MFS Modern Fiction Studies

1.

We may as well enter the novel by way of the one word title, Jazz, a stop consonant and a flatted monosyllable that extends into a voiced double sibilant. Like the muted soundsplash of a brush against a snare drum. "Sth, I know that woman," a woman's voice cautions in a whisper, then it suddenly drops us, without warning, into a confusing world.

The confusion arises from the speed of the telling. Fragments of information rush along unconnectedly. A woman and a flock of birds; a man both sad and happy; he has shot an eighteen-year-old girl; Violet (the voice drops briefly, between commas, to touch on the woman's name) cuts up the girl's dead face at a funeral, then hurries back to her apartment where she sets the flock free "to freeze or fly" (an unusual yoking of verbs and choices); one is a parrot that says, "I love you."

The voice, a written voice, hurtles along offering no explanations, dropping more bits of information that stubbornly refuse to come together and make sense: that the man, Joe Trace, is Violet's husband, that Violet is fifty and skinny, that the dead girl had a creamy [End Page 733] face, that the girl has an aunt, that there's an upstairs neighbor, Malvonne. We read on impatiently, wanting to interrupt and ask questions, but this voice is in a reckless hurry to tell everything at once without stopping. It throws in additional information, about spring, about another girl, another threesome. It slows down at last, a little out of breath, hinting at some kind of mystery at the end: "What turned out different was who shot whom" (6). We read on, on, bewildered but intrigued, looking at the words, listening to their rhythm, their rhythms, seeking desperately to discover the meanings of the text. Halfway through the novel we pause to take stock, to put things together, to get our bearings.

A visual examination of the layout of Jazz reveals that it has no numbered chapters and no chapter titles to act as guides. The text has been cut into unnumbered unequal sections, ten of them, divided by blank pages that compel even the fast page turner to slow down. Each section is further cut into a number of unequal subsections: the first (1-21) has three subsections separated by two-line gaps; the last (219-229), seven.

Here is a musical score that has to be made to spring into audial life, into sound and rhythm and beat. The inner ear listens to what one reads, and the words begin to take wing, to leap into sound:

Blues man. Black and bluesman. Blacktherefore blue man.Everybody knows your name.Where-did-she-go-and-why man. So-lonesome-l-could-die man.Everybody knows your name.

(119)

A six string guitar at play. The first line sounds three chords, the tonic, the subdominant, and the dominant, combinations of "blues" and "black" and "man." Words are made to merge, like notes, to create run-on sounds. The third line continues the run-ons, the finger style playing of the individual notes of two chords that echo, and rhyme, and connect "why" and "die" but leave the connection a mystery ("man" here is not a word but an expression, an afternote). Line four is a repeat of line two ("Everybody knows your name"), and both act as chordal closures.¹ The text, vibrant with sound and rhythm, invites us, we slowly realize, to set aside Cartesian logic in order to enter a magic world that cries out for deeper modes of knowing. We flip back to pages that had sounded intriguing, but we did not know why.

Dorcas' aunt listens to the maddening new sounds that spring out of Harlem and hit her below the sash, as she puts it. A "dirty, [End Page 734] get-on-down" music (58), a "juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music" (59) that compelled hips and feet to move, a music that infuriated her "for doing what it did and did and did to her and everybody else she knew or knew about" (59). The harsh blare of the consonants, the staccato generated by the commas that insist on hesitations needed to accelerate the beat, the deliberate use of alliteration and of words repeated to speed tempo—all come together to recreate the impact of jazz.

Eighteen-year-old Dorcas, lying in bed, listens to the same intoxicating music that courses through and is part of her being:

tickled and happy knowing that there was no place to be where somewhere, close by, somebody was not licking his licorice stick, tickling the ivories, beating his skins, blowing off his horn while a knowing woman sang ain't nobody going to keep me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it right here, or else.

(60)

This time Toni Morrison seeks to create the very rhythms of jazz, a very specific sexual term in its origins, according to James Baldwin, as in "jazz me, baby" (The Price 650). Sexual metaphors, charged with energy, leap into life. Language is made to syncopate, the printed words loosen up and begin to move, the syntax turns liquid and flows. It is not just the jargon—licorice stick for clarinet, ivories for the piano, skins for drums—but the sounds of jazz that arise from the text and hit the ear.

