Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz.'

Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes. For example, Sula is structured around the inter-play between supposed binary oppositions (such as Bottom/valley, white/black, male/female), and Beloved examines the necessary dangers of both memory and its repression. Postmodern themes are also evident in Morrison's published interviews and essays. Repeatedly, she declares her interest in the ambiguity of presumed dualities,(1) and she insists that her novels remain open-ended, not as final authoritative statements but as maps (Morrison, "Memory" 389) or as texts with plenty of "holes and spaces so the reader can come into" them (Tate 125). Thus her texts are deliberately like other African American art forms, such as jazz and preaching, that allow for audience response. Moreover, instead of focusing on the whole or the center, Morrison tries to develop "parts out of pieces," "preferr[ing] them unconnected - to be related but not to touch, to circle, not line up" (Morrison, "Memory" 388). For her what is absent is at least as important as what is present. Her role is not to reveal some already established reality but to "fret the pieces and fragments of memory" and to investigate "the process by which we construct and deconstruct reality in order to be able to function in it" (Washington 58).(2) In short, Morrison requires that her novels be regarded, in Roland Barthes's terms, as texts, not works (Work 74-79).

Thus, throughout Morrison's fiction, her characters are caught in the endless flux of becoming. In their multiple quests for viable identities, they must negotiate within the white/black polarity, and their explorations into their roles and identities are skewed because that pervasive and unyielding polarity leads to the displacement of additional polarities. Her characters have trouble developing fulfilled selves because they lack adequate relationships with one or more others, such as parents, spouse, family, neighborhood, community, and/or society.

Such postmodern tendencies are more explicit in Jazz than in Morrison's previous novels. The difficulties of the characters in Jazz are related primarily to the absence or displacement of parents and children, which, in turn, is related to the lack of satisfactory connection to the past. Such Derridean concepts as the differance, the trace, and the breach are especially useful in understanding the characters in Jazz who, in their displacement, tend to overemphasize one or the other terms of various binary oppositions. Joe, for example, having been deprived of true parents and therefore having had to rely solely on himself, exaggerates the importance of self, to the exclusion of anything else. Violet, on the other hand, has allowed her mother's fate to overwhelm her sense of self. The complex process of recovery which the novel documents is the movement away from such dependence on one face of an opposition and toward a healthier location within the play of oppositions.

More broadly, the novel's postmodernism suggests Morrison's political stance. In Jazz, as elsewhere, Morrison exposes the debilitating effects of white oppression, yet she avoids sentimental praise for African Americans. Instead, she locates her novel in the play between the two races: It is about the African American experience in white-dominated America and about how that experience is defined by African Americans' historical and continuing relationship with whites. Her novel thus mirrors her argument in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that the concept of "an American Africanism" (38) was created in the imaginations of whites as a way of defining themselves: "The process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony" (8). If whites have defined themselves against the African American other, the characters in Jazz have no alternative but to define themselves against the white presence. In either case, Morrison foregrounds the play between the two entities, not the traditionally privileged entity and not a reactive substitution of the traditionally deprived one.

Without for the moment considering its Derridean implications, Joe Trace's name bears thematic weight. Joe is adept at hunting, having learned the art of tracking prey from Henry LeStroy/LeStory. Good hunters follow the track of their prey by interpreting or reading its traces, the signs or evidence of its former presence. A track is also the forced or fixed direction imposed on one by external forces, such as the railroad tracks (which "control" the "feet" [32] of Joe, Violet, and the millions of other migrants), the record needle's track, or more generally fate: A faithful man near fifty "is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you. . . . You can't get off the track a City lays for you" (120).

Joe and Violet, like all the novel's characters, are bound to the track of Northern, urban, African American life. Lured from their rural Southern roots by the promise of economic opportunity and racial liberation, they are hooked by the City's music and throbbing energy. But, like many Morrison characters (for example, Cholly Breedlove, Son, Sethe, and Paul D), their identities are still linked to their roots in the rural South. The track of their lives is constituted by the traces of that past, largely their memories, which paradoxically give their present lives meaning and prevent the fulfillment of those present lives. Thus, Joe, haunted by his inability to verify his mother's existence, reconstructs her in Dorcas and attempts to relive his remembered joy (his "Victory") in Vesper County. For Violet, the traces of the past take the forms of her fear of repeating her own mother's suicide, her inability to have her own child, and yet her projections of a child onto Dorcas (108-09), Felice (197), and even Golden Gray, who "'"lived inside [her] mind"'" (208). Alice Manfred is also controlled by the traces of her past, for her bitter death-in-life is associated with her husband's infidelity and her desire for revenge. Similarly, Dorcas's present is dominated by the traces of her memory of the riot-caused fire that killed her parents and burned her treasured dolls.

