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Singing the
blues/reclaiming jazz: Toni Morrison and cultural mourning.
by Roberta Rubenstein
"Cultural mourning" connotes the response of African Americans not only
to the lost lives and lost possibilities produced by slavery but also
to the loss of cultural productions through appropriation by white
culture. In her 1992 novel, Jazz, Morrison re-claims black music both
by reconceptualizing the Jazz Age and by employing the literary
equivalents of its musical forms.
If one of the most notable things about the early decades of the 20th
century was the overlapping of various modes of artistic development in
response to an interval of dynamic social and cultural changes, one of
the most regrettable features of histories of the period has been the
tendency to maintain a segregated perspective, restricting the
contributions of artists of the Harlem Renaissance to the "Colored
Only" side of a long-perpetuated division in cultural and aesthetic
analysis. For example, in Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the
Artist 1885-1925 (1985), Frederick R. Karl traces the common aesthetic
roots of modernist literature, painting, and music without mentioning a
single African-American artist in any of those mediums. More recently,
revisionist scholars of the immensely fertile period that encompassed
both the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance have corrected such narrow
views, not only underscoring the conjoined contribution of musicians,
writers, and painters of the period but acknowledging the vital
cross-fertilization that occurred among artists of different races and
mediums. Thus, focusing on the artistic vitality of New York City
during the second decade of this century, Ann Douglas emphasizes the
"free and creative borrowings across race, class, and gender lines"
(295).
Despite such
cross-fertilization, however--or perhaps because of it--not only jazz
music but, more broadly, the Jazz Age to which it gave its unique
aesthetic stamp was rapidly appropriated by white culture. As Douglas
adds, "to appropriate something is to abstract it by taking it out of
its matrix, its indigenous original context, in order to resituate it
in a plan of one's own making, a place alien to its natural habitat and
design" (295). Such a resituation was indeed explicitly advanced by
Gilbert Seldes, an influential white cultural critic during the Harlem
Renaissance, who in 1923 bluntly declared that "before jazz can amount
to much as an art form it must be appropriated by white musicians with
conventional training" (paraphrased in North 154).
Among those who have rightly objected to such aesthetic
appropriations--to say nothing of the overt racism of Seldes's
remark--Toni Morrison has commented, "I'm not sure that the... [Harlem
Renaissance] was really ours. I think in some ways it was but in some
ways it was somebody else's interest in it that made it exist" (Davis
233). In particular, she has protested such appropriations in the
domain of music:
Black music's always called something--spiritual, gospel, jazz,
boogie-woogie, bop, bebop, rap--but it's never called music, for
example,
20th-century music, modern music.... White critics, in general, claim
it as
American, which it is, but it's almost as though it was made with their
culture, and so black people have no part in it, except marginally, to
provide the music. To talk about it is to appropriate it.... The white
musicians in the States were feeding off of [jazz in the twenties],
claiming it as their own, but the original musicians were unable to
get aesthetic and critical acclaim there. (Carabi 41)
In contrast to jazz, blues music has retained much more clearly its
identification with African-American sources of origin and development,
perhaps because, as Paul Oliver explains, "Implicit in the term `blues'
was the whole tragedy of black servitude since Black Anthony Johnson,
the first of the `twenty and odd Negers' to set foot on American soil,
landed from a Dutch `man of warre' at Jamestown in 1619." The blues
emerged out of the tragic circumstances of African-American history,
expressing the "themes of suffering and misery that had arisen from
poverty and destitution, from disease and disaster, violence and
brutality, from bad living conditions and aimless migration" (284,
289).
In this essay I wish to
argue that Toni Morrison has done much more than merely protest white
appropriation of African-American music. Focusing on her novel entitled
Jazz, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which she engages in a kind of
"cultural mourning" that ultimately serves both as an expression of
grief for lost lives and possibilities and as a form of
re-appropriation of lost (appropriated) cultural creations. After
considering briefly Morrison's concern throughout her fiction with
notions of love and loss within the context of psychoanalytic theories
regarding the grieving process, I will explore specifically the ways in
which she thematically "sings the blues" of black experience through
the use of literary techniques that inventively borrow from blues
patterns and the structure of jazz performance. In this way, I will
argue, Morrison reclaims a distinctly and uniquely African-American
tradition and at the same time calls for a revisioning of the cultural
history of the Jazz Age.
