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Article Excerpt
In Toni Morrison's Jazz, Harlem's streets are like the groove in a record--at once a scene of oppression and release: "What [the city] is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street plans, all laid out, the City can't hurt you" (8). It is the city that "decides"; it is imperative to know its "plans" if one is to remain "unhurt."
This is not the first time that the city (that is, the western city) appears as instrumentality--as civic space, architecture, and medium. Before Jazz, Michel de Certeau wrote of the "walking exile," "body of legends," and "dreams" of urban pedestrians (107), whose myriad itineraries exceed the regulatory design of the city with choices too innumerable to predict or control. In Morrison's Harlem, civic regulations are everywhere subverted by African Americans, writes Sylvia Meyer, whose article identifies Harlem as a "paradise" (preparing for my own Utopian reading of urban space in Jazz) insofar as it "[insists] on human possibility" (354), the exercise of individual agency. One learns to remain "unhurt" by not "compromising" "street plans": "All you have to do is heed the design--the way it's laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go, and what you might need tomorrow" (Morrison 9). It is here that the city (which Morrison's narrator "loves") is also liberating, for its laws provide for improvisatory lawlessness. In Harlem bodies react to prepared layouts, permitted routes, signs, obstructions, and walls, ever "mindful" that regulations command the present and "tomorrow." Volition, force, motion--kinetic processes--occur in the static routes of urban blueprints, which, configuring the possibilities for civic space, supplant the unpredictability of movement with the predictability of design. In this way, Jazz observes two Harlems, one regulatory and one liberating. Like Certeau, Morrison celebrates the way day-to-day activity exceeds institutional regulation.
In Jazz, civic space, technology, music, and literature are scenes static and dynamic. Systems that enforce regulation, repetition, and control inevitably provide for hybridity, improvisation, and release. Jazz witnesses the excess of human behaviour in real time, against the atemporality of the discursively instituted sites of Law, or "the rules |. . .] imposed by a rationality founded on established rights and property" (39). Institutional codes, procedures, regulations, and technologies govern behaviour in time, making it predictable, transforming its "subjects [. . .] into operators of the writing machine that orders and uses them" (136). Certeau's view of western scriptural economies--which subordinate process (action open to circumstance) to discourse (knowing that regulates circumstance)--furthers the work of Morrison scholars who explore the importance of musical improvisation on the novel's vision of liberation and community. Morrisons utopianism--improvisatory, processual, in concert with the possibilities offered by time (change)--critiques the fixity of Law, which, in trying to control possibility, tries to transcend time. Utopia is thus less the place of Law than the no-place of action (which does not abide in and by discourse). This embrace of possibilities outside of institutional frameworks--the infinitely variable uses to which institutions are put--is expressed in the novel through jazz, which is not repeatable. Its repetitions are never the same, not even on records.
Morrison conflates civic authority and recording technology, specifically in the form of Bluebird records, a label founded in 1932 for the sale of popular songs, including jazz. Bluebird records take the performing voice, varied from moment to moment, and try to make it repeatable. The technology separates performance from temporal context, as in Morrison's description of a street singer:
He is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That's the way the city spins you. Makes you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to. All the while letting you think you're free; that you can jump into thickets because you feel like it. There are no thickets here and if moved grass is okay to walk on the City will let you know. You can't get off the track a City lays for you. (120)
The pedestrian's loss of agency as a result of civic planning, which routes movement, is like the loss of orality, or experience of the singing voice unmediated by machinery. One "voice" of the city is the "recording" of regulation, it "makes you do what it wants" and "go where" it says to, in always the same codified way. It forecloses on possibilities--jumping into "thickets"--and on occasions, so each instance is another replication of the Law: grass either is or is not to be walked upon. In keeping with Morrison's conflation of civic authority with recording technology, Katherine Boutry argues that the recording industry, as "institution," similarly "contains" (95) the feminine "performing body" (91). Such institutions, aiming for profit and power, use technology for social control: "Morrison uses recording metaphors throughout the novel [...] for the cultural imperatives that dictate behavior" (103). But if live performance provides possibility, surprise, and adaptation, hence agency, Morrison's writing opposes the fatalism of institutions. Recognizing the irreducibility of individual moments--how the occasions available to one are not the occasions available to another, which includes the various occasions in which we play records and how they alter listening--performance works with, not against, the possibilities of circumstance.
But Harlem is not just an institution, for the narrator (who, as the end of the novel reveals, is Morrison herself) "loves" it (220). "I'm crazy about this city," she says (7). Within "crazy" resides the affection of the narrator, one that places her outside the norm of the "rational organization" (Certeau 94) that determines Harlem. "Crazies" dwell on margins, and Morrison's city is simultaneously centre and margin, inhabited by unspoken others, African Americans barred from institutional power at the same time as they subvert it. As Linden Peach argues, Harlem consists of African American "communities which exist behind and which transcend the boundaries drawn up by the whites to define and contain them" (112). Peach stresses the importance of improvisation in Morrison's community, how the interaction of jazz, its "renegotiation" (117), and its strategic "embellishment" (124) of borrowed tunes, challenge the pre-emptive "truths" and "cultural ideals" (120) of the 1920s, and subvert the surveillance of African American space by the engines that enforce those truths and ideals. As "crazies" indicates, the transcendence of what "defines" and "contains" African Americans occurs within the enclosures of Law. Institutions dedicated to stasis, to keeping people in their place (both physical and conceptual), provide occasions for agency. In the same way, jazz musicians embellish notated music, articulating themselves while still within the scriptural economy: "Procedures of consumption [of "borrowed tunes"] maintained their [African Americans'] difference in the very space that the occupier [white institutions] was organizing" (Certeau 32). To play these tunes recognizably but differently is to articulate difference within the confines of their organization. Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris gestures...
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