The syllables "ick" and "ing" act in counterpoint. The "ick," first sounded in "tickled," continues to sound, like a pair of drum-sticks clicking, in licking, licorice, stick, ticking, making the submerged sexual innuendoes sound loud and clear. The participial "-ing" (set up by the first "knowing") is repeated to maintain a continuous flow of movement: licking, tickling, beating, blowing, knowing, going. Internal echo-rhymes ("where," "somewhere") and balanced repetition ("somewhere," "somebody") quicken the tempo. The tiny riff ("where somewhere, close by, somebody") with its deliberate commas, placed to compel the voice to pause, enacts a slow shimmy. The three song titles, unpunctuated, are made to run on together so that the sexual vibes, released by a "knowing" woman, are light and easy before they develop a pronounced sexual beat ("you got to get it bring it and put it right here").² The whole passage ends with a period that is no period, for the voice does not drop but continues to sound. "Or else" is indefinite, incomplete, it is a warning, or else a promise. It resonates, and how does one punctuate a resonance? [End Page 735]

That the whole of Jazz resonates becomes clear only after we slowly discover how to respond to its rhythms. Then sentences sing, then adjectives turn into breathless run-ons. Dorcas has a "cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail" face (12). Violet lies under a quilt made of "no-question-about-it" satin (224). Harlem, in New York, in 1926, is a Jordan, a City of promise that the narrator trumpets forth with joy: "Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff" (7). Violet imagines Joe Trace and Dorcas listening to music, the girl's hand under the table, "drumming out the rhythm on the inside of his thigh, his thigh, his thigh, thigh, thigh" (95).

In Jazz Morrison transposes into another medium the music that sprang out of her people and expressed their joys, their sorrows, their beliefs, their psyche. This music—spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz—has spread throughout the world in our time, and is no longer uniquely or exclusively African American. There's need now, suggests Morrison, to make fiction do what the music used to do, tell the whole wide world the ongoing story of her people. In Beloved she used the blues mode of fiction to conjure up and exorcise, to expiate and to pass on, the "disremembered" dark world of slaves and of slavery.³Jazz dramatizes what happened to those born after Emancipation who migrated from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North to seek both refuge and a new way of life. To transform what happened into a magical performance staged for an audience of readers Morrison had to invent (in its Latin meaning) a language and discover a new form.

She had gradually (by writing the first four novels) to make the language she inherited her very own, then transform it (in Beloved and in Jazz) into a powerful instrument that could play her music. In this, she is like Louis Armstrong, who played a number of instruments, including the cornet, before he discovered the tonal range of the trumpet (after "West End Blues"), an instrument he made his very own, according to Graham Collier, "by incorporating all manner of vibratos, glissandos, growls, shakes and gradations of tone into his technique" (10).

The range of my language determines the range of my world, says Wittgenstein. By the time she came to the writing of Jazz, Morrison had created a medium for herself that had a tonal stretch and an intrinsic musicality. She made the black vernacular blend harmoniously with standard English so that we do not sense awkward or obvious shifts of key. She combed out the vernacular; she purified the dialect of the tribe.⁴ Words of all kinds flow smoothly along. [End Page 736] Black idiom does not call attention to itself, nor is the language surface disturbed by heavy abstract Latinate words. The basic voice used in Jazz is warm and human, reassuring, a voice of quiet authority in command of itself.

That's the kind of voice that issues out of the audible text, Morrison's tape recording of Jazz.⁵ Very like the voice of Ma Rainey or of Bessie Smith singing the blues on early records. The words that pour out sound rich and mellow, with a lilt all their own and a steady speed. Toni Morrison's voice has a low but dynamic register. No dramatic changes of tempo occur, but there are subtle modulations and variations especially when it presents dialogue. During the exchanges between Alice Manfred and Violet (79-87, 109-114) tonal inflections—pauses, voice drops, punctuations of silence—communicate why and how the two women feel drawn to each other. Towards the end, when Felice and Violet and Joe Trace talk and offer dramatic revelations (198-216), the black vernacular with its flicks of irony, its touches of humor, its use of understatement (and quite purged of phonetic dross), comes alive and resonant.

Morrison uses many strategies to make the visual, as opposed to the audible, text resound. Her aim was, as she has said in several of her interviews, "to . . . remove the print-quality of language to put back the oral quality, where intonation, volume, gesture are all there" ("Toni Morrison," Tate 126). She wanted "to make the story appear oral, meandering, effortless, spoken" ("Rootedness" 341). She wanted to "make a truly aural novel" ("Toni Morrison," Ruas 233). The reader has to actively participate in the process of musicalizing the text before it will yield up all its meanings.

Often she uses the rhetorical device of repetition to intensify the beat in order to deepen meaning. A deceptively simple two-part statement about the Beast that "slaughtered children because it yearned to be slaughtered children" (78) has to be eye-read first, then ear-read with care. For the beat falls on the first "slaughtered" (a verb) and not on the second (an adjective) where it shifts to "children." Eight-year-old Dorcas must have seen the flames of the house in which her mother was burned alive to a crisp. But, the narrator says, "she never said. Never said anything about it. She went to two funerals in five days, and never said a word" (57; italics mine). The repetition does not merely generate the rhythm of pause and emphasis and release, it calls attention to and dramatizes the psychic wound that festers silently in the eighteen-year-old Dorcas.

