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Chapter Four “The Specter as Possibility”: Ghostly Narrators in Jazz and Love In Morrison’s fiction, the spectral defies compartmentalization and definition, and it can serve as a spot for the eruption of various stories and perspectives that were previously ignored. Her sixth and eighth novels, Jazz (1992) and Love (2003), are not exceptions to this supernatural rule as it operates in Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Paradise. The difference is that in these two books the specter is the narrator. This use of a spectral narrator moves beyond the “unreliable” tendencies of first-person narrative voices. In Morrison’s previous work, the importance of storytelling as a device for ordering the characters’ impressions and foregrounding their experiences against the backdrop of historical episodes is clear. This spectral narrator is a new kind of creative voice that privileges the eruptions of various perspectives at the textual and narrative level. In Jazz and Love, the narrators fulfill the functions of previous spectral figures: their identities are fluid and indeterminate; they are guides for the characters in the novels; but, as narrative voices, they further open the texts to new possibilities and new avenues of interaction with readers. In Jazz, Morrison re-creates New York during the Jazz Age. She follows her main characters, Joe and Violet Trace, as they migrate north from Virginia to escape the Jim Crow South; but even though they may physically leave Virginia, the past still haunts the couple. The action revolves primarily around Joe’s affair with a young girl he murders when she leaves him for a younger man and Violet’s breakdown after discovering the infidelity , which induces her to attack Joe’s lover any way she can, even if she must knife a corpse. Of course, the characters are not simply affected by the affair  “The Specter as Possibility” and its consequences; layered upon these problems are Joe and Violet’s haunting traumatic pasts. Operating under the surface of the plot are the horrors that Violet and Joe have each brought with them from Virginia and the family secrets they will not share even with each other. Additionally, as Jazz is the middle book of Morrison’s historical trilogy, the traumas that Violet and Joe have experienced are directly traceable to memories and effects of slavery and Reconstruction as evidenced by the characters of Wild and Golden Gray. The reader becomes aware of these secrets through a narration that, unlike in previous Morrison novels, is from the first-person point of view; but the identity of the narrator is unknown, thus leaving the reader faced with a ghostly presence as the source of information. In Love, the setting spans several decades, picking up approximately where Jazz left off and moving through the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and on into the 1990s. Similar to Jazz, there is a plot that follows a marriage; but this time the partners are an older man and his twelveyear -old granddaughter’s best friend, and the relationship that sours is the one between the young friends, Christine and Heed. The ghostly narrator, who actually is dead in the present time of the novel, murders Cosey, the wealthy older man, for the girls’ protection. In this novel, the relationships are affected by class, as the wealthy Cosey simply buys his granddaughter’s friend Heed from her parents, and by the patriarchy, as Cosey lords it over his household and indelibly damages the two girls through his sexual abuse of his twelve-year-old wife. Jazz may be part of Morrison’s trilogy between Beloved and Paradise, but it shares more affinities with this later work, Love. Jazz and Love carry on the author’s concern with African American history and issues of haunting, but they introduce a new motif of a spectral narrator who happens to be the guide for the ghosted characters. What, then, are the implications of having ghostly narrators? Barbara T. Christian posits that part of Morrison’s task as a writer is “a remapping of the historical terrain for African Americans, a terrain that had been previously charted by a master narrative from the outside, rather than from inside their experiences” (31). Speaking of Jazz in particular, Alan Munton writes, “Morrison has made the European novel tell a different story by imagining hitherto ignored histories which enable us to hear lost black voices” (250). As evidenced in Beloved and Paradise, Morrison’s literary purpose is to bring to light...

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