Jazz
(1992) is the middle novel of a series of three, of which the first is
Beloved (1987); the third is the recently published Paradise (1998). As
Morrison has articulated the connection among the narratives, "the
thread that's running through the work I'm doing now is this
question--who is the Beloved?" (Darling 254). Her interest in the
identity of the "beloved," however--and of the complex nature of love
itself--dates from the beginning of her writing career. In a 1977
interview titled "'The Seams Can't Show," she observed, "Actually, I
think, all the time that I write, I'm writing about love or its
absence. Although I don't start out that way. ... Each one of us is in
some way at some moment a victim and in no position to do a thing about
it. Some child is always left unpicked up at some moment. In a world
like that, how does one remain whole...?" (Bakerman 40).
More recently, Morrison has elaborated on the relationship between this
central literary preoccupation and a central theme of the blues: "my
notion of love--romantic love--probably is very closely related to
blues. There's always somebody leaving somebody, and there's never any
vengeance, any bitterness. There's just an observation of it, and it's
almost as though the singer says, `I am so miserable because you don't
love me,' but it's not unthinkable" (Koenen 71). That feeling is
directly articulated in Jazz through the song of a man sitting on a
fruit crate, whose wooden leg serves as an allusion to the famous blues
singer, Peg Leg:
Blues man. Black and bluesman. Blacktherefore blue man.
Everybody knows your name.
Where-did-she-go-and-why man. So-lonesome-I-could-die man.
Everybody knows your name. (119)
Like the penetrating expression of such blues complaints, and like
their recapitulation in the instrumental variations of a jazz
improvisation, Morrison's lament on the "absence of love" has both
broadened and deepened in its expression during the course of her
fiction, coming to represent the experience of loss felt not only by
individuals who have been separated from parents, spouses, lovers, or
children, but by an entire group whose members have been scarred,
directly or indirectly, by a legacy of cultural dislocation, personal
dispossession, and emotional (if not actual) dismemberment. As the
character Baby Suggs expresses it in Beloved, "Not a house in the
country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief" (5).
What Morrison calls the "absence of love" I would term loss, because
individuals experience it not merely as absence--something missing--but
as a lack that continues to occupy a palpable emotional space: the
presence of absence.
In his
studies of the effects of bereavement, loss, and grief, psychoanalyst
John Bowlby theorized that the loss of a parent during early childhood
"gives rise not only to separation anxiety and grief but to processes
of mourning in which aggression, the function of which is to achieve
reunion, plays a major part" (37). "Mourning" signifies the emotional
and psychological process "whereby the bereaved gradually undoes the
psychological bonds that bound him to the deceased" (Raphael 33),
usually experienced by an individual in response to the loss through
death or separation from a person to whom he or she is deeply
emotionally attached. Its typical emotional characteristics are a
combination of anger and sorrow, though other responses, including
despair, depression, and denial, may also contribute.
With regard to the collective dimension of mourning that I explore
here, Peter Marris, in his investigation of the losses that result when
groups of individuals are obliged to relocate, observes,
if we believe that the meaning of life can only be defined in the
particular experience of each individual, we cannot at the same time
treat
that experience as indifferent--uprooting people from their homes,
disrupting
their relationships with impatiently facile exhortations to
adaptability.
Such change implies loss, and these losses must be grieved for, unless
life is meaningless anyway. Thus the management of change depends upon
our
ability to articulate the process of grieving. (91)
Marsha H. Levy-Warren, drawing on Freud's theory of mourning and
melancholia, stresses that "a move from one's culture of origin can be
seen as similar to the loss of a loved person, which initiates a
process of mourning" (305). By implication, the effect of such an
experience can be only magnified if the cultural relocation is
involuntary, collective, brutal, and experienced without recourse to
mourning rituals and other structures that enable the process of
grieving to resolve.
In Morrison's
fiction, the sense of loss--the presence of absence--has evolved into
representations of what I call cultural mourning in two distinct
senses. I use the term culture to signify both a cultural
identity--African American--and its aesthetic productions. Mourning
names the process through which losses might be grieved and resolved:
both the historical/aesthetic sense of loss as a result of white
appropriation of cultural creations and the psychoanalytic sense of
loss as the working-through of individual and collective grief
resulting from massive cultural dislocation and its ramifications over
time. In the latter sense of cultural mourning, for African Americans
that grief originates in events that occurred generations earlier when
their ancestors, forcibly transported to the United States as slaves,
were subjected to involuntary separations, violations, and traumatic
personal losses. Ineradicably woven into the fabric of African-American
experience is the cultural memory of injury and loss--lost lives, lost
possibilities, lost parents and children, lost parts of the body, lost
selves. Naming and embodying that grief, Toni Morrison expresses the
responsibility that she feels for "all of these people; these unburied,
or at least unceremoniously buried, people made literate in art"
(Naylor 209).
