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Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon: Inspiring Our Imaginations

In the form of smart phones and Martian rovers, modernity presents itself as the age of “miracles”–miracles which are entirely man-made.  These miracles are the expression of the human will, of the interrelation of science and power. Modernity makes everyday life the focus of human existence.1

Modernity does more than that, however. It forces public discourse to confine itself to the purely utilitarian. A decade into the twenty-first century its dominance is easy to see. Everyday life becomes the intersection of science and power–now redefined as the miraculous.

This onslaught of the miraculous leaves us with questions:

(1) Did modernity give us daily miracles or daily magic?

(2) Has it produced as much evil as good?

Numerous twentieth century authors would second Voegelin’s assessment that in many ways modernity produced a “cancerous growth of the utilitarian segment of existence” that has “injected a strong element of magic culture into modern civilization.”2

Readers of Eric Voegelin long have realized that he offers the philosophical language to understand the literary works of the philokalon–the lover of the beautiful. His interpretations of Thomas Mann and Henry James, for example, allow us to see the portrayal of flourishing lives in ways we can understand. At the same time Voegelin shows the readers the spreading of both cancer and magic.

Voegelinian Analysis and Literature

Charles Embry and Glenn Hughes, among others, have applied Voegelin’s method of literary criticism to literary works written in the first half of the twentieth century.  At the moment, however, there is not much applying Voegelin’s literary criticism to late twentieth century authors, especially to those who are sometimes mischaracterized as postmodern.

Two elements of Voegelin’s analysis are particularly applicable to the works of Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison–the paradox of consciousness (the understanding that reality is the product of metalepsis) and the importance of opsis (the clarity of sight gained when one is able to momentarily achieve reflective distance). Acceptance of the paradox of consciousness and achievement of the reflective distance required for opsis are essential to glimpsing reality and separating magic from miracle in the works of these two authors.

They consistently comment on the effects of a purely utilitarian worldview on the spiritual substance of individuals and the United States, and, like Voegelin, they continue to search for miracle–“another world’s intrusion into this one.” They investigate comprehensive reality, a reality that surrounds and encompasses the phenomenal world and fills it with meaning. Reality, Voegelin wrote in The Ecumenic Age, is not a static order full of things. He termed that belief “magic.” Rather, reality is a living organism that evolves “in the direction of emergent truth” through human participation in “the movement of reality towards consciousness.”3

We cannot escape involvement in that reality. Participation is the only given. It is the place where we have no choice. However, we can choose how we will participate. Will we deny aspects of reality? Will we choose resignation and retreat from the world? Will we resist reason and engage in magic? Or will we embrace the miraculous, those instances in which humanity catches momentary glimpses of the intersection of It-Reality and Thing-Reality?

The Worlds of Intention and Participation

Thing reality, Voegelin wrote, is the world of intention. I am a subject in a world of objects. I arrange those objects according to my intent and choice. “I watch the ballet.”  “I go to college to get a better job.”  “I throw the ball.”  A self makes and carries out decisions in an attempt to control and order her life (and those of the people she meets along the way).

It-reality, however, is the experience of participation in a mystery, a drama that exists outside the individual irrespective of her wishes and outside her control. This is the experience of life in the middle, of life as a predicate.

I heard the music from Sleeping Beauty and couldn’t help dancing.

I got so excited about the book I was reading I completely lost track of time.

As I watched the ballgame, I could see my brother in the outfield when he was sixteen.

It-Reality transcends time, space, the individual human life, and the world of existent objects. Yet human beings do experience it as existing. They do experience a feeling that there is something more than what they can see that binds all human life together into one drama of being. Transcendent reality is not a person or a thing; it is an experience–“the experienced presence, the Parousia, of the formative It-reality in all things” through the opening of the soul to the ground (foundation) of existence.4

The Dominant Mood: Anxiety and Paranoia

The works of Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon are explorations of the paradox of consciousness and the search for opsis. A number of observers have noticed that the works of Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon often assume the form of the detective story.5 But Pynchon’s and Morrison’s detective stories are a little out of the ordinary. These authors are detectives of metalepsis–of the joint participation of human beings and transcendence in the construction of reality.

Like detectives, their characters exist outside the social mainstream. They have their own code of ethics, their own way of approaching the world and their place in it, their own consciousness. They are not necessarily “nice” people who exemplify the preferred civic virtues. They generally are quite odd by “normal” standards.  Wherever they are, Morrison’s and Pynchon’s protagonists do not quite fit. Not one of them lives at ease within the dominant social paradigm.  They see things others don’t always see. The past is always with them, whether they want it to be or not.

Their characters engage in a search for meaning in the metaxy in ignorance of where it may take them and even of who they are. They begin, and sometimes remain, unknown to themselves. The dominant mood of their novels is paranoia in the face of the anxiety of existence.

Morrison and Pynchon seem to tell us this is the response of the reflective person to the disorder of the contemporary world–a world that has emptied itself of any ground of being and in which human beings are forced to exist out of nothing and so to live in magic. But they see the paradox of consciousness and their stories involve them trying, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, to find the balance of consciousness.