Morrison generally abides by the conventions of print and rarely uses typography to convey signals to her readers. In Jazz only once [End Page 737] does she juxtapose capitals, an exclamation mark, and italics to call for an increase in volume: "NO! that Violet is not somebody walking round town" (95). The expression, "that Violet," is used nineteen times in one section (89-114) to indicate a Violet powerfully affected and changed by the city. What Morrison uses as a major device is punctuation. Not of the modern kind, not one that is merely correct and grammatical, not one that aims at logic, clarity and directness of meaning. The punctuation in Jazz is rhythmical. It transforms the text into a musical score, it compels the use of both eye and ear; what it generates is a cadence that makes meanings vibrate. Morrison's use of the art of pointing (that's what punctuation is) enables the listening reader to descend into a deeper mode of knowing. What appears on the surface to be just the story of a sordid affair—a fifty-three-year-old man deceives his wife of thirty-three years to have a fling with an eighteen-year-old girl who soon deserts him before he shoots her at a house rent party—turns into a delicate exploration of the mystery of love.

Punctuation and repetition combine to set in motion rhythms that amplify the significance of this story. "Abandoned" by their mothers, Joe and Dorcas feel drawn to each other because of the "inside nothing" within them, a nothing that only they can fill for each other. A paragraph dramatizes the genesis of Dorcas' "inside nothing":

Maybe her nothing was worse since she knew her mother, and had even been slapped in the face by her for some sass she could not remember. But she did remember, and told him so, about the slap across her face, the pop and sting of it and how it burned. How it burned, she told him. And of all the slaps she got, that one was the one she remembered best because it was the last. She leaned out the window of her best girlfriend's house because the shouts were not part of what she was dreaming. They were outside her head, across the street. Like the running. Everybody running. For water? Buckets? The fire engine, polished and poised in another part of town? There was no getting in that house where her clothespin dolls lay in a row. In a cigar box. But she tried anyway to get them. Barefoot, in the dress she had slept in, she ran to get them, and yelled to her mother that the box of dolls, the box of dolls was up there on the dresser can we get them? Mama?

(38)

This deceptively simple paragraph both conceals and reveals Morrison's superb skill as a writer. The opening sentence pours out of the narrator, easy and casual, the colloquial "sass" folding into the language flow. Four interconnected words send forth vibrations. The first two, "nothing" and "mother," stir up a double sense of loss, [End Page 738] Dorcas' and Joe's; the other two, "slapped" and "remember," take us into Dorcas' nothingness. What Dorcas remembers is not her mother but the slap, the last slap she got from her mother, the slap that "burned" (this verb quivers with meanings). What Dorcas really remembers and misses intensely is her dead mother's caring love. Rhythmic phrasing transforms the slap into a form of love. Words ("slap," "remember," "told") and phrases ("how it burned") are not just repeated but made to flow across sentences, like musical slurs across bars, to create continuity. Commas and periods carefully placed after the words repeated ("remember," "burned") make for subtle variations of rising and falling pitch.

The shifts in rhythm parallel the shifts in narration. The narrator of the first sentence steps aside. The second sentence, and the third, and the fourth, are channeled through the eighteen-year-old Dorcas who tells her lover about her recall of the last slap. Then the narrative becomes a torrent of sensations and feelings and detail that pours out of the eight-year-old Dorcas, who relives the incident that caused her psychic wound. The pace quickens, the tempo now increases. There are syntactic breaks, fragments and repetition across fragments ("Like the running. Everybody running"). Question marks signal the bewilderment of the eight-year-old who is frantic about her beloved clothespin dolls. Details—the bare feet, the dress, the cigar box, the dresser—make the scene vividly real, while the information about the gleaming fire engine, ready in whitetown but deliberately not dispatched, provides a political dimension of which the little girl is unaware. What she knows is that her box of dolls is in the burning house. In a state of panic she runs and screams, screams to her mother to get the dolls on the dresser. At the end the eight-year-old just screams. For her mother. We do not know what happens, nor do we need to know. The last word ("Mama?") with its question mark is more than a child's scream, it is eighteen-year-old Dorcas' intolerable cry of remembered anguish, it is a question that soars straight up despairingly into the sky, resounding silence the answer.

2.

Jazz is made up of a number of such rhythmic paragraphs, subsections and sections that together compose a musical score. The novel has a loose fluid non-Aristotelian experimental form. Not the tight, climactic, Freytag-pyramid structure of conventional fiction, but the form of a jazz piece.⁶ Toni Morrison oralizes print. She also [End Page 739] uses her language instrument to try out some daring modes and techniques of play and to create the informal, improvisatory patterning of jazz.

The visual layout—the lack of rigid chapter divisions, the unnumbered sections with blank pages in between, the unequal subsections separated by two-line gaps—appears to dissolve as word sounds begin to move. Toni Morrison produces a textual continuum by using transitional slurs and glides across sections. "In a hat in the morning" ends one section; "the hat pushed back on her forehead. . ." the next section begins (87, 89; italics mine). "Pain" opens another section, picking up the last wordsound, "pain," of the previous section (216, 219). Two words "spring" and "city" act as a glissando causing two sections to slide together (114, 117). "But where is she?", at the end of a section, is a dramatic question about Wild, the mother whom Joe hunts for in Vienna for the last time in 1906; the answer, two blank pages later, "there she is," opens the next section and refers, strangely, not to Wild but to Dorcas in 1926 in the City (184, 187).

Such carry-overs make for rhythmic flow. Unlike the clearly demarcated movements of a symphony, the sections of Jazz never come to a complete stop. Like nonstop sequences during a jam session, they keep moving restlessly on and on giving the text a jazz feel. For Morrison tries to approximate not only the sounds of jazz but also the patterning. The first few pages, like a twelve-bar jazz "tune" or set melody, tell in summary the whole story of Violet and Joe and Dorcas, a story repeated and modulated at the end by that of Violet and Joe and Felice, Dorcas' friend, "another true-as-life Dorcas" (197), as the narrator informs us. In between the beginning and the end are amplifications, with improvisations, variations and solo statements, a virtuoso display of jazz play. Morrison wants her fiction "to recreate play and arbitrariness in the way narrative events unfold" ("Memory" 388). Jazz is a shimmering network of characters and of strands of action.

The characters are cross-connected in strange ways. Joe's Dorcas (whose biblical name means "gazelle") is a city version and a repeat of the deer-eyed Wild, the mother who orphaned her newly born baby, never looked at it, or held it in her arms (170). Young Joe hunted for a mother he never could find, and then discovers there-she-is Dorcas in the City in 1926. His Violet helped Joe escape the emptiness within himself in 1893, when he fell out of a walnut tree into her life. By marrying Violet, Joe rescued her from the dark [End Page 740] memory of her mother, Rose Dear, who had flung herself into a well in 1892.

These story strands do not assume a plot pattern. Nor do they build to a climax or climb steadily to a crescendo. The narrative sets its own pace and meanders along through place and time, shifting between the City and the country, presenting freeflowing associated events in the lives of Joe and Violet and Dorcas, wandering off at times to relate the experiences of their friends and relations. And so we get to know a whole cast of tangential characters and events seemingly unconnected. We are told what happened to Joe and Violet before the move to the City in 1906. Orphan Joe's story is connected with that of Hunters Hunter, who was present when Wild gave birth to Joe and, as a father figure, taught him hunting skills and shaped his sensibility, especially his protective regard for women.

We also come to know in some detail the story of Hunters Hunter who, as a boy, was briefly involved with a rich landowner's daughter, Vera Louise Gray. The strange by-product of their sexual escapades would have been just a "mortification" to be disposed of (178), had the baby not had radiantly golden skin and, later, gray eyes. Golden Gray was raised and spoiled by his mother in Baltimore, helped by her servant, True Belle, Violet's grandmother, who also adored the little boy with his golden curls.

At eighteen, told by his mother that his father was "a black-skinned nigger" (145), in despair perhaps at the paradox of being a white black, then told what he has to do by True Belle, Golden Gray journeys to Vienna to discover and, perhaps, to kill his father. On the way he encounters Wild and, fascinated by her, she "of luminous eyes and lips to break your heart" (155), forgets his mission of vengeance and disappears with her into the woods, after assisting at the birth of Joe. The strange story of Joe, the strange attendants at his strange birth and his unsuccessful quest for his mother, reads like a primitive folk tale with mythic overtones.

More down to earth is the interconnected story of Violet and her family, a tragic story of poverty and dispossession, with an absent father (involved in some way with the Virginia Readjusters, but of no real help to his own family) and a mother who commits suicide. It is the grandmother, True Belle, a former slave, who rescues the family from despair and teaches them the lessons of laughter and survival. She is what Morrison has termed the "advising, benevolent, protective, wise Black ancestor" ("City Limits" 39), the tribal mother in whom rests the wisdom of the race, the savior figure [End Page 741] who propels Violet to Palestine where she meets Joe and acquires inner strength and confidence.

These intertwined strands of stories seem to lead nowhere and appear to lack coherence and pattern. Of all the characters, only Joe and Violet migrate to the City where they are involved with Malvonne, the Traces's upstairs neighbor from whom Joe rents a room for his meetings with Dorcas, and with Alice Manfred, Dorcas' aunt, who brought the eight-year-old orphan from riot-torn East St. Louis to live with her in Harlem. The other stories are incomplete. Some characters disappear. We never know what happens to Hunters Hunter—neither does Joe. Nor is the mystery of Wild and of Golden Gray ever solved. We never see them again. What we are left with is what Joe sees in 1906: a cave, sunlit and set in a rock formation above a flowing river named Treason by white folks, and unmistakable signs of domesticity and peace within (184). But where is she, Joe's question, triggers other questions never answered: what? who? why?

Why? we too ask. Why the strange patterning, the crazy chronology, why not focus on the story of Joe and Violet and Dorcas? Answers suggest themselves. More than just a story of three individuals, the novel, a continuation of Beloved, jazzifies the history of a people. Morrison extends the range of her fictional world by giving us rapid and vivid glimpses of their life in the rural South after emancipation.

