Involuntary Vulnerability and the Felix Culpa in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Given that jazz is "an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motifs" (Jones 200) and Toni Morrison's Jazz is often considered a textualized piece of jazz, the characters' involuntary vulnerability to harsh outside circumstances is fundamentally reiterated and varied throughout the novel. The recurrent tunes of the motif are intricately intertwined with a variety of other thematic elements--such as "the mystery of love" that involves jealousy and forgiveness (Jazz 5), the history of southern blacks' migration to northern cities, and their quest for identity by seeking their parents. The narrative of Jazz thus weaves the motif of the turn-of-the-century African American characters' involuntary vulnerability and its improvised variations, synchronizing distinct levels of structure and textuality with jazz-like flexibility and fluidity. On the superficial level, the narrator interweaves both negative and positive natures of the characters. The reader may easily find the characters' disordered aspects--carnal desire, jealousy, lack of morality, injury, murder, and the like; yet, with a bit more care, their affirmative aspects also become clear.

Instead of giving a moral assessment of their binary behaviors, however, Jazz turns its attention toward a deeper level, starting to seriously examine the question of "who shot whom" (6). The narrator now traces the concealed forces that govern and victimize the characters' psyches stealthily but dominantly. She indicates the existence of manipulating external circumstances, which make them "crack" involuntarily in terms of morality, as Richard Hardack observes:

The implicit connection between transcendental/Modernist fragmentation, violence, and the site of the involuntary has been recently reinforced and rendered explicit in Morrison's Jazz. Morrison asserts that the violent fragmentation of the American character--in Melville's Pierre, who loses control of his body, and in Billy Budd, who kills without intention, in Norris' McTeague or De Lillo's Axton in The Names, or in any of a plethora of American characters who are defined by what is in some context an act of involuntary or unconscious violence--is foremost a projected attribute of American blackness. (452)

The deviant conduct of the characters in Jazz is involuntary and, perhaps, inevitable. They are inevitably fragmented by outer forces such as the seducing City and its music, the unreliable narrator, as well as social, political, and economic conditions. Morrison, therefore, does not assert that these involuntarily victimized, pathetic characters are to blame for their extraordinary behaviors; rather, she gives them a chance to redeem themselves, exhorting them to forgive and love each other and to be careful in order not to be trapped by the manipulating circumstances. "Sth" (3), the novel's opening word, serves to elicit attention from the listener/reader and may well launch this exploration of the text with an emphasis on the main characters--Joe Trace, Violet, Dorcas Manfred, and Golden Gray.

Throughout the novel, the characters exhibit the duplicity of the human mind: while they display aberrant behaviors such as murder, injury, and misunderstanding, they are also neighborly and kind. The narrative begins with their extraordinary transgressions, which might make the reader consider the characters as morally/mentally corrupt. Above all, Joe is a dreamer desirous to take a bite of the forbidden apple--that is, Dorcas. Although "he knew wrong wasn't right," his vain impulse to taste the apple keeps growing intense (74). And he appears to have fulfilled this desire in the sense that he could date the young Dorcas, but the affair ends up with his shooting Dorcas because of the unsatisfied desire to possess her as his own. Even after her death, Joe's aspiration for Dorcas is still operating: dreaming of Dorcas, he quits his job and pays little attention to his wife. He has lost all sense of reality. His wife Violet is almost a lunatic when she tries to take revenge by attacking Dorcas in the coffin. She is also one who seems to hardly realize...