The plots of their books are multiple and complex. Their characters are strange. The fantastic abounds. However, there is one constant. Ask the question: “What are they about?” and there is only one answer. They are about the search for metalepsis  and the potential for opsis that can result from the search.

The Novelist’s Search for the Ground

These authors’ novels are mythopoetic searches for the ground.  They want to “relate existent things to a ground that will endow their existence with meaning.”6 That ground seems to have something to do with death. In book after book by these authors we are told that “nothing ever dies.”7

The dead inhabit us and demand something from us. In some way death illuminates the meaning of life and must be treated with respect. Taking the perspective of death sometimes results in opsis. At the same time, memory must be honored, not because it keeps us in old stories and paradigms–some of which may be horrific or oppressive–but so that redemption can be found (and disorder overcome) through faith, hope, and love.   

Opsis and metalepsis are the ground of the miraculous. Competing grounds of existence are shown as fictitious. Fictitious grounds flood their novels, but are unable to satisfy the emptiness and longing. The same can be said of guilt and regret. The death of the spirit affects Morrison’s and Pynchon’s characters keenly.

In the experience of these characters it is the world of the spirit (or at least of spirits) that seems most real–the very world society, culture, and politics tell them is most unreal. Religion offers them no solace. At some intuitive level they understand the difference between religious dogma co-opted by power and the inrush of the spirit into the soul. In such circumstances, paranoia may be the most genuinely rational response. But these novels also seem to demonstrate the destructive consequences that follow if paranoia makes us try to justify avoiding metalepsis.

Transforming Faces into Countenances

Pynchon’s and Morrison’s stories are imaginative and mythical.  Each story though seems to take us to the same conclusion. If we recognize life as metaleptic participation in the metaxy, then, despite the anxiety of existence and the eclipse of reason by the contemporary world, we remain open to the ground of being and able to participate in reality.

At that point mere faces become countenances responsible for one another. In their books characters often begin by seeing others as “faces,” flat, two-dimensional, cardboard cut-out figures–subjected as Voegelin said in Enlightenment and Revolution to the will to power with its concomitant desire to turn ourselves into Supermen or gods.

These “others” go unnoticed, the alien, unannounced and disconnected enemy in some binary opposition. Over the course of the story these “other” acquire depth and substance. They begin to become luminous and to exert a pull on the character. They radiate the reality of the ground of existence and pull us toward that ground. They become transformed from “faces” into countenances–“the appearance of some reality and, as such, it mediates between our act of comprehending and that which we comprehend in the sense that it opens for our speculative sight the essence of that which we are seeking to comprehend.”8

Countenances open our eyes to the ground–to the intrusion of another world into our own, and hence to the miraculous. Then the character begins to become human. She feels the connection with that other and, through the other, a connection to It-reality, to the ground. This connection becomes the basis for a reunion with herself and with humanity and produces at least a tentative movement toward an understanding of the symbol “universal mankind.”

Listening to the Truly Human

Voegelin continually argued that we must listen to those stories that are truly human. Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon give us truly human stories.  Though as spiritual realists they are as critical of dogmatic Christianity as they are of the contemporary world’s anoia (folly), they know the reality of the miraculous. They ask us to break with the path on which we find ourselves–which our culture both consciously and unconsciously promotes–to forge different, less deformed stories that will take us to “a modernity after the end of modernity?”9

Despite the horrors that sometimes can be encountered in their stories, Morrison and Pynchon continually evoke a sense of awe, wonder, and openness to all levels of existence.  In their works people keep searching for something that will unlock that revelation and give them something concrete to believe in.

We see coincidences; we see the miraculous.  But because their characters lack opsis or a framework in which to put those luminous moments, they may become murderers, fools, or paranoids. Some run off on wild adventures in the hope that meaning will reveal itself out of all the coincidences and accidents.  Those attempts never seem to work and leave the individual as empty as before.

But it’s not that revelation isn’t there. And it’s not that meaning doesn’t exist. And it’s not that experience is devoid of transcendence. In Pynchon’s and Morrison’s novels characters may remain closed to the miraculous because they cannot let go of the past. Their  tell us that the all-encompassing It-Reality is reality and that we must look for follow clues beyond modernity in order to find the spiritual substance that will bind us together.

“Somewhere further along, she’d been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being–God at play” (Thomas Pynchon, Vineland)

“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” (Toni Morrison, Paradise)

Both of these quotations give us an image of the ground of existence–an image that only a mythopoet could evoke. Embedded in what we see with our physical eyes is the world of the spirit. As Pavel Florensky puts it in Ikonostasis, “. . . the spiritual world of the invisible is not some infinitely far off kingdom; instead, it everywhere surrounds us as an ocean; and we are like creatures lost on the bottom of the ocean floor while everywhere is streaming upward the fullness of a grace steadily growing brighter.”10

For Eric Voegelin, the crisis of the age was the loss of the spirit.11 Underlying this loss of the spirit was the disappearance of sin, of responsibility–an exit from the paradox of consciousness. By both rejecting the paradox of consciousness, with its accompanying demand for metaleptic participation, and refusing to accept that consciousness is located both in the comprehending reality and in us, humanity lost contact with the ground of being and, thus with the reality of what human beings are and what their place in the cosmos is.