But trace carries special significance, because it is one of the recurring concepts in Derrida's writing.(3) For Derrida the trace designates the play or oscillation between a present, a thing-as-it-is, and an absence, an other. It is "the intimate relation of the living present to its outside, the opening to exteriority in general" (Speech 86). The trace is thus inseparable from Derrida's concept of the differance, since both attempt to identify the indescribable gap between every pair of binary oppositions, the gap that allows them to exist, the "presence-absence" (Of Grammatology 71) that, never known directly, allows everything else to be comprehended. The trace is the "arche-phenomenon of 'memory'" (Of Grammatology 70), the play between the past and the present, the residue of the past that allows the present consciousness to exist: "The self of the living present is primordially a trace" (Speech 85).

Thus, like everyone, Joe Trace is a trace. He named himself because he thought that "'the "trace" [his parents] disappeared without was me'" (124). His presence is only understood, only exists, in terms of the play between it and his absent parents, his absent past, and therefore his absent self. His conscious presence in the City only exists in terms of its play with, or memory of, his absent past in Vesper County. He loves Dorcas because she recalls for him that past; she for him is the trace of that past and the trace of himself. Her facial blemishes, "'like faint hoofmarks,'" are the "'tracks'" which he thinks he needs in order to renegotiate his past: "'Take my little hoof marks away? Leave me with no tracks at all? In this world the best thing, the only thing, is to find the trail and stick to it.'" Dorcas is thus a reiteration of Joe's never-acknowledged mother, Wild, and Joe's doubling of Dorcas and Wild becomes explicit in Joe's metaphor of tracking: "'I tracked my mother in Virginia and it led me right to her, and I tracked Dorcas from borough to borough'" (130).

But Joe is mistaken in his quest. The past cannot be reclaimed; one present cannot substitute for a lost present; one person cannot stand for another. His attempt leads to the reification of the second person, as Dorcas realizes: "'Joe didn't care what kind of woman I was. He should have. I cared. I wanted to have a personality and with Acton I'm getting one'" (190). Moreover, Joe's quest is too self-serving. Falling into what Derrida calls the error of logocentrism or the metaphysics of presence, he insists on his power of self-determination. For Derrida, "there are no 'conscious' traces" (Margins 21), yet Joe proudly asserts that, as opposed to his experience with Violet, he "chose" Dorcas and she is therefore his. Similarly, he vainly recounts the seven changes in his life (123-29), as if he, his present Being, independently made those choices and controlled his life.

None of this is meant as an indictment of Joe. Like such characters as Sethe and Paul D in Beloved, he has to work through his grief for his missing mother, has to renegotiate his own past. Moreover, Joe, like Morrison's other African Americans, is a displaced victim of the white majority. Thus, Joe is already an other, relegated to the disprivileged term of the white/black duality. Having been always already displaced, it is inevitable for Joe to resort to displacement himself.

Joe's displacement originates with the even more radical displacement of his mother, Wild. Except for her appearance at Joe's birth, she is known only by her absence: She simultaneously is and is not; she is "everywhere and nowhere" (179). Just as Derrida, following Heidigger, expresses this (non)existing state by placing a word under erasure, as in thing (Of Grammatology 19), she might be inscribed as Wild. She haunts the cane fields, where a sense of her presence, a trace, is enough to generate terror and myth. When Joe attempts to find her, she (and Golden Grey) exists, not in presence, but in signs of their presence; that is, in the interaction of absence and presence. Wild's presence/absence lies somewhere in the play between the signifiers (the redwinged blackbirds, her song, her human utensils and clothes) and the human being those signifiers presumably point to. Thus, her presence/absence calls attention to and calls into question the usual assumptions about the privilege of presence, self, and signified.

Through Henry Lestroy/LesTory, Morrison elaborates further on these themes and on the theme of parenthood. In a novel that reiterates the lack of parents (Joe's, Violet's, Dorcas's, Alice Manfred's), Henry's role as a father is significant. His fatherhood is unknown both to him and Golden Grey for years, and when his son finds him, in a quest for origins similar to Joe's quests, no father-son relationship is possible. Thus, he is a father but not a father. Henry does, however, become a father surrogate for Joe, whose birth he facilitates. Thus, Henry's fatherhood is transferred from Golden Grey, his biological son, to Joe, his surrogate son; and the transferral is completed as Golden Grey becomes in a sense Joe's (absent) stepfather through his union with Wild.

