Jazz’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

Jazz, published in 1992, continues to be listed by book sites as “historical fiction.” Morrison may have concurred. Instead of attempting to control or recast its critical reception, as she sometimes does with retrospectives on previous novels, her foreword to the 2004 Vintage edition of Jazz focuses on its process of production “where the project came as close as it could to its idea of itself—the essence of the so-called Jazz Age” (xviii). By reflecting her own reiteration about the significance of absent presences, she indicates via her lack of concern with the book’s interpretive labels the fact that she has become more comfortable with its—and her—place in literary critical history.

This second of stories in Morrison’s trilogy on the African American experience came five years after what we have called the “critical watershed moment” of Beloved’s publication. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Beloved cinched Morrison’s nomination for the Nobel award she received the year after Jazz appeared, an upwardly mobile trend from which critical momentum on Jazz certainly benefited. Its subsequent 2004 foreword describes the development of the book as an urtext. Morrison wanted her words to “reflect the content and characteristics of [jazz] music (romance, freedom of choice, doom, seduction, anger) and the manner of its expression” (xv).

To pull this off, she turned, as with Beloved, to a compilation of images narrating black life in America—and to memories of her mother. If The Black Book presents a scrapbook of mostly painful African American existence to its 1974 date, including an 1856 article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” the collection from which Jazz takes its inspiration, more specifically a photograph from James Van Der Zee’s haunting Harlem Book of the Dead, represents the most comprehensive documentation of black middle-class New Yorkers and their death rituals during the Harlem Renaissance. Akin to Morrison’s effort with her ur-Jazz, Van Der Zee’s portraits not only recognize the Harlem Renaissance but essentially helped generate it. Recalling herself as a child daring to open a forbidden trunk that contained, sitting on top of crepe dresses, a tiny, fringed, and glitteringly glass-bejeweled evening purse belonging to her mother afforded Morrison the necessary imaginative entry into the roaring twenties of that mother-as-girl.