Voegelin saw humanity’s “unwillingness to accept the stature of merely being a man existing between the poles of perfection and imperfection.”12 Life no longer would be lived in the middle, the metaxy. There would be no ground of existence to which humanity could attune itself. There only could be existence and non-existence. Thus, even though the spiritual world is all around us, it eludes our grasp. Revelation seems to wait for us around every corner, but revelation rarely comes and then only for an instant. “The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it, is not a story to be told from beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in the process of revelation.”13

Reality encompasses the Beginning, the Beyond, and this experience of the middle in which human beings find themselves. We strain for understanding; we ache for the solid ground that can explain and order our lives. But we never find it, even though it is all around us.

Rational Action is Directed Toward Transcendence

In Voegelin’s writings, we cannot find it because we are looking for a thing and transcendence is not a thing; it is an experience–the experience of opening the soul to the Ground of existence. The Beyond is “the experienced presence, the Parousia, of the formative It-Reality in all things.”14

We all experience the pull of transcendence because we “all experience our own existence as not existing out of itself but as coming from somewhere even if we don’t know from where.”15 We participate in Divine Being because we feel a tension, a pull, toward the Beyond, a mysterious attraction that only can be love. Reason, as well, pushes us to participate and becomes both our tool and our guide in the quest for the Ground.

Rational action is action that pushes us to our ultimate purpose–participation in the Ground of existence. The rational life is the one that accepts the mystery of an unknown all-comprehending reality and jointly participates with transcendence to make It-Reality luminous for itself in the physical world. This participation is the source of our humanity because it is what we share in common, our species life, if you will. It is our awareness of the ground and the love of the ineffable beyond the being of things.

It is what creates Universal Mankind, which is “not a society existing in the world, but a symbol which indicates man’s consciousness of participating, in his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality that moves toward its transfiguration.”16 Universal mankind is the symbol expressing our concrete experience that every human being’s daily life, as unique as it may be in some ways, is the same.

The truly human story, Voegelin suggests again and again, is rooted in the quest for the ground.17 Who sees well enough, who possesses sufficient reflective distance to put the ineffable experiences of the anxiety of existence, awe, the existence of the miraculous, and the simultaneity of the beginning, the middle, and the beyond into symbols we can understand? What does it take to be able to symbolize the ground?

A Worthy Story Includes All of Reality

Truly human stories see life as joint participation of all levels of reality in faith, hope, and love and recognize the ground as divine. Thus, a truly human story is a meditation on theology.18 The two quotations that begin this section embody those qualities. For, “where love toward Divine Being is experienced; where hope for fulfillment in relation to such a Being is experienced as the point of orientation in life; where these experiences are present, there is that openness of the soul in existence that is an orienting center in the life of man.”19

Such stories understand the paradox of the complex consciousness-reality-language and know that reality is not an object of consciousness. Rather reality is “the something in which consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of being.”20 Such stories are evoked by the concrete circumstances of their period, especially perceptions of disorder and of attempts to divinize man. They seek neither fantasy nor immanentization. They are works of imagination in the sense that “man can find the way from his participatory experience of reality to its expression through symbols.”21

It is, in fact, this imaginative responsiveness that makes man a “creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth.”22 Truly human stories, Voegelin tells us, are imaginative responses to a reality that can be experienced but not immanentized–they evoke a glimpse of the ineffable. The images of myth, of stories, “emerge as the exegetic symbols from a divine-human encounter, specifically from a meditative ‘rise’ toward the Beyond. . . .”23 Voegelin, using Phaedrus, expresses the experience as a ‘rise’ to the transcendent “pole of the quest . . . which is ‘colorless, formless, and impalpable,’ but nevertheless ‘visible’ to the mind” in such a way it can be “denotable by language” and the encounter with the human mind.24

This is the place where sometimes truth may be made luminous for itself. This is the place where a face becomes a countenance–not an image of reality, but reality itself shining through the face. And the reality that shines through is that of the Ground. That is a moment of parousia (presence) of the divine beyond, of opsis (vision) where we “reach the limit at which language does not merely refer to reality but is reality emerging as the luminous ‘word’ from the divine-human encounter.”25 It is the moment in which it is possible to experience the Beyond’s presence in the human soul.26 The best stories provide the symbols that allow us to experience the presence of the Beyond in our souls.

The Artist’s Response to the Pull from Beyond

The artist at his best responds to the pull from the Beyond which brings true freedom. It is this radical freedom that allows her to create worlds where men can fly and where there are ghosts and magical creatures that can be seen. The experience of a world outside that of subjects and objects enables the storyteller to use imagination to create language that in some way replicates the entire range of reality experienced by the full paradox of consciousness, including its mystery.

The artist is playing–and enjoying–his part in the story told in God.27 And a really good story, like those of Morrison and Pynchon, draws the reader into the story itself until those stories become almost appendages to It-Reality with its message of mystery, suffering, grace, and redemption through unmerited love. Truly human stories, then, arise from the experience of metaleptic participation in the metaxy. The stories that match the concrete experiences of human beings in the metaxy are stories that do allow for a meta-narrative.

