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

Keren Omry

Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two crucial signposts identifying the trajectory of an African American aesthetic. Central to the aesthetics of each is a subversion of the very process of historical or generic categorization that reduces the complexity of human experience to a simplified, linear catalogue of events or trends. The authors introduce a musical sensibility into their respective writings, expanding the literary palette, the effects of which emphasize the impotence of an exclusive, deterministic, and category-bound history and disrupting a linear strategy of historical narrative. Significantly, this musical sensibility is a jazz-based one and produces a jazz aesthetic that saturates Reed's and Morrison's works.

Linking black fiction with blues and/or jazz music has, by now, an extensive scholarly history. (1) Although often widely varied in approach, this large body of scholarship has established a recognizable jazz discourse in literary analysis through which the uses and implications of these links can be explored. The emerging prevalence of this interdisciplinary discourse in critical readings of African American literature creates a contextual harmony through which the multifaceted literary roles of jazz are revealed (roles that, as in Morrison's Paradise, are not always immediately obvious or explicated).

Paradise and Mumbo Jumbo both seek constructive ways to incorporate the history of African American experience into an aesthetic that moves beyond the traditional notion of an historical narrative. Recognizing the risks of stasis and even decomposition of the narrow retrospective gaze (Morrison's description of Ruby in Paradise offers one example), Morrison and Reed use a jazz aesthetic as a way of reconciling the violent past with the new demands of the present, ultimately envisioning a future that rewrites racial and ethnic ideologies. The creative efforts of these two authors are informed by the developments in jazz music that, by the early 1960s, began to be identified as the "New Music" or "free jazz." Free jazz becomes a conceptual model through which Reed and Morrison create a new language that then begins to transform the potentially paralyzing and destructive force of the past into a much more productive, creative force. By juxtaposing these two novels, written 30 years apart by two vastly different authors, the transition in political and aesthetic sensibilities that determines their various approaches becomes clear. Reed's own investment in jazz is an explicit one, beginning from a jazz column he wrote in his adolescence and running through his poetry performances. For example, Kip Hanrahan's Conjure constitutes music composed for Reed's poetry and performed by him, as in the 2003 rendition performed in the Barbican Centre, London, with Taj Mahal, David Murray, Billy Bang, and Leo Nocentelli. As W. Lawrence Hogue asserts in an article on the postmodern jazz aesthetic that motivates the work of Reed, Morrison, and Clarence Major, Reed's literary sensibilities carefully amalgamate the world of jazz (structure, language, content, and so on) with hoodoo culture and practices as a way to countermand a modernist ethnocentricity that casts African Americans as perpetually object, Other, and/or periphery (169-70). Morrison's engagement with jazz is much more subtle; her novel Jazz, according to Hogue's scheme of alternative paradigms of modernism and their complementary postmodern critique, particularly fails to offer a viable alternative to modernist power structures. Hogue argues that her narrative yearns back to a folk culture--a nostalgia that inevitably conflicts with a postmodern challenge to the possibility of the past to offer historical redemption. Hogue's lucid explication of Morrison's jazz modernism does not stand in contrast to her critique of this paradigm in Paradise. If in The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, the blues and jazz become a structuring medium that urges a re-membering, to use her term, that is, a recollection as well as an embodiment of the past as the primary means for resolution, then Paradise moves instead as revision of historical teleology. As I will show, while the novelist herself is rarely explicit about the role played by jazz in her writing, the combination of jazz aesthetics with a paradigm of nostalgia offers precisely the critique that Hogue deems absent from Morrison's writing.

In what might initially look like an unlikely theoretical excursion, I would like to introduce ideas developed by Theodor W. Adorno in his "Vers une Musique Informelle", published in his collection of essays, Quasi una Fantasia (1961). Introducing Adorno's ideas to a consideration of free jazz and of the jazz aesthetic of Reed's and Morrison's writing offers a peculiarly engaging perspective: by crossing conventional boundaries in the analytical framework, the space for analysis is dramatically expanded while the mechanism for analysis is made new--precisely through that initial disorientation. (2) In "Vers une Musique Informelle," Adorno offers an analytic description of the developments of modern music. His discussion of musique informelle suggests the emergence of a new kind of music as the immanent outcome of the historical process of musical innovation. By describing some aspects of Adorno's vision and their manifestation in or relevance to free jazz, I demonstrate how the former can be used as a model for understanding the musical and social implications of the latter--without also suggesting that free jazz is a manifestation of musique informelle.

Adorno himself wrote an unambiguously disparaging critique of what he considered to be jazz music. (3) His perspective ignores the diversity and complexity of jazz and remains fixed only on its most popularized manifestations. This sweeping contempt for what he described as a popularized mechanism of the totalitarian state to control the masses is not unsurprising in light of his beautifully articulate considerations of Western Classical music and his meticulous sensitivity to its social and political potentialities. Bearing in mind his own location in the United States as a refugee from the terrors of Nazi Germany during the time he wrote most of his jazz-critiques only adds to the surprise at his neglect of the political and musical agency manifest in jazz. Although not American himself, this paradox of discriminatory analytical tolerance in Adorno's work serves to embody the perceived dichotomy of black and white that characterizes the history of the US.

