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The Story Must Go On
and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni
Morrison's Beloved and Jazz
by Martha J. Cutter
A fixed law, an established rule: that is what immobilizes narrative.
(Todorov 165)
Rereading [is] an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological
habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once
it has been consumed ("devoured") .[ldots] [Rereading] is tolerated
only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people,
and professors) .[ldots] (Barthes 15-16)
Narratives, it seems, move toward closure. This is an impulse of both
the narrative itself (which must finally come to an end at a certain
page number) and of the reader (who must eventually close the book, put
it down, and begin something else). Even texts that attempt to keep
meaning in motion, to present multiple possible endings for their
plots, are subject to this totalizing pressure. In a society which
considers rereading to be a kind of marginal activity (as Barthes
implies), when confronted with a perplexing ending most readers will
simply pick one scenario and consider the case closed. For example,
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) ends with an extremely ambiguous
moment in which the protagonist, Milkman Dead, leaps into the arms of
his friend Guitar, who has been pursuing him in order to kill him.
Although Morrison crafts this moment so that it is subject to multiple
interpretations, many readers feel obligated to take a stand as to how
the plot of the novel ends. But Morrison's point in creat ing this
ending, and in much of her fiction, is to keep meaning in motion, to
keep the story going on and on in the reader's mind and heart. The
reader might turn back to the first page of the novel to begin
rereading it for clues about what the ending means--but only if the
reader has been able to resist the totalizing impulse, the desire to
close the book, resolve the story, find an ending that sutures over
uncertainties in favor of a unified and unambiguous conclusion.
The search to find narrative methods that resist the totalizing impulse
of narrative and of readers themselves is a central aspect of
Morrison's fictional technique, and is certainly connected to her
investment in an oral, African American tradition of storytelling, of
the Griot. Beloved (1987) marks the height of Morrison's achievement,
for it is a narrative that resists closure in numerous ways. I have
found that for this reason teaching Beloved is always a new
experience--no class reacts to it the same way, as it generates
multiple ambiguities that cannot easily be sutured over. Yet in
teaching this book, I am always surprised by how ready students are to
resolve the issue of Beloved's status in this novel, to decide
unambiguously that she is a ghost--in fact, the ghost of the child
Sethe killed eighteen years earlier. In my mind, however, the text
balances between realistic explanations of Beloved's presence (she is
an escaped slave woman who has been sexually abused by a white man) and
supernatural ones (she is Sethe's dead child come back to haunt her),
and is therefore an excellent example of what Tzvetan Todorov has
called the fantastic. Why do students ignore the text's balance between
the realistic and the marvelous? And even more puzzling, why has this
tendency to fix on a particular meaning for Beloved been replicated by
literary scholars, most of whom view Beloved as a ghost? [1]
This essay uses structuralist, post-structuralist, and reader-response
theories of textuality to argue that the narration in Beloved creates a
too close identification between the main characters' points of view
and the point of view of the reader; the ultimate result is that many
readers finish the text believing, like Sethe and Denver, that Beloved
was the ghost of the dead child. From this point of view, the text's
meaning is closed, totalized, finalized; and although the narrative
voice reasserts itself to raise troubling questions about what Beloved
really was, these questions are often ignored. But this essay also
argues that Morrison is aware of this tendency, and that she puts the
meaning of Beloved back into circulation with her next novel, Jazz
(1992). Morrison brings back the character of Beloved as a human
being--or seems to--in Jazz, forcing readers to reexamine the previous
novel and the previous novel's conclusion. Although this intertexuality
between Beloved and Jazz has received little criti cal attention, an
examination of it is crucial to an understanding of how Morrison
creates narrative designs that avoid irnirnobilization. [2] The
interplay between Jazz and Beloved rips open the sutures a reader may
have imposed over the ending of Beloved. The structure of narration in
Jazz also disallows a too close identification among narrator,
character, and reader, forcing the reader to read intertextually and
metatextually, even as the overt narrative voice of Jazz criticizes
such procedures as faulty and inconclusive. In the end, what Morrison
creates through the intertextuality between Jazz and Beloved is a story
that resists closure through its very awareness of a reader's need for
closure, and its simultaneous insistence that closure itself is a
delusion, an impulse that must at all times and in all ways be
deconstructed and undermined. For to close a story is, finally, to
forget it. To keep stories alive and in memory, they must be told and
retold--the story must go on and on to survive.
Beloved as a Fantastic Novel
Todorov defines the fantastic as a literary genre that makes
uncertainty on the part of its readers the very core of its rhetorical
and thematic strategies. More specifically, the reader must hesitate
between two narrative explanations for unusual events: Either they can
be explained by realistic reasons (for example, a character believes
s/he saw a ghost, but it turned out to be a chair covered by a white
sheet), or they can be explained by marvelous ones (for example, a
character believes s/he saw a ghost, and it actually does turn out to
be a ghost). When a reader hesitates between marvelous and realistic
causes for unusual events, s/he is in the realm of the fantastic (25).
Of course, it is difficult for a text to maintain this hesitation
throughout its narration, butt Todorov does say that some texts are
able to accomplish this, forcing a reread to reread the text in a
metatextual way (90).
