Golden gray and the talking book: identity as a site of artful construction in Toni Morrison's Jazz

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Caroline Brown

Jazz, the product of slavery, segregation, poverty, and disenfranchisement, is many things: a "complicated anger" Uazz 59); the carefree indulgence of the now; a marginalized population's assertion of selfhood, of cultural vitality and artistic pride; the hope for musical synthesis through conflict. Created in an era of socially sanctioned African-American invisibility and stigmatization, it is also the affirmation of individual and group worth: the soul's manifestation of its love for its complement, the rejected flesh. A tribute to the soul's resilience, it is ultimately one process through which it may heal itself.

Of the intersection of jazz music, history, and the erotic, Toni Morrison states:

At that time, when the ex-slaves were moving into the city, running away from something that was constricting and killing them and dispossessing them over and over and over again, they were in a very limiting environment. But when you listen to their music--the beginnings of jazz--you realized that they are talking about something else. They are talking about love, about loss. But there is such grandeur, such satisfaction in those lyrics.... the/re never happy--somebody's always leaving--but they're not whining. It's as though the whole tragedy of choosing somebody, risking love, risking emotion, risking sensuality, and then losing it all didn't matter, since it was their choice. Exercising choice in who you love was a major, major thing. And the music reinforced the idea of love as a space where one could negotiate freedom. For some black people jazz meant claiming their own bodies. You can imagine what that must have meant for people whose bodies had been owned, who had been slaves as children, or who remem bered their parents' being slaves. Blues and jazz represented ownership of one's own emotions. (Schappell and Brodsky 365)

Jazz is, quite literally, the textual negotiation of freedom through the grammar of the erotic. The erotic--sexual hunger, romantic love, dangerous desire, sensual pleasure--drives the narrative. Still, it is never about itself alone. Rather, its extravagance is propelled by the narcotic of freedom, the luxury of asserting the right to choose and shape one's destiny, and, as Morrison maintains, to own "one's own emotions." Jazz becomes the process through which its protagonists "own" their emotions. It is the ritual through which those experiences that inform these emotions are reclaimed and thus reincorporated into the psychic fiber of those lives.

This is nowhere more obvious than in Morrison's depiction of Joe and Violet Trace, the embattled couple at the heart of the novel. Through each spouse's individual narrative, Morrison recreates the cycles of jazz, relying on the musical idiom to trace the characters' descent into the haunting territory of their souls, into the spiritual hunger that drives physical compulsion and emotional distress. Thus Violet's account, her plunge into an aggressive and eccentric egotism upon learning of her husband's betrayal with a teenager, is noisy and frantic. Her words, seized from the third-person narrator, veer almost haphazardly into and out of the ongoing narrative. However, as a consequence of returning to her past, she is eventually reborn through the chaos symbolized by the jazz process. Joe's journey, configured as an immersion into the blues, the heart of jazz, manifests itself as a depression, solitary and torpid, a metaphorical cave within which he has interred himself. His words, orderly and falling into ti dy quotes, reveal his seeming discipline. Yet they hide the rage at their core. Having murdered his teenaged mistress, he must atone psychologically, working through his guilt, and accepting responsibility for his actions. He must also identify the conflicted maternal longing for the woman who initially rejected him--his cave-dwelling, feral mother, whom his tortured consciousness finally confuses with the equally rejecting Dorcas. The jazz idiom of Morrison's novel is thus central to the recovery of the past, both personal and historic, and a reenvisioning of the future. All are impacted by the erotic.

It would then seem that the Golden Gray segment rests outside of the boundaries of the jazz ethos. Strangely detached from the larger narrative, it is pointedly pre-jazz in era and sensibility, and deals less with the erotic as a manifestation of the bodily than as an abstract concept only vaguely impacting, and then in the negative, Golden himself. Yet the Golden segment, in a sense, becomes the embodiment of jazz. Both the narrative unraveling of an erotic mystery and a meditation on the mysteries of eros, it becomes the voice of the non-hermeneutic, a narrative enigma that entices then evades. Immersing the reader in its polyphony, it materializes as jazz itself. Yet, it is not simply jazz as a musical form or a poetic device; it is jazz personified as love. Its incorporation also allows the emergence of a sustained artistic vision that is as political a statement as an aesthetic one. Within this movement, the erotic is never simply a sexualized commodity to be voyeuristically relished. Rather, it is an a ctive process in which the reader is expected to be fully engaged. It literally becomes the textual negotiation of freedom, that process through which the past and future touch, merging as the non-hermeneutic, that space in which order collapses and the reinvention symbolized by the erotic is possible.