Jazz is set during
the 1920s, an era of emerging cultural optimism for African Americans.
As Morrison explains in an interview, during that period of vibrant
social and aesthetic transformations in the decade after the First
World War, "black culture, rather than American culture, began to alter
the whole country and eventually the western world. It was an
overwhelming development in terms of excitement and glamour, and the
sense of individualizing ourselves swept the world" (Carabi 41). In her
novel, a series of linked episodes reveal the emergence of that
cultural moment through the portraits of half a dozen characters whose
lives converge in the "City"--never named but understood as New York
City's Harlem--in the years following the Great Migration and World War
I. A central story within the several overlapping ones is a romantic
love triangle involving a middle-aged married couple, Violet and Joe
Trace, and Dorcas Manfred, an eighteen-year-old girl with whom Joe has
a brief love affair. Their liaison, as the narrator informs us at the
outset, is "one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made [Joe] so sad
and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going" (3). Though most
of the action in Jazz takes place in the "City," several flashbacks are
set in rural Virginia, including the self-contained story of a mulatto
named Golden Gray, whose life only tangentially intersects with Joe
Trace's.
The narrator of Jazz is,
uniquely, "without sex, gender, or age," a presence Morrison designates
as the "voice" in order to highlight its function not as a person (of
either gender) but as "the voice of a talking book .... I deliberately
restricted myself [to] using an T that was only connected to the
artifact of the book as an active participant in the invention of the
story of the book, as though the book were talking, writing itself, in
a sense" (Carabi 42). Initially, that voice exults as it records the
emergence of a new order: "Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the
sad stuff. The bad stuff. ... History is over, you all, and
everything's ahead at last" (Jazz 7). The voice fervently celebrates
the era of the "New Negro" along with the emergence of opportunity,
cultural pride, and vibrant new musical idioms. Yet beneath these
exuberant expressions a contrary one insinuates itself--a blues theme
of "complicated anger" (59) interwoven with strands of danger, sorrow,
and loss. As the narrating voice describes the clarinets that wail, the
drums that pulse--sometimes ebulliently, sometimes sorrowfully--beneath
the surface of the characters' lives, Morrison also plays on the
contradictions that are inherent in "blues" music itself by expressing
a countervailing theme. As the voice concedes early in the novel, "Word
was that underneath the good times and the easy money something evil
ran the streets and nothing was safe--not even the dead" (9).
Virtually all music critics concur that it was from the blues that jazz
music developed, and that essentially jazz elaborates on the
characteristic elements of the older form, including the basic
twelve-bar structure with flatted third, fifth, and seventh notes, and
the call-and-response pattern. As Mary Ellison describes the essential
relationship between the two forms, "Jazz and blues have always been
different genres of the same music[,] with jazz emphasizing the
instrumental and blues the vocal content. Jazz has consistently been
dependent on the blues, from its inception to its most recent
developments" (19). Moreover, as Albert Murray has pointed out, even
within blues music there is often a contradiction between the vocal
expression--which may and often does verbalize melancholy--and the
instrumental expression: "more often than not even as the words of the
lyrics recount a tale of woe, the instrumentation may mock, shout
defiance, or voice resolution and determination" (69). In Jazz,
Morrison captures these complex relationships between, and within, the
different musics: the narrating voice conveys the literary counterpart
of the blues lament, while the narrative structure transmits the
literary equivalent of the variations and riffs of jazz.
In contrast to the expressed early optimism about city life as an
invitation to opportunity and freedom, the narrating voice admits late
in Jazz that the City is--like the voice itself--inscrutable,
unreliable; beneath the surface are other (unarticulated) stories that
may contradict the ones we've been told. Additionally, as eventually
becomes clear, the narrating voice is itself distracted, as much as are
the people it observes/fabricates, by the enticements of urban life at
the dawn of a new age:
Round and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you.
Makes
you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to. All the while
letting you think you're free.... You can't get off the track a City
lays
for you. Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your
health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started:
hungry
for the one thing everybody loses--young loving. (120)
The voice's inventions thus also circle back, like the City's enmeshing
circular tracks, to Morrison's central blues theme of "love or its
absence."
