One of the most lamentable developments in the Arts over the past hundred years has been the replacement of structure and universality by lyricism and individualism. Artists and authors used to be able to assume that they and their audience shared a Culture which partook of a definite system of values and beliefs. When we read Shakespeare or look at a painting by Rembrandt or listen to music by Bach, we can feel that we share in the artists vision and we can readily comprehend the fundamental messages that underlie their works. This does not rob them of their depth or their rich textures--merely think of all the reams of paper that have been consumed in dissecting the character of Hamlet--but it does mean that they are accessible to the general public by reference to our common heritage.
Modernity has replaced such universal art with the subjective, the self-indulgent and the abstruse. The themes and messages of art are now unique to the artist/author and the audience is expected to study the individual creator in order to try to understand their works. And since it is no longer important to these artists to convey their meanings, technical proficiency, narrative structure and clarity have given way to idiosyncrasy and abstraction. Of course, the best illustrations of this revolution came early on in the process; after the intelligentsia accepted James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (see Orrin's review), Jackson Pollack's paint splatters and musical innovations like dissonance and atonality as legitimate advances in the arts, it pretty much opened the doors to anything. Once you abandon objective standards for determining value, which the critics largely have done, you lose the capacity to differentiate good art from bad art. You are left with the oddly bifurcated culture that we see now, where the public shuns the very product that the elites run up the flagpole. Joyce may be considered the greatest author of the 20th Century, but nobody has ever read either Ulysses (see Orrin's review) or Finnegan's Wake from cover to cover. There's not a living room in America with a Pollack on the wall and the only Picasso is his Don Quixote, a fairly conventional representational piece which unlike his most critically acclaimed work refers to one of the world's enduring literary masterpieces. And Classical music has innovated to the point of extinction. It's time for someone to step in and tell the avant garde that no one followed them and the experiment, having failed, is over.
All of which brings us to Jazz by Toni Morrison. I didn't hate this book, the way I did Beloved (see Orrin's review). The central event of the story is once again an incomprehensible murder--this time a middle aged man kills his young lover in order to preserve the feelings their affair has produced. His wife, upon learning of the liaison, mutilates the corpse; but the two inexplicably resume their married life. So okay, it's a tad melodramatic and unlikely, but great fiction has been built on such shaky foundations before. Morrison however seems uninterested in mining any psychological depths or spinning out any conclusions from her basic set up. Instead the book is sort of a set of bluesy linguistic riffs on Renaissance Harlem, ping ponging backwards and forwards in time, and it does contain some beautiful passages of prose; but to what end? We never really connect with or care about any of the characters. We know about the crimes from the word go, so there's no dramatic tension. Do the periodic phrases of lambent, tumescent prosody really suffice to make the book worthwhile? I think not. The beauty of language has fairly little to do with the basic value of a work of fiction. The Sears Catalogue might sound pretty to some people if read aloud in French, but that doesn't make it great literature.
A short summary of Toni Morrison's Jazz This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Jazz. Giselle Anatol of the Toni Morrison Society said, playing and listening to jazz has a pure and purifying effect.
![Jazz toni morrison ending Jazz toni morrison ending](/uploads/1/3/7/7/137738105/243579989.jpg)
Here's a little clue for you--when the professional reviewers praise the language but pan the story and the regular readers (at sites like Amazon) say they loved it even though they didn't understand it, it's safe to assume that you've got an author who's skating on reputation and warning flags should go up in your head. Morrison's Nobel Prize is probably unwarranted by any measure, but it certainly receives no validation from this book.
Response to Orrin's review by Aisha Garner :
Upon reading the anti-Morrison invective posted on the Amazon.com site 'In a more just world, Toni Morrison's Beloved would be ignored because it simply isn't very good,' I felt compelled to write. Although I agree that Octavia Butler is one of the best of her genre (as evidenced in Mind of My Mind and Adulthood Rites much more so than Kindred), Morrison is certainly one of the best of her genre as well. By insinuating that Morrison is an over-exposed near-charlatan resting on the laurels of an undeserved prize, you are absolutely wrong.
Personally, I take offense to the absurd subculture of self-indulgent, pretentious artists whose parasitic attachments to legitimate art movements result in the erosion of the credibility of art as a whole. Passing off substandard art in a contrived, gilded package with the 'If you don't get it, you're the problem' con is an old and tired trick.
However, more tired is the subculture of art critics who, in their incapacity (or refusal) to see any diversion from the 'mainstream' (a codeword for Eurocentric; I wonder if medieval Japanese shoguns would really appreciate Bach?) artform as valid, routinely lacerate dissimilar art in an attempt to conserve a snobbish, exclusionary wet dream of European artistic dominance. Isn't the whole point of art to expand the audience's viewpoint? I would ask you to consider that the experience of African-Americans is not 'mainstream' and any artist who dares to produce work reflecting this might have the right to demand an open mind from her audience.
Please read my review below, and I hope that you choose to reread Jazz with improved insight:
'In line with Toni Morrison's tradition of superb fiction tomes, Jazz is a work that is too complex to produce a universal interpretation. The genius of Morrison's work is the personal relationship between the reader and the subject matter that her novels compel. Interpretation is purposefully subjective. In Jazz, Morrison manages to accomplish a literary feat: somehow capturing the history, essence, and character of a genre of music and translating it into literature. The novel Jazz, is, like the music, seductive yet melancholy, spirited yet unpretentious, and is a simultaneous diatribe against and celebration of life. Jazz does not attempt to offer a rational explanation of the seemingly bizarre behavior of the main protagonists; instead, Jazz attempts to delve further into the human consciousness, into the concatenation of events which shape (and sometimes warp) the human mind; Jazz attempts to highlight the perpetual change which constitutes life.
