Appreciation of Heaven’s Works

The theme of the work "Paradise" is the deep concern for the fate of black people at the bottom, especially black women at the bottom:

1. Fighting for a future life that belongs to black people - that is, exploring the struggle of black people for Issues of equal rights and the meaning and value of future ideal life;

2. Learn to integrate into society and live seriously - that is, issues about black people's life beliefs, life attitudes and ways of survival;

3. Living a good life - mainly exploring what kind of life is a good life, and how to strive for and enjoy a good life in the future.

The women in "Paradise" realize the engagement between women and women through the development of sisterhood, and demonstrate the healing power contained in women themselves without the participation of men. Sisterhood is an affinity relationship between two or more unrelated women that supports and comforts each other. To a certain extent, in a world dominated by men, sisterhood is a spiritual and material guarantee for the majority of women to survive and develop. It unites scattered individuals into collective strength and forms a huge driving force.

Racism is as much about white people’s perceptions of themselves and their place in the world as it is about black people’s experiences in a racist society. In "Paradise", there is a profound historical background for African Americans to imitate white people and implement extreme racism. The concept of white racism did not disappear with the abolition of slavery. As a minority group, African Americans have always existed in a mainstream white society full of hostility and discrimination. In the 1960s, because they could not find a suitable place for themselves in the established order of white people, African Americans tried to find a sense of security and belonging within their own race through self-isolation, and proposed the concept of "separation of black and white." Political opinions. The towns of Haven and Ruby, full of racial and cultural conflicts, were a microcosm of American society at that time.

The ancestors of the residents of Ruby Town in the novel were originally slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana. In order to find the dream paradise of black people, in 1890, their grandfather Zachary moved to Dickinson and Stuart. Under the leadership of Ya Morgan, they traveled long distances to the west. They were rejected and discriminated against by whites and light-skinned blacks on the way, and the town of Oven was established after going through hardships. By 1949, many white people who moved westward were already living in Haven Town, and the "paradise" of black people's ideal life in Haven Town began to decline. Dicken and Stuart were worried that the black people in the town would forget the bitter history of the past, so they led 15 black families into the depths of Oklahoma.

On the way, Dicken and Stuart's sister Ruby became seriously ill, but was rejected by the white hospital in the town. By the time they transferred my sister to a second hospital, she was unconscious and dead in the hospital corridor. When the nurses managed to contact a veterinarian to examine the dead Ruby, they were outraged, took their sister home, and buried her in a beautiful spot on the Stuart Ranch. Ruby's unfortunate experience is deeply implanted in the racial memory of black people, leaving an indelible mark of pain on their souls. In their eyes, outsiders (especially white people) are equated with enemies. The naming of the town after Ruby reflects the racial remembrance of black people: it is not only a symbol of black racial hatred, but also a manifestation of racial unity. Ruby becomes a scapegoat for racial discrimination precisely because of her special identity with African characteristics, and her image conforms to the inherent characteristics of the scapegoat archetype.

The apartheid policy implemented by white people has caused black people to suffer humiliation and pain for hundreds of years. However, the African Americans in "Paradise" satirically parody the racial discrimination of white people. They subvert the racist ideas of white supremacy, believe that dark skin is beautiful, and are proud of their blackness. Fight to defend the pure blood of black people. “They were born of an ancient hatred that began with one black person despising another kind of black person, and that kind of black person took that hatred to new levels, and their selfishness was reflected in a moment of arrogance, a mistake, and Two hundred years of disasters and triumphs have been ruined by the ruthlessness of the mind.

The difference between Ruby Town and other residential areas is that it is isolated from the world.

In the pursuit of racial equality in today's world, different races and cultures move from exclusion to integration, and "integration" and "diversity" exist. Placing the marginal narrative of "black ontology" in mainstream discourse - Toni Morrison's writing strategy in "Paradise"

As an African-American writer, Toni Morrison is faced with choosing a narrative form problem. Writers must use "marginal narratives" to combat the marginalization of black people. This "marginal narrative" mainly refers to the "blackness" that is different from white mainstream literature, that is, a "black ontology" is inserted into the mainstream Western language and theory where blackness does not exist at all. The work "Paradise" expresses the characteristics of black culture from the remaining oral forms, fragmented memory narrative mode, referential characters, and surrealist narrative style. Morrison wants to use marginal narratives to fight against the cultural colonization of disadvantaged ethnic groups by mainstream discourse, in order to evoke the submerged racial memory of the black nation.

In fact, the essence of the "blackness" theory advocated by black literary theorists such as Gates is to try to insert a "black ontology" in the mainstream Western language and theory where blackness does not exist at all. , "And this blackness appears in the form of mainstream Western language, that is, it is reflected in differentiated black English expressions under the consistent encoding of superficial language symbols." Comorison described himself as "poetic" The credit for the diction comes first and foremost to one’s own blackness. Some scholars pointed out that "Morrison's characters emerge from the margins. They carry the complex meaning of literary discourse and are looking for a way to the center."