For my
purposes, it is also crucial to consider what Todorov has to say about
the way the fantastic as a genre first swallows up, and then ejects,
the reader's point of view. Since the fantastic is based essentially on
a hesitation of the reader--a reader who identifies with the chief
character-there is often a confluence between the main character's and
the reader's points of view: "The reader's role is so to speak
entrusted to a character" (33). However, although the fantastic begins
in an integration of the reader's and the character's perspectives, it
does not necessarily end that way. The character cannot, after all,
normally exit the world of the text, but the reader can, and once s/he
does, the reader may begin searching for the way the effect of the
fantastic was produced. Thus, according to Todorov, in a second reading
the identification between character and reader "is no longer
possible," and so this second reading "inevitably becomes a
meta-reading" (90). At the end of a fantastic text the conflu ence
between reader's and character's points of view self-destructs, forcing
the reader to read metatextually, searching for the mechanisms whereby
this identification was created and the ambiguous world of the
fantastic was maintained. Although Todorov calls his work on the
fantastic "structural," I am suggesting it has numerous features
congruent with a post-structuralist and post-modem theory of
textuality, in which a text is never closed, but can be read over and
over again.
Although Beloved also
exhibits a number of other features congruent with Todorov's definition
of the fantastic, I do not mean to argue that Morrison conceptualized
her novel with Todorov's ideas in mind. [3] Rather, I am suggesting
that Todorov's approach helps us to comprehend how certain formal and
textual features of narration are interwoven with an oral African
American aesthetic agenda to create a work that is, in both its lexical
and aural features, infinite, plural, and open. [4] In "Unspeakable
Things Unspoken," Morrison states that African American literature
should not be judged "solely in terms of its referents to Eurocentric
criteria" (22). But Morrison also argues that "finding or imposing
Western influences in/on Afro-American literature has value" when a
work is not appreciated only because it meets such criteria (23).
Employing Todorov's approach to understand Beloved is not to cripple
the novel or infantalize it, but rather more fully to appreciate the
multiple ways it undermines the totaliz ing impulses of narrative and
of readers.
Beyond helping
understand textual instability, Todorov's theory is also useful in
assessing the reason that the text's unstable elements sometimes become
unified by the novel's end. [5] According to Todorov's definition,
Beloved is an almost perfect fantastic narrative. However, some of its
rhetorical strategies cause it to seem more marvelous than fantastic.
More specifically, its narration so closely entangles the characters'
points of view with the point of view of the reader that, by the end of
the text, it is difficult to separate the two, and many readers are
likely to agree with Sethe and Denver that Beloved is the returned
ghost of Sethe's deceased, crawling-already? baby. Of course, the text
does present several alternative and more realistic explanations for
Beloved's presence that often get overlooked. [6] For example, embedded
into the text is the possibility that Beloved is an actual survivor of
the Middle Passage and/or a woman held hostage in a cabin by a white
man who used her for sexual purp oses. Consider, for instance, the
textual moment when Denver asks Beloved about the world "over there,"
and Beloved responds:" 'I'm small in that place. I'm like this here.'
She raised her lead off the bed, lay down on her side and curled
up[ldots] 'Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move
in[ldots] A lot of people is down here. Some is dead'" (75). This
passage, which seems to start as a description of the afterlife (" 'I'm
small in that dace'") quickly metamorphosizes into something else ("'No
room to move in[ldots] Some is dead'"). Finally, we are left unsure
whether Beloved is describing death, the Middle Passage, or both--the
interpretations collapse into each other.
The importation of slaves to the United States was banned in 1807, yet
historical research suggests that violations were prevalent well into
the 1850s and 1860s (House 25). Therefore, one possible "realistic"
explanation for Beloved's presence in the novel (although, of course,
this explanation also functions on the supernatural level) is that she
is an actual survivor of the Middle Passage, and Morrison includes
details that support such a reading. For example, Beloved's voice is
described as having a cadence not like" Denver's and Sethe's (60),
possibility indicating an African accent. Her forehead is marked with
fine lines that Sethe interprets as "fingernail prints" (202) from when
she held the child, but that could also be African tribal marks of
identification (or scarification). Furthermore, in her inner monologue
(210-13), Beloved describes a number of details congruent with the
Middle Passage: crouching in the hold of a ship next to dying bodies
(210), bodies thrown overboard (211), starvation and d ehydration
(210), sexual abuse (212), and finally the loss of a woman who looks
like her own mother (211). If we read Beloved as an actual survivor of
the Middle Passage who mistakes Sethe for her long lost mother, then
statements like "I don't have nobody" (65) and her accusation that
Sethe "never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away
from her" (242) have a certain logic, a certain realism. Throughout the
novel, what seems to be commentary on the afterlife could just as
plausibly be the vivid recollections of an experience of extreme horror
branded onto the consciousness of a real survivor. [7]
A first "realistic" explanation for Beloved's presence, then, is her
status as an actual survivor of the Middle Passage. A second (and
congruent) explanation is her status as a sexually abused woman kept
prisoner all her life by a white man. This possibility is first
suggested by Morrison when Beloved dances "a little two-step, two-step,
make-a-new step, slide, slide and strut on down" (74). If Beloved is
the ghost of Sethe's dead child, when and where did she learn this
complicated step? And what are we to make of her statement that "she
knew one whiteman"? Sethe interprets this to mean that Beloved "had
been locked up by some whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out
the door" (119). Did this white man teach Beloved to dance the two-step
and call her, as she says to Sethe, "'beloved in the dark and bitch in
the light'"? Is this white man the one who is described as laying "on
top of her" and sticking his "fingers in her" (241)? When Beloved
describes herself as being afraid of waking up and finding herself "in
pieces" (133), is this the nightmare of a ghost or of a girl--a
child--who has undergone repeated and brutal sexual violation? Beloved
seems to describe sexual abuse when she tells Sethe that "one of them
[a white man] was in the house I was in. He hurt me'" (215). In these
passages the supernatural explanation for Beloved's presence must
survive extreme pressure from the realm of the realistic, for the only
white man the infant Beloved ever saw was Schoolteacher, who did not
touch her or hurt her "where she sleeps." It is also crucial that this
pressure toward a realistic explanation for Beloved's presence
continues to exert itself throughout the text; even as late as the
final section of the novel Stamp Paid adds fuel to this possibility by
informing Paul D. that there "was a girl locked up in the house with a
whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl
gone. Maybe that's her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a
pup" (235). If Beloved is this girl, a number of troubling textual
details are explained: her repeated descriptions of what seems to be
sexual abuse, her unlined feet, her fear of men like Paul D., her
child-like vocabulary, and her emotions of abandonment, bodily
fragmentation, and mental instability.
