爵士化黑人身份認同:童妮．摩里森《爵士樂》中的重複與差異

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩. 士. 論. 文. Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 爵士化黑人身分認同︰童妮．摩里森《爵士樂》中的重複與差異. Jazzing Up Black Identity: Repetition and Differences in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. 指導教授：李秀娟 Advisor: Prof. Hsiu-chuan Lee 研究生：簡鈺娟 Advisee: Yu-Jyuan Jian. 中華民國九十八年八月 August 2009.

(2) 摘要. 本論文研究爵士樂與童妮‧摩里森《爵士樂》之間的多重連結，並據此探討《爵士樂》如何藉由形式上的重複與差異塑造黑人身分認同。第一章對爵士樂的雜糅歷史及表演性質進行檢視，並試圖解釋我為何將《爵士樂》視為未定的黑人身分認同之表現形式。藉此，我以摩里森書中所運用的爵士樂技巧，證明她對黑人身分認同所持的非本質主義式態度。第二章運用爵士樂中的即興重複段，解釋《爵士樂》裡的重複如何即興演繹黑人身分認同。在我看來，循環出現的主題與反覆的節奏能使不同情境的主題呈現出多重樣貌，以及藉「衍異」產生個人身分認同的多種解釋。第三章研究《爵士樂》如何將聖經故事轉變為非裔美國人的爵士樂曲，使書中人物、敘事者、及讀者皆可在其中隨意即興演繹個人身分的意涵。藉由《聖經》跟《爵士樂》的比較，我企圖檢視《爵士樂》如何以重寫聖經裡的場景來建構黑人身分認同。總之，我詳細說明《爵士樂》中的人物宛如爵士樂演奏者般，經歷認同的過程且以多變的形式演奏出他們的身分認同。藉由分析爵士樂中的重複與差異，我將黑人身分認同詮釋為可藉演奏而重複的範疇。作為雜糅的產物，《爵士樂》允許自身被再製為「衍異」形式下的產物，且持續激發此本小說被嫁接到不同情境下的黑人身分認同之新詮釋。.

(3) Abstract. This thesis studies the manifold connections between jazz and Toni Morrison’s Jazz and thereby explores how Jazz jazzes up black identity through repetition and differences. Examining the hybrid implications and performative nature of jazz, Chapter One attempts to justify my reading of 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. Chapter Two draws 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. Chapter Three investigates how Jazz transforms biblical stories into an African American jazz song, in which the characters, the narrator, and the reader are free to improvise the meaning of their identities. Through a juxtaposed reading of Jazz and the Bible, I wish to examine how Jazz, in rewriting certain biblical scenes, motivates the construction of black identity. All in all, I elaborate on how the characters in Jazz, like jazz performers, experience a process of identification and plays out their identities in a mobile way. Analyzing repetition and différance in Jazz, I interpret black identity as a repeatable category through performance. As a hybrid product, Jazz allows itself to be remade into différancial forms, and thus continues to jazz up new interpretations of black identity in the various contexts the novel is, and will be, grafted into..

(4) Acknowledgements. I would like to dedicate my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Hsiu-chuan Lee, for her conscientious instruction and constant encouragement during the past years. From her teachings, my level of intelligence has not only been elevated, but reached a height that I never thought I would get to. Besides, I am especially indebted to her for her heartfelt concern about my psychosomatic state and her timely pep talk when I was about to quit thesis writing. I cannot thank her enough for what she has done for me. I am also grateful to my thesis examiners, Prof. Wen-ching Ho and Prof. Yu-chuan Shao, for their insightful inspections and constructive comments. Prof. Ho has not only enlightened me on Morrison’s study with his lectures on American novels but also recommended me to attend the African and African American Popular Culture Conference held in 2007. Thanks to his guidance, I have gained a deeper understanding of Morrison’s novels. Prof. Shao has offered me great encouragement and precious advice on my thesis. For me, their kindly help really gives my thesis considerable polish. I would also like to extend my gratitude to all my fellow classmates, especially Wen-yu Hsieh, Wen-shiun Chen, Wei-cheng Lee, Li-jing Wang, and Sao-wan Chan, for their camaraderie. I also appreciate the timely support from my senior classmates, Chih-wei Yang and Szu-ping Huang. Furthermore, I am deeply indebted to all my friends, especially Chi-wen Su, Yu-ting Lin, and Chuan-ju Tseng, for lifting me up when I felt weak. Last but not least, I owe a great deal to my family. During an economic crunch, they tightened their belts just to render me enough support for my graduate studies. I truly appreciate their unconditional love. Overall, I thank all people around me for seeing me through this academic journey..

(5) Table of Contents. Introduction. 1. Chapter One. 13. Jazz and Black Identity 1.1 Hybrid Implications in “Recitatif” and Beloved. 13. 1.2 The History of Jazz. 19. 1.3 Music and Identity. 25. Chapter Two Repetition and Differences. 31. 2.1 Repetition and Différance. 32. 2.2 The Performative Différance in Jazz. 37. Chapter Three Repetition and Biblical Allusions. 50. 3.1 Biblical Allusions, Jazz Performance, and Black Identity in Jazz. 51. 3.2 Biblical Revision in Jazz. 53. 3.3 The Biblical Significance of Joe. 61. Conclusion. 69. Works Cited. 73.

(6) Introduction. Set in the 1920s, Toni Morrison’s Jazz features urban black experience with its notable jazz form. Just as the ground beat is repeated and modulated in a jazz performance, the theme of love and murder continues with variations in Jazz, from the motif of mourning to the personal reminiscences of each character and the recapitulation of the main story yet again. In Jazz, repetition not only helps improvise plenty of interconnected stories but also enables a fragment to be told by different persons from different viewpoints. Accordingly, thematic repetition not only moves the reader to the territory of individual psyche but also contrasts actual events with what might have been. Thematic repetition in Jazz, then, bridges the past and the present, the actual and the possible, and therefore stimulates improvisation. Just as repetition without completion leads to various interpretations of the fleeting leitmotif in a jazz performance, the repetition of events in Jazz generates a host of interpretative traces that cast individual personality and even racial identity into question: Is Dorcas a prey or a predator in love? Is Golden Gray black or white? As we read on, we may find these either-or divisions unstable and, likewise, all binary oppositions under challenge. What, then, are possible definitions of black identity? How can jazz, as a hybrid product derived from both African and European music, illuminate our understanding of black identity? Does Jazz signify black identity in the way that jazz is played? By foregrounding repetition and its ensuing differences in Jazz, I attempt in this thesis to read the novel as a jazz performance from which polyphonic voices and multiple interpretations unfurl. My aim is to examine the relationship between jazz and Jazz and to explore how the novel Jazz jazzes up black identity through repetition and differences. Before delving into the repetition and differences in Jazz, I would like to review.