Unique cultural identity, ethnicity, and gender attributes The richness and distinct black cultural identity that make up Toni Morrison's text. Morrison has accepted Western culture since she was a child and is familiar with Western literature and its various allusions. However, when she absorbs Western literature, she is good at integrating it into blackness and presenting it in a unique way. She imitates writing techniques such as mythical archetypes, symbolic hints, sliding consciousness, and uncertainty from Western classical to modern and even postmodern writing techniques. "Paradise" reproduces many elements of Western literature. However, “black literature’s repetition of Western literary forms always carries black characteristics, which are reflected in the specific use of language.”

1. The remaining oral form: the living situation of the black nation Representations

African American subcultures are relegated to "legacy oral forms." The oral culture that remains is primarily auditory, functional, collective, and direct. Its main forms are: speeches, myths, legends and stories. Morrison has a special liking for the "storytelling" form. In her speech at the Nobel Prize Ceremony, she emphasized: "For me, listening to other people's stories is not just a pastime. I firmly believe that this is one of the main ways for people to gain knowledge." In "Paradise" she asked Ruby The people in the town learned about past history by "listening to stories": in the room with the stove, they "listened to war stories; listened to the stories of the great immigrants - those who did it and those who didn't." Hear the stories of wise men's successes and failures - their fears, their bravery, their confusions; hear the stories of deep and eternal love." The work emphasizes the twin brothers (ie Stuart and Stuart) in many places. Ken) Details of "listening to the story":

With each misfortune, they became more stubborn and prouder, and all the details were engraved in the powerful memories of the twin brothers. Unembellished stories were told again and again in the dark barn near the big stove in the sunset of Sunday prayer meetings. The twin brothers were born in 1924 and have listened to stories about the past forty years for twenty years - they listened, imagined, and remembered every specific thing, because every detail is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The pleasant shock was as thrilling as a dream, more impulsive and purposeful than the war they were engaged in.

The novel allows readers to learn about the ups and downs of the town's history, the grudges between the characters, and the evolution of conflicts through "story" together with the characters. The novel begins with the monastery being ransacked and a white woman shot and killed. The subsequent plot does not continue to develop according to this, but leads to the history and current situation of Ruby Town.

Through "storytelling", we learned about the nine black families living in Ruby Town. Since their ancestors were trafficked to the American South as slaves in 1755, they have gone through many vicissitudes and have always maintained the "eight-layer stone" (that is, the bottom layer of the coal mine). Black and bright coal) of pure black blood, and "becomes more stubborn and proud with each misfortune."

It is the third generation starting from "Grandpa" Zechariah to the twin brothers. Although the Stuarts are smart and capable, due to the different concepts, narrow thinking, and short-sightedness of the old and new generations, there are crises and conflicts lurking in the town, which are about to break out. They blame this situation on a woman not far away. The monastery, and the reader sees the scene at the beginning of the novel. The attack on the monastery is both the introduction and almost the end of the story. Most of the novel is devoted to recalling and tracing the origin of the story, as well as the conflicts, grudges and love between the various characters associated with it. Hate love and hatred. This form of "oral history" has ancient roots in African culture.

Morrison inherited the tradition of griots, African song and dance artists. She said: "Black people have stories, and these stories must be heard. First there is oral literature, then written literature. Before there was Griot. They knew the stories by heart, and people listened to the stories. My book has a voice, which is very important. Important - you can hear it, I can hear it, so I tend to use less adverbs, not because I'm writing a script, but because I'm trying to give the audience a definite voiced dialogue." In fact, this form of "Griot" (storytelling) has two functions at a deep level: First, in the formal contrast with the white mainstream discourse, African American blacks find their own moral, social and Rhetorical models of aesthetic purpose. Another function of "Glio" shows that although it is a folk art model formed very early, it carries and accumulates the profound black national cultural spirit and embodies the national values ????and Morality, therefore, if "certain experiences, meanings and values ??that cannot be expressed or fully justified in terms of the dominant culture are still based on the current - cultural and social - practices or formations of some previous social and cultural "Published and practiced," then, this "remaining oral myth of African Americans has become a moral and speculative story. In other words, these stories have ancient archetypes in their patterns," and they are culturally content. "Racial," it has become a symbol of the harsh living conditions unique to a nation.

2. "Fragmented memory" narrative mode: dissolving the central "baina quilt" metaphorical structure

Susan S. Lancer, a representative of American feminist narrative theory, pointed out that “African American subjectivity, or any subjectivity, cannot be expressed in any linear sequence of words. ""Paradise" narrates the story in the mode of "reviving memories", but the narrative process is non-continuous and is presented in the structure of "fragmented memory".

