The Arrivant in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Deviation, Iteration, Intersection

Abstract

This essay aims at applying the Derridean concept of the arrivant—as developed in Aporias—to the analysis of domesticity and transience in Toni Morrison’s fiction. I take cue as well from Sara Ahmed’s discussion on deviation as grounded on iteration: deviation not as a unique event but as arriving into places where “others too have arrived” (105). I intend to discuss the arrivants in Morrison’s novels, with particular attention to the “repetition of this tendency to deviate from the straight line” that characterizes them (ibid).

This involves the repetition of the arrival, trajectories intersecting at one point in space, where they stop, if only momentarily. In Paradise, an array of women arrives to the Convent, an abandoned location still inscribed with traces of previous inhabitants. Great narrative effort is devoted to reconstruct the trajectories that bring the women there, who seem to have deviated from straight lines prescribed by a heteropatriarchal world.

My working hypothesis is that the iteration of the moment of arrival is depicted by Morrison as the mechanism through which a transient, contingent community may emerge. This is facilitated by considering that others too might arrive, being always open to the potential arrival of an(other), thus preventing the closure of a space into an immunitary domestic realm, a private space. The point of intersection, therefore, does not crystallize into a permanent home, but remains transient.