[In the following essay, Lewis argues that Morrison's Jazz may be categorized as a “jazz novel,” in that the narrative structure of the story is based on stylistic techniques of jazz music.]

It don't mean a thing
If it ain't got that swing.
Doo wop, doo wop, doo wop, doo wah …

—Duke Ellington, 1932

If we look at the beginning and end of Toni Morrison's Jazz, the novel appears to be structurally backwards. The opening paragraph tells the whole story: Joe Trace

… fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church.

(3)

So, we know what happens and to whom. But these few lines “ain't got that swing,” and are essentially meaningless until we read the rest of the book. Once we get to the end, however, we are left with the impression that the story is unfinished, will continue, and will repeat itself.

I thought of this as a flaw in Morrison's writings. In an interview conducted by Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, Morrison says that when she finishes a book she misses “the characters, their company, the sense of possibility in them” (Tate, 131). This statement validated, for me, the suspicion that Toni Morrison, with all her great talent, simply does not know how to bring closure to her narratives.

During my research for an earlier version of this paper, I discovered the term “jazz literature.” Then I realized that Morrison's stylistic approach in Jazz is no accident; it is a very carefully structured technique that she executes supremely well as I will show in this essay. Nor is it the first time she has used it; much of her work, especially Beloved and Sula are jazz novels. Moreover, the jazz text is not even Morrison's invention; I am thinking particularly of Ann Petry's The Street. As Gayl Jones points out:

The writer's attempt to imply or reproduce musical rhythms can take the form of jazz-like flexibility and fluidity in prose rhythms (words, lines, paragraphs, the whole text), such as non-chronological syncopated order, pacing or tempo. A sense of jazz—the jam session—can also emerge from an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motif of the text, in key words or phrases.

(Jones, 200)

Thus, while the unnamed narrator assumes omniscient authority over the text, each of the main characters of Jazz takes a turn telling the story from her/his point of view.

Before I move into my analysis of the text, I think it is important to examine some of the elements of jazz and its presumed origin(s), usage and meanings.

No one is exactly certain how the word jazz originated. Emerging sometime around 1910, the term is usually associated with the folk mores of black men, and therefore its roots have been linked to Africa. Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans, suggests that jazz may have derived from an itinerant black musician named Jazbo Brown whose appreciative audience chanted, “More, Jazbo! More, Jaz, more!” (Southern, 362).

The development of jazz and the creation of Morrison's Jazz complement each other in terms of historical accuracy. The novel is set in the 1920s, and it was in the 1920s that jazz began to flourish. As blacks migrated from the south to the north prior to and during the '20s they demanded “their kind of music” (Southern, 363)—the kind that reflected their plight. Performers used their songs to express their inner-most feelings as is exemplified in pieces such as “John Henry,” “Down by the Riverside,” and “This Thing Called Love.”

Jazz is a music with a vocabulary of its own: a break is a brief flurry of notes played by the soloist during a pause in the ensemble playing. You will recall that the narrator of Jazz calls them “‘cracks’ … Not openings or breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light of the day” (22). A riff is a short phrase repeated over and over again by the ensemble—the way the story is told about the death of Dorcas. A sideman is any member of the orchestra other than the leader—in this case side woman, the narrator of Jazz.

As Southern points out:

The most salient features of jazz derive directly from the blues. Jazz is a vocally oriented music; its players replace the voice with their instruments, but try to recreate its singing style and blue notes by using sliding, whining, growling, and falsetto effects. Like the blues, jazz emphasizes individualism. The performer is at the same time the composer, shaping the music in style and form. A traditional melody or harmonic framework may serve as the takeoff point for improvisation, but it is the personality of the player and the way he [sic]¹ improvises that produces the music … the preexistent core of musical material … is generally short. The length of the jazz piece derives from repetition of the basic material.

(Southern, 363)

This sounds like a summary of Morrison's Jazz. The “core” of the material is short; as I mentioned earlier, it is all on the first page. The length of the novel is derived from “repetition of the basic material.”

Like jazz, Jazz moves back and forth in time. At one moment we are in 1906, then 1926, then back again:

Arriving at the train station in 1906, the smiles they both smiled at the women with little children, strung like beads over suitcases, were touched with pity. They liked children. Loved them even. Especially Joe, who had a way with them. But neither wanted the trouble. Years later, however, when Violet was forty, she was already staring at infants, hesitating in front of toys displaced at Christmas.