The theme of loss in
Jazz is expressed not only by reference to the blues lament, with its
emphasis on lost love, but also formally. Though Craig Hansen Werner
and other scholars of literary modernism have noted affinities between
Morrison's techniques and the formal experimentation of Woolf and
Faulkner--both of whom were the focus of Morrison's M.A. thesis at
Cornell--I would argue that these echoes function mainly as Morrison's
rather ironic reminder of the connection between modernism and the Jazz
Age, for, ultimately, her narrative inventiveness seems to owe less to
her literary predecessors than to the improvisational strategies of
jazz itself. Some years before she wrote Jazz, Morrison described her
affinity for the structural openness of this musical form, explaining
that
Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord. There may
be
a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you.... There is
always
something else that you want from the music. I want my books to be like
that--because I want that feeling of something held in reserve and the
sense that there is more--that you can't have it all right now. (McKay
411)
Recently, Morrison has also made explicit the analogies she endeavored
to create between jazz as a musical form and the narrative structure
and voice of Jazz. Considering how to tell the story, she created a
narrator who did not know exactly where the story was going:
It reminded me of a jazz performance in which the musicians are on
stage. And they know what they are doing, they rehearse, but the
performance is open to change, and the other musicians have to respond
quickly to that change. Somebody takes off from a basic pattern, then
the others have to accommodate themselves. That's the excitement, the
razor's edge of a live performance of jazz.... I was trying to align
myself with more interesting and intricate aspects of my notion of jazz
as a demanding, improvisatory art form.... (Carabi 41-42)
Considering such correspondences between musical and narrative
techniques in Jazz, Eusebio Rodrigues contends that Morrison employs
punctuation, repetition, rhythm, and other linguistic elements in
distinctive ways to mimic jazz and to transform the text into "a
musical score," whereby "the reader has to actively participate in the
process of musicalizing the text before it will yield up all its
meanings" (738, 737). Paula Gallant Eckard further proposes that in
effect, jazz is "the mysterious narrator of the novel.... Jazz as
narrator constructs the text" (11-18).
The mimetic relationship between the improvisatory nature of jazz and
the fluid structure of literary narrative also operates in the other
direction, according to ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner, who proposes
that jazz improvisations might be likened to storytelling:
In part, the metaphor of storytelling suggests the dramatic molding of
creations to include movement through successive events "transcending"
particular repetitive, formal aspects of the composition and featuring
distinct types of musical material.... Paul Wertico advises his
students
that in initiating a solo they should think in terms of developing
specific "characters and a plot.... You introduce these little
different
[musical] things that can be brought back out later on; and the way you
put them together makes a little story. That can be [on the scale of]
a sentence or a paragraph.... The real great cats can write novels."
(202, ellipses and brackets in original)
One of many ways in which Morrison inventively translates jazz and
blues techniques into their narrative equivalents pertains to the way
that the structure of Jazz depends on a call-and-response pattern. Each
of the ten sections of Morrison's novel concludes with an idea or
phrase to which the opening words of the next section respond;
additionally, like jazz improvisations on a blues theme, each
"response" opens into a new (narrative) direction. The first section of
the novel, for example, ends with the words (spoken by one of Violet
Trace's parrots), "I love you" (24); the section that follows opens
with the response, "Or used to" (27), and shifts--as a musical
improvisation might shift to a different basic chord--to reflections on
Violet's loneliness; she has released her lovebirds in response to
Joe's new interest in the young girl Dorcas, who also reminds Violet of
her own childlessness. Similarly, the link between the last two
sections of the novel depends on call-and-response for the shifting
meaning of a particular phrase: Dorcas's friend Felice, comparing her
grandmother's preparation of catfish with Violet Trace's--the latter's
version too heavy on the hot pepper--explains that she drank plenty of
water rather than refuse the fish (and hurt Violet's feelings) because
it "eased the pain" (216); the narrative's final section opens with the
response, "Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for
it" (219).
Pain is, indeed, both
the central preoccupation of Morrison's novel and the essential subject
of the blues. Thus, through the narrative's blues lament--the longing
for "the heart you can't live without" (130), as Joe Trace puts it--the
cultural mourning that the novel embodies through the characters' lives
and stories also functions as Morrison's literary "voicing" of the
African-American musical tradition of the blues. Jazz can thus also be
said to dramatize both thematically and structurally Ralph Ellison's
famous observation that the blues originated in "an impulse to keep the
painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's
aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it,
not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a
near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an
autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically"
(78-79). Reflecting this dynamic, while the voice of Jazz lyrically
constructs the characters' efforts to recover love and the beloved, the
subtext in effect expresses not only the contradiction within the blues
but also the equivalent of instrumental jazz variations on the theme,
exposing the "personal catastrophe" of the beloved's radical,
irrevocable absence.
