Historical Background
Jazz takes place in Harlem, New York during the late 1920s. The twenties is a period known in the United States as “The Age of Prosperity.” At the end of World War I in 1918, “The war to end all wars,” America breathed a sigh of relief, as a collective effort freed the world from German imperialism.
After helping to make the world safe for democracy, there were celebrations nationwide. Americans were eager to refocus their attention on themselves. As a result, the country experienced a growth spurt. Modernization brought the invention of the automobile, an increase in the standard of living, in economic opportunities, and in leisure time.
There was a new way of living. For the first time people worked less hours per week and there was more money to spend on entertainment and conveniences. Appliances like irons, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners were widely available. Canned foods and commercial bakeries freed women from long hours in the kitchen. Movies, baseball games, and sports of every sort were popular.
A new emphasis was placed on education. More children attended school regularly with the goal of completing their educations. An education reform movement called for going beyond the three R’s to a more progressive approach.
The political and social climates were pushed in all different directions. The twenties brought the end of the ideals of the Wilson Era.
The presidency passed from Warren G. Harding to Calvin Coolidge to Herbert Hoover. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the sale of liquor. Yet, while prohibition was in effect, speakeasies and night clubs, where liquor was sold, were fashionable and in abundance. It is believed that there were over 30,000 speakeasies in New York City and over 200,000 speakeasies in the United States.
The Women’s Suffrage Movement pushed for the right to vote, and the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920. Women formed the League of Women Voters and continued their fight for equality and a change in the status quo.
Change took place very rapidly in all aspects of life. Women’s fashions went from just inches off the ground to above the knee. There was new music, new money, and a new carefree attitude. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway best described the mindset of this era. Gaiety and youth were the new ideals and everyone did a wild and crazy dance called the Charleston.
Another important phenomenon of the twenties was the New York Stock Exchange. People had extra money to invest and putting money in stocks was considered a good way to save for the future. Eventually greed, speculation, and a manipulation of the trading system began to have a devastating effect on the economy. Inflation increased and stock prices fell. On October 29, 1929 the stock market crashed. Many experts view this day as the official end of the “Age of Prosperity.”
In the twenties African-Americans never fully benefited from the “Age of Prosperity.” African-Americans who fought in World War I looked forward to their own taste of freedom. When black soldiers returned home, they wanted freedom from the cotton fields they were still tied to. Under the sharecropping system, no matter how hard they worked, they found themselves deeper and deeper in debt.
After slavery was abolished, African-Americans were no longer forced to pick crops like cotton and sugar cane. However, the work still had to be done, and people still needed a place to live. A land or plantation owner built shacks on his land and the people who picked the cotton or cane crop were allowed to live...
(This entire section contains 1850 words.)
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there. They were given staples like flour, sugar, and perhaps a mule and some tools.
Instead of being paid for the work that was done, another system was devised. The owner would keep a record of how many pounds of cotton were picked, how much rent was charged for the shack, and how much money was owed for the supplies that were given at the start of the year.
Families could work from sun up to sun down for a full year and at the end of the year find themselves getting no pay at all. Furthermore, they found themselves owing the landowner hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Usually sharecroppers could not read or write and were cheated. Prices for the staples were inflated, and prices paid for the crops that were picked were extremely low.
Sharecroppers found themselves doing backbreaking work year after year with nothing to show for it but a growing debt. Children didn’t go to school because they had to help bring in the crop. Sharecroppers were often hungry because they didn’t make enough money to feed their families and had little time to plant a garden.
Sharecroppers were often sick because the shacks offered very little protection from the heat and the cold. The situation became another form of slavery. When work opportunities opened in the North, southern African-Americans ran away from their debt to start over. The work available in the North, although not glamorous, was much easier than the work they were accustomed to, and they would get paid.
Another concern for African-Americans during the post-slavery era was lynchings. Even though it was 50 years after the end of slavery, lynchings were common in the South. Southern whites were angry about the end of slavery and the gains being made by African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, was formed with the purpose of forcefully putting African-Americans back in their place.
The main tactic used by the Klan was terrorism. Klan members would hold night meetings with the faces of those present covered with white hoods to hide their identities. Often Klan members were also important members of the community like the sheriff, the judge, the mayor, and local businessmen.
