Chapter Five
THE VANISHING UNIVERSAL
The distance that prohibition provides for subjects offers them the space for critical reflection. Through this distance, the structure of the society of prohibition thus allows for subjects to make sense of it. When this distance collapses under the weight of the imperative to enjoy, we lose our ability to interpret events occurring in the world—to connect isolated events to the larger social order. Interpretation requires distance and separation, and the society of commanded enjoyment allows us neither. We become so caught up in the immediacy of events that we lack ability to reflect on the mediations that underlie this apparent immediacy. A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.
In his account of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson describes the widespread failure of interpretation symptomatic of the society of enjoyment, a failure he links to the contemporary collapse of distance. This means, first of all, that we lack the ability not only to interpret events but even to locate ourselves in the world. According to Jameson, “this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.”1 Unable to discover how our spatial world is organized—to perform what Jameson calls cognitive mapping—we experience events as random and disconnected. Cognitive mapping relies on the universalizing, seeing the necessity at work within the seeming randomness of events. But the ability to universalize is precisely what the society of enjoyment militates against. As a result, interpretation appears only in disguised forms.
Jameson sees conspiracy theory as one of these forms. The conspiracy theorist attempts to interpret events, to plot their connection to the whole, and this act involves universalizing. Jameson says, “conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.”2 Grasping the totality is impossible today because, paradoxically, global capitalism is authentically total: we can’t access the point beyond it that would allow us to see it as a totality. However, conspiracy theory makes an effort at universalizing, even if this effort involves a fallacious belief in its own transcendence. That is, the conspiracy theorist believes that she/he can attain the (impossible) perspective of an outsider, one looking at the contemporary world system from a point beyond it. But despite this fundamental error, the very prevalence of conspiracy theory indicates the extent to which the society of enjoyment resists the act of interpretation. Today, interpretation finds itself denigrated to such an extent that it appears only in the form of paranoia.
Contemporary works of art frequently display the society of enjoyment’s resistance to meaning and interpretation. As Jameson points out, modernist art, despite its difficulty, is nonetheless fundamentally directed toward the act of interpretation. In fact, the difficulty of modernist art is an index of its interpretability. The difficulty allows for—and even invites—the act of interpretation. With postmodern art (or, to translate into our terms, art in the society of enjoyment), interpretation becomes beside the point. According to Jameson:
We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodernism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts—such is the logic of postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video.3
In video and other contemporary art, the resistance to interpretation does not appear as part of the work’s content. It is instead a matter of form. While experiencing the continuous flow of experimental video—just as when watching television or surfing the internet—it becomes difficult to isolate a text for interpretation. Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.4
The inability to universalize manifests itself not just in contemporary works of art, but also—and even more emphatically—in contemporary theory as well. Theory itself has become, as Jameson notes, hostile to theory. This becomes readily apparent in New Historicism, where “extreme theoretical energy is captured and deployed, but repressed by a valorization of immanence and nominalism that can either look like a ‘return to the thing itself’ or a ‘resistance to theory.’”5 This “valorization of immanence,” as we saw in the previous chapter, is the preeminent “theoretical” position today. It is theorizing that works to confine itself to the particular, to resist the temptation to lift events and texts out of their particular context. Such a focus on immanence and particularity misses the functioning of the system as a whole, the way in which the universal informs the emergence of particularity. As Jameson puts it, “a relaxed consent to immanence [. . .] can yield no experimental information as to the shape of the system and its boundaries, the specific social and historical fashion in which an outside is unattainable and we are turned back in on ourselves.”6 For Jameson, even if we are trapped within the contemporary world system, the abandonment of the attempt to think the whole—the abandonment of the attempt to interpret—will not allow us to see the way that we are trapped. Only the effort to think to totality can bring our inability to think the totality into view. But this requires a commitment to universalizing, a process that the society of enjoyment renders increasingly difficult.
THE ETHICS OF THE PARTICULAR
Universality has fallen into ill repute in part because of the link between universalizing and violence. As it mediates the competing claims of different particularities, universality necessarily forces particularities to sacrifice their particularity. It is this violence implicit in universality that has occasioned so much opposition to it in recent years, so much insistence that we resist the lure of universality and confine ourselves to the less violent (and less grandiose) claims of multiple particularities. This dissatisfaction with universality has been, in part, responsible for a turn away from Marxism among the Left, a turn to what some call post-Marxism.7 Marxism, because it demands the universalization of the class perspective of the proletariat and the prioritizing of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie, necessarily subsumes other, perhaps equally important, struggles beneath this one—struggles against things such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, two former Marxists themselves, formulate the move away from universality most forcefully:
The epistemological niche from which “universal” classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. This point is decisive: there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to “the truth,” which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects.8
According to Laclau and Mouffe, we must give up the pretensions of universality because this is the only way of avoiding authoritarianism and the only way of sustaining a democratic Leftist politics.
However, as we can see in the passage from Laclau and Mouffe, there is some slippage between the impossibility of universality and the call for a prohibition against “the discourse of the universal.” In other words, they begin by claiming that universality is no longer possible, that the universal position “has been eradicated,” and then they insist that we must renounce universality. By making universality seem to be a possibility that we must avoid, Laclau and Mouffe cover over their insight into the evanescent nature of universality today. There is no need to avoid or renounce universality, precisely because we are no longer capable of it. And we are no longer capable of it insofar as we experience our subjectivity as one of, in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, “a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity.” For Laclau and Mouffe, as for much of the contemporary Left, this turn from universality to particularity is a turn away from domination and from the violence of trying to speak for others. What they miss, however, is what is lost along with the loss of universality. When we can no longer take up a universalizing perspective, we can no longer escape our isolated position in order to understand the social order as a totality. Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday lives—we lose the ability to find meaning—because it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible.