One theme is privileged. One story is heard again and again in two or three different forms that “go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”28 That theme is that the world is in Divine Being, whatever it is called, however it is experienced, and whatever it wants to call itself.

We will never be without some uncertainty or anxiety of existence. Dogmas and doctrines that attempt to encapsulate and ossify truth will not assuage the anxiety. We cannot categorize transcendence in some nice, intellectually elegant fashion. At some point we must recognize that just as the world of things (even when most attuned to the order of existence) often is cluttered, messy, and ambiguous, so too is the quest of the Ground. And every generation in every society must conduct that quest for itself.

We will never have “it.” We can never hold “it.” Our understanding of It-Reality will continue to change and evolve, whether we like it or not. Answers will always be partial; fragmented truth is our lot. Voegelin describes in in Israel and Revelation as inherent knowledge that we are participants in the great stream of being “in which he flows while it flows through him.”29

We experience both consubstantiality and “separate existence within the stream of being, and the various existences are distinguished by their degree of durability.” Human beings always will experience awe and wonder at the mystery of reality. In the face of that mystery we will long to fly–either into the mystery and towards the Ground or away from them and back into ourselves–our shrunken selves.

Face Becomes Countenance

“You. Sula. What’s the difference? You was there. You watched, didn’t you? Me, I never would’ve watched” (Toni Morrison, Sula)

“And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice.Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,–ev’rybody’s axes converge,–forc’d at least thus to acknowledge one another,–an entirely different set of rules for how to behave” (Thomas Pynchon Mason and Dixon)

What happens when human beings feel the pull of the metaxy? Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon explore such experiences as if each character’s story was a puzzle that both the character and the reader need to put together from odds and ends of clues. Their stories are always about the “drama of being” and transcendence is an essential character in that drama. Beginning, present, and beyond are linked.

Further, we are not allowed to “watch” the drama of being from some exterior vantage point. Reality is bigger than the physical world we see and that larger reality will invade our nice, neat, rational spaces when and where it (not we) sees fit. They write their stories backwards and inside out (from our point of view) because they don’t want to give us the comfort of being outside the story. They drag us into their stories and make us live them along with the characters and in the same way the characters must live them–with partial knowledge of the “facts,” with incomplete understanding of the big picture, with whatever strengths or weaknesses we bring to what happens to us in this world that seems random or weird or unexplainable.

Because it is impossible here to provide the plot summaries of all Morrison’s and Pynchon’s works, we will focus on two examples: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (set in the 1980’s) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (set in the 1970’s). The themes discussed can be found in all the books by these two authors.

Vineland: The Line Between Order and Disorder

Vineland juxtaposes the real and the fantastic so well that it is a textbook example of Voegelin’s statement that the definition of magic is the “expansion of the will to power from the realm of phenomena to that of substance.”30 It opens on a summer’s day in 1984. Zoyd Wheeler, clothed in a dress whose colors “would look good on television (4), is about to earn his mental disability check (and in the process inform the federal government he’s still in the same place) by his annual motorcycle jump through the window of a local bar. Immediately apparent is the surface disorder of his life as an individual and as a parent.

Zoyd, the single father of teen-aged Prairie, is about as far as one can get from being a poster child for family values as they are conceived in contemporary America. He appears to be nothing but a middle-aged hippie unable to give up a failed lifestyle with a mind addled by drug abuse. But the reader recognizes very quickly that his thoughts and actions are a model of good order and reason compared to those of many of the other characters, the country at large, and especially the U.S. government. In Vineland Pynchon illuminates for his reader the delicate line between order and disorder.

Zoyd is the ex-husband of Frenesi Gates, a sixties radical co-opted by the government and moved around the country to be used as an informant. A woman who has never been able to take responsibility for anything (58), her life is a paradigm for the lives of all the other characters. The plot revolves around the effects of Frenesi and her actions on the rest of the characters. Prairie searches for her. Federal District Attorney Brock Vond is obsessed by her. Her old friend and co-worker from a 60’s filmmaking cooperative, DL (Darryl Louise), and Weed (a former lover whose death Frenesi set up) have been betrayed by her. Zoyd has never gotten over loving her.

Living with an Unbalanced Consciousness

Although the story seems to hinge on Frenesi, the plot really revolves around the consequences of trying to live with an unbalanced consciousness, a failure to see reality, and a desire for magic power. Most of the main characters are lifetime searchers “for meaning” (9). None have yet found a way to live. Frenesi, DL, her partner Takeshi, Brock Vond, Zoyd and his friends, a DEA agent named Hector Zuñiga who has spent 20 years trying to turn Zoyd into an informant, even mobster Ralph Wayvone are afflicted by some “major obstacle” to fulfilling their “true karmic project” (382). That true karmic project turns out to be “the usual journey from point A to point B” (382).

The reader learns that most of these characters have spent their lives paying attention to the wrong things (380). They become obsessed with distractions of one sort or another instead of the real journey. They attempt to project a world from themselves. But projecting a world from themselves left each only with regret or the desire for revenge, maybe itself a form of regret.

