Figuring In, Figuring Out: Narration and Negotiation in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Introduction:
Figuring In, Figuring out

At the end of Jazz the narrator tells us that she had believed "life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. . . . I don't believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out" (227-28). With these words she affirms the transitory nature of understanding, narration, and judgment as something that cannot occur outside a participation in ("figuring in") subjective interplay. This denial of the existence of an objective narrative space, and situating of the text within the broader signifying play of the world, links the performative and constative functions of Jazz, so that the closing words of the novel are an imagined injunction to, and declaration of, freedom: "[I'd s]ay make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now" (229). As has been pointed out by Michal Peled Ginsburg and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, at this stage of the novel the narrator's voice seems close to that of Toni Morrison herself. Moreover the "you," for the first time in the text, refers to the reader—or if one prefers, a narratee with no difference from the real reader.

Yet all this takes place around a set of characters who have a problematized relation to the process of narration, who somehow escape that narration and make it a victim of itself. The signifying process is not one-sided; the freedom to make and to be remade through narrative is a reciprocal process, even though the narrator only realizes it at the end: "when I invented stories about them . . . I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy" (220).

Whilst previous scholarly work has identified the problematization of narrative as a central concern of Jazz, ¹ there has been relatively little exploration of the theoretical implications of this participative relationship between the narrator, the narrated, and the reader. Philip Page, for instance, argues that the novel has "post-modern tendencies" (55), suggesting that the problematization of narrative leads us to ask of the narrator, "Where has she been unreliable before, or worse, can readers rely on any part of her narration?" (61); Carolyn M. Jones argues that Jazz is "a site of multiple voices" (494). Yet the implications of such multiplicity have been largely unexamined. In this article I aim to show how Jazz not only highlights the difficulties of narration through an exploration of displacement, iteration, and negotiation, but also raises and anticipates the political and ethical problematic which such a skeptical relationship to narrative might entail. I shall finally argue that these considerations prepare us for the final pages of the novel, in which a new language inflected with alterity emerges and helps us understand the nature of the "freedom" invoked in the novel's final sentences. This language makes no claims on presence or straightforward "meaning," but is rather a means of "figuring in" the world as well as figuring it out.

I shall draw on the work of Homi Bhabha, who, in The Location of Culture, focuses on the experience of the British Empire to develop a conception of language use that highlights the possibilities of signifiers being reappropriated by individual language users. This reappropriation is far from straightforward: for signifiers are reinterpreted in discourse at the same time as they affect that discourse. So, for instance, Bhabha cites Alexander Duff's India and India Missions and its descriptions of how Indians reinterpret the Christian notion of being "reborn" as relating to Brahman reincarnation (101), and the missionary's subsequent attempts to explain the concept in "improved language." The apparently unavoidable misunderstandings result in a negotiation between the "pre-occupations...