Morrison wanted the structure to equal meaning in this novel (xix). The novel, or the characters, never really move past this scene.
This scene acts as a call to the characters, and the rest of the novel is a performance and improvisation in response to this scene. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church (3).īy establishing the triggering action of her plot in such a succinct manner, Morrison establishes this as the initiating riff of the song that is the rest of the novel. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
In the compressed space of the opening paragraph of the novel, the unnamed narrator establishes both Joe’s murder of Dorcas and his wife’s attempted cutting of Dorcas’ face at her funeral: In a departure from the traditional novelistic form, Morrison’s narrator summarizes the entire story of the novel in the first few pages of the first chapter (Morrison 3-6). The narrative voice of Morrison’s novel is constantly engaged in the process of inventing, improvising, and changing the narrative they are sharing with the reader. Instead of a strict progression from past to future, from cause to effect, Morrison’s novel is focused on the repetitive performance and improvisation of the present tense, particularly illustrated in her repeated improvisational performances of the central climactic scene-Violet’s failed attempt to cut Dorcas’ face at her funeral. Just as Jazz music allows the individual artist considerable freedom from the strictness of written notation, the structure of Jazz allows Morrison’s narrator and characters freedom from the traditional novelistic structure of movement towards resolution. In order to render the musicality of Jazz into the literary structure of the novel, Morrison “integrate freedom with structure, spontaneity with forethought individual expression with collective interplay” (Grandt xiii). When writing Jazz, Toni Morrison “was interested in rendering a period in African American life through a specific lens-one that would reflect the content and characteristics of its music …and the manner of its expression” (xv). The following work was created for ENG 214: Intro to African American Literature and Culture II.
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