Yet even as the text produces evidence that supports a realistic
explanation of Beloved's presence, it also continually draws us back
into the realm of the marvelous. Beloved appears to possess information
that only Sethe's deceased child could know. For example, she speaks of
Sethe's lost earrings, and she sings a song Sethe claims she made up
and taught to her own children. These details can be explained away:
Perhaps Sethe only thinks she made up the song, but it was actually
common among African or African American women, and perhaps Beloved's
own mother really did have a pair of diamond earrings. But as the text
progresses, the weight of these "coincidences" seems to become greater
and greater. Beloved has a scar beneath her chin identical to the one
Sethe marked her child with; Beloved has the same name as Sethe's
child; Beloved seems to have supernatural powers (to disappear, to move
Paul D. from room to room, to choke Sethe from afar, etc.). As readers,
we could find realistic explanations for these events (coincidence,
hallucination, lust, self-mutilation, etc.), but as the text continues
we do not.
Morrison's own comments
appear to support the idea that there are realistic and supernatural
ways of reading this character. In an interview with Marsha Darling,
Morrison comments that Beloved should be read as both Sethe's dead
child and a survivor/ghost of the Middle Passage (247). In a later
interview with Angels Carabi, Morrison posits that Beloved could either
be "a ghost who has been exorcised or she's a real person pregnant by
Paul D." The point is, as Morrison says, that "when you see Beloved
toward the end, you don't know" (43; emphasis added). So why does this
narrative so often get read as marvelous when the possibility of
reading it as fantastic--as balancing between the realistic and the
marvelous--exists? As I have already suggested, it may be precisely the
narrative structure of the text that causes readers to overlook these
ambiguities. While a number of different voices narrate the text,
Sethe's and Denver's points of view most often predominate. The
reader's role is, as Todorov would say, e ntrusted to the character.
Hearing the notes of Beloved's song, Sethe also hears "the click--the
settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them"
(175), and the narrative voice comments that "things were where they
ought to be or poised and ready to glide in" (176). "The click"
represents the point at which the reader's and the character's points
of view coalesce, and although Morrison provides evidence that should
disrupt this alliance, the evidence often is ignored.
It is true, as Maggie Sale argues, that the text as a whole values "the
articulation of multiple perspectives" (43) and, as Linda KrumhoLz
comments, that Beloved is supposed to act as a trickster figure "who
defies narrative closure or categorization" (397). Yet here we may need
to make a distinction between what Peter Rabinowitz has called the
actual audience and the authorial audience (126). While the authorial
audience (the ideal reader) can still see the story through multiple
points of view, the actual audience (real readers) may reduce the
articulation of multiple perspectives to one (Sethe's or Denver's),
thereby limiting the text's flexibility and openness. Furthermore,
because both of the book's central characters seem hesitant to raise
questions about Beloved's status after she has disappeared, the actual
audience also may not raise them. Sethe remains convinced that Beloved
was her dead child, her "'best thing'" (272), and when Paul D. asks
Denver if she believes Beloved was her sister, Denver res ponds, "'At
times. At times I think she was--more'" (266). Beloved is the ghost,
and more, but she is not less--the woman from the cabin or an actual
survivor of the Middle Passage.
About jazz music, Morrison comments, "You have to make something out of
a mistake, and if you do it well enough it will take you to another
place where you never would have gone had you not made that error"
("Art" 116). In Beloved, Denver's and Sethe's points of view are so
compelling that readers are pulled into them, willy-nilly, wanting,
needing to believe what they do. Is this a kind of creative "mistake"
that Morrison attempts to revise in her next "performance," that allows
her to go to another place in her next narrative? But what basis do I
have for calling this an "error"? In a narrative in which it is taken
for granted that all the houses are packed to the rafters with some
sort of ghost, should it surprise us that many readers finally become
convinced that Beloved is a ghost? And what leads me to believe that
seeing Beloved as a ghost in any way shuts down the storytelling and
retelling possibilities of the narrative as a whole?
"A fixed law, an established rule: that is what immobilizes narrative"
(Todorov 165). Closure is death. Or, as Morrison states in an interview
with Christina Davis, "You don't end a story in the oral tradition--you
can have the little message at the end, your little moral, but the
ambiguity is deliberate because it doesn't end, it's an ongoing thing
and the reader or the listener is in it and you have to THINK" (419).
If students and scholars decide finally and irrevocably that Beloved is
a ghost, they see only one choice the ending offers, only part of
Morrison's complex project. Perhaps the confluence between characters'
and readers' points of view is a "flaw" in the narrative structure that
Morrison seeks creatively to revise in her next novel, Jazz.
Traces and Stitches: Beloved's Absent Presence in Jazz
Morrison seems to be aware of the tendency among readers to close down
the possibilities of meaning in Beloved, and so in her next novel, she
reintroduces the character of Beloved. But this time, Beloved's
presence seems to be explained by completely natural rationales. At the
end of Beloved, although one boy describes seeing "cutting through the
woods, a naked woman with fish for hair" (267), the character of
Beloved is finally said to disappear without a trace: "By and by all
trace is gone" (275; my emphasis). When Beloved departs 124 Bluestone
Road it is 1873 or 1874, and she appears to be pregnant. In Jazz, a
woman named Wild gives birth in 1873 to a child named Joseph. When
Joseph makes inquiries about his own parents he is told: "'O honey,
they disappeared without a trace'" (124; my emphasis). Joe believes the
"trace" they disappeared without is him; in other words, he believes
his last name is "Trace," and he becomes Joe Trace. Joe's name is the
trace of Beloved in Jazz, the remainder of a presence tha t could not
be contained.
Other textual
details incorporated into Jazz also suggest that Beloved and Joe
Trace's mother (called simply "Wild") may be the same character. When
Wild is first seen by the character Golden Gray, he describes her as
"'a naked berry-black woman. She is covered with mud and leaves are in
her hair. Her eyes are large and terrible'" (144). The pregnancy, the
color of her skin ("coal black" [171]), her nakedness, and her haunting
eyes all connect Wild with Beloved, as do her extreme fear of
individuals and her minimalistic language skills. After giving birth to
a son, Wild escapes to the woods, where she lives in a cave and is seen
only occasionally, but always characterized by her "babygirl laugh"
(166, 167) and the four redwing birds, "those blue-black birds with the
bolt of red on their wings" (176; see also 178) that mark, or we might
say trace, her presence. These symbols clearly connect Wild and
Beloved: the child-woman laugh; the blackness of the birds interrupted
by a streak of redness, of bloodiness, l ike the red slash of Sethe's
saw over the black skin of her crawling-already? babygirl child. [8]
These traces of Beloved in the character of Wild may seem coincidental,
and not weighty enough to convince us that Beloved and Wild are the
same character. But Morrison's point is not to convince us of this
"fact"; rather, her point is to play a sophisticated literary game of
"what if?": "What if Beloved was not a ghost, but an actual pregnant
woman?" and "What if she appears in my next novel as a physical being,
gives birth to a child, and then disappears?" and "What if this child
and other characters then spend the rest of the novel seeking, but
never finding this woman, this wild/beloved fleshly-yet-ghostly
character?" How does such a series of questions destabilize our prior
reading of the novel Beloved? How does it destabilize our reading of
Jazz? How does it force us to read intertextually and metatextually,
and to reread and recreate the two textual worlds?
That Morrison wants us to play this "what if" game is clear from her
linguistic wordplay (i.e., Joe Trace, the babygirl laugh, etc.) and
from her own comments about the two novels. In a 1985 conversation with
Gloria Naylor, Morrison describes how she creates Beloved in the first
novel and then "extend[sl her life, you know, her search, her quest,
all the way through as long as a I care to go, into the twenties where
it switches to this other girl. Therefore [in Jazz] I have a New York
uptown-Harlem milieu in which to put this love story, but Beloved will
be there also" (585). Beloved is present in Jazz not simply as a
metaphor, but as an actual physical presence that Morrison has been
rescuing, bit by bit, "from the grave of time and inattention" (593).
In a recent interview, Morrison stresses the intertextual connection
between Beloved and Wild even more emphatically: "The woman they call
Wild [ldots] could be Sethe's daughter, Beloved [ldots] who runs away,
ending up in Virginia, which is right next to Ohi o" (Carabi 43). In
Jazz, Beloved becomes a physical presence (rather than only a ghost),
but she also becomes an intertexual prompt to the attentive reader to
trace and retrace her footsteps, her remainder--to read and reread.
Stitches and seams, traces and tracks--these are the "signs" of
Beloved's presence in Jazz that should create rereading. The trace
itself is not so much a mark of presence, but a mark of an "irreducible
absence" (Derrida 47), what Rodolphe Gasche explains as the sign "which
always stands for an absent presence" (46). In a Derridean reading of
Jazz, Philip Page argues that textual traces of Wild mean she exists
"not in presence, but [ldots] in the interaction of absence and
presence" (57). [9] I would suggest that the trace also functions as a
metaphor for the way Morrison knits together these two novels. In Jazz,
the character Alice Manfred (Dorcas's aunt) sews "stitches [which] were
invisible to the eye" (111). These stitches knit together the fabric,
but are unseen. Like Alice, Morrison intermeshes Jazz with Beloved
through traces that cannot fully be seen, that are an absent presence,
but that are nonetheless binding despite their existence below the
surface of the narrative fabric.