The stories of Joe and Violet are set against the bleak conditions in the South at the time: segregation, the exploitation of labor by white landowners, the miserable wages paid, brutal eviction from lands and houses, the injustices and deceptions practiced on people deliberately kept illiterate. This sociopolitical context is not just background detail presented in the detached language of sociology. It is brought to dynamic life by breaking up chronology (so that time-fragments can be moved and can be kept moving) and by using light irony and wry humor to undercut the pain.

Morrison appropriates the blues mode to distance and so to intensify and refine the suffering in order to strip it of sentimentality. Four years after the dispossession, in 1892, the narrator twice tells us, Rose Dear jumped in the well and missed all the fun (99, 102). In 1901 Joe and Violet were evicted from a piece of land they had bought, but Joe does not complain, only stating, "'Like a fool I thought they'd let me keep it. They ran us off with two slips of paper I never saw nor signed'" (126). The technique is like that used in a Louis Armstrong jazz piece: "What did I do," he asks, "what did [End Page 742] I do, to be so black and blue?", playing on words lightly, uncomplainingly, repeating them softly. "My only sin," he sings, "is in my skin," the echo-rhyme giving the words an ironic edge. His raspy growl with its tonal spread (on the words "do" and "black"), the accompanying groundbeat, both intensify and deepen what he means.

The rhythm changes for the presentation of the race riots of the time, but the technique does not. Facts are set down coldly, matter-of-factly, the voice never raised. Over two hundred dead in East St. Louis, the narrator tells us and then adds a deadly aside: "So many whites killed the papers would not print the number" (57). Dorcas' father is "pulled off a streetcar and stomped to death," her mother "burned crispy" (57). Joe does not elaborate on the 1917 summer riots of New York when he was almost burned alive. There were four-day hangings in Rocky Mount, the narrator tells us. But it wasn't messy at all, no, an orderly decorum was maintained: "the men on Tuesday, the women two days later" (101). A young tenor is tied to a log and castrated. The narrator focuses not on visual horror but on the grandmother, "refusing to give up his waste-filled trousers, washing them over and over although the stain had disappeared at the third rinse" (101). The obvious is never stated: that the act of repeated washing is the grandmother's way of expressing her helpless inexpressible grief. Distancing intensifies horror.

One of the ways of escape from the horror and the suffering in the South was to go north. The rhythm changes once again to present the theme of migration, of people on the move, on the go. It has a quick beat that accelerates to capture the excitement, the anxieties laced with hope, the joy and the abandon of a million people entering a land where the cities of the North dissolve into one big City, Harlem.⁷ Trains carry them there, and Morrison's phrasing enacts both the rhythm of the wheels and the cascading swirl of sensations and feelings just before entry:

When the train trembled approaching the water surrounding the City, they thought it was like them: nervous at having got there at last, but terrified of what was on the other side. Eager, a little scared, they did not even nap during the fourteen hours of a ride smoother than a rocking cradle. The quick darkness in the carriage cars when they shot through a tunnel made them wonder if maybe there was a wall ahead to crash into or a cliff hanging over nothing. The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet. Joe stood up, his fingers clutching the baggage rack above his head. He felt the dancing better that way, and told Violet to do the same.

(30) [End Page 743]

The ten participial "-ing"s create a sensation of continuous speed; the anapestic beat is unmistakable, and nonstop like the rhythm of a train; commas, found at the beginning of the passage and reintroduced towards the end, enact the hesitations of the people, the slowdown of the train; the train itself, with its trembling and dancing carriage cars, comes alive, like the trembling (with fear and anxiety) and the dancing (with joy) people it carries along.

The jazz sequence (30-34) celebrates the frenzy of a flood of people seeking a promised haven they now can see: "The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it" (33). Morrison and her language turn into a one-woman band to convey the frantic search for the City of refuge. The ensemble turns a roll-call of city names into music and plays repetitions and modulations of the groundbeat: the mad rush of people escaping from "Springfield Ohio, Springfield Indiana, Greensburg Indiana, Wilmington Delaware, New Orleans Louisiana" (33), moving "west to Kansas City or Oklahoma; north to Chicago or Bloomington Indiana" (98), shuttling between cities, traveling "from Georgia to Illinois, to the City, back to Georgia, out to San Diego" (32), finally surrendering themselves to the City.

Then Morrison's solo comes through loud, clear, and unique, distinctly her own, telling the story of two to represent a million, singing the experiences of Joe and Violet as they "train-dance" into the big City (36): "They weren't even there yet and already the City was speaking to them. They were dancing. And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. Like a million more they could hardly wait to get there and love it back" (32).

3.

This sequence initiates the setting up of the novel's major theme: the impact of their most recent move on the psyche of a people. The earlier "move," over two hundred years ago, had taken place on black slaveships from a land beyond the sea.⁸ This time the journey, from the rural South—which for many of the uprooted had begun to feel like home (111)—to the industrial North, from country to city, was not as traumatic but was profound. It changed them.