(107)

This passage is extremely important. It gives us insight into Violet's character. She has, indeed, a bad case of the blues. Though we know that she is physically as strong as John Henry's Polly Ann—she “could handle mules, bale hay and chop wood as good as any man” (105)—she suffers from “mother hunger” as she remembers her last miscarried child. Violet owns a parrot that says “I love you,” sleeps with a doll, tries to steal a baby, and is haunted by the memory of that last child, “a girl probably” (108). But her loss is as deliberate as the melody of a jazz piece. Yet, she is unwilling to accept the blame for her abortion. Instead, she blames the child for not being strong enough to survive the “mammymade poison” of “soap, salt and castor oil” (109). She makes the connection that her daughter and Dorcas would have been the same age, and at this point, Violet replaces “the daughter who fled her womb” with her husband's lover: “bitch or dumpling, the two of them, mother and daughter, could have walked Broadway together” (108).

The language in Jazz represents “the name of the sound, and the sound of the name,” as Morrison quotes on the fly sheet. That is to say, Morrison chooses words that keep the concept of jazz on the forefront. The word slide, for example, is associated with a trombone, indeed, “The Trombone Blues” (21). Joe Trace says, “The quiet money whispers twice: once when I slide it in my pocket; once when I slide it out” (123, my emphasis). And the narrator tells us: “He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg …” (34).² One can almost hear the slide of a trombone, or the lonesome wail of a saxophone.

The notion of sliding symbolizes the slipperiness of Joe Trace. He slips out of prosecution for the murder of Dorcas because “nobody actually saw him do it” (4). The reader, too, forgives him because he “cried all day … and that was as bad as jail” (4). Also, Dorcas' death is not entirely Joe's fault; he shoots her in the shoulder, but Dorcas chooses to bleed to death, as shall be discussed in detail later.

Joe has no ties, except for Violet whom he treats “like a piece of furniture” (123). He admits to changing “into new seven times” before he meets Dorcas. He does not leave us wondering what those changes are, and we experience a break in Jazz as I defined it earlier: Joe names himself after his parents abandon him. The second change occurs when Joe is taught how to hunt and “trained to be a man” (125). He marries Violet in 1893, the third change. In 1906 he and Violet travel to Rome, where they board a train to the City and find menial labor. The move from West Fifty-third to uptown constitutes the fifth change, the one Joe thinks is his “permanent self” (127). But Joe changes again when, during the riots of 1917, he is rescued by a white man. Then, two years later, he changes for the seventh time when he “danced in the street” as the colored troops of the 369th Regiment marched proudly through the streets of New York.³

I mention these changes—these variations in the character of Joe Trace, because they illustrate the concept of jazz in Jazz. Joe continues to change, especially in the epiphany we witness here:

I dismissed the evil in my thoughts because I wasn't sure that the sooty music the blind twins were playing wasn't the cause. It can do that to you, a certain kind of guitar playing. Not like the clarinets, but close. If that song had been coming through a clarinet, I'd have known right away. But the guitars—they confused me, made me doubt myself, and I lost the trail. Went home and didn't pick it up again until the next day when Malvonne looked at me and covered her mouth with her hand. Couldn't cover her eyes, though; the laugh came flying out of there.

(132)

The clarinet has a single reed; its notes are easier to follow. But the guitar, with its variable ranges, has six strings that can be played simultaneously. The melody (Dorcas) is difficult to trace.

The guitar has a special value in the text of Jazz. In the 1920s the guitar emerged as leader of the jazz ensemble. Southern writes:

… they worked out special devices—drawing the blade of a knife across the strings of the guitar as they played …—to produce whining tones reminiscent of the human voice, so that their instrument could “talk”. …

(Southern, 371)

Joe Trace is the leader of the ensemble; all action is centered around his relationship with Dorcas. Joe realizes that, like the guitar, he has been played. Here, too, the music takes on a character of its own. Joe calls it “the sooty music” that “confused” him. Earlier, the narrator alludes to the diabolic nature of jazz from Alice Manfred's point of view: “… she was no match for a City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day. ‘Come,’ it said. ‘Come and do wrong’” (67).