After exciting themselves at the meeting with anti-African-American talk, they would ride off to an African-American family’s home and burn a 10 foot tall cross in the yard. Then the Klan would charge into the house and drag out the father or another male in the family, beat him, castrate him, and hang him from a tree until dead. Women and children were treated in the same way.
The dead body was left swinging for all to see and to remind African-Americans that they were not truly free. During the early twentieth century and well into the twenties, lynchings were a constant threat and The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed to combat this problem.
In the twenties, second-class status and lack of opportunity were facts of life for African-Americans. They seemed to be standing still. Approximately 90 percent of African-Americans lived in southern states, and they were suffering. They viewed the North as a promised land. They believed dignity, opportunity, and freedom could be found there. Often late at night they packed whatever they could carry and ran away from the land that was holding them against their will.
The period from 1915 to 1940, when African-Americans migrated north en masse, was called “The Great Migration.” Up North they looked for freedom, opportunity, and the excitement of city life. What they found was another form of racism, but at least they could make a decent living and feed their families.
Harlem was the number-one destination and was considered “the black capital of the world.” Madame C.J. Walker, a former washer woman, became the first African-American millionaire when she invented the straightening comb and other hair care products. During the 1920s, Harlem’s writers, artists, and musicians produced a large body of work inspired by their roots. “The Harlem Renaissance,” “Negritude,” and “Black Nationalism” were movements that shaped the cultural and political mood for this world-famous community.
Famous writers of the Harlem Renaissance were James Weldon Johnson who wrote the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston wrote of Africa and their people and abandoned the practice of imitating white styles and themes. Downtown white patrons like Carl Van Vechten applauded their talent and provided financial support.
Harlem Renaissance writers were invited to Van Vechten’s literary salons to discuss their work. Van Vechten wrote the novel Nigger Heaven and the title alone caused outrage in some circles and amusement in others. Many rich whites ventured to Harlem to see bandleader Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, one of the most famous nightclubs in the country. Each year there was a black play on Broadway.
In the twenties, political activist Marcus Garvey planted the first seeds of the black power movement with his motto “Up You Mighty Race.” His “Back to Africa” movement won the support of followers nationally because African-Americans were tired of being beaten down. Garveyites dressed in military uniforms and paraded in proud pagaentry through the streets of Harlem.
In 1926 scholar and historian Carter G. Woodson initiated Negro History Week. The week focused on the achievements of Negroes past and present. He also published the Journal of Negro History and formed the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.
Whites and blacks joined together to form The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to deal with the problem of lynchings. Scholar W.E.B. DuBois became one of the first founders of the NAACP and edited the organization’s Crisis magazine. Crisis became both a literary and political vehicle for African-Americans at the time.
Around the same time, a new music was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Jass, as it was first called, was a hot, driving sound. At first considered merely race music popular among blacks, jazz could be heard from New Orleans to Kansas City to Chicago to New York and soon became American music. It is said that jazz “completely transformed the popular music of the country.” (Hoff Wilson, p. xxiii). Kid Ory, King Oliver, and trumpeter Louis Armstrong were some of the early jazz talents. Some music historians credit jazz as the first music to be created in America for classical music was borrowed from Europe.
Another nickname for the twenties in the United States was the Jazz Age. Jazz was more than music; it was a rebellion. The music had a rhythm, emotion, and free form that fit in with the fast paced changes of the decade. Jazz was a way of life that went beyond entertainment to culture.
However alive and exciting urban living might have been at this time, many southern-born African-Americans found it uncomfortably different from the rhythm of rural life. Many suffered loneliness and destruction. Others found themselves involved in the betrayal of values and customs they once held dear.
Fon W. Boardman in his book America and the Jazz Age sums up the decade. “Life in the United States was made up of all these things—lynchings and refrigerators, short skirts and votes for women—and many more.” To some it seemed like the best of times, to others it seemed a barren era, morally and intellectually. Morrison weaves her story over, around, and through the black experience at this time.
