Toni Morrison's Jazz and the City

Out of three volumes of Toni Morrison's trilogy starting with Beloved (1987) and ending with Paradise (1997), Jazz (1992) may very well be most vocal. narrative's deliberately ungendered, unspecific voice and its avatars take center stage against a Harlem backdrop. But what consistently calls the with a capital C only indirectly functions as historical background. It seems to be doing much more than encoding Afro-American place. metropolis in 1926 is a vast receptacle of actual, historical, vocal, and memorial traces. Black Manhattan, as James Weldon Johnson used to call it, shapes up as a space of resistance in which all sorts of cultural practices resurface under oppressive conditions. Yet sense of place in Jazz, as Eudora Welty defines in her essay The Eye of Story, [1] is a fledgling, tentative one which only timidly heralds Paradise's discrimination-safe haven. As a new composite, City is conditioned by Great Migration from rural South which started in 1870s and climaxed between 1910 and 1930. Whatever traces of this former history survive in text remain fragmentary or else unarticulated. They sometimes even lead to literal dead ends. Derived from James Van Der Zee's eerie collection of photographs Harlem Book of Dead, narrative itself unfolds as a Book of Dead, a site of traumas forever replayed, revisited by characters of a new type of black diaspora. Just like Middle Passage of slaves across Atlantic, City of Harlem Renaissance in 1920s is some sort of zero moment in black history. disremembered and unaccounted (Beloved 275) stories of times past can only reemerge as loose fragments patched up by an uncertain if forceful narrator. And context narrator provides for these migrants' dreams also precludes any smooth representation of the glittering (Jazz 35) and its race music (79). voice registers--and yet fails to register--the oscillation between narrative construction and invention, or pauses. And as admits to its own unreliability, also allows its originally single-voiced authority to be questioned and eventually superseded by multi-vocality. In between narration and silence, its frantic vibrations echo fierce energy of turn-of-the-century Underwood Archives photographs in which entire blocks and buildings under construction stand halfway up, transfixed in some indefinite in-betweenness. In 1926 the was already much more than just a black neighborhood within Manhattan; was not even a within city, but capital of black America. And sense of place was essentially defined by what could no longer be, and by what wasn't quite yet. As narr ator says, a city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's bright steel rocking above shade below that does it (7). Some of these dreams however are endlessly deferred in Jazz, quite literally displaced so that they mirror book's discontinuous narrative sequences. A Discourse of Displacement Morrison's sixth novel plays with what could be called an aesthetic of displacement. In black diasporic tradition, displaced individuals embark on a journey of literal reconfiguring and remembering in New York's fluid framework. overpowering City frames story and influences lives of its inhabitants in much same way that James Van Der Zee's black-and-white photographs and comments frame dead people he photographed in Harlem funeral parlors in 1920s. One of his plates shows a dead girl shot by her lover. Toni Morrison chose to call her Dorcas. She was one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noise- less gun. She complained of being sick at party and friends... [took] her in room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw blood on her dress

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• The Modality of Toni Morrison's Jazz

  Chad Jewett•African American Review•2015

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