By appropriating Adornian critique to consider jazz and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in "Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz," James Harding attempts to redeem, or at the very least to understand, Adorno's vehement attack on jazz. Harding suggests that despite its persistent problems, Adorno's jazz critique is in fact inseparable from his critique of contemporary western culture, thus renegotiating its weakness as narrow musical analysis and illuminating both its relevance and its power as a tool of social criticism:

   Not only does Adorno use the same dialectical method in his
   criticisms of Wagner and of jazz; but, insofar as jazz purports to
   be a voice of liberation (separatist or otherwise), it also falls
   within the scope of Adorno's dialectical critique of Enlightenment
   philosophy. In both cases the issue for Adorno is to point out
   where discourses of liberation perpetuate the domination that they
   ostensibly eliminate, to show where they generate the abuse they
   are supposed to prevent. To criticize jazz is simultaneously to
   criticise the social structures from which it seeks (or purports)
   to disentangle itself, structures which inevitably absorb,
   appropriate, and alter jazz almost as quickly as it appears. (144)

Thus, Harding's essay proposes that what are often seen as disparate sociocultural realms actually replicate the same patterns of domination. Art music of the kind that Adorno values as subversive and empowering is able to avoid this process of absorption and appropriation through a self-conscious deliberation with the forces of domination: through strategies such as irony and repetition, the music challenges power structures. It is precisely this critical specificity recognized in classical music and ignored by Adorno in jazz that is the weakness of his work on the latter musical form.

Despite the inevitable irony, Adorno's work can be applied very fruitfully to jazz, leading to illuminating understandings of the development of avant-garde jazz and the emergence of free jazz, insights that dramatically push forward any consideration of the projects undertaken by Reed and Morrison in the novels under consideration here. (4) I am using the work of Adorno--a white, Jewish, German philosopher and music theorist--in relation to an African American musical form, as intimated above, precisely to complicate the racial binaries that so often crop up in any discussion of jazz or of African American literature. By using an Adornian mode, I illustrate how, through their syncopated narratives and alternative structural resources (conjure and nostalgia, respectively), Reed and Morrison weaken the racialized dichotomy that has historically distinguished black from white and to create a dialogue between the (at minimum) two cultural and ethnic communities.

Both Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise envision a veritable utopia. Here I depart from Hogue, whose analysis of Mumbo Jumbo as definitively defying closure describes the text explicitly as anti-utopian. While I agree that Reed clearly resists a Christian teleology of utopia (which Hogue refers to as western linearity), I understand Reed to offer instead new mechanisms by which meaning is established, communicated, as well as challenged, and it is to these processes, discussed further below, that I refer as utopian. Although the link between the conceptual utopia implicated in each and free jazz is not always straightforward or explicit, the music and the literature clearly grapple with parallel ideas and problems, and the solutions of one inform the development of the other. In "T. W. Adorno; Or, Historical Tropes," Frederic Jameson discusses at length the metaphysical nostalgia, or utopian vision, implicit in musical paradigms (from Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky). According to Jameson's writing about a shifting subject-object relationship, there is for Adorno an inevitable promise of a reconciliation between the two, a theoretical possible unity (38-42). In an arguably parallel impulse, free jazz (both in its inception in the late 1950s-early 1960s and also more contemporarily) offers a paradigm for the musical narrative that blurs the distinction between chaos and order that allows the logic for a piece to emerge from within (as foreshadowed in Adorno's conception of musique informelle). By complicating the divide between subject (and subjectivity) and object (and objectivity), free jazz reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the collective, and demands a temporally challenging but ongoing engagement with its own expression. The result of the often violent manifestations of these musical explorations is a reconceptualization of the notion of history, of the past and its effects on the present. Reed's and Morrison's novels explore literary counterparts to these musical/political ideas.

The immediate link between Adorno's article and the form of free jazz is in the very title of the article, which translates as "Approaching an Informal Music." I discuss below how the connotation of a dynamic process is particularly apt, but the second half of the title is more directly relevant to free jazz. By "informal music," Adorno denotes a music that rejects form, even referring to this as free music at times in his article. (The phrase musique informelle additionally, and no doubt deliberately, implies a lack of formality, a rejection of traditional and expected forms of expression.) In this article and in his work in general Adorno begins to identify a trajectory of development in Classical music whereby each stage or period relates in a particular way to structural categories it had inherited from the style that came before it. Adorno identifies the realization of these forces as musique informelle, in which the musical expression effectively rejects all the structural categories that it had inherited in its attempts to become absolutely free. However, paradoxically, this moment in the musical trajectory was, in fact, a utopian impossibility, according to Adorno.