Interpretation operates by relating the particular to the universal, by taking a seemingly isolated event and seeing its larger importance. The universal provides the framework of meaning through which the particular acquires whatever sense it will acquire. Without the possibility of a reference to the universal, particular events lose their connection to the whole and thus take on the appearance of contingency. We can see this phenomenon at its most egregious in the contemporary attitude toward crime. People fear crime today in large part because it always threatens to take them by surprise. Rather than being the product of definite sociohistorical conditions, the criminal seems to emerge out of nowhere, strike, and then return to anonymity. As the victim (or potential victim) of the crime, I experience it as a wholly random act, disconnected with the functioning of the social order as a whole. What I experience most forcefully is the fact that the crime could have happened to anyone—that it could have happened to someone else just as easily as it happened to me. Certainly it is never anything that I did that triggered the crime—or at least such is my experience. Crimes appear, in other words, in almost every instance as particular acts without any link to the universal, without any connection to the social order in which they exist. One might have a theory about crime—blaming it on “liberal judges,” for instance—but when crime actually strikes, it seems random and irreducibly singular. Hence, it becomes impossible to interpret crime, to grasp particular crimes within their universal significance.9 But nonetheless crime does have a universal significance, and it does emerge from localizable conditions, despite its appearance of isolation and particularity. In fact, one could convincingly argue that crime should be easier to understand within the current context of global capitalism than ever before in human history, simply because never before have those who live in squalor been bombarded on a daily basis with nonstop images of opulence. Making connections like this is increasingly difficult today, however, because subjects increasingly view their experience as an isolated, essentially private experience.10
In addition to fostering paranoia about crime, this contemporary failure to recognize the universal—and the inability to interpret that it produces—renders subjects unable to see any way out of the isolated particularity that engulfs them. A sense of claustrophobia sets in: without the possibility of universality, I have no means through which I might escape my insular, private world. From this perspective, one can understand yet another reason for the appeal of fundamentalism today. In addition to promising a return of transcendence (as we saw in the previous chapter), fundamentalism (grounded in religion, ethnicity, nation, etc.) provides the subject with a way out of his or her private world, a way of rediscovering the possibility of the universal. It assures us that there is a universal frame of reference that holds for everyone and that isn’t subject to the variegations of our relativistic world. Whereas traditional religions today make allowances for other religions (other particularities) and thus tend to eschew universalizing, fundamentalism has no such qualms. The subject in the society of enjoyment feels incapable of universality, and fundamentalism comes along to provide an avenue through which it can be attained and experienced. As long as subjects continue to feel themselves isolated within their particularity, fundamentalism will continue to have an appeal. It provides the missing universal framework that allows us to make sense of our particular situation, to discover its meaning. Fundamentalism, however, is not the only path to universality. In fact, the turn toward it is based upon a misperception involved in the experience of late capitalist subjectivity.
Though subjects don’t recognize the existence of the universal today, they nonetheless continue to exist under its sway. As speaking beings, we are all the time employing the universal, discussing a particular situation through the vehicle of the universal. From the moment that we use words at all, we have moved from the level of the particular to that of the universal. This is the point that Hegel insists upon in the first chapter of the Phenomenology:
Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say in this sense-certainty what we mean to say. But language, as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean.11
Hegel’s claim here is that though we may intend to communicate a particular content when we speak, the very act of speaking itself—using words—necessarily implies that we are dealing with universals, not particulars. Whatever words we use to describe the particular that we are trying to describe will be universals—words that describe other particularities as well. Hence, we cannot speak that particular that we are trying to speak. As Hegel puts it, “the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently universal.”12 Rather than speaking about particulars, we are always involved with the universal while we inhabit the world of language, the symbolic order. The point, then—and this is what the fundamentalist misses—is that we haven’t lost the universal, that the universal continues to persist despite the current difficulties we have in discerning it. Though our experience seems bereft of the universal, it is nonetheless there, providing the frame through which we encounter the particulars of our everyday lives. The key to interpretation today is the ability to grasp this silent functioning of the universal. We can continue to interpret—we can continue to move from the particular to the universal—because the universal persists. Interpretation becomes, however, more difficult and, at the same time, more exigent. In the face of the seeming absence of the universal, we must interpret all the more, because without interpretation our experience is simply a series of randomly arranged events, wholly without significance.
FIRST-YEAR PHENOMENOLOGY
One need not spend too much time in a college literature classroom before one discovers on a very practical level the widespread difficulty with interpretation that exists today. Asking fledgling students of literature to interpret a work of fiction or a poem results not, as we might expect, in reductive or even moralizing interpretations—like interpreting Othello as a warning against excessive jealousy or Hamlet as an admonition against thinking too much. Instead, what ensues is inevitably a variety of descriptions about what happens in the literary text, rather than what the text might mean. The question of meaning is, in other words, completely foreign to most students when they come to college. It is enough to decipher what is happening in a text, so that one never arrives at interpretation. Interpretation is a luxury—“reading too much into things”—and an indication of wasted time. In short, students today often act as if they are followers of the Baudrillard of the 1980s, believing that resisting meaning is akin to resisting domination. As Baudrillard puts it in In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, “Defiance always comes from that which has no meaning, no name, no identity—it is a defiance of meaning, of power, of truth, of their existing as such, of their pretending to exist as such.”13 Baudrillard’s image of a mass resistance to meaning correctly apprehends the contemporary situation, but he wrongly sees it as resistance to power. To resist meaning, to refuse interpretation, is to succumb a priori to power, not to defy it, because meaning is the only way we have of grasping how it is that power functions, which is why Jameson champions cognitive mapping as a form of class consciousness. Thus, even Baudrillard’s analysis of resistance to meaning as a mode of resistance to power relies upon the very ability to interpret and make meaning that he ostensibly eschews. Without interpretation and meaning, we have no way to understand the social order, let alone a means of contesting its inequities. The difficulty that students have in interpretation is only an impoverishment of their ability to resist, not a sign of it.
The proclivity of students to confine themselves to descriptions of what happens in texts, rather than to move to interpretation of them, is not without its philosophical antecedents. They are, in fact, taking the basic directives of phenomenology and existentialism to their most extreme point. The mantra of Husserlian phenomenology—“Back to the things themselves”—expresses a desire to arrive at a level prior to interpretation and meaning, the level of experience itself. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it in The Phenomenology of Perception, “Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization.”14 Phenomenology insists that interpretation—what Merleau-Ponty calls “thematization”—deforms experience, and that the task of philosophy is to counter the damage done by interpretation. The ultimate goal is description, not interpretation. Or, as Merleau-Ponty says, “all [phenomenology’s] efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.”15 This rejection of interpretation in favor of what is prior to it—“direct and primitive contact with the world”— has as its premise the belief that there is experience prior to thematization, description prior to interpretation. That is to say, the phenomenologist believes in an immediacy—the experience of life itself—that is prior to all mediation, even if we can never successfully arrive back at this immediacy through the enterprise of thought.16 Phenomenology, in this sense, lends some credence to the complaint of the first-year literature student that all efforts at interpretation are “reading too much into things.” We should, according to this position, confine ourselves to the process of getting at the original experience of the text, prior to the imposition of meaning upon it.17
Phenomenology’s mistake consists in failing to see the radicality of the subject’s insertion into the world. For phenomenology, the subject emerges against and in the midst of an already-existing background; the subject always already exists in the world. This is what Heidegger means by the term “being-in-the-world”: Dasein never emerges except contextually, within its particular world and within history, and Dasein is inextricably tied to that world. The problem is that this schema smoothes over the precarious entrance of Dasein into its world. As Heidegger would have it, the process is always successful because it is part of Dasein’s “fundamental ontology,” because the life-world is the always already, the sine qua non of Dasein. Heidegger envisions no act in which the subject decides to invest her or himself in the goings-on of the world, in which the subject decides that the world matters to her or him. He refuses to grant that it is possible to exist within a world and not invest oneself in it, as the existence of psychotics attests to.18
For Heidegger, the great philosophical question—“How can I be certain of the existence of an external world?”—represents a fundamental error even in its very conception. Its error consists in failing to grasp Dasein’s primordial being-in-the-world: Dasein is not first an isolated subject that later enters a world, but its very existence necessarily presupposes a world. The call for a proof of the existence of the external world is thus nonsense. As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ does not consist in the fact that this proof is still lacking up to now, but in the fact that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.”19 Dasein’s worldliness has for Heidegger a constitutive priority, and this means that all efforts at interpreting the world necessarily come after the experience of it. Heidegger does allow that Dasein is always interpreting its world, but this interpretation always comes, as it were, too late. We interpret after we experience. Because it comes too late, the goal of Being and Time is to work its way back through interpretation—to overcome metaphysics—to what is prior. Heidegger’s contention that experience is prior to interpretation finds an ironic echo in the first-year literature student’s complaint that interpretation is an essentially foreign activity imposed upon life after the fact—and thus it does violence to that life, forcing life into a box that ill fits it.
