Kinds of Blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the Jazz Aesthetic

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Jurgen E. Grandt

Jazzing Up the World: Toni Morrison and Hans Janowitz

Toni Morrison's jazz critics have primarily focused on two aspects of her novel, narrative structure and language, in order to assess the aesthetic at work. Perhaps the most jazz-like aspect of the novel's technique of storytelling is its narrative voice, and Paula Gallant Eckard goes so far as to claim that, "though unnamed, jazz is the essential narrator of the novel" (13). Critics have correctly pointed out that the narrator resembles a jazz soloist who improvises on a basic theme--the novel's first paragraph--and in the course of the solo constantly invents, re-harmonizes, elaborates, digresses, and explores. (5) Significantly, it is a narrative voice engaged in the creative process of storytelling, reacting against and responding to other voices, other sounds, picking up new motifs on the way, correcting itself, even contradicting itself:

   Risky, I'd say, trying to figure out anybody's
   state of mind. But worth the
   trouble if you're like me--curious,
   inventive, and well-informed. Joe acts
   like he knew all about what the old
   folks did to keep on going, but he
   couldn't have known much about True
   Belle, for example, because I doubt
   Violet ever talked to him about her
   grandmother--and never about her
   mother. So he didn't know. Neither do
   I, although it's not hard to imagine
   what it must have been like. (137)

The narrator's storytelling is truly improvisational: "I watched them through windows and doors, took every opportunity I had to follow them, to gossip about them and fill in heir lives" (220).

Janowitz's narrative voice, like Morrison's, is not only gossipy and judgmental, but also forgoes linear narration by switching back and forth in time and place, invoking new voices, finding and elaborating new motifs, improvising scenes and dialogue. In short, it too is a narrative voice engaged in the creative process of storytelling: It revels in interrupting its own storyline "because it brings me delight to disrupt syncopationally the so-called course of the action once again and always again. For do not forget, ladies and gentlemen: it is a jazz novel that is developing here. After all, the jazz character must finally erupt somewhere. And because much has been ruptured in this chapter already, it shall therefore erupt in the next one" (19). Whereas Morrison's narrator improvises and leaves the basic melody of the storyline behind to elaborate on the beauties of the city sky or explain the significance of Thursdays (35-36, 49-51), Janowitz's narrator improvises as well, elaborating on the characteristics of Hungarian aristocrats in exile or explaining the history of a hotel room mirror, for instance (19-22, 32). And like Morrison's narrator, Janowitz's remains unnamed, disembodied, running the same risks the jazz soloist runs in the act of creation, making corrections when necessary in order to maintain a connection between the melodic line of the solo and the underlying chord progression of the song, lapsing into contradictions when the connection ruptures, and, also typical of jazz according to Morrison's critics, eschewing closure (6):