Instead of learning from their mistakes and concentrating on the real point of the journey, they let the past own them. For Frenesi, “the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave” (71-72). Her dad appears to her in a dream and tells her straight out: “Take care of your dead, or they’ll take care of you” (370). However, Frenesi is not alone in her failure to take responsibility for her actions. She dreams of It-Reality (256) but lacks the self-discipline and ability to pay attention to anything but power. She experiences regret, but lacks any energy to gain insight from her experiences or to use them to change her approach to life.

A Contracted Self in a Land of Contracted Selves

Most of the characters are full of regrets. Instead of participation, Vineland’s characters seek control, and in the process of seeking control each becomes a contracted self in a land of contracted selves. They want magic, not miracle.

But something in each of them cannot repress or mollify the uneasiness of living that contracted life. At some level each character recognizes the world as “spilled and broken” (267)–with everyone “locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie” (222). On an unredeemed earth (382-83) with an “infantilized” (52) population, there is a spark telling them reality is more than this and they need to find out what that “more” is.

And so the predominant themes in Vineland are obsession with the trivial and irrelevant, a lack of discipline and sense of responsibility, a belief in magic with an accompanying attempt to construct alternative realities that can be controlled, the ease with which justice is perverted by resentment and the will to power, and the failure to respond with awe and wonder to an almost palpable It-Reality.

What Pynchon shows his readers in this work is the disastrous consequences of failing to pay attention and genuinely “see” reality. Pynchon’s cry is “Sleepers Awake! A voice astounds us” (325).31 Pynchon describes the Thanatoids, for example, who were individuals caught between life and death. Slaves to the anxiety of existence, they lingered on after death waiting for some adjustment of the karmic balance, some balancing of the scales that would bring them a sense that the wrongs unjustly done to them had been redressed: “What was a Thanatoid at the end of the long dread day, but memory” (325)?

While hiding from pursuers, DL and her partner Takeshi take refuge in what is supposed to be an abandoned town called Shade Creek. They find that Thanatoids from all over the country are congregating there looking for a balancing of the karmic accounts that will free them to complete their journey through death. But they never take action themselves, instead immersing themselves in watching television and in honing their sense of resentment (171), “persisting on the skimpiest of hopes” (173).

Using an outlawed ninja movement, Frenesi’s friend, DL, has almost killed the wrong man (Takeshi) and, as penance, must become his partner. She mistook him for federal prosecutor Brock Vond and corrupted her ninja skills to attempt his murder. She acted hastily and saw only a face–a face she hated for what he had done to her friends.

But her ninja training is founded on spiritual as well as physical discipline. By separating the spiritual from the physical, she has violated the discipline and contracted her soul. She had subverted the “original purity of ninja intent” and thus, “bled” it of its “spirit” (127). DL’s life has been one long failure of participation and responsibility, a “slowly poisoning her spirit” (132).

The Hard Path to Opsis

As the mother superior of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives tells her, “all we see’s somebody running because if she [DL] stops running, she’ll fall and nothing’s beyond” (155). The death of the spirit has left DL dissatisfied, unhappy, and full of regret. And Takeshi as well has led an “emotionally diseased life” (158). Together they begin the long, hard path to opsis.

Opsis, as the head of the sisterhood (Sister Rochelle) put it: “Takes a serious attention span . . . . Common sense and hard work’s all it is. Only the first of many . . . disillusionments . . . is finding that the knowledge won’t come down all at once in any big transcendent moment” (112). So far in life, DL (and most of the other characters) had been almost clinically unable to pay attention (155). DL and the others must learn that this is not like “paying attention” in school or gaining control over their minds and bodies. Paying attention in Pynchon (and in Morrison) requires an attempt to engage another subject, another being, and let that subject take control of us.

Paradise

Paradise shares many of the same themes as Vineland.32 In it Toni Morrison asks readers to live six years (1970-1976) in the life of Ruby, Oklahoma. The story revolves around the town’s interaction with and reaction to five women who live at what used to be a convent school for Arapaho Indian girls located 17 miles outside of town. Four of the women are newcomers running from their pasts: Mavis Albright (the only one who seems to have a last name) is an abused wife haunted by the death of her twin infants, who suffocated in the back seat of the car as she bought hot dogs for her husband’s dinner.

Seneca is a cutter, abandoned at 5 by her ‘sister’ (who really was her mother), shuffled from foster home to foster home, and sexually abused early and often; Pallas (Divine) is pregnant and in denial after running away from high school with her boyfriend who wound up sleeping with her mother; and the tough flamboyant Grace (Gigi) with no mother and a father on death row, who openly flaunts her sexuality and sexual availability. The fifth woman, Consolata (Connie) is left over from the convent days–an orphan “stolen” by the nuns from the streets of a Brazilian city on their return to the United States. All five are wanderers floating through the present, branded with past scars, and without constructive thoughts as to their futures.

In the view of the men of the town, these women are “detritus”(4)–unwanted, immoral, and vulgar throwaways–totally unacceptable in a town that prides itself on isolation and self-sufficiency, a town whose citizens cannot “tolerate anybody but themselves” (13). They seem to have arrived from nowhere and, in the eyes of the town fathers, to have no morality and no sense. Unlike the town’s women, they dance, drink, and wear make-up and up-to-date clothes. More importantly, they are racially impure. As time goes by, the townspeople, especially the men, will make these women the scapegoats for sick babies, unhappy wives, and seemingly disrespectful children.

