"A Music Seeking Its Words": Double-Timing and Double Consciousness in Toni Morrison's Jazz

While projected as somatic others, black women are also treated as inherent specters and spectators; they are the prototypical unobserved observers of much of American Literature. Black women thus endure "the watched and guarded environment"--always under a narrator's or double's eye--of a typically unidentified or impersonal audience; they grow up where unmarried and unmarriageable pregnancy was the end and close of livable life. . . . she wondered about the hysteria, the violence . . . of pregnancy without marriageability. . . They spoke to her firmly but carefully about her body. . . . The moment she got breasts they were bound and resented, a resentment that increased to outright hatred of her pregnant possibilities and never stopped until she married . . . when suddenly it was the opposite. (76) Because a woman can in effect be two different people, herself and her child, doubleconsciousness can also reflect an internalized alienation from her body; the perpetual inversion of expectations and identity; and a violent hysteria centered around her disruptive ability to create and identify with another human being. Though primarily a male trait in the literary tradition--often imagined as the male alienation from or loss of a woman--this self-alienation or doubling for Morrison becomes the defining mark of a particularly female black psyche, and this female black psyche the defining characteristic of American identity. As in Light in August and Native Son, the murder of a woman occupies the center of Morrison's novel; but in this case it is a black woman killed by, or who decides she will die at the hands of, a black man. (Unlike her literary antecedents, Dorcas also figuratively and literally keeps her head.) This obviously doubleedged privileging or reinscription of the black female body, and of black female doubleconsciousness, then represents the central assertion of Morrison's text. Though later abstracted from her text's resolution, for Morrison race and gender must first be used to define a doubleconsciousness almost all American writers seem to want to possess as their birthright. For many black women, the immediate effect of double-consciousness is then experienced in an alienation from their own bodies. Dorcas feels this music "while her aunt worried about how to keep the heart ignorant of the hips and the head in charge of both" (60). Alice thus breaks the self into disconnected parts, trying to keep Dorcas and that life below the belt from meeting; in and of themselves, the heart, head, and hips represent the socialized double-consciousness of black women: "There was a [End Page 456] night in her sixteenth year when Dorcas stood in her body," and from then on she is an adult, a duality (64). Recalling Charles Johnson's configuration of the West's Cartesian double-consciousness, Violet, in a manner parallel to Alice, splits her mind from her body: "All my troubles be over if I could get my body sick stead of my head" (84). This divided self quickly and inevitably loses control of its body, as Violet discovers when her body begins to hide and attack things of its own volition. When her fiance leaves her, Neola similarly loses not just her love but her control over the arm and hand on which he placed the ring, an arm which then remains forever poised over her heart: "As though she held the broken pieces of her heart together in the crook of her frozen arm. No other part of her was touched by this paralysis" (62). These broken bodies are cast to extremes, becoming either wholly animated or wholly inanimated by an internalized double-consciousness. Much like Neola, Violet loses the singular possession of her body, which becomes a force she must wrestle with: "instead of putting her left heel forward, she stepped back and folded her legs in order to sit in the street." When Violet "had stumbled into a crack or two"--which the narrator calls "cracks because cracks is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but fissures in the globe light of the day"--she also immediately "felt the anything-at-all begin in her mouth. Words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment" (23). In other words, the physical fissure Violet experiences, her inability to identify with her body as her self, reflects a fragmentation of language and consciousness; the globe is split in half, and Violet falls into a transcendental crack in consciousness itself. From disconnected words soon come disjointed actions: "Less excusable than a wayward mouth is an independent hand that can find in a parrot's cage a knife lost for weeks" (24). (The loosed household parrot represents a wild yet autonomic and Citybound nature, a voice and language without intention or meaning, reiterating--mimicking, doubling, and of course parroting--to Violet the "I love you" which her husband could no longer manage and neither Violet could bear to hear.) Trying to stave off this race music, Alice also encounters a Modernist crack in language, and in fact only cannot connect: What she read seemed crazy, out of focus. Some great gap lunged between the print and the child. She glanced between them struggling for the connection, something to close the distance between the silent staring child and the slippery crazy words. (58) The disconnection between print and child, parent and child, word and meaning, self and body, self and other, are all staged as in need of jazz, of these talking "drums which spanned the distance, gather[ed] them all up and connected them." 11 Though Alice still reaches for this "gathering rope" with one hand, and balls the other into a fist--"I don't know how she did it-balance herself with two different hand gestures"--the music transcends the artificial separation between the two hands. It is only the music--half Nature, half City--which ultimately transcends double-consciousness and restores nature to itself, when, as Morrison tells us with a tip to Charlie, "the winds blew and so did the musicians. . . . From then on the bird was a Pleasure to itself and to them" (224). [End Page 457] In attempting to disfigure Dorcas' corpse, Violet tries to kill what's already dead and without a will because Violet has lost control of herself; Alice knows that behind the act of this woman called Violent lay "A terrible and nasty closeness. . . . And of course race music to urge them on" (79). Consistently described as a compelled and possessed figure, "Violet walked past her, drawn like a magnet" to Dorcas' picture; she is possessed by music, by the dead, by some other. Violet's conversation with Alice, like Joe's with himself, takes place as if under the observation of some third person, an overriding but unidentifiable presence and power, in fact the narrator: "I'm not the one you need to be scared of." "No? Who Is?" "I don't know. That's what hurts my head." . . . "Why did he do such a thing?" "Why did she?" "Why did you?" "I don't know." (80-81) The narrator alleges that most of her characters don't know what they are doing, let alone why they are doing it. (No one save the narrator acknowledges being in-charge; as Violet laments, "Where the grown people? Is it us?" [110].) When we discover that Alice also has a figurative skeleton in her closet, that her life has in many ways paralleled Violet's, we are told that "Violet listened as closely to what she was saying as did the woman sitting by her," split into observer and observed, into double-consciousness. 12 Both women are waiting to find out what they will say and do. In Morrison's fable of double identity, we even wind up with an "other Violet": Violet wonders who on earth that other Violet was that walked about the City in her skin; peeped out through her eyes and saw other things. . . . that Violet slammed past a whitewoman. . . . She has been looking for that knife for a month. Couldn't for the life of her think what she'd done with it. But that Violet knew and went right to it. (89) This other Violet--the emphatic Violent of double-consciousness, the murder lurking in duality--is also in effect another narrator of Violet's life. When Violet goes to Dorcas' funeral, she is as much a spectator to the scene as anyone else, as "surprised to see now [her knife] aimed at the girl's haughty secret face" (91). Her violence represents a public attempt to break through what remains of the secret, the private and the voluntary, though even this desire turns out to be largely a function of the involuntary. Like Joe, Violet through most of the text speaks less than she is spoken through: I got quiet because the things I couldn't say were coming out of my mouth anyhow. I got quiet because I didn't know what my [End Page 458] hands might get up to. . . . The business going on inside me I thought was none of my business and none of