토니 모리슨의『재즈』: 재즈를 통한 도시의 소통

Abstract

This paper studies Jazz in order to analyze Toni Morrison’s musical strategies, particularly. Morrison’s strong interests in the interrelated characteristics of music and text. The music, especially, jazz and blues has been the energy of spiritual aid necessary to rehabilitate the blackness of African Americans as well as a means of expression allowing them to represent themselves through their history of hardship. Furthermore, the atmosphere of the Jazz is filled with Morrison's images and musical narration which together represents African Americans’ identity based on the harmonized relationship between their lives and music. Morrison, as an African American writer who owns the potential sense of black music, has discovered the fusion of distinguished African American culture in Harlem, New York in the 1920s which is African Americans’ sorrow and