Therefore, I had no trouble understanding orphan Dorcas' 'wild ways' and unimaginable selfishness, nor Joe's never-ending 'hunt' for his mother, which culminated in Dorcas' shooting. Like its musical counterpart, the novel Jazz is a work of genius. Would that all novels evoke such a profound personal impact.
Aisha Garner Europe in the twentieth century paxton smith.
P.S. Your review of the novel Jazz has an eerie similarity to the critical reviews of jazz as a genre of music during its inception.
Orrin's response to Aisha :
Dear Ms Garner :
Thank you for your thoughtful comments on my reviews of Toni Morrison's novels. I could not disagree with you more, but I take your point.
Our disagreement boils down to a simple but quite fundamental point : must great Art be universal, or can it be subjectively great ? I, of course, feel that the question answers itself. The very term 'great' implies universality, that the work is capable of communicating ideas which will speak to, and which concern, the many. A parochial work which only appeals to the few may be beautiful to those few, but it is not truly great. If we were to judge Art (or anything else, for that matter) subjectively, we would have no capacity to differentiate among the various works. Every work of art has been loved by someone, but this can not be the measure of its greatness, otherwise, every work is great.
If Ms Morrison speaks to you then by all means read and enjoy her. My reviews merely reflect the fact that she will not appeal to people in general.
Jazz Toni Morrison Plot
Thank you again for writing,
OJ
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (D)
OJ
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (D)
Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz takes place during what is known as the Jazz Age, in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, as you can tell through the vivid use of language and diction. The main characters Violet and Joe, a fifty-year-old couple, suffers major strains on their relationship when Joe has an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas, and then ends up killing because he fears he might lose her. Even with Joe cheating on his wife, Violet and Joe attempt to continue their relationship, though both are unhappy.
As mentioned earlier, Jazz is set in 1926. Throughout the book, Toni Morrison is able to deliver subtle hints about the time period in ways no other author is able to do. An example of the historical context represented in Toni Morrison’s novel is when she refers to the fashion of the time “Voilet would dress her hair for for her the way the girls wore it now: short, bangs paper sharp above the eyebrows? Ear curls? Razor-thin part on the side? Hair sliding into careful waves marcelled to a T.”(page 108). I find that historical citations are one of the major ingredients Toni Morrison uses in her recipe for writing a story.
While the systematic study of the structure and development of language in general or of particular languages and the careful organization of writing so that it is written in a successful and effective way are essential for an author’s style, sentence structure is also an extremely important element to include in the process, I find Toni Morrison does well at formating her sentence structure . She includes a wide variety of different types of sentences, which I feel makes her writing much more fluid.
In addition, Morrison draws the reader’s attention by manipulating sentence length and wording to express the tone or emotion she is trying to convey. This is exemplified through the brief statements that appear in Jazz when Violet is violently reflecting on her husband’s affair: “One man. One defenseless girl. Death” (Jazz 73), Morrison demonstrates her skill in sentence usage very often throughout her works, and the quality of these sentences reflects her overall skill as an author.
To be honest when I was first reading this book I didn’t understand why it didn’t follow any particular structure and why Toni Morrison had structured the novel the way she did but someone explained to me about how they understood Toni Morrison’s novel and they described how Morrison’s novel was a literary interpretation of a jazz song. I wish that I had come up with their conclusion but the way they told me was “Morrison’s creative use of grammar was like the dis-chords of the jazz piano. Her confusing sentence structure was like the ever changing time signature from the drums and the piano coming in just that little bit after the off beat. The long unexplained side-plots are like improvised saxophone solos that do what they like and break all the rules. Morrison said that the “reader didn’t need to see it so much as feel what it was like” (Morrison 1993) and that is exactly what I understood the double bass player to be doing as he closed his eyes without a second glance at his sheet music and let the notes run in and out of his soul.”
In conclusion there are numerous components that add up to form an author’s style. A few recognizable traits of Morrison’s work include the use of similes and creative analogies, excerpts from history to make the stories legitimate, and diverse sentence structure. All of these aspects combine to make Toni Morrison’s complex and intricate novels what they are today. This author’s distinctive style is what has made her so legendary and prominent in the literary world.
Works Cited
Jazz Toni Morrison Quotes
Ciment, James. End of world war 1 to the great crash. Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. This book gives incite on the Jazz age, the period after world war 1 to the great crash, it tells the history of this time and its people. I’m using this book to research a possible question I want to write my argument about which is, Would the story exist if it were written in a different time and place? I’m starting to read more into the jazz age to look a what the environment African Americans lived in at this time.
Jazz Toni Morrison Audiobook
Gillespie, Carmen. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison. E-book, New York, 2008. Facts on File library of American literature, Facts on File library of American literature. -Critical companion to Toni Morrison [electronic resource] : a literary reference to her life and work.
-Presents a biography of Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison, features synopses and critical assessments of her novels, children’s books, nonfiction books, essays, interviews, speeches, and cinematic, theatrical, musical, poetic, and dance productions, and discusses related people, places, and topics.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York, Knopf, 1992. In the winter of 1926, when everyone everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead. Joe trace, a middle age waiter who moonlights as a door to door salesman of cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. at a funeral, joe’s wife, violet, attracts the girls corpse. this passionate, profound story of love and obsession by nobel prize laureate toni morrison brings us back and forth in time as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
Jazz Toni Morrison Pdf
Toni Morrison. Edited by Harold Bloom, e-book, New York, 2011. Bloom’s modern critical views, Bloom’s modern critical views. Presents eleven essays on the concepts and texts of African-American female writer Toni Morrison, and includes a chronology and a bibliography.