Thus, in this
novel Morrison represents, in yet another key, the subjective inner
world in which the conception of the "beloved" originates, expressing
the psychoanalytic dimension of cultural mourning that I identified
earlier in this essay. The "absence of love" or the sense of the
presence of loss that permeates each of Morrison's seven novels to date
often stems from a child's experience of involuntary separation from or
actual psychological abandonment by one or both parents. Implicitly,
such abandonments recapitulate the literal and emotional displacements
of slavery, beginning with the genocide of African people who were
ripped from their families and cultures and placed on slave ships bound
for the West, but who did not survive the Middle Passage. Those who did
survive were destined to live out the losses upon which slavery was
predicated--the specific deprivations, degradations, and abuses of
body, mind, and being that are so disturbingly rendered in Morrison's
Beloved.
Using a telling metaphor,
Douglas has observed that African Americans, "whose ancestors were
kidnapped from their native land and sold into slavery in an alien
country, were, in fact, America's only truly orphan group" (83).
Representing the traces of this experience of loss at both individual
and communal levels, Morrison's novels before and including Jazz are
populated by a number of lost or orphaned children. Some of these are
literally orphans: Cholly Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) who was abandoned
at birth by his mother in a dumpheap and whose father never knew of his
existence; Pilate Dead (Song of Solomon) who was born an orphan at the
moment of her mother's death; Sethe (Beloved), who was separated by
slavery from her mother and never knew her father. Others are emotional
orphans, like Pecola Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) and Sula Peace (Sula),
who experience themselves as radically estranged from their parents.
Another group includes cultural orphans, like Jadine Childs (Tar Baby),
who, besides being literally parentless, wobbles ambivalently between
black and white worlds.
Both
literal and metaphoric orphans figure prominently in Jazz, beginning
with the major figures in the love triangle/tragedy announced on the
first page. Joe and Violet Trace and Dorcas Manfred are each the
offspring of dead, missing, or emotionally unavailable parents. Dorcas,
Joe Trace's eighteen-year-old lover, was orphaned in childhood. Her
parents were innocent victims of the violent race riots that consumed
East St. Louis in 1917, leaving more than two hundred African Americans
dead--her father was stomped to death and her mother died when their
house was torched. Dorcas's friend Felice is, if not an actual orphan,
arguably an emotional one. Raised by her grandmother while her parents
worked on the railroad line in other cities, Felice knew her father and
mother primarily through the brief visits that punctuated their much
longer absences. As she phrases it, "I would see them once every three
weeks for two and a half days, and all day Christmas and all day
Easter.... Thirty-four days a year" (198).
More literally than Felice and like her younger rival, Dorcas, Violet
Trace was orphaned during adolescence. Her "phantom father" (100)
deserted his family to seek his fortune, leaving his wife, Rose Dear,
to raise their five young daughters. When Rose Dear was brutally
dispossessed from her sharecropper's hut, she moved her family to an
abandoned shack. Before long, however, she found her hardscrabble life
unendurable and, broken in spirit, drowned herself in the well when
Violet was twelve, leaving her daughters in the care of their
grandmother, True Belle. Violet was convinced by her mother's suffering
and despair that she never wanted children of her own. Several
miscarriages and many years later, the inner emptiness produced by that
decision haunts her in the form of a "mother-hunger" so intense that
she sleeps with dolls and even takes a baby from a carriage. She
imagines her husband's lover Dorcas as "a girl young enough to be that
[lost] daughter" of her failed pregnancies and, torn between regarding
her as "the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb"
(108-09), at Dorcas's funeral she finally acts out her anguish by
mutilating the dead girl's face. The narrator, regarding Violet's
subsequent effort to learn as much as she can about Dorcas, acerbicly
comments, "Maybe she thought she could solve the mystery of love that
way. Good luck and let me know" (5). Later, the voice speculates that
Violet's violent action can be understood as "a crooked kind of
mourning for a rival young enough to be a daughter" (111).
