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Beyond the "literary
habit": oral tradition and jazz in 'Beloved.
by Cheryl Hall
The number and variety of responses to Toni Morrison's 1987 novel
Beloved are ample testimony to Morrison's ability to move her readers,
to involve them and make them (as she claims) "part of the creative
process" (Bonetti). In re visioning slave history through the story of
Sethe, a woman who is haunted both by her past as a slave and by the
violence she is driven to as a result of that past, Morrison has
created her most complex and (with perhaps the exception of Tar Baby)
most controversial work to date. The controversy stems in part from the
power of the subject matter and the frankness with which Morrison
addresses it, in part from the mystery surrounding the title
character--an example of the deliberate ambiguity that has delighted
and frustrated Morrison's readers throughout her career. Perhaps even
more powerful than the story Morrison tells, however (and more
potentially disturbing, for some readers), is the way she tells it, the
innovative choices she makes that have driven many critics to find a
new generic or structural model for their interpretations.
In a 1983 interview with Kay Bonetti, Morrison talks about her struggle
to write a new kind of novel:
I wanted...the books...to have an effortlessness and an artlessness,
and a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound.... And the
closest I came, I think, to finding it was in some books written by
Africans, novels that were loose...the kind that people could call
unstructured because they were circular, and because they sounded
like somebody was telling you a story. Yet you knew it was nothing
simple, as simple as that--it was intricate.... I wanted the sound to
be
something I felt was spoken and more oral and less print.
In responding to the charges of ambiguity levelled against her work,
Morrison aligns her fictional craft with that of the musician:
I don't want them [the novels] to be unsatisfying, and some people do
find it wholly unsatisfying, but I think that's the habit, the literary
habit, of having certain kinds of endings. Although we don't expect a
poem
to end that way, you know, or even music doesn't end that way, certain
kinds of music. There's always something tasty in your mouth when
you hear blues, there's always something left over with jazz, because
it's
on edge, and you're never satisfied, you're always a little hungry.
(Bonetti)
Morrison's equation of her art with both music and storytelling
suggests that, as critics, we must come to her work with a new set of
assumptions, based not on what Morrison calls the traditional "pyramid"
form (with rising action, climax, denouement, etc.) but on forms
arising from the oral tradition, in which song and story intertwine and
are often inseparable.
Anthony J.
Berret, in a far-ranging discussion of the earlier novels The Bluest
Eye, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, asserts Morrison's dependence on
"music as a model for her writing" (268), and suggests that jazz in
particular is central to Morrison's work. Other critics and reviewers
note the "lyrical" quality of Morrison's prose as well, and if we are
to find a way to deal with those elements of Morrison's fiction viewed
by some readers as critical problems (her ambiguity, her loose, even
"fragmented" narrative structure, her endless repetition of themes,
images, whole stories), it seems obvious that music is an appropriate,
if not the most appropriate, critical tool. While Judith Thurman's
"operatic" perspective is a useful one, jazz is an even more revealing
lens through which to view Beloved, in combination with the precepts of
the oral tradition of performance from which jazz derives (see Stearns,
among others).
One element of
Morrison's narrative style that may prove problematic for readers of
Beloved is the way in which, while maintaining an omniscient point of
view, Morrison shifts the narrative perspective from the consciousness
of one character to that of another. Close examination of these
passages reveals not confusion, however, but the intricacy Morrison has
spoken of wanting to achieve. The shifts are carefully orchestrated so
that when the perspective changes, the new consciousness we are aware
of is picking up a thread of the melody established by the formerly
dominant consciousness. A process of interchange that is very musical
in form, the theme-and-variation sort of movement so central to the art
of jazz, takes place (the technique also exhibits the parataxis often
noted by oral tradition scholars). One necessarily lengthy excerpt from
the second chapter of Part One provides a stunning illustration of
Morrison's technique. Sethe and Paul D are in bed after their first
sexual encounter, both awake, both disappointed:
Nothing could be as good as the sex with her Paul D had been imagining
off and on for twenty-five years. His foolishness made him smile and
think fondly of himself as he turned over on his side, facing her.
Sethe's
eyes were closed, her hair a mess. Looked at this way, minus the
polished eyes, her face was not so attractive. So it must have been her
eyes that kept him both guarded and stirred up.... Maybe if she would
keep them dosed like that...But no, there was her mouth. Nice. Halle
never knew what he had.
Although her eyes were closed, Sethe knew his gaze was on her face,
and a paper picture of just how bad she must look raised itself up
before
her mind's eye. Still, there was no mockery coming from his gaze. Soft.
[...] Not since Halle had a man looked at her that way: not loving or
passionate, but interested, as though he were examining an ear of corn
for quality. [...]
Sethe made a dress on the sly and Halle hung his hitching rope from
a nail on the wall of her cabin. And there on top of a mattress on top
of
the dirt floor of the cabin they coupled for the third time, the first
two
having been in the tiny cornfield Mr. Garner kept because it was a crop
animals could use as well as humans. Both Halle and Sethe were under
the impression that they were hidden. Scrunched down among the
stalks they couldn't see anything, including the corn tops waving over
their heads and visible to everyone else.
