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Jazzing It Up A Storm: The Execution and Meaning of Toni Morrison's Jazzy Prose Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Alan J. Rice
Alan J. Rice
Affiliation:
Alan J. Rice is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of American Studies, University of Keele, Keele ST5 5BG, England.
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Extract

The publication of Toni Morrison's new novel Jazz with its insistent jazzy themes and rhythms will have concentrated the minds of critics on the relationship of her work to America's most important indigenous artistic form, jazz music. However, in their headlong rush to foreground the impact of jazz on Toni Morrison's latest novel critics should be wary of isolating this novel as her only jazz-influenced work. All of her novels have been informed by the rhythms and cadences of a black musical tradition and in this article I want to stress the centrality of jazz music stylistically to her whole corpus of work. Morrison herself has acknowledged the centrality of a musical aesthetic to her work in interview after interview long before the publication of Jazz:

…a novel written a certain way can do precisely what spirituals used to do. It can do exactly what blues or jazz or gossip or stories or myths or folklore did – that stuff which was a common wellspring of ideas…

Morrison is writing out of an oral tradition which foregrounds musical performances as well as other oral forms. Some critics have acknowledged the importance of jazz to her work, notably Anthony J. Berret in his article “Toni Morrison's Literary Jazz”. But, despite some provocative and illuminating comments, his is not a systematic account of the use of a jazz mode in Morrison's fiction and I wish in this paper to attempt a more rigorous analysis of her early novels, outlining her willed use of a jazz aesthetic as a pivotal structural device.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , December 1994 , pp. 423 - 432
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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