Interpretation—or theory—obscures our originary relationship to things. To return to the terms of Heidegger, it transforms an understanding of things as ready-to-hand (zuhanden), as useful, into an understanding of things as present-at-hand (vorhanden), as independent objects. Rather than seeing things in their handiness, we see them in their objective presence. That is, we experience the hammer not as a tool that has the function of pounding nails—we don’t know it in its usefulness—but as an object of theoretical contemplation, existing apart from us and from our use of it. It may even lead us to ask the—scandalous—question: Does the hammer really exist, or is it just a product of our thought? Such a question is the apotheosis of the error of thinking in terms of objective presence. Thinking things in their objective presence, the end result of the theoretical or interpretive attitude, causes us to conceive of a barrier between us and the world, to think in terms of subject and object.20 Thus, theory itself becomes the mystification that the existential analysis of Being and Time must traverse in order to arrive at the coordinates of our originary being-in-the-world and our originary relationship to things as ready-to-hand.
In Being and Time, Heidegger implicitly associates the transformation induced by theory (from readiness to objective presence) with the ideological manipulation of the They (das Man). The They levels down primordial experience to the confines of its own averageness; it allows nothing exceptional or individual to remain independent of its purview, thereby fundamentally distorting Dasein’s experience. For Heidegger, the They is ideology, appropriating all difference and integrating this difference into its sameness. But one of the decisive moments of Being and Time is the implicit identification of the They and theory: both have the effect of obscuring our originary being-in-the-world, of transforming our relationship to things from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand. Through this equation, Heidegger takes up a position quite similar to that of Baudrillard, insofar as he condemns the act of interpretation to the status of ideology. Interpreting, like the distortions of the They, removes us from our own experience, making it seem as if the world is something distinct from us, something that merely might—or might not—exist. Even though Heidegger himself is doubtless interpreting in Being and Time, he nonetheless embraces there a thoroughgoing hostility to interpretation, a hostility that is the reverse side of his prioritizing of experience.
The phenomenological conception—so clearly present in Heidegger’s thought—that prioritizes experience and description is the prevailing conception today. It plays a part in (to a greater or lesser extent) many of the theoretical movements prominent in contemporary thought, such as Derridean deconstruction, Foucaultian new historicism, cultural studies, and even the post-Marxism of figures like Laclau and Mouffe. Despite their many differences, these lines of thought focus on the experience that has been neglected and forgotten by conceptual (and universalist) thinking. Though perhaps all of the proponents of these positions would emphatically reject phenomenology (and certainly existentialism!), this is nonetheless part of the heritage informing contemporary theory. The result of this line of thought is a lingering resistance to the act of interpretation because of its violent imposition of the universal upon experience. This determination to respect experience, however, leaves experience itself something completely alien, something we cannot understand. So long as we remain hostile to interpretation, we will remain unable to gain any purchase on the experience that we are so determined to respect.21 As Alain Badiou insists, “we can never go back on universalism. There is no earlier territoriality calling for protection or recovery. The whole point is that differences be traversed, conserved and deposed simultaneously, somewhere other than in the frozen waters of selfish calculation.”22
MORRISON BEYOND NIETZSCHE
If we are attempting to discover the continued importance of interpretation and of the universal, then turning to the work of Toni Morrison certainly seems a strange choice. From her first novel, The Bluest Eye, to her most famous one, Beloved, Morrison’s fiction seems to emphasize what universalizing fails to capture and to stress the way in which trauma limits the possibilities of universalizing. The Bluest Eye, for instance, demonstrates the damage that the universalizing of white experience does to a young African American girl. And Beloved is constantly at pains to point out that words—that is, universality—fail to capture the horror of the slave experience, which led a mother to kill her own child.23 (The repeated insistence in the epilogue of Beloved concerning the inadequacy of narrative—“It was not a story to pass on”24—illustrates this point most emphatically.) Critics have stressed repeatedly that the salient feature of Morrison’s fiction is its insistence on respecting “a world of difference”25 and on resisting “critical and ideological closure.”26 According to Lisa Garbus, Morrison “unearth[s] graves in order to de-symbolize death, to bring back its real, and to unseat the dead masses from a lie of language, from the pretense that their story has been told.”27 And Denise Heinze claims that “in all of her novels, writer, text, and audience converge on the indeterminacy of meaning.”28 Something essential in Morrison’s work calls attention to the failure of universalizing (or language, the instrument of universalizing) to account for everything. James Phelan even coins the category of the “stubborn”—that textual element which absolutely resists interpretation—in response to his encounter with Morrison. He claims that “Beloved herself is a paradigm case of the stubborn. Despite the best efforts of many careful readers, her character escapes any comprehensive, coherent account. No matter how we arrange or rearrange the information about Beloved, there is always something that does not fit with the experience of everything else.”29 Morrison’s emphasis on what “does not fit” is crucial to the ethical dimension of her fiction: by pointing to what universalizing cannot explain, she makes clear the violence involved in the very act of universalizing.
The novel Paradise seems to be firmly rooted in this tradition. Rather than asserting the presence of the universal in the face of its seeming absence, Morrison’s Paradise appears at first glance to be doing the reverse—revealing that there is no universal, that all we have are particulars. In this sense, the novel would be one in a series of modern and postmodern works bent on revealing the perspectivist nature of all truth. According to this prevailing perspectivism, there is no absolute perspective that one can inhabit vis-à-vis human experience, but only a series of limited, local perspectives. It is Nietzsche who, in On the Genealogy of Morals, gives this line of thinking what is perhaps its most coherent expression. “There is,” according to Nietzsche, “only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”30 The perspectivist work of art, then, rather than articulating a unitary narrative vision, deconstructs such a vision, making evident the existence of multiple perspectives on the events it depicts. Because we delude ourselves into believing in one—our—perspective as the perspective, the novelist must disabuse us of this notion through the presentation of a multifaceted narration. Paradise, in this view, would be tacitly acknowledging that in order to understand its content, we must not rely on a single perspective of it, but must piece together a series of perspectives into a more complete picture.
