Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

Chapter 4: Using Jazz Music and Aesthetics to Redescribe the African American in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

137 — 4 — Using Jazz Music and Aesthetics to Redescribe the African American in Toni Morrison’s Jazz Because they belong to a different epistemological system , certain African American cultural forms such as the blues and jazz challenge Enlightenment reason and the Eurocentric horizon of the novel. In offering definitions of life that are different from a middle-­ class, Eurocentric, Christian life, these cultural forms expose its limits and boundaries. Toni Morrison’s Jazz, her only novel to do so overtly, uses these cultural forms to escape but not leave the Eurocentric paradigm of modernity, including the modern Western novel, which is a subsystem of Enlightenment reason. In this chapter, first, I will examine how Jazz takes a peripheral jazz music–jazz aesthetics paradigm, which has been defined as negative Other by mainstream American society, particularly in the 1920s, and reconfigures it to improvise on the conventions of the novel and, like Anna Julia Cooper in A Voice From the South and W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, to rerepresent an African American who is not deviant or devalued Other but instead has her own logic, agency, and distinct subjectivity, which can empathize with and accept the law of the Other. Second, I will show how Morrison in Jazz improvises on the form of the novel and on subjectivity but fails to improvise on gender and sexuality. Toni Morrison’s Jazz, published in 1992, assumes and plays with both of Enrique Dussel’s modern paradigms—­ the Eurocentric and the planetary. Like Everett’s Erasure, Jazz undermines instrumental reason—­ the reduction of 138 chapter 4 the social world to “thing-­ like” equivalences—­ and other Enlightenment ideas as a way of redescribing the African American. But unlike some postmodern texts that do not offer a valid economic, political, or cultural alternative, Jazz offers southern black folk culture and a jazz/blues1 urban lifestyle. The two function as alternatives to and/or as refuges from the dominant, capitalist, modern, middle-­ class, Christian American lifestyle, which is unbalanced and restrictive . But like some Eurocentric postmodern texts, Jazz offers southern black folk culture as being merely different in the postmodern sense, which does not include differences . Jazz also offers a jazz/blues urban lifestyle, which includes differences, for those individuals who are able to critique and/or work through the difficulties brought on by modern urban living, with jazz becoming the sign of planetary modernity. As a consequence, Jazz, on the one hand, is “only partially effective” in its postmodern critique of modernity, insofar as it remains “locked within the binary structure of the Eurocentric paradigm of modernity” that it seeks to contest (Dubey, “Contemporary African American Fiction” 159). This aspect of its postmodernism is Euro­ centric. On the other hand, Jazz is quite effective in using a jazz/blues urban lifestyle to offer planetary postmodernity as a way of contesting Eurocentric modernity and of offering differences. Jazz, we can say, in playing off the Eurocentric and the planetary critiques of modernity, is simply blowing a jazz/blues tune that serves as a critique and an alternative to Eurocentric modernity. Set in Harlem in the mid-­ 1920s, Jazz deals not with the expected middle-­ class writers, artists, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance but instead with the plight of the large numbers of poor and working-­ class African Americans in Harlem who migrated from the South. “I wanted to show how ordinary people lived and viewed that period [the 1920s] in history,” says Morrison in an interview (Micucci 275). Approximately two million African Americans moved North during the Great Migrations (Lilienfeld 55). More specifically, the text is about the ordinary people of Harlem as represented by the blues lives of Joe and Violet Trace, transplanted Virginians who have lived in Harlem Using Jazz Music and Aesthetics to Redescribe the African American in Toni Morrison’s jazz 139 for almost twenty years. When the novel opens, both are in their fifties, and Joe has had a three-­ month affair with Dorcas, an eighteen-­ year-­ old girl who lives with one of his clients, as he tries to deal with a troubled loveless marriage and an absent mother. But Dorcas loses interest in him and ends the secret affair. Out of jealousy, Joe follows her to a party, where he shoots her as she dances with a younger man. Dorcas dies because she refuses to go to the hospital (Jazz 209...