201 Chapter Four Toni Morrison's Jazz: Intertextual Artistry, or

77 Pages·2008·0.64 MB·English

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Chapter Four
Toni Morrison’s Jazz: Intertextual Artistry, or “it’s got a heap of signifying
wrapped up in it”
In the opening sentence of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground
(1864), a nameless narrator writes, “I am a sick man” (3), and proceeds to tell the
story of how he came to be “sick,” which is to say, through the writing of his story he
constructs a narrative of his identity. As Stuart Hall explains, “Identity is a narrative
of the self; it’s the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are” (16). For
Dostoevsky’s narrator, the process of writing his story helps him develop his sense of
self and understand who he is, namely, a “sick man.” Similarly, in the opening
sentence of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) a nameless narrator writes, “I am an
invisible man” (3), and proceeds to tell the story of how he came to realize that he
was “invisible.” Ellison’s narrator, like Dostoevsky’s, establishes his sense of identity
through the process of writing his life story, and both narrators write after the fact
from the position of someone outside the dominant society.1 However, Dostoevsky’s
narrator is a white European, while Ellison’s narrator is an African American,
meaning his voice has typically, often forcefully, been silenced in American literature
and history. Through his nameless narrator, Ellison writes a black voice into
existence, effectively challenging the authority of the white, male, “Author-God” and

1 Obviously there is a significant difference between being an outsider to 19th c. bourgeois society and
being a racial outsider to 20th c. American society.
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revising Dostoevsky. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “to revise [in this way] is
to Signify” (SM xxiii). Ellison’s nameless narrator not only Signifies on the white
European tradition, he also revises a familiar trope within the black tradition, namely,
“the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice” (Gates 239).2
Because Ellison’s novel Signifies on both African American and white European
literary traditions, Invisible Man can be described as “double voiced,” meaning it
speaks to “literary antecedents” from “both white and black” literary traditions (Gates
xxiii).3
So, too, is Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) “double-voiced” for its opening
sentence Signifies on both Ellison and Dostoevsky. Once again, a nameless narrator
speaks in the first person about the identity of a particular individual saying, “Sth, I
know that woman” (4). Morrison’s sentence structure resembles Dostoevsky’s and
Ellison’s, in the sense that the first person subject pronoun “I” is followed by a verb
and then a noun phrase. Although the verbs “am” and “know” are different, both
convey knowledge of someone’s identity. Another slight difference is that

2 As Gates explains, Ellison’s title, Invisible Man, is an “ironic” revision of Richard Wright’s Native
Son (1940) and Black Boy (1944). Ellison’s replacing of “son” and “boy” with “man” “suggests a more
mature and stronger status” giving the speaking black voice more power than it might have had as
“boy” or “son,” which are traditionally condescending terms used by white people to refer to black
men. The word “invisible” is “an ironic response of absence to the would be presence of blacks”
(Gates 106).
3 In “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview,” Ellison mentions that Richard Wright
recommended Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as well as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Henry James. Ellison
also references Dostoyevsky in “Richard Wright’s Blues” (78-9) and “Hidden Name and Complex
Fate” (161). All three of these essays are in Shadow and Act.
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Dostoevsky’s and Ellison’s narrators write about themselves, whereas Morrison’s
nameless narrator speaks about the identity of someone else, namely, Violet Trace.
The identity in question this time is not that of a man, but a woman, specifically, a
black woman. On the first page of the novel, the narrator reveals that Violet’s
husband, Joe Trace, has been having an affair with a younger woman named Dorcas
Manfred, and when Dorcas ends the affair, Joe shoots and kills her. At the funeral,
Violet tries to stab Dorcas’ already-dead body. Because the novel opens with
someone else constructing a narrative of Violet’s identity, Morrison highlights the
traditional silencing of the black female voice and foreshadows the identity quest
Violet undergoes. Through these revisions Morrison Signifies on Dostoevsky and
Ellison, effectively indicating that her own literary influences come from both the
African American male and white European male traditions.4
However, Morrison’s emphasis on speaking the black female subject into
existence more explicitly resembles Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching
God (1937), which “depicts the search for identity and self-understanding of an Afro-
American woman” through the example of Janie (Gates 184). Like Janie, Violet
searches for self-understanding, but unlike Janie, Violet’s identity quest is disrupted
by the process of migration. According to Farah Jasmine Griffin’s “Who set you