In another sense Henry is the archetypal father figure, the "father" of the novel. He is "Hunters Hunter" (166), who enjoys perfect knowledge of and union with nature. The name suggests that he is the perfect, extreme, or even ur-hunter, and thus parallels Derrida's use of the prefix archie- or arche-, as in "arche-writing" (Of Grammatology 60). Henry's bond with nature, echoed in Joe and Violet's vague longings for the health and sensibleness of their rural lives (207), suggests his valued status. He is a griot, a spiritual guide, like Pilate in Song of Solomon and Therese in Tar Baby, and like them his harmony with nature corresponds with his inner harmony and fulfilled self-knowledge. Moreover, his name, "Henry Lestory or LesTroy or something like that" (148), suggests that he is a synecdoche for the novel. Henry is the story in the sense that he has perfected the story's principal metaphor, tracking, so that he has found his role and his identity and therefore has no need for further tracking. He thus stands calmly in his earned selfhood, while the other characters spin around and around the track. Since such self-assurance, such presence places Henry dangerously near, if not within, the logocentric myth, his appearances are necessarily brief.

As characters, bound by the traces, pursue the track, they are vulnerable to gaps or ruptures in the trail, which becomes another charged metaphor in the novel. Violet often loses herself in "cracks," "dark fissures in the globe light of day," "crevices one steps across all the time," "seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places beyond which is anything" (22-23). Literally, these are the sidewalk "cracks" that City women "trip" over (196), but they suggest psychological "collapses" (24), moments of failure to cope as when Violet suddenly sits down in the street (17), when Violet momentarily walks off with the baby, when Joe murders Dorcas, and when Violet stabs Dorcas's body. Similarly, for Golden Grey the lack of a father is "a phantom I have to behold and be held by, in whatever crevices it lies" (158). Yet cracks and crevices are not always negative. Joe, in quest of his mother, slides through a "crevice" into her chamber of gold (183). The positive/negative mixture of the motif is reinforced by its connection to both light and dark: Although fissures are normally dark, Joe's movement into absolute light, "like falling into the sun," is a direct result of his following the track through the dark crevice. This paradoxical mixture is reiterated at the end of the novel when the narrator reflects on life for blacks in the City: "The shade" (the energizing life of the City, the clicking fingers, but also the "warning and the shudder") simultaneously "lurk[s]" and "hover[s] kindly" and "stretches - just there - at the edge of the dream, or slips into the crevices of a chuckle" (227).

As with the trace, this imagery of the breach is illuminated by Derrida's use of the term. Breaches, the gaps which open up the apparently seamless continuity of existence, are the dislocations in the track: "There is no breach without difference and no difference without trace" (Margins 18). For Derrida the synonyms are violent - "crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment" (Of Grammatology 65) - yet a breach is also a hinge or joint, a break which "designat[es] difference and articulation." Thus, a crack or breach is disruptive, but the disruption allows us to know the entities being separated and to re-focus on the gap itself or on the structure of the breaching, which is the structure of the trace, of the differance.

In Jazz the deepest breach is the well in which Rose Dear kills herself. Violet, driven almost to insanity by her mother's suicide, is haunted by the image of a well - "The well sucked her sleep" (102) - and is even "scare[d]" by "deep holes" (223). For her the image of a well is a powerful lure, with its "limitless beckoning" (101) and its "pull" (104).

Derrida, meditating on the ontology of books, refers to "the unnamable bottomless well" (Writing 297), which is "the abyss" (296) as well as the center. The center is "the absence of play and difference, another name for death" (297), and the book, as a completed, enclosed entity, "was to have insinuated itself into the dangerous hole, was to have furtively penetrated into the manacing dwelling place" (297-98). For Derrida, only by repetition, which is also implied by the image of tracing, does one escape from this well/trap. If we return to the book, to the hole, we attain a "strange serenity" (298) and we are "fulfilled . . . by remaining open, by pronouncing non-closure." Thus, the well is a breach, a potentially dangerous opening, abyss, or "labyrinth," but at the same time an opportunity for discovery and peace.

