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How can Toni Morrison’s Jazz be read as a postmodern text? What are the advantages
about writing about the past in this way?
Toni Morrison’s temporal advantage writing Jazz about the past, allowed her to grasp a
broader perspective of life in the Harlem Renaissance
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Morrison claimed to have read articles,
advertisements, columns, employment ads, Sunday school programs, essays and listen
to records from 1926
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In her historical research, Morrison took inspiration directly from James Van Der Zee’s
‘The Harlem Book of the Dead’ which was published in 1978
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Morrison had written the forward to
Harlem Book of the Dead, and quotes a caption of the photo in her own forward to jazz
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She complained of being sick at the party
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After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood
on her dress
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’ She was just trying to give him a chance to get away
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” The young girl and Dorcas share their tragic
demise ultimately due to the lifestyles they adapt when migrating into the City; which
stem through jazz music and its sensuality
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”
In the article ‘Jazz and the Future Blues: Toni Morrison's Urban Folk Zone’ by Andrew
Scheiber, jazz music is described as an urban extension of the blues
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” Paradoxically, Jazz is a sound that threatens to obscure, eclipse, and
even disown the vernacular forms out of which it has evolved and from which it derives
its affirmative power
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The character Felice in Jazz
uses the idea of the camera to showcase the struggle of identity she feels, remembering
blues and the person she used to be
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Nothing like me
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Then it would work
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” The
reality of Jazz music’s danger comes in the form of Dorcas’s death
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Morrison
compares her writing style to “a jazz performance in which the musicians are on stage
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Somebody takes off from a basic pattern, and then
the others have to accommodate themselves
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” Jazz’s post modernity allows Morrison to stray from the structural
conventions of the novel and infuse Jazz music into its form to enhance meaning
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This indifference can be seen through the matter of fact tone used to describe the
horrific violence in the opening pages where “violet went to the funeral to see the girl
and to cut her dead face”
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Almost like a Jazz piece, several narrators step forward in
a stream of consciousness which is often a tangent of their own improvisation, like Jazz
soloists
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Jazz music is unpredictable and the narrator admits
that she never thought that the first person narrators could be thinking other thoughts
and feeling other feelings to the extent that it and the powerful Jazz music would affect
the plot and protect them against their expectedly tragic outcome which the narrator
illustrated (when she predicted Violet and Joe would kill each other)
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” Morrison uses meta fiction as she explains through the narrator that
retelling history is not factual and is open for bias and interpretation
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The narrator is conversational in her
approach assuming the role of a storyteller using repetition, assonance, alliteration,
improvisation and fluidity through each chapter to parallel the novel to an oral tale with
allowance for reader input and active thinking rather than simply listening and not
interpreting
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Morrison even
refers to the risk of trying to figure out anybody’s state of mind, as not even the
storyteller knows the character’s thoughts in the end which is thought provoking and
challenging for the reader
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Critic Madhu
Dubey argues in Narration and Migration: Jazz and Vernacular Theories of Black
Women’s Fiction, that “The traditional oral modes could not speak to the cultural

‘disarray’ caused by the Great Migration” but Morrison’s novel and its complex form
proves advantageous to Migrant readers as they can feel comfort from the comic ending
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294)



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