Movement from the earth into the household: its rooms, its quality of shelter. The activity for which the rooms were designed: eating, sleeping, bathing, leisure, etc.
The houses disrupted precisely as the earth was disrupted. The chaos of the earth duplicated in the house designed for order. The disruption is caused by the man born out of the womb of the sea accompanied by ammonia odors of birth.
The conflict that follows is between the ahistorical (the pristine) and the historical (or social) forces inherent in the uses of tar.
The conflict is, further, between two kinds of chaos: civilized chaos and natural chaos.
The revelation, then, is the revelation of secrets. Everybody with one or two exceptions has a secret: secrets of acts committed (as with Margaret and Son), and secrets of thoughts unspoken but driving nonetheless (as with Valerian and Jadine). And then the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.
I apologize for using my own work as an illustration to those of you who may not be familiar with it. But had I chosen material from other writers, the possibility of its being unfamiliar would be equally as great.
My inability to consider the world in terms other than verbal means that I am not able to not think about writing. It is the “world coherent” for me. So I am perplexed by the dread and apprehension with which some writers regard the process. I am also bored by the type and space devoted to the death of fiction when the funeral is lasting longer than the life of the art itself; we can be safe in our assumption that the corpse is immortal. The “goodbye” is at least 110 years old.
What the fiction-obituary critics are responding to is the peril literature is in. Peril that can be categorized in three parts:
First is the suspicion (or fact—I am not sure which) that the best young minds are not being attracted to writing, that technology, postmodernist architecture, “new” music, film, etc., are much more demanding and exciting.
Second is the conviction (in the academy at any rate) that fiction as narrative is obsolete because it is dictatorial, bourgeois, and self-congratulatory in its attempt to maintain the status quo.
Third of the categories of peril is the growth requirement of publishers—the marketplace demands narrow the possibilities for new writers to find a publishing home.
There are, of course, some other perhaps more immediate perils (global stability, poverty, hunger, love, death), so it really is not a good time to write. To which observation one can only say: So what? When has it ever been a good time? Plague-ridden Britain for Chaucer? World War II for Eudora Welty? World War I for Virginia Woolf? South African brutality for Nadine Gordimer? The 94 percent slave population for Plato?
As writers, what we do is remember. And to remember this world is to create it. The writer’s responsibility (whatever her or his time) is to change the world—improve his/her own time. Or, less ambitious, to help make sense of it. Simply in order to discover that it does make sense. Not one sense. What is the point of 2 billion people making one sense.
I am old enough to have seen the northern lights (1938?) and I remember that most shocking, most profound event in the sky over Lorain, Ohio. After that how could I be content with one simple color? Or a simple Hannah Peace?
The Trouble with Paradise
I want to begin my meditation on the trouble with paradise with some remarks on the environment in which I work and in which many writers also work. The construction of race and its hierarchy have a powerful impact on expressive language, just as figurative, interpretative language impacts powerfully on the construction of a racial society. The intimate exchange between the atmosphere of racism and the language that asserts, erases, manipulates, or transforms it is unavoidable among fiction writers, who must manage to hold an unblinking gaze into the realm of difference. We are always being compelled by and being pulled into an imaginary of lives we have never led, emotions we have never felt to which we have no experiential access, and toward persons never invited into our dreams. We imagine old people when we are young, write about the wealthy when we have nothing, genders that are not our own, people who exist nowhere except in our minds holding views we not only do not share but may even loathe. We write about nationalities with whom we have merely a superficial acquaintance. The willingness, the necessity, the excitement of moving about in unknown terrain constitute both the risk and the satisfaction of the work.
Of the several realms of difference, the most stubborn to imagine convincingly is the racial difference. It is a stubbornness born of ages of political insistence and social apparatus. And while it has an almost unmitigated force in political and domestic life, the realm of racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it has no claim. It is truly a realm that is no realm at all. An all-consuming vacancy, the enunciatory difficulty of which does not diminish with the discovery that one is narrating that which is both constitutive and fraudulent, both common and strange. Strong critical language is available clarifying that discovery of the chasm that is none, as well as the apprehension which that discovery raises. But it is quite one thing to identify the apprehension and quite another to implement it, to narrate it, to dramatize its play. Fictional excursions into these realms are as endlessly intriguing to me as they are instructive in the manner in which the power of racial difference is rendered. These imaginative forays can be sophisticated, cunning, thrillingly successful, or fragile and uninformed. But none is accidental. For many writers it is not enough to indicate or represent difference, its fault line and its solidity. It is rather more to the point of their project to use it for metaphoric and structural purposes. Often enhancing or decorating racial difference becomes a strategy for genuflecting before one’s own race about which one feels unease.
I am deeply and personally involved in figuring out how to manipulate, mutate, and control imagistic, metaphoric language in order to produce something that could be called race-specific race-free prose: literature that is free of the imaginative restraints that the racially inflected language at my disposal imposes on me. The Paradise project required me first to recognize and identify racially inflected language and strategies, then deploy them to achieve a counter effect, to deactivate their power, summon other opposing powers, and liberate what I am able to invent, record, describe, and transform from the straitjacket a racialized society can, and frequently does, buckle us into.
