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Chapter 7: The Jungian/African Collective Unconscious, Jazz Aesthetics, and Xam Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues
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245 — 7 — The Jungian/African Collective Unconscious, Jazz Aesthetics, and Xam Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Xam Wilson Cartiér published two novels— Muse-Echo Blues and Be-Bop, Re-Bop— that deal with African American jazz music and how it informs African American life. I have chosen to focus on Muse-Echo Blues because its main character is a woman, and I am particularly interested in examining how gender plays a role in identity formation and postmodern subjectivity, especially as this subjectivity attempts to escape the conventions of the middle class and heteropatriarchy . Equally as important, Muse-Echo Blues’ form is almost exclusively jazz- influenced. Muse-Echo Blues is, at its heart, a novel about the search for the flow of life and the inherent distortions and oppressions that necessarily accompany this epistemological quest. As in a jazz tune, the novel desperately wants to break free of the social and simply exists, becoming the pure essence of spirit and consciousness . In this chapter, first, I will demonstrate how Muse-Echo Blues uses the jazz idiom paradigm, discussed in the first chapter, and the Jungian/African American collective unconscious as counterspaces to discombobulate the ideology of rationality, middle- class respectability, heteropatriarchy , and the conventional boundaries of the novel, which colonize and weigh down the flow of life. Second, I will use Carl G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as a theoretical framework to show how Muse-Echo Blues redefines the African American with history, agency, 246 chapter 7 and distinct subjectivity, outside heteropatriarchy, middle- class respectability, and Enlightenment reason, which has historically defined the African American as deviant or in devalued terms. Muse-Echo Blues, which was published in 1992, uses the jazz paradigm and the collective unconscious to interrogate rigid identity politics and racial essentialism, which are modeled on the violent hierarchy of Western metaphysics , opening up African American consciousness to the flow of desire and advocating a different way to be human in the West. More important, Muse-Echo Blues uses jazz and the collective unconscious to give agency to the Other’s alterity , with no aspect of human life being denied or objectified. Unlike Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire and Everett’s Erasure and like Greer’s Hanging by Her Teeth, Muse- Echo Blues lets into its writing what has always been forbidden: the effects of femininity. This is a writing where the self has a relation to the Other. In divorcing the African American from signifiers of sex, gender, and power, Muse-Echo Blues offers an alternative to the entire masculine- rational worldview . Through the language and rhythm of jazz, the novel interprets the sweep and scope of modern American life. First, Muse-Echo Blues challenges many of the suppositions of Enlightenment reason, choosing not to obey the limits . In presenting the troubled events/story of Kat, a 1990s San Francisco jazz pianist and composer who has a composer ’s blockage and men’s complexes and who is in search of her inner clime, or spiritual core, in a nonchronological order, Muse-Echo Blues undermines reason’s notion of linearity , which is a cornerstone of Western metaphysics. In using improvisation and play in constructing the narrative and Kat’s consciousness, the text demonstrates its inability to master/pin down meaning, which contests the whole idea of absolute truth. In using italicized information to signify nonrational forms of speech such as fantasy, dreams, memories , and visions, the text opens up normative social reality and psychic consciousness and incorporates marginalized and nonrecognized cognitions or dimensions of human existence , plugging into other kinds of intelligence and/or forms of speech. Muse-Echo Blues also gives real and imaginary [54.152.77.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:31 GMT) TheJungian/AfricanCollectiveUnconscious,JazzAesthetics,andXamCartiér’smuse-echoblues 247 characters in the same textual space as a way of undermining that binary. Finally, in having Kat move through time and in and out of other characters, the text offers a different notion of consciousness/subjectivity. In short, in giving us a text that undermines the expected conventions of the modern novel and a human psyche that incorporates the conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious, Muse-Echo Blues deconstructs the particular style of reason initiated by the Enlightenment that took a hegemonic hold and became the only valid form of rational thinking. The novel opens up the world to a planetary rather than a Eurocentric perspective on the human condition...