The above certainly appears consonant with the image of Morrison as the quintessential postmodern novelist. If we look only at the structure of the novel, it is easy to see it as a refutation of universalizing in the name of perspectivism and hence as a rejection of the possibility of interpretation. The effect of this structure in Morrison’s novel is, however, precisely the opposite of what one would expect. Rather than complicating a seemingly universal perspective with a series of particular perspectives, the different sections provide the universal frame through which we can understand the “particular” event that opens the novel. Morrison uses the different perspectives not to espouse perspectivism, but to make evident the hidden universal frame that informs all of our particular experiences. In this way, the novel completely confounds the expectations created by its structure.
The structure of Paradise approximates the structure of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: it is divided into different sections bearing the names of different characters, and each section provides the background and perspective of its titular character (though the narration in Morrison’s novel is, unlike Faulkner’s, in third person). Rather than beginning with a false universality and exposing it as simply the sum of various particular perspectives, Paradise begins with what appears to be the absence of universality and subsequently illustrates its presence. In short, Morrison’s project in Paradise is at once to present the phenomenology of contemporary experience—with its seeming nonuniversality—and to make clear, through the progress of the novel, that a universal frame does exist, albeit one that we do not experience as such.31
The novel is centered on a group of nine African American families who fled Louisiana at the turn of the century, looking for some respite from white racism in Oklahoma. When they arrive in Oklahoma, an all-black town refuses them entrance, citing their dark skin color. This event, called the “Disallowing,” serves to unify the families and bond them into a community. They found their own town and call it “Haven.” Haven falls apart in 1949, and the current town fathers move the families and found a new town, which they call “Ruby.” The novel begins with a group of nine men from Ruby in the midst of an attack on a house outside of town, where five women reside. This house, named the “Convent” because it was once home to a number of nuns, has become a refuge for wayward women, primarily for women fleeing from men. These women, we learn through the course of the novel, have proven a constant source of temptation and irritation for the people of Ruby. In the attack that opens the novel, the town elders kill the five women living at the Convent, in an effort to free the town from their untoward influence. The effort fails, however, as the bodies of the women disappear immediately after the attack and the women subsequently reappear in various locations. But what is most striking about the novel is not its story line; it is the form that the story takes.
Morrison begins Paradise, much as she begins her prior novel Jazz, with a statement that cannot but fail to make sense to someone reading the novel for the first time.32 The novel begins abruptly—“They shoot the white girl first”—and without immediate explanation.33 The striking violence of this initial sentence seems to arrive from nowhere. It seems, in short, to be an act that occurs outside of any symbolic frame, standing on its own. The sentences that immediately follow do little to clarify who is doing the shooting, who is being shot, or why it is happening. Indeed, the entirety of the novel’s first section, entitled “Ruby,” provides no help in answering these questions. As we read the rest of the novel, however, we gradually begin to grasp who is involved and why it has happened. We learn that the men of Ruby have perpetuated this violence upon the women of the Convent because they want no more of the disruptive feminine jouissance that these women seem to embody. Nonetheless, it requires the entirety of the novel for this to become clear. As J. Brooks Bouson puts it, “the narrative slowly and circuitously spirals around this central act of violence.”34 Morrison devotes the rest of Paradise to clarifying this first line, to providing the frame through which we can properly understand the seemingly isolated event that it depicts.
The salient feature of Paradise is that, as a reader, I experience events long before I can make sense of them.35 Events initially seem to exist outside of any frame of meaning, and it is only afterward that the frame through which the event is comprehensible becomes visible. The event itself initially appears as a violent irruption of the Real, occurring outside of any symbolic context. What Morrison is tapping into here is one of the key aspects of contemporary experience. Rather than experiencing the events in our lives as a part of a whole, within the context of the universal, we tend to experience events in isolation, as if each event exists in its own sphere, untouched by any other. The lack of an evident universal is what makes interpretation so difficult today. This appearance, however, is misleading, and it is through the act of interpretation that we can see the connection between events, the way in which they are all situated within a universality. On the level of its form, the novel illustrates both the illusion of nonuniversality and the hidden universality that makes interpretation possible.
Like the novel’s opening, the “Mavis” section begins with a startling event, coming without warning. Mavis is the first of the Convent women that the novel introduces, and her section begins, “The neighbors seemed pleased when the babies smothered” (21). Again, the startling violence seems, to the reader, to burst forth spontaneously, completely removed from any symbolic context in which it might be interpreted. Not only do we not know which babies smother, how they smothered, or who is responsible for their being smothered, we don’t know why it pleased the neighbors. Nor do we know why it occurred. Without any of this kind of knowledge, interpretation seems impossible; the event seems to be an unexplainable irruption of the Real.36 However, as the section progresses, Morrison provides the context that allows us to understand both the details of the event and also why it happened. It soon becomes apparent that Mavis (who left her infant twins in a hot, enclosed car while she went into the grocery) had definite reasons for wanting her children dead, even if these reasons were not conscious ones.
After the death of the twins, Mavis comes to believe that her children and her husband are conspiring to kill her. She imagines the children snickering behind the door while Frank (her husband) has sex with her, and then she imagines that Frank’s yawn after sex is a signal to them. Rather than simply indicating Mavis’s descent into madness, this paranoia, while on one level perhaps baseless, nonetheless taps into the truth about her relationship with Frank and her children. Morrison’s description of their sex the night before Mavis leaves makes her position evident: “He didn’t penetrate—just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann” (26). Though we may assume that Frank and the children have no active plan to do away with Mavis, they do consistently brutalize her. Earlier, during an interview with a journalist concerning the smothering, Mavis endures silently her daughter Sal squeezing her waist and then kicking her shin, not daring to “swat Sal’s hand away or acknowledge the pain even slightly” (23). Only the twins, the youngest of the children, were not a part of the mechanism that dominates Mavis. They were “the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren’t a trial” (25). But the twins were also only newborns. By allowing them to smother when she did, Mavis provides assurance that they will not grow up and become like Frank and the other children; the newborn twins remain “the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren’t a trial” only so long as they remain at the age they are. With the twins, Mavis has the relationship that a mother is “supposed” to have. They function as an ego ideal, allowing her the only position from which she can see herself as she wants to be seen. Rather than have this ideal turn against her, Mavis destroys it. In destroying it, she tries to preserve it as best she can.