(7) Jian 2. existent research on similar topics, in a bid to build my study upon previous achievements. Named after jazz, the novel Jazz is noted for its musical attributes. In “Experiencing Jazz,” Eusebio L. Rodrigues borrows jazz aesthetics to account for the musical form of Jazz. By looking into the rhythmic passages of Jazz, he explicates how punctuation marks and rhymed words parallel the beats of jazz and how the interconnected stories of the novel resemble the subsections of jazz, using “stretched blue notes to restate and to purify earlier experiences of joy and pain” (751). For Rodrigues, the rhetorical device of repetition is used to “intensify the beat in order to deepen meaning” (737). While Rodrigues reads Jazz as a jazz performance with repetitive rhythms, Page regards Jazz as an alternative to the either-or divisions with the repeated appearances of “trace.”1 Drawing on Derrida’s notion of différance, he deciphers the repeated appearances of the “trace” in Jazz. The “trace,” defined as an oscillation between presence and absence (Page 161), functions to locate a site of the past in the present consciousness and thus allows the endless repetition in differences. For Page, repetition residing in the recurrent appearance of “trace,” in the endless differing and deferring chain of différance, can be viewed as a way to avoid both an arbitrary closure of meaning and binary oppositions between absence and presence. As Rodrigues holds that the repetition of rhythms contributes to amplification and improvisation in Jazz, Page argues that repetition in the form of the “trace” enables infinite redoubling and thus reconciles a meaning with its outside. As repetition in Rodrigues allows a subsection to repeat and improvise without coming to a complete stop, repetition implied in Page’s “trace” acts as a force against an arbitrary closure. 1. In “Make Me, Remake Me: Traces, Cracks, and Wells in Jazz,” through a Derridean insight, Philip Page studies the various appearances of traces, cracks, and wells in Jazz. In his reading of Jazz, the “traces“ take the forms of the hunting trace, the record needle’s track and so on. For instance, by defining the hunting trace as “the sign of its former presence” and the record needle’s track as “the fixed direction imposed by external forces” (160), Page parallels the appearances of “traces” with the repetition and reconstruction of the past. Traces in Jazz negotiate the past with the present and, broadly speaking, meditate between the past/present polarity..

(8) Jian 3. Both Rodrigues and Page read new dimensions into the theme of repetition in Jazz by affirming the force of differences in repetition. Nonetheless, they have not yet built the link between repetition and identity. I wish to add to their arguments by exploring different layers of repetition and utilizing them to account for Morrison’s specific way of formulating black identity in Jazz. Following Rodrigues, I would like to look into the repetition in the musical form of Jazz. However, I would like to move beyond the reading of Jazz as a musical performance. Viewing Jazz as a performance welding together jazz and identity, I seek to investigate the link between the repetition of rhythms and the traces of identity. Like Page, I would like to borrow Derrida’s notion of différance to read Jazz, but I aspire to read the novel’s formation of black identity in light of the idea of différance. Reading Jazz as putting biblical stories in différance, I wish to examine how certain plots of Jazz mime the stories of the Bible and how the novel places biblical stories into differing and deferring settings, into different times and spaces. With an initial whisper “sth,” the narrator uncovers a few fragments of information and briefs out the main story in the first paragraph of Jazz: Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deep down, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.” (1; emphasis added) In a word, Jazz is mainly about a love-and-murder triangular relationship, as indicated.

(9) Jian 4. at the very beginning of the novel. The plot development centers on the death of the young lover Dorcas, thereby moving the reader to the subtexts of the love-and-murder story and the reminiscences of this event. In individual memories, stories are recited and images are repeated, all of which lead to the twists and turns of our initial understanding of Jazz. At the very outset, the narrator supposes that s/he “knows” the story. His/her knowledge, however, turns out to be problematic as other characters tell their versions of the story. Characters repeat a fragment from diverse viewpoints, and as a result, retell the story with differences. While reiterating the principal event shown in the initial paragraph, they actually challenge the presupposed knowing of the events. Repetition enables improvisation in jazz. As a key feature of jazz, improvisation refers to the moment when performers alter a sustained tone and thereby incorporate their creativity into the piece. While repeating the melodies already played, performers are free to add words, notes, or vary the tempo. Improvisation, then, can be premised on a given tone “repeated several times in succession” and a musical phrase “placed differently in relation to the underlying beat” (Gridley 40). Like jazz, Jazz functions to place an image or a story in different contexts and thereby improvise new stories through repetition. For example, the image of birds is repeated to render new interpretations to the relationship between Joe and Violet. At the very outset, Violet releases a flock of birds from the cages, including a parrot saying “I love you” (3). The image of birds is repeated at the end of the first chapter: “He [Joe] is married to a woman who speaks mainly to her [Violet’s] birds. One of whom answers back: ‘I love you’” (24). Interestingly, the second chapter also begins with the image of birds in response to the end of the first chapter: “Or used to. When Violet threw out the birds, it left her not only without the canaries’ company and the parrot’s confession but also minus the routine of covering their cages, a habit that had become one of.

(10) Jian 5. those necessary things for the night” (27). Linking together two chapters with “I love you” and “Or used to,” the image of birds reminds the reader of the broken relationship between Joe and Violet. Nevertheless, near the end of the novel, the image of the bird turns from a reminder of the heart-breaking story into a symbol of consolation to the traumatic past. As Joe and Violet gradually mend fences by sharing their personal stories with each other, fussing with Violet’s newly-bought bird becomes part of their daily routine. Afterwards, they let go the bird in hope that it can join its company to sing like a musician (224). Then, in Joe’s fantasy, the image of the bird reemerges as a sacrifice to the traumatic past: “Lying next to her, his head turned toward the window, he sees through the glass darkness taking the shape of a shoulder with a thin line of blood. Slowly, slowly it forms itself into a bird with a blade of red on the wing” (224-225). As the image of a caged parrot saying “I love you” is finally rewritten into a music-embracing bird and then a sacrificial bird, the empty statement of “I love you” in the beginning is transformed into a hopeful promise in the end. Besides the repetition of events, the repetition of rhythm translates expressive energy and fuels resonant imagery in jazz. In “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry,” Sherley A. Williams explicates how blues creates the effect of “worrying of the line” through repetition: Repetition in blues is seldom word for word and the definition of worrying the line includes changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetitions of phrases within the line itself, and the endless blues cries which often punctuate the performance of the songs. (qtd. in Jones 94-95) Just as its predecessor blues generates textual changes through repetition, jazz manages to repeat and then modulate ideas through the variation of rhythm. In Jazz, Morrison enacts the rhythm of jazz and thereby amplifies the resonance of imagery,.

(11) Jian 6. vividly portraying Joe and Violet’s train dance to the City: When the train trembled approaching the water surrounding the City, they [Joe and Violet] thought it was like them: nervous at having gotten there at last, but terrified of what was on the other side. Eager, a little scared, they did not even nap during the fourteen hours of a ride smoother than a rocking cradle. The quick darkness in the carriage cars when they shot through a tunnel made them wonder if maybe there was a wall ahead to crash into or a cliff hanging over nothing. The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet. Joe stood up, his fingers clutching the baggage rack above his head. He felt the dancing better that way, and told Violet to do the same. (30; emphasis added) Here the repetitive participle “-ing” produces a nonstop sound effect and features the continuation of speed (Rodrigues 744). The participle “-ing” both functions as the onomatopoeia of the train’s rumbling and as the rhythmic reflection of the couple’s feeling during their sleepless hours. Moreover, synonyms like “shiver” and “tremble” analogize the movement of the train to the mood of the couple. Like the train, Joe and Violet experience the anxious trembling on the one hand and joyful dancing on the other hand. In this sense, the onomatopoeic repetition of “-ing” brings vivacity to the novel, and thereby reconciles possible predicaments with promises in the city. Likened to the train ever on the move, the jazz effect in Jazz continually maps musical aesthetics into possible interpretations of the novel. Repetition is viable through musical devices such as antiphony, or the so-called call and response in jazz music. Just as a jazz artist responds to his/her colleague in a performance, characters repeat each other’s stories and create differences in Jazz..