4 Obviously Morrison has influences within the white American male tradition. Much has been made
of her master’s thesis on William Faulkner and her novels are often taught in conjunction with his. In
addition, Jazz in particular has been discussed in comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925).
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flowin’?” The African-American Migration Narrative (1995), Jazz “is Morrison’s
most explicit migration narrative to date” (184), and charts the effects of such
dislocation on Violet, Joe, Dorcas, and the nameless narrator. In other words,
Morrison’s Jazz Signifies on two prominent tropes of African American literature, the
identity quest and the migration narrative. By Signifyin(g) on these tropes, Morrison
establishes her characters’ identities as well as her own artistic identity. According to
Gates, “black writers read and critique the texts of other black writers as an act of
rhetorical self-definition” (Gates 122). Which is to say, black writers establish their
artistic identities through the process of Signifyin(g), in the same way that jazz
musicians establish their identities by improvising. As I shall demonstrate in this
chapter, Toni Morrison is a literary jazz musician, improvising on history, African
and African American folklore, literature, literary criticism, and photography. In this
way, Morrison’s artistic identity is highly unstable, just like Michael Ondaatje’s, for
both artists combine several genres within their respective literary works.
Similarly, the identity of Morrison’s nameless narrator is also highly unstable
because it shifts seamlessly between several narrative voices creating free indirect
discourse. According to Gates, it is this sort of “peculiar play of ‘voices’” that defines
the Speakerly Text (xxv), exemplified most notably by Hurston’s Their Eyes.
Although Hurston gradually combines a conventionally white third person omniscient
voice with her characters’ black dialect to create free indirect discourse, Morrison’s
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narrator utilizes free indirect discourse from the beginning, effectively speaking itself
into existence and silencing conventional white narrative voice.
Because the narrator’s voice literally blends and clashes with the voices of the
other characters, much debate has occurred over the identity of Morrison’s mysterious
narrator.5 In an interview with Angels Carabi, Morrison explains her strategy: “The
voice is the voice of a talking book….I deliberately restricted myself [to] using an ‘I’
that was only connected to the artifact of the book…, as though the book were
talking, writing itself, in a sense” (para. 14, 15). In short, Morrison’s narrator is not an
actual person and has no physical body within the novel. By attributing the narrative
voice of Jazz to the book itself, Morrison alludes to the trope of the talking book.
According to Gates, “the trope of the Talking Book first occurred in a 1770 slave
narrative” (130), James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Most
Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, An African
Prince, As Related by Himself. One of the “remarkable particulars” in Gronniosaw’s
Narrative describes his efforts to read his master’s prayer book. After seeing his
master read from the book, Gronniosaw believes that the book literally speaks to his

5 As Jane Lilienfield explains, “[s]ome critics…believe that Malvonne is the narrator of Jazz, but they
cannot explain how Malvonne has gained narrative access to the interior lives of” the other characters.
“Other critics believe that the narrator expresses many aspects of Morrison herself…Still other readers
suggest that the city of Harlem may be a site of narration” (46-7). Another possibility, according to
Paula Gallant Eckard, is that “jazz is the mysterious narrator of the novel” (11). Along the same lines,
Carolyn M. Jones believes that “[t]he narrator is [a] jazz artist” (487). Taking a different approach
Richard Hardack suggests that the “narrator…is not just the book…but the sweet sharp tooth of
double-consciousness itself” (164-5). In “Women’s Classic Blues in Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Cultural
Artifact as Narrator,” Tracey Sherard problematizes the narrator’s lack of gender.
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master, but when Gronniosaw puts his ear to the book, he hears nothing. As Gates
explains, “The silent book did not reflect or acknowledge the black presence before
it….The text’s voice, for Gronniosaw, presupposed a face; and a black face, in turn,
presupposed the text’s silence since blackness was a sign of absence, the remarkably
ultimate absence of face and voice” (136-137). In this instance, the master’s text fails
to “acknowledge” the existence of black people, effectively equating “blackness”
with “absence.” Gronniosaw’s “desire for recognition…in the text of Western letters”
inspires his reversal of “the (non-) Talking Book….The text refuses to speak to
Gronniosaw, so…[he] writes a text that speaks his face into existence among the
authors and texts of the Western tradition” (137-138). The trope of the talking book,
then, speaks in a black voice about the lives of black people, in effect reversing, or
Signifyin(g) on the texts of Western letters. What’s more, the trope is a sign of
intertextuality. In utilizing the trope, Morrison emphasizes the fact that both her novel
and her narrator are “double-voiced” and speaks to other texts.
When the narrator says, “’Sth, I know that woman,’” it is a response to an
absent question, presumably, “who is that?” But who asks this absent question? One
possibility is that it comes from white authors of history and literature who have
traditionally represented the African American presence as absence and, thus, would
not know who Violet is. In this scenario, Morrison reverses the typical Western
equation of blackness as absence, so that whiteness is absence and the African
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American is simply present in the voice of the narrator. As a result, Morrison places
whiteness at the periphery and gives blackness center stage.6 Upon opening
Morrison’s novel, then, readers enter a black centered world, which means the absent
question could also have been posed by a member of the black community, to whom
and for whom the narrator also speaks. The narrator’s “attitude toward the fictional
world seems to be at the opposite pole from the one [Roland] Barthes attacked. Far
from being the tyrant he portrayed, Morrison’s author is neither single, nor unified or
homogeneous. ‘It’ is tolerant, plural, heterogeneous” (Ginsburg & Rimmon-Kenan
80). In other words, as the narrator tells the story of Violet, her husband Joe, and the
other woman, Dorcas Manfred, it does not resemble Barthes’ Author-God, or Don
DeLillo’s Bill Gray; instead, its narrative and identity are multi-dimensional spaces in
which numerous voices blend and clash, thus preventing any unified meaning.
Similarly, the ambiguity surrounding the identities of the narrator, Violet, Joe, and
Dorcas, provides the reader with an opportunity to improvise. As Carolyn M. Jones
notes, “Morrison’s text…[is] a site of performance, of interaction between reader and
writer with the text as an instrument both played and heard” (491). Any interpretation
of Morrison’s Jazz, then, is a performance, wherein the reader becomes the jazz
musician improvising on the ambiguities.