At least Violet Trace and Dorcas Manfred had actual parents during
childhood; Violet's husband, Joe Trace, never did. Abandoned by his
mother at birth and raised by another family, he gave himself a surname
that retains the story of the parents who "disappeared without a trace"
(124); he reaches the age of fifty still trying to fill the "inside
nothing" (37) where the minimal "trace" of primary attachments has
expanded to form a space of enormous longing. Although he never locates
the woman who had "orphaned her baby rather than nurse him or coddle
him or stay in the house with him" (178), in the Virginia woods where
he grew up he discovers the den-like home of the woman referred to only
as "Wild." The description of his arrival in Wild's primitive den is
especially evocative of the mythical return to the womb followed by
rebirth: "He had come through a few body-lengths of darkness and was
looking out the south side of the rock face. A natural burrow . ...
Unable to turn around inside, he pulled himself all the way out to
reenter head first . ... Then he saw the crevice. He went into it on
his behind until a floor stopped his slide. It was like falling into
the sun" (183).
If Joe Trace is in
any way reborn, however, it is in an ironic sense, precipitating an
even deeper need; the trail that leads him to his mother's primitive
burrow becomes emotionally entangled with the trail that leads to his
young lover. The "little half moons [that] clustered under [Dorcas's]
cheek bones, like faint hoofmarks" (130) signal her "wild" animal link
to Joe's mother, Wild. Dorcas temporarily occupies the empty "inside
nothing" space in Joe's heart, becoming the "beloved" in a way that
temporarily assuages the unappeased hunger he feels for the mother who
abandoned him at birth. Telling Dorcas details of his earlier life that
he has never before shared with another person, he explains that she is
the central figure in his vision of Paradise:
the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he
left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the
first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. The
very
first to know what it was like. To bite it, bite it down. Hear the
crunch
and let the red peeling break his heart. You looked at me then like you
knew me, and I thought it really was Eden ... (133)
The suggestive meanings of Paradise obviously continue to interest
Morrison, as demonstrated by the novel that immediately follows Jazz,
entitled Paradise. The wish/longing for a vanished Eden or Paradise is
a nostalgic fantasy that encodes our human knowledge of the inevitable
original loss at the individual level: separation from infantile bliss.
For actual orphans like Joe Trace, there never could have been a true
interlude of infantile bliss experienced as unconditional love;
nonetheless, the longing to "recover" something that never existed in
the first place endures as an emotionally powerful imperative.
Understood psychoanalytically, the figure of the mother "remembered"
from infancy is a not a true memory but a fantasy of her, an imago--"a
kind of stereotyped mental picture that forms in the unconscious,
reflecting not only real experiences" but also other early experiences
that occur before a child's emotional differentiation from its mother
and that are thus psychologically attributed to her (Chasseguet-Smirgel
115). Moreover, as Mario Jacoby observes, despite the fact that "the
harmonious world which is now regarded as lost ... never really
existed," the image of Paradise "as an inner image or expectation ...
lives on within us, creating a nostalgia the intensity of which is in
inverse proportion to the amount of external fulfillment encountered in
the earliest phase of life" (5, 8).
In Jazz, Joe Trace's fantasy of his irrecoverably lost mother fuels a
need so insistent that, even into middle age, it demands an outlet for
its expression. Soon after Joe discovers Wild's dwelling among the
rocks, he calls, "But where is she?" (184). Following a significant
narrative pause (produced by the white space of a chapter break), the
response--"There she is" (187)--reveals Morrison's consummate narrative
sleight of hand as well as her psychological compass: the ambiguous
pronoun no longer refers to Joe Trace's mother but to his young lover,
Dorcas.
The call-and-response
slippage between the two female pronoun referents is significant both
structurally and psychologically. Structurally, in addition to the
blues pattern, the shift suggests a jazz technique. If one regards the
white spaces of the chapter breaks in the novel as the narrative
equivalents of rests, then what Paul Berliner says about these "musical
spaces" may also be applied to Morrison's novel: "suspended over the
passing beats, a rest ... invites listeners to reflect upon the
soloist's most recent figure [here understood as a musical motif],
challenging them to anticipate the entrance of subsequent figures. ...
[S]ubstantial rests that shift the figure's placement within a measure
can also cause the figure to become transfigured in unexpected ways"
(157-88, emphasis mine).