The story is not told in the order of events. The rhythm may be extended, circuitous, or stagnant. The story begins and ends in 1976, but the main events are submerged in a large number of memories, and the story of the main plot of the novel is over a century long. Characters and events are interrupted, and the narrative time is constantly displaced and mutated. It clearly has the multi-layered and multi-structure characteristics of Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness novels. On the other hand, the author inherits the narrative style of "Eva" and abandons the traditional narrative style. A single narrative perspective is replaced by multiple narrative perspectives, and the novel's loose combination of fragments (memory fragments) replaces the compact plot arrangement. Each of the nine chapters in the book is titled after a female name, such as Mavis. , Grace, Sinica, Di Yin, Patricia, Consolata, Lou En, etc., and the plot of the entire work is closely related to these women.

The novel eliminates the peculiarities of general literature. The concept of time, in order to highlight history, characters and events, the exhibition space of the novel has been strengthened, showing the writing characteristics of postmodern literature mosaic and collage combination, and also consistent with the aesthetic image of "sewing a quilt" in black female literature A secret fit.

“Sewing Baina quilts” originated from the African folk activities of women sewing quilts.

Three distinctive activities of black women—quilting, pantymaking, and singing. More importantly, in feminist literary theory, "stitching" has become a metaphor for the structure of women's texts that dissolves the "center".

"Paradise" uses multiple women's names as different chapter titles and connects the entire content into one chapter. In the ingenious narrative concept, it not only "stitches" the fragments of the memory of black life, but also embeds the story of black women. ists’ profound thinking about reality. According to the feminist critic Rachel Du Plessis, pure "female writing" has no hierarchical differences? "It wants to break the hierarchy, organize all materials into multiple centers, and make various factors evenly Shown without prominent location or moment.” She also said that in the "quilt of words" of feminist texts, there is no "subordination" and no "hierarchy." In this way, the multi-generational structure of "Paradise" has the symbolic metaphorical nature of deconstructing the center and authority.

3. Characters with "referential" functions: subverting white mainstream culture in dual meanings

Characters in black literary works generally have referential codes role. "The function of referential codes is to provide a cultural reference framework for a specific text." The referential codes of "Paradise" are not fragmentary, fragmented, and illogical breaks; rather, they are all-round, focusing on fuzzy multiple , a system that can release rich cultural information to readers. That is to say, the characters in "Paradise" have the function of "double meaning" unique to black literature. Most of the novel's titles, characters, place names, things, scenes, etc. have meanings, thus forming a relatively large referential system. Especially in terms of the referential nature of the characters, it is rich in information and profound in meaning. Some Western scholars pointed out: "The characters and plots in this novel use various myths from the Bible to ancient Greece, cartoons, and even hybrids." Morrison, who is familiar with Western literature, uses characters from the Bible or ancient Greek mythology as prototypes, but quietly incorporates "black" elements.

(1) Black versions of biblical characters. African Americans have been searching for their own black culture through various channels. It is of course necessary to return to their native African lands to search, but their dual cultural background complicates this "search". Black intellectuals living in a white world advocate that "by correcting some traditional fallacies, we can find images of black people in places that they think only belong to them." The black female writer Walker wrote in "The Color Purple" that Nietzsche discovered that, Jesus Christ, who has always been considered white, was black. "It is a shameless act for white people to take Jesus, who was originally black, as their own, just as they plundered the wealth of Africa and appropriated the fruits of black labor for free. Morrison is also looking for black people in "Paradise" Christ, and is a female Christ. The name of the soul figure in the convent in the book, Consolata, means "The Comforter". The appearance of this character is uncertain, and it is difficult to judge that she is black. Or white, the author only mentioned her "green eyes" and "brown" hair, and used the form of question marks. Perhaps this is the narrative strategy of female writers. Mythologist Joseph Campbell believes that Consolata. Likely alluded to as a black female Jesus, he said: “The gods in most cultures are gentle and loving and will sacrifice themselves if necessary. Jesus was originally a man, but Christianity gave him female characteristics and then turned "her" into a male.

In "Paradise", when the black people began to migrate and wander after being rejected, they considered themselves God's chosen people, and "Grandpa" Zechariah was the great ancestor who led them through the hardships. . Through code switching and corresponding descriptions of characters, Morrison evolved the main metaphors and symbols in the Bible into archetypal patterns and symbols that are relatively universal across cultures.

(2) Greek goddesses and black women. "Paradise" not only looks for images of black people in the Bible, but also discovers their origins and relationships in Greek mythology. The Pallas described in the fifth chapter of the work is based on the Greek goddess Athena, but still emphasizes the blackness. As we all know, Athena is the goddess of wisdom in Greek mythology and the protector of the city of Athens.

However, Martin Bernard pointed out in the book "Black Athena: The African Origins of Ancient Civilization" (1987): "The black Greek goddess Athena came from ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean islands as early as 2100 to 1100 BC. It was borrowed and integrated into ancient Greek culture."

The Pallas described in "Paradise" is the Greek goddess Athena (explanation in the English dictionary: Pallas=Athena). . Morrison used this image to try to metaphor the relationship between Western civilization and African civilization, while giving the image a richer cultural connotation. Pallas in the work had a rough life. He witnessed the incestuous behavior of her boyfriend and her mother, which was a huge mental shock. With the help of her sisters, she survived strongly and gave birth to a child in a monastery.

It is worth noting that Morrison calls the pregnant girl Pallas. One of the reasons is that in African culture "mother" plays an important role in the family; in addition, Morrison also "stole" weapons from French feminist critics who were deeply influenced by deconstruction. For example, Kristeva believes that the expression of maternal desire is a challenge to masculinity, and believes that "pregnancy and parenting can break the opposition between self and others, subject and object, internal and external." Moreover, she used the image of "good-enough mother" to advocate the integration of mother and sex, and described art as the language of "mother's enjoyment". In this way, women are not only a space for art and writing, but also a space for truth: "The unrepresentable truth is out of reach, subverting the order of male logic, control, and pseudo-truth."

Morrison attaches great importance to the importance of motherhood to women. Most of the other women in "Paradise" are also related to motherhood: Thorne suffered a miscarriage when she was young due to her husband's affair with Consolata; Arnett and sister-in-law Sweetie suffered from the consequences of childbirth. of trauma. The former became pregnant at the age of fourteen, but the man did not intend to get married, and the two families developed a grudge. When the fetus was moving, he beat his abdomen hard and poked his lower body with the handle of a small brush, causing the child to be born prematurely. Sweety gave birth to four children who were all disabled, which hurt her physically and mentally. In Christian ideology, the mother is regarded as an obvious sign of female body pleasure, but this pleasure is strictly suppressed, and the reproductive function must be subordinated to the law in the name of the father. What patriarchy oppresses is not women themselves, but their status as mothers. It can be seen that the referential nature of Pallas, an image based on black people, has multiple subversive effects on mainstream white culture.

4. Surrealist narrative style: the deconstruction of the empirical world by black cosmology

Morrison admits that her work has similarities with Latin American magical realism, but believes that I am expressing a "reality" that is different from the definition of traditional Western literature. Alice Walker once said that she would be candid about mysticism-animism because she believed it was both the best thing for African Americans to remember their African heritage and "more important than any politics, race, or geography." Something more esoteric”. Morrison also holds a "black cosmology", which is similar to the "law of interpenetration" of primitive thinking. For example, the living and the dead can talk; humans, animals and plants can interact with each other. Morrison's novels first reject rational explanations of things and then affirm the transcendent and magical.

The entire novel "Beloved" (1988) is integrated into the ghost world. The belief that people can "come back to life" is the logical starting point of its creation. "Paradise" continues the author's previous techniques and also shows the unique style of African Americans. There are many surrealistic descriptions in "Heaven", such as the mysterious person Zacharias and his son saw before arriving in Haven; the mysterious woman Pedade who only sings but does not speak, etc., all have a surreal color. Among them, Consolata's talent of "inner vision" and her "step into magic" to save people are the most magical parts of the book: Consolata looked at the corpse, took off her glasses without hesitation, and stared at him. red trickles in hair. She stepped inside. Seeing the stretch of road that he had dreamed of crossing, he felt overturned, had a headache, felt chest tightness, and didn't want to breathe.

Then, the sun shone and dispersed the morning fog, revealing a large field of miscanthus grassland and perhaps traces of witches. "This poetic text on the one hand uses the Eden-like tranquility and beauty of the monastery to contrast the brutality and brutality of these black men, and at the same time hints at the upcoming changes in the town. Another example is her exquisite metaphor showing the male residents of Ruby Town. Sticking to the rules: they "do not think of how to govern by extending a hand of friendship or love, but outline precautions, polishing the examples as necessary until each one fits the polished groove." One of Sen’s major contributions to English literature was to conduct a comprehensive “cleansing” of black literary language, “returning the original meaning to the words rather than repeating meanings that had been destroyed through vulgarity. "It is with the help of this language full of love and passion that Morrison arduously and unyieldingly searches for the "paradise" of black women's writing.

Black women have long been enslaved and have been silent. From her unique perspective, Morrison strives to find a paradise where she can freely write about the fate of black women. Through her skillful use of various literary techniques, she points out the sinners and crimes that suppress the voices of black women, and breaks through the incompetence of black women. The Situation of Speech calls for black women to turn their fragmented voices into a unified cry