Literary free jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: language and meaning

Moving from a modernist sensibility in Jazz, which arguably harks back to a redeeming folk past as an alternative Other to the present, in Paradise, Morrison offers the possibility of dehistoricized narrative--demonstrating the critique offered by postmodern narrativity to the hierarchy of a linear history. (7) She reconfigures the presence of the past in Paradise. In other words, for both the citizens of Ruby and her readers, Morrison's text signifies, on one hand, a melancholic yearning for an irretrievable past: for the characters, this past marked a victory for African American experience with the thriving of Ruby. For the reader, the text is constantly suggestive of that lost comforting confidence in the representative possibilities of language. On the other hand, in the present of the narrative, both of these foundations are crumbling. However, Morrison's text does not signal these figures as absence; instead, it recognizes a productive material presence (as, for example, in the inscription on the communal Oven so central to Ruby s changing identity), marking the possibility of a new form of expression--communal, individual, and textual. (8)

The main narrative action in Paradise focuses on the struggles of Ruby, an all-black community in Oklahoma in the middle of the twentieth century, to reconcile the force of history with that of the present. The strident insistence of many of the town members on preserving the past intact, arrested in time, leads to a violent rupture in the community, split variously along lines of generation, gender, and skin color. The absolute refusal to acknowledge any need for change leads to the festering decay of the community from within, as well as collapse of the borders that enclosed it. (9) Virtually all of the putative dangers to the fixed harmony of Ruby are embodied in the abandoned Convent, situated just outside of the town. (As in Mumbo-Jumbo, the novel figures a physical space that represents a past and manifests a new way of living the present. Morrison complicates her representation of this physicality by inscribing the Convent as having first been built as a debaucherous haven for a gangster. Every apparently original moment is, thus, preceded by an even earlier one.) The Convent is populated by five women. Each has arrived at the Convent at a different stage of her life, and each has her own narrative voice in the novel. Like Reed's Kathedral, Morrison's Convent points to the disintegrating viability of a static, exclusive, and preconceived order--a Christian order, a white order, and a patriarchal or masculine order. However, instead of the imagined result of chaos, these texts offer new types of logic based on process and change, as alternatives to the binaric order-chaos model.

Commenting on the role of jazz in her writing, Morrison once asserted, "Jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord.... And it agitates you.... There is something underneath them that is incomplete" (McKay 411). This resistance to what is inevitably the artificial sense of closure that Morrison associates with European art forms is reflected in Paradise, a novel shimmering with processes of constant renewal.