Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 25

“Sweet Desolation” and Seduction
in Toni Morrison’s
From the “Sixty million and more” to the great unwashed “Ninety
percent,” and from '"Five-cent nickel, / Ten-cent dime, / Busting rocks is busting
time ” (
Beloved 40) to “When I was young and in my prime / 1 could get my
barbecue any old time” (
z a J 60)—this is the leap from Beloved (1988) to Jaz
(1992). To recognize the pain of slavery and the promise of Emancipation in the
first is to recognize the promise of the Promised Land and the pain of urban
reality in the second. In Beloved, finding grace in haunted houses, even in a pool
of baby’s blood, becomes paramount. With Jazz, it is a matter of snaking past
adulterous murderers and into the flights of frenzied fancy, to a place of solace
and understanding amid all that chaos: “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody
says it’s easy either. What it is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street
plans, all laid out, the City can’t hurt you” (8). Or, can it?
Is the “tomorrow” of Toni Morrison to be found in the northern city, far
from the southern plantations like Sweet Home (in
)? Is it found in the
“clarinets and lovemaking” (7) that drift from third story rooms over bustling
streets? The “city as character” in Jazz is more than a mere literary notion; the
pages are alive with the sights, sounds, colors, shouts, music, touch of the pulse
of city life, to such an extent that, as the novel progresses, no matter where you
look, the sight of stoops and the crazy, beautiful, elegant sound of Ellington are
never too far off:
A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.
Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that
does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river,
at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of
apartment buildings, I’m strong. (7)
The strength of the City for this novel is beyond the scholastic and the trivial. It
is a strength more in tune with the melding of the personal with the societal than
with the novelistic representation of the Great Migration of southern Blacks to
northern urban centers. Morrison’s city is more than a Promised Land; it is a
rightful place for the beaten and bruised, the weary and downtrodden. It is also a
place of forgetfulness and solitude, right there in the middle of the hustle and
bustle of crowds.
In Jazz, the transient nature of life presents a supernatural truth that
pervades everything, including character and action. Transience flows alongside
fate/predestination, upholding an eternal continuum from which objects in the
novel, characters, and actions emerge and recede. Within this literary work, the