This text attempts to explore Toni Morrison’s strategic negotiation between essentialism and anti-essentialism in regard to the re-appropriation of African American musical aesthetics in fiction. The text also tries to examine how Morrison’s dual-stance positioning demonstrates the conscious strategy of achieving the double goal of recovering African American and female voices as well as of critiquing hegemonic cultural logics about race and gender.
To this end, I draw on some critics and musicians representing contending views regarding the cultural origins of jazz to argue how Morrison employs the music as a concurrent aesthetic/cultural metaphor for blackness and for American diversity through the re-appropriation of jazz characteristics in Jazz. As a whole, the text considers that the motivations behind Morrison’s accommodation of the two stances in her fiction are related to her strategic positioning that offers fruitful possibilities for mediating affirmations of difference and the necessity of racial, gender and cultural group politics.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Musical Aesthetics of Jazz
Morrison and Jazz
Jazz and Jazz Fiction
Writing Orality: Jazz as a Talking Book
The Relationship between the Phonic and the Graphic
Speech-based Poetics
Call-and-Response as a Model for Narration
(Author)-Narratee/Narrator-(Reader) Nexus
Narrator-Character Nexus
Violet Trace’s Responsive Rememories
Joe Trace’s Signifyin(g) Response
Dorcas’ Free, Risky Play
Felice’s Love for the New Music by Okeh
Golden Gray’s Bluesy Response
Conclusion
Objectives & Themes
This work examines how Toni Morrison utilizes jazz aesthetics—specifically improvisation, call-and-response, and polyrhythm—as a structural and thematic model to redefine the African American novel and reclaim cultural memory.
- The intersection of African American musical tradition and literary narrative.
- Morrison’s "talking book" concept and the interplay between orality and scripturality.
- The use of call-and-response as a tool to decentralize narrative authority and foster reader participation.
- The critique of essentialism through the lens of jazz-inflected prose fiction.
Excerpt from the Book
Speech-based Poetics
In correspondence to the epigraph, the text proper of the novel revolves around the paradoxical yet complementary interplay of orality and scripturality. Right from its first pages, the novel spotlights the condensed use of both paralinguistic and linguistic elements which enhance what June Jordan calls the “voiceprints of language.” For example, the vocally produced sound “Sth”, opening the novel in “Sth, I know that woman” (J 3), is interpreted as the susurration of the gossiping narrator, whisperingly starting to recount the story of Violet Trace who tries to avenge herself on the now dead young girl Dorcas by slashing her face, because she used to be the secret lover of her husband Joe Trace. The paralinguistic interjection ‘Sth’ is also construed as the sound of a phonograph’s stylus fixing in around the groove of a musical record playing the sound of percussion instruments. It might, in addition, refer to the hissing sound heard when the reader is turning the pages of the book while in the act of reading, emphasising thus, on the one hand, the physical tactile sensation the reader experiences in relation to the book as physical object and, more importantly, on the other hand, the quality of the novel’s language as representing the oral within the scriptural.
Summary of Chapters
Introduction: Establishes the connection between jazz and African American identity, framing jazz as a cultural and aesthetic practice that Morrison incorporates into her writing.
The Musical Aesthetics of Jazz: Explores Morrison’s familial and professional ties to music and how she utilizes aural qualities to create a "talking book" experience.
Writing Orality: Jazz as a Talking Book: Analyzes the relationship between speech and writing through Derridean theory, highlighting how the novel functions as an intersection of phonic and graphic modes.
Call-and-Response as a Model for Narration: Discusses the narrator-reader and narrator-character relationships, emphasizing how call-and-response techniques democratize the narrative process.
Conclusion: Summarizes how Morrison’s revisionist deployment of jazz aesthetics affirms the dual presence of essentialism and anti-essentialism in her work.
Keywords
Toni Morrison, Jazz, Call-and-Response, Orality, African American Literature, Improvisation, Narratology, Literary Theory, Black Music, Cultural Identity, Scripturality, Polyphony, Rememory, Modernism, Postmodernism
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary focus of this publication?
The work explores how Toni Morrison translates the musical characteristics and cultural philosophy of jazz into literary structures within her novel 'Jazz'.
What are the central thematic fields?
Key themes include the transformation of African American vernacular traditions into written form, the role of memory, and the aesthetic representation of black identity.
What is the core research question?
The research asks how Morrison utilizes jazz as an aesthetic model to challenge traditional, linear storytelling and to create an inclusive, participatory narrative space.
Which scientific methodology is applied?
The author employs a narratological and cultural-studies approach, integrating literary theory (such as Derrida and Gates) with musicological perspectives on jazz and blues.
What topics are discussed in the main body?
The main body covers the "talking book" metaphor, the call-and-response interaction between narrator and characters, and the specific use of stylistic devices like tense switching and stream of consciousness.
Which keywords best describe this study?
Important descriptors include Jazz, Call-and-Response, Orality, Improvisation, and African American Literature.
How does the narrator's relationship with characters reflect jazz patterns?
The narrator engages in a call-and-response dynamic, where the third-person narrative "call" prompts characters to provide their own "responses" through first-person narration.
How is the concept of the "talking book" explained?
It is presented as an aesthetic strategy where the printed text mimics the oral quality of speech, effectively inviting the reader to participate in a communal storytelling experience.
Why does the author focus on the role of the reader?
Because Morrison’s compositional strategy creates "holes and spaces" in the text, requiring the reader to actively fill in the narrative, thus mirroring the improvisational nature of jazz performance.
- Citar trabajo
- Mohamed Sghir Syad (Autor), 2014, Jazz aesthetic form in Toni Morrison's "Jazz", Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/318632