In Jazz the well also becomes an open image, not merely a haunting image of death. The narrator's uncharacteristically jaunty description of Rose Dear's suicide hints at this ambiguity: "And then Rose Dear jumped in the well and missed all the fun" (99). There is another hint in Violet's sense of the well as "a place so narrow, so dark it was pure" (101). By the time Violet and Joe are reunited, the well becomes an image of secure love and generosity: "Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on [Joe's] chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well . . ." (225). This dual sense of the well, as a place of danger yet of awareness, is most evident when the narrator tries "to dream a nice dream" for Golden Grey:

I want him to stand next to a well dug quite clear from trees so twigs and leaves will not fall into the deep water, and while standing there in shapely light, his fingertips on the rim of stone, his gaze at no one thing, his mind soaked and sodden with sorrow, or dry and brittle with the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything). There then, with nothing available but the soaking or the brittleness, not even looking toward the well, not aware of its mossy, unpleasant odor, or the little life that hovers at its rim, but to stand there next to it and from down in it, where the light does not reach, a collection of leftover smiles stirs, some brief benevolent love rises from the darkness and there is nothing for him to see or hear, and there is no reason to stay but he does. For the safety at first, then for the company. Then for himself - with a kind of confident, enabling, serene power that flicks like a razor and then hides. (161)

At the rim of the well, like Violet and Joe, Golden Grey can enjoy the play, the life, between and among ultimate dichotomous forces: life/death, light/dark, self/other, humanity/Nature, solitude/plenitude, presence/absence. So the well is necessary even if it is a death-hole, even if fear of it may paralyze. Like the breach, the well is salutary and serene, not something to embrace, for embracing the other is no answer, but something to stand in relation to, an opening into differance, a trace.

Moreover, like Derrida's insistence on repetition as the way to avoid closure, the narrator's dream of Golden Grey's ideal relationship with the well includes the sense of endless repetition:

But he has felt it now, and it may come again. No doubt a lot of other things will come again: doubt will come, and things may seem unclear from time to time. But once the razor blade has flicked - he will remember it, and if he remembers it he can recall it. That is to say, he has it at his disposal. (161)

Once in the mind, the scene or act becomes not mere presence but a productive combination of presence and absence, becomes not mere "work" to be consumed, but "Text" to be endlessly reread.(4)

However, despite the felicity of this remembered paradisiacal scene by the well, the narrator grows to the realization that the well too must be rejected:

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. Hangs on to wells and a boy's golden hair; would just as soon inhale sweet fire caused by a burning girl as hold a maybe-yes maybe-no hand. I don't believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out. (227-28)

Whether it be lovely (the golden hair), scary (the well), or ambiguously lovely/scary (the fire), holding on to anything is dangerous, dangerously static, dangerously death-like. Rogueness is needed - the unpredictable, the uncentered, the undeterminable.

Derrida asserts that the old metaphysics, overemphasizing binary oppositions, inevitably favors one term of each opposition. Not rejecting the terms or replacing the traditionally favored one with the unprivileged one, he argues for a new, more complex perception of their inter-relation. As Barbara Johnson puts it, "Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or' nor 'both/and,' nor even 'neither/nor,' while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either" (12). That is to say, one keeps the dichotomy, but one blurs the distinction between opposing terms, in recognition of the reality that neither term is self-sufficient, original, privileged, or, by itself, knowable.(5)

Jazz explores this pattern of blurred distinctions, and thereby creates rogueness, through its narration. The main narrator, first-person but not a character in the fictional world, thereby straddles the conventional dichotomy between third-person (external) narrators and first-person (internal) narrators.(6) The dichotomy is further compromised by the characters' long, first-person monologues, in which they take over the narrating function, and by the narrator's tendency to move inconspicuously in and out of their minds, for example in the long chapter on Violet (89-114) in which she is sitting with her malt in the drugstore but mentally ranging over her whole life.

Further "fretting out" of distinctions results because the narrator is paradoxically both knowledgeable and unreliable/limited. From the opening sentence ("Sth, I know that woman" [3]), she(7) emphasizes her knowledge with phrases like "I know" (63, 119, 152, 154), "I have seen" (35, 36, 59, 67), "I see" (143), "I could see" (195), and "I could hear" (196). She often speaks in the present tense to emphasize the direct, firsthand nature of her knowledge, and she asserts that she has known the whole story in advance and that as she narrates she still can "see" the characters (226). Although readers may doubt such assertions, her knowledge is verified throughout the novel by the consistency between her assertions and the characters' first-person accounts.(8)