Rather than emerging spontaneously, then, the event that begins the “Mavis” section occurs within a specific symbolic context, within which it is possible for the reader to locate the event and thus to understand it. Of course, the event remains a violent irruption of the Real. It indicates the point at which Mavis’s desire, repressed (and denied by her family) in the symbolic, returned in the Real. Interpretation doesn’t mean reducing this Real act to its symbolic underpinnings, but grasping the symbolic frame in which it occurs—and the point at which the symbolic frame breaks down.37 As Lacan points out in Seminar XI, “Interpretation is not directed so much at the meaning as towards reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may discover the determinants of the subject’s entire behaviour.”38 That is, interpretation does not discover a universe replete with meaning, but reduces nonmeaning in that universe. In short, interpretation can achieve comprehension without being comprehensive, without saying it all. Before we acquire the symbolic context through which we can look at Mavis’s act, it appears non-sensical and completely unlocalizable. After Morrison provides the symbolic context in the pages following the description of the act, the act still seems non-sensical, but at least we can now locate it within a universe of meaning, isolating this kernel of non-sense—a process which is the act of interpretation.
To see the difference between making the Real meaningful and locating its nonmeaning within a symbolic context, let us take a contemporary version of the irruption of the Real—the idea of a meteor or comet colliding with the earth. As we can see from the popularity of films such as Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), this idea resonates today: Why? To understand its importance we must understand the symbolic context in which the event would occur—rather than grasp a meaning within the event itself. The latter approach, one which would symbolize the Real, might, for instance, take the oncoming meteor as a message from God, telling us that we have been sinful and that, therefore, we must be destroyed. Needless to say, this would not be the common response today. The common response would be a refusal of the possibility of interpretation, a proclamation about the nonsensical status of this event. This anti-interpretive approach would see the event as wholly incomprehensible, irreducible to any meaning whatsoever.
Reducing the Real event to a meaning and refusing interpretation altogether, however, are not the only possibilities. There is a third way—that of situating the Real event within a symbolic context. This path allows us to attain comprehension without becoming comprehensive and thereby foreclosing the Real. According to this line of thought, the collision of the meteor with the earth would remain a nonsensical event, but we could nonetheless understand why this event seems to have such a powerful hold over us today. At the moment when the hegemony of late capitalism as a world system has become secure, the meteor serves to remind us that no social structure is immune to the return of the Real. In this sense, the meteor (as represented in the film) indicates the presence of a desire for something beyond late capitalism, a yearning for what cannot be reduced to a commodity. That a beyond to late capitalism can only be envisioned as a world-ending catastrophe indicates most vividly the degree of late capitalism’s hegemony today. The only way to escape the commodification of everything seems to be the destruction of everything. Such an interpretation of the potential meteor collision does not render the collision itself meaningful (or any less traumatic); instead, it discovers meaning around the collision, in the investment in and responses to the event. The difficulty of this kind of interpretation lies in the prevailing absence of any universalizing efforts today. In the absence of this universalizing, we gaze speechless upon every irruption of the Real, unable to embark upon the interpretation that the event demands.
AGAINST INTERPRETATION
Paradise makes very clear why we suffer from an absence of interpretation. In addition to depicting the phenomenology of the seemingly inexplicable event in the form of her novel—that is, in the experience of the reader—Morrison also shows the same thing taking place on the level of content, to the characters in the novel. The form and the content of the novel closely parallel each other. What the form of the novel effects upon the reader, the content illustrates happening to the characters. The act of violence that frames the novel—the murder of the women at the Convent—has its roots in the failure of the leading men of the town of Ruby to interpret their series of encounters with the Convent women and their enjoyment. As the history of the town evinces, the failure of interpretation is the direct result of a change that has been taking place in Ruby—the change from being a town governed by prohibition to being a town governed by an imperative to enjoy. Whereas the prohibition of enjoyment allows for the existence of an evident universal Law (laid down by the symbolic Father), in the society of enjoyment this Law is less evident, more amorphous—and thus the universal is less clearly evident as well. This change leaves subjects increasingly incapable of interpretation, which ultimately leads to a paranoid experience of the world (as we see in the male leadership of the town) and to the attack on the Convent women.
The town of Haven was originally established, as its name suggests, as a place for those who had no place. The nine families who founded Haven collectively identify themselves as “eight-rock” (which stands for “a deep, deep level in the coal mines” [193]), because of the purity of their stand against white racism and oppression—they are “descendents of those who, after the Civil War, had defied or hidden from whites doing all they could to force them to stay and work as sharecroppers in Louisiana” (193)—and because of their racial purity. Led by Zechariah or Big Papa, the grandfather of Deacon and Steward Morgan (who are the town leaders in Ruby), these eight-rock families journey from Louisiana to Oklahoma, looking for a place outside of direct white control. Once they arrive in Oklahoma and attempt to settle in the all-black town of Fairly, Oklahoma (which they had read about in advertisements), they encounter a new manifestation of racism. The town rejects them because of their dark skin color, exhibiting an intraracial racism that catches the eight-rock families by surprise, which they haven’t witnessed before.39 The rejection by the town of Fairly, the Disallowing, brings the group of families together:
Afterward the people were no longer nine families and some more. They became a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion. Everything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of Haven or Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff out of many. (189)
Prompted by the Disallowing, Big Papa leads the group farther into Oklahoma, where they establish their own “Haven” from the humiliations that they have received.
Big Papa and the other “Old Fathers” establish the town of Haven through the erection of a monument—the Oven. Building the Oven is the first act of the town fathers, and Big Papa forges on it the Prohibition that would hold the town together. He writes, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow.” These words, in some sense, hold the key to the entire novel, because the change that they undergo provides a precise indication of a fundamental historical shift. “Beware the Furrow of His Brow” compels the subjects of Haven to obedience, to the sacrifice of their private enjoyment for the sake of the community. Anyone unwilling to make this sacrifice will be ostracized, and we know that Big Papa has the determination to exclude even those closest to him. Prior to the journey to Oklahoma, some white men with a gun compelled Big Papa and his brother to dance for them. His brother complied; Big Papa refused and received a bullet in his foot. Afterward, Big Papa never said another word to his brother—who was no longer his brother, because “from that moment on they weren’t brothers anymore” (302)—and left him behind as he headed for Oklahoma. This willingness to exclude his own brother provides empirical support for the threat written on the Oven: everyone knows that Big Papa isn’t afraid to take action against those who refuse to “Beware the Furrow of His Brow.”
In the world of Big Papa, one always knows where one stands. The clarity of the Law facilitates interpretation. The symbolic father will not tolerate deviance (or enjoyment)—no one can refuse to “Beware the Furrow of His Brow” and continue to “enjoy” the protection that Haven offers—but, in return for obedience, in return for the sacrifice of one’s enjoyment, one gains respite and distance from enjoyment as well. Haven is, Morrison shows us, not just a haven from a racist society, but, more importantly, a haven from enjoyment. It is a haven from the white racist enjoyment that demanded dancing from Big Papa and his brother, and it is at the same time a haven from the enjoyment of the townspeople themselves. All enjoyment, whatever its stripe, much be checked at the door of Haven: this is the meaning of the words that grace the Oven and the significance of the town’s name. Everyone who lives in the town must agree to live according to Big Papa’s Law, to forsake the enjoyment of publicly transgressing it. Or they must at least acknowledge it, even if they decide to transgress it in some way. In the town of Haven, we can see a microcosm of the society of prohibition—how it creates stability and cohesiveness through its efforts to keep enjoyment at bay. It is the Oven and its words that represent this prohibition, which is why building it was the initial project of the town fathers. The main focus of Paradise is not this society of prohibition, however, but what results after Big Papa dies and after the town of Haven becomes the town of Ruby—when the prohibition against enjoyment begins to become an imperative to enjoy.