The idea of drawing a blade across the strings of a guitar symbolizes not only dislocation and severed ties, but also the overall image of violence in the City: “Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half” (7); “Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose” (77); and, of course, Violet wields a blade as she approaches Dorcas' coffin.

So, Jazz thematically represents a contrast of good and evil. Everything everybody does in this book can be excused, in effect, because it is the music that makes them do it. The music—that “lowdown music,” that manifests itself in “(s)ongs that used to start in the head” and then dropped on down, “down to places below the sash and the buckled belts” (56); that “nasty” music that somehow connects itself to the “silent black women and men” (57), anger, riots, and violence; the “something evil” that “ran the streets and nothing was safe—not even the dead” (9).

Like Sula Peace in Morrison's Sula, the community needs a scapegoat, someone or something upon which to unload their burden of guilt. Music serves this purpose.

Even in making that comparison we can see another element of jazz: repetition. As I mentioned earlier, there are intratextual repetitions in Jazz. There are also intertextual repetitions, as well. In Sula, Shadrack proclaims a “National Suicide Day” (Sula, 41), January 3, 1941. In Jazz, Violet's mother commits suicide by throwing herself down a well. Violet, herself, tries to cut the face of the dead Dorcas on January 3, 1926 (9). When Dorcas chooses to die from a gunshot wound in her shoulder, she repeats the suicide of Violet's mother.

Sula Peace watches her mother, Hannah, burn to death because she is “interested.” Dorcas, whose mother dies in a house fire, “must have seen the flames, must have, because the whole street was screaming” (57). Each girl remains silent as her mother dies. And the end of each novel is open, without a final chord.

I can remember a time in my childhood when my mother and I listened to “Sepia Serenade,” a radio show intended for black audiences. Songs like “Work with Me Annie” and its sequel, “Annie Had a Baby, Can't Work No Mo'” permeated the walls of our little house. Then my mother “got religion,” as we say, and the “devil's music” was no longer allowed in our home.

But music is not the only role that jazz plays in Jazz. The Dictionary of Word Origins explains that jazz:

… originated in a West African language, was for a long time a Black slang term in America for ‘strenuous activity,’ particularly ‘sexual intercourse’. …

(307)

In fact, the word jazz—(nouns, verbs and adjectives)—can mean a number of things: business, affairs, nonsense, bureaucratic red tape, sex, etc., and especially gossip or signifying, which is precisely what our narrator does. She tells the story, with a difference, because surely she was not present at the actual crime. And it is she who admits near the end that she doesn't know exactly what happened. In other words, she presents herself as an authority on the lives of Violet, Joe, Dorcas and Felice when she says, “Sth, I know that woman … Know her husband, too” (3), and then “changes her tune,” so to speak, when she realizes that she has been watched as much as she did the watching:

I thought I knew them and wasn't worried that they didn't really know me … they knew me all along … they watched me … and when I was feeling most invisible, being tight-lipped, silent and unobservable, they were whispering about me to each other …

So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it … the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. … they danced and walked all over me. Busy they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human. …

(220)

What does this mean? Well, if we go back to page six of the text, the narrator introduces (but does not name) Felice: “another girl with four marcelled waves … that's how that scandalizing threesome on Lennox Avenue began. What turned out different was who shot whom” (emphasis mine). She predicts another murder, another climax to the story. The reader anticipates this action as the story unfolds, but it never happens. No one else gets shot. Or, rather, I should say, no one except the narrator who gets “shot down” in her prophesy. She, too, experiences an epiphany. Her own imagination has betrayed her: “It never occurred to me that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of” (221). With that thought she realizes that she has not even known herself.

I am aware that critics have tried to “de-genderize” the narrator, and that my reference to her as female is unpopular. Interestingly, John Leonard, in his article, “Her Soul's High Song,” suggests that the narrative voice is “the book itself” (718). This argument has some merit when we consider the last lines of the book: “Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it … because look, look. Look where your hands are now” (229). But it brings up the question, can a book write itself? I think it is safer to say that the narrator tries to write her own story and discovers that she is the open book we are reading. I see her as a character similar to Mrs. Hedges in The Street. Or, perhaps she solicits the reader's participation in the “remake” of this Jazz. Whatever the explanation, everybody knows somebody who knows everybody's business except her own.⁴ The fact that she has no name is another example of Morrison's brilliance; anonymity is a key element of gossip. (You did not hear it from me.)

