Involuntary Vulnerability and the Felix Culpa in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Abstract

Given that jazz is interplay of voices improvising on basic themes or motifs (Jones 200) and Toni Morrison's Jazz is often considered a textualized piece of jazz, characters' involuntary vulnerability to harsh outside circumstances is fundamentally reiterated and varied throughout novel. The recurrent tunes of motif are intricately intertwined with a variety of other thematic elements--such as the mystery of that involves jealousy and forgiveness (Jazz 5), history of southern blacks' migration to northern cities, and their quest for identity by seeking their parents. The narrative of Jazz thus weaves motif of turn-of-the-century African American characters' involuntary vulnerability and its improvised variations, synchronizing distinct levels of structure and textuality with jazz-like flexibility and fluidity. On superficial level, narrator interweaves both negative and positive natures of characters. The reader may easily find characters' disordered aspects--carnal desire, jealousy, lack of morality, injury, murder, and like; yet, with a bit more care, their affirmative aspects also become clear. Instead of giving a moral assessment of their binary behaviors, however, Jazz turns its attention toward a deeper level, starting to seriously examine question of shot whom (6). The narrator now traces concealed forces that govern and victimize characters' psyches stealthily but dominantly. She indicates existence of manipulating external circumstances, which make them crack involuntarily in terms of morality, as Richard Hardack observes: The implicit connection between transcendental/Modernist fragmentation, violence, and site of involuntary has been recently reinforced and rendered explicit in Morrison's Jazz. Morrison asserts that violent fragmentation of American character--in Melville's Pierre, who loses control of his body, and in Billy Budd, who kills without intention, in Norris' McTeague or De Lillo's Axton in The Names, or in any of a plethora of American characters who are defined by what is in some context an act of involuntary or unconscious violence--is foremost a projected attribute of American blackness. (452) The deviant conduct of characters in Jazz is involuntary and, perhaps, inevitable. They are inevitably fragmented by outer forces such as seducing City and its music, unreliable narrator, as well as social, political,and economic conditions. Morrison, therefore, does not assert that these involuntarily victimized, pathetic characters are to blame for their extraordinary behaviors; rather, she gives them a chance to redeem themselves, exhorting them to forgive and love each other and to be careful in order not to be trapped by manipulating circumstances. Sth (3), novel's opening word, serves to elicit attention from listener/reader and may well launch this exploration of text with an emphasis on main characters--Joe Trace, Violet, Dorcas Manfred, and Golden Gray. Throughout novel, characters exhibit duplicity of human mind: while they display aberrant behaviors such as murder, injury, and misunderstanding, they are also neighborly and kind. The narrative begins with their extraordinary transgressions, which might make reader consider characters as morally/mentally corrupt. Above all, Joe is a dreamer desirous to take a bite of forbidden apple--that is, Dorcas. Although knew wrong wasn't right, his vain impulse to taste apple keeps growing intense (74). And he appears to have fulfilled this desire in sense that he could date young Dorcas, but affair ends up with his shooting Dorcas because of unsatisfied desire to possess her as his own. Even after her death, Joe's aspiration for Dorcas is still operating: dreaming of Dorcas, he quits his job and pays little attention to his wife. …