The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Martha J. Cutter

Narrative Ambiguity in Jazz

The openness of Beloved is therefore enhanced by the way Morrison puts meaning back into play in Jazz through an intertextual relationship with a prior text, and by the ghost chapters she encourages us to write that may suture these texts together. But Jazz also refuses the death of closure through a narrative structure that can be fruitfully contrasted with Beloved's. The narrator of Jazz at times appears to be a disembodied entity who tells us that "I haven't got any muscles, so I can't really be expected to defend myself" (8). Yet at other times s/he seems to be a human individual who knows the disappointment of inattentive lovers, of missed opportunities (9). Furthermore, while this narrator appears to be omniscient, disclosing details no one but an author could know--such as Joe Trace's three trips in search of Wild (121-35)--at other times the voice is subjective, limited, or just plain wrong. The narrator makes erroneous value judgments about characters like Joe, describing his thoughts as "loose" (11 9), and about Golden Gray, "not noticing the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin" (160). The narrator has pretensions toward omniscience but is wrong, over and over again.

This narrative voice destabilizes a reader's reading of the text; it seems to tell the story as a character within the text, yet also positions itself outside the text, narrating it after the fact. Moreover, as Page argues, this narrator straddles the conventional dichotomy between third-person (external) narration and first-person (internal) narrators, destabilizing traditional conceptions of narration (60). And, most importantly, the narrative voice claims to be truthful and wise--only to turn around and critique itself, admit that it is fallible. The narrator believes Joe and Violet will replay their violent past histories, but this does not occur: "I was sure one would kill the other.[ldots] I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself.[ldots] I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable--human, I guess you'd say, while I was the predicable one" (220). The narrator also asserts complete control over the plot of the novel, as an author would: "Well, it's my storm, isn't it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back again" (219). Once again, however, the narrator is wrong: "And when I was feeling most invisible, being tightlipped, silent, and unobservable, they were whispering about me to each other. They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness. That when I invented stories about them--and doing it seemed to me so fine--I was completely in their hands" (220). Most interestingly, the narrator admits his/her lack of omniscience: "I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" (160). The narrator is not in control of the story, and although s/he tells it, the points of view of the narrator, the reader, and the characters never coalesce in Jazz, as they do in Beloved.