A Love Supreme: Jazzthetic Strategies in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art, above all in the music. That was functional.... My parallel is always the music, because all of the strategies of the art are there.... The power of the word is not music, but in terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror that gives me the necessary clarity.--Toni Morrison (qtd. in Gilroy 181) ********** Music is everywhere and all around in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. (1) fact, it is so full of music that it seems odd that despite a flood of critical attention, Morrison's intricate tale of the fugitive slave Sethe who killed one of her children to prevent her from being carried back into slavery has seldom been discussed with regard to its scope. (2) The novel's most intense musical moment certainly occurs towards the end of the tale, when 30 community women succeed in driving out the mysterious and haunting child-woman Beloved from Sethe's home at Bluestone Road 124: the beginning there were no words. the beginning there was the sound, and they all knew what that sounded like.... [T]he voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the that broke the back of words. Building upon upon until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of wide enough to deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (259-61) (3) This passage points to the significance of music, not only in the context of Beloved, but also with regard to the predicament of the black diaspora at large. The assertion In the beginning there were no words. the beginning there was the sound, and they all knew what that sounded like, in an ironic subversion of John 1.1, declares the continuity of expression in the African American world. The passage refers less to metaphysical implications than to historical conditions, simply putting forth that the--English--word is much younger than the patterns of music that originated in African culture. As forms of expression handed down by generations and firmly rooted in the black community, these sounds offer an expressive potential that enables individuals to appropriate the English language and transform it according to their needs: It is the sound that [breaks] the back of words, and it is in the specifically that the self-assured use of language giving to formerly unspeakable occurrences becomes possible. And there is a redemptive potential: Sethe and Denver are eventually redeemed of Beloved--who embodies a part of Sethe's unresolved and repressive past--by the sheer force of relying on the polyphony of a collective layering of voice upon upon voice. For Morrison, African American writing fundamentally relies on the sounds and rhythms of black music--as a source of narrative content, but particularly also as an aesthetic mirror. She notes: If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its relationship to audience performance, the critical which upholds tradition and communal values and which also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions. (1984, 388-89) Morrison's narrative approach can be called a jazzthetic one. With regard to Beloved in particular, her scope has received little critical attention. While Morrison's subsequent novel Jazz has been acknowledged and praised for its use of technique, Beloved has rarely been read under similar premises. This critical inattention is surprising since Beloved-in which Morrison avoids all kinds of immediate references to written material-bears rather clearly marked references to material and styles. …

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