Toni Reigns in Paradise

"Then there is the grandeur," said Toni Morrison. Sure, the sentence is just one of many from Chapter One of Morrison's new novel Paradise, read by the author to an audience of several hundred in Faneuil Hall last Wednesday night. This particular phrase is unique, though, because through it the novelist perfectly encapsulated the listener's experience of her own reading.

If anything, the term "grandeur" alone cannot accommodate Morrison, whose magisterial presence in the hall was almost elemental, permeating and reconstituting every particle of the air from the moment she entered the room.

The hyperbole of such statements would be unforgivable if the evening itself had not been so stylized, hyperbole itself so woven into the fabric of the event. The audience and even the sponsoring hosts came less to hear a reading than to canonize their hero, speaking and behaving in such a self-conscious series of superlatives that no account could downplay their ecstasy and still comprise a faithful report.

So, you may already be asking, was such pageantry the necessary complement of a first-class book or, like so much ceremony, a feat of window-dressing staged around a hollowness of ideas? In other words, did author and text deserve the worshipful two hours carved out for them?

The answer to that question is decidedly split. While Morrison herself possessed all the "grace, the dignity, and the intellectual depth" that Professor of Afro-American Studies Cornel West '74 ascribed to her in his dulcet introduction, Paradise as a novel is, almost unprecedently for the Nobel Laureate, less than wholly compelling.

Morrison chose to read the opening chapter of Paradise because, to her mind, that chapter more than the others "can stand alone" from the rest of the text. The strange truth is that the selection actually works better as a separate entity than it does as an entrance into her book.

The chapter describes the intrusion by the men of Ruby, Oklahoma--"the one all-black town worth the pain"--into a nearby former mission-school known colloquially as the Convent. Five women, fugitives each from justice, abuse or a lover's caprice, are living in the Convent at the moment when the men invade one morning and shoot them one by one.

Before the novel's publication in January, when it still bore the name Morrison had picked for it--War--Morrison had intended this moment of violence to both open and close Paradise. In so doing, the whole moral weight of histories, conflicts and biases that she unpacks throughout the novel would bear down upon the shootists (and the reader) at the climactic moment of violence.

That scheme was rejected by her publishers, and Paradise was released to the public with a mournful, creakily "mystical coda that is easily the least effective passage of the book. Even without that concluding misstep, though, the impact of the first chapter within the circular framework Morrison attempts is severely diluted by two factors.

One is that we get too full an outline of the many characters' thoughts, so that later, when the same moment is revived in the novel's finale, there is little left to reveal. Of course, that broad surveying into Who Feels What lends the chapter very well to independent analysis, making Morrison's reading a strong, emotionally-rich teaser for readers who, unfortunately, are not likely to have their curiosity sated by the way Paradise plays out.

The second problem with the opening chapter--as issue both related to and graver than the first problem--is that few of the men or women in Paradise are convincingly full-blooded, nor do the majority of them experience any true psychological or ideological change.

These thinnish, arc-less characterizations--shocking from the creator of Song of Solomon's galvanizing Milkman and Pilate, or Beloved's triumvirate of mother and daughters--detract from the novel as a whole. Again, though, this ailment of the text proved ironically rewarding for the Faneuil Hall audience, who could follow the movements of plot and character easily without the impediments of tortuous internal conflicts or irreducible psychic complexities.

Whatever the disappointments of her material--and granted, these shortcomings would almost certainly go unnoticed coming from any other author--Morrison stood proud atop the evening like the Tall Ships in our harbor, her elocution marvelous and her words like banners unfurled. Her delivery maintained a patrician exactitude--affording the word "vegetable" its deserved four syllables, crisply enunciating the second "t" in "tomatoes"--that rivaled her beautiful prose itself as a tribute to our language.

The final 20 minutes of the evening granted audience members a chance to ask Morrison questions about either Paradise itself or her techniques and travails as a writer. Here Morrison displayed a charming sense of confidence and humor. She told one man who inquired about her biblical references, "I was hoping nobody would ask me that."

When another reader asked how she gauges the amount of plot and character information to include, Morrison responded, "I don't know how I do it, but I'll tell you this--knowing that is the difference between an amateur and a professional."

West and DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates, seated like acolytes beside and behind the author, grinned with the audience at her unexpected but graceful bravado. Perhaps their glee stemmed in part from how effectively her comments deflated the near-pomposity with which they had begun the evening. Gates went so far in introducing, West to christen him "a true citizen of the Republic of Letters," a bold pronouncement for anyone to make when the queen of said Republic sits a few feet away.

Acknowledging her virtual iconography of black female authorship in a recent Time Magazine profile, Morrison stated that "most of the questions I get after readings or talks are anthropological or sociological or political. They are not about literary concerns." Those kinds of questions were largely missing from the Faneuil Hall session, although the briskness with which the question-and-answer period was conducted and concluded may have been largely responsible.

Or maybe no verbal articulation of sociology and politics could have equalled the visual impact of this scene: certainly America's and possibly the world's pre-eminent black novelist standing before white marble busts of white former presidents, reading a story of riven societies while the wall behind her proclaimed "Liberty and Union Now and Forever."

Toni Morrison proved her ability to stand in a room imbued with our national history and still put her surroundings doubly to shame, both through the superior power of her presence and the doleful worldly realities she insistently describes. Paradise is not her strongest work, but it admirably continues her long-standing interrogation of how and by whom liberty and union are defined, of when and where they have ever truly existed.

Maya Angelou has written that "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived / But, if faced with courage, need not be lived again." In terms of pure, unflinching courage, the Founding Fathers' "Liberty and Union Now and Forever" could not hold a candle to the muscular, subversive shock of one woman's "They shoot the white girl first." A roomful of listeners paid tribute last Friday night to a great artist, whose wizardly deployment of language continues to offer us hope that history may be, or maybe has already been, redeemed.