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Blues People in a Jazz World
| Article
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20257 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,697 Words |
| Author
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Bernard W. Bell
Bernard W. Bell is professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. His latest book is The Afro-American
Novel and Its Tradition (1987). |
JAZZ
Toni Morrison
New York: Knopf, 1992
229 pp., $21.00
"If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture," Toni Morrison explained in 1984, "it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its relationship to audience performance." In her 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved, Morrison keeps faith with the aesthetic tradition of African American culture by constructing a womanist neoslave narrative of double consciousness, set in post-Civil War Cincinnati, Ohio, that speaks in many compelling voices on several time levels of the historical rape of black American women and of the resilient spirit of black Americans in surviving as a people. In Jazz, her new novel, Morrison continues to explore this tradition as she improvises blues and jazz variations on the triangular Harlem love story of middle-aged Joe and Violet Trace and teenaged Dorcas Manfred in 1926.
Although she mentions a "Trombone Blues" and several blues lyrics (e.g., "ain't nobody going to keep me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it right here, or else"), some readers will be disappointed that Morrison employs neither specific, well-known blues or jazz musicians as prominent characters nor a particular blues or jazz song as the dominant motif in her narrative. After all, the 1920s was the era of the classic, unrelated blues "sisters" (Bessie, Mamie, Clara, and Trixie Smith) and legendary jazz innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Instead Morrison introduces her narrative with a blues-based love story by a dramatized, disembodied yet intimate narrator that sets up a polyphonic structure of call-and-response between old and young, past and present, rural and urban, and southern and northern voices of blues people in a jazz world:
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze
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