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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Paradise by Toni Morrison, a neglected and most mysterious masterpiece. We consider the novel’s place in Morrison’s oeuvre as both capstone and reversal, and its mixed reception by its first critics as a too-baldly mythic betrayal of novelistic realism. Then we discuss the thematic place of gender, race, and religion in the complex narrative, encompassing how Morrison’s propensity for victim-blaming rescues the novel from didacticism; how her elusive portrayal of racial identity interrogates the reader’s own ideology of race; how the novel’s plot parodies and critiques the Exodus narrative at the fount of Abrahamic religion, American national myth, and the African-American freedom struggle; and how Paradise finally offers itself as the ambiguous, riddling scripture of the next faith, a syncretic gnostic-infused non-dualistic neo-Christianity presided over by a Black Madonna. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: