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A Love Supreme: Jazzthetic Strategies in Toni Morrison’S Beloved

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A Love Supreme: Jazzthetic Strategies in Toni Morrison’S Beloved Universität Potsdam Lars Eckstein A love supreme: jazzthetic strategies in Toni Morrison’s Beloved First published in: African American Review. - ISSN: 1062-4783. - 40 (2006) 2, p. 271-283 Postprint published at the Institutional Repository of the Potsdam University: In: Postprints der Universität Potsdam Philosophische Reihe ; 85 http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2012/6044/ http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-60446 Postprints der Universität Potsdam Philosophische Reihe ; 85 A Love Supreme: Jazzthetic Strategies in Toni Morrison's Beloved 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 paral- Lars Eckstein is Assistant lel is always the music, because all of the strategies of the art are there.... The Professor of English at the power of the word is not music, but in terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror University of Tübingen, that gives me the necessary clarity. —Toni Morrison (qtd. in Gilroy 181) Germany. His book Re- Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory was recently usic is everywhere and all around in Toni Morrison's published by Rodopi Press. Mnovel Beloved} In 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 musical 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: In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning there was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like.... [T]he voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound 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. In the beginning there was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like," in an ironic subversion of John 1.1, declares the continuity of musical 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 sound pat- terns 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 sound specifically that the self-assured use of language giving voice 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 sound relying on the African American Review, Volume 40, Number 2 © 2006 Lars Eckstein 271 polyphony of a collective layering of Words into Music-Music into Words "voice upon voice upon voice." For Morrison, African American writing fundamentally relies on the he intimate relationship between sounds and rhythms of black music— TAfrican American music and as a source of narrative content, but writing has become a commonplace in particularly also as an aesthetic "mir- critical debates. In his essay "Late ror." She notes: Coltrane: A Re-Membering of If my work is faithfully to reflect the Orpheus," Kimberly W. Benston, for aesthetic tradition of Afro-American instance, speaks of a shared "notion culture, it must make conscious use of that black language leads toward music, the characteristics of its art forms and that it passes into music when it attains translate them into print: antiphony, the maximal pitch of its being" (416). the group nature of art, its functionali- But what exactly happens when lan- ty, its improvisational nature, its rela- guage attempts to "pass" into music? tionship to audience performance, the How can we conceive of the intermedi- critical voice which upholds tradition al dialogue between letters and sound and communal values and which also that is so readily posited? Answers to provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restric- these questions have remained vague tions. (1984,388-89) in literary criticism, in part because the relationship between verbal language Morrison's narrative approach can be and the musical idiom is, after all, not called a "jazzthetic" one. With regard an easy one. Traditional musicologists, to Beloved in particular, her musical for instance, often strictly deny that scope has received little critical atten- words can pass into music at all; they tion. While Morrison's subsequent argue that the semiotics of language novel Jazz has been acknowledged and and of music simply work on premises altogether different from one another. praised for its use of musical tech- Theodor W. Adorno warns in "Music, nique, Beloved has rarely been read Language and Composition": "Music is under similar premises. This critical similar to language. Expressions like inattention is surprising since Beloved— musical idiom or musical accent are in which Morrison avoids all kinds of not metaphors. But music is not lan- immediate references to written mater- guage. Its similarity to language points ial—bears rather clearly marked refer- at its innermost nature, but also to ences to musical material and styles.4 something vague. The person who Here I briefly discuss references to the takes music literally as language will configuration of the main characters be led astray by it.... [W]hat is said Sethe and her daughter Denver. First cannot be abstracted from the music; it and foremost, however, Beloved takes does not form a system of signs" (85). up jazz in its form, in its "aural" style, Words, Adorno implies, bear reference and in its performative orientation.5 to things in the world, while music is Thus, I offer an extensive reading of largely self-referential. If music does not denote anything in particular, it parts of the novel in the context of John should follow, then, that a translation Coltrane's famous 1965 suite A Love of literature into music or vice versa is Supreme. Finally, I examine the ideolog- necessarily bound to fail. ical implications and motivations of Morrison's adoption of jazz. To begin, More recent approaches in musi- however, I clear some theoretical cology, however, doubt the mutual ground on which rests the slightly exclusivity of musical and verbal meanings. First, the notion that music uneasy relationship between literature is something "absolute" is firmly and music. grounded in a selective discourse on 4 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW art music. Adorno's statement is to be and, last but not least, ethnicity.9 seen as a product of a—particularly In addition, advocates of German—ideological tradition dating "absolute" music disregard the fact back to the nineteenth century, when that even though music may not have critics and writers such as Eduard stable or fixed signifieds, we may only Hanslick, Ε. T. A. Hoffmann, or Arthur comprehend or make sense of music by Schopenhauer originally tried to associating sound with personal expe- strengthen instrumental music against riences, which, at the end of the day, the (Italian) operatic tradition.6 As are communicated verbally. Such asso- such, the still widely shared, and espe- ciations are not entirely arbitrary, as cially widely taught, conception of musical meaning relies on specific cul- music as a self-sustaining structure is a tural codes and generic conventions very narrow one that focuses on a lim- shared by particular interpretive com- ited number of composers of western munities.10 More importantly, musical art music; it operates by an elitist and, meaning undergoes processes of inter- at the end of the day, Eurocentric, dis- subjective negotiation, both in the con- missal of popular, folkloristic, or non- text of immediate experience in a com- western musical traditions.7 munal performative context, and with Moreover, musicologists who insist regard to processes of distinction and that music is purely self-referential the accumulation of cultural capital. As focus on structural aspects only, there- a result, certain musical styles do by neglecting the pragmatic dimension indeed denote certain semantic fields. of musical meaning. Recent approaches With regard to black music and jazz in in musical semiotics and culture particular, Paul Gilroy, for instance, (Tarasti, Cook, Frith) emphasise that argues that "this music and its broken music cannot be fully understood by rhythm of life ... are a place in which the black vernacular has been able to looking at an abstract structural entity, preserve and cultivate both the distinc- but that we have to pay particular tive rapport with the presence of death attention to the numerous contexts in which derives from slavery and a relat- which music is performed and heard. ed ontological state that I want to call Like language, musical meaning the condition of pain" (203). Literature unfolds not only because it is, but also may take up such semantic fields—like because it does things in particular situ- the death deriving from slavery—by ations.
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