Postmodernism, traditional cultural forms, and the African American narrative: Major's Reflex, Morrison's Jazz, and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2002 by Hogue, W Lawrence

Toni Morrison's Jazz, like Major's Reflex, also assumes the first modern paradigm. Like Reflex, Jazz attacks instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas as a way of textualizing the African American outside the Enlightenment's construction of the African American as Other than reason. But, unlike Major in Reflex, Morrison does offer southern black folk culture as an alternative to the dominant white society. Jazz is set in Harlem in the mid-1920s and deals with the migration of large numbers of African Americans (embodied in Joe and Violet Trace) from the rural South to the urban North. Joe and Violet Trace are transplanted Virginians who have lived in Harlem for almost twenty years. Violet is a beautician and Joe sells beauty products door-to-door. When the novel opens both are in their fifties and Joe has had an affair with Dorcas, an 18-year-old girl who lives with one of his clients. When she loses interest in the affair, Joe follows her to a party where he shoots her as she dances with a younger man. Dorcas dies because she refuses to go to the hospital to avoid focusing attention on the party and its illegal liquor. Embarrassment and a sense of shame keep Alice Manfred, Dorcas's guardian, from reporting Joe to the police. But Joe's wife, Violet, appears at Dorcas's funeral intent on using her knife to disfigure the corpse's face.

The historical backdrop for the unhappy triangle of Joe, Violet, and Dorcas is the Jazz Age, an age defined by African American culture, music, and literature. There is the heady tempo and daring temper of black life in Harlem. There are also the race riots. Jazz reaches from post-WWI Harlem back to Reconstruction, recounting hardships and hopes. In the Harlem of the twenties, the characters are caught up not only in jazz music, but also in an emerging mass-commodified capitalist American society that objectifies and exploits them.

But it is the way that Jazz is narrated that causes critics to define it as postmodern. It is told by a contradictory, multiple narrative voice. The narrative voice is part character and part omniscient narrator. First, there are the confiding tones of the limited first person, "I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too" (3). Second, there is the capacious, all-knowing voice of the anonymous speaker in the third person: "The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget" (33). Caroline Rody argues that in Jazz Morrison plays "with the convention of the omniscient speaker" (621). In most (modern) literature, the omniscient narrator is a naturalized convention. But, in Jazz, the omniscient narrator's knowledge and power are undermined by the "force of desire, specifically, the desire for human relationship" (622). Jazz humanizes and therefore problematizes the all-knowing omniscient narrator. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out in his review of Jazz, the multiple and self-contradictory omniscient narrative voice is "indeterminate: it is neither male or female; neither young nor old; neither rich nor poor" (54). This voice is, to use Derrida's marker for the indication of overturning violent hierarchies, both/and (Positions 41).