In the end, these eminently rational and common sense men become incapable of reaching rational decisions. On a July dawn in 1976, after discussing the problems they see as facing their town at the oven, they attack the Convent women, “God at their side” (18), to preserve “the only black town worth the effort” (279). How did this happen?

“8-Rock” Blood

Ruby is an all-black town, but one with a twist. That twist has its origins in a covenant. The original nine founding families all were very dark (8-rock, or 8-R, like deeply-mined coal). Though never slaves, these families experienced all the terrors and degradations of the post-Reconstruction South. To escape, they migrated from Louisiana to Oklahoma; however, every black town refused them admission. The ultimate “disallowing,” one that “rocked them, and changed them for all time” (95), occurred in 1890 when the families asked for help in Fairly, Oklahoma, and were refused entrance because they were too black and too poor.

The group first founded a town called Haven, and even before they constructed permanent homes, they built a community oven inscribed “Beware the furrow of his brow.” That oven symbolized the unity of the community and its dedication to righteousness. Meals were cooked on it. Deliberations were conducted and important community decisions were made there.

No one was quite sure exactly what the phrase meant or why their leader, Zechariah Morgan, had chosen it. Some interpreted the phrase to mean they must make no choice that would furrow God’s brow; others thought maybe the brow they were told to keep smooth was that of Zechariah Morgan. Whatever the phrase meant, the oven evoked the community’s spiritual substance–the essence of what Haven was about. God would protect the people of Haven as long as they remained true to Him and maintained the purity of the community.

The Covenant Town Named Ruby

When after World War II it was no longer possible to keep Haven prosperous and untouched by the rest of the world, fifteen families dismantled the oven and moved deeper into Oklahoma. They called the new town Ruby and its guiding principle was “May God bless the pure and holy and may nothing keep us apart from each other nor from the One who does the blessing” (205). Ruby would be a new start, but it still would honor the covenant of purity and exclusion.

In Ruby, the founders constructed their vision of paradise–one seemingly free from sin and safe from racism. If anyone was tempted to forget the covenant, Zechariah’s grandsons, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan, would remind them. The most important part of educating the town’s children was the stories told in the evenings at home about the exodus, the “disallowing,” and the redemption of the community in Ruby (110).

The citizens of Ruby believed that they alone had created paradise and could preserve it through faithful adherence to the covenant. In the words of a newcomer to Ruby, the town believed “it had created the pasture it grazed” (212), one in which their wives and children were safe and they could control their own lives, their own stories. They made their own magic. In the eyes of its citizens, Ruby was a place of great harmony and order.

What Toni Morrison portrays in Paradise is a community that is very orderly at the level of intentional reality. Its citizens have constructed a code and follow it. They are pious, God-fearing people who regularly attend church. The town appears to reap the rewards of its virtue. The twin brothers Steward and Deacon Morgan (Zechariah’s grandsons) make money almost effortlessly because of their hard work, rectitude, and attention to the covenant. So do others.

Beneath Orderly Appearances

Single-minded commitment to the utilitarian, however, harms those who adopt it. Steward’s wife, Dovey, believes Steward’s financial success has come at a cost. A man who loves wide-open spaces, he has sold much of his ranch for development. Over the years he also has lost his ability to enjoy people, food, and conversation (82). As the story unfolds, Morrison shows the reader that Ruby’s emphasis on its self-constructed reality produces an outward order and prosperity that masks an interior impoverishment and disorder.

In this town, metaleptic participation has given way to ideology and there is little opsis. Ruby’s men expand their will to power over everything there, including the content of religious doctrine. However, the magic in which they engage to keep Ruby pure and holy increasingly produces disordered, sick, and alienated bodies and souls. A genealogy compiled by the town’s schoolteacher and historian reveals the deep disorder that underlies Ruby. It reveals that “unadulterated and unadulterated 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby” (217). Anyone who does not marry “8-rock” (and their spouses) is marginalized by the town as no longer “pure and holy.”

When old men needed care and women were spinsters in a town closed to outsiders and intent on its racial and sexual purity, “takeovers” among close relatives became common. Was the “takeover” arrangement merely a cover for incest? Her genealogy reveals that “the small m. was a joke, a dream, a violation of law” (187). Ruby has reduced all of moral decision making to the maintenance of the purity of 8-rock blood. Women’s actions must be watched and controlled because keeping the covenant means there must be no adultery and all marriages must be between 8-rocks. No change can challenge the covenant.

Throughout Paradise Morrison contrasts the narrow, exclusive sense of reality, spirituality, and virtue found in the town with a wider perspective, one grounded in opsis. In presenting this perspective, Morrison suggests that genuinely moral decisions arise only out of a consciousness that is open to a larger and more comprehensive reality. An important message of Morrison’s story, whether intended or not, is that moral decision-making can only take place in a consciousness attuned to all of reality.