Psychologically, the blank spaces or rests might be said to signify the
presence of absence: the space once occupied by the lost
love-object--originally the mother whose emotional presence or absence
profoundly marks subsequent "figures" in intimate relationships. That
figure itself becomes imaginatively "transfigured" as Morrison
continues to plumb more deeply--in both psychological and cultural
terms--what might be called the beloved imago: that figure who
signifies the image of idealized love, retained despite--or, more
accurately, because of--its absence through loss or death. Indeed, what
she refers to as the "dead girl" in Beloved evolves, like an unfolding
harmonic progression, into another "dead girl" in Jazz. As Morrison
herself has explained,
I call her Beloved so that I can filter all these confrontations and
questions that she has in that situation [the circumstances of her
death
and reappearance in Beloved] ... and then to extend her life ... her
search,
her quest, all the way through as long as I care to go, into the
twenties
where it switches to this other girl [Dorcas, in Jazz]. Therefore, I
have
a New York uptown-Harlem milieu in which to put this love story, but
Beloved will be there also. (Naylor 208)
Interestingly, Morrison only later realized the full implications of
the recurring presence and image of the "dead girl" in her fiction,
noticing that "bit by bit I had been rescuing her from the grave of
time and inattention. Her fingernails maybe in the first book; face and
legs, perhaps, the second time. Little by little bringing her back into
living life.... She is here now, alive. I have seen, named and claimed
her--and oh what company she keeps" (Naylor 217). That haunting,
evolving "dead girl" represents the psychic core of loss and mourning
that Morrison, over the course of her fiction, has been figuratively
re-constructing. In gathering together those parts of the body, in
reclaiming those parts of the self, she narratively attempts to
reverse, by "re-membering" the literal and figurative dismemberments of
the slave experience and its after-effects.
To the extent that a child's earliest primary attachment has been
disrupted or severed, he or she (as well as the adult whose
psychological reality has been shaped by those critical childhood
experiences) yearns for a substitute who might replace the absent
beloved, who might fill the empty emotional space that persists in the
form of unresolved mourning. Bowlby describes a complication of
mourning in which the person who has experienced a loss "mislocates"
the absent figure in some other figure in his or her life, regarding
that person as "in certain respects a substitute for someone lost," but
for whom ultimately no substitute can suffice (161). Thus, Morrison's
Joe Trace, "a long way from ... Eden" (180) in every sense, and driven
by the feeling that he associates with his unsuccessful search for his
mother, follows the trail from "where is she?" to "There she is"--that
is, from his absent mother in the woods to his absenting-herself young
lover in the City. As he soliloquizes,
In this world the best thing, the only thing, is to find the trail and
stick to it. I tracked my mother in Virginia and it led me right to
her,
and I tracked Dorcas from borough to borough.... [I]f the trail speaks,
no
matter what's in the way, you can find yourself in a crowded room
aiming a
bullet at her heart, never mind it's the heart you can't live without.
(130)
Locating Dorcas at a jazz party in the City, Joe is angered when he
realizes that she prefers a younger man named Acton (suggesting
"action" or "actin'"). She tells Joe--in words that threaten the
vulnerable space of his "inside nothing"--"I don't want you inside me.
I don't want you beside me" (189). As if to punish the original Beloved
whose unendurable abandonment is about to be repeated, Joe shoots her
emotional surrogate, Dorcas, who bleeds to death from the wound. Later,
when Dorcas's friend Felice asks Joe, "Why'd you shoot at her if you
loved her?" Joe replies, with a candor that makes explicit the
deficiency that has stunted his emotional life, "Scared. Didn't know
how to love anybody" (213).
Another orphan's story in Jazz, one that resonates like a blues lament
with Joe Trace's story and amplifies its emotional meaning, is the
narratively self-contained story of Golden Gray. The most enigmatic
character of the narrative, Golden Gray is a young man of an earlier
time who also seeks an unknown and radically absent parent. The son of
a "phantom father" who never knew of his paternity and a white woman
who never acknowledged her motherhood, he is also, figuratively, the
child of a black slave woman who was obliged to relinquish her own
children in order to become a surrogate mother for the mulatto boy with
beautiful golden skin and hair.
When Golden Gray reaches the age of eighteen, he learns the identity of
his father from the woman who "lied to him about practically everything
including the question of whether she was his owner, his mother or a
kindly neighbor" (143). Tracking his father in the same Virginia woods
in which, many years later, Joe Trace attempts to track his mother,
Golden Gray finds the cabin of the woodsman Henry Lestory/LesTroy.
Awaiting the arrival of the man reputed to be his father, he describes
his feelings regarding his missing parent as an amputee might describe
his experience of a phantom limb, in language that most explicitly
articulates the "inside nothing" produced by a child's experience of
abandonment or radical estrangement from a parent:
Only now ... that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the
place where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought
everybody
was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery....
