Jazz
(18) Toni Morrison: Jazz
I finished Jazz about three weeks ago but it wasn't until today, the last day we discussed it in my Toni Morrison class, that it hit me. And I can't even tell you what it was because I couldn't spoil it for you. No, I don't mean the plot. It's Toni Morrison--most people are begging for plot spoilers the first time around. (When I read Beloved recently, I found it relatively easy to follow the plot--but I think that's because I read it in high school. Jazz was totally new, and that much harder.)
I got the narrator.
Well, not exactly. I got what the narrator was saying on the last two pages. But it won't spoil anything much for me to tell you about the narrator herself; she's someone (something?) you should be looking out for as you go in...
The narrator of Jazz is not a character in the novel. Except she is. (We don't know for sure that she's a she, but I can't help thinking of her so.) Sometimes she talks about walking in the city (1920s Harlem), and I thought I caught a glimpse of her in Violet's hurry-up customer, but other times I picture her as a nosy, ghosty, gossipy wind. She watches everything, but she doesn't know why people do what they do, and sometimes she jumps to the wrong conclusion, and sometimes she has to correct herself. Example:Risky, I'd say, trying to figure out anybody's state of mind. but worth the trouble if you're like me--curious, inventive and well-informed. Joe acts like he knew all about what the old folks did to keep going, but he couldn't have known much about True Belle, for example, because I doubt Violet ever talked to him about her grandmother--and never about her mother. So he didn't know. Neither did I, although it's not hard to imagine what it must have been like.
Unlike Beloved, Jazz keeps this same narrator the whole way through, although a few times the real characters butt in, quotation marks setting off their own voices.
The real characters: An older couple, around fifty, Violet and Joe. They met picking cotton in the country, and finally moved to the city about twenty years ago. Violet does hair now, and Joe waits tables and sells Cleopatra beauty products on the side. Dorcas is the teenage girl he fell in love with. When she ditched him for a younger man, he shot her at a party with a noiseless gun. ("They asked her about it and she said, 'I'll tell you tomorrow, yes. I'll tell you tomorrow.' She was just trying to give him a chance to get away" runs the caption of the photograph in The Harlem Book of the Dead, where Morrison found her inspiration for Jazz.) Now Violet is trying to figure out who Dorcas was that Joe loved her so much, and Joe is still looking for her. Her isn't exactly Dorcas. There are a lot of missing people in this story. Someone who isn't missing is Felice, Dorcas' friend. Everyone is happy to meet her in the end. Keep a sharp eye out for Golden Gray, too. (Does he have something to do with Violet's "cracks"?)
Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise have been described as Morrison's "love trilogy." Beloved is about mother love; Jazz is about lovers. (I'll let you know about Paradise in a while.) Keep this in mind when you read the last two pages. And when you get to the last two paragraphs, especially if you're a little lonely, and you're the sort of person who turns to books for love, start reading the words out loud to yourself, slowly, so you don't miss it.
I finished Jazz about three weeks ago but it wasn't until today, the last day we discussed it in my Toni Morrison class, that it hit me. And I can't even tell you what it was because I couldn't spoil it for you. No, I don't mean the plot. It's Toni Morrison--most people are begging for plot spoilers the first time around. (When I read Beloved recently, I found it relatively easy to follow the plot--but I think that's because I read it in high school. Jazz was totally new, and that much harder.)
I got the narrator.
Well, not exactly. I got what the narrator was saying on the last two pages. But it won't spoil anything much for me to tell you about the narrator herself; she's someone (something?) you should be looking out for as you go in...
The narrator of Jazz is not a character in the novel. Except she is. (We don't know for sure that she's a she, but I can't help thinking of her so.) Sometimes she talks about walking in the city (1920s Harlem), and I thought I caught a glimpse of her in Violet's hurry-up customer, but other times I picture her as a nosy, ghosty, gossipy wind. She watches everything, but she doesn't know why people do what they do, and sometimes she jumps to the wrong conclusion, and sometimes she has to correct herself. Example:Risky, I'd say, trying to figure out anybody's state of mind. but worth the trouble if you're like me--curious, inventive and well-informed. Joe acts like he knew all about what the old folks did to keep going, but he couldn't have known much about True Belle, for example, because I doubt Violet ever talked to him about her grandmother--and never about her mother. So he didn't know. Neither did I, although it's not hard to imagine what it must have been like.
Unlike Beloved, Jazz keeps this same narrator the whole way through, although a few times the real characters butt in, quotation marks setting off their own voices.
The real characters: An older couple, around fifty, Violet and Joe. They met picking cotton in the country, and finally moved to the city about twenty years ago. Violet does hair now, and Joe waits tables and sells Cleopatra beauty products on the side. Dorcas is the teenage girl he fell in love with. When she ditched him for a younger man, he shot her at a party with a noiseless gun. ("They asked her about it and she said, 'I'll tell you tomorrow, yes. I'll tell you tomorrow.' She was just trying to give him a chance to get away" runs the caption of the photograph in The Harlem Book of the Dead, where Morrison found her inspiration for Jazz.) Now Violet is trying to figure out who Dorcas was that Joe loved her so much, and Joe is still looking for her. Her isn't exactly Dorcas. There are a lot of missing people in this story. Someone who isn't missing is Felice, Dorcas' friend. Everyone is happy to meet her in the end. Keep a sharp eye out for Golden Gray, too. (Does he have something to do with Violet's "cracks"?)
Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise have been described as Morrison's "love trilogy." Beloved is about mother love; Jazz is about lovers. (I'll let you know about Paradise in a while.) Keep this in mind when you read the last two pages. And when you get to the last two paragraphs, especially if you're a little lonely, and you're the sort of person who turns to books for love, start reading the words out loud to yourself, slowly, so you don't miss it.