The Convent, Transcendence, Mystery, and Miracle

The Convent sits at the crossroads of both parts of reality. At its inception, the Convent represented the experience of living a story told within the theatre of transcendence. It was not the physical building that made this so; it was the presence of the sisters. Once the last nun dies, disorder reigns there as well, but disorder of a different sort than that which occupies Ruby.

The women who one-by-one find shelter at the Convent reek of “disorder, deception, and drift” (221). Each views the Convent as a refuge from both their personal demons and the disorder of the outside world. Yet they are incapable of overcoming their own internal disorder. Even Connie, who grew up at the Convent, has succumbed in her despair over the death of the Mother Superior. Ultimately, Connie recovers and leads the women in a process of healing whose foundation is experience of both poles of life in the metaxy.

Connie’s message is simple: Body and soul are one, “Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve” (263). Responsibility toward oneself and others can only be achieved by openness to both. The world of the spirit is just as true and real as the world of the body. Yet, even at the time of their worst disorder these women are capable of helping those who seek them out. And the women of Ruby do seek them out, walking the dirt road to the Convent in loneliness, despair, or desperation. All found refuge. A few found peace. The Convent becomes a symbol of redemption–of life in the  Metaxy as an exercise in faith, hope, and love.

In the end, Morrison offers us mystery and miracle. The mystery surrounding what happens to the women’s bodies after the raid on the Convent is a symbol of the permeability of the boundaries between It-Reality and Thing-Reality. When the midwife, Lone DuPres, the Morgan brothers’ wives, and Lone’s male relatives arrive at the Convent in a failed attempt to stop the men, they find two dead women. The rest escaped the building and were shot down running across the fields. However, when the undertaker arrives to remove the bodies, they are gone.

In the book’s brief final chapter the reader sees each woman engage in an act of reconciliation with someone from her past from whom she had been estranged, either physically or emotionally, in life. The manner in which the women mysteriously appear and disappear suggests that they are apparitions. However, the people they meet experience them as flesh and blood.

The World is in God

The most telling of the vignettes is Connie’s. Connie is lying with her head in the lap of a mysterious figure she remembers from her childhood called Piedade, listening to her sing. She is totally at peace. They are sitting by the ocean. “Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf” (318). They watch a ship come into 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).

Morrison’s paradise is not someplace “out there” and it is not achieved by being virtuous and following the rules. Paradise is the recognition of a world full of grace where humans share in the hard work of forgiving each other. For  Morrison, in the end paradise does rest on human action–not in the sense of constructing heavens on earth to escape reality, but in the sense of embracing life in between and doing the work that must done on earth to help all people remember how to return to what Morrison called “love begun” (318). There is no guarantee of order, but there is a path humanity can follow.

The message is that the paradox of consciousness is real.  We do live both within Thing reality and It-reality.  The world is in God. If we are open to participating in the drama of being we will finally live in the real world, see the anxiety of existence for what it is–a push into the search for meaning, and accept the uncertain and mysterious in our lives.  Then we may be able to replace magic with miracle.

Accepting the Miraculous

“. . . the Yurok and Tolowa peoples, log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense they had of some invisible boundary” (Thomas Pynchon, Vineland)

“God is a teacher and guide who taught how  ‘to see for yourself . . . if you stopped steeping in vanity’s sour juice and paid attention to his world.'” (Toni Morrison, Paradise)

In her compilation of African-American folk tales, Virginia Hamilton writes that “The People Could Fly” was “first told and retold by those who had only their imaginations to set them free.”34 It is the story of slaves who sprouted wings and, thus, escaped their bondage.

Perhaps there is a lesson in that story for today’s world as well. Once we become enslaved to anything, only imagination can set us free. Truly human stories fire our imaginations and help us stretch ourselves further than we ever thought we could. Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon demonstrate our need for such stories and, through their illumination of It-reality, offer us glimpses of what we need to construct a modernity after modernity–one that reflects a spiritual substance.

Modernity’s denial of the spirit meant that the self no longer is a predicate in the comprehending reality; instead it is a subject in a world of objects, autonomous, a law unto itself. But in denying the reality of sin, mankind also denied the reality of the pull from “It” which alone constitute our humanity. In other words, humankind denied there is any story, any comprehending reality, in which to take part except the one we write in our isolation for ourselves.

Western humanity, at least, decided it made its own stories. In modernity those stories were optimistic. Life was what an individual made it. Human beings could use calculation and technique to make more perfect people and worlds. Mankind could write a story of universal human progress that would overcome the fact that as individuals we stand alone in the face of the void of non-existence. Such is the power of magical thinking.

No Answers But Glimpses of Light

But the concrete experience of the twentieth century suggested caution and pessimism were more realistic. Calculation is difficult in a random, frightening world in which a person feels little or no control and everything seems to happen by accident. Calculation seems perverse when its sole goal appears to be the creation of corpses. It appeared that not only did human beings face a void alone, but that almost all other human beings sought to push them into it.

There would be no universal human story. There is no overall comprehending reality. There is no overarching story. Any such meta-narrative could only be an instrument of power and oppression. All stories were individual ones. All stories were contingent products of accident in which each alone struggled to build a personal metaphor–not a story, just a metaphor.

