Collective Individuality in Toni Morrison's Jazz by: Teddy Aronson  his 1925 essay, “The New Negro,” Alain Locke characterizes the attitude of the Harlem Renaissance as a joyful one. Blacks in Harlem had experienced “something like a spiritual emancipation” (Locke 4), and they felt as if they were free to contemplate their shared past without being shackled by it, to move forward to shape their future. Toni Morrison’s account of the Harlem Renaissance, in her novel Jazz, also considers the idea of a collective past, but she chooses to examine how individuals struggled in the new world of relative freedom. For Morrison, the most important questions of the post-emancipation era were how free blacks would negotiate their new independence and their new identities, and how they would be able to negotiate feelings of perpetual misplacement in places which had always been closed to them. Morrison’s characters relive and recreate the past in a city that, in some quarters, honors the New Negro. The black community in Harlem, Morrison emphasizes, is not homogenous; it consists of individuals overcoming their own personal struggles, both past and present. A prominent scholar of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, Alain Locke liberated the voices of the African-Americans of Harlem, who were tentatively exploring new freedoms. Through his essays, fiction, Locke’s optimistic language reinforces the idea of African-Americans as a flexible, determined group, one which can cohere despite the troubles of its individual members and despite its city to country diaspora:
The nature of and events in the City relentlessly mold the lives of each character in Jazz; it is a force so influential that the City, which is, in the end, an abstraction, an idea about a physical place, becomes another character in the book. The City is built by the work of individuals who have organized themselves into a collective; the City of Jazz would not have existed without the confluence of people and ideas which occurred there in the 1920s. But, once it exists, it becomes an actor, a force which can both bring together and separate people. In her analysis of the City in Jazz, Anne-Marie Paquet-Davis says that the “necessary repositioning (the City) imposes upon everyone entering its limits
 The City has a strong influence on the narrator, and the range of feelings the narrator describes – resilience, confusion, loneliness, and immortality – confirm the overwhelming power of the City to transform. Such transformation can be positive, but the reader senses that the City can isolate. The daylight’s cutting effect illuminates the physical borders which mark off homes from one another; individuals are ensconced in apartments, disconnected. Faces blur with “the work of stonemasons,” which suggests that the faces populating the City have lost some uniquely human quality, perhaps that of compassion, of desire to connect with the other. But the City also possessed reassuring qualities: “Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do. And what does on in its blocks and lots and side streets is anything the strong can think of and the weak will admire. All you have to do is heed the design – the way it’s laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow” (9) Still, the question remains: does the city comfort the individual, or segregate him? For people like Joe and Violet, the City ultimately provides hope, and thus a type of consolation. But, even as Joe and Violet often live in parallel, their lives fail to intersect in the City. — Joe Trace — Joe Trace is trapped in his past, and he grapples with his identity as he seeks to moor himself to the present, his present, in the City. At a very young age, Joe, having learned that his parents had “disappeared without a trace,” misconstrues the meaning of these words and taken them “to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me” (124). Joe’s abandonment in Virginia engenders the uncertainty and fluidity which mark his later life, and also give him the name which he later adopts, Joe Trace. In her essay “Cracks and Traces: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Carolyn Jones maps out the ways in which Joe Trace collects and holds onto the traces of his own past, and his reasons for doing so account in some way for his attraction to Dorcas: “(Joe) sees in her light-skinned face the tracks that mark the way to what he has lost,” and the “marks that are signs on Joe’s past, the marks in the rite of passage to self-understanding, are part of why Joe chooses Dorcas” (Jones 483). Joe Trace not only reminds himself of his own passage through history that the traumas which have shaped him, but he sees in others the reinforcing effect of the disorder imposed on him by his losses. These traces, then, are what Joe uses to construct a mangled sort of identity; his challenge is to be able to reach a point at which he is capable of reflection, of gaining the “new outlook” and “greater certainty of what it is all about” that Locke discusses. Only by participating in such reflection will he become an empowered New Negro. — Violet Trace — Throughout Jazz, Violet Trace is defined by her relation to and behavior towards others. She is the consequence of external action, and her isolation in the City reinforces that missing piece of her identity: “The woman people called Violent now because she had tried to call what lay in a coffin” (79), the woman who attacked her husband’s murdered mistress’s corpse. The transition from the name Violet to Violent deprives her of the ties she had to her married name, Trace. As Violent, she represents the misery of unchecked, misguided passion. Because she has always found love elusive, she yearns for it desperately: “Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses – young loving” (120). Violet/Violent does not find contentment because she never forges a loving connection with anyone; though she constantly interacts with others, these interactions are dissatisfying and do not help her fashion a true, honest self. Fascinatingly, it is Violet’s parrot who underscores the notion of Violet as trapped in a historical cycle, unable to claim her own identity and fated to be Violent.  This passage presents a telling contrast between the parrot and its owner. Once liberated, the parrot forgets how to fly and trembles, ignorant of how to exercise his independence. Violet, also forced to flee, reacts to her loneliness angrily, not plaintively, as her parrot did. If both the parrot and Violet are considered products of a migration (in Violet’s case, the historical migration from the South to the City, and, in the parrot’s, the movement from Violet’s room to the outdoors) and specifically of escape from confining situations, then it is illuminating to think of how poorly they react to their newfound freedom. The intense isolation Violet feels is almost inescapable. She may be free, but of what value is her freedom to her? Just as the parrot is confused by his freedom, so is Violet. Violet refuses her parrot’s calls for love because she cannot love, scarred as she is by her husband’s loss of love for her. His love has been lost somewhere in the seemingly vast expanse of the City. By the end of Jazz, Violet’s is able to reclaim her identity as Joe’s love. The reunion of Joe and Violet is facilitated by Felice, Dorcas’s best friend, who is the outside force that pushes them to move beyond Dorcas, whom they both associate with the City. Such amnesia is painful for Joe and Violet, but that pain can be dealt with, as Morrison reveals. People can begin to heal once they reconcile and cease their insistence that they be forever alone, Morrison explains, and that healing happens through laughter and music. Ellison writes of how music can aid people in transcending pain; “blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing it from a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (Ellison 78). Through Ellison, we see that the problem plaguing the characters in Jazz is their refusal to embrace both past and present, both the pain and the chance for freedom from pain. In order to establish real, whole identities, they need to undergo a process of finding and expressing their emotions as a group. Ultimately, it is the narrator’s closing words which remind the reader, having read the stories of Joe, Violet, and Dorcas, of the one thing they can’t forget to do: “I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable, human” (221). One cannot forget to live. The narrator becomesthe creator and the voice of Jazz and emphasized how one cannot forget to live as and for oneself. The withering effects of isolation could kill a person in the City, but it’s the jazz that floods the buildings and streets, connecting each individual into a collection of people, that sustains everyone. § Works Cited Albrecht-Crane, Christa. “Becoming Minoritarian: Post-Identity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 36.1 (2003): 56-73. Web. 20 April 2010. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage International, 1964. Print. Jones, Carol M. “Cracks and Traces: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review. 31.3 (1997): 481-495. Web. 20 April 2010. Locke, Alain. “The New Negro.” The New Negro: An Interpretation. Ed. Alain Locke. New York: Arno, 1968. 3-16. Print. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Vintage International, 1992. Print. Paquet-Davis, Anne-Marie. “Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the City.” African American Review 35.2 (2001): 219-231. Web. 20 April 2010. Pearce, Richard. “Toni Morrison’s “Jazz”: Negotiations of the African American Beauty Culture.” Narrative. 6.3 (1998): 307-324. Web. 20 April 2010. Further Reading The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and Arnold Rampersad The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness, John N. Duvall |
Aronson |