruby leaders' insistence on the truth of their reading of the Oven's inscription may be taken as an example of the first interpretation, Morrison's destabilizing of it may be read as an example of the second.

(8.) To underline the Convent's non-utopian position, one of the first things Morrison shows to happen at the place is the death of Consolata's beloved adoptive mother, which leads Consolata into a long period of mourning and drinking in a dark and lonely basement that has strong affinities with Dante's Hell (247-48). Later, a nasty fight suddenly erupts between two of the Convent's inhabitants, rendering the Convent an unstable place occasionally governed by chaos, conflict, and "sisterly" animosity (168-69).

(9.) It is important to emphasize the lack of national affiliation that characterizes Morrison's paradise. Otherwise, one might be led to see her vision of Paradise as a personal, inner matter, as a continuation of the vision put forth by Emerson in canonical exceptionalist essays like "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance." Yet, as is clear from Emerson's closing statement in "The American Scholar," his personal vision is strongly connected with a national one: "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men" (425).

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verse, 1983

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." 1968. Lodge 167-72.

Baym, Nina, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1995.

Belsey, Catherine. "Literature, History, Politics." 1986. Lodge 400-10.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.

--. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.

Bigsby; Christopher. "Jazz Queen." Independent on Sunday 26 Apr. 1992: 28-29.

Bradford, William. "From 'Of Plymouth Plantation.'" 1650. Baym 83-100.

Byers, Thomas B. "A City Upon a Hill: American Literature and the Ideology of Exceptionalism." American Studies in Scandinavia 29.2 (1997): 85-105.

Carter, Dale. "American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Will Not Die." American Studies in Scandinavia 29.2 (1997): 76-84.

Cixous, Helene, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. 1975. Trans. Betsy Wing. Theory and History of Literature 24. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.

--. "Structure, Sign, and Play In the Discourse of the Human Sciences." 1966. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology. Ed. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Miller. Albany: SUNY P, 1984. 35-78.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." 1837. Baym 421-25.

--. "Self-Reliance." 1841. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym, et al. Shorter 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1989.437-54.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. 1942. London: Vintage, 1996.

Glaude, Eddie S. "Exodus and the Politics of Nation." Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century. Ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker. New York: New York UP, 1997. 115-35.

Harding, Vincent. "The Uses of the Afro-American Past." The Religious Situation. Ed. Donald R. Cutter. Boston: Beacon, 1969. 829-40.

Hawthome, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

King, Martin Luther. "I Have a Dream." 1963. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lauter 2482-86.

Lauter, Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 2 vols.

Lodge, David, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London: Longman, 1988.

Madsen, Deborah L. American Exceptionalism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.

Malcolm X. "The Black Revolution." Malcolm X Speaks: Selected and Statements. 1965. Ed. George Breitman. New York: Grove P, 1866. 45-57.

Marcus, James. "This Side of Paradise." Interview with Toni Morrison. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/7651/002-5902217-44200 56

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

--. The Bluest Eye. 1970. Reading: Triad/Granada, 1981.

--. Paradise. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998.

--. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Raboteau, Albert J. "African-Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel." African-American Christianity: Essays in History. Ed. Paul E. Johnson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 1-17.

Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. 1991. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Tindall, George Brown, and David E. Shi. America: A Narrative History. 1984. Brief 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1993.

Vesey, Lawrence. "The New Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing." Reviews in American History 7 (Mar. 1979): 1-12.

White, E. Frances. "Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse, and African American Nationalism." 1990. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. Ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: New P, 1995. 504-24. Winthrop, John. "From 'A Model of Christian Charity.'" 1630. Baym 100-12.