In an article entitled “Riffs on Violence,” Paul Gray discusses what he terms “the unsolved mystery” of Jazz. Gray argues that the novel “never answers the question of ‘why’?” I disagree. I think that Joe, Dorcas and the narrator form an ensemble that tells us exactly why Joe shoots Dorcas and why she chooses to die, although the psyche behind the why is far beyond the realms of my psychoanalytic expertise.

Joe brings gifts to his lover. At each meeting he gives her money, or candy, or cologne. He is devoted to her just as she is: “He didn't care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything—and it pleased him” (190). But Dorcas is not happy with that. She needs a challenge, like Acton. She wants someone who wants to change her; she wants a man everybody else wants. She tells Joe that he makes her sick, and threatens, “You bring me another bottle of cologne I'll drink it and die you don't leave me alone” (189). Dorcas would rather be dead than stay with Joe. She knows he is coming for her; he's been searching for five days. She begins to “see him everywhere” (190). He will never let her go.

Thanks to Malvonne's laughter, Joe knows about Acton, one of the “wise, young roosters” who don't have to do anything except “wait for chicks to pass by and find them” (132). He equates Dorcas with Eve: “you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core” (133). She is the forbidden fruit he wants to “bite … chew up … and … carry around for the rest of my life” (134). He experiences a kind of love he has never known before: “I didn't fall in love, I rose in it” (135). She has given him life, meaning. Like the phoenix, he is renewed.

When Malvonne laughs, she laughs at Joe, a laugh which says, in essence, there's no fool like an old fool. Joe is humiliated, stripped of his manly pride. He can take anything from Dorcas as long as he is allowed to sustain the illusion that he possesses her, and as long as her abuse is private. When she takes that away from him, he tracks her down and shoots—“Frankie and Johnny” in reverse.

When Violet tries to cut the dead girl's face, she wants to strip Dorcas of identity, to sever her ties with Joe, to “de-face” her, in other words. With Dorcas, Violet does not have to face the possibility that something is “wrong” with her. Her failure in that attempt forces her to come to terms with the desire Joe has for the girl. She then chooses to fuse herself with Dorcas, to “re-make” herself in an effort to recapture Joe's love. She learns how to dance like the girl, wear make-up like Dorcas, listen to the same kind of music. She conducts quite an extensive investigation into the life of Dorcas and even places on her mantle a picture of the girl “alive at least and very bold” (6), so that she and Joe could look at it “in bewilderment” (6).

Joe jazzes Dorcas. In so doing, he jazzes over Violet. Joe sells cosmetics; Violet fixes hair. They are both in the business of making women look jazzy.

So, Morrison's choice of title is not based solely on the theme of music in the lives of her characters. It is a manifestation of the conditions of life among migratory Negroes, their family love, romantic love and desire. It is an ongoing development of her writing style that bears the absence of a final chord and leaves the reader wanting something more. And it is, indeed, a mastery of technique used to give voices to women, and ears to all who would hear.

Notes

1. If this is done by six influential people usage will begin to change quickly. Most of the great jazz vocalists have been women, and many fine instrumentalists, too.

2. The egg is also connected with the fertility that has been separated from the child-bearing by abortion.

3. For more information see Franklin and Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom, (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 297-318.

4. Consider what Job tells Jason in The Sound and the Fury: “You fools a man whut so smart he cant even keep up wid hisself” (pp. 311-12).

Works Cited

Ayto, John. The Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1947, 1981.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Faulkner, William. [1929 and 1956] The Sound and the Fury. New York: The Modern Library. 1992.

Gray, Paul. “Riffs on Violence.” Time, April 27, 1992, 69.

Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices, Oral Tradition in African-American Literature. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

Leonard, John. “Her Soul's High Song.” The Nation, May 25, 1992, 706-18.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.

———. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Petry, Ann. The Street. Boston: Beacon Press, 1946.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1983.

Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1983.