Jazz begins with a gossipy narrator displaying her knowledge about the principal event in the novel. The narrator, who “knows” “that woman” [Violet] and
“her husband” [Joe] (3), briefly tells a story about love-and-murder triangular
relationship between Violet, Joe, and Dorcas. In his/her first version of the story, when spring comes, there will be another scandalizing threesome and another tragedy in which “what turned out different was who shot whom” (6). Later on, as the story is repeated, spring comes but instead of providing the setting for another tragedy, it brings new possibilities. Spring, then, means not “the time of year when the City urges contradiction most” (117) but “a condition: the range of what an artful City can do” (118). In Jazz, images and themes are repeated by different narrators in different
contexts. These various versions of narrative should not be considered contradictory to each other; rather, they are manifestations of performative différance. Every
moment when a theme is repeated, it carries new meanings different from those of the previous version. Like riffs in a jazz performance, repetitive images and recurring themes open up interpretations and fuel improvisation in Jazz. In this section, I aim to examine the repetitive rhythms and recurring images of the novel, in a way to read Jazz as a différancial performance of jazz.
The story of Jazz proceeds in the form of repetition and différance. For instance, the beginning of a chapter always recapitulates the ending of its previous chapter from a different perspective. First, the concluding sentence of the first chapter “I love you”
(24) is followed by “[o]r used to” (27), the very opening of the second chapter. With the narrative focus shifting from Violet to Joe, the inter-chapter connection of “I love you” and “[o]r used to” features an irony of Violet and Joe’s marriage. Likewise, the depiction of weather change in the end of the second chapter, “[f]rom freezing to hot to cold” (51), paves the way for Alice’s reminiscence in the beginning of the third chapter: “Like that day in July, almost nine years back, when the beautiful men were cold” (52). Interestingly, the third chapter ends with Alice talking to Violet, “the woman sitting by her [Alice’s] ironing board in a hat in the morning” (87), as the fourth chapter delves into the psyche of the hat-wearing Violet: “The hat, pushed back on her forehead, gave Violet a scatty look” (89). Likewise, the following chapters are also modeled upon the repetition and revision of their previous chapters, till Jazz ends with the narrator stressing the hands-on participation of the reader: “You are free to do it [the making and remaking of me] and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now”(229). In a sense, while inter-chapter connections in Jazz can be read as the transitions between each solo part, the open-endedness of the novel can be likened to the lack of final chord making possible the reader’s participation in
a jazz performance. Like jazz performers, characters in Jazz take turns to voice their stories in response to antecedent episodes, and furthermore invite the reader to improvise the meaning of the performance in an open-ended way. In fact, the open-endedness of jazz can be derived from the pattern of “a snake swallowing its tail” (Collier 14) in African music. To produce a state of trance and possession in religious ceremonies, African music has a tendency to “let a section of a song repeat for a considerable length of time, until the leader or master drummer decides that it has gone on long enough and shifts to another section or pattern” (Collier, Making 14).
Like jazz, Jazz also characterizes the pattern of “a snake swallowing its tail” (Collier, Making 14) by linking the last note of a section with the first note of another.
Assuming the form of jazz, Jazz fuels the force of différance with the device of repetition in the narrative structure mentioned above. Besides, repetition and
différance in Jazz can be premised on rhyme, repetitive words, and recurring images.
In Jazz, rhyme not only creates the impact of jazz, but more significantly, manifests a wonder of différance. A paragraph that describes Dorcas’s experience of music appreciation not merely features the employment of jazz but also gestures toward some possible interpretations of Jazz:
Dorcas lay on a chenille bedspread, tickled and happy knowing that there was no place to be where somewhere, close by, somebody was not licking his licorice stick, tickling the ivories, beating his skins, blowing off his horn while a knowing woman sang ain’t nobody going to keep me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it right here, or else. (60)
Rhyme produces the sound of jazz and enhances the beauty of Jazz. Reading the passage above as a jazz performance, Eusebio L. Rodrigues indicates that the
syllables “ick” in rhyming words (licking, licorice, stick, tickling) function as “a pair
of drumsticks” while the series of the participle “-ing” characterizes “a continuous flow of movement” (735).
Like repetitive rhythms, rhyme and repetitive words generate new contexts and unfurl new layers of meaning in the passage above. Rhymed with “tickling the ivories” to create the sound effect of drums (Rodrigues 735), the phrase “licking his licorice stick” can be viewed as musical notes of jazz. Yet “licorice stick” could also possibly mean “clarinet” while “ivories” stand for the piano and “skins” refer to drums (Rodrigues 735) as the rhyme scheme imitates the style of jazz. Besides rhyme, repetitive words are employed to enhance meaning. Words like “tickle” and
“knowing” are repeated in the abovementioned passage to produce not only resonance, but also, a sexual motif. “Tickled” by jazz, Dorcas imagines somebody “tickling the ivories,” namely playing the ivory instrument. Here, music is sexually connotative as the jazz man tickles not only the ivories but also Dorcas. Moreover, “knowing” the implications of jazz, Dorcas catches on to what the “knowing” woman sings about.
The unpunctuated lines sung by the “knowing” woman, as Rodrigues indicates, provide a feeling of “sexual vibes” (735). The images of the “key” and the “keyhole”
also connote sexual meaning, and the breathless run-on lines she hums, like the flow of musical notes, are expressive of love and lust. Like the “knowing” woman, Dorcas is sex-savvy, “knowing” the sexual connotations of jazz.
Besides rhyme and repetitive words, recurring images are characteristic of the style of Jazz. For example, the image of candy is repeated in different scenarios to feature the motif of love. Absorbed in jazz, Dorcas finds the best place ever “where somewhere, close by, somebody was not licking his licorice stick” (60, emphasis added). Here, “where” and “somewhere” are rhymed to intensify the yearning for a place in love. Besides, the image of “licorice stick” not only weaves the feeling of sweet love into the jazz motif, but more significantly, hints at the future encounter
between Joe and Dorcas. In Jazz, the image of Dorcas buying candy is repeated several times. Lying in bed remembering details about Dorcas, Joe remembers the time when he delivered the Cleopatra order to Alice’s house. When Dorcas answered the door, he found that she was the very girl that had bought candy in the drugstore, knowing “there she was” (29). Leading the reader to explore the psyche of characters, the recurring motifs deepen the motif of love in the novel.
Besides, the recurring image of candy functions to conjure up various interpretations of Docas’s identity. For Joe, Dorcas is a candy, a psychic place, and even a mother substitute. As the narrator repeats Joe’s personal story afterwards, s/he describes Dorcas as “Joe’s personal sweet” (120) and, to continue this image of candy, the rented room is thus where they regularly meet and “where his private candy box opens for him” (121). Actually, it is the hunger for youth that evokes the image of
“licorice sticks”: “That [Dorcas] and the clarinets and even they [being a youngster and newcomer in the City] were called licorice sticks” (120). Besides being candy, for Joe, Dorcas also means a place to resort to and something more:
All I know is I saw her buying candy and the whole thing was sweet. Not just the candy—the whole thing and picture of it. Candy’s something you lick, suck on, and then swallow and it’s gone. No. This was something else….I needed to be there, where it was all mixed up together just right, and where that was, was Dorcas. (121-122; emphasis added)
Here, the image of candy is reminiscent of Dorcas’s being there-ness, namely Dorcas’s role as a psychic place and even as a mother substitute for Joe. Joe regards Dorcas not as a licorice stick to lick, but as something to fill in for his past. Later in the novel, when Joe traces Dorcas and finding “There she is” (186) at the party, he meanwhile recalls his past search for his mother Wild wondering “But where is she”
(184; emphasis original). Indeed, the recurring motif of tracing the lost love in
different scenarios of Jazz parallels Joe’s quest for his mother Wild and his search for Dorcas and thereby sets a dialogue between the past and the present. In this sense, Joe loves Dorcas because she takes the place of Wild. In love with Dorcas, Joe finds his identity not as an orphan but as the apple of Dorcas’s eye.