Adorno cautions that a music that seeks to be absolutely free falls into one of two traps: music that rejects all structural limitations finds itself either incomprehensible and thus effectively limited, or inevitably these rejected formal impositions arise in new manifestations. In other words, the first thing that could happen is that in rejecting all recognizable formal restrictions, the music becomes unintelligible, which was, for Adorno, a prime evil. Musical authenticity was of the highest value for Adorno, and for music to be authentic, it must contain truth-value, a quality that music achieves by being communicative, relating to human experience on some level: musical aesthetic, cultural, social, political. Free music thus becomes in effect irrelevant or, to avoid precisely that incommunicability while still avoiding the limitations that it casts aside, free music will--Adorno contends--inadvertently but inevitably give rise to precisely the same musical structures that it sought to reject:

   in aesthetics the universal and the particular do not constitute
   mutually exclusive opposites.... If informal music dispenses with
   [these crystallized musical co-ordinates]--in other words, with the
   musically bad universal forms of internal compositional
   categories-then these universal forms will surface again in the
   innermost recesses of the particular event and set them alight.
   (Adorno 273)

In other words, Adorno effectively suggests that absolutely free music is, by definition, an unattainable ideal. Any semblance of absolute freedom will crumble immediately under the natural tendency to seek comfortable limitations rather than freedom, order rather than chaos. Moreover, even if music were able to be somehow absolutely free, through our very attempt to listen to it, we would uncontrollably seek to understand it and thus superimpose a linguistic or conceptual framework onto it. The necessary participation of the listener in the impossible realization of the utopian ideal is a point I will return to at greater length below.

Enter free jazz. Incidentally recorded in the year that Adorno wrote "Vers une Musique Informelle," Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz does something similar to musique informelle. Although Coleman's Free Jazz is not the only and was not the first record to put forth many of these ideas, in the history of jazz it realized various musical forces and became the turning point in the development of jazz. Others central to developing these ideas are Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. In particular, Coltrane's Ascension presents an example that offers an equally potent analytical mechanism as does Coleman's Free Jazz. The renowned music critic Gary Giddins compared Coltrane's achievement in Ascension to the radical effect of modernist painting: "after you paint a canvas that's completely white and hang it up in a museum, you've gone as far as you can go ... what are you going to put on it? That's what happened with the avant-garde: Coltrane got to the white canvas with Ascension..... Coltrane had given us a new canvas and we could begin on that again" (qtd. in Shipton 804). The critical relevance notwithstanding, the fiery impact of Coleman's recording on the music world has determined my choice.

Free Jazz opens with an exciting explosion of notes and then what Ornette Coleman describes as a moment of "harmonic unison." This startling opening sparked no little controversy when it emerged in the jazz world, its more negative critics naming it on a continuum from offensive cacophony to anti-jazz. These condemnations notwithstanding, a careful re-investigation of Free Jazz reveals that it actually follows a quite traditional jazz form: from its polyphonic musical opening, it moves from one soloist to the next in a not unconventional manner. So, here, as in musique informelle, in music that strives to cast aside the structural limitations--not in a strict abandonment of the idea of history but an attempt to shake free of its constrictions--those very same categories emerge from within. And yet their effect as well as their role in the musical experience has changed.

Adorno writes that this music defines itself not only through its difference from prior restricting forms, but also in terms of its own "musical substance, and not in terms of external laws" ("Vers" 273). In other words, musique informelle finds its structural and emotional logic within, rather than through references to previous works. In many ways the spontaneity of improvisational techniques of jazz fulfills this characteristic of Adorno's ideal musique informelle. This claim for spontaneity is not to ignore, discount, or overlook the use of repetition, allusion, and even pastiche both in free jazz and in my reading of an African American free-jazz literary aesthetic. However, it is the radical reconfiguration of the chronology as well as the temporality of the musical material that reveals the introspective creativity: when, for example, Coltrane bursts through the temporal logic of melodic structures in his transformative process of repetition in My Favorite Things, with the seemingly monotonous reiteration, the music ceases to allude to an early pop tune and turns inward, becoming radically self-referential. Having redefined the roles of most--if not all--of the central elements of jazz, the music can hardly be comprehensible in immediate reference to other kinds of jazz, but through a concentrated listening process the inner logic and the emotional truth of the musical content become apparent. Moreover, the radical emphasis on the dynamic process of the musical moment, which works through spontaneous and collective improvisation, suggests a practice parallel to the one that Adorno envisions. While he cautions that "this [self-reflexive quality] gives rise to the difficulty that in the absence of such residual forms, musical coherence appears to be quite inconceivable" (273), in fact, this communicative quality, so crucial according to Adorno, becomes self-evident when the music's defining introspectivity comes into focus. Free jazz, with its self-referentiality, together with the much more radical dependence on spontaneous as well as group improvisation, offers a model whereby the musical material cannot be said to be the raw material of composition because the freedom of free jazz lies precisely in the elimination of these preconceived definitions. The process of composition is, by and large, a spontaneous reaction to the material then being explored by the various musicians. This spontaneity stands in complex relation to a utopian ideal that I suggest it approximates, parallel to musique informelle. Rather than seeing improvisation as a simple and pragmatic negotiation of available materials (thus radically anti-utopian in its move away from any idealized goal or process), it can be understood as a direct focus on a present moment: unlike the teleology of (linear) historical narratives, in this case there is no deferral of and aspiration to an endlessly delayed end. It is, instead, historicized through the very economy of that moment and thus effectively realizes this end.