In order to record and present this continuing process of change in fictional form, Morrison had to use unusual narrative strategies. [End Page 744] A totally objective narrator would have been too distant, too impersonal; an ordinary first-person one too involved, too limited, to understand the tribulations of a people. Morrison makes use of a number of voices and tellers. These voices blend and change, then shift into viewpoints that switch (at times in the same paragraph) and slide, then become voices again. The process of thinking turns into a point of view, then changes into a voice. A mysterious "I" enters and speaks for a while, turns objective, disappears, and reenters again and again. We have to be alert at all times, the ear at the ready, to pick up and put together the "arrangement" of echoes of sound and meaning that these connected voices release. Morrison adapts the oral/musical mode of storytelling that relies on listening and memory.

Section four (89-114), which revolves around the activities of Violet, illustrates this mode vividly. It is late March 1926, and we enter a drugstore (Duggie's) with Violet. The narrator takes us into a Violet aware of another Violet, "that Violet," within her. The angles of the telling keep shifting constantly, shuttling between the Violet that was, in the country, and the Violet that is, the one whose psyche has been deformed by her twenty years in the City, so that people call her "Violent." At times Violet recalls the past briefly, she talks with Alice Manfred, at times she uses the first person (97); at other times the strange narrator slips into an "I," quite unobtrusively (101). We move back and forth in time (between 1888 and 1926) and in place (from Vesper County, Virginia, to the City), coming to know almost the whole story of Violet, bits and pieces of which we had been told in the first three sections.

We come to know details about Dorcas' funeral, about Violet's first meeting with Joe, about Rose Dear's suicide. We are now aware of the reasons behind Violet's "public crazinesses" (22), of the forces in her that made her pick up (not steal) the baby with the "honey-sweet, butter-colored face" (19) so that people thought she was crazy. And of the two hungers in her: the unfulfilled "mother-hunger" (108)—she and Joe didn't want babies at first; she had three miscarriages; later she sleeps with a doll in her arms—and the stories True Belle had fed Violet about the golden-skinned baby that made her yearn to be "White. Light. Young again" (208),⁹ as she later confesses to Alice. Amid the whirl of detail a truth hits Violet about Joe and about herself: "Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and [End Page 745] so was he" (97). We easily make the cross-connections: that Joe's heart drew him inevitably, via Wild, to Dorcas, and that for Violet, Joe was a substitute for Golden Gray. Perhaps Violet will be able to solve the "mystery of love" (5).

We are given more hints about the mystery. Morrison offers three sections that take us into the inner beings of three major characters, Joe, Dorcas and Felice. She does not use the Joycean stream-of-consciousness, perhaps because she wants to do more, penetrate below consciousness into the psyche. She makes use of the first-person talking voice, a voice that talks not to someone else but to one's unpolluted self. Joe talks to himself and, towards the end of his section, to Dorcas, his other self. His section, placed in quotation marks (121-135), compels us to realize how the city has changed him.

In the country, hunting in vain for Wild, having tracked her down to an isolated rock formation above a river teeming with fish, aware of the music of her unseen presence everywhere around, Joe had first whispered a loud plea to her to say something, to give him a sign, at least to show him a hand. What he got was a nothing (which lodged within him) and a resounding silence. Then desperate when four redwings (a sure sign of Wild's presence) "shot" up out of the base of a strange white-oak tree (it was entwined in its own roots as though nourishing and protecting itself), Joe had "shot" at it with an unloaded shotgun, discharging his anger harmlessly. In the City, hunting for Dorcas, who has abandoned him, Joe is driven by his hunter self to shoot her using a silencer: "But if 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).

Dorcas too is driven by forces the City unleashes in her. Lacking the sustenance provided by nature and by the country, cut off suddenly from her mother's nurturing love, strictly disciplined by her terrified aunt, Dorcas is a rebel, a wild creature of the City who takes in the intoxicating words of that "knowing" woman: you got to get it bring it and put it right here or else (60). Her talk to her self, just after she is shot, compresses all we need to know: "They need me to say his name so they can go after him. Take away his sample case with Rochelle and Bernadine and Faye inside. I know his name but Mama won't tell. The world rocked from a stick beneath my hand, Felice. There in that room with the ice sign in the window" (193). A dying girl talking urgently to her inner self, and to Felice, her other self, telling what she now knows about her self. Joe's [End Page 746] sample case with its Cleopatra products dissolves into the cigar box with the clothespin dolls she had loved. The room with the ominous iceman's sign in the window becomes not just a place for assignation but one where human love, noble and pure, and almost cosmic ("the world rocked"), and warmly sexual ("a stick beneath my hand") also fleetingly manifests itself. Her love is so generous and self-sacrificial that she allows herself to bleed to death rather than reveal his name for the police to find him.¹⁰ "Mama won't tell," she says, using a vibrant word that refers beyond herself to the primal source out of which all love springs.