By casting her as a first-person narrator, however, Morrison moves the narration from the hypothetical "omniscient" to somewhere between knowledgeable and not knowledgeable. The narrator often alludes to what she does not know: how Violet's affair ended (5), what Joe whispered to Dorcas at Alice Manfred's luncheon (71), what Joe's tears were for (221). She admits to relying on what other people knew or thought (57, 166, 179), and she is quite explicitly and admittedly a gossip who, when she doesn't know, speculates. Her admissions of limited knowledge do not silence her and are often followed by such phrases as "but I do know" (5, 17, 137). If opinions are divided, she gives hers (118); if she doesn't have access to a character's mind, she "can tell" by the character's manner (49); and if she lacks direct knowledge, she speculates by resorting to conditional verb tenses: "It had to be" (140), "It must have been" (173). Her sense of Joe and Violet is "caught midway between was and must be," caught in the play between past tense and conditional tense, between fact and speculation. "For [her] they are real" (226), but the nature of that reality, somewhere between the narrator's imagination and the "actual" reality of the novel's world, remains open.

Three passages call special attention to the narrator's sense of her role and purposes. Near the beginning of the novel, she says that she survives the City by being secretive and by "watch[ing] everything and everyone and try[ing] to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do" (8). Later she knows that it is "risky, . . . trying to figure out anybody's state of mind. But worth the trouble if you're like [her] - curious, inventive, and well-informed" (137). And near the end she acknowledges that she "invented stories about" the characters, that she "took every opportunity [she] had to follow them, to gossip about and fill in their lives," that she was immersed in "meddling" and "finger-shaping" (220). She is well-informed, and/or/but she must try to figure things out, but try and fill in suggest that her figuring may not always be accurate and that, by her own admission, her biases have affected her narration.

The narrator's biases undermine her reliability. Dazzled by the City's music, its "unbelievable sky" (35), its springtime (117), and its "sweetheart weather" (195), she admits that it distorts her feelings: "A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things" (7); and the City has resulted in her "liv[ing] a long time, maybe too much, in [her] own mind." She worries that ". . . it can make you inhospitable if you aren't careful, the last thing I want to be" (9).

Yet that is what has happened to her. She has been deceived by the "artful City" (118) into wanting to see, and therefore into seeing, more problems than there are. She overemphasizes the negative in Golden Grey, not merely describing him as "a hypocrite," but judgmentally laying on the criticism: "He is lying, the hypocrite." And she revels in asserting her own superiority: "He thinks his story is wonderful, and that if spoken right will impress his father with his willingness, his honor. But I know better" (154). Since an external narrator should know better, such protestations ring false. And a few pages later, after reporting Golden's anguish, the narrator realizes her mistake: "What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly?" This unreliability then becomes explicit: "I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" (160). Again? Where has she been unreliable before, or, worse, can readers rely on any part of her narration? Deliberately, such questions have no answers, because this narration is not confined to "a simple 'either/or' structure"; instead, the narrator is knowledgeable and limited, reliable and unreliable.

Like her exaggeration of Golden Grey's weakness, the narrator also mispredicts, from the beginning, further disaster for Joe and Violet: "It promised to be a mighty bleak household . . ."; ". . . that's how that scandalizing threesome [Joe, Violet, and Felice] on Lenox Avenue began" (6); "A host of thoughtful people looked at the signs . . . and believed it was the commencement of all sorts of destruction" (9). Because of this premonition of disaster, indeed her gossipy desire to believe that the worst will happen, she is taken aback when Joe and Violet recover. Since Felice will be an instrument in that recovery, "she makes [the narrator] nervous," and makes the narrator "doubt [her] own self" (198).

This self-doubt is justified and becomes overt when at the end the narrator confesses:

So I [missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable - human, I guess you'd say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling, while finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious. (220)

Thus, the narrator commits the same logocentric mistake that the characters commit. In her solitude, her privileged selfhood, she thinks that only she knows, that only her perceptions have truth, or at least that her view and her imagination are superior. She privileges self over other, present over past, her narration of events (the sjuzet or discourse) over the events themselves (the fabula or story). Morrison thus suggests that such privileging, as well as the insistence on the distinctions that inevitably lead to the privileging, is suspect. The pattern is the same: Artificial categories - whether of narrators, individuals, races, or whatever - reflect metaphysical simplification and the closure of death.

When the narrator realizes each of her major errors, her self-correcting wish is to move into physical closeness with the characters. To make up for overly criticizing Golden Grey, she says, "I want to dream a nice dream for him, and another of him. Lie down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet, and contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it, diminish it" (161). Similarly, after misinterpreting Felice, Joe, and Violet, she wants "to be in a place already made for me, both snug and wide open," and that place is "in the peace left by [Wild] who lived [in the chamber of gold] and scared everybody." She wants to enter the characters' world and to exist there peacefully, in intimate communion with the characters: "She has seen me and is not afraid of me. She hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her. Released in secret" (221). But by the conventional distinctions between external narrator and characters, this cannot happen. It cannot and yet it does, because Morrison, not content with conventional distinctions, insists on blurring the distinctions, on pushing beyond them, on exploring the differance.

The differance, in this case the "space" between narrator and characters, is further teased out by the characters' tendency to share the narrator's role. Like her, they are compulsive talkers: They must tell their individual stories in their monologues; Joe and Violet must talk all night when they first meet (105); Violet and Alice find mutual comfort in endless conversations; and Dorcas wants a lover whom she can talk about. Characters also imitate the narrator by recreating or "narrating" scenes through memory, as when Joe struggles fiercely to remember "every detail of that October afternoon" (28) when he met Dorcas. Like the narrator, they also project themselves mentally into events they did not experience: Dorcas pictures the burning of her dolls (60-61); Violet imagines Joe and Dorcas at the Mexico nightclub (94-96); and Joe constructs a reconciliation scene with Dorcas (183).

The most remarkable conflation of the narrator's and a character's mental projections occurs when the narrator relates Golden Grey's encounter with Wild. The narrator's knowledge is expressed as what she sees, as a vision: "I see him in a two-seat phaeton" (143). But Golden's experience is reported with the same metaphor: He thinks that ". . . what he is running from is not a real woman but a 'vision'" (144). Moreover, his action to help the unconscious Wild is triggered by his inward vision of himself not helping her: "He does not see himself touching her, but the picture he does imagine is himself walking away from her a second time, climbing into his carriage and leaving her a second time" (145). Since the scene is a vision, a vision of the narrator's, the doubling of the metaphor further calls into question the traditional distinctions between narrator and character and between their ways of knowing.

A third way that characters blur the distinction between themselves and the narrator is by inventing personality traits of other characters. Unnamed characters make up stories about Wild (165-67); Alice muses over the personalities of Joe (73) and Violet (75); and, most notably, Violet "invent[s]" a "personality" for Dorcas (28). Later in her "deep-dreaming," that made-up personality becomes intermingled with her last miscarried fetus as she imagines Dorcas to be "a girl young enough to be that daughter" (109), and when Felice appears Violet repeats the projection, thinking of Felice as "another true-as-life Dorcas" (197).

Two further examples reinforce this pattern of blurred character/narrator distinctions. Malvonne not only gossips but actually intervenes in others' lives. Not only does "her interest [lie] in the neighborhood people" (41), but she opens their letters and tries to help by writing appropriate responses. In both respects she thereby replicates the narrator, who "watch[es] everything and everyone and tr[ies] to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do" (8). Thus, the character Malvonne, a present third-person gossip, doubles the narrator, an absent first-person gossip. The second example occurs in a single passage. After Violet has re-found herself at the end of the novel, she tells Felice, "'"What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?"'" (208). This appears to be one lesson Violet has learned, one part of what it takes to gain and retain a viable identity in Morrison's fictional world. At the same time the power to make up the world as you want it describes the role of the narrator, thus implying that success in both roles is indistinguishable.

In addition to these blurred distinctions between narrator and characters, the gap between narrator and reader is also radically diminished. Just as the narrator imagines physical embraces with Golden Grey and later with Wild, she ends the novel by projecting physical intimacy with the reader. After describing Joe and Violet's new love (222-25) and then recalling (for the first time) a tender moment from their Virginia past (225-26), the narrator extrapolates their love to lovers in general (226-29). But the narrator cannot participate directly in human relationships, so, in the extraordinary closing paragraphs, she laments that "I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret. . . ." Her secret love is for the reader: ". . . I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else." Like any lover she wants hers to reciprocate: ". . . I want you to love me back and show it to me." She imagines that she is the book, and therefore that the reader holds her: ". . . I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning." The reader's act of reading the book becomes the basis for the narrator's imagined love affair: "I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer - that's the kick" (229).(9) Or, as Derrida writes,

The beyond of the closure of the book is neither to be awaited nor to be refound. It is there, but out there, beyond, within repetition, but eluding us there. It is there like the shadow of the book, the third party between the hands holding the book, the deferral within the now of writing, the distance between the book and the book, that other hand. (Writing 300)

The narrator of Jazz uses italics because she "can't say that aloud," cannot erase the barrier, cannot actually see and feel the reader. She can dream across the barrier, and thus Morrison can explore the differance, but the reader remains separate. Still, the narrator urges the reader to share in the dream, in the play: "If I were able I'd say it. Say make me, remake me" (229). If the reader actively participates in the (re)making of the novel, then the narrator/reader relationship exists, and the absolute distinction between the two is dissolved. Only by repeating the book can we avoid its potential dead end: "The return to the book does not enclose us within the book" (Derrida, Writing 294). The book, any book, must be re-made, must be "ceaselessy begun and taken up again on a site which is neither in the book nor outside it," because in that "repetition," that "bottomlessness of infinite redoubling," or tracing, what disappears is "the self-identity of the origin," the deadening lack of play of self, presence, and origin (Writing 296, 298). Once again, the image of tracing is instructive. To trace is to copy, to double, and thus to avoid the death-like closure of completion, thereby allowing for endless readings, endless reader participation, endless reversions of the text. To trace is also to write, to make physical marks on a blank surface, to set in motion the continuing flux of meaning (Miller 6-8).

In closing, the narrator reaches even further toward the reader to imagine physical intimacy: "You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now" (229). This lyrical evocation of loving contact between narrator and reader is anticipated by the narrator's references to the reader throughout the novel. She narrates as though she were talking directly to the reader, and she often includes the reader in her talk: "Close up on the tops of buildings, near, nearer than the cap you are wearing" (35); "Think how it is, if you can manage, just manage it" (63); and "Can you see the fields beyond, crackling and drying in the wind?" (153).

As these invocations of the reader suggest, the narrator's rhetoric often resembles spoken rather than written language, as if the narrator were gossiping over the back fence with her neighbor. The initial "word" of the novel implants this sense of orality. Sth is not a word but a sound, the sound of sucking one's teeth while talking, which is reiterated by the woman in the Dumfrey women's building (19), by Alice Manfred (84), and in Beloved by Ella (185). In all these cases the sound is similar to a "Tut-tut," expressing each woman's disapproval of some other woman's behavior. However, in Beloved the narrator describes the sound somewhat differently when Stamp Paid overhears the voices of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved:

They had become an occasional mutter - like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks. (172)

So, this startling first word/sound enters at least two gaps. It begins the oral quality of the prose, a quality continued throughout by references to the reader and by numerous colloquial words and expressions, such as "Good luck and let me know" (5), "hincty" (143), and "quiet as it's kept" (17).(10) It also suggests at least two ways of perceiving the narrator's activity. On the one hand, the narrator is like the other women, gossiping and sucking her teeth in disapproving exaggeration of their problems; but, by the implications of the passage from Beloved, her discourse is also her solitary ruminations to herself.

This play between written and oral language begins with the novel's epigraph. The passage from "The Thunder: Perfect Mind," one of the texts in the collection known as The Nag Hammadi Library, juxtaposes orality ("the name of the sound") and inscription ("the sign of the letter"). Like Jazz, "Thunder" is a "revelation discourse" narrated by a presumably female figure who combines both genders ("I am the bride and the bridegroom") and who transcends worldly limitations (MacRae 295, 296). Like Morrison's narrator, the narrator of "Thunder" is contradictory: "I am strength and I am fear," "I am the union and the dissolution." Both narrators both know and do not know ("For I am knowledge and ignorance"), are self-deprecatory and accusatory ("I am shame and boldness"), are sympathetic and antagonistic ("I am compassionate and I am cruel"), and are present and absent ("On the day when I [am far away] from you, [I am close] to you"). Both speak words that can be heard but not fully comprehended: "I am the hearing that is attainable to everyone and the speech which cannot be grasped."

For Derrida, a principal error of traditional Western thought is its opposition between speech and writing and its privileging of the former. Morrison necessarily approaches this dualism from the perspective of a genre in which writing is privileged, and, thus, by calling attention to the oral elements in its language, her novel's rhetoric compensates for that privileging, inscribes the differance, and thereby enacts an alternative to the either/or trap of the old metaphysics.

Notes

1. Examples of such dualities are good and evil (McKay 420, 423; Parker 253; Tate 129), male and female (Jones 148; Ruas 231,239), the nest and adventure (Tare 122), reality and unreality (Bakerman 60), and presence and absence (Morrison, "Unspeakable" 210).

2. Morrison comments on the open-endedness of her fiction in Jones (135); Ruas (232, 236); Morrison, "Rootedness" (341); and Morrison, "Unspeakable" (226, 229). For Morrison's parallels between her fiction and jazz, see LeClair (28) and McKay (429). For parallels with traditional African American cultural forms, see Morrison, "Memory" (388-89). Morrison stresses the absent over the present in her fiction in Bakerman (59); McKay (429); Morrison, "Rootedness" (341); and Stepto (218).

3. Whether or not the allusion to Derrida is deliberate may have to wait for a future interview with Morrison, but, as outlined above, her previous statements about her work attest to the postmodern tenor of her thinking.

4. In addition to Barthes's "From Work to Text" (74-79), see also his S/Z(10-16) for his thoughts on rereading.

5. Such blurring is implied by Barthes's insistence on the play within a text and on a text's ultimate plurality ("Work" 74-79).

6. In Gerard Genette's terms this narrator is simultaneously "extradiegetic" and "intradiegetic" (228-29).

7. For me, as for many readers, this strange narrator seems female. The narrators gender, however, is never clearly indicated, which reinforces my point about Morrison's blurring of conventional distinctions. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr', puts it, Morrison's narrator "is neither male nor female; neither young nor old; neither rich nor poor. [The narrator] is both and neither' (54).

8. Seymour Chatman argues that a primary source of narrative authority evolves from the narrator's overlap with the characters. When the narrative stance or value system is consistent with that of the characters, especially when "the narrator possesses not only access to but an unusual affinity or 'vibration' with the character's mind, the narrators authority is increased" (207).

9. Roland Barthes alludes to this erotic dimension of reading when he asserts that 'the Text is dilatory" ("Work" 76), suggesting that it operates not only by delay but by dilation.

10. In commenting on this phrase in the opening line of The Bluest Eye, Morrison cells it "speakerly" and refers to its "'back fence' connotation, its suggestion of illicit gossip" ("Unspeakable" 218). The mixed spoken/written quality of the rhetoric of Jazz continues the emphasis in Morrison's fiction on the oral tradition of African American folklore. As Trudier Harris shows, Morrison's previous novels reveal this interest - in the form of narrator-as-storyteller; in the use of folk tales, jokes, superstitions, and other kinds of folklore; and in the emphasis on such "oral" features as music.

Works Cited

Bakerman, Jane. "The Seams Can't Show: An interview with Toni Morrison." Black American Literature Forum 12 (1978): 56-60.

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1979. 73-82.

-----. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1982.

-----. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

-----. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. D. B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

-----. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Review of Jazz. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Gates and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 52-55.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

Jones, Bessie W. "An Interview with Toni Morrison." The World of Toni Morrison. Ed. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson. Dubuque: Kandall/Hunt, 1985. 127-51.

LeClair, Thomas. "'The Language Must Not Sweat': A Conversation with Toni Morrison." New Republic 21 Mar. 1981: 25-29.

MacRae, George W. Introduction to "The Thunder: Perfect Mind." The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 3rd ed. Ed. James M. Robinson. Sen Francisco: Harper, 1988. 295-98.

McKay, Nellie Y. "An Interview with Toni Morrison." Contemporary Literature 24 (Winter 1983): 413-29.

Miller, J. Hillis. Ariadne's Thread. New Haven: Yale UP. 1992.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

-----. The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1970.

-----. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

-----. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thought 59 (Dec. 1984): 385-90.

-----. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

-----. "Rootedness The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. 339-45.

-----. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.

-----. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

-----. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.

-----. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1990. 201-30.

Parker, Battye J. "Complexity: Toni Morrison's Women - An Interview Essay." Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Ed. Roseann P. Bell, Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Anchor, 1979. 251-57.

Ruas, Charles. Conversations with American Writers. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Stepto, Robert B. "'Intimate Things in Place': A Conversation with Toni Morrison." Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Stepto. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1979. 213-29.

Tate, Claudia. "Toni Morrison." Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Tate. New York: Continuum, 1983. 117-31.

Washington, Elsie B. "Toni Morrison Now." Essence Oct. 1987: 58+.

Philip Page is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. He is the author of an AAR article on Morrison's Beloved, as well as published essays on Willa Cather, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, and Katherine Anne Porter.