Adorno put this process another way when he wrote: "One might say that music operates within that language, rather than with it." ("Vers" 281) This statement reformulates the introspective process of self-definition and reconceptualizes the relationship between musical language and the act of composition. To achieve this reformulation he relates an anecdote about Schoenberg, who--when told that his 12-tone technique had become a universal triumph--reportedly asked: "'Indeed, and do they actually compose with it?'" (qtd. in "Vers" 284). It is this with it that Adorno emphasizes and seeks to redress. Adorno writes that the "with it" of Schoenberg's question contains a "residue of unresolved externality. Composition is understood in a traditional sense; the composer composes with raw material which he works on thematically.... Material and composition remain alien, opposed to each other" (285). Schoenberg's statement suggests an irreducible gap between the act of composition and the musical material with which it functions. (This alignment of musical material and language is one Adorno makes and thus already begins to collapse the functional divide between the elements and process of composition.)

Adorno foresees a different process in musique informelle that dissolves the distance between the material and the composition. Rather than presuming the prior existence of one of the components of music, the two begin to coexist simultaneously; the musical language and the act of composition that creates new meaning of this language become inextricably linked and function together. The gap between the two remains irreducible, and yet it is the tension between them that is manipulated in the act of creativity. And it is this gap, this tension, that brings me to literature. Considering Reed's and Morrison's respective choices of the titles of their novels with relation to one another fruitfully demonstrates how these books rewrite the relationship between language and meaning in ways very similar to those suggested by Adorno and to those explored in Coleman's Free Jazz. In particular, I am focusing on this conceptual shift that seeks to realize the impossible utopia that appears in the move from one novel to the other.

With Mumbo Jumbo, published in 1972, Reed is writing in a time when the innovations in jazz become increasingly diverse, exploding any tentatively unifying definition heretofore applied to jazz. With the forays into fusion, the growing popularity of R&B and soul, the early days of hip hop, and the pervasive refusal to accept any musical feature as given, stable, or static, jazz soon became generally defined by what it was not rather than by what it was. Facing the mid-20th-century crisis of postmodern fragmentation, Reed relies on fairly unambiguous musical references as an underlying cohesive element, one most fruitfully aligned with early avant-garde jazz experiments with modality. Miles Davis's revolutionary Milestones, recorded in 1958, offered an unprecedented jazz album of a concentrated effort to explore the use of modes rather than of harmony as a structural guideline for the music. (5) In what became known as modal jazz, the harmonic complexities that had been the basis for improvisation in bebop were already embedded in the musical foundation of musicians who then returned their focus to the melody. Jazz musicians--with Miles Davis and John Coltrane at the forefront of these changes--explored the implications of moving from one type of scale to another. So, by shifting scales, or modes, in the middle of a musical piece the musician effectively disrupts the recognized logic of the music, offering a new logical basis in its stead. The momentum in this kind of improvisation results from the movement of the musician through all of the notes in one scale before moving on to the next. By focusing on an internal logic that dictates the pace and character of the music, modality foreshadows the self-referential stipulation of musique informelle that becomes much more significant in Free Jazz and in Paradise.

The central narrative in Mumbo Jumbo takes place in Harlem in the 1920s. Harlem is afflicted by a plague (or, rather, an "anti-plague") called Jes Grew. This anti-plague began with the African American community but soon spreads indiscriminately across the country. The symptoms of Jes Grew start the feet tapping, the knees shaking, and the body moving, leaving the afflicted characters dancing helplessly and uncontrollably in the streets. The devastating power of this anti-plague threatens to affect the entire country's social political, economic, and cultural infrastructures, collapsing it into the overpowering musical force. The book is populated by numerous groups, representative of the many different communities in African American society in the early 1970s, each group relating to Jes Grew in a different way: some try to control it, others to contain it, some to feed it, to end it, and so forth.

Furthermore, in the melodic structure of modal music, each part relates to the other, but there is no overarching defining relation between the parts: as each moment passes, this relationship changes. This construct is reflected in the very arrangement of Reed's narrative. The opening chapter of the novel, which precedes the title page and publication details, introduces five narrative modes. The first mode is a recognizable third-person, omniscient, and dramatic narrative. The standard narrative form is meticulously defamiliarized through a lack of punctuation, a general absence of narrative explicative tags, and idiosyncratic spelling and dialect. The second narrative mode, depicted in italic fonts, is a partially omniscient narrative, predominantly focused on the not yet identified Wallflower Order and on Jes Grew itself. The narrator explains that "Jes Grew is seeking its words. Its text. For what good is liturgy without a text?" (6). This assertion becomes the key to the novel's progression. This explanation that the anti-plague is searching for its text acquires added meaning when immediately followed not by text but by an image--the third narrative mode.

Reed does not seek a translation of the visual into the linguistic. Rather, he hopes to add the literally unspeakable dimension of narration into his story, a story of African American history that is both literally and figuratively unspeakable. This mode of narration requires of readers an entirely new way of reading. To gain the full effect of the technique, readers must resist the temptation to either ignore these pictures or to reduce them to a loose verbal translation.