(12) Jian 7. Their story-retelling, in a sense, can be viewed as an act of re-membering2--the dialogical linking of different voices, tones, and pieces of the story. In “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Morrison defines “memory” as “the deliberate act of remembering” that leads to “a form of willed creation” (385). She also voices that memory, unlike research, is not about what an event really was but how and why it appeared so (385). Accordingly, Morrison wishes the reader to feel the story rather than know the story, involving her reader in the construction of her novels. The reader, then, participates in the act of re-membering and integrates his/her experience into the interpretation of Jazz in the endless relay of jazz creation. As the art of improvisation in jazz can be likened to the art of story-telling in Jazz, the story-telling repeats and renews a past event through the call-and-response relay. In this thesis, I wish to study the manifold connections between jazz and Jazz. My intention is threefold: first, I will investigate the hybrid origin of jazz and thereby argue that Morrison’s employment of jazz attests to her non-essentialist attitude toward black identity; second, I will analyze the formation of black identity in Jazz in light of the repetitive structure of jazz; third, reading Jazz as an African American rewriting of the Bible, I will look into how Derrida’s notion of différance is played out in the novel. By tracing the history of jazz, I will come up with a proposition that jazz is hybrid rather than black-exclusive. By stressing jazz as an art form of hybrid cultural origin, I will argue that Jazz, like jazz, is not a uniquely black invention aiming at the creation of an “intrinsic” black identity. Since the category of the black is open to interpretations, I seek to broach the possible definitions of “blackness” by 2. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Freud defines repetition as opposed to remembering, claiming that the patient “repeats instead of re-membering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance” (151). According to Freud, the patient reproduces a repressed desire “not as a memory but as an action” (150) and repeats to act unconsciously under resistance. Only by tracing back the origin of the repressed desire, by the act of remembering, can the compulsion to repeat be worked through. While Freud distinguishes repetition from remembering, my reading of Jazz would nonetheless find in repetitions a way to remember and understand Morrison’s idea of memory..

(13) Jian 8. discussing the device of repetition in Jazz. Then, I will extend my study of the repetition of rhythms and images to the repetition of biblical motifs in the novel, unraveling how Jazz jazzes up black identity through the process of repeating stories and creating differences. On the whole, this thesis conjoins the historical investigation of jazz to the formal analysis of Jazz, in hope to correlate the form of the novel with Morrison’s concern about the formation of black identity. Chapter One attempts to uncover Morrison’s non-essentialist attitude toward black identity through her employment of jazz. First, I will review how identity is portrayed as an open-ended concept in Morrison’s previous works, “Recitatif” and Beloved. Next, I will brief out the history of jazz to come with a preposition that jazz is originally a hybrid product welding together European and African musical traditions, so as to find out how the creolized blackness in jazz can enhance our understanding of black art and of black identity. Finally, borrowing insights from Simon Frith’s “Music and Identity,” I would like to investigate how jazz performances conjure up a process of identification and thus produce black identity as an effect. A brief review of Morrison’s previous works, especially “Recitatif” and Beloved, may explain her intention to make black identity an open-ended discussion through her employment of jazz in Jazz. As Morrison voices her indignation against a unitary definition of black literature, “Nothing would be more hateful to me than a monolithic prescription for what black literature is or ought to be” (“Memory” 389). In fact, neither black literature nor black identity is definite in Morrison’s fiction. In “Recitatif,” what can be inferred is that Twyla and Roberta are of different races but there is no telling about who is white and who is black. In Beloved, Sethe names Denver after a white lady Amy Denver and, in a sense, incorporates the hybridity of ethnic experience into the naming of Denver as an African American. Both “Recitatif” and Beloved encompass the shared experience of blacks and whites and thus move.

(14) Jian 9. beyond essentialist racial narratives. Just as “Recitatif” and Beloved may fail to be defined as exclusively “black,” so may Jazz. Rendered in the form of jazz, Jazz shares the hybrid sentiment with jazz. Despite its indisputable African heritage, jazz descends as much from European music: its instrumentation, basic principles of harmony, and formal structures. As a matter of fact, many jazz pioneers were “the half-caste black Creoles who came from a subculture that was more European than black” (Collier, Making 6). Since its day of birth, hybrid implications have been mapped into jazz and posed challenges to an “intrinsic” blackness. Just as jazz is a mixed-blood product welding European form and African rhythm, Jazz can be viewed as a marriage between European tradition and black influence. In “Rootedness: the Ancestor as Foundation,” Morrison briefly introduces the history of the novel, whose status evolves from the exclusive art form of the European middle class to the possible storytelling method of African Americans, and then proudly proclaims her ambition to incorporate the characteristics of black art into the genre of novel (340-342). With her cultural heritage in mind, Morrison finds the potential of black music for modifying the originally European fictional form because she hears her cultural sources in black music. Utilizing memory to motivate her creation, she must have heard the pluralistic possibilities featured by the African rhythm of jazz when she composed Jazz. Just as Jazz manifests Morrison’s attempt to creolize the traditional genre of the novel, her employment of jazz in Jazz further hybridizes the meaning of black identity. Here come the questions: can black identity remain uniquely “black” if hybridity has always already been incorporated into the ethnic experience, as perceived in jazz and Jazz? How can jazz, as a mixed-blood form of music, shape our view of identity as a construct? Following my foregoing intention to trace the hybrid implications of jazz, my discussion will then dwell on the contextual relationship between jazz form and.

(15) Jian 10. identity formation. Chapter Two will explore the formal qualities of jazz in Jazz, qualities ranging from the repetitive rhythm of jazz to the repetitive motif of jazz, in an attempt to find out how the device of repetition in jazz contributes to the construction of identity in the novel. Actually, the repetition of rhythms has played a part in Morrison’s fiction. For instance, in Beloved, the repetition of rhythms unfurls a haunting atmosphere at the outset: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” (3). With the rhythmic beats of “spiteful” and “full,” the accentuated image of haunting is repeated for the unspoken past to be heard. In Jazz, the repetition of rhythms and images rewrites the past events into the present consciousness. Just as repetition enables improvisation through the call and response in jazz, the repetition of rhythms and images amplifies the story-telling with the novel interpretations of the past in Jazz. As characters tell the past events in different versions, the past events are rewritten into their present consciousness and, meanwhile, their identities are cast into rhythmic flow. For instance, the following song in Jazz illustrates the various versions of Joe’s image as an individual: Blues man. Black and bluesman. Blacktherefore blue man. Everybody knows your name3. Where-did-she-go-and-why man. So-lonesome-I-could-die man. Everybody knows your name. (119) Joe is a “blues man,” a “black and bluesman,” a “blacktherefore blue man,” a “where-did-she-go-and-why man,” and also a “so-lonesome-I-could-die man.” Here, the repetition of the alliterative words “blues,” “black,” and ”blue” bridge the black identity with that of the blues artist and also the blue mood. With the repetition of the 3. Wen-ching Ho indicates that this line “Everybody knows your name” may also imply a textual link to James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name, in which Baldwin portrays the underprivileged situation of African-Americans in the U.S. society: “[W] hat this evasion of the Negro’s humanity has done to the nation is not so well known” (96). Optimistically, the jazz song here may compensate for the denial of black humanity in Nobody Knows My Name as it repeats itself to make the name of the bluesman, symbolically Joe, known to the public..