It is important to remind ourselves that in addition to poetry and fictional prose, racial discourse permeates all of the scholarly disciplines: theology, history, the social sciences, literary criticism, the language of law, psychiatry, and the natural sciences. By this I mean more than the traces of racism that survive in the language as normal and inevitable, such as name-calling; skin privileges (the equation of black with evil and white with purity); the orthographic disrespect given the speech of African Americans; the pseudoscience developed to discredit them, etc., and I mean more than the unabashedly racist agendas that are promoted in some of the scholarship of these disciplines. I mean the untrammeled agency and license racial discourse provides intellectuals, while at the same time fructifying, closing off knowledge about the race upon which such discourse is dependent. One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought is that it seems never to produce new knowledge. It seems able merely to reformulate and refigure itself in multiple but static assertions. It has no referent in the material world. Like the concept of black blood, or white blood, or blue blood it is designed to create and employ a self-contained field, to construct artificial borders and to maintain them against all reason and against all evidence.
The problem of writing in a language in which the codes of racial hierarchy and disdain are deeply embedded was exacerbated when I began Paradise. In that novel I was determined to focus the assault on the metaphorical, metonymic infrastructure upon which such language rests and luxuriates. I am aware of how whiteness matures and ascends the throne of universalism by maintaining i
ts powers to describe and to enforce its descriptions. To challenge that view of universalism, to exorcize, alter, and defang the white/black confrontation and concentrate on the residue of that hostility seemed to me a daunting project and an artistically liberating one. The material had been for some time of keen interest to me: the all-black towns founded by African Americans in the nineteenth century provided a rich field for an exploration into race-specific/race-free language. I assumed the reader would be habituated to very few approaches to African American literature: (1) reading it as sociology—not art, (2) a reading that anticipated the pleasure or the crisis—the frisson of an encounter with the exotic or the sentimentally familiar with romantic, (3) a reading that was alert to, familiar with, and dependent upon racial codes. I wanted to transgress and render useless those assumptions.
Paradise places an all-black community, one chosen by its inhabitants, next to a raceless one, also chosen by its inhabitants. The grounds for traditional black/white hostilities shift to the nature of exclusion, the origins of chauvinism, the sources of oppression, assault, and slaughter. The exclusively black community is all about its race: preserving it, developing powerful myths of origin, and maintaining its purity. In the Convent of women, other than the nuns, race is indeterminate. All racial codes are eliminated, deliberately withheld. I tried to give so full a description of the women that knowing their racial identity would become irrelevant.
Uninterested in the black/white tension that one expects to be central in any fiction written by an African American author, the book provides itself with an expanded canvas. Unconstrained by the weary and wearying vocabulary of racial domination, outside the boundaries of an already defined debate, the novel seeks to unencumber itself from the limits that figurations of a racialized language impose on the imagination while simultaneously normalizing a particular race’s culture. For many American readers this was disturbing: some admitted to being preoccupied with finding out which was the white girl; others wondered initially and then abandoned the question; some never concerned themselves with the discovery either by reading them as all black or, the lucky ones, by reading them as all fully realized people. In American English eliminating racial markers is challenging. There are matters of physical description, of dialogue, of assumptions about background and social status, of cultural differences. The technical problems were lessened because the action took place in the seventies, when women wandered about on their own and when African American culture reached a kind of apogee of influence on American culture in general. Conflicts in the text are gender related; they are also generational. They are struggles over history: Who will tell and thereby control the story of the past? Who will shape the future? They are conflicts of value, of ethics. Of personal identity. What is manhood? Womanhood? And finally, most importantly, what is personhood?
Raising these questions seemed to me most compelling when augmented by yearnings for freedom and safety; for plenitude, for rest, for beauty; by contemplations on the temporal and the eternal; by the search for one’s own space, for respect, for love, for bliss—in short, paradise. And that throws into relief the second trouble with Paradise: how to render expressive religious language credibly and effectively in postmodernist fiction without having to submit to a vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored, or to the biblical/political scholasticism of the more entrenched and dictatorial wings of contemporary religious institutions—none of which, it seems to me, represents the everyday practice of nineteenth-century African Americans and their children, nor lends itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. How to express profound and motivating faith in and to a secularized, scientific world? How, in other words, to reimagine paradise?
Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar, common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, / … with gay enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of Paradise”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; / Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—Hesperian fables true, / … of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / Of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant.”
That scenario, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and visited by guests and tourists, regularly on display for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they stack up in 1995.
Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified by what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.
Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.
Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling feature of paradise because some, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.
Eternity, since it holds the pain of dying again, and, in its rejection of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest appeal. And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life, and fitter life, remind us of the desire for earthbound eternity, rather than eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is. Thus, paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to heaven, has serious intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me or us forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.
But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes. There are many reasons why the imag
es of the horrors of hell were meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times, with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a loss of shame in contemporary life.
One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the numbness toward anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is understood, justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its awe-fullness. It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why are we not so frightened by its possibilities that we turn toward good? Is afterlife of any sort too simple for our complex, sophisticated modern intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise, evil needs costumes, constantly refurbished and replenished? Hell has always lent itself to glamour, headlines, a tuxedo, cunning, a gruesome mask or a seductive one. Maybe it needs blood, slime, roaring simply to get our attention, to tickle us, draw from us our wit, our imagination, our energy, our heights of performance. After which paradise is simply its absence, an edgeless and therefore unavailing lack full of an already perceived, already recognizable landscape: great trees for shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious metals, jewelry, animal husbandry. Outside fighting hell, waging war against the unworthy, there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do. A nonexclusionary, unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis, is no paradise at all.
The literary problem is harnessing contemporary language to reveal not only the intellectual complexity of paradise, but language that seizes the imagination not as an amicus brief to a naïve or psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent life itself. If I am to do justice to, bear witness to the deeply religious population of this project and render their profoundly held moral system affective in these alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired times—where religion is understood to run the gamut from scorned, unintelligible fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I have serious problems.
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