In “Music and Identity” Simon Frith proposes that hip-pop music, with its quotation from classical music, blurs the high/low cultural boundary and the mind/body distinction, thereby producing “new ways of performing texts” and “new ways of performing the making of meaning” (115; emphasis original). Musical
appreciation, then, is never just “a matter of feeling” but “a matter of judgment” (Frith 115) as the quoting act in performance involves a process of meaning-making that features the transgression from one cultural context to another. Indeed, Frith’s insight into hip-pop music can be applied to jazz, a fusion of European and African styles.
André Hodeir justifies the European influence in jazz as “the necessity of borrowing in order to evolve” (45; emphasis original). Despite its European borrowing, jazz produces new meanings that defy the “norm” of white music. More precisely, the European borrowing in jazz engenders not only an alternative reading of its quoted predecessor but also a new way of meaning-making. Likewise, with biblical allusions, Jazz not only offers an alternative perspective to examine the western canon but
widens the spectrum of black art.
In Jazz, the extramarital affair of Joe and Dorcas has biblical references. The images of the apple, the snake, and Eden are repeated to open up new interpretations of the Bible and to create an African American version of Genesis. For instance, the image of the apple is repeated with different meanings. As a newcomer, Joe is so fascinated by the City that he forgets “apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit” (34). Here, apple trees can be considered a country symbol. Yet, despite the country implications of apple trees mentioned above, the City—New York—is widely known as “the Big Apple” nowadays. With its mesmerizing power, “the Big Apple” eclipses the charm of apple trees in Jazz. Indeed, “the Big Apple” surrenders Joe to its temptation not only by washing away Joe’s memories about apple trees in the country but, more
dramatically, by offering Joe another apple—Dorcas later in the novel. Contextualized with diverse referents, the apple provides a dialogue not only between the City and the country but, afterward, between Jazz and the Bible.
More often than not, the image of the apple implies a connection to the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. Infatuated with the City, Joe forgets the old days with his wife Violet in the country, falling for a girl young enough to be his daughter. For Joe, eighteen-year-old Dorcas is the apple of his eye. Lying next to Joe, Dorcas whispers to Joe, requesting him to take her to Mexico, where they can dance together, or sit at a table listening to music and flirting with each other under the tablecloth:
Nobody can see under the tablecloth. Joe, Joe, take me, say you’ll take me.
How you going to get out the house? he asks. I’ll figure it, she croons, just like always, just say yes. Well, he says, well, no point in picking the apple if you don’t want to see how it taste. How does it taste, Joe? she asks. And he opens his eyes (40).
In a way, Joe’s eye-opening act connects the apple here to the fruit of knowledge in the Bible. After eating the fruit of knowledge, Adam and Eve open their eyes to know their nakedness (Gen. 3:7). For Joe, crunching the apple is indeed an eye-opening sensation metaphorically related to the first-time sex between him and Dorcas:
Just for you. Anything just for you. To bite down hard, chew up the core and have the taste of red apple skin to carry around for the rest of my life.
In Malvonne’s nephew’s room….Your first time. And mine, in a manner of speaking. For which, and I will say it again, I would strut out the Garden, strut!...Dorcas, girl, your first time and mine. I chose you….I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking out, the choosing. (135; emphasis original)
While Adam and Eve are sadly driven out of Eden in Genesis, the African American Adam, Joe, prides himself on the once-and-for-all taste of the apple and struts out of Eden without regret. Comparing Dorcas to the apple and their first-time sex to the experience of apple-crunching, Joe attributes the act of apple-picking, symbolically his extramarital affair with Dorcas, to a free will rather than a sin. Like Adam and Eve, Joe gains “wisdom” to know good and evil after eating the fruit, and thus “opens his eyes.” However, Joe never regrets taking the bite into the apple even though he is keenly aware of the evils in his apple-crunching by claiming that he chooses Dorcas at a “wrong time” and he is “doing wrong by my wife [Violet]” (135). Setting his heart on Dorcas, he is willing to take whatever consequences the extramarital affair may bring about. In the Bible, facing God’s interrogation, Adam lays the blame of biting the apple on Eve while Eve ascribes the evil to the serpent (Gen. 3:12-13). Unlike Adam and Eve, Joe not only pleasurably takes the blame but also proudly proclaims his willful act of apple-picking, his choice of Dorcas. As Felice retells the “truth” of Dorcas’s death, Joe’s love is eventually repaid by Dorcas, who on her deathbed opens
her eyes saying out loud to Felice: “There’s only one apple…. Just one. Tell Joe”
(213). Under Morrison’s pen, the sinful act of apple-crunching in Genesis is rewritten into an African American love story.
In both Genesis and Jazz, eating the apple makes eyes open. After eating the apple, not only Adam and Eve in Genesis but also Joe and Dorcas in Jazz open their eyes only to find that “something is missing” (Rice 131) 5. That is to say, they end up desiring what they do not get. In Genesis, Eve desires omnipotent knowledge from the apple, but after crunching the apple, she opens her eyes only to see her nakedness and the consequences of being driven out of Eden. In Jazz, Joe and Dorcas desire love in each other to compensate for their parental loss. Nevertheless, the act of
apple-crunching--or symbolically their first-time sex—leads them only to find that love evades them in Jazz: Joe discovers that he does not know how to love, and Dorcas finds her affections for Acton misplaced. What is missing, like an open-ended musical note in Jazz, can be an unfulfilled desire, or symbolically (Rice 132).
Besides, what is missing can also be a vanished Eden that brings about a nostalgic fantasy for infantile bliss--the non-separable state with the mother, the primary love object (Rubenstein 158). Eden, in its absence, urges humans to seek substitutes through love. As we shall see, Joe and Violet have found in each other a substitute for what they missed in their childhood through the years of their marriage.
Now after years of their marriage, they are looking for other substitutes. Ruminating over their relationship, Violet notes:
Standing in the cane, he [Joe] was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see [Dorcas], but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but
5 Here “something missing” implies a textual link to Jazz. As the narrator in the novel reflects on the clinging force of the past in characters’ stories, s/he remarks that “Something is missing there.
Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out” (228). According to the narrator, to “figure out” what is missing, Joe and Dorcas have to “figure in” each other’s stories first.
wishing he was the golden boy [Golden Gray] I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he. (97) While Violet sees herself as Dorcas’s substitute, Dorcas nonetheless serves as Joe’s mother substitute. On his journey to find Dorcas, Joe has in his mind his past quest for his mother, Wild. Alone in search of Dorcas, Joe is “a long way from Virginia, and even longer from Eden” (180). Now that Joe’s tracing of Dorcas parallels his tracing of Wild, Eden embodies not only Joe’s blissful memories with Dorcas but also his constant obsession with the loss of Wild. As “something missing,” the vanished Eden conjures up a desire for différential substitutes to take place of the primary love object.
Yet, nor does the meaning of Eden remain stable in Jazz. Not a fixed site of nostalgia, Eden carries changeable meanings. Hearing stories about sinful love from Neola Miller, one of her babysitters, Dorcas does not get the moral, for, in her view, where there is fleshly love, there is Paradise:
Dorcas, at least, was enchanted by the frail, melty tendency of the flesh and the Paradise that could make a woman go right back after two days, two! or make a girl travel four hundred miles to a camptown, or fold Neola’s arm, the better to hold the pieces of her heart in her hand.
Paradise. All for Paradise. (63)
As long as earthly Paradise is constructed through love, the lost celestial Eden in the Bible no longer matters much. In Joe’s version of Adam and Eve’s story, moreover, Adam turns out to be a rich man when he leaves Eden, for he has not only Eve but also the first taste of the apple (132). Not nostalgic for the lost Eden, Joe, the African American Adam, dare pride himself on the choice of the apple and “strut out the Garden” (134). In love with Dorcas, Joe further redefines Eden as available through an understanding look between lovers: “You [Dorcas] looked at me then like you
knew me, and I thought it really was Eden…” (133). While Adam in Genesis fails to get omnipotent knowledge from the apple and is then banished out of Eden, Joe in Jazz gains a understanding look from his “apple,” Dorcas, and becomes powerful enough to regain his own Eden.
Like Eden, the biblical motif of the snake is repeated with different meanings in Jazz. In the Bible, the snake deceives Eve into eating the apple (Gen. 3:1-7). Judging the sin of apple-crunching, God puts enmity between Eve and the snake and between their offspring, predicting that they will feud with each other forever (Gen.3:15). In Jazz, Joe paradoxically assumes double roles--the role of Adam and the role of the snake. Recalling Joe’s “murder” of her niece, Alice resents his “snake-in-the-grass stealing of the girl in her charge [Dorcas] (76). For Alice, Joe is crafty enough to snake through her own grass, through “the watched and guarded environment” (76) she has prepared for Dorcas. It never occurs to Alice that Joe and Dorcas actually met each other at her door in the first place and had developed their relationship ever since.
Interestingly, as a crafty snake, Joe snakes through not only Alice’s place but also Violet’s. In their first encounter, Joe falls out of a walnut tree in front of Violet. Then, Violet teases him about his sleeping in trees because there can be snakes. In response to her tease, Joe talks back by saying “Snakes around here crawl the ground at night”
(104). Interestingly, Joe can be considered a snake himself, who entices Violet into marriage and then betrays her. And if Joe is like the snake in Genesis, Dorcas and Violet are like Eve. While Eve is at enmity with the snake in the Bible, Violet, Dorcas, and Joe are nonetheless involved in a far more ambivalent love-and-murder triangle.
