Rethinking Community in Literature and Literary Studies: The Secret Communal Life of Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Abstract

The aim of Paula Martin-Salvan’s chapter is to sketch a theoretical pattern for the analysis of literary texts from the perspective of community that overcomes traditional limitations and terminological fuzziness perceived in the overwhelming body of literary criticism devoted to the topic. Her research on the representation of communities in fiction is based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between an “operative” and an “inoperative” model of community. Of particular interest for this chapter is the potential this distinction creates for the exploration of the role that novels play in the imaginative fashioning of alternative communities, both within the diegetic or fictional universe created within a particular text and in connection to the relationships established between authors, narrators, and readers. In order to illustrate the kind of analysis derived from this theoretical framework, Martin-Salvan will discuss Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise (Paradise. Knopf, New York, 1997) as a case study. Morrison’s work has been traditionally approached by critics in terms of oppressive vs. oppressed communities, through the perspectives of race and gender. It is Martin-Salvan’s contention that Morrison’s work actually explores the complexities and contradictions implicit in our use of the notion of community, depicting the crisscrossing of communities, the exclusion mechanisms used for the sake of protection, and the liminal and threshold areas between communities.