Title: Answer jazz's call: experiencing Toni Morrison's Jazz.'
Author(s): Veronique Lesoinne
Source: MELUS. 22.3 (Fall 1997): p151. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Article
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
Ideally, the [jazz] listener listened intently enough to join the improviser's trance. That was understood as the listener's job, the listener's act of creation.
This made possible a depth of thought....
The indefinite personality of the narrator in Toni Morrison's novel, Jazz, invokes two of the author's central concerns in the creation of African American literature. On the one hand, through both the indeterminacy and the self-questioning of the narrative I," she compels her readers, whatever their ethnic background, to engage in a thorough self-exploration, or, in her own words, "to examine centers of the self and ... to compare those centers with the `raceless' ones with which we are, all of us, most familiar" (Morrison qtd. in Hulbert 46). On the other hand, the narrating voice's indeterminacy enacts in a most forceful way the novelist's notion of African American modernity. Morrison once "observed ... [that] `a =modernity which overturns pre-war definitions ushers in the Jazz Age (an age defined by Afro-American art and culture), and requires new minds of intelligences to define oneself.' Efforts to shape identity became newly =`complex, contradictory, evasive, independent, liquid'" (Hulbert 46). =SPAN class=hitHighlite>Morrison's way of encouraging us on this difficult quest, then, is to invite us to write the novel with her as we are reading it, to (re-)create the novel, and by the same token to (re-)shape ourselves. In that sense, she offers the reader the opportunity to become the protagonist of his/her version of Jazz.
To a large extent, this invitation arises from the spaces that both =he direct reference to jazz music and the slipperiness of the narrator's identity and personality open for the readers. The very title vividly