The fourth mode of narration is repeatedly interjected into the novel as external, nonfictional, quotations that push the narrative forward. Like the visual interjections, these citations cannot be neatly integrated into a conventional textual analysis of Mumbo Jumbo. Finally, the fifth mode of narration introduced in the first chapter of the novel is a dry, informative narration that provides explanatory definitions, footnotes, and even a partial bibliography in the end. Similar to the mode of visual imagery and to that of quoted nonfictional remarks, the effect of this mode is to blur the boundaries of the text by introducing preconceived ideas associated with a particular term and to create new meanings for the term in the space of the novel. Moreover, these external references display a self-conscious textuality while simultaneously creating a tension between levels of fictionality and nonfictionality of the novel. The bibliography, the footnotes, the didactic passages, and the other instances of this narrative mode suggest a much more academic and analytical text than one would normally expect in a novel. This apparatus then raises questions about what is being analyzed: Reed's text can be read as an analytical interpretation of a particular reality, but also as a fictional account, then open to the reader's interpretation.

As the novel moves from one narrative mode to another, the authoritative process of textual analysis is contrasted with the surreal world of Jes Grew, the anti-plague, and the human android, for example, as well as with the religious or fantastic realm of voodoo, spirit possession, spells, and curses. The purpose of the modal narration is not to posit each mode in competition against the other. Rather, by including all forms of reality and of textuality, Reed stresses the Impossibility of single meanings and invokes, instead, an acceptance of plurality with multiple interpretations co-existing simultaneously, or shifting, each one relevant for a different reader at a different moment.

As the narrative in its various modes progresses, the reader gradually realizes that the motivating force behind Jes Grew is its search for its text, its meaning. It was separated from its scriptures--from its system of referents--in the early history before the beginning of the novel, and now it has risen in its powerful search to be reunited with its text, as the novel's title manifests. One of the primary significations of mumbo-jumbo is a grotesque idol (or the representation thereof) worshipped by some West African peoples. A second product of the title--one more immediate in common parlance--is the suggestion of something (especially language, spoken or written) unintelligible, obscure, or meaningless. These two initial definitions are crucially linked and particularly pertinent in the context of my argument: a venerated idol is both the unknowable entity who holds the key to some ungraspable truth, and the necessarily grotesque representation thereof (grotesque because it attempts to contain the unknowable in a form recognizable in human experience). The words mumbo jumbo thus both contain and represent precisely that unknowability, and they attempt to reconcile that difference between sign and signified in the one term; the phrase both manifests meaning and resists it entirely.

The latter definition of non-sense takes on new implications when the reader realizes that in fact it is the title of a narrative about that search for meaning: Jes Grew, the anti-plague, is seeking to be reunited with its scriptures--the holy text that holds the key to all meaning. Moreover, the various forces populating the text: PaPa LaBas, the Wallflower Order, the Mu'tafikah, the police, Black Herman, and Abdul Hamid undertake this search to control, to possess, to promote, or to free the musical text that manifests that Adornian utopia or Absolute that is, otherwise, by definition unattainable. Reed's Mumbo Jumbo begins as nonsense, turns into an unrealizable search for sense, which is then resolved through the sense of the search itself. So, like the immediate cacophony of Free Jazz and like musique informelle, so, too, does Mumbo Jumbo only begin to be communicative through the dynamic here-and-now of the text itself. It is only through reading the text that we can move from nonsense to sense. Reed thus seeks to establish a new language whereby the system of references is not so distant--so violently separate--from the system of referents and becomes, instead, a self-reflexive process.

This process becomes even more complicated with the recognition that mumbo-jumbo signifies the history of African America. The slaves who were brought to America from Africa were not only linguistically alienated from the slave traders but were often isolated entirely. In all likelihood coming from different tribes in Africa, they were frequently unable to communicate with one another; in other words, their communication was all mumbo jumbo. The term has also been used as a racial slur to disparage enslaved Africans for their inability to communicate with whites. To avoid this linguistic and therefore social isolation, the enslaved Africans had to create a new language--one that moved them out of the past of Africa to acquire a relevance for their present, while still preserving the heritage of this past. Reed does the same thing, forcing his readers to make new sense of the aesthetic, literary as well as syntactical language that he creates. Reed makes this project explicit in his further complication of the book's title. Mumbo-jumbo is a distortion of a Mandingo phrase that denotes a "magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away." Reed is this magician. In a word, he conjures a new language through which the troubled spirits of the haunting past can be put to rest and a new relation to the present and to the future can be established.