Sethe smiled at her and Halle's stupidity. Even the crows knew and
came to look. Uncrossing her ankles, she managed not to laugh aloud.
The jump, thought Paul D, from a calf to a girl wasn't all that mighty.
Not the leap Halle believed it would be. And taking her in the corn
rather than her quarters, a yard away from the cabins of the others who
had lost out, was a gesture of tenderness. Halle wanted privacy for her
and got public display. Who could miss a ripple in a cornfield on a
quiet
cloudless day? (25-27)
The complex pattern that is established in this chapter includes not
only the unconscious mental interplay between the two characters, but
also a physical exchange--the stretching and stirring and turning of
both characters, trying to disguise their wakefulness from one another.
Sethe and Paul D share that combination of self-absorption and
awareness of others that is a trademark of jazz musicians. They take
thematic and imagistic cues from one another, seemingly unaware of the
content of each other's thoughts but increasingly aware of their
direction. They repeat motifs--eyes, faces, corn--on different
instruments. Paul D's style is rueful, sometimes raunchy, Sethe's
gentler, but still self-amused. It is in passages like this one that it
becomes obvious how Morrison's text invites--and generously
repays--examination within a musical context.
Another stumbling block for readers used to traditional novelistic form
is the repetition of scenes and stories that recurs throughout the
novel, repetition on a much larger scale than that of the shared motifs
in the passage quoted earlier. The stories of Denver's birth and of
Sethe's degradation at the hands of the schoolteacher and his nephews
when they take her milk are among those repeated several times, from
different perspectives and in varying length and detail, throughout
Beloved. The jazz vantage point can be usefully applied here again
(especially in terms of the theme-and-variation movement between
voices, or instruments), but perhaps even more applicable is an
awareness on the reader's part of the other non-written tradition
Morrison consciously draws upon--the storytelling tradition that, like
jazz, springs from native African culture.
Morrison's awareness of this tradition is effectively established in
novels like Tar Baby and Song of Solomon, both of which are structured
around ideas based on folktales from the black oral tradition. Tar
Baby, of course, stems from the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby
he encounters, a story we recall from Joel Chandler Harris's collection
of "Uncle Remus" tales, but one whose existence in oral circulation
significantly predates Harris's racist framing device (and which
probably originates in an African trickster tale). Song of Solomon has
its roots in traditional African tales of the Salt-Eaters, in which
black people, gifted with the ability to fly--even after having been
taken as slaves to America--lose that ability after adopting the
practice of eating salt (Bonetti).
Though obviously slave tales made up a significant percentage of the
stories in oral circulation in black slave culture (and Sethe's story
is taken from one of many documented accounts, a newspaper story of a
woman who killed her children, then drowned herself, to avoid being
taken back into slavery), what is significant in Beloved is not the
symbolic reproduction of a particular oral account, but Morrison's
awareness of the way tales circulate in an oral culture. Stories in
oral cultures serve many of the same purposes as the repeated stories
in Beloved: the transmission of historical data, the preservation of
cultural values and ideas, the education and entertainment of children
(and adults). The knowledge transmitted is not static, however, though
essential details may be retained. It is enriched and modified with
every telling, and by each different storyteller. Tales are told over
and over again, as often as they are called for by the listeners, or as
often as the (actual or ceremonial) need for their telling occurs. The
story of Denver's birth serves different purposes for Sethe and Denver
and Beloved, and is related by different tellers (Sethe and Denver) in
ways designed to benefit both hearer and teller. Denver, for instance,
derives great personal satisfaction not only from savoring the exciting
details of her entry into the world, but from feeding (almost
literally) those details to the Sethe-hungry Beloved as well, in a
process that--for a while, anyway--nourishes them both. The story of
Sethe's trial at the hands of the schoolteacher's nephews is more often
and more variously repeated, and is a harder one for readers to hear
over and over again--readers like Stanley Crouch may simply accuse
Morrison of "losing control" (42). For Sethe and for Morrison, however,
the story is significant of that which must not be forgotten about
slavery, and Morrison's coining of the word "rememory" only underlines
both the function and the repeated nature of the story.
Repetition in Beloved also occurs on another level throughout the
novel, a level also at work both in jazz and in storytelling (which
really differ more significantly in media than in anything else). A
sophisticated system of repeated motifs is at work in Beloved, some
motifs functioning merely as ornaments--grace notes, if you will--while
others carry thematic content. A motif, in the study of folklore and
the oral tradition, is the smallest recognizably repeatable element of
a story, and Beloved contains many such elements. Shoes, colors,
hearts, trees--all occur again and again in various forms and with
fascinating frequency. Paul D's tobacco-tin heart maintains, as a
motif, basically the same form throughout the novel (though the
container/organ itself is shown at different degrees of "open-ness"),
while the tree motif occurs in many different forms, all intricately
linked to slavery or the lives of particular slaves: the "tree" of
whip-scars on Sethe's back, hanging trees, the tree at Sweet Home that
Paul D calls Brother, and the trail of trees he follows (at the advice
of the Indians) to reach the North. The repetition of the shoe motif is
of course linked to Baby Suggs's training as a cobbler--and Baby Suggs,
even dead, is a powerful force throughout the novel--but more
importantly, it may also be meant to draw our attention to shoes as
status symbols denied to most slaves. The skill of repairing shoes,
taught to Baby Suggs as a slave, is then used by her as an ex-slave to
gain a measure of status (part of which is supplied by her "holy" role)
which eventually excites a jealousy that leads to tacit betrayal. As a
result of this betrayal, Baby Suggs loses faith and dies, we are led to
believe, from a lack of color and weariness of heart. The tiny shock of
recognition we receive with each recurrent motif is akin to the
pleasure we derive from identifying familiar phrases in a complex jazz
performance.
The portions of
Beloved that are most recognizably innovative in form (and most
puzzling for critics) occur toward the end of the novel, as the second,
third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Part Two. By the end of the last
of these sections, the arrangement of the words on the pages looks a
lot like poetry, and at least one critic (House) suggests that we
should read this final section like poetry, line for line. Not
surprisingly, the resemblance to poetry established, these portions are
those that most resemble, structurally, a musical composition, and in
particular a jazz ensemble piece.
One of the mainstays of jazz performance is the jam session, during
which several musicians come together to participate in a unique
musical experience. The session is often marked by a series of solo
performances by different musicians, almost always improvised, created
out of the musician's stock of knowledge about the possibilities
inherent in a particular range of notes for every standard key, and
featuring a number of recognizable "riffs." The soloists draw on the
performances that precede theirs, and usually incorporate certain
elements from those performances into their own, varying them and
surpassing them in a productive kind of one-upmanship that is designed
to highlight the particular capabilities of each different instrument.
The session usually culminates in an ensemble performance, the
musicians meshing their solo efforts in what can be, to the
uninitiated, a complex cacophony of sound.
The latter chapters of Part Two exemplify in Morrison's medium what
jazz artists achieve in music. The opening lines of each section are
convincing enough evidence that each speaker is pursuing her particular
variation on the same theme: "Beloved, she my daughter. She mine"
(200); "Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my
mother's milk" (205); "I am Beloved and she is mine" (211, 214). Each
voice continues in a vein which exploits the needs of the individual
(instrument) and with a style that is highly individualized. Sethe's
variation on the Beloved theme is one of explanation and expiation, a
gathering together of the concerns that have compelled her throughout
the novel. Denver's variation is the preservation of her self and her
rediscovered sister, a process that reveals (again) her fear of Sethe
and her idealized notion of her father. Beloved's variations deal with
loss and identification, and the rediscovery of a mother figure the
gaps in her language closing (as visually the words on the page draw
closer together) as her resolve strengthens and her awareness
increases.
When the voices are
integrated after Beloved's second solo performance, the same variations
are revisited, this time in call-and-response fashion. Sethe and
Beloved begin: "Tell me the truth. Didn't you come from the other side?
/ Yes. I was on the other side. / You came back because of me? / Yes"
(215). Denver and Beloved are then paired: "She said you wouldn't hurt
me. / She hurt me. / I will protect you. / I want her face. / Don't
love her too much. / I am loving her too much" (216). The three voices
are then brought together in an urgent polyphony: "Beloved / You are my
sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; you are me...I have
your milk / I have your smile / I will take care of you...You are mine
/ You are mine / You are mine" (216-17). One can almost hear the
punchy, chorded emphasis on the word mine--undoubtedly one of the most
frequently repeated words in the novel.
Paul Whiteman has written that jazz is "`not the thing said, but the
manner of saying it'" (Qtd. in Sargeant 27), and while in Beloved "the
thing said" is essential to Morrison's project, "the manner of saying
it" is certainly no less important. Morrison's indebtedness to
oral/musical tradition is reflected in a variety of ways in her work,
and her insistence upon the reader as "part of the creative process" is
one more link to that tradition and its manifestation in jazz. While
Morrison's authoritative position for this particular text is
undisputed, the implication is there that the Beloved experience
differs for every audience, and with each successive performance. Just
as a jazz audience may influence the performance by its response, so
are our readings of Beloved shaped by what we bring to it. When we come
to the text entrenched in our "literary habit," Beloved may overwhelm
us, appall us, even frighten us. When we come with an understanding of
oral/ musical traditions, the novel's capacity for frenetic movement,
for harmony and discord, purity and excess, engages us in a
(re)memorable performance.
Works Cited
Berret, Anthony J. "Toni Morrison's Literary Jazz." College Language
Association Journal 32.3 (March 1989): 267-83.
Bonetti, Kay. Interview with Toni Morrison. Columbia, MO: American
Audio Prose Library, 1983.
Crouch, Stanley. "Aunt Medea." Rev. of Beloved, by Toni Morrison. New
Republic 19 Oct. 1987: 3843.
House, Elizabeth B. "Toni Morrison's Ghost The Beloved Who Is Not
Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 18.1 (Spring 1990): 17-26.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Sargeant, Winthrop. Jazz: A History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Stearns, Marshall W. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford U P, 1967.
Thurman, Judith. "A House Divided." Rev. of Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
New Yorker 2 Nov. 1987: 175-82.
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