Jazz
In 1987, Toni Morrison achieved a decisive plateau in her career with her fifth novel, Beloved, a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller that solidified her position as the leading African American novelist of her generation. With Jazz, on the other hand, Morrison has dared to risk her established position by writing a novel that is less masterful and confident, more exploratory and tentative. She begins Jazz not in the rural and small-town settings that are her recognized forte, but in Harlem in the 1920’s; and she uses the novel to explore her mixed feelings about that legendary time and place. Also, Morrison creates quite an unconventional narrator, one who is not the authoritative master of her characters’ lives and fates, but rather a character in her own right who is at times as uncertain and fallible as the other people in the book. Jazz thus seems at times less in control than Morrison’s other novels, but its inventiveness is exhilarating, and its many stories, characters, and perspectives are richly imagined and frequently moving.
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s is a legendary period of African American creativity in fiction and poetry, but Morrison curiously makes no reference to the rich literary culture of that era. Rather, her emphasis is on jazz—the distinctively urban African American music that reached an early peak in the 1920’s. Thus Jazz begins with an anecdote that seems the novelistic equivalent to a blues ballad such as “Frankie and Johnny.” Joe Trace, a married man in his fifties, has a “deepdown, spooky” love for eighteen-year-old Dorcas, but he shoots her when their three-month-old affair goes awry. Joe’s wife, Violet, then takes a strange revenge by bursting in on Dorcas’ funeral and trying to slash the dead girl’s face.
Playing off this sensational opening story, Morrison’s narrative ranges in many directions, much as a jazz musician might improvise on the opening statement of a melody. In a vividly sensuous style, the author brings to life both the excitement of Jazz Age Harlem, to which many African Americans migrated in the years after World War I, and the racism, violence, and unresolved mysteries of the places they left behind—the rural South and the cities of the Midwest.
Curiously, Morrison almost never uses the word “Harlem”; instead, throughout the novel she refers to this section of New York as “the City.” This nomenclature conveys the legendary power that this specific locale had in the 1920’s, as well as suggesting the mythic dimensions that large cities in general had for African Americans at that time. In Morrison’s hands, the City virtually becomes a character in its own right. The main narrator—an unnamed observer with a distinctly subjective personality—sounds a keynote theme of the novel when she declares early on, “I’m crazy about this City.” Joe’s decision to take a mistress seems as much an aspect of his love for the City as an attraction to a particular woman. The narrator notes that generally, when a man in the City sees a woman who excites him, “he’d think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight.” The narrator implies that Joe takes a mistress largely because he wants to feel once again the excitement that he and Violet experienced when they “train-danced” into the City in 1906, when “the ground was a dance-hall floor.”
Another way that Morrison brings the City’s personality into play is to connect its moods to the moods and actions of the characters. For example, Joe begins his affair with Dorcas in October—an autumnal time of his life, as well as a special time of year when he begins to notice how the color of the city sky “move[s] from a thin ice blue to purple with a heart of gold.” The main action of the novel moves from this golden October, through the cold January of Dorcas’ murder and Joe and Violet’s despair, to the “sweetheart weather” of early spring when life begins to blossom for Joe and Violet once again.
For Morrison, the City and its music are initially a metaphor for the exhilarating liberation felt by African Americans who moved to northern cities. Her narrator says, “I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it.” In the decade after the end of World War I, it seemed that “all the wars are over and there will never be another one.…There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff.…The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.” With her colloquial voice and exuberant clusters of vivid images, Morrison’s narrator celebrates the vitality and promise of the City in a manner that is often reminiscent of the first great New York City poet, Walt Whitman.
The characters in Jazz, however, hold divergent visions of the City’s promise. Even more than Joe and Violet (who came to the City in 1906 as a married couple in their thirties), teenage Dorcas feels the sensual power of the City. Transformed from the sorrowful nine-year-old orphan who arrived in New York City in 1917, Dorcas becomes obsessed with Harlem’s flashy styles and “lowdown” jazz, its abundant nightlife and uninhibited attitudes: “Dorcas thought of that life-below-the-sash as all the life there was.” In contrast, her aunt, Alice Manfred, gains an inspiring vision of the political potential that New York City holds for African Americans. Arriving in the City in July, 1917, soon after the East St. Louis riots that killed her sister and brother-in-law (Dorcas’ parents), Alice witnesses a solemn march down Fifth Avenue in protest over the two hundred people killed in the riots. For Alice, this silent march, accompanied only by drumbeats, suggests the “fellowship, discipline and transcendence” possible in a unified black community. Although this vision of black solidarity is subsumed in Jazz (as it has been in American society) by the sensual, individualistic energies of urban life, Alice’s experience of it remains a resonant moment in the novel.