I don't need the arm. But I do need to know what it could have been
like to have had it. It's a phantom I have to behold and be held by....
I
will locate it so the severed part can remember the snatch, the slice
of
its disfigurement. (158-59)
Here, Morrison recapitulates the imagery of dismemberment that occurs
throughout her fiction as a trope for the profound damages inflicted on
African Americans by the emotional dismemberments of slavery and its
aftermath. Remembering--"re-membering" (Morrison's own play on the
word)--is a crucial compensatory process that might begin to ameliorate
the pain of literal and figurative, individual and communal, severances
that cumulatively persist as cultural mourning.
Significantly, Golden Gray's articulation of the "presence of absence"
occurs just before another birth; the pregnant woman known only as
Wild, whom Golden Gray has found injured on the road and taken to his
putative father's cabin, gives birth to a son. Just as Golden Gray's
father rejects his son, so does this mother reject her infant. Their
complementary refusals bind the several stories of abandoned children
and lost parents that compose the narrative of Jazz, while also hinting
at an explanation for the absent mother later sought by Joe Trace.
Morrison, pointing out that "the dates are the same" for the
disappearance of Sethe's daughter at the end of Beloved and the birth
of Joe Trace in Jazz, has explained that "Wild is a kind of Beloved":
You see a pregnant black woman naked at the end of Beloved. It's at the
same time ... back in the Golden Gray section of Jazz, there is a crazy
woman out in the woods. The woman they call Wild (because she's sort of
out of it from the hit on the head) could be Sethe's daughter, Beloved.
When you see Beloved towards the end [of Beloved], you don't know;
she's
either a ghost who has been exorcised or she's a real person [who is]
pregnant by Paul D, who runs away, ending up in Virginia, which is
right
next to Ohio. (Carabi 43)
Morrison's provocative suggestion that Wild may be both Joe Trace's
mother and "a kind of Beloved" underscores the encompassing
psychological truth embodied in that figure; it/she represents not only
the lost/dead daughter named by the bereaved slave mother who took her
child's life in order to "save" it but, more broadly, the beloved
imago--the vanished love-object, the missing or lost half of the
original parent-child bond--that persists psychologically as an
idealized, haunting, disembodied/embodied presence. Although by the end
of Jazz Joe Trace refuses full responsibility for Dorcas's death and
although Violet accepts his attempts at reconciliation, the "trace" of
loss remains ineradicable.
Thus,
naming and giving still another form to the lost Beloved as the
symbolic figure--and transfiguration--of cultural mourning, Morrison
illuminates the links and resonances between emotional/psychological
and aesthetic/cultural losses. Her complex strategy bridges figurative
correspondences between musical and narrative forms: from the blues,
she adapts the call-and-response pattern and the lyrical lament for
"the heart you can't live without"; from jazz, she adapts notions of
improvisation and unpredictability. Thus herself "appropriating"
musical techniques for literary purposes, she has devised a narrative
design that captures both the voices we hear through it and the
distinctive cultural moment in which it is set. Simultaneously
re-envisioning the historical period and re-appropriating its musical
creations, Jazz sings the blues and reclaims jazz, celebrating the
central contribution of these musical forms to a vital era of
African-American--and white--cultural history. Moreover, Morrison's
"call" demands her readers' response: to acknowledge the profound
psychological and cultural losses on which those aesthetic expressions
are predicated.
WORKS CITED
Bakerman, Jane. "`The Seams Can't Show': An Interview with Toni
Morrison." Taylor-Guthrie 30-42.
Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
Bowlby, John. Loss: Sadness and Depression. Vol. 3 of Attachment and
Loss. New York: Basic, 1980.
Carabi, Angels. "Interview with Toni Morrison." Belies Lettres 10.2
(1995): 40-43.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. "Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst:
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Darling, Marsha. "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with
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Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New
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in Toni Morrison's Jazz." College Language Association Journal 38.1
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Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Plume, 1988.
--. Jazz. 1992. New York: Plume/Penguin, 11993.
--. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. 1976. New York: Vintage, 1982.
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Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson:
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Werner, Craig Hansen. Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the
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ROBERTA RUBENSTEIN is Professor of Literature at American University,
where she was named Scholar/Teacher of the Year in 1994. Her
publications include The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking
the Forms of Consciousness (1979) and Boundaries of the Self: Gender,
Culture, Fiction (1987) as well as more than thirty essays on modern
and contemporary women writers.
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