Critical Evaluation
Set in New York in 1926, Toni Morrison’s Jazz takes the reader back through the rural and city histories of the two main characters, Violet and Joe Trace, to make sense of their actions in the present. Historically, Jazz alludes to the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North, to returned veterans of World War I who cannot get respect or the work they deserve, to the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, and most emphatically, to the Harlem Renaissance, with its jazz and literature.
Jazz comprises ten sections in which the unnamed narrator characterizes the city and discusses what she knows of the lives of Joe and Violet. Subsections in each chapter are focalized through Joe, Violet, Dorcas, Alice, and Felice. The subsections fill out the narrator’s improvisations, take them somewhere else, embellish them, and often contradict them. Various events, loves, and losses that have shaped the characters are repeated or given significance with differences in meaning, range, and depth. The last line of one section is usually picked up in the opening of the next. The idea of the South as the Promised Land for former slaves is also improvised upon by the narrator, who adores the city, and through Joe and Dorcas’s love affair. Joe thinks of Dorcas as his Eden, believing he has eaten the first apple and its core.
The narrator is energized by the contradictions, bravado, and vibrancy of the city, and she often begins a section or a subsection with a riff on its excitement, diversity, changeability, and sheer spectacle. Like all Morrison novels, Jazz demands the reader’s attention, so that she or he can follow the threads or motifs of the text and the shifts in time.
Music, central to the structure and themes of the novel, includes snatches of jazz lyrics and many allusions to blues and jazz and their focus on love and loss. Jazz, the narrator says, can be exhilaratingly dangerous or, as the middle-class Alice Manfred initially claims, dirty and lowdown.
Some reviewers of Jazz were puzzled by the novel’s narrator. She seems to be a gossipy, lonely older woman, a voyeur who may be a member of the Salem Baptist Church Women’s Club and a customer of Violet the beautician. Like most of her neighbors, the narrator seems to have a rural background. She provides the reader with facts but her interpretations, often based on books or films of the day, are often wrong. For example, in the sixth section, she believes that Golden Gray, the light-colored African American, would have shunned the black girl who is Joe’s mother. As Joe’s thoughts confirm later, Golden Gray and Wild become a couple.
The theme of lost love is as important in jazz music as it is in this novel. Many characters lose their parents to the consequences of racism, which in turn affects the children’s lives, too. Violet’s father is mostly absent because of his politics, and the family, particularly Rose Dear, pays for his absence. Rose Dear, too, lost her mother to the demands of slavery and the selfishness of True Belle’s mistress, once slaves were liberated. Vera Louise withheld wages from True Belle until the latter convinced her she was dying. Joe’s parents vanished, Dorcas’s parents were killed during a riot, and Felice’s parents worked away from home while Felice lived with her grandmother. Despite their parents’ unavoidable absence, the characters carry a sense of guilt as well as anger and lack of self-worth into their new lives in the city.
At the center of the novel is the elusive Wild, who is Joe’s mother, Golden Gray’s companion, and the source of rural beliefs of various kinds. She may represent the black woman who is every African American’s ancestor. She cannot be seen but can be heard in a laugh, in a rustle of crops, in the weather, or in characters like Violet or Felice.
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