Misreading Morrison, Mishearing Jazz: A Response to Toni Morrison's Jazz Critics

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.