Enraptured by the City and its jazz as Morrison’s narrator is, she also acknowledges that its mood of incessant liberation and excitement has a darker side of emotional volatility, despair, and violence. “Word was that underneath the good times and easy money something evil ran the streets and nothing was safe—not even the dead.” How could someone as avuncular and trustworthy as Joe Trace, “a nice, neighborly, everybody-knows-him man,” be capable of seducing a teenage girl and then shooting her? How could someone as good looking and industrious as Violet become so emotionally unstable as to try to steal a baby from one of her hairdressing clients, or to try to slash the face of a girl who was already dead? According to the narrator, part of the answer to these questions can be found in the nature of the City itself. She claims that the City enables people to become “their stronger, riskier selves,” but after a while “they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like.” Also, the narrator maintains, “Little of [the sensual delight of the City] makes for love, but it does pump desire.”
Morrison is not satisfied with such general explanations for her characters’ eccentricities and sorrows, however, and she explores the more specific sources of their feelings and behavior in two important ways. Morrison frequently shifts the novel’s point of view, so that the reader gets to know a character from many angles: by considering the unnamed narrator’s omniscient view, by hearing the character’s own voice in first-person passages, and by gaining the perspectives of other characters who hold their own distinctive views. For example, the reader’s view of Dorcas becomes considerably more complex as one moves through the novel. She is seen by Alice as the defenseless victim of an older man’s seduction; by Violet as the beautiful daughter she wishes she could have had; and by the narrator as a thrill-seeking adolescent who partially wished to die. Even toward the end of the novel, the two people who presumably remember Dorcas best see her in diametrically different ways. To her best friend Felice, Dorcas was a “cold,” hard, less-than-attractive young woman who consistently “used people” in unscrupulous ways. To Joe, she was a “soft,” beautiful girl; he claims, “I never saw a needier creature.”
Morrison also complicates our understanding of her characters by exploring their roots in the rural South and the midwestern cities from which they came. All her principal characters are scarred or haunted by their pasts—often by the racism and violence that are the heritage of slavery. As mentioned above, Dorcas and Alice lost their closest relatives in the East St. Louis race riots of 1917. Also, the ancestors of Violet and Joe are presented in an intricately interwoven series of flashbacks set in fictional Vesper County, Virginia. Violet is left to endure the memories of her father abandoning his family when she was a young girl, of her family being evicted from their home by whites when she was twelve, and of her mother, Rose Dear, committing suicide by throwing herself down a well when Violet was sixteen. Joe, also an orphan, is haunted by the memory of his search for his mother, Wild, a feral woman who lived in the woods of Vesper County. Although he learned how to stalk from tracking expert Hunter’s Hunter, Joe was never able to catch a glimpse of his mother.
Joe, Violet, and several other major characters are thus involved in a search for self that involves working out the family patterns that haunt them. They feel compelled to discover who their true ancestors were, to meet or understand them, and ultimately to find other people who will fill the gaps left by the relatives they have, in one way or another, lost. Morrison thus provides yet another way of understanding her characters by showing how they fit into the others’ patterns of need. For example, through her mother’s suicide Violet lost both her mother and her desire to be a mother, yet she comes to find in Alice and Dorcas the images of the caring maternal figure and the beautiful young daughter that she longs to have in her life. Similar patterns can be discerned in the actions of most of the major characters.
Since Morrison begins Jazz by celebrating the excitement and permissiveness of the City, it is ironic that those of her characters who eventually find themselves do so by rejecting such City values. Early in the novel, Alice Manfred is a spokesperson for old-fashioned values whose censorious perspective on the City’s “lowdown” ways seems slightly prudish. Her critical perspective gains power as she generously takes Violet (the violator of her niece Dorcas’ funeral) under her wing and helps Violet regain an old-fashioned but stabilizing sense of herself. Thus when Violet is asked late in the novel why she disrupted Dorcas’ funeral, she replies, “Lost the lady”—she had lost the civilized side of herself. Also toward the end of the novel, Joe and Violet move closer to each other by embracing a quiet domestic existence that owes little of its bliss to the City’s blandishments. Even Felice, the teenage best friend of Dorcas who shared her appetite for the City’s frenzied nightlife, seems to be finding the “happiness” that her name denotes by gradually accepting a cozy role as Joe and Violet’s surrogate daughter.