The story of Dorcas reveals the tremendous impact the City makes on the young and the defenseless. It deludes them into believing that they are free to do what they want and get away with it. They do not realize the insidious "plans" of the well laid-out streets of the City that makes people do what it wants. The intoxicating rhythms of its music with its jazz beat never stop, they urge everyone every day to "come and do wrong" (67). City life is essentially street life (120). Country images, when used for city life, become charged with irony. Young men are sheiks "radiant and brutal" (120) or else "roosters" that never pursue but lie in wait for the "chicks" to pass by and find them. Country tracks for hunting become city trails as Joe discovers. The City pumps desire (34) and transforms love into a soaring "love appetite" (67). Only a nameless parrot in a cage can utter an "I love you" in the City.

Even the older women are affected by the City. Some await the arrival of "Imminent Demise" (56) or the coming of the God of Wrath. The call-and-response give-and-take of church preaching generates a jazz patterning with words repeated, questions asked, answers given:

He was not just on His way, coming, coming to right the wrongs done to them, He was here. Already. See? See? What the world had done to them it was now doing to itself. Did the world mess over them? Yes but look where the mess originated. Were they berated and cursed? Oh yes but look how the world cursed and berated itself. Were the women fondled in kitchens and the back of stores? Uh huh.

(77-78)

Questions trigger staccato responses like "yes" qualified by a "but" and confirmed by an "uh huh." Lacking a wise ancestor, some turn for support to "leagues, clubs, societies, sisterhoods" (78). Others turn wild, for there's no helping hand to rely on. They arm themselves with "folded blades, packets of lye, shards of glass taped to their hands" (78) in order to attack, and to defend themselves from attack. [End Page 747]

4.

Morrison had to create a special narrator who could survey and present the City's far-ranging impact and also maintain the jazz pace of the story. Not one who was objective (too cold, human involvement was essential), not one who was omniscient (that kind wouldn't be dramatic and couldn't produce tempo), not one of the characters (that kind would limit story range). She made use of an overarching narrator who could be both detached and involved and, perhaps, unlike the other voices and tellers, attempt to understand the significance of the story of a people, the meaning of their history.

"Sth," this narrator begins, using a cautionary female whisper. We read on wanting to discover to whom this first-person voice belongs. Our first clue is a tantalizing proclamation; "I'm crazy about this City" (7). Almost immediately the mystery deepens, for we are offered a series of strange statements:

I haven't got any muscles, so I can't really be expected to defend myself. But I do know how to take precaution. Mostly it's making sure no one knows all there is to know about me. Second, I watch everything and everyone and try to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do. You have to understand what it's like, taking on a big city: I'm exposed to all sorts of ignorance and criminality. Still, this is the only life for me.

(8)

Patiently we play detective, note the clues, make deductions about this narrator who tries to be self-effacing, never intrusive. No muscles: a disembodied voice perhaps, the voice of the City. It uses city idiom; its language is simple and colloquial, but not quite clear. What does it mean to take on a city, why is this the only life? I watch everything and everyone, it says. Perhaps this "I" is an all-seeing eye, all-piercing too, one that can penetrate human motives and plans. We think suddenly of the myths of Plato and of the Bhagavad Gita.

And then of the epigraph of Jazz which we had bypassed:

I am the name of the sound    and the sound of the name.I am the sign of the letter    and the designation of the division.

"Thunder, Perfect Mind," The Nag Hammadi

"Thunder," a short tractate in the Nag Hammadi collection, is a revelation discourse uttered by a goddess figure whose name is [End Page 748] Thunder, which in Greek is feminine. Thunder is the way in which Zeus tonans makes his presence known on earth, a heavenly voice. In this tractate, according to Douglas M. Parrott, "Thunder is allegorized as Perfect Mind, meaning the extension of the divine into the world" (296). That it is the thunder goddess who narrates the story becomes clear at last in the first paragraph of the final section of Jazz, where the words "thunder" and "storm," the phrase "I the eye of the storm," and the statement "I break lives to prove I can mend them back again" are heard (219).

A strange narrator this, this female immanence of the divine, perplexing, full of contradictions, a narrator that changes as her story moves on. By the time the end draws near, she has lost the city confidence she had in herself and in her telling. At first she claims to be "curious, inventive and well-informed" (137). But then she accuses herself of being careless, stupid and unreliable (160). She bewails her racially determined mistake about Golden Gray's motive: not out of revenge related to skin color does he drive to Vienna, but because of his desperate need for a father figure and for authentic being (159). The narrator-deity hastens to mend matters. What she does is unclear: she uses her powers to invoke the spirit of love that rises mysteriously out of a well (surely the one into which Rose Dear flung herself)¹¹ and enters Golden Gray's being. That's why, perhaps, he and Wild go away together.

Despite all her powers, this female deity cannot really penetrate human hearts and understand what being human means. She is surprised at the way the story of Violet and Joe and Dorcas/Felice ends, for she had overestimated the powerful impact of the City and underestimated the human resilience that enables a whole people to believe they will overcome. She had expected that "one would kill the other" (220). Instead Violet and Joe come together and heal each other. Felice heals Joe by telling him that Dorcas loved him at the end, that she let herself die for his sake. Unlike Dorcas who allowed the City to shape her, Felice, urged on by the changed Violet, will not allow the world to change her self, but will make up her own world. And will be happy, as her name suggests.

