Toni Morrison by Valerie Smith

Author:Valerie Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Jazz and Paradise

Jazz

Between 1982 and 1997, Toni Morrison published three novels to which she and many of her critics have referred collectively as a trilogy: Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). These novels are considered a trilogy for a variety of reasons. Some critics have argued that they are connected by their shared focus on the relationship between excessive love and violence: Beloved on maternal love, Jazz on romantic love, and Paradise on religious or communal love. They have been called a trilogy because of their historical reach: read chronologically, the novels span 100 years of African American life and cover a broad geographic area. Beloved is set during the 1870s outside Cincinnati, Ohio with flashbacks to a plantation in Kentucky and a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia. Jazz is set in 1920s Harlem with flashbacks to Reconstruction era Virginia. Paradise is set mostly in the 1970s in the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, but the text is flooded with memories of the ancestors, the “Old Fathers” who left Louisiana and Mississippi and founded Haven in the 1870s after the failure of Reconstruction. All three novels are set against the backdrop of a war – the Civil War, World War I, the Vietnam War. Perhaps most significantly, all three offer revisions of critical periods in US history by foregrounding the underacknowledged experiences of African Americans.1

Just as the plot of Beloved grew out of a news item of which Morrison became aware when she was compiling The Black Book, the plot of Jazz was inspired by a photograph Morrison encountered while she was preparing the Foreword to a collection of images shot by the legendary African American photographer James Van Der Zee entitled The Harlem Book of the Dead. 2 As Van Der Zee tells Camille Billops in an interview included in The Harlem Book of the Dead:

[The girl in the photograph] was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noiseless gun. She complained of being sick at the party and friends said, ‘Well, why don’t you lay down?’ and they taken her in the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They asked her about it and she said, ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ She was just trying to give him a chance to get away. For the picture, I placed the flowers on her chest.3

For Morrison, the young woman’s self-destructive desire to protect her vengeful lover seemed “redolent of the proud hopelessness of love mourned and championed in blues music, and, simultaneously, fired by the irresistible energy of jazz music” (p. xvi).4

The plot of Jazz is essentially summarized in its first pages. In the opening lines of the novel, we read of a woman named Violet whose husband murdered the 18-year-old girl named Dorcas with whom he was having an affair. At the young woman’s funeral, Violet tried to slash the dead girl’s face as she lay in

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