(16) Jian 11. line “Everybody knows your name,” the various versions of Joe’s image repeat themselves to be heard. As Joe’s image is put into deferral, not only do many sides of his personal story come into view but his image is juxtaposed with the various aspects of a typical black life: blues, the melancholic experience of being black, the betrayal of love, and the loneliness. The jazz song bridges Joe’s individual life with urban black experiences. By repeating stories and making them heard, jazz enables the act of re-membering and weaves the shared experiences into the contents of a new African American identity. Following my foregoing emphasis on the similar formal qualities of jazz and Jazz, my discussion will then shift into how Jazz serves as a différancial rewriting of biblical stories. Chapter Three intends to read Jazz intertextually with Genesis and thereby investigate how Jazz, as the African American rewriting of biblical stories, enriches the significance of black identity. I will start with the proposition that Jazz repeats and rewrites Genesis. In Jazz, Morrison recasts the biblical story of Adam and Eve to the extramarital affair of Joe and Dorcas: I [Joe] told you [Dorcas] again that you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden, he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life (133). Compared to the biblical story of human genesis, Morrison’s version is rather ambivalent. Examining the biblical canon with an alternative perspective, Morrison juxtaposes the sacred union of Adam and Eve with the unholy adultery of Joe and Dorcas. Just as the religious significance in the canonical version is overwhelmed by lascivious romance in the African American rewriting, the canonical aura of the original story gives in to novel interpretations. The biblical story as such is repeated with differences in Morrison’s text. The Afro-American Adam, Joe Trace, unlike his.

(17) Jian 12. biblical counterpart, does not “fall in love” but “rises in it” (135). Devoted to the apple of his eyes, Joe can “strut out of the Garden” (134) without regrets. In this aspect, Morrison’s version of the genesis story also accentuates the thematic emphasis on love in a jazz performance. Besides, in Chapter Three, through a study of the name “Joseph” in the Bible, I will explore how Joe takes the role of his namesakes—Joseph the earthly father of Jesus Christ and Joseph in Genesis—and then come up with some possible interpretations of Joe’s identity. Through a comparison between Joseph in the Bible and Joe in Jazz, I would like to decipher how biblical allusions conjure up African American histories and therefore contribute to the formation of black identity. Mapping biblical stories into African American literature, Jazz parallels biblical figures with its participants--the narrator, the reader, and the characters. Like jazz, Jazz incorporates them into the meaning-making process of the performance, thereby encouraging them to interpret their roles and improvise the meaning of identity. All in all, I wish to explore how Jazz improvises black identity, mainly through the study of the manifold connections between jazz and Jazz. I seek to uncover how repetition can motivate improvisation and interpretation and how black identity can be improvised in the chain of ever differing signifiers and significance in Jazz under the following premises: jazz as a mixed-blood product, repetition as a force of improvisation in both jazz and Jazz, and Jazz as a repetition of biblical stories in différance. Every repetition fulfills a different chapter, and does so with a large degree of improvisation, making Jazz unequivocally the finest identity performance. In this sense, Jazz is not merely a hybrid form of music and novel but also enacts possible definitions of African Americans, the meanings of which lie in the repetition with différance..

(18) Jian 13. Chapter One Jazz and Black Identity Toni Morrison’s Jazz is an audacious innovation in view of the employment of jazz. In her foreword to Jazz, Morrison argues that the application of the jazzy narrative is not meant for “a musical background, or decorative references” but “a manifestation of the music’s intellect, sensuality, anarchy; its story, its range, and its modernity” (xix). In Jazz, as the narrator “I” moves back and forth in time, s/he launches the relay of storytelling in the structure of jazz music, and thereby improvises the meaning of identity. Why does Morrison choose jazz, instead of gospel music or black spirituals, to feature the formation of identity? In this chapter, I would like to argue that, through her employment of jazz, Morrison proposes a non-essentialist attitude toward the black identity. As Morrison never makes the black identity a definite category, I will first examine the open-endedness of identity in Morrison’s previous works, “Recitatif” and Beloved. Then, I will trace the history of jazz to foreground that jazz is hybrid rather than black exclusive, thereby linking the creolized blackness in jazz to the non-essentialized black identity in Jazz. Finally, I will further elaborate on the relationship between the performance of jazz and the formation of identity, mainly in light of the ideas advanced in Simon Frith’s “Music and Identity.” 1.1. Hybrid Implications in “Recitatif” and Beloved The hybrid implications of identity are not new in Morrison. According to Morrison, “Recitatif” is “an experiment in the removal of all codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial” (Playing xi). Indeed, “Recitatif” is a short story about the friendship between Twyla and Roberta, who are of two different races but there is no spelling-out of who is white and who is African American. Through constantly revising each other’s memories.

(19) Jian 14. about Maggie, a deaf and dumb worker abused at the orphanage, Twyla and Roberta assure themselves of Maggie’s racial ambiguity and also of their desire to hurt her. How does racial ambiguity--as in Twyla, Roberta, and Maggie—open the way to racial reconciliation? By definition, the title “Recitatif” is the French word for “recitative,” which means “musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio” (Allen 1002). Conjoining together music and drama, recitative assumes “some form of repetition to generate comprehensibility as well as pleasure” (Ringer 13). Like recitative, “Recitatif” has its dramatic emphasis repeated in the story. Race and traumatic mothering situation are two repetitive motifs in the story. Actually, their dysfunctional mothering situation is a shared trauma inside their hearts: Twyla’s mother never stops dancing and Roberta’s never gets well. Although Twyla and Roberta are racially different, their traumatic roles as outcasts put them on the same boat and establishes the bond between them: “We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped” (446). Being dumped children, however, Twyla and Roberta did not take sides with the underprivileged servant Maggie, but instead teased her about her handicap, shouting at her “Dummy!” and “Bow legs!” (447) in their childhood. Later on in their adult lives, the racially ambiguous Maggie turns into a haunting image, repetitively emerging in their conversation when they reencounter each other. In “Recitatif,” Twyla and Roberta hold different views toward the memories about Maggie and racial issues as well. When they meet with each other at Howard Johnson’s, where Twyla works as a waitress, they give remembrances about each other’s mothers. Instead of having a heart-to-heart talk, they assume a polite air and downplay their mothers’ situation, claiming that their mothers are “Fine” and “Pretty.

(20) Jian 15. as picture” (453). When they meet again at a newly-open Food Emporium of the neighborhood, Twyla and Roberta honestly reveal their mothers’ situation: “‘Is your mother sick too?’ ‘No, she dances all night.’ ‘Oh—and an understanding nod’” (455). They also mention Maggie and begin to revise their memories about her. While Twyla does not remember the incident, Roberta insists that instead of falling down, Maggie was knocked down by the “gar girls” and they witnessed. After talking about what happened to Maggie, Twyla feels the gap between Roberta and her and then recalls their previous encounter at Howard Johnson’s, when Roberta was indifferent to her. As Twyla inquires why Roberta acted as if she had never known her, Roberta puts forth the issue of race: “Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was” (457). While Roberta is keenly aware of the racial issue, Twyla remembers differently, reckoning Howard Johnson’s as a racially friendly place where a houseful of blacks rubbed shoulders with white people. Here, Maggie can be considered an indication of the existence of inequality. Later on, racial strife drives a wedge between them. In Twyla’s description, racial strife can be hauntingly influential: Strife came to us that fall. At least that’s what the paper called it. Strife. Racial strife. The word made me think of a bird—a big shrieking bird out of 1,000,000,000 BC. Flapping its wings and cawing. Its eye with no lid always bearing down on you. All day it screeched and at night it slept on the rooftops. It woke you in the morning and from the Today show to the eleven o’clock news it kept you an awful company. (458) In appearance, the word “strife,” with its noise and inherent disturbing force, stands in contrast to the image of Maggie, who is dumb and therefore devoiced. The recurrence of Maggie in their memories nonetheless testifies to the clinging force of racial problems. While Roberta joins the picketing women to protest against transferring her.

(21) Jian 16. children to another school, Twyla takes a dim view of the protest, regarding the picketing women as rioters “swarming all over the place like they own it” (459). Insisting that the picketing women are just “mothers” rather than rioters, Roberta brings up again the issue of Maggie, claiming that Maggie was black and that both of them kicked her down. Like the “shrieking bird” of the racial strife, the racially ambiguous Maggie in the past continues to exert influences upon them. The issue of racial identity is further entangled with two protagonists’ traumatic childhood without mothers in “Recitatif.” Seeing Roberta hold the sign “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!,” Twyla sarcastically answers her back by holding another sign “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?” (461). After that, Roberta disappears from the protest, leaving Twyla puzzled with Maggie’s “black” identity. Ruminating over Maggie’s identity, Twyla reflects on her attitude toward race: I tried to reassure myself about the race thing for a long time until it dawned on me the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join it with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. (462) The memories about Maggie have been troubling Twyla so much because her existence reminds Twyla of her dancing mother, and actually her own situation as an orphaned outcast. Here, for Twyla and Roberta, Maggie is not only an indicator of race, but also a more general sign of trauma. Near the end of the story, they finally agree upon their memories about Maggie. Although they cannot be sure whether Maggie is black or not, she does remind them of their dysfunctional mothers. Here, Maggie’s ambiguous identity, a shared trauma between the two girls of different races, then becomes a key to their reconciliation. Stressing the absence of mother as a common experience between the black and the white, Morrison aspires to speak for an.

(22) Jian 17. American experience going beyond the traditional division of races. Like “Recitatif,” Beloved also manifests Morrison’s non-essentialized attitude toward the black identity. In Beloved, the story of Denver’s birth has been repeated for several times, and passed down from Sethe to Denver and from Denver to Beloved. Named after a white lady Amy Denver, Denver keeps the story of her birth—a story commemorating the friendship between blacks and whites—to heart. After fleeing from the Sweet Home, Sethe meets Amy Denver, a white runaway indentured servant, and describes her as “the raggediest looking trash you ever saw” (38) at first sight. Ugly as she looks, however, Amy has “good hands” (90) and a heart of gold. Amy kindly offers her help instead of turning in Sethe, the runaway slave, to get rewards. She uses her good hands to massage Sethe’s feet and, more significantly, to deliver the baby Denver. The birth of Denver as such characterizes an encounter between a black woman and her white counterpart that generates humanist love not bound by racial barrier: They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. (99-100) Despite their racial differences, Amy shares a kindred spirit with Sethe because of their positions as outcasts. Sharing her story with Sethe, Amy reveals the inhuman maltreatment she has suffered, similar to Sethe: Having been given to Mr. Buddy, Amy had been working for him and often whipped by him in Kentucky just as Sethe had been whipped by Schoolteacher at Sweet Home. Besides, neither Sethe nor Amy knows their fathers as their mothers have been sexually abused under slavery or under.

(23) Jian 18. servitude. Having been left fatherless and abused, Amy identifies with Sethe, trying her best to offer help without expecting anything in return. Upon her departure, Amy asks Sethe to pass on her name to the baby Denver: “’She’s never gonna know who I am. You gonna tell her? Who brought her into this here world?’ ‘You better tell her. You hear? Say Miss Amy Denver. Of Boston’”(100). In memory of the cross-racial love, Sethe names Denver after Amy Denver and, in a sense, passes on the friendship between two outcasts of different races to her daughter. Inherited from the white girl Amy Denver, the name “Denver” carries a hybrid implication of cross-racial friendship, incorporating the hybrid ethnic experience into the black identity. Besides Amy Denver, Lady Jones is another figure that manifests Morrison’s hybrid expressions of black identity in Beloved. Lady Jones, Denver’s schoolteacher, is a light-skinned creole with “gray eyes and yellow woolly hair” (291). Having been insulted as “all that yellow gone to waste” and “white nigger” (Ibid.) by the black community, Lady Jones dislikes her “white” traits such as her blond hair, and marries “the blackest man she could find” (Ibid.). Having been selected to teach at a colored girls’ school thanks to her light skin, though, she devotes herself to teaching, transforming her experience of racial discrimination into her pursuit for racial equality. Through Lady Jones, Morrison discloses the discrimination against the creole inside the black community, and thereby voices her for a non-essentialized black identity. After all, black identity should not be an advocacy defined in accordance with skin-color differences; rather, it must be an open category inclusive of various features of the black life. Indeed, Morrison does not one-sidedly depict all white people as evil; instead, she stresses the importance of racial reconciliation and humanist love. In Beloved, white people also suffer from racial injustice. Edward Bodwin, a white abolitionist, recalls his experience as a victim in the times of slavery:.

(24) Jian 19. Twenty years ago when the Society was at its height in opposing slavery, it was as though his coloring was itself the heart of the matter. The “bleached nigger” was what his enemies called him, and on a trip to Arkansas, some Mississippi rivermen, enraged by the Negro boatmen they competed with, had caught him and shoe-blackened his face and his hair. (306) As Mr. Bodwin stands up against slavery, he is banished from the white community. His skin color, however, makes him a target of attack. White racists think of him as a traitor who betrays the good of the white and therefore deserves the nickname of “bleached nigger.” By manipulating skin color as a united front, white racists establish the white as a privileged sign, distributing racial rancor for their own good. Despite skin color difference, Mr. Bodwin stands for a cross-racial love and a humanist concern that go beyond the black/white polarity. With cross-racial love and humanist value in mind, Morrison takes on positive interactions between blacks and whites and thus unravels a hybrid expression of black experience in “Recitatif” and Beloved. In “Recitatif,” race acts as a site of conflict between two racially different girls, yet the shared experience of being outcasts serves as an antidote to racial strife. In Beloved, race is the afflictive root of slavery and thus the cause of black people’s nightmares, yet still there are moments of cross-racial understanding, as typified in the examples Amy Denver and Edward Bodwin. As humanist concern prevails over skin-color differences in her works, Morrison presents the reader a black literature that portrays different aspects of black life and even moves beyond racial barrier. Seeking in literature the room for de-essentialization, Morrison creates “Recitatif,” Beloved, and later Jazz as well to portray the cross-racial African American experiences. 1.2. The History of Jazz.

(25) Jian 20. As in “Recitatif” and Beloved, Morrison manifests her intention not to essentialize black identity in Jazz. Crafting Jazz with jazz sensibility, Morrison deliberately delineates the formation of black identity through the employment of jazz, a kind of music that does not belong exclusively to blacks. In this section, I would like to briefly review relevant research on the history of jazz, in an attempt to make sense the link between Morrison’s non-essentialized attitude toward black identity and the employment of jazz in Jazz. Though widely acknowledged as a black product, jazz has been dramatically Europeanized since the day it came into being. As James Lincoln Collier argues in Jazz: the American Theme Song, jazz does not “arise from some generalized ‘black culture’ or ‘black experience,’” but evolves instead from the musical practices of the Creole (201). In other words, the development of jazz is inseparable from racial and cultural mixture, which can trace back to the period of Spanish rule in the 1700s and 1800s when the Creole became the dominant group in New Orleans (Gridley 33). Unlike southern black laborers, the Creole were well-educated and middle-class people who, despite the African influence in religious practices, language, and folkways, viewed themselves as the inheritors of European tradition (Collier, Jazz 201). With part African and part French ancestry, the Creole inherited influences from both cultures in their musical practices. As connoisseurs of music and art, the Creole constantly engaged in musical activities and dances, which helped provide an environment for jazz to thrive. Actually, as a seaport and a center of commerce, New Orleans maintained a cosmopolitan party atmosphere with its numerous taverns and dance halls. Jazz thrived in this party atmosphere, as the demand for fresh material urged musicians to experiment on “odd assortments of approaches and material” (Gridley 37). Indeed, jazz on the threshold was designed not so much for listening as for dancing. With the.

(26) Jian 21. increasing popularity of dancing, the evolution of dances led to the evolution of jazz. Jazz bands constantly reinvented themselves, experimenting on new jazz rhythms that can evoke positive interaction with the audience. If the dancers were impressed by jazz rhythms, they would take part in the improvisations of jazz to quicken the tempo or vary the rhythm at will. Intended for dancing and performing, jazz is “not what you play, but how you play it” (Gridley 33). Collier notes that, unlike European music, perfect jazz can count on one or two notes. Consequently, to the jazz players the nitty-gritty is “not which notes or chords are played, but how they are played” (Making 6). The performativity of jazz can be attributed to the minstrel show, which Collier describes as “the most important vehicle” for black music in the nineteenth century (Making 31). In the1840s, the minstrel show came in the form of popular art with white performers wearing blackface, whose topic centered on black life on the plantation (Yanow xxvi). During the Civil War, the minstrel show was then used as propaganda for the humanist cause of the North (Collier, Making 31). In 1855, black minstrelsy came into existence. Black performers “blacked up” to present the “authentic” picture of black life, featuring “the clichéd humor, rampant racism, and use of outrageous stereotypes” (Yanow xxvi). As the music grew more creative in black shows than in white ones, the black minstrelsy boosted the popularity of new songs and thus offered singers, dancers, and musicians an opportunity to work in show business (Collier, Making 31). As Scott Yanow notes, “[b]y the early 1900s some jazz musicians were employed in minstrel shows along with pioneering blues singers” (Yanow xxvi). Later on, jazz was above being a foil to minstrel music. What is noteworthy, though, is the performance-oriented nature of jazz inherited from minstrel music. Just as the minstrel show allows both white performers and black performers to “blacken up” and to play out the black story, jazz also welcomes the.

(27) Jian 22. performers and the audience of any race to improvise the performance. The charm of jazz lies not only in its performativity but also in its hybridity. André Hodeir argues against the “original purity” of jazz, proposing that “jazz has never been a ‘pure’ music” (46). He does not see the European elements in jazz as white-influenced decadence, but rather, as a necessary “borrowing in order to evolve” (45). In Hodeir’s opinion, the European elements contributed to provide jazz with melodic originality: These elements, all of Anglo-Saxon or French origin—hymns, songs, and later, popular dances and military marches—gave jazz some of its principal characteristics: its tonal system, its form, the four-beat measure, the four-bar unit of construction, a certain kind of syncopation, and so forth. (40) European elements in jazz, represented by the Creole, endowed jazz with basic principles. Nevertheless, jazz is more than a fusion of both European and African music. The encountering of both cultures generates the unique features of jazz. Take the rhythmic pulse of jazz, one of the unique features of jazz, for example. The rhythmic pulse of jazz, as Collier points out, is “not some modification of African or European time schedules but something quite different from, and a good deal less rigid than, either” (Making 6). Indeed, as a racially and culturally mixed milieu, New Orleans makes excellent jazz. Stressing the participation of various ethnic groups in the making of jazz, Collier claims that by 1900 New Orleans had been too racially and culturally mixed to ascribe jazz only to the Creole or the black, borrowing Raeburn’s words: “with mixed-blood Creoles teamed with blacks and whites [in jazz bands], not to mention Latin Americans like Martin Araham, who was known as ‘Chink,’ any attempt to assign racial connotations to style would be relative, at best” (qtd. in Collier, Jazz 199-200). Derived from a melting pot, jazz not only manifests the hybrid.

(28) Jian 23. experience of the white and the black but, more significantly, welcomes different ethnic groups to make and remake it. To cite Raeburn again, “In New Orleans nothing is pure” (qtd. in Collier, Jazz 200). It is through the process of hybridization that jazz continues to evolve. Generally speaking, jazz, as a fusion of European traditions and African traditions, can be ascribed to the combining influences of the Creole and the Negro. The dividing line between the two ethnic groups, however, blurred when Creoles were forced to give up the status they had secured during the 1700s and to be classified as the Negro under the Louisiana Legislative Code in 1894 (Yanow 8). Before we examine the elements of jazz music, it is important to take note of the race of jazz musicians, which may explain why jazz is generally thought of as a black product. Collier puts forth the main reason why music had been considered a black profession: According to Victorian gentility, whoever in show business is considered “only a cut above a prostitute” (Collier, Making 34). Since middle class were above the condescending engagement within show business, music had been mostly a black profession by post-Civil War times (Collier, Making 33). Music skills are never inborn, though. As Gridley argues, musical preferences for African techniques were learned rather than genetic, passed down from generation to generation (39). Contending that “there is no ‘racial unconscious’ that is transmitted genetically” (39), Gridley yet accentuates the relation between musical skills and cultural heritage. Now that black musicians played music with the skills passed on as part of their cultural heritage, the audience might have a bee in the bonnet that music played by them sounds African. Stressing learned skills in musical performances, Gridley proclaims that the blood actually has nothing to do with musical performances, but cultural heritage helps to hand down African-American musical styles and to generate the “illusion” that jazz is essentially “black”(39). Jazz is, eventually, a product derived from different musical.

(29) Jian 24. forms not defined by race. The key features of jazz are a blend of African and European sources. In Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, Gridley examines the hybrid history of the key features in jazz, including improvisation, instrumentation, and so on. Improvisation, “the practice of spontaneously varying individual parts” (40), can be traced back to the drum ensemble of Ghana, in which the leader drummer varies his part to send signals. Not black-exclusive, improvisation can also be found in European music, specifically in pre-twentieth-century concert music and the French and German keyboard tradition, in which singers start notes at will and musicians improvise a piece on the demand of the audience (41). Besides, in terms of the choice of instruments, percussion instruments--such as wood block, cowbell, and drum—are of African ancestry (42). As of the string instruments in jazz, banjo can be correlated with African tradition while guitar has a European ancestry (43). In a sense, the hybrid origin of jazz, as exemplified in the influx of European and African influences into the making of jazz, bears witness to the cross-cultural juxtaposition as a force of creativity. As cross-cultural elements are being filtered into the birth of jazz, jazz is indeed too hybrid to be considered black-exclusive. In fact, the common conception of jazz as a quintessentially black cultural symbol may not stand to reason. In Jazz: the American Theme Song, Collier indicates three reasons that jazz failed to appeal to a large number of black audience in the 1900s (203-205). First, religious blacks viewed jazz as a “devil music” (203). Second, the black middle class, who had lived in accordance with Victorian gentility, considered jazz musicians a cut above prostitutes. Third, a large number of black people, trapped in Southern sharecroppers’ cabins, were too financially challenged to buy jazz records. In sum, jazz was not widely accepted by the black community because of religious, social, and economic reasons. If we consider the low popularity of jazz among the black in the early days, it will be.

(30) Jian 25. problematic to see jazz as a shared cultural symbol of all blacks. This being said, the question is: what are the possible reasons for Morrison to portray the formation of black identity through jazz music in Jazz? In a way we can take the hybridity and the performative nature of jazz into consideration. For one thing, with hybrid elements introduced by the Creole, jazz incorporates cross-cultural vivacity into black experience. For instance, the episode of the mulatto Golden Gray in Jazz implies a cross-racial romance between blacks and whites. Furthermore, Gray’s quest for his black father runs parallel with Joe’s search for identity, which metaphorically resembles an improvisational relay between performers in jazz. Moreover, as jazz accentuates story-telling through the improvisation of notes from the audience or performers, the performance-oriented nature of jazz functions to invite whoever in the performance to jazz up a black story. In Jazz, characters take turns to tell their stories and respond to each other’s, thereby improvising a jazz performance that welcomes the reader to contribute his/her own takes of the story. Besides appealing to the form and style of jazz music in her making of Jazz, Morrison’s employment of jazz music in her novel may also be attributed to the de-essentialized nature of jazz music. Although “jazz” may not be a shared cultural treasure of all African Americans in the novel, it could work well as an open category for contriving a new idea of blackness. As an unorthodox emblem of the black, jazz, with its hybrid implications and its performance-oriented nature, may yet manifest Morrison’s non-essentialized attitude toward black identity. 1.3. Music and Identity In the foreword to Jazz, Morrison proclaims her attempt to delineate “a period in African American life through a specific lens” that would show “the content and characteristics of its music and the manner of its expression” (xv). Jazz, along with its key features, fuels expressivity for African American life in the 1920s. What is.

(31) Jian 26. noteworthy, especially, is the influence jazz exerts on black life. How can jazz be appropriated into the formation of black identity? After examining Morrison’s efforts to de-essentialize African-American identity in “Recitatif” and Beloved along with the early history of jazz, I would like to further investigate the relationship between jazz music and black identity. Before venturing on the formal analysis of Jazz in Chapter Two, I would like to figure out how black identity can be constructed through jazz music and, moreover, how Morrison’s deliberate use of jazz aesthetics in Jazz can be correlated with her conception of blackness. Some issues thus come to the fore: What are the possible links between music and identity? How can Morrison’s employment of jazz in Jazz testify to her non-essentialized attitude toward black identity? How can jazz, with hybrid implications and performance-oriented nature, interpret the meaning of black identity? Borrowing insights from Simon Frith’s “Music and Identity,” I would like to explicate how jazz music, instead of passively reflecting black culture, actively invites the performers and the audience to improvise their identity and, in this sense, produces black identity as a performative effect. In “Music and Identity,” Simon Frith takes a dim view of cultural essentialism, in which “only African Americans can appreciate African American music” (108). To account for white people’s love for the music of the African diaspora, Frith puts forth a groundbreaking argument that music has less to do with mirroring a culture than making a culture. It creates an experience of identification that shapes one’s understanding of a culture (109). Those who are absorbed in music will project their personal experience onto the piece and, meanwhile, be affected by the contextual factors around the musical space, such as the racial background of the performers and the place where music is played. For instance, as discussed in the previous section, the race of jazz musicians sometimes plays a part in musical preferences. As black musicians apply their cultural background to their performances, the jazz they play.

(32) Jian 27. may sound more African in the ears of the audience. Yet, as Gridley proposes, racial unconscious is more learned than genetic (39), and what lies behind jazz music is not an inborn “entity” of African culture but an experience of identification with a changing black tradition. More precisely, jazz music does not reflect a genetically static black identity, but rather creates an African American culture by placing its participants in the web of identity performative space for negotiation and development. Correlating musical appreciation with identity formation, Frith builds his arguments on two premises: first, identity is a mobile process rather than a fixed entity, and secondly, musical appreciation is “an experience of this self-in-process” (109; emphasis original). Musical appreciation, as an experimental process of identity, provides points of identification--“not the positioning of the subject as such, but our experience of the movement between positions” (Frith 110). While attentively listening to music, people will temporally forget their real-world status, involve themselves in the world of music, and regain an imagined self in the process of musical appreciation or participation. Ralph Ellison indicates the “cruel contradiction” of jazz—the implication of “individual assertion within and against the group”: Each true jazz moment ... springs from a contest in which the artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents a definition of his identity; as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus because jazz finds its very life in improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazz man must lose his identity even as he finds it. (qtd. in Frith 118) In a jazz performance, performers take turns to voice their individual statement, and significantly challenge group restrictions. Hence, a jazz performer acquires his/her identity by playing out his/her individuality against his/her group identification..

(33) Jian 28. Paradoxically, however, s/he cannot do completely without the group in order to define himself/herself. Sometimes a soloist and sometimes an accompanist, a performer undergoes a change of roles in a jazz performance, with his/her identity destabilized. Significantly, each jazz moment can be viewed as a point of identification that suggests a self-in-process. In The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern stresses the improvisational tendencies of jazz, noting “the length of the jazz piece derives from repetition of the basic material” (368). In jazz, improvisation is enacted through the repetition of a main note, which is called the “riff” in jazz vocabulary. According to Eileen Southern, a “riff” is “a short phrase repeated over and over again by the ensemble” (369). Through the repetition of core notes in improvisation, a performer makes each moment defer and differ4 from its previous moment in jazz; meanwhile, s/he comes up with a fresh assertion of his/her individuality and also a new interpretation of his/her role in the performance. Besides performers, the audience are also welcome to interact with the jazz ensemble by adding a note or two to improvise the meaning of the piece. Building the meaning of jazz on improvisation, participants incorporate their personality into the performance and shape the style of jazz while experiencing a self-in-process through changing roles. With its hybrid history and performance-oriented nature, jazz provides a mobile experience of the self and thus hints at an indefinite meaning of identity. As participants come together to improvise the performance with their interpretations of 4. Here I would like to relate the concept of “riff” to Derrida’s notion of différance. In Of Grammatology, Derrida uses the French verb “différer,” meaning “to differ” and “to defer” in French, to account for the possibility of a linguistic sign to produce difference (62). To be more specific, unable to define itself autonomously, a word is always being contextualized and determined by other words. As a word is always being repeated in the chain of its deferring and differing substitutions, its meaning is put into endless deferral in différance. Echoing Derrida’s notion of différance, a riff in the improvisation of jazz may imply the force of differences to renew the meaning of the main note every moment the note is repeated. I will then draw on the concept of “riff” and “différance” to explicate the function of recurring motifs and repetitive rhythms in Jazz in the following chapters..