In his article, Hogue suggests that Reed's use of hoodoo constructs a site of alterity that empowers the periphery. Indeed, the novel reflects the role of the conjuring hoodoo in yet another meaning of the book's title. "Mumbo Jumbo" is the name given to the voodoo Kathedral where PaPa LaBas, a character who "carries Jes Grew in him like most other folk carry genes," lives and works (23). (This process of cultural appropriation and transformation of initially oppressive forces is enacted across African American histories, and Reed reflects it in the name he gives to the place of worship, which the narrator and characters facetiously call the Kathedral.) Thus, both the language and the physical space that contains much of the action in the novel have been rewritten to accommodate the forces of the present. The Kathedral ceases being mumbo-jumbo: a misspelled, misunderstood or distorted, and incomprehensible relic of Christianity. It is, instead, the home and workspace of PaPa LaBas, the central figure who bridges the past and the present. The Kathedral physically and linguistically reconfigures the role of Christianity in the lives of African Americans. Instead of the vestry, cloister, nave, vestibule, or altar, the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral contains the "Dark Tower Room the Weary Blues Room the Groove Bang and Jive Around Room the Aswelay Room [and the] room PaPa LaBas calls the Mango Room" (49-50). (6) Here Reed alludes to such prominent African American writers as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Steve Cannon, and Norman H. Pritchard, and thereby complicates his own temporality. In a jazz reading of the text, Reed is resisting a linear narrative of influence or tradition; his alignment of literary predecessors with a space of spirituality nevertheless acknowledges a cultural network in which he functions. A reflection of this Kathedral and its deliberate signification on Christianity and African American history can be found in the Convent at the center of the action in Morrison's Paradise. The role of the Convent, together with the shift from "mumbo jumbo" to the religiously inflected "paradise," demonstrates how Paradise advances Reed's project afresh.

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.

Building from the new sense created by Reed's mumbo-jumbo, Morrison focuses on language as the vehicle that can realize the utopian vision distorted in the Ruby. For a full understanding of the implications of the title Paradise, it is useful to think back to the linguistic implications of the story of the Garden of Eden, in the Old Testament. It is only with the fruit of knowledge that language as we know it emerges. Before the Fall of humankind, there was no interruption between language and essence: "In the beginning was the Word"; God said "Let there be light," and there was light; Adam named the animals in Eden and by naming them he defined and described their character--much like Adam himself, whose name describes him, for adam is the Hebrew word for man. With the Fall, however, language is no longer united with its essence and becomes instead a system of reference that perpetually seeks its meaning--a system given force and form in Reed's Jes Grew. By titling her novel Paradise, then, Morrison focuses on this tension between language and meaning (the project undertaken by Adorno's utopian musique informelle), seeking to capture the distance between them and reformulate it as a productive force.

The first sentences of Paradise points to the central method Morrison uses to explore this tension: "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun" (3). This opening forms one of the only explicit references to the white girl as such. The reader is never told directly which girl is "the white one." And yet, in a novel where race figures so centrally in the process of coming to terms with the trauma of a racialized past and finding a productive aesthetic that can create a new way of life for African Americans, the ambiguity of explicit racial identity signifies importance. Instead, what Morrison does is to force the reader to find a new way of understanding race. Throughout the novel, she strips her language of all conventionally identifiable racial markers and demands that we come to recognize language not simply as the system of signification that relies on its own history but as a rearticulated (and rejuvenated) referent in itself. In other words, language as a process need not (indeed, cannot) reiterate or re-embody meaning but is always an immediate and particular use of language and structures of communication. This immediacy and particulation both dehistoricize language by moving away from an inherited linearity of meaning and rehistoricizes it by demanding a recognition of the historical context of each utterance. Morrison suggests that contemporary experience may be communicated through this recognition. She calls--a la Adorno--for a departure from generalized abstraction in language and a focus instead on the specificity and historicity of each utterance. This new language is not an idealized language that would necessarily eschew meaning at the very moment it is articulated but a language that reinvents itself self-consciously as it seeks to relate meaning. It is precisely within the gap between language and meaning that the devastating dangers of racism lie: when the signifier of black is violently divorced from an ethnically identified subject, it carries with it the ultimate destructive force; indeed, with the Fall and with the birth of language, Adam and Eve were also punished with death.

While a postmodern reading of Paradise arguably focuses on similar aspects of the novel, Morrison addresses the dangerous binaries of racialized discourse through a narrower jazz perspective in the text. (10) Reminiscent of the anti-melodic explorations of Free Jazz, resistance to preconfigured orders propel the narrative of Paradise forward. The language of the novel manipulates the tension between explication and implication, challenging the reader's expectations and biases but also her search for the comfort of resolution. Figured as the tension between language and music where each communicates meaning differently, Morrison uses this gap to push forward her narrative.

Paradise is not Morrison's first or only exploration into the racial implications of language. In her 1983 short story "Recitatif," Morrison's straightforward focus on language and its relation to music yields the relationship between two girls when they meet at five different points during their life. The reader is told that one girl is African American and the other is white but not also which is which. The narrative drops hints and clues but any attempt at resolution becomes a process in reductive stereotypification. Nevertheless, the story is propelled by the backdrop of racial politics (and its implications on the economy and family structure of the characters' lives) as it changes each time the characters meet. Thus, Morrison reveals the two-dimensionality of racialized thinking and demands a new conceptualization of race and ethnic identification, renewing the language of representation. The implications of the short story title are paramount. The OED defines Recitatif as "the style of musical declamation between singing and ordinary speech, used especially in the dialogue and narrative parts of an opera or oratoria." In other words, it bridges music and language and tends to carry the burden of the narrative. Thus, by implication, Morrison's new--or realized, rather--language that seeks to revise understandings of ethnicity carries the narrative through its recitative nature. In other words, the short story that refuses conventional linguistic racial markers and yet is centrally concerned with the implications of race, is a recitative--a musical articulation that transforms this linguistic absence into a conceptual (social, political and cultural) presence: a new and musical narrative of race. Morrison's later novel, Paradise, extends this linguistic project into a much longer and more volatile process.

