TONI MORRISON, Jazz: Harlem, Jazz, and Narrative Counterpoints

Like James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” that we discussed last week, Toni Morrison’s Jazz is set in Harlem but in the 1920s. The novel is set after World War 1 thus also during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, where a new cultural flowering of both music and literature took place that came to have resonance all over America and indeed in the rest of the world. Morrison’s novel uses jazz as a template for establishing a rhythm for her narrative and also for introducing contrapuntal notes between different events, characters, and between the past and the present. While the just-ended First World War provides a certain sense of worldly weariness for the characters in the novel, the real backdrop to their attempts at self-fashioning is provided by the history of the American Great Migration, of which the 1920s furnished the tail end of the first big wave. The central characters Joe Trace and Violet had themselves migrated from the South to escape its anti-Black violence, but we later find that they are not entirely free of the memories and impulses that the South had inculcated in them. The overlaying of structures of feeling between the South and Harlem then provides a number of contrasting notes to their lives, manifest most clearly in the crisis with which the novel opens. Joe has killed his lover the 18-year-old Dorcas and Violet goes to the funeral parlor where she is lying for the funeral to slash her face with a knife. Violet finds a picture of Dorcas among her husband’s things and places it on their mantlepiece at home, and both Joe and Violet sneak up in turns at night to take long glances at the picture for different reasons. This peculiar routine leads husband and wife gradually to mourn for their individual and mutual losses. From this strange set of events the story unfolds, not as a straightforward narration, but as a series of sometimes jerky and sometimes smooth narrative movements, all amply modulated with references to the cityscape, its architecture, the people that populate it, and the various kinds of music that provide it with its soundtrack. We will see how Morrison weaves all these together into a story that echoes some of the themes in her previous novels, but also breaks new ground in representing the city as itself a character in Jazz.
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Suggested Reading
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (London: Vintage, 1992).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (New York: One World, 2015).
Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, “Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the City,” African American Review 35.2 (2001): 219-231.
Dale Patterson, “Building Intimacy: The Erotic Architectures of Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58:2 (2017): 129-145.
Justine Tally, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
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Thank you too, Prof Quayson.

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Thanks Professor

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thank you

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She is so good