Toni Morrison's fiction, we have been repeatedly told, embodies
features
taken from jazz. Her books have a “jazzy prose style,” express
a
“jazz aesthetic,” or are “literary jazz.” Critics
propose that jazz riffs can be
found in her writing, and that she improvises in prose in a manner
comparable to an improvising jazz musician. None of this seems to me
to be true. To establish a relationship between music and prose fiction
would be difficult under any circumstances. It is all the more difficult
when
the critics concerned show themselves to be unaware of the basic formal
structures of jazz. The riff is foregrounded because it is the only feature
of jazz that can be compared to prose (because both may include
repetitions). It is a more serious objection that Rice, Small-McCarthy,
Berrett, and others, including James A. Snead and Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
consistently ignore structure, harmony, and melody in favour of rhythm.
The reason for this is that jazz rhythm can be traced back to its African
origins, whereas structure, harmony, and melody require an engagement
with European sources. Clearly, an ideology of authenticity is at work
here. Yet a parallel argument is willing to relate Morrison's fiction
to its
European origins. For, if her novel Jazz is, as Rinaldo Walcott
indicates,
a rewriting of Scott Fitzgerald's version of the “Jazz Age,”
then that rewriting or radical revision must occur by reference to a form
– the novel – that originated in Europe and is (in the cited
instance) a product of white America.
America Beyond the Color Line: Henry Louis Gates Jr., Literary Theory, Genealogy and Visual Culture
