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

On its most basic level, the non-hermeneutic is that which escapes or disrupts interpretation. It is "pure surface phenomenon ... of unpredictable singularity" which "vanishes without ever 'freezing' into a state of stability" (Gumbrecht, "Epiphany" 533). More indicative of creative rather than analytical processes, the non-hermeneutic neither can nor should be understood "as phenomena belonging to the universe of mimesis, or a representation, as a signifier coupled to a signified, or, seen from the opposite perspective, as something to be interpreted, read, or deciphered" (520).

When adapted to the structure of the written text, the non-hermeneutic gaze would function within a deconstructivist paradigm. It suggests that which is never fully conceptualized, that which eludes even as it is in the process of being formulated. Within this project, I refer to the non-hermeneutic as those forms and spaces of indecipherability within Jazz that, for any number of reasons, resist interpretation. In fact, the novel's power rests in the uneasy tension that arises from the development of its "meanings" intersecting with the manner in which it is constructed as a form, apart from any specific interpretative significance. This tension gives rise to constantly shifting and uncertain readings which destabilize our assumptions about perspective and, by extension, what is considered "reality."

The erotic is that concept which connects meaning and form, infuses the body into the text, and becomes the most consistent site of the non-hermeneutic, as contradictory as that sounds. A paradoxical concept, the erotic is an especially appropriate manifestation of the non-hermeneutic within the text. Conventionally considered the carnal or amatory, in the written text it usually refers to the sexually titillating, from the sentimental to the pornographic. However, the erotic has as its root eros, a Greek noun meaning love or desire, whether for another person, a pursuit or discipline, or an idea. It is this binarism that lends the erotic its plasticity and which Audre Lorde evokes in her provocative essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power."

In her essay, Lorde argues for the construction of the erotic as a site of female agency and resistance to oppression. "The erotic," she explains, "is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings" (54). For Lorde, the love that eroticism represents is a deeply intuitive and sensual energy that transforms as it heals. It is that which emerges from the disorderly fusion of the bodily and the psychic. Thus the power of the erotic is its specifically unifying potential: within the self, with others, or between larger ideological movements. Or as Lorde explains:

The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is ... false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic--the sensual--those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love in its deepest meanings. (56)