Another irony that emerges in the final chapters of Jazz is that as Morrison’s main characters become more stable, the narrator seems to become emotionally unhinged. At the beginning of the last chapter, she declares that her love for the City has obscured her understanding of her characters: “I missed the people altogether.” In the narrator’s view, the characters have seized their lives so powerfully that they have taken over the novel: “They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness.…Sometimes they even felt sorry for me and just thinking about their pity I want to die.”
The narrator’s strange outburst is Morrison’s way of dramatizing her realization that the fateful ending she had foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel no longer fits the way that her characters have evolved. Early in the novel, the narrator had indicated that the arrival of Felice at the home of Joe and Violet would lead to a reprise of the shooting of Dorcas, though “what turned out different was who shot whom.” By the end of the novel, however, the characters have outgrown the need for such violence. Curiously, rather than excising the earlier foreshadowing passage, Morrison chooses to leave it in and to dramatize the feelings of anxious inadequacy that this narrative dissonance brings up in the narrator. To some readers, these choices might seem to display an irritatingly self-conscious emphasis on the writing process. Seen in another way, however, Morrison is providing the narrator with the same opportunity that the characters have enjoyed: the chance to realize her mistakes and to renew and reinvent herself on a stronger footing.
Toni Morrison has stated that the overarching purpose of her novels is to show readers “how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something.” In Jazz, her characters are the victims of fragmented families, racism, violence, and their own appetites and illusions, while the narrator is the victim of her own arrogance and longing for certainty. The great strength of the novel lies in the many ways that Morrison dramatizes her characters moving out of their victimization, and rarely settling for mere survival. When Violet is in the depths of her despair, Alice advises her, “You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.” In their various ways, Joe, Violet, the narrator, and many other characters in Jazz all eventually absorb this all-important lesson: They learn to give and to receive a mature kind of love.
Bibliography
Gates, David. “American Means Black, Too.” Newsweek 119 (April 27, 1992): 66. A review of Jazz that maintains that the novel is not just about the story and characters but also about “the process of its own creation.”
Hulbert, Ann. “Romance and Race.” Review of Jazz, by Toni Morrison. The New Republic 206 (May 18, 1992): 43-48. Hulbert criticizes Jazz as a failed experiment in self-conscious improvisation. She argues that Morrison’s characters are flat and her descriptions clichéd. According to Hulbert, although Morrison intends to avoid romanticizing blackness, she instead ends up sentimentalizing family domesticity.
Jones, Carolyn M. “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review 31 (Fall, 1997): 481-495. Jones discusses Jazz in relation to its precursor, Beloved, tracing the theme of healing and reconstructing “cracked” black identity through love. She compares the formation of identity to the improvisation of jazz and concludes that Jazz represents both the ongoing construction of personal identity and the formation of community.
Kubitschek, Missy D. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Discusses Morrison’s writing in traditions of African American, modernist, and postmodernist American writers. Chapters focus on individual novels, including Jazz, and feature sections on plot and character development, narrative structure, thematic issues, and critical approaches. Ideal for students and general readers.
Leonard, John. “Her Soul’s High Song.” The Nation 254 (May 25, 1992): 706-718. This discussion of Jazz in relation to Morrison’s other novels finds her dominant theme to be “identity-making” in a black culture of broken families and failed dreams. Leonard admires Jazz s wealth of characters, its exploration of their Southern roots, and its witty use of a self-conscious narrator. According to Leonard, Morrison is “the best writer working in America.”
McDowell, Deborah A. “Harlem Nocturne.” The Women’s Review of Books 9 (June, 1992): 1, 3–4. Maintains that Morrison intends to animate “the dry and disconnected bones of the black historical past.” Sees a direct connection between Jazz and Beloved, especially between characters.
Mbalia, Doreatha D. “Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz.” Modern American Fiction 39 (Fall/Winter, 1993): 623-646. Mbalia offers a plot and character analysis of Jazz while discussing the theme of shared unity of African people as a defense against the racial oppression of blacks. She explores the analogy of jazz music with narrative form and the merger of form and content in Morrison’s novel.
Miller, Jane. “New Romance.” London Review of Books, May 14, 1992, 12. Insists that “Jazz is a love story, indeed a romance” of older women and African American culture.
O’Brien, Edna. “Jazz.” The New York Times Book Review, April 5, 1992, 1, 29–30. Admires the worlds of Harlem and the rural South evoked by Morrison but misses “the emotional nexus” provided by other writers such as William Faulkner and James Joyce in creating their own vivid worlds.
Pereira, Mali W. “Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby.” MELUS 22 (Fall, 1997): 71-82. Focuses on Tar Baby as a transitional novel connecting Morrison’s earlier work with her later books. Offers an in-depth analysis of Jazz, showing how the novel compares with and comments on The Bluest Eye.
Rodrigues, Eusebio, L. “Experiencing Jazz.” Modern American Fiction 39 (Fall/Winter, 1993): 733-754. Rodrigues presents a literary analysis of Jazz, focusing on the music symbolism of the novel. He interprets jazz as an analogy for black experience and its literary construction and discusses the literary devices of punctuation and rhythmic use of words.
Rubin, Merle. “Morrison’s Poignant Harlem Novel.” The Christian Science Monitor 84 (April 17, 1992): 13. Claims that the novel “demonstrates once again that [Morrison] is one of the most brilliant and inventive American novelists writing today.” Admires the novel’s musical quality and compelling characters.
Techniques / Literary Precedents
Although Jazz is part of a broader narrative that began with Beloved and continues with Paradise, it stands out as more daring and sophisticated in its literary technique. In this book, Morrison masterfully aligns form and function by naming the novel after a native musical tradition and incorporating elements of that musical style into the context where the characters and events unfold. Nearly every section of the novel highlights the pervasive presence of jazz music, serving as a counterpoint to the unfolding events.
The novel structurally mirrors the characteristics of a jazz improvisation, developing a main (plot) line and then exploring variations on that theme. Much like solos in a jazz ensemble are passed among different instruments and players, seemingly competing for the audience's attention and approval, but ultimately collaborating to create a performance greater than any single solo, Jazz employs multiple voices to narrate two intertwined stories. One narrative focuses on Joe's murder of Dorcas and its aftermath, while the other recounts the Reconstruction-era tale of Golden Gray’s birth and coming-of-age. The connection between these stories lies in the way Gray’s story has become a part of family folklore, shaping Violet’s values so profoundly that, despite all her suffering, she explains her descent into madness as a desire to be "White. Light. Young again."
Indeed, Jazz features many solos. The most improvisational solo comes from a narrator who recounts both stories but may not be a reliable witness to the events. To balance the intentional ambiguities introduced by this unreliable narrator, who contradicts herself and offers dismissive judgments of the characters, Morrison allows Joe, Felice, and even Dorcas to share their own pieces of the larger story. Additionally, she employs limited omniscient narration to delve into the personal histories of Violet and Alice Manfred.
In this adaptation of a musical form, Morrison builds on the foundation laid by E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), which depicted the events of 1900-1919 from a modern, postmodernist viewpoint by mimicking the rhythms and techniques of ragtime music, a precursor to jazz. Both novels reference musical forms and reconstruct the history of two adjacent, often overlapping, time periods from a distinctly postmodernist perspective. Similar to Doctorow, Morrison introduces a theme for development and mimics improvisation while evolving that motif, potentially adding another variation as she proceeds. For instance, both novels emulate the classical musical tradition of the overture, which has evolved as the introduction to pieces for both ragtime and jazz. Traditionally, the overture presented all the major motifs and themes of a suite or opera for later elaboration and development. In a similar fashion, the initial chapters of Ragtime and Jazz outline the entire plot of the novel in a condensed form. In the opening chapter, Morrison reveals the murder, the mutilation, Violet's attempt to kidnap a baby, Felice's eventual visit to Violet's apartment, and even True Belle's legacy of idolizing the legend of Golden Gray, alongside the pervasive presence of jazz as a backdrop for the novel's action. Additionally, she introduces the unreliable, judgmental narrator's voice, although as readers, we are not yet sufficiently skeptical of what this voice tells us. For example, the narrator predicts that Felice's arrival would result in "that scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue," implying salacious behavior, but the eventual relationships among Felice, Violet, and Joe are far from scandalous—they are quite domestic. The novel will later unravel and develop each thread of this complex narrative. Thus, Jazz is a fiction that replicates jazz as a musical form and uses representations of jazz music as both an auditory backdrop and a symbolic representation of the attractions, joys, and temptations of the city, which becomes the narrator's central focus.
