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

For the narrator this both begins and ends in race as a primary arbiter of identity, its potential as such, and its very real restrictions. Although a fundamentally racialized being, informed by the racist symbolic and operational systems with which he lives, whether he realizes it or not, Golden possess an identity that is much more extensive than this alone. Jazz becomes the process through which the narrator, not necessarily Golden himself, comes to understand the complexity and inconsistencies of identity. Identity is the ultimate structure of improvisation: erratic, ambiguous, artful. It is scrappy, shifting according to necessity, opportunity, and desire. It is as much a product of the self as of the self's interaction with its environment, the result of both self-creation and others' convictions.

Like Dorcas, Joe's murdered mistress, Golden Gray is an erratic mixture of emotions, attitudes, and labels that are then construed as identity: self-loathing mulatto; entitled white gentleman; self-righteous hypocrite; unformed adult, egocentric and immature; frightened orphan, unclaimed and misunderstood, in search of a home. While growth begins, for the narrator, with the assurance offered by the comfort and strength to be found in blackness, it becomes this and more, a mystery that will ultimately allow the soul sustenance and transcendence:

Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down. Not hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter things. I have to be a shadow who wishes him well, like the smiles of the dead left over from their lives. I want to dream a nice dream for him, and another of him. Lie down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet, and contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it, diminish it. I want to be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open. I want him to stand... his mind soaked and sodden with sorrow, or dry and brittle with... hopelessness.... There then, with nothing available..., a collection of leftover smiles stirs, some brief benevolent love rises from the darkness and there is nothing for him to see or hear, and there is no reason to stay but he does. For the safety at first, then for the company. Then for himself--with a... confident, enabling, seren e power....(161)

While this sustenance would appear to be based on racial sensitivity and a self-love that surpasses racial superiority, it cannot be accepted as such. For, if it is a wish based on the vagaries of race, there is the potential it will be rejected. More specifically, however, the words themselves will always remain a mystery just beyond the reader's ability to fathom, a private wish bequeathed by an artist to the creation, who ceases to be a personal possession once he, she, or it enters the public sphere, whether the world of the page, stage, or canvas. Here, for instance, there are echoes of the James Van Der Zee mortuary photos from which Morrison, who wrote the forward to The Harlem Book of the Dead, received her idea that produced Jazz. Nevertheless, while asserting individual agency within the context of the narrative, the character becomes as much a creation of various readers as of the actual creator. Characters function within the domain of the non-hermeneutic; the fate of each must, in part, be determined by the readers themselves, a form of improvisation that creates different results in each particular case. Although the indiscriminate affirmation of love and empty displays of affection may not permit growth to either the character or reader, the love that is empathy, that is the emotional transfer embodied within artistry itself, is far from futile, becoming, as the narrator's imagery suggests, an almost erotic exchange of feeling and sensation. To feel deeply for another, and to alter one's perspective and behavior in response is, adding a twist to Violet 's words, potentially to remake the world. Or, as Linell Cady posits: