In the first change of his life, Joe renames himself Joseph Trace. Hearing from his stepmother that his biological parents disappear “without a trace,” he changes his surname from Williams to Trace: “I’m Trace, what they went off without” (124). In a sense, his renaming act can be read with a Derridean insight. As the identity of his biological parents cannot be confirmed, Joe is himself a trace, whose identity is formed just within the process of tracing his ancestry and can only be perceived in retrospect as an effect. Indeed, Joe’s renaming act can manifest the nature of identity.
Identity, as an open category itself, allows the trace of any possible reading. In this section, I wish to interpret Joe’s identity through a biblical reading of the name
“Joseph,” in light of the idea advanced in Patricia Hunt’s “’Free to do something wild’:
History and the Ancestor in Jazz.” Through a biblical study, Hunt indicates the significance of Joe Trace’s given name, Joseph. Ranging from the Joseph of Genesis to the Joseph in Acts, she accounts for how Joe in Jazz acts as a “chosen” figure conjuring up the concept of resurrection in Afro-Christian tradition. Based on Hunt’s finding, I wish to explicate how Jazz sheds light on both biblical stories and African American histories, through a comparison between Joe in Trace, Joseph of Genesis,
and Joseph the earthly father of Jesus.
In the New Testament, Joseph is best known as the earthly father of Jesus Christ. To honor his genealogy, Jesus’s bloodline is traced in Matthew and Luke. In the record of genealogy, however, the identity of Joseph has always been contested.
Whether Joseph is “the son of Jacob” (Matt. 1:16) or “the son of Heli” (Luke 3:23) is not for sure. Interestingly, Joseph’s ancestry can be traced back not only to King David but also to Rahab, a prostitute that marries Salmon and gives birth to Boaz (Matt. 1:4-5). Rahab hides Joshua’s spies from the authorities of Jericho, and thus, her family is spared after the Israelites take over the city (Jos. 2:1-24, 6:22-25). A person with good deeds, she is often mentioned as an example of salvation through faith (Heb. 11:31; Jas. 2:25). Thus, the presence of her name in the genealogy manifests not a profanation of the holy bloodline; rather, it implies a moral that good lineage lies not in royal blood but in good deeds. Because of her faith and deeds, Rahab finally has her status raised from a prostitute to the ancestress of Joseph and Jesus.
Like Joseph the earthly father of Jesus, Joe has an ambiguous identity in Jazz.
Orphaned, Joe does not know the identities of his biological parents, but he infers that his mother may be Wild, a wild black woman. Like Rahab, Wild also renews her status from a wild woman to a goddess-like figure. The episode of Wild begins with the narrator’s sarcastic comments on snake-like Joe and nutty Wild: “Any fascination could mark a newborn: melons, rabbits, wisteria, rope, and, more than a shed
snakeskin, a wild woman is the worst of all” (165; emphasis added). Townspeople keep a wide berth of Wild because she is crazy and therefore dangerous: “Just thinking about her, whether she was close or not, could mess up a whole morning’s work” (166). Actually, the name “Wild” is given by Henry Lestroy, nicknamed Hunters Hunter. For Hunter, taming Wild is nonetheless a tall order:
First thing came to mind was the woman he named himself some thirteen
years ago because, while tending her, that was the word he thought of:
Wild. He was sure he was tending a sweet but abused young girl at first, but when she bit him, he said, Oh, she’s Wild. Thinking, some things are like that. There’s no gain fathoming more. (166)
Bit by her fingertips and frustrated by her lunatic reaction, the Hunter considers Wild uncivilized and unfathomable. Though considering her crazy, he later insists that “she got reasons” (175). Furthermore, Hunter warns Joe against hurting her on his journey to find her: “You know, that woman is somebody’s mother and somebody ought to take care [of her]” (175; emphasis original). In Hunter’s view, Wild is “a mother”
rather than “a creature,” and thus she should be treated with humanity. Wild’s status, then, changes from a “madwoman” to “a mother.” Later on, Wild even has her status raised to a quasi-goddess when the narrator reflects on his/her past prejudices against the characters and takes back his/her previous comments on Wild as “a wild woman,”
praising her for the soothing peace she has brought:
I’d love to close myself in the peace left by the woman who lived there and scared everybody. Unseen because she knows better than to be seen…..She has seen me and is not afraid of me. She hugs me.
Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her. Released in secret. (221)
For the narrator, Wild, with a power of invisibility, can be likened to a
human-embracing goddess who offers people timely support and unconditional love.
In the Bible, Joseph the earthly father of Jesus is granted to be possibly related to Rahab, who, as mentioned above, is a prostitute turning out to be the mother of her kingly descendants. Compared with his biblical namesake, Joe in Jazz is also blessed to be possibly kin to Wild, an understanding quasi-goddess in the guise of a wild woman. Though their identities remain ambiguous, Joseph in either work
traces his ancestry to a woman with a heart of gold.
Indeed, those named Joseph appear as good men in the Bible. First, though not mentioned much, Joseph the earthly father of Jesus is noted as “a righteous man”
(Matt. 1:18). Hearing of his wife’s unmarital pregnancy, he decides to “divorce her quietly” in order not to “expose her to public disgrace” (Matt. 1:19). Later on, an angel comes into his dream, telling him to marry Mary without worry because the Holy Spirit, later known as Jesus, will be born through her virginal pregnancy (Matt.
1:20). Therefore, Joseph takes the role of Jesus’s earthly father and thereby delivers the messiah to the earth. Another example is Joseph of Genesis, the son of Jacob (Israel) who is sold by his brothers to Egypt but is eventually designated by Pharaoh to become the ruler of Egypt (Gen. 37:1-50:26). With his ability to interpret Pharaph’s dreams, Joseph predicts that seven years of famine will ensue after seven years of abundance. A man of wisdom, he changes his status from an imprisoned slave to be the ruler of Egypt. Under his rule, Egypt remains an abundant land even in difficult years. As the famine also extends to the land of Canaan, Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to buy food and thus meet Joseph again. Eventually, he forgives his brothers and has their families settled in Egypt. A man of virtue, Joseph of Genesis saves both the Egyptians and the Israelites from starvation, and furthermore, he returns his brothers’ betrayal with kindness.
In a sense, Joe in Jazz can also be considered a good man. Except his extramarital affair and his gunshot at Dorcas, he is innocuous, kind, and helpful.
Trying to give him impunity, Alice thinks about how nice Joe is before he fires at Dorcas. In Alice’s view, Joe is nice and neighborly enough to make people feel “not only safe but kindly in his company” (73). For Violet, Joe is not only kind but also reliable. On the one hand, he has been so kind that he never hurts anything but Dorcas (81). On the other hand, feeling secure in his company, Violet regards Joe as the one
who saves her from the well that devours her mother: “Never again would she wake struggling against the pull of a narrow well. Or watch first light with the sadness left over from finding Rose Dear in the morning twisted into water too much small” (104).
In Felice’s eye, Joe is also a good husband, who does both kitchen chores and haircut for Violet (206). Knowing that he is so kind, she can understand the words Dorcas utters on her deathbed: “There’s only one apple….Just one. Tell Joe” (213). Despite his would-be kindness, however, Joe shots Dorcas down. Unlike his biblical
namesakes, Joe is susceptible to desire and therefore his love for Dorcas becomes his hamartia. Nevertheless, his flaw makes him more human as humans are complicated, changeable, and therefore lovable. In a way, it is the humanist love that redeems his wrongdoings and transforms a tragedy into felicity in Jazz.
In fact, the presence of Josephs often foreshadows the arrival of a redeemer in the Bible. The best-known example is the Joseph in Matthew and Luke, who serves as Jesus’s earthly father bringing him up to save humans from sins. Actually, the name
“Joseph” in Hebrew means “may he [God] add.” Rachel, the wife of Jacob (Israel), names her first son “Joseph” to pray for another son (Gen. 30:22-24). Later on, God grants her wish and sends her another son named Benjamin. Indeed, the birth of Joseph of Genesis not only presages the coming of Benjamin for Rachel, but more significantly, paves the way for a future redeemer, Moses, to come to the Israelites’
rescue. Noted as a slave-turned-ruler, Joseph of Genesis shows great wisdom to bail the Egyptians out of famine and to bring them affluence. In his term, he moves his family, namely the Israelites, from Canaan to Egypt. After a few generations, however, the Egyptians disregard Joseph’s contributions and view the growing number of the Israelites as an eyesore. Therefore, the Israelites are forced into slavery until Moses leads them out of Egypt (Ex. 1:1-12:42). In this sense, the story of Joseph gives rise to the story of Moses, a redeemer freeing the Israelites from the tyranny of the
Egyptians.
A redeemer also comes after Morrison’s African American Joseph, Joe. In Jazz, Joe’s ill-reputed “murder” is redeemed by the arrival of Felice, a close friend of Dorcas’s. First, Felice reveals that Joe did not shoot Dorcas to death; rather, “Dorcas let herself die” (209). Delivering Dorcas’s last words, Felice also lets Joe know that he is “the only one apple” (213) in Dorcas’s eye. Moreover, after Felice’s visit, Joe and Violet begin to work on their relationship (212). With “happiness” implied in her name, Felice not only gives Joe, the ill-reputed “murder,” his hue but, more
significantly, helps Joe and Violet restore their relationship. No wonder Joe takes her name for a blessing: “’Felice. They named you right. Remember that’” (215). Like a musical note, the arrival of Felice brings about a change in tune. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator calls the trio of Felice, Joe, and Violet “scandalizing
threesome,” predicting that “What turned out different was who shot whom” (6). Near the end of the novel, nevertheless, the narrator takes back her previous prejudice:
I saw the three of them, Felice, Joe, and Violet, and they looked to me like a mirror image of Dorcas, Joe, and Violet….Like dangerous children.
That’s what I wanted to believe. It never occurred to me that they were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in ways I never dreamed of. (221)
In the narrator’s view, the tragic trio of Dorcas, Joe, and Violet turns into the benevolent trio of Felice, Joe, and Violet. In place of Dorcas, Felice provides an alternative perspective to Dorcas’s death, thereby transforming the previously tragic atmosphere of the novel into a harmonious ending note.
In the Bible, the story of Joseph in Genesis serves as a prelude not only to the Exodus but, symbolically, to the African American diaspora:
The Joseph story connects to the later bondage of the Hebrews in Egypt,
when “there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph” (ex.
1:8); the bondage of the nation of Israel has been analogized to the slavery of Africans in the United States and to the subordinate social status of black Americans more generally. (Hunt 52)
In Exodus, the Israelites are oppressed under the tyranny of the Egyptians: “in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly” (Ex. 1:14). To bail the Israelites out of Egypt, God sends consecutive plagues on the Egyptians. Yielding to God’s will, Pharaoh finally agrees to let the Israelites go. Like the Israelites of Exodus in Egypt, Africans were forced into slavery in the United States during the Middle Passage, yearning for emancipation, freedom, and humanity.
Just as the story of Joseph in Genesis hints at a greater link to the Exodus and symbolically to the Middle Passage, Joe’s personal story in Jazz also is connected to black migrations in history—both the Middle Passage and the Jazz Age Migration.
First, Joe’s migration to the City in Jazz features the diasporic experience of black southerners around the early twentieth century. Years after the abolishment of slavery, many blacks still struggled for a higher social status in the U.S. society. It was the yearning for a decent life that motivated the Jazz Age Migration, in which many blacks went up to the North to pursue a decent life. From 1910 to 1930, partly due to the rampant racism in the South, and partly due to the economic prospect of life in the North, a large number of black southerners moved up north (Yanow 9-10). The mass exodus galvanized many top jazz musicians into migration from New Orleans and other southern areas to northern cities (Yanow 10). Like jazz musicians of the early twentieth century, Joe and Violet in Jazz are among the wave of economic migration up north to the City to improvise their jazz stories: “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” (33). Fervently falling for the City at
first sight, Joe and Violet train-dance on their way, like many other immigrants:
And like a million others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they stared out the windows for first sight of the City that danced with them, proving already how much it loved them. Like a million more they could hardly wait to get there and love it back. (32; emphasis added) Here, the story of Joe and Violet not only represents the migrant experience of a million others during the Jazz Age, but it also echoes the epigraph of Beloved that reads “Sixty Million and More” to pay homage to the Middle Passage. While sixty million and more Africans died in the slave trade of the Middle Passage, Joe and Violet and a million more others find themselves reborn with “stronger and riskier selves” (33) through the migration to the City. Hence, the bitter past in the Middle Passage is rewritten into a hopeful prospect in the story of Joe and Violet, and symbolically in the Jazz Age Migration.
On the whole, biblical allusions in Jazz provide points of identification for the narrator, the reader, and characters to role-play biblical figures and thereby to make sense their stories. Like jazz performers, they take the roles of biblical figures and reinterpret biblical stories with their experience, and thus redefine their identities against each other through the performance. Putting biblical scenes in the context of African American histories, Jazz encourages the reader to graft the jazz stories onto his/her life’s repertoire and thus to jazz up their own racial identities.
Conclusion
I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division.
“Thunder, Perfect Mind,” The Nag Hammadi Taken from the Greek poem “Thunder, Perfect Mind,” the epigraph of Jazz manifests the improvisation of identity in a jazzy way. Indeed, “Thunder” describes a god/goddess that proclaims for him/herself a set of paradoxical identities: “I am the whore and the holy one,” “I am the bride and the bridegroom,” “I am sinless, and the root of sin derives from me,” and “I am the voice whose sound is manifold / and the word whose appearance is multiple” and so on (MacRae 297-303). Through these antithetical statements of his/her identity, the “I” in “Thunder” reconciles a set of antinomies per se. Like the thunder-god/goddess, the narrator “I” in Jazz bespeaks multiple identities. S/he is sexually ambiguous. S/he is cruel yet also kind: “I break lives to prove I can mend them back again” (219). S/he is omniscient yet unreliable, who “invented stories” about the characters with her “know-it-all self” (220). S/he is
“the eye of the storm” (219) and the voyeur-vu, who observes the lives of the
characters but turns out to be gazed upon: “I had to follow them, to gossip about and fill in their lives, and all the while they were watching me” (220). In a sense, being complicated and changeable, s/he can be considered an improvisational note, whose naming process lies in jazz performance as “the name of the sound” and “the sound of the name.” Overall, how can the ambiguous identity of the “I” in the epigraph shed light on our understanding of black identity in Jazz? How can Jazz, as a cultural production, make the black “I” a category in différance?
Like the narrator, characters and the reader also cast their identities into jazz performances in Jazz. In the previous chapters, I have elaborated on how characters in Jazz, like jazz performers, experience a process of identification and plays out their identities in a mobile way. In Chapter One, by exploring the hybrid implications and performative nature of jazz, I justify my purpose of reading Jazz as a manifestation of indefinite black identities. In this way, I attest Morrison’s employment of jazz to her non-essentialist attitude toward blackness. In Chapter Two, I draw on riffs in jazz to explicate how the devices of repetition help improvise the meanings of identity in Jazz. In my view, recurring motifs and repetitive rhythms contribute to variegating a theme in different contexts and engender various interpretations of one’s identity through différance. In Chapter Three, comparing biblical allusions in Jazz to riffs in jazz, I investigate how Jazz transforms biblical stories into an African American jazz song, in which characters, the narrator, and the reader are free to “blacken up” and improvise the meaning of their identities. Analyzing repetition and différance in Jazz, I interpret black identity as a repeatable category through performance.
Although I have traced the history of jazz and examined the devices of repetition to make sense the link between music and identity, I have not yet done a closer analysis of the jazz pattern in Jazz due to my limited knowledge of musicology.
A more fruitful approach may be initiated by applying musicology to the study of Morrison. In a pioneering study, for instance, Lars Eckstein does a comparative study between Coltrane’s four-part suite “A Love Supreme” and Morrison’s novel, Beloved.
With a focus on jazzthetic techniques, he explicates how Beloved resembles a jazz
With a focus on jazzthetic techniques, he explicates how Beloved resembles a jazz