Another example of the recurring image is “pain.” The narrator talks about urban black life: “Nobody wants to be an emergency at Harlem Hospital but if the Negro surgeon is visiting, pride cuts down the pain” (7). As racial pride can take away physical pain, an understanding action can ease a psychological pain. Invited to have dinner at the Trace, Felice is kind enough to drink much water to disguise her dislike for the catfish cooked by Violet: “I drank a lot of water so as not to hurt her feelings.
It eased the pain”(216). Interestingly, pain ends the chapter about Felice and begins another chapter told by the anonymous narrator: “Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it” (219). Reflecting on his/her past prejudice against the characters in the novel, the narrator confesses that s/he has gloated over their
misfortune only to quench his/her sweettooth for pain. Self-critical of his/her rejoice in their tragedy, s/he begins to identify with the characters and therefore feels uneasy:
“And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don’t I?” (219) In the beginning of the novel, the narrator comments that “[T]he children of suicides [Violet and the like] are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are not really here” (4). Nevertheless, as the story proceeds, s/he grows to “solve the mystery of love” (5) by reading their stories and sharing their pain. As the word “pain” is repeated in different parts of the story, physical pain and psychological pain are interwoven, and the characters’ experience of pain is thus shared.
Repetitive words link together fragments of information and different parts of narration in Jazz. For instance, the word “slap” is repeated in different contexts to piece together the motifs of parental discipline and racial strife. Hearing of her
premarital pregnancy, Colonel Gray goes purple with rage to “slap” his daughter, Vera Louise, into the serving table (141). Though not knowing who the father of Vera’s child is, Colonel Gray sweats when the possibility of his daughter being with “seven mulatto children on his land” (141) comes into his mind. For Colonel Gray, Vera Louise’s pregnancy can be a disgrace not merely to the family but also to the white race. Moreover, combining the motif of parental discipline with that of racial concern, the repetition of “slap” can serve as a pun to dramatize the inner world of Dorcas.
Having suffered from the loss of her mother, Dorcas often feels the “inside nothing”
(37) as Joe does:
Maybe her nothing was worse since she knew her mother, and had even been slapped in the face by her for some sass she could not remember.
But she did remember, and told him so, about the slap across her face, the pop and sting of it and how it burned. How it burned, she told him.
And of all the slaps she got, that one was the one she remembered best because it was the last. She leaned out the window of her best girlfriend’s house because the shouts were not past of what she was dreaming. They were outside her head, across the street. Like the running. Everybody running. For water? Buckets? The fire engine, polished and poised in another part of town? There was no getting in that house where her clothspin dolls lay in a row. In a cigar box. But she tried anyway to get them. Barefoot, in the dress she had slept in, she ran to get them, and yelled to her mother that the box of dolls, the box of dolls was up there on the dresser can we get them? Mama? (38; emphasis added)
Repetitive words, such as “burned” and “slap” here, serve as puns that take on a double sense of loss. As Rodrigues argues, the repetitive phrase “how it burned” is rendered with double meanings (739): With the traumatic loss of her mother in mind,
Dorcas vividly remembers the slap that “burned” and, the house that “burned.” Here,
“how it burned” implies more a psychological pain than a physical one. Likewise, the slap on the face by Mama runs parallel with the slap of water in the fire. Likened to the notes in jazz, the slap on the face and the slap of water flow rhythmically across her face, across the street, and across her mind. Actually, according to Dorcas’s aunt, Alice, the fire can be attributed to a racial riot (57). With the implication of parental discipline and racial strife, the pun “slap” functions as a traumatic sign, reminding Dorcas of the fire that deprives her of her mother.
Like a musical note, the word “slap” is constantly re-contextualized to improvise different stories. While the “slap” can correlate parental discipline with racial strife, it can also reinvent itself to mean something different. In the narrator’s observation of city life, slaps can be spared for something more meaningful:
Some old people who didn’t slap the children for being slappable; who saved that strength in case it was needed for something important. A last courtship full of smiles and little presents. Or the dedicated care of an old friend who might not make it through without them. (11)
In its context, the passage above is used in contrast to the gloomy atmosphere of Joe and Violet’s home: “But up there on Lenox, in Violet and Joe Trace’s apartment, the rooms are like the empty birdcages wrapped in cloth” (11). Nonetheless, near the end of the novel, Joe and Violet’s relationship is restored as the sound of snapping fingers fills the air in the City (226-227). Symbolically, the sound of snapping finger connotes an act of intimacy and public love. According to the narrator, public love can be found in the intimate act of snapping fingers between Joe and Violet: “The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other” (229) and their shared secret that “I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning” (229; emphasis original). In a
sense, the strength of slapping is spared for the click of snapping fingers. Significantly, the change from “slap” to “snap” marks not only a musical change in tune but also a process of différance. With writ-ability, the once-traumatic sign “slap” can be rewritten into a more blessed one “snap.” As “slap” is in différance to become its differing and deferring substitute “snap,” the traumatic past can be revised into a hopeful present. Actually, the sound of snapping fingers bails characters out of the clinging force of the past. For the narrator, the characters in Jazz are “the sound of snapping fingers” (226), or like “a magician-made clock with hands the same size”
(227) without the indicator of time. Hearing the “ticking, tap, snap” made by the characters, the narrator reflects on their stories:
I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some say to think about itself, but that it has gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. Hangs on to wells and a boy’s golden hair; would just as soon inhale sweet fire caused by a burning girl as hold a maybe-yes maybe-no
hand….Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure out. (228)
The sound of “ticking, tap, snap” can reconcile the clinging force of the past with
“something missing” here—love. To sum up, as “slap” is rewritten into “snap” in différance, the tragic tune in the beginning of Jazz is transformed into a more blessed one in the end.
In addition to the shift from “slap” to “snap,” Morrison also employs the double meaning of “well” to indicate both the danger and security in Violet’s stories—the well as Rose Dear’s deathbed and the well as Joe’s chest (165-166). Compelled by racial violence, Violet’s mother, Rose Dear, steps toward “the limitless beckoning from the well” (101). Lamenting over Rose Dear’s death, Violet says to herself:
“What was the thing, I wonder, the one and final thing she had not been able to endure or repeat?” (101). The answer is death, which evokes the image of the well. Since Rose Dear can never repeat her stories after jumping into the well, the well
symbolizes a closure of meaning. Nevertheless, near the end of the novel, the image of the well is rewritten to describe the mended love between Joe and Violet:
“Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on his chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well” (225). In light of Derrida, the well represents an open image that can reconcile a set of dichotomous forces: “life/death, light/dark, self/other, humanity/nature,
solitude/plenitude, presence/absence” (Page 166). In a Derridean sense, as the center of death—the well—is repeated in différance, the arbitrary closure of the irretrievable past is cut open, and the death-like closure of an one-sided interpretation is avoided.
Identity is never definite in Jazz. Neither the identity of a word, an image, nor a person is centered on one-sided interpretation. For Alice, Joe, the “killer” of her niece, should be a nice man: “A sample-case man. A nice, neighborly, everybody-knows-him man….He was one of those men who might have marched down Fifth Avenue—cold and silent and dignified—into the space the drums made” (73-74; emphasis added). In Alice’s view, the juxtaposition of Joe and drums should provide an atmosphere of
Identity is never definite in Jazz. Neither the identity of a word, an image, nor a person is centered on one-sided interpretation. For Alice, Joe, the “killer” of her niece, should be a nice man: “A sample-case man. A nice, neighborly, everybody-knows-him man….He was one of those men who might have marched down Fifth Avenue—cold and silent and dignified—into the space the drums made” (73-74; emphasis added). In Alice’s view, the juxtaposition of Joe and drums should provide an atmosphere of