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

Golden Gray is eventually "ready for those deer eyes to open" (162). Finally, it is Wild who changes his mind about blowing his father's head off with a shotgun, who steers him "away from death" (173). Does Wild help Golden Gray accept the blackness of his father, the blackness that he finds in himself? Do Wild and Golden Gray live together in her cave of light? Does Wild stitch the seams of Golden Gray's shirt, stitching the story of her textual presence to a reconfigured reality where she and Golden Gray can be united? The narrative never confirms this hypothesis, but the sutures are certainly suggestive.

Stitches may link individuals within this particular textual universe, then, but they may also link characters who appear to be from different textual universes. In Beloved, Baby Suggs sleeps under a drab quilt made up of "scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool" (38), yet by the end of the novel it has become "a quilt of merry colors" (271). The dull-colored quilt gets restitched when Sethe buys bright cloth (including "yellow ribbon") to make dresses for Beloved and herself; the two women are described as "tacking [the extra] scraps of cloth on Baby Suggs's quilt" (241). So in both Beloved and Jazz, it appears that the character Wild/Beloved exists, and that she sews. In Beloved and Jazz, sewing may therefore function as a metaphor for processes not only that connect individuals (Beloved and Sethe, Wild and Golden Gray) but for the textual and narrative processes that connect text and intertext. Nearly imperceptible stitches in the narrative universes of Beloved and Jazz create a relationship that sutures these texts together, that attentive readers can trace and retrace.

Read intertextually, these two texts create a perfect fantastic narrative: The first narrative (Beloved) tilts toward the marvelous, while the second (Jazz) tilts toward the realistic. Therefore the presence of Beloved in Jazz creates the balance that is the fantastic, but it also necessitates both intertextual and metatextual readings. Eco argues that certain texts force readers to read intertextually: "To identify these frames the reader had to 'walk,' so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather intertextual support. [ldots] I call these interpretative moves inferential walks" (32). Morrison's textual strategy of bringing Beloved alive in Jazz forces us to "walk" back to the world of Beloved in order to identify the frames which might permit the physical existence of Beloved, the character, and the narrative existence of Beloved, the text, in Jazz. To permit Beloved's/Wild's existence in Jazz, we might have to resuscitate the realistic hypothesis of her presence in Beloved--we may have to infer that our original concept of her as a ghost was only partially true. The two texts also force the reader to read metatextually: to reexamine in a more critical light our practices of reading, or "producing," a text. I myself have searched Beloved for clues to Wild's character, and searched Jazz for clues to Beloved's character. I read back and forth between the two texts, taking my inferential walks, trying to figure out what Beloved really is: a ghost or a real woman. Both and neither, the two texts seem to whisper to me; you will never know, because closure and certainty is death for Beloved, for reading itself.