6 This is the case with many of Morrison’s novels; Song of Solomon (1977) Paradise (1997) and Love
(2003), each detail the lives of black characters specifically within the black community.
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I. Jazz, a Novel Riffin(g) on Photography and History
If Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter improvises on the historical
and visual ambiguities of the Bolden Band photo, Morrison’s Jazz improvises on the
historical gaps surrounding the photograph of a dead woman found in James Van Der
Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). In the “Foreword” to Van Der Zee’s
collection, Morrison writes that “[t]he narrative quality, the intimacy, the humanity of
his photographs are stunning,” so much so that “one can only say, ‘How living are his
portraits of the dead’” (HBD no pg. #). Morrison describes Van Der Zee’s photos
paradoxically in that they are both “living” and “dead.” Because his subjects are
physically dead, his authorial desires do not have to contend with those of his
subjects, meaning he has more control over the final image than Bellocq has over his
Storyville prostitutes and Brita has over her authors simply because their subjects are
living beings with agency. As suggested in Chapter Three, Ondaatje’s Bellocq wants
very much to dominate the prostitutes he photographs and, thus, control the resulting
image, but he is unable to do so and his frustration drives him to commit suicide. As
suggested in Chapter Two, DeLillo’s Brita Nilsson, like Diane Arbus, dominates her
“city people” by preventing them from participating in the photographic process. Like
Bellocq, Brita and Arbus deny their subjects’ agency, but over time Brita comes to
find her “city people” series unsatisfying. For Brita, such authorial control leads to
the death of her project, whereas for Bellocq such control leads to the literal death of
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the author. When Brita begins her author series, however, she utilizes a completely
different approach than she did with her “city people.” No longer does she try to
dominate her subjects; rather, photography is a collaborative process in which the
subject has agency and actively participates in the construction of the final image.
Such collaboration highlights the dual nature of photography, in the sense that it is
both a transparent document and an aesthetic work of art, as DeLillo indicates
through the inclusion of the Tiananmen Square and mass wedding photos. Both
photos seem to document an exact historical moment, but they are actually highly
ambiguous, as Ondaatje indicates with the Bolden Band photo and Morrison indicates
with the Van Der Zee photo.
Although his subjects may be dead, Van Der Zee’s photos are full of narrative
life. By mentioning the “narrative quality” of Van Der Zee’s photos, Morrison
suggests, as I argued in Chapter Two, that a still photo depicts a single moment in a
continuum of moments and, because of this, behind each photo lies a story, or
narrative. An end note by Van Der Zee and a few lines of poetry by Owen Dodson
(52), provide all that is known historically about the anonymous young woman, who
was shot and killed at a party by someone she knew but refused to name. Morrison
borrows this brief historical narrative for the basic plot of Jazz, naming the
anonymous woman Dorcas Manfred and her unknown assailant, Joe Trace,
effectively improvising on the historical gaps surrounding both of their identities. In
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keeping with the historical narrative, Joe shoots Dorcas at a party, she refuses to
identify him, and she dies before morning; at her funeral, which is when the Van Der
Zee photo would have been taken, Violet stabs Dorcas’ already-dead body. This, like
the naming of Dorcas and Joe, is an improvisation on Morrison’s part. Morrison
reveals the basic plot of her novel on the first page, which might seem to end the story
before it has even begun; however, like Marcelle Smith Rice, “I contend that [Van
Der Zee’s] snapshot is not an endpoint,…but rather a starting point for Morrison to
explore the lives of all those people touched by Dorcas’ death” (146). Which is to
say, the Van Der Zee photo and the young woman’s historical narrative supply a
sequence of events, but they do not explain how and why she was shot, or why she
refused to name the guilty party.7
Morrison’s novel begins where the photo and historical narrative end, by
detailing the lives and identities of Violet, Joe, and Dorcas, as well as how the affair
began and ended, and how Violet came to stab Dorcas’ already-dead body. In this
way, “The image of the dead girl bec[o]me[s] the bluesy riff that is Jazz” (Marcelle
Smith Rice 144), since it provides the theme or topic upon which the characters and
Morrison improvise. To put it another way, Morrison riffs on the photo’s historical

7 This is a frequent opening strategy for Morrison. For instance, the opening sentence of Paradise
(1997) reads: “They shoot the white girl first” (3), but the reader does know why or who “they” are
until much later. In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature,” Morrison discusses how she does something similar in The Bluest Eye (1970), where “the
text is wide open the moment the cover is opened” because “the complete ‘plot’ [is] on the first page”
(24).