At the end it is spring, a time of awakening. We now know the many implications of the question that had sounded simple at the beginning: "who shot whom" (6). We know, even though City people think that the threesome on Lenox Avenue is "scandalizing" (6), that all three have somehow managed to put their lives together. Even the invisible narrator, who has watched human beings love and heal each other, changes, released from her long isolation after [End Page 749] she is touched (in more ways than one) by Wild's eyes and her hug, and her hand—Wild's mysterious way of showing love, perhaps (221).

Jazz doesn't solve but does celebrate instead the mystery of human love. Of human life, too. It asks questions, not cosmic questions like unde malum, but questions about the presence of evil in the city streets. The story of Joe and Dorcas is associated with the Garden of Eden and the apple.¹² Human beings (as Morrison's other novels, especially Tar Baby, imply) have to move out of Paradise to enjoy the fruit of knowledge and to experience love and pleasure and pain. After twenty years in the City, fifty-three-year-old Joe has not lost his country innocence and is still a sixteen-year-old "kid" (121), until he meets Dorcas. Through Felice, Dorcas sends Joe a cryptic message, "There's only one apple. . . . Just one" (213). The message confirms Joe's interpretation of the Eden story: "I told you again that you were 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" (133).

Violet, at fifty, aware that the place of shade without trees awaits her (110), sighs out her disappointment with life. It is Alice Manfred who tells her what to do: don't just accept life, but "make it, make it" in this world (113). Through what happened to Dorcas, Alice was taught "just how small and quick this little bitty life is" (113) and that it doesn't help to live in fear. She turns into the city version of True Belle, who taught Violet and her family how to survive, with the truth that laughter is more serious than tears.

Dorcas' "Mama?," hurled up into the overarching sky, is a question that has no answer. It is a personal cry of anguish, a cry for help. It is also the cry of a whole people seeking a way out of suffering and injustice and despair. No answers are provided. Help is perhaps possible, suggested by the word "hand," which people seek, and offer, and sometimes find, and by "love," which can rise up like a Rose Dear smile out of a dark well, and which never really dies, even in the City. And also by jazz and the blues, music that quickens the sad bird Violet bought for Joe and for their apartment, a music that can render a people's pain and so transmute and transcend it.

What all this leads to is a question not to be asked. Like jazz, Jazz hits us below the Cartesian belt and offers us a powerful experience that does not insist on definite meanings. Hunters Hunter stops speculating about his encounters with the mysterious Wild: [End Page 750] "there's no gain fathoming more" (166).¹³Jazz does not offer us any solutions, or even a resolution.

Like Louis Armstrong's classic "West End Blues" (1928), the novel ends with a closing ensemble of interludes and breaks and brief solos. Played in a low register, at a slow blues tempo, the seven subsections (219-229) use stretched blue notes to restate and to purify earlier experiences of joy and pain. We catch, as in a break, a glimpse of fifty-eight-year-old Alice Manfred, who has gone back to Springfield, where she has "someone who can provide the necessary things for the night" (222). We see Felice walking with slow confidence on the City streets. A musical interlude gently evokes the memory of Violet, in 1906, in the country, tired and asleep after a day's hard work, laughing and happy as she lies dreaming, with Joe watching over her protectively. Another interlude: Joe and Violet, together again, walk the streets of the City together, or lie in bed together under a satin quilt as memories filter through to them:

Lying next to her, his head turned toward the window, he sees through the glass darkness taking the shape of a shoulder with a thin line of blood. Slowly, slowly it forms itself into a bird with a blade of red on the wing. Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on his chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well and down there somebody is gathering gifts (lead pencils, Bull Durham, Jap Rose Soap) to distribute to them all.

(224-225)

Darkness dissolves as we listen to this slow soft music that, like Joe's two-colored eyes, like Joe himself, is both sad and happy, a music of sibilants. The bloodred streak on Dorcas' shoulder turns into one of Wild's escort of redwings, while sunlight rims Rose Dear's well for Violet and a phantom father returns bearing small tokens of love (101).

The lead player then begins an improvisatory solo (226-228) using a moderate tempo. The words and notes and sounds stir our musical memories, for we have heard them all before: click and clicking, tap and snap and snapping fingers, shade and crevices, wells and the world, and golden hair, and hand. We now know better than to try to figure out what the solo means. What we experience is language trying to become music as it tries to capture the flow of human time.

At the very end the narrator-goddess, awakened by the mysterious power of human love, acutely conscious now of the "division" of the divine she had mentioned in the epigraph, intensely aware of her own aloneness and of her need for a hand and for a healing of division, utters a loud silent plea that is almost human: "If I were [End Page 751] able I'd say it. Say 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" (229).¹⁴