Jazz in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Jazz in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Although it is difficult to establish a relationship between music and prose fiction, Toni Morrison, in Jazz, demonstrates the unique role of black music, not only as an expression of black aesthetics and aspirations for Afro-Americans, but also as a reflection of genuine social, economic, and political realities that are often misinterpreted by others. Morrison specifically investigates the lives of Afro-Americans in order to clarify their blurred and unrecorded collective memory; to gather collective memory of Afro-Americans, she thoroughly explores the individual lives dimmed by hypocritical white bureaucracy and uses jazz music as a necessary device. Throughout jazz, the imaginative sound and rhythm of jazz music with its aesthetic passion and cultural vitality overwhelm the identity of Afro-Americans. As the novel progresses, Morrison appropriates the jazz mode to create the feelings of distance and so to accentuate the adversity of their painful experiences. Thus, an inheritance of cultural disruption and emotional disturbances that are inextricably interwoven in the fabric of Afro-American lives are thoroughly exposed in her work. The images of jazz, the sound which carries the transcendental meaning beyond the denotation of words, pervade this work. Morrison 'improvises' her prose fiction by including many features of jazz aesthetics in a manner comparable to improvising jazz music. Therefore, in this paper, the means in which Morrison documents the collective memory of Afro-American experiences through the use of literary techniques acquired from the patterns of jazz music, are explored. Secondly, this paper demonstrates the presence of orality in black culture, using Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic nature of language, to prove that the oral structure displayed by Morrison in her novel is in a pattern similar to that found in jazz music. Throughout this novel, Toni Morrison was able to record the true reality of Afro-Americans in a unique way, not only to move beyond language, but to incorporate ethnic significances beyond the denotation of words as she successfully composes jazz music in her literature, Jazz.