(34) Jian 29. the piece, jazz does not exclude the white from enacting their musical values in the performance. Not racially exclusive, jazz welcomes its participants to have some say about the performance, urging them to experience themselves in a mobile way and thus to define their identity through the ensemble. According to Eileen Southern, the polyphonic texture of jazz can be attributed to the feature of “collective improvisation,” during which each performer improvises “his or her part in such a way that the parts combined into a balanced, integrated whole” (369). To make an excellent jazz performance, a performer launches challenge against his/her fellow performers with his/her interpretations of the piece while paradoxically negotiating their individuality with the ensemble. To cite Frith’s insight into the “dance form” of music, “Identity is thus necessarily a matter of ritual; it describes one’s place in a dramatized pattern of relationships -- one can never really express oneself ‘autonomously.’ Self-identity is cultural identity” (125). Usually presented as a visual form of meaning-making, jazz encourages the performers and the audience to improvise and interpret the performance through their immediate experience of bodily participation, thereby placing self-construction in contextual relationships. As a performer-cum-composer art, jazz features an experience of mobile identity through bodily participation in the process of meaning-making. It is thus significant to explore how jazz music blurs the boundary between the imaginative world and the real world, transmits the codes of identification, and produces identity as an effect. Viewing music as enacting a border-crossing force between the imaginative world and the real world, Simon Frith proposes that identity is “always already an ideal” yet “always also real enacted in musical activities” (123). Absorbed in jazz, white listeners may experience the black diaspora in mind and imagine what it would be like being black while maintaining their real-world white identity. Though knowing that their experience of black identity is unreal, white listeners would come.

(35) Jian 30. up with their own interpretations of blackness by appreciating jazz. Sharing the kindred spirit with “Recitatif” and Beloved, Jazz implies a non-essentialized attitude toward black identity. To cite Frith, “what makes music special -- what makes it special for identity -- is that it defines a space without boundaries”(127). Assuming the form of a jazz performance, Jazz actively invites its participants to interpret the meaning of the novel and improvise their identity. Chapter Two will address the function of repetition through a formal analysis of Jazz, in an attempt to decipher how the re-telling of the past calls forth the improvisation of black identity..

(36) Jian 31. Chapter Two Repetition and Differences. In her foreword to Jazz, Morrison argues that the narrative structure of Jazz, unlike those of her previous novels, is not “designed to enhance meaning” but “would equal meaning” (xix, emphasis original). The narrative structure of Jazz as such is not meant to convey certain messages on ideologies; rather, it aims to produce a jazz performance of its own. In Jazz, rhythms and images are repeated to create emphasis and to amplify the texture of the narrative. Stories are constantly recapitulated, reiterated, and renewed by different characters, leading the reader to explore different layers of rhetorical truth. How does repetition function to place an image or a story into different contexts and thus to come up with various interpretations? How can Jazz, like jazz, generate the process of identification and thus involves its participants in the complicated web of identification? In a sense, repetitive rhythms and recurring motifs in Jazz can be likened to “riffs,” “short phrase[s] repeated over and over again by the ensemble” in jazz (Southern 369). Every moment when a note or a theme is repeated in jazz, it is being placed into another context, with its meaning different from its previous occurrence and its meaning put into deferral. As a jazz performer riffs on a piece, s/he not merely repeats phrases but also renews them by adding a note, changing a tune, or varying the tempo. Through riffs, a jazz performer is given an opportunity to improvise a piece with his/her own interpretations. Besides, the audience, as participants in jazz, are also invited to riff on the piece and thus have some say in the performance. As the performers and even the audience take turns to riff on the piece, they voice their interpretations against other fellow performers, negotiating their individuality with the ensemble to make an excellent jazz performance. Sometimes a soloist and sometimes.

(37) Jian 32. an accompanist, a performer experiences a process of shifting identification, in which self-identity is being defined within/against the group. Like jazz, the novel Jazz welcomes the characters, the narrator, and even the reader to share their stories and thus to play on their identities. In this chapter, I aim to explore the devices of repetition embedded in the musical rendering of Jazz and delve into the issue of identity. Reading Jazz as a jazz performance in différance, I would like to divide my discussion of this chapter into two parts: first, I will explain Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance and its linkage to repetition and differences; second, in light of différance, I will explore the function of repetitive rhythms and recurring motifs in Jazz, and then conclude that Jazz, as a jazz performance in différance, actively places the reader in a web of identification process and engages him/her in an experience of self-making. 2.1. Repetition and Différance Before delving into Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” I would like to briefly examine Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics, on which Derrida builds his theoretical basis and from which he makes his own departure. In Courses in General Linguistics, Saussure stresses the arbitrary nature of linguistic system that designates the bond between the concept and the sound-image, namely between the signified and the signifier. For instance, the Latin word arbor designates the concept “tree” because linguistic system makes it mean so (66). In Saussure’s view, language is a system of differences. Words are created to denote different meanings because they contain different phonemes. For instance, the word “cat” means “cat” only by doing without the phonic possibility of becoming the word “cap.” But for the operation of the linguistic system, the phonic and conceptual differences between “cat” and “cap” would not exist. As Saussure indicates, “in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither.

(38) Jian 33. ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system” (120; emphasis original). In Saussure’s structural linguistics, a word establishes its phonic and conceptual status only by differentiating itself from its neighboring words in a sentence by adopting different phonemes. As a structural necessity, differences function to draw a stark line between a word and its other and thereby assure a word of its unique meaning. Differences, then, contribute to binary oppositions between a linguistic sign and its other, between a category of signs and its outside, and between an identity and its dissent in human civilization. While Saussure views differences as the boundary between a word and its other so as to assure the word of its phonic and conceptual status, Derrida reads the differences in language not as a hub of meanings but as an effect of différance. Coined to denote the meaning of both “difference” and “deferral,” the French word différance implies a process of how a linguistic sign establishes itself by negotiating its meaning with its interior differences and deferral: Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is différance. (Derrida, “Linguistics” 62; emphasis original) If we read the word “cat” in light of Derrida’s notion of différance, the letter “a” in “cat” contains the trace of its previous letter “c“ and paves the way for its following letter “t.” The letter “a” in the formation of “cat,” nevertheless, might have a possibility of being followed by the letter “p” to become another word “cap.” In this sense, the absence of the letter “p” is inscribed in the formation of the word “cat.” When we make a slip of the pen, we mistake “cap” for “cat” and, consequently,.