Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz.'

African American Review, Spring, 1995 by Philip Page

Thus, throughout Morrison's fiction, her characters are caught in the endless flux of becoming. In their multiple quests for viable identities, they must negotiate within the white/black polarity, and their explorations into their roles and identities are skewed because that pervasive and unyielding polarity leads to the displacement of additional polarities. Her characters have trouble developing fulfilled selves because they lack adequate relationships with one or more others, such as parents, spouse, family, neighborhood, community, and/or society.

Such postmodern tendencies are more explicit in Jazz than in Morrison's previous novels. The difficulties of the characters in Jazz are related primarily to the absence or displacement of parents and children, which, in turn, is related to the lack of satisfactory connection to the past. Such Derridean concepts as the differance, the trace, and the breach are especially useful in understanding the characters in Jazz who, in their displacement, tend to overemphasize one or the other terms of various binary oppositions. Joe, for example, having been deprived of true parents and therefore having had to rely solely on himself, exaggerates the importance of self, to the exclusion of anything else. Violet, on the other hand, has allowed her mother's fate to overwhelm her sense of self. The complex process of recovery which the novel documents is the movement away from such dependence on one face of an opposition and toward a healthier location within the play of oppositions.

More broadly, the novel's postmodernism suggests Morrison's political stance. In Jazz, as elsewhere, Morrison exposes the debilitating effects of white oppression, yet she avoids sentimental praise for African Americans. Instead, she locates her novel in the play between the two races: It is about the African American experience in white-dominated America and about how that experience is defined by African Americans' historical and continuing relationship with whites. Her novel thus mirrors her argument in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that the concept of "an American Africanism" (38) was created in the imaginations of whites as a way of defining themselves: "The process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony" (8). If whites have defined themselves against the African American other, the characters in Jazz have no alternative but to define themselves against the white presence. In either case, Morrison foregrounds the play between the two entities, not the traditionally privileged entity and not a reactive substitution of the traditionally deprived one.

Without for the moment considering its Derridean implications, Joe Trace's name bears thematic weight. Joe is adept at hunting, having learned the art of tracking prey from Henry LeStroy/LeStory. Good hunters follow the track of their prey by interpreting or reading its traces, the signs or evidence of its former presence. A track is also the forced or fixed direction imposed on one by external forces, such as the railroad tracks (which "control" the "feet" [32] of Joe, Violet, and the millions of other migrants), the record needle's track, or more generally fate: A faithful man near fifty "is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you. . . . You can't get off the track a City lays for you" (120).

Joe and Violet, like all the novel's characters, are bound to the track of Northern, urban, African American life. Lured from their rural Southern roots by the promise of economic opportunity and racial liberation, they are hooked by the City's music and throbbing energy. But, like many Morrison characters (for example, Cholly Breedlove, Son, Sethe, and Paul D), their identities are still linked to their roots in the rural South. The track of their lives is constituted by the traces of that past, largely their memories, which paradoxically give their present lives meaning and prevent the fulfillment of those present lives. Thus, Joe, haunted by his inability to verify his mother's existence, reconstructs her in Dorcas and attempts to relive his remembered joy (his "Victory") in Vesper County. For Violet, the traces of the past take the forms of her fear of repeating her own mother's suicide, her inability to have her own child, and yet her projections of a child onto Dorcas (108-09), Felice (197), and even Golden Gray, who "'"lived inside [her] mind"'" (208). Alice Manfred is also controlled by the traces of her past, for her bitter death-in-life is associated with her husband's infidelity and her desire for revenge. Similarly, Dorcas's present is dominated by the traces of her memory of the riot-caused fire that killed her parents and burned her treasured dolls.

But trace carries special significance, because it is one of the recurring concepts in Derrida's writing.(3) For Derrida the trace designates the play or oscillation between a present, a thing-as-it-is, and an absence, an other. It is "the intimate relation of the living present to its outside, the opening to exteriority in general" (Speech 86). The trace is thus inseparable from Derrida's concept of the differance, since both attempt to identify the indescribable gap between every pair of binary oppositions, the gap that allows them to exist, the "presence-absence" (Of Grammatology 71) that, never known directly, allows everything else to be comprehended. The trace is the "arche-phenomenon of 'memory'" (Of Grammatology 70), the play between the past and the present, the residue of the past that allows the present consciousness to exist: "The self of the living present is primordially a trace" (Speech 85).