Overview
Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) is the story of a violent love triangle and its emotional, psychological, and spiritual aftershocks. Set in Harlem in 1926, Morrison uses the relationship between Joe and Violet Trace, a middle-aged couple who escape the oppressive South to move to “the city” (Harlem), and Dorcas, Joe’s 17-year-old lover, to explore the theme of love in all of its manifestations.
Morrison’s inspiration for Jazz was a photograph of a young Black girl in her coffin, taken by photographer James Van Der Zee, and reprinted in a collection of his funeral photography entitled The Harlem Book of the Dead, for which Morrison wrote the foreword. In an interview with author Gloria Naylor, Morrison explained how the girl in the photo, at a party, refused to tell anyone why she was suddenly weak and bleeding, asking her friends to simply let her rest and telling them, “I’ll tell you tomorrow” (a tomorrow that she never saw), thus enabling her lover, who had shot her, to safely escape. Morrison was haunted by the story because “a woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself.” In Jazz, Morrison interrogates the “reconfiguration of the self” that love, particularly “couple-love,” as Morrison terms it, invokes.
Morrison chooses “the City,” Harlem, as the setting for Jazz.The novel explores the legacy of slavery and Reconstruction on the “modern,” urban Black community and the myriad ways the individuals in the community attempt to navigate and reconcile the tensions between this legacy and the events of Black America’s modern age (the Great Migration, the St. Louis Riots of 1917, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement)..
Morrison consciously modeled the novel on the music form jazz, a hybrid of several different music forms (blues, ragtime, gospel, marches, and European harmonic forms), which is characterized by its improvisational nature, rhythmic complexity, and freedom of self-expression. Jazz is used as a metaphor for the African American experience, and the music form infuses every aspect of the novel—setting, narrative structure, narration, and characterization.
In terms of Jazz’s narrative structure, the chapters have no titles, suggesting a fluidity between perspectives, experiences, and voices. The present action takes the reader from winter 1926 to spring 1927. The narrator reveals the entire plot of the novel in the first four pages and then guides the reader on the journey—weaving together the past and the present, stretching back to 1850 and the intervening years–of discovering the “how” and the “why.”Jazz is a literary jazz composition, blending elements of several literary genres (historical fiction, psychological fiction, coming-of-age, magical realism, folklore, post-modernist fiction) into a multi-layered, polyphonic, riveting work of fiction.
Background Knowledge and Historical Contexts
The optional readings and videos below provide some historical context which may be useful when reading the novel.
- The Great Migration: The Great Migration (1910-1970) | National Archives
- The St. Louis Riot of 1917: The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead, Devastating a Community on the Rise
- The 1920s: The 1920s: Definition and Facts | HISTORY
- The Harlem Renaissance: Harlem Renaissance – Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY
- The Civil Rights Movement in America: Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders | HISTORY
Questions/Topics to Consider While Reading
- Exploration of Memory and the Past: How do the personal traumas the characters have experienced in their pasts affect their ability to live in the present? Describe Joe’s worries about his memories in chapter 2 of the novel. How do incomplete memories disturb his sense of self? What, if anything, is best left forgotten for characters in the novel?
- Motherhood and Family: How does the novel explore the tension between identity and motherhood? How does “mother-hunger” affect the decisions and actions of the characters in the novel? Why does Violet decide not to have children, and why does she change her mind later?
- Community and the City: Describe the role of the city landscape as a character in the novel. Why does the narrator talk so much about the cityscape, and how does it relate to the lives of the characters? How are the City and the country portrayed differently in the novel? How does moving to the City immediately affect the way African American migrants perceive themselves and their culture? Consider the importance of community and companionship in the novel. How do the residents create and maintain a sense of community in the City? One of the themes in the novel is that of the “pariah” or outcast. Which characters can be considered pariah and why? What is the role of the pariah in the novel?
- Identity/Naming: What two revelations about herself does Violet have in the fourth chapter? Why are they significant? How does Violet’s profession as a hairdresser help to define her? Discuss the significance of how Joe chose his last name, which he explains in chapter 5. What clue does this explanation give about why he struggles with his identity? How many times has Joe changed? When were these times? How are these changes significant? Why do you think the narrator spends so much time describing Golden Gray and his journey to confront his father in Virginia? What does this help the reader understand about Golden’s sense of identity? Discuss the significance of names and naming in the novel (Joe Trace, Violet, Dorcas, True Belle, Rose Dear, Wild, Golden Gray).
- Love: What aspects of love are examined in the novel? Morrison has said that Jazz is about the dangers of excessive love. Who loves excessively in the novel and with what results? How do Joe’s and Violet’s memories of each other illustrate the theme of lost intimacy in their marriage? What motivates Violet to investigate Dorcas, Joe’s lover? How does her investigation reflect her emotional state and her desire to reclaim her marriage? In the last pages of the novel, the narrator looks at “young loving” and mature love. What is sweet about each kind? Does the narrator prefer one kind over the other? What mood do the last scenes with Joe and Violet create? Consider how imagery reinforces this mood.
- Womanhood and Friendship between Women: Examine the theme of sisterhood and the different female relationships in the novel. How does the situation in which Winsome Clark finds herself, described in her letter that Malvonne reads, represent the struggles for identity that Malvonne and many women in the City experience? How does Alice teach Dorcas to navigate a world that oppresses her? Discuss Alice Manfred’s distinction between “armed” and “unarmed’ women. Explain how Alice changes because of her unlikely friendship with Violet, considering especially the last six paragraphs of chapter 6.
- Moral Ambiguity and Ethical Dilemmas: What roles do religion and morality play in the novel? Which character best reflects these roles? What is Morrison saying about these beliefs/concepts through this character? Does Morrison suggest a moral in her story?
- Symbolism: Discuss the role that nature plays in the novel. How are the seasons used symbolically in the novel? Why does Dorcas choose to die and what does her death symbolize? How does this symbolism contribute to the development and understanding of character and theme? How does Harlem’s depiction in the novel mirror the emotional states of Violet and Joe? What does the city represent in terms of opportunity and constraint? How do birds, and especially the parrot, function in the novel as symbols of the ways in which Joe and Violet’s marriage has broken down?
- Morrison’s Writing Style: What effect does the narrative voice that Morrison employs in Jazz have on our reading of the novel? Why would she have chosen a narrator that is neither a character nor wholly omniscient and detached? How does the narrator’s voice shape the reader’s understanding of the characters? Is the narrator reliable? Why or why not? How can the narrative structure of the novel be compared to a jazz piece? Why does Morrison choose this particular way of telling the story?