Besides, despite its implication of evil, the snake can be strategically reversed into an African American emblem. In Jazz, Joe compares himself to a snake having shed skins for eight times in life. With Dorcas, Joe initiates his eighth change, the last one. Infatuated with Dorcas, he notes: “They say snakes go blind for a while before
they shed skin for the last time” (129). His snake-like changes, in a sense, feature the process of becoming “a new Negro” (129). Before meeting Dorcas, he has undergone seven changes, most of which concern his racial identity. The first change comes when he renames himself Joseph Trace; the second is when he trains himself to be a man under the guidance of Mr. Frank, the hunter’s hunter; the third change is followed by a racially-provoked fire in Vienna, his hometown, and his subsequent marriage with Violet; the fourth time comes when he and Violet move to the
Tenderloin, the lower east side of New York, on a train under the Jim Crow law; the fifth time occurs when they move uptown and fight with light-skinned renters to settle down in Harlem; the sixth time is caused by the 1917 racial riot, during which he almost dies; the seventh is when Joe joins the 1919 parade to celebrate the victory of the colored troops in World War I. Indeed, Joe’s snake-like changes carry racial significance. Being a colored man, Joe is bound to constantly reinvent himself: “I talk about being new seven times before I met you [Dorcas], but back then, back there, if you was or claimed to be colored, you had to be new and stay the same every day the sun rose and every night it dropped” (135). To survive racial discrimination as a black, Joe has to go through a series of changes to be strong enough. The skin-shedding process, then, transforms Joe into “a new Negro” (129) and thereby creates an African American version of Genesis. Rendering Joe as both Adam and the snake, Morrison changes the meaning of the snake in Genesis from an evil instigator to an emblem for the “new Negro” in Jazz.
Indeed, the snake in Jazz may remind the reader of its various roles in different parts of the Bible, besides Genesis. In the Bible, the snake also serves as God’s messenger to lead Moses and the Israelites to Canaan, the Promised Land. When Moses and Aaron first request Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to move out of Egypt, Aaron performs the miracle of turning his staff into a snake to deliver God’s message
in front of Pharaoh and his officials (Ex. 7:8-13). Indeed, as God’s messenger, the snake strengthens the Israelites’ faith in God and show them the way to Canaan. When the Israelites distrust God and Moses, God sends venomous snakes among Israelites as punishment. Shortly after their repentance, God asks Moses to make a bronze snake to heal the bites (Num. 21: 4-8). Even in the Bible, the role of the snake ranges from an evil instigator in human genesis to God’s messenger in the story of Moses and the Israelites.
Apparently, neither in Jazz nor in the Bible is the snake portrayed as irrevocably evil. In Jazz, the narrator observes how Golden Gray attends to Wild, a fainting black woman, imagining that he will be delighted with her ill-requited deeds:
If she [Wild] should rise up and claw him[Golden Gray] it would satisfy him even more and confirm True Belle’s warning about the man who saved the rattler, nursed the rattler, fed the rattler only to discover that the last piece of information he would have on earth was the irrevocable nature of the rattler. (155)
Golden Gray has been taught that the rattler, the snake, takes on an irrevocable nature of returning evil for kindness. The lesson does not prove true in this case, though.
Neither Wild nor Golden Gray is bound by an irrevocable nature in the story; they are rather inclined to change. Golden Gray might be determined to kill Henry Lestory but Wild changes his mind (173). Significantly, everyone is as changeable as a
skin-shedding snake in Jazz: Joe eventually reinvents himself from being the murderer of Dorcas to becoming her only apple (213); Dorcas can mean both an adulteress and a would-be daughter for Violet (109); Felice changes from Dorcas’s alibi to a girl bringing happiness to Joe and Violet (215); Alice refuses to see anybody connected to Joe at first but anyhow she lets Violet in: “The woman who avoided the streets [Alice] let into her living room the woman who sat down in the middle of one
[Violet]” (73). In a way, the snake-like change is a must for humanity. Humanity, in the narrator’s definition, is tantamount to mutability: “Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say….” (220). If biblical allusions are riffs in jazz, then characters are jazz performers who experience a process of identification through a shift of roles and changes of identity. Interestingly, besides the roles of Adam and the snake, Joe also enacts the roles of Moses and his namesakes, both Joseph of Genesis and Joseph the father of Jesus. In the following section, I will elaborate on how Joe is connected to biblical figures and how his possible identities further take on African American significance.