Neither Toni Morrison nor Thomas Pynchon gives their readers answers to the questions posed by their books. There is no tying up of loose ends or even actual endings. Instead, there is a glimpse of light, often offered in the most prosaic of ways, which leaves us standing in the middle of the story with a head full of questions. Moments of illumination of the ground abound.

Sometimes there is a moment of turning and opsis, with a glimpse of It-reality’s attempt to break into the world of material things. Thus, we get snatches of what a truly human life might be like even though we see no characters that can fully live such a life. Their characters begin by searching for answers, but end by facing, and coming closer to accepting, mystery. That acceptance of mystery, they suggest, may open doors to the miraculous.

 

References

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988.

Chesterton, G.K. “Everlasting Man.” The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Vol. II. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 1986.

Embry, Charles, ed. Philosophy, Literature, and Politics: Essays Honoring Ellis Sandoz. University of Missouri Press. 2005.

___. The Philosopher and the Storyteller. University of Missouri Press, 2008.

___, ed. Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature. University of Missouri Press. 2011.

Florensky, Pavel. Ikonostasis. Trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 1996.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Penguin Books. 1982.

___. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

___. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1991.

___. Paradise. New York: Penguin Books. 1999.

Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Patel, Cyrus R. K. Negative Liberties. Durham: Duke University Press. 2001.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Bantam Books. 1976.

___. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennials. 1986.

___. Vineland. London: Mandarin Paperbacks. 1991.

___. Mason and Dixon. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1997.

___. Against the Day. Viking. 2006.

___. Inherent Vice. Penguin. 2009.

Ruderman, Anne Crippen. The Pleasures of Virtue. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. New York: G.P. Putnam. 2003.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History I:Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 1.

___. Order and History IV: The Ecumenic Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1974.

___. From Enlightenment to Revolution. Duke University Press. 1975.

___. Order and History V: In Search of Order. Ed. Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1987.

___. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 28: What is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings. Ed. Thomas Hollweck and Paul Caringella. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1990.

___.The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 25: History of Political Ideas VII: The New Order and Last Orientation. ed. Jurgen Gebhardt and Thomas Hollweck. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1999.

___. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 11:Published Essays 1953-1965. ed. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2000.

___.The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 26: History of Political Ideas VIII: Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man. Ed. David Walsh. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

 

Notes

1. See for example, Stanley Hauerwas  “Killing Compassion” in James L. Marsh, ed. Process, Praxis, and Transcendence (Albany: State University of New York, 1999) and Sheldon Wolin. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 2006).

2. See also the works of  Jonathan Franzen, José Saramago, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Leslie Marmon Silko, and J. M. Coetzee.

3. Eric Voegelin.  Order and History IV: Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 216-217.

4. Eric Voegelin, Order and History V: In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) 30.

5. See, for example, Cyrus R. K. Patel, Negative Liberties (Duke University Press, 2001).

6. Eric Voegelin, “Anxiety and Reason,” The Collected Works of Eric VoegelinVol 28: What Is History? and Other Late Unpublished Writings. Ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 74.

7. Toni Morrison. Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 36.

8. Pavel Florensky, Ikonostasis (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 53.

9. Eric Voegelin. History of Political Ideas VII: The New Order and Last Orientation. Ed. Thomas Hollweck and Jurgen Gebhardt. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 25 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).

10. Florensky, 64.

11. Jurgen Gebhardt and Thomas Hollweck, “Editor’s Introduction.” Eric Voegelin. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 25: History of Political Ideas Volume VII, The New Order and Last Orientation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).

12. David Walsh. “Editor’s Introduction.” Eric Voegelin. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 26: History of Political Ideas Volume VIII, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 22.

13. Eric Voegelin. Order and History 4:6.

14. Voegelin, Order and History 5:30.

15. Voegelin. In Search of the Ground,The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin II: Published Essays 1953-1965. Ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 230.

16. Voegelin. Order and History 4:305.

17. Voegelin. “Anxiety and Reason,” 74.

18. Ibid., 106.

19. Voegelin. “In Search of the Ground,” 230.

20. Voegelin. Order and History 5:15.

21. Ibid., Order and History 5:37.

22. Ibid., 5:38.

23. Voegelin. “The Beginning and the Beyond,” The Collected Works of Eric VoegelinVol 28: What Is History? And Other Unpublished Writings. Ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 217.

24. Ibid., 217.

25. Ibid., 231.

26. Ibid., 232.

27. Order and History 4:13.

28. Willa Cather. O Pioneers! In Willa Cather: Early Stories and Novels (New York: Library of America, 1987), 196.

29. Voegelin. Order and History I: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 3.

30. In-text citations for this section are from Thomas Pynchon. Vineland (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1991).

31. Pynchon writes that Bach’s “Wachet Auf!” is “one of the best tunes ever to come out of Europe” (325).

32.  In-text citations for this section are from Toni Morrison. Paradise (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

33. Virginia Hamilton. The People Could Fly (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 173.

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Margaret Seyford Hrezo is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Radford University in Virginia. She is author of Damned If You Do: Dilemmas of Action in Literature and Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2010).

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