In addition to the key motifs of language and naming implicit in the novel's title, the associative implications of "paradise" are numerous: it is both a prelapsarian Eden and a utopian Heaven of the after-life. "Paradise" contains both innocence and sin; temptation and surrender; death and eternity; the Fall and redemption; ignorance and knowledge. Each of these contradictory ideas, as well as the contradiction itself, are crucial revisionary elements in the novel (as the opening passage insinuate).

Adorno's construction of musique informelle is fundamentally utopian as it relies on a faith in the social power of music that paradoxically transcends the problems inherent in that society. There are clear links between Morrison's paradise and Adorno's utopia. Both concepts envision a time and space that will restore a lost harmony or balance. And yet both recognize that the trauma of loss and of human experience makes a return to the state of innocence impossible; they turn to aesthetic production as the only possible medium that will enable a move beyond the social cultural, and individual paralysis of history. (11) The reconfiguration of origins and the concentration on loss, absence, trauma with the vision of a new utopian future are all part of this musical moment, in the 1950 and 1960s. (12) The strident and relentless drive of free jazz that takes it beyond immediate access or even comprehensibility represents the necessary and violent interruption of an aesthetic sensibility that had lost its capacity for representability. (13)

The interplay of loss and absence are explicit in Morrison's use of language in Paradise. Recalling one of the defining characteristics of Adorno's musique informelle, here the language is more than the medium by which themes are elaborated. In fact, Morrison's themes are manifest in the language itself. This process dramatically alters the experience of reading: because of its central thematic role in the novel through its rejection of pre-existing (or external) linguistic structures of race, the language becomes insistently self-reflexive, creating a tension between immediate outside references--or lack thereof--and a new system of signification that emerges from within the text. In his study of the implications of Auschwitz on art, Josh Cohen writes: "The untranslatable metaphor, as the taking place of a word without reference beyond itself, lets the unsayable be heard at the heart of speech" (113). The trauma of human experience becomes both unsayable and implicit in a new system of references. Morrison's Paradise similarly explores ways that language can become the central arena to reconceptualize history.

Cohen's summary of Adorno's position echoes this structure and links it with the utopian ideal I have discussed: "Art is not the fulfillment but the maintenance of its promise" (53), that is the promise of the fulfillment of the utopian ideal inherent in the representability of art. (14) Thus, the crux arises from an absence, from the tension of anticipation. It is through linguistic absence and anticipated fulfillment that Morrison succeeds in reformulating ethnicity (in its social, political, aesthetic, as well as linguistic implications). This focus on language as central to conceptualizing ethnicity comes to the foreground in the novel.

Toni Morrison's move to Paradise is not a retrospective yearning for a prelapsarian state. The narratives of history (both within and without the context of this novel) refuse this return to innocence. Like Free Jazz and musique informelle, Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison erode the system of reference on which history is built; moving from mumbo jumbo to a new paradise, they create a new language that enables a dynamic ethnic identification, one that rewrites history into a productive force.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. "On Jazz." 1936. Trans. Jamie Owen Daniel. Discourse 12.1 (1989-1990): 45-69.

--. "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," 1938. The Frankfurt School Reader. Eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart. New York: Continuum, 1982.

--. "Perennial Fashions-Jazz." 1953. Prisms. Trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981. 119-32.

--. "Vers une Musique Informelle." 1961. Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso Classics, 1998. 269-322.

Baker, Jr., Houston A. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Cohen, Josh. Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2003.

Eckstein, Lars. "Jazzthetics in Morrison." African American Review 40 (2006): 271-83.

Gabbard, Krin, ed. Jazz Among the Discourses. London: Duke UP, 1995.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

Gussow, Adam. Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

Harding, James M. "Adorno, Ellison, and the Critique of Jazz." Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 129-58.

Hogue, W. Lawrence. "Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major's Reflex, Morrison's Jazz, and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo." Novel (2002): 169-92.

Jameson, Frederic. Marxism and Form. Princeton, N J: Princeton UP, 1971.

Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

McKay, Nellie Y. "An Interview with Toni Morrison." Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates and K. Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad P, 1993. 396-411.

Morrison, Toni, Paradise. 1997. London: Vintage, 1999.

--. "Recitatif." Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women. Eds. Imamu Amiri Baraka & Amina Baraka. New York: Morrow, 1983.

O'Meally, Robert, ed. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

Porter, Horace A. Jazz Country: Ralph Ellison in America. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2001.

Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. 1972. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Rice, Alan. "'It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing': Jazz's Many Uses for Toni Morrison." Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. Ed. Saadi A. Simawe. New York: Garland, 2000. 153-80.

--. "Jazzing It Up a Storm: The Execution and Meeting of Toni Morrison's Jazzy Prose Style." Journal of American Studies 28.3 (1994): 423-32.

Shipton, Alyn. A New History of Jazz. London: Continuum Books, 2001.