Morrison once expressed her desire to create a "talking book," and in Jazz, she endeavors to bring this literary concept to life. The narrator in this book stands out as one of its most mysterious elements. To grasp the essence of this narrator, it's essential to clarify what the voice is not. We don't hear the voice of any clearly identifiable character as the main narrator, although we do encounter distinct first-person narratives from several characters. The primary narrator isn't a figure present in Harlem in 1926, nor a character in the Reconstruction-era story involving True Belle and Golden Gray. Morrison's apparent goal is for the voice we hear to be that of the book itself. This seems especially evident in the final scene, where the narrator admits her jealousy of Joe's and Violet's "public love" and expresses her frustration at not being able to verbalize words of commitment and love: "Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now." If we interpret the "you" as the reader—us—we can infer that our hands are still holding the open book as we finish reading, just before closing it. If this is accurate, it suggests that Morrison is presenting a reader-response theory of fiction within her narrative. Her narrator—the book itself—acknowledges that the act of reading doesn't conclude when the book is closed. As readers, we continue to reinterpret, deconstruct, and reconstruct the meanings that any author might embed in or represent through her stories or characters. Morrison understands that the "true" meaning of the text is the one we "make and remake" through contemplation, reflection, and response. Thus, creating a complete literary experience requires the combined efforts of the writer, the reader, and the characters.
Due to this approach, it is us, not the narrator, who become the ultimate judges of truth within Morrison's depiction. Similar to Louise Erdrich's Chippewa nation novels (Love Medicine, 1984; The Beet Queen, 1987; and Tracks, 1991), we as readers must navigate through conflicting narratives that offer different interpretations of reality. We must discern the truth between Violet's limited omniscient perspective, Joe's first-person central account, and others. We cannot rely on an authoritative voice to resolve these competing claims for us. This narrator does not serve as an umpire for her audience. Although she occasionally asserts omniscience, she turns out to be the least trustworthy of all the storytellers in Jazz. The characters' accounts of the truth, placed within a literary context by Morrison, at least implicitly acknowledge their author's biases. In contrast, the narrator does not admit to any bias; she initially presents herself as authoritative, all-knowing, and infallible in assigning motives or interpreting events. However, Morrison portrays the narrator undergoing three distinct transformations: from a gossipy, judgmental presence at the story's start, to a risk-taker confronting her own fallibility as a witness or creator of events, and finally to a subdued metafictionist aware of the limitations of all fictional constructs, including the one she is both the source and a part of.
The novel opens with not a word but a sound of condemnation, perhaps even contempt, from the gossipy, judgmental presence for one of the key figures in the story: "Sth, I know that woman [Violet]." The narrator begins with a pre-speech sound, likely the sucking of air through the teeth, which implicitly conveys dismissal or judgment. She quickly asserts complete knowledge of Violet's, Joe's, and even the community's motives. Her confidence extends to a joyful fondness for the city itself, a sentiment she will later contradict: "I'm crazy about this city," she declares while listing several apparent improvements in opportunities for African Americans. However, these will soon be overshadowed by numerous instances of ongoing prejudice in the city, the most blatant being the delayed response of medics to the dying Dorcas. Furthermore, the narrator shares much of the excitement Joe and Violet felt when they first encountered the city: "I have seen the City do an unbelievable sky." She extends her narrative judgment to both the characters and the city: regarding Dorcas, she states, "I always believed that girl was a pack of lies."
However, the tone quickly shifts. Each new chapter begins with a more subdued tone, and the narrator loses much of her previous confidence and sense of superiority. As she starts to contemplate the complexity of Joe's motives, she introduces a new tone filled with authorial uncertainty: "I've wondered about it." Despite her assertions that she knows Joe well, she perceives him as a stereotype, a "blackthereforeblues man," and can only suggest that the "City spins you" once one gets on the City's metaphorical track, as an explanation for the inevitability of Joe's killing Dorcas.
