ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the ethical impact of narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz upon readers’ understandings of racial subjectivity. Applying New Critical readings of literary allusions and Reader Response insights into the function of texts upon audiences, it views Morrison as critiquing the Modernist literary canon for its inadequate representation of complex racialized subjects.
Jazz’s narrator echoes the isolationist approach of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the Modernist racial perspectives of William Faulkner’s Light in August and Sound and the Fury to adumbrate perspectival limitations of this cannon. Embodying the canon as a wounded amputee in the figure of Golden Gray, the novel employs the narrator’s shifting perspective on race to expand canonical understandings of racial subjectivity.
Jazz ultimately achieves a radical reimagining of both the canon and Western culture by allusively rooting them in a foreclosed racial hybridity. It traces this hybridity through characters’ longings for primogenitive maternal figures, represented by Wild and Thunder, Perfect Mind. While the novel finally ties Western culture to a primogenitive Afro-Asiatic Egyptian past, the musical form of jazz embodies a sensibility divergent from that expressed in the Modernist present. Through the music, Jazz facilitates canonical revision, supplying a model for improvisational, responsive reading practices that are essential to an ethics of race.