By 1949, Haven had lost its vitality, prompting the people of the town to move. Two of Big Papa’s grandsons, Steward and Deacon Morgan, attempt to bring what the Oven embodies with them as they move the town farther “Out There,” deeper into Oklahoma. They move the Oven brick by brick and place it at the center of Ruby, the new town of the eight-rock families. However, something significant occurs in the transition from Haven to Ruby: the Prohibition loses its clarity, the word “Beware” is no longer visible on the Oven, so that it now reads “the Furrow of His Brow.” The change in the town’s name also tells us that things are different. Whereas “Haven” suggests a place free from enjoyment, “Ruby”—with its connotations of wealth and femininity—indicates the reverse, a place filled with enjoyment. The controversy that arises over the words on the Oven is the final stage of this transition. It is a struggle between those who would preserve the Prohibition and attempt to keep the town free of enjoyment (led by Steward and Deacon Morgan, the descendants of the original Father) and those who would eliminate it, replacing the Prohibition with an image with which they can identify (led by the new minister in town, Richard Misner).
The young people of Ruby want to make the Oven’s words more appropriate to the age, replacing the missing word “Beware” with the word “Be”—so that the Oven reads “Be the Furrow of His Brow”—in order to give it “new life.” Misner claims that “What’s at issue is clarifying the motto” (86). But even Misner’s way of putting it offends the town fathers, who see the change as representative of an easing of the Law and its Prohibition. As Reverend Pulliam incredulously replies, “Motto? Motto? We talking command! [. . .] ‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow.’ That’s what it says clear as daylight. That’s not a suggestion, that’s an order!” (86). This transition from “Beware” to “Be” and from “order” to “motto” (or “suggestion”) indicates a larger historical shift that the town leaders are making every effort to resist. Whereas the word “beware” suggests that God has the power and that humanity must obey, the word “be” suggests that one can identify oneself with God. In other words, the status of God changes from being the site of authority to being an image on the same level as the subject. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek sees a parallel dynamic at work in the function of the father. He notes that “Today [. . .] it is the very symbolic function of the father which is increasingly undermined—that is, which is losing its performative efficiency; for that reason, a father is no longer perceived as one’s Ego Ideal, the (more or less failed, inadequate) bearer of symbolic authority, but as one’s ideal ego, imaginary competitor.” 40 Certainly, the youth of Ruby don’t envision themselves as competing with God, but they do feel as if, as they say, “We are the power” (87, Morrison’s emphasis). The word “beware” is prohibitory, while the word “be” is a positive imperative: “Beware the Furrow of His Brow” prohibits enjoyment; “Be the Furrow of His Brow” commands it, which changes things fundamentally. Even though the younger generation does not win the argument, symbolic authority has nonetheless been undermined. This change in the function of symbolic authority—the transformation of the prohibition—fundamentally changes the relationship of the town to enjoyment. Once it is no longer prohibited, the people of the town encounter enjoyment erupting throughout Ruby—and its appearances are in each case tied to the Convent and the women who live there.
From the standpoint of the society of prohibition, enjoyment is embodied in the external Other—those we ostracize from the social order. Hence, though we feel anxiety about it, we know where enjoyment is located; it has a context in which it exists. When we encounter an outbreak of enjoyment, we can’t understand it, but we can interpret it, make clear its symbolic context. It seems to occur within a universal frame. However, in a society that commands, rather than prohibits, enjoyment, this context seems to evaporate. The imperative to enjoy has the effect of masking the presence of the universal, making it seem as if there is no longer a functioning universal. This is why interpretation is so difficult within the society of enjoyment. Enjoyment is no longer confined to an external position, but confronts us at every turn—within the social order rather than just outside it. In this way, the society of enjoyment produces paranoia: paranoia results from constant confrontations with the enjoying other and the belief that this other is enjoying in our stead. We receive an imperative to enjoy, but rather than feeling as if we are actually enjoying ourselves, we impute enjoyment to the other, a enjoyment that is “rightfully” ours. The problem is that this appearance of the other’s enjoyment does not simply appear in its “proper” context, as external to the social order, at a distance. Instead, it appears directly in front of us, exposing our failure to enjoy and flaunting its success. Because of the seeming proximity of this enjoyment, it is impossible to locate it in a proper symbolic context. This impossibility shapes our response: we can’t interpret the other’s enjoyment, so we feel as if we must destroy it. This is precisely the dynamic at work in the attack on the Convent that opens Paradise.
GET THEE TO A NUNNERY
As we see in Paradise, the subject in the society of enjoyment constantly feels horrified by the prospect that the other is enjoying in its stead. The men of Ruby are in this sense exemplary subjects of this kind of society. From the beginning of the attack, the novel reveals that the enjoyment embodied in the women of the Convent and the Convent itself horrifies the men involved in the attack and serves as its motive. The women that live here, in the minds of the men attacking, have engaged in all sorts of sexual activity, performed abortions, and even seduced the men of the town with their magic. They have practiced diabolical forms of paganism. Thus, there are dirty secrets here, or so the men feel: “And at last they will see the cellar and expose its filth to the light that is soon to scour the Oklahoma sky” (3). In addition to discovering the hidden “filth,” the men discover laziness and signs that the women haven’t worked hard. This further infuriates them, because work and enjoyment are strictly opposed. Absence of work implies excess of enjoyment. Work is a sacrifice of enjoyment for the sake of some present or future good: when I work, rather than enjoying myself, I defer this enjoyment.41 The signs of the absence of work anger the men and fuel their attack, because they indicate that the women were not sacrificing their enjoyment while their attackers were. The men were living “proper” and “upright” lives in the town; these women were doing whatever they pleased. This is evident from the details that Morrison includes in the opening section: “Together they scan dusty mason jars and what is left of last year’s canning: tomatoes, green beans, peaches. Slack, they think. August just around the corner and these women have not even sorted, let alone washed, the jars” (5). Later on in the attack, the men discover that the women slept in hammocks rather than beds, which causes them to “exchange knowing looks” (7)—looks that know the ease of the hammock suggests excessive enjoyment. While the male attackers have been hard at work, the women at the Convent haven’t been working, but have been taking it easy, awash in enjoyment. The women are “Like children, always on the lookout for fun, devoted to it but always needing a break in order to have it. A lift, a hand, a five-dollar bill. Somebody to excuse or coddle them” (157).
The horror the men feel concerning this enjoyment, while present in the initial description of their attack in the novel’s first section, becomes all the more apparent in subsequent sections. The danger that the Convent women represent for Ruby is clear: “fun-obsessed adults were clear signs of an already advanced decay. Soon the whole country would be awash in toys, tone-deaf from raucous music and hollow laughter. But not here. Not in Ruby” (157). The enjoyment of the women threatens to swallow Ruby up, to take away the order that sustains the community. If the women are able to infect the community, they will destroy the prohibition against enjoyment and thus effectively destroy the bond that holds Ruby together. The Convent women refuse to sacrifice “fun” for the sake of the community, and this type of refusal is threatening because it is contagious. And if it spreads, people will cease to feel an attachment to the community.
It is precisely this lack of any sense of attachment—this enjoyment that occurs without any reference to the social order—that most disturbs the people of Ruby. We see the men collectively exclaiming, “Something’s going on out there, and I don’t like any of it. No men. Kissing on themselves. Babies hid away. Jesus! No telling what else” (276).42 The women at the Convent horrify because they enjoy themselves and because this enjoyment gives the appearance of self-sufficiency. As the statement “No men” suggests, the townspeople from Ruby see that this enjoyment of the Convent women isn’t at all dependent on them. They recognize that these women “don’t need men and they don’t need God” (276): the Convent women experience the self-sufficiency of feminine enjoyment. For Lacan, feminine enjoyment is “a supplementary jouissance, [. . .] a jouissance of the body that is [. . .] beyond the phallus.”43 Feminine enjoyment, unlike the phallic version, doesn’t require the Other, which is why it has a special ability to spark violent feelings of both desire and outrage.44 While the men recoil from this self-sufficiency, it also entraps their desire, as is evinced most explicitly by the affairs that two of the men (Deacon and K.D.) have with Convent women. The Convent women attract the desire of the men of Ruby because they haven’t sacrificed their enjoyment for the sake of the social order in the way that the men themselves have. But this refusal to give up enjoyment, this self-sufficiency of feminine enjoyment, is also the driving force behind the attack.
THE ETHICS OF “PLAYING THE SAP”
The people of Ruby can peacefully coexist with the Convent only as long as their relationship with the Convent remains at the level of desire. As long as the self-sufficient enjoyment serves only to incite their desire, the townspeople can get along with the existence of these women. Deacon can have an affair with Connie; K.D. can have an affair with Gigi, and the women of Ruby can go to the Convent whenever they are pregnant and would rather not be. These relationships remain at the level of desire and thus imply a distance from the Convent women’s enjoyment. But at the moment the townspeople feel as if they have become the tools of this enjoyment, vehicles for it, they recoil in anger. Deacon ends his affair with Connie after his wife Soane learns about it, but also after Connie bites his lip, which reveals that he is just a tool for her enjoyment. Connie herself recognizes that this is the reason Deacon is breaking off their relationship, because “who would chance [an affair] with a women bent upon eating him like a meal?” (239). Once Connie shows Deacon that he is a means for her to enjoy, he breaks off the relationship. A similar thing happens at the wedding of K.D. and Arnette, the event that actually triggers the attack on the Convent.
Morrison’s depiction of the wedding and its aftermath marks the point of the most direct conflict between law and enjoyment in the novel. Marriage is the law’s way of containing enjoyment—both by limiting sexual enjoyment to legal monogamy and by imposing heterosexuality as the only licit sexual expression. In a legally sanctioned marriage ceremony, the law codifies enjoyment and thereby contains the danger that it represents to the social order. And in this particular case, K.D.’s marriage to Arnette indicates that he has sacrificed his enjoyment with Gigi; he has opted for a relationship that is legal but which lacks all enjoyment. The appearance of the Convent women, however, represents a clear contrast to this expression of legality and suppression of enjoyment.
The wedding reception becomes the occasion, the vehicle, for the Convent women to enjoy themselves. They arrive with the car radio blasting and the loud horn of their Cadillac honking, even though “none of them was dressed for a wedding” and they look “like go-go girls: pink shorts, skimpy tops, see-through skirts; painted eyes, no lipstick; obviously no underwear, no stockings” (156). Once there, the Convent women display their unrestrained enjoyment without any concern for an authority in the town that would prohibit it. In this way, the women make evident the sacrifice of enjoyment that the townspeople make and that they themselves have refused to make. Morrison describes their actions at length:
The Convent girls are dancing; throwing their arms over their heads, they do this and that and then the other. They grin and yip but look at no one. Just their own rocking bodies.[. . .] Two small girls ride their bikes over; wide-eyes, they watch the dancing women. One of them, with amazing hair, asks can she borrow a bike. Then another. They ride the bikes down Central Avenue with no regard for what the breeze does to their long flowered skirts or how pumping pedals plumped their breasts. One coasts with her ankles on the handlebars. Another rides the handlebars with Brood on the seat behind her. One, in the world’s shortest pink shorts, is seated on a bench, arms wrapped around herself. She looks drunk. Are they all? (157-58, my emphasis)
This passage illustrates the “excessive” enjoyment of the women, but it also shows their self-sufficiency. What really enthralls and angers the people of Ruby here is that the women don’t seem concerned with how the Other is seeing them; they seem concerned only with their own enjoyment, which is why they “look at no one.” In addition, this enjoyment occurs at a wedding in Ruby; the wedding becomes the occasion for the Convent women to enjoy themselves.45 The entire town, in a sense, is here just a tool for their enjoyment. This is why the wedding is the last straw: it leads directly to the subsequent attack on the Convent. The enjoyment of the Convent women presents no lethal threat—and in fact it incites desire—as long as it remains at a safe distance. But when it comes too close and the townspeople become a vehicle for it, they recoil.
We can see a similar dynamic at work in the noir hero’s response to the femme fatale. At first, the femme fatale’s self-sufficient enjoyment entices the noir hero, capturing his desire. Even though the hero knows when he first meets the femme fatale that she is manipulative and dangerous, he nonetheless begins to desire her. Rather than deterring his desire, the femme fatale’s lies have the effect of enhancing it. However, this desire turns into outrage or rejection at the moment it becomes apparent that the femme fatale is using the hero to obtain her enjoyment. The hero recognizes that he isn’t the object of the femme fatale’s desire, but just a means by which she obtains her enjoyment. This is most clearly evident in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). Throughout the film, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) desires and even falls in love with Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), despite—or because of—her multiple lies and her “evil” behavior. At the end of the film, however, Spade turns her over to the police, even as he expresses his love for her. He must turn her in, he lets her know, because he has become a tool for enjoyment. He repeatedly tells her, “I won’t play the sap for you.” Spade resists “playing the sap” because he is horrified by this enjoyment that he would facilitate. As in the town of Ruby, Spade rejects the other’s enjoyment at the moment he gains too close a proximity to it.