As she delves deeper into her characters' minds, she also explores her own areas of doubt more profoundly. Although she prides herself on being "curious, inventive, and well-informed" [emphasis added], she relinquishes her claims to certainty: "Risky, I'd say, trying to figure out anybody's state of mind." As she begins to question her construction of the characters' psyches, she also realizes that as a narrator, and even as a book, she cannot be sure she controls the very creation that is the novel's content.
Although she has one more moment of judgmental narration, dismissing Golden Gray on his quest to confront his father as a "hypocrite," she comes to understand that the characters, not the author or narrator, are exerting control over the narrative itself. When Felice visits Violet and Joe for the first time, the narrator admits, "She makes me nervous"—but not for any reasons the narrator mentions. Felice makes her "nervous" because she has an insider's perspective, as Dorcas's friend and confidante, and as the person who heard Dorcas's last words. Felice knows truths about Dorcas that the narrator simply cannot claim as her own. Unlike the confident voice we encountered at the start of Jazz, this narrator, like most of her characters, has become painfully aware of her fallibility.
In her final appearance, Morrison's narrator appears chastened, almost humbled by the characters' resistance—their refusal to align with her thematic vision. As Felice enters the narrative, implicitly challenging the narrator's authority, the narrator undergoes a period of introspection. She reconsiders her control over the story she is crafting, thereby extending Jazz into the realm of metafiction, which explores the fiction-making process as analogous to the creation and processing of ideas. As a metafictionist, however, Morrison's narrator is subdued and reflective. She begins by reversing her attitude toward the city she once adored and extends this reconsideration to her concept of writing: "I ought to get out of this place.... It was loving the City that distracted me and gave me ideas. Made me think I could speak its loud voice and make that sound human. I missed the people altogether." As she candidly reflects on the gap between her expectations for her characters and their actual behavior, which seems to defy her plans, she arrives at a new understanding of the relationship between creator and creation. This directly challenges traditional notions of authorial control: "They [her characters] knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness. That when I invented stories about them—and doing it seemed to me so fine—I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy." Realizing that her characters, rather than her design, drive the story, the narrator acknowledges the arrogance of promoting a singular, theme-driven perspective. She believes that her characters' needs and desires propelled the narrative into a chorus of competing realities, from Joe's remorse to Alice's sorrow and Rose Dear's despair. While she intended to direct their lives, her characters were "thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of."
As Jazz evolves from traditional, assertive, even arrogant modes of discourse to metafictional uncertainty, it places its author at the cutting edge of literary innovation once again. The novel raises new, pertinent questions about narrative authority, the relationship between creator and creation, and the extent to which readers understand their own thought processes by contemplating analogies between human thought and literary creation. By incorporating innovative jazz motifs into the narrative, Morrison enhanced both the content and form of her groundbreaking "talking book."
Bibliography and Further Reading
Adams, Russell L. Great Negroes Past and Present. Chicago: Afro-Am, 1984.
Adero, Malaika. ed. Up South. New York: The New Press, 1993.
Angelo, Bonnie. “The Pain of Being Black.” Time (May 22, 1989): 120-122.
Bloom Harold. Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
Boardman, Fon W. America and the Jazz Age. New York: Henry Z. Walck, 1968.
Dreifus, Claudia. “Chole Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison,” New York Times Magazine (September 11, 1994).
Eden, Richard. “Those Nights on the Harlem Roof Tops,” Los Angeles Times Book Review (April 19, 1992): 3.
Katz, William Loren. Eyewitness: The Negro in American History. New York: Pitman Publishing, 1969.
Leonard, John. “All That Jazz.” New York (December 21-28, 1992): 72.
Mendelsholm, Jane. “Harlem on Her Mind,” Voice Literary Supplement, (May 1992): 25
Nicholson, David. “Toni Morrison’s Rhapsody in Blues”, The Washington Post Book World (April 19, 1992).
O’Brien, Edna. “The Clearest Eye: Jazz,” New York Times Review of Books (April 5, 1992).
Potter, L., Miles, W. Rosenblum, N. Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in WWII. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
“The World According to Toni Morrison,” Essence (May 1995).
“Toni Morrison’s Black Magic,” Newsweek (March 30, 1981): 51.
Wilson, Joan Hoff. The Twenties. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1972.