Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Abstract

Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes. For example, Sula is structured around inter-play between supposed binary oppositions (such as Bottom/valley, white/black, male/female), and Beloved examines necessary dangers of both and its repression. Postmodern themes are also evident in Morrison's published interviews and essays. Repeatedly, she declares her interest in ambiguity of presumed dualities,(1) and she insists that her novels remain open-ended, not as final authoritative statements but as maps (Morrison, Memory 389) or as texts with plenty of holes and spaces so reader can come them (Tate 125). Thus her texts are deliberately like other African American art forms, such as jazz and preaching, that allow for audience response. Moreover, instead of focusing on whole or center, Morrison tries to develop parts out of pieces, preferr[ing] them unconnected - to be related but not to touch, to circle, not line up (Morrison, Memory 388). For her what is absent is at least as important as what is present. Her role is not to reveal some already established reality but to fret pieces and fragments of memory and to investigate the process by which we construct and deconstruct reality in order to be able to function in it (Washington 58).(2) In short, Morrison requires that her novels be regarded, in Roland Barthes's terms, as texts, not works (Work 74-79). Thus, throughout Morrison's fiction, her characters are caught in endless flux of becoming. In their multiple quests for viable identities, they must negotiate within white/black polarity, and their explorations into their roles and identities are skewed because that pervasive and unyielding polarity leads to displacement of additional polarities. Her characters have trouble developing fulfilled selves because they lack adequate relationships with one or more others, such as parents, spouse, family, neighborhood, community, and/or society. Such postmodern tendencies are more explicit in Jazz than in Morrison's previous novels. difficulties of characters in Jazz are related primarily to absence or displacement of parents and children, which, in turn, is related to lack of satisfactory connection to past. Such Derridean concepts as differance, trace, and breach are especially useful in understanding characters in Jazz who, in their displacement, tend to overemphasize one or other terms of various binary oppositions. Joe, for example, having been deprived of true parents and therefore having had to rely solely on himself, exaggerates importance of self, to exclusion of anything else. Violet, on other hand, has allowed her mother's fate to overwhelm her sense of self. complex process of recovery which novel documents is movement away from such dependence on one face of opposition and toward a healthier location within play of oppositions. More broadly, novel's postmodernism suggests Morrison's political stance. In Jazz, as elsewhere, Morrison exposes debilitating effects of white oppression, yet she avoids sentimental praise for African Americans. Instead, she locates her novel in play between two races: It is about African American experience in white-dominated America and about how that experience is defined by African Americans' historical and continuing relationship with whites. Her novel thus mirrors her argument in Playing in Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination that concept of an American (38) was created in imaginations of whites as a way of defining themselves: The process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became operative mode of a new cultural hegemony (8). If whites have defined themselves against African American other, characters in Jazz have no alternative but to define themselves against white presence. …