One of these traces has to do with the corporeality of Wild, about
which the text is insistent. Wild is a woman who may be "crazy" but
still "got reasons" for her behavior (175), a woman who could have
learned to talk, to dress, and to nurse her child, but does not (167).
Hunters Hunter (or Henry Lestory or Les Troy) has spoken to her at
least twice, and it saddens him to know that "instead of resting she
was hungry still" (167). Wild leaves a "trail" that might be followed
(175), "traces" like "ruined honeycombs, [or] the bits and leaving of
stolen victuals" (176). Although these traces are illusive, Morrison's
text insists that they are not the signs of a supernatural presence, of
"a witch" (179), but of a woman who is "still out there--and real"
(167). Wild also gives birth to a boy--Joe Trace--and in this sense the
narrative insists on a very real, physical presence for her.
So Wild is real, and physical. Yet the narrative also insists that Wild
is, in some sense, Beloved. Like Beloved, Wild drives men to
distraction, causing them to go "soft in the head" or leave "their beds
in the shank of the night" (167). Like Beloved, Wild appears to possess
an uncontainable hunger, a desire that is lavished on sweet things. In
Beloved Sethe and Denver learn that Beloved's hunger can be satiated by
sweet things," "honey as well as the wax it came in, sugar
sandwiches.[ldot] She gnawed a cane stick to flax and kept the strings
in her mouth long after the syrup had been sucked away" (55). These
traces are re-manifested in Wild, who also appears to love sweet
things, judging by the trail of ruined honeycombs she leaves behind,
and by the fact that she is associated with the canefield where she is
believed to reside (175), where she "creeps about and hides and touches
and laughs a low sweet babygirl laugh" (37).
These "signs" function as injunctions to the attentive reader to try to
trace and retrace Beloved's presence in Wild, and Wild's presence in
Beloved. Like Joe, however, the attentive reader follows these traces
but never finds definitive answers. Three times Joe attempts to
penetrate the secret of Wild, to receive an acknowledgment that she is
his mother. What he finds on his third visit does not so much confirm
this story as tell a new story--the story of Golden Gray and Wild. When
Joe finally discovers Wild's underground cave of light, he smells "no
odor of dung or fur" but instead "a domestic smell--oil, ashes" (183).
This seems to indicate that Wild is no longer wild but has, to some
extent, become "civilized," as do the other signs of her absent
presence: "A green dress. A rocking chair without an arm. A circle of
stones for cooking. Jars, baskets, pots; a doll, a spindle, earrings, a
photograph, a stack of sticks, a set of silver brushes and a silver
cigar case" (184). Perhaps these items--some of whic h (the silver
brushes and case) clearly belong to Golden Gray--are stolen. Yet they
also seem to mark a connection to the prior text (the earrings, for
example) as well as the possible signs of a domestic union between
Wild, the "coal black" woman, and Golden Gray, the light-skinned "white
man" who turns out to be the son of a very "black" man, Hunters Hunter.
For in addition to the spindle (used perhaps to generate thread), Joe
sees "a pair of man's trousers with buttons of bone. Carefully folded,
a silk shirt, faded pale and creamy--except at the seams. There, both
thread and fabric were a fresh and sunny yellow" (184). These clothes
clearly belong to Golden Gray (see 158), but what do we make of the
fact that they have been repaired at the seams with thread that is "a
fresh and sunny yellow"? Who sews these seams, these stitches?
Morrison may be encouraging us, here, to write what Umberto Eco calls a
"ghost chapter" (214) about the possible union of Wild/Beloved and
Golden Gray. Clues to this ghost chapter are scattered throughout the
text, like Wild's leavings of half-eaten victuals. We are told, for
example, that, although Wild fears Henry Lestory and will not nurse her
own son, she does develop a kind of liking for Golden Gray; individuals
remember "when she came, what she looked like, why she stayed and that
queer boy [Golden Gray] she set so much store by" (168). Golden Gray
himself feels emotions of both attraction and repulsion for Wild; he
fears she will "explode in his arms, or worse, that he will, in hers"
(153). The narrative suggests, however, that Golden Gray overcomes his
repulsion to accept--and perhaps love--Wild:
Golden Gray is eventually "ready for those deer eyes to open" (162).
Finally, it is Wild who changes his mind about blowing his father's
head off with a shotgun, who steers him "away from death" (173). Does
Wild help Golden Gray accept the blackness of his father, the blackness
that he finds in himself? Do Wild and Golden Gray live together in her
cave of light? Does Wild stitch the seams of Golden Gray's shirt,
stitching the story of her textual presence to a reconfigured reality
where she and Golden Gray can be united? The narrative never confirms
this hypothesis, but the sutures are certainly suggestive.
Stitches may link individuals within this particular textual universe,
then, but they may also link characters who appear to be from different
textual universes. In Beloved, Baby Suggs sleeps under a drab quilt
made up of "scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool" (38), yet
by the end of the novel it has become "a quilt of merry colors" (271).
The dull-colored quilt gets restitched when Sethe buys bright cloth
(including "yellow ribbon") to make dresses for Beloved and herself;
the two women are described as "tacking [the extra] scraps of cloth on
Baby Suggs's quilt" (241). So in both Beloved and Jazz, it appears that
the character Wild/Beloved exists, and that she sews. In Beloved and
Jazz, sewing may therefore function as a metaphor for processes not
only that connect individuals (Beloved and Sethe, Wild and Golden Gray)
but for the textual and narrative processes that connect text and
intertext. Nearly imperceptible stitches in the narrative universes of
Beloved and Jazz create a relationship that sutures these texts
together, that attentive readers can trace and retrace.
Read intertextually, these two texts create a perfect fantastic
narrative: The first narrative (Beloved) tilts toward the marvelous,
while the second (Jazz) tilts toward the realistic. Therefore the
presence of Beloved in Jazz creates the balance that is the fantastic,
but it also necessitates both intertextual and metatextual readings.
Eco argues that certain texts force readers to read intertextually: "To
identify these frames the reader had to 'walk,' so to speak, outside
the text, in order to gather intertextual support. [ldots] I call these
interpretative moves inferential walks" (32). Morrison's textual
strategy of bringing Beloved alive in Jazz forces us to "walk" back to
the world of Beloved in order to identify the frames which might permit
the physical existence of Beloved, the character, and the narrative
existence of Beloved, the text, in Jazz. To permit Beloved's/Wild's
existence in Jazz, we might have to resuscitate the realistic
hypothesis of her presence in Beloved--we may have to infer that our
original concept of her as a ghost was only partially true. The two
texts also force the reader to read metatextually: to reexamine in a
more critical light our practices of reading, or "producing," a text. I
myself have searched Beloved for clues to Wild's character, and
searched Jazz for clues to Beloved's character. I read back and forth
between the two texts, taking my inferential walks, trying to figure
out what Beloved really is: a ghost or a real woman. Both and neither,
the two texts seem to whisper to me; you will never know, because
closure and certainty is death for Beloved, for reading itself.
Narrative Ambiguity in Jazz
The openness of Beloved is therefore enhanced by the way Morrison puts
meaning back into play in Jazz through an intertextual relationship
with a prior text, and by the ghost chapters she encourages us to write
that may suture these texts together. But Jazz also refuses the death
of closure through a narrative structure that can be fruitfully
contrasted with Beloved's. The narrator of Jazz at times appears to be
a disembodied entity who tells us that "I haven't got any muscles, so I
can't really be expected to defend myself" (8). Yet at other times s/he
seems to be a human individual who knows the disappointment of
inattentive lovers, of missed opportunities (9). Furthermore, while
this narrator appears to be omniscient, disclosing details no one but
an author could know--such as Joe Trace's three trips in search of Wild
(121-35)--at other times the voice is subjective, limited, or just
plain wrong. The narrator makes erroneous value judgments about
characters like Joe, describing his thoughts as "loose" (11 9), and
about Golden Gray, "not noticing the hurt that was not linked to the
color of his skin" (160). The narrator has pretensions toward
omniscience but is wrong, over and over again.
This narrative voice destabilizes a reader's reading of the text; it
seems to tell the story as a character within the text, yet also
positions itself outside the text, narrating it after the fact.
Moreover, as Page argues, this narrator straddles the conventional
dichotomy between third-person (external) narration and first-person
(internal) narrators, destabilizing traditional conceptions of
narration (60). And, most importantly, the narrative voice claims to be
truthful and wise--only to turn around and critique itself, admit that
it is fallible. The narrator believes Joe and Violet will replay their
violent past histories, but this does not occur: "I was sure one would
kill the other.[ldots] I was so sure it would happen. That the past was
an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself.[ldots] I was so
sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy
being original, complicated, changeable--human, I guess you'd say,
while I was the predicable one" (220). The narrator also asserts
complete control over the plot of the novel, as an author would: "Well,
it's my storm, isn't it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back
again" (219). Once again, however, the narrator is wrong: "And when I
was feeling most invisible, being tightlipped, silent, and
unobservable, they were whispering about me to each other. They 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" (220). Most interestingly, the narrator admits his/her
lack of omniscience: "I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates
me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" (160). The narrator is not
in control of the story, and although s/he tells it, the points of view
of the narrator, the reader, and the characters never coalesce in Jazz,
as they do in Beloved.
Critics
have speculated endlessly about this oddly omniscient-yet-erroneous,
embodied-yet-disembodied narrator, with some arguing that s/he is a
character within the text, the author of the text, the voice of the
city, or the voice of jazz. Still others have argued that the narrative
voice is the voice of the novel. [10] I favor the last of these
explanations: that the narrator is not a character within the text,
although at times s/he plays that role, but rather the voice of the
narrative itself. Morrison comments in an interview that "the Voice" is
meant to convey that the book "was talking, writing itself, in a sense"
(Carabi 42). Morrison is crafting what Ishmael Reed and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., would call "an oral book, a talking book" (Reed 63), a text
"that privileg[es] the representation of the speaking black voice"
(Gates 249). This voice can also be read as that of language
itself--language which continually aims for objectivity, yet contains a
radical instability and subjectivity, which would like to create
perfect designs, but finally only creates "errors" that still may take
us where we need to go. In discussing Golden Gray, the voice comments,
"Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be
doomed to another misunderstanding.[ldots] I want to be the language
that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to
be open" (161). The voice 'struggles to catch Golden Gray in perfect
language, yet realizes that such a task is never completely realized.
Instead the voice can only find "aching words that set, then miss, the
mark" (219). Finally this may be the voice of language speaking itself,
but it is not a voice that can be trusted to get at the "truth"--not
even a voice that trusts itself to get at the truth. Its words can only
set, and then miss, the mark.