It is this terrifying proximity to enjoyment—the postmodern condition par excellence—that makes it is so difficult to interpret. The very excessive-ness of enjoyment seems to obliterate any symbolic context in which we might locate it. Throughout Paradise, Morrison makes evident how the failure of interpretation leads to the outbreak of violence that frames the novel. If the men could interpret, what would they see? They would see that the enjoyment of the other that they are attempting to wipe out in their attack on the Convent is really their own. In “playing the sap” for the other, not only do we facilitate the other’s enjoyment, but this is also the way we ourselves enjoy: enjoyment doesn’t respect the barrier between subject and other—or, more precisely, it always transcends this barrier. As Alenka Zupancic makes clear, “it is not simply the mode of enjoyment of the neighbour, of the other, that is strange to me. The heart of the problem is that I experience my own enjoyment (which emerges along with the enjoyment of the other, and is even indissociable from it) as strange and hostile.”46 Enjoyment necessarily involves, as Lacan puts it in Seminar VII, “suffering for my neighbor.”47
Rather than just being a peculiar or perverse form of obtaining enjoyment, what Sam Spade calls “playing the sap” is the form of obtaining it. This is why we view enjoyment as evil, as something from which we retreat: it implies placing oneself in the position of the tool that the other uses to procure her/his enjoyment. And our retreat from this enjoyment is simply a way of retreating from our own. According to Lacan:
My neighbor possesses all the evil [read: enjoyment] Freud speaks about, but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move toward some cruelty. His or mine?, you will object. But haven’t I just explained to you that nothing indicates they are distinct? It seems rather that they are the same, on condition that those limits which oblige me to posit myself opposite the other as my fellow man are crossed.48
When the men from Ruby attack the Convent, this signals their refusal of their own enjoyment and their effort to put a definitive end to their own troubling enjoyment, which they are unable to eliminate in any other way.
In attacking the feminine jouissance of the Convent women, the men of Ruby fail to recognize the inevitably partial nature of enjoyment itself. If we can only obtain enjoyment as the enjoyment of the other, then our enjoyment is always destined to remain incomplete. We will never have it; instead, it will always have us—and part of it will always remain the other’s. In this sense, one can understand why the men of Ruby refuse to recognize their own enjoyment in the Convent women: this refusal sustains the image of a complete enjoyment (even as it represents this enjoyment as unattainable). To accept the partiality of enjoyment is to free oneself from the authority of the symbolic Law and from the logic of prohibition and transgression. The society of commanded enjoyment offers us the opportunity to embrace the partiality of enjoyment at the same time that it demands we strive for an illusory total enjoyment. When we don’t see our own enjoyment in that of the other, we necessarily succumb to this demand and miss this opportunity.
Morrison takes great pains to show that each of the men involved in the attack has targeted something in himself more than himself—his idiosyncratic way of obtaining enjoyment—for the violence to eliminate. K.D., for instance, hopes to wipe out his own humiliating pursuit of Gigi and her ultimate rejection of him. As the men attack the Convent, K.D. recalls to the other men the horror of Gigi, making clear that this is what motivates his participation: “The girl whose name he now scandalized he had stalked for years till she threw him out the door” (278). Morrison reveals that “he had loved her for years, an aching, humiliating, self-loathing love that drifted from pining to stealth” (149). This sense of humiliation is the enjoyment that K.D. wants nothing to do with. As with K.D., each of the other male attackers has their own enjoyment at stake in the act. Even more important, however, is the question of the entire community’s relationship to enjoyment. The Convent women represent the enjoyment that threatens to envelop all of Ruby, to destroy the cohesive social order. One might argue, then, that the attack had a certain justification, that the men, with the best of intentions, were simply trying to preserve their way of life—or even to return Ruby to the purity that it once had. The problem with this line of thinking, as the sequel to the attack demonstrates, is that enjoyment is not as easy to wipe out as all that. Guns do not provide enough armament to eliminate it. And the effort to wipe it out, to return the social order back to its traditional mode of functioning, de facto perpetuates it, even increases its presence.49
The film Pleasantville (1998) provides a perfect illustration of the inevitable failure of attempts to wipe out enjoyment. In the film, two teenagers from the nineties are magically beamed into a television program from the fifties that depicts a community in which the prohibition against enjoyment is functioning effectively. Needless to say, the contemporary teens, simply by acting like themselves, quickly introduce enjoyment into the community. The film depicts this through a noted innovation in visual effects: when characters begin to experience enjoyment, they suddenly appear in color, rather than their usual black and white.50 As more and more characters begin to enjoy, the shots become increasingly colorized. There is, however, a predictable backlash to this outbreak of enjoyment, much like the one that animates Paradise. In Pleasantville, a group of the town fathers, determined to resist the infiltration of enjoyment into their community, attempt to ostracize the colorized characters. But in the attempt the town fathers themselves become colorized, as a result of the enjoyment obtained in their efforts to eradicate enjoyment. As the film makes clear visually, there is enjoyment in the very effort to get rid of it. The attack on the Convent in Paradise is doomed to failure for similar reasons: its aim is to eliminate the enjoyment that threatens the community, but the attack itself partakes of that very same enjoyment.
The attack also fails because it is impossible to destroy enjoyment, insofar as it is attached to the immortality of the death drive. The men who attack the Convent shoot and seem to kill the five women residing there; however, immediately after the event, there are no bodies, nor even the Cadillac that the women drove to the wedding. The absence of the Cadillac here is crucial: for the town, the Cadillac is integral to the way that the Convent women enjoy, because they drove it—with stereo blasting and horn honking—to the wedding of K.D. and Arnette, where they made their loudest show of enjoyment. It is also crucial that the women’s bodies are missing. Morrison is not depicting an immortality of the soul, but of the enjoying body. Try as we might, we cannot rid ourselves of this enjoyment, which stems from the submission of the body to the constraints of the signifier. What forms in this process is the death drive—an undying insistence on repetition. Since this enjoyment is inescapable, the only question is how we decide to relate to it. While Morrison shows us the ramifications of one way—the attempt to reject it—she also points to another way.
Through an insistence on interpretation even at those times when interpretation seems impossible, we can recognize that this horrifying enjoyment we would reject is not simply the other’s enjoyment, but also our own. The very thing that attracts us to the other is its relationship to enjoyment. Enjoyment itself, of course, cannot be made meaningful; it cannot be interpreted. In this sense, the characters’ encounter with enjoyment in the novel is parallel with the reader’s encounter with the violent event that opens the novel. Something in both encounters resists being made meaningful. But this does not sink the entire project of interpretation. Interpretation involves seeing the symbolic context within which enjoyment makes its appearance, seeing the meaning that surrounds it. In doing so, we see that the universal does persist, despite its seeming abeyance. To insist upon meaning is not to do unwarranted violence to the particular or to elide meaning’s inevitable failure but rather the only possible way to preserve the singularity of the particular. It is only through interpretation that we come to realize our failure of knowledge and thus the Real dimension of the other that constitutes its singularity. Without the attempt to interpret, we remain confident that we know all there is to know. We rest secure in our cynicism.