Szwed, John. So What: The Life of Miles Davis. London: Arrow, 2003.

Townsend, Peter. Jazz in American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000.

Tracy, Stephen C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Coleman, Ornette The Shape of Jazz to Come. Atlantic, 1959.

--. The Change of the Century. Atlantic, 1959.

Davis, Miles. Milestones. Columbia, 1958.

Sun Ra. The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra. Savoy, 1961.

Taylor, Cecil. Looking Ahead. Contemporary, 1958.

Notes

(1.) See, for example, works by Baker, Gabbard, Gates, Gilroy, Gussow, Lock, O'Meally, Porter, Rice, Townsend, and Tracy.

(2.) Cf. Eckstein.

(3.) See, for example, Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music," "Perennial Fashions-Jazz," and "On Jazz."

(4.) in Marxism and Form, Jameson describes the work of art as first and foremost a symbolic act, a means of representation, thus serving as a performative intervention in the social situation in which it was created (3-58). He describes the problematics of representation, as they are manifest in historical modes of production, citing realism-modernism-postmodernism as one version of the historical shift. Accordingly, the postmodernist sensibility I attribute both to Reed and Morrison in this analysis, and to free jazz, reflects precisely that crisis of representation that Jameson hints at, whereby the referent (here, that of racialized essentialism) has faded from view, leaving a signifier unbound to historical restrictions, while remaining an allusion to them.

(5.) For more on Milestones and modality, see Shipton 664-65, and see Szwed.

(6.) This deliberate use of physical space to represent African American history is made even more explicit in Reed's description of the Mu'tafikah's headquarters in the basement of a "3-story building located at the edge of 'Chinatown.' Upstairs is a store which deals in religious articles. Above this is a gun store; at the top, an advertising firm which deals in soap accounts. If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan during the 1920s it would resemble this little architectural number." (82).

(7.) For more on the discussion of jazz as folk redemption in Jazz, see Hogue.

(8.) This reformulation of the past, what I am calling a paradigm of nostalgia, is not dissimilar to what Lock describes as two major impulses, in his critical response to the works of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton: "a utopian impulse, evident in the creation of imagined places (Promised Lands), and the impulse to remember, to bear witness.... These impulses might be, and sometimes have been regarded as antipathetic: the utopian associated with space, the future, the sacred, and the spirituals, the remembering with time, the past, the secular, and the blues ... these impulses can fuse, forming a crossroads in the creative consciousness where visions of the future and revisions of the past become part of the same process" (2).

(9.) The intrusive passers-by who verbally abuse a little girl of Ruby in the history of the narrative is an early sign of this crumbling. The alleged presence of a white girl living in the outskirts of the town is a culmination of the town's rotting self-definition and finally of its violent destruction.

(10.) Indeed, free jazz itself is not entirely separate from postmodern aesthetics. Significantly, Coleman selected Jackson Pollock's "White Light" as the artwork for the cover of his album. Coleman's own resistance to melody in the strict sense of the term closely parallels the resistance to figurativism in abstract expressionism. For more on jazz and the visual arts, see O'Meally.

(11.) In Interrupting Auschwitz, his study of the implications of the Holocaust for aesthetic production, Cohen describes another example where any traditional language of history or narrative aesthetic becomes inadequate and must be transformed to comprehend and transcend a traumatic historical moment. While the vast differences between the forces culminating in the Holocaust and those leading to slavery and its aftermath of racism resist any easy conflation of the two histories, the scale of the horror of each enables a natural comparison. Cohen's reading, which dwells on Adorno's work, reveals an aesthetic response to trauma that in many ways parallels Morrison's project in Paradise.

(12.) Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and The Change of the Century, Taylor, and Sun Ra are only some of the more explicitly titled visions of a new future.

(13.) I am not suggesting that Coleman, Coltrane, or other free jazz musicians made political decisions in their musical experimentations. Nor did they all always or necessarily function out of a sense of trauma and loss. However, reflecting on the effect of their music, on its reception by critics and audiences, its relationship to earlier musical forms and to the social and political contexts in which it was formed, I cannot ignore these implications. Consider, for example, Coltrane's response to the recurring critique that he played angry music: "I don't really know what a listener feels when he hears music. The musician may feel one way and the listener may get something else from the music.... The beauty of jazz is that you're free to do just what you feel." Coltrane recognizes the potential disparity between the performer's and the audience's experience of music but acknowledges the importance of both (Porter 195).

(14.) Cohen makes this link even clearer in his related analysis of Edmond Jabes and the concept of the Book. Quoting from Jabes, Cohen writes that "if 'making a book, or rather, helping it to come into being means above all blurring its utopian tracks, wiping out the trace' ... it is because its 'utopia'--its consummation as Book--is what presents itself only in the form of an erasure" (122).

Keren Omry, since being awarded her PhD in English Literature at the University of London, continues to explore the ongoing dialogue between contemporary African American literature, jazz aesthetics, and paradigms of ethnic identity. She also researches, teaches, and has published on the intersections between racialized and gendered discourses in science fictional narratives

COPYRIGHT 2007 African American Review
COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group