Readers are, then, given a large responsibility in the textual world
that is Jazz. Language itself is imperfect; furthermore, we are guided
by no reliable person (character or narrator) who can perfect it,
stabilize its meaning. As Doreatha Mbalia notes, "With this type of
narrator, Morrison is teaching us to read differently. You can't depend
on the narrator for the truth--or the author for that matter" (635).
[11] So when we reread the text we do so knowing that neither the
characters' points of view nor the narrator's point of view is
completely accurate, or all-encompassing. Rather, the meaning of the
text is created through an interaction of points of view, and the story
goes on and on as each reading, each reader modifies, shapes, and
finally creates it as s/he reads. Morrison's text encourages us to
remake the novel through its creation of this unusual narrative design.
About the city, Morrison's voice comments that, if you "heed the
design--the way it's laid out for you," it will be "mindful of where
you want to go and what you might need tomorrow" (9). This statement
emblematizes the discursive structure of Jazz: If we are mindful of its
narrative design, it can take us not only where we want to go today,
but where we might need to go tomorrow--in the future, as we read and
reread.
Jazz is therefore an
excellent example of not only a speakerly text, a talking book, but an
extremely open text from a reader-response point of view. Eco argues
that certain texts are aimed "at giving the Model Reader the solutions
he [or she] does not expect, challenging every overcoded intertextual
frame as well as the reader's predictive indolence." Jazz's narrative
ambiguity creates a structure that (to use Eco's terms) validates "the
widest possible range of interpretative proposals" (33), constantly
forcing us to reexamine our interpretations of the text. In a more
insistent way than Beloved, Jazz encourages a metareading--a reading of
how the original reading was produced. Moreover, because of Jazz's
critique of the process of interpretation, our metareading of the text
is also a metareading of our own practices of reading: We reread the
text to understand our failures as readers, which parallel the failures
of the narrator to predict the text's outcome. Eco argues that the
reader usually collaborates in the course of the plot or fabula, making
forecasts about what will next occur. The ending of a text generally
"not only confirms or contradicts the last forecasts, but also
authenticates or inauthenticates the whole system of long-distance
hypotheses hazarded by the reader about the final state of the fabula"
(32). But the ending of Jazz throws us back on our own resources,
neither confirming nor denying our forecasts. Were we wrong to trust
the voice of the book--the voice of language speaking? But who else can
we trust? Only ourselves--and perhaps not even ourselves. Jazz finally
informs us that it will provide no authoritative point of view for us
to identify with. We confront the world of the text on our own, writing
our ghost chapters, taking our inferential walks in the void, the
sphere, the oddly unstable, but oddly liberating, constantly shifting
terrain of textuality itself.
[In]conclusion: Beloved Returns
In Playing in the Dark, Morrison comments that "the imagination that
produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to
future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world
and an endlessly flexible language" (xii). For Morrison, rereading is
not an activity confined to certain "marginal" categories of people, as
Barthes rather sardonically phrases it, but is fundamentally necessary
to the creation of the openness that is at the core of language, of
storytelling. Jazz creates a shareable universe, as reader, characters,
and narrator together shape the plot, and an endlessly flexible
language, as the story gets told and retold. And the intertextuality
between Beloved and Jazz adds to the flexibility of the imaginative
world Morrison has crafted, engendering rereadings as well as
consciousness of our own flaws as "readers," as "producers," of textual
interpretations. Reading becomes an infinite process--not a stone
dropped into a pond, but an ever-expanding series of circles r adiating
out from a center, a text, an interpretation, a reader. And this
process is continued in Morrison's next novel, Paradise (1998), which
also contains intertextual references to the story of Beloved/Wild--
hints that expand the fictional universe Morrison is crafting while
simultaneously encouraging us to read and reread, create and recreate,
this universe. [12]
Beloved/Wild
is herself the ultimate figure of this ever-expanding, infinite process
of rereading, of a story that can go on and on. The intertextuality
between Beloved and Jazz means, finally, that Beloved/Wild can never be
finalized, immobilized. In the last analysis, we cannot say who this
is, this Beloved/Wild creature who haunts the pages of both fictional
universes, and even of Morrison's most recent novel Paradise, this
individual who can be tracked (followed), but not traced--fixed in one
location, one text, contained in one sphere of meaning. So it is
certainly meant to be ironic that, in the final chapter of Jazz, the
narrator claims to have traced Beloved/Wild, to have reached
comprehension of her: "She has seen me and is not afraid of me. She
hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her.
Released in secret. Now I know" (221). Apparently, the narrator
penetrates to the secret of Beloved/Wild, and it frees the
narrator--the mystery is solved. But what is the final revealed se
cret? We never know--we are never told. Nor do we even know whether we
can trust the narrator when s/he says, "Now I know." [In]conclusion:
Beloved returns in Jazz, yet she remains a mystery. So we must start
over--reading and rereading, motioning to future readings as well as
contemporary ones, creating and recreating that endlessly flexible
language, that endlessly shareable world, that endlessly changing text
that is storytelling itself.
Martha J. Cutter is Associate Professor of English at Kent State
University, where she teaches multiethnic American literature. Her book
Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Women's Writing,
1850-1930, was recently published by the University of Mississippi
Press. Professor Cutter wishes to thank Carolyn Sorisio and Deborah J.
Rosenthal for their careful input on this essay.
Notes
(1.) Critics most frequently view Beloved as a ghost, although there
are competing ideas about what this ghost represents (see Jessee 208,
Rushdy 578, Wyatt 479, Daily 144, Horvitz 163-64, and Barnett 418).
Linda Krumholz believes that Beloved is a contradictory symbol and a
rift in the attempt to close meaning (401-02), but nonetheless reads
her as the repressed memories of slavery, everyone's ghost (400).
However, a few critics resist stabilizing the text's presentation of
Beloved. James Phelan, for example, argues that, because the novel
supports--indeed, insists on--all these not entirely compatible
accounts [of Beloved's presence], it prevents us from resting with any
one" (711). Deborah Ayer Sitter argues that Beloved should be seen in
at least three ways: "as the incarnated spirit of Sethe's murdered
daughter, as an escaped slave who murdered her abusive master, and as
the collective racial memory of the Middle Passage, in particular, and
of the experience of slavery, in general" (29n17).
(2.) There has been no extended critical discussion of the intertextual
relationship between Beloved and Jazz, although Sarah Aguiar, Roberta
Rubenstein, and Carolyn Jones briefly mention the subject. Yet none of
these critics evaluates how this intertextuality affects our reading
practices, or how Wild/Beloved's appearance in Jazz may encourage
rereading of both texts. I am using the term intertextuality to mean
quite literal and deliberate connections between two or more fictional
texts by one author, what some theorists have called "autotextuality."
For a more general definition of intertextuality, see Kristeva (36) or
Scholes (145).
(3.) Some features
of Todorov's fantastic present in Beloved include: a collapse between
mind and matter (114-15); a collapse between subject and object (117);
an interpenetration of the physical and spiritual worlds (118); a
destablized, fluid, even non-existent sense of time (118-19, 145); and
a portrayal of desire that is excessive and transgressive (138).
(4.) I mention only briefly Morrison's investment in oral storytelling
traditions of African and African American culture, since Maggie Sale
has already analyzed this topic in detail and since numerous other
critics have discussed it (see, for example, Holloway, Handley, Harris,
and Rushdy). In interviews, Morrison has repeatedly emphasized her
interest in capturing the oral quality of storytelling and dialogue in
written language (see, e.g., Tate 126, Ruas 108).
(5.) There has been little discussion of Beloved according to Todorov's
definition of the fantastic. Gary Daily is most concerned with how "the
'fierce and instructive' ghost of Beloved, meshes with historical
accounts of slavery" (141). And although Sharon Jessee does briefly
employ some of Todorov's categorizations (203), she is more interested
in using an African cosmology to understand Beloved as the return of
the repressed past (200).
(6.)
Beloved's status as a real woman who has suffered the horrors of
slavery has been most extensively discussed by Elizabeth House; no
other critic has pursued this line of investigation.
(7.) Beloved's connection to the Middle Passage has been discussed in
more detail by Deborah Horvitz (162-65).
(8.) There have been few extended critical interpretations of Wild.
Roberta Rubenstein sees her as "the radically unavailable embodiment of
a primary emotional attachment, whose absence persists as a haunting,
idealized presence" (161); Richard Hardack believes she is Morrison's
gendering of "Pan as female" (462); Doreatha Mbalia views her as a
representation of the possibility of wildness in all women of African
descent (626); and Eusebio Rodrigues sees her as being associated "with
a Kalilike 'mother' nature" (753n13).
(9.) Page's reading of Jazz argues that such Derridean concepts as the
differance, the trace, and the breach are useful in understanding
specific characters (55), as well as the way the novel enacts an
alternative to the either/or trap of Western, binary logic (65). Page
does not discuss, however, connections between Beloved and Jazz.
(10.) Leonard first suggested that the narrator is the voice of the
book, and the novel's last sentences lend credence to this idea: "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" (Morrison 229). Leonard
notes that, quite literally, our hands are holding the book; as we read
the book we create and recreate it (49). Other critics have read the
voice as "a hybrid creature who is half character, half omniscient
narrator" (Mbalia 624), "the author incarnat[ed]" (Furman 100), "the
voice of the city" ( Rodrigues 748), and the voice of jazz (Eckard 13,
Lesoinne 162).
(11.) A fruitful
subject for research on Jazz has been how Morrison uses the structure
of jazz music itself to encourage the reader to remake the novel. Since
critics such as Carolyn Jones, Paula Eckard, Richard Hardack, and
Veronique Lesoinne have already extensively explored this subject, I
have not pursued this line of analysis here.
(12.) In a 1987 interview with Gail Caidwell, Morrison reports that she
conceived of Beloved as the first part of a three-volume work (240). In
the third volume of this "trilogy" (Paradise) the figure of Beloved
appears to split into the five different women who inhabit the Convent,
all of whom are described as having foolish "babygirl dreams" (222).
Out of these women, Pallas has the most intertextual resonance with
Beloved; Pallas has experiences of drowning and sexual abuse (163),
problems with speech (173,175), and "hair full of algae" (174)
reminiscent of Beloved's "fish for hair" (267). Most suggestive is
Pallas's last name ('Truelove" [164]) which not only echoes the word
beloved but also the name of a family in The Bluest Eye (Breedlove). It
is not my purpose here to pursue intertextuality in Paradise, but
rather to suggest that the story of Beloved/Wild is not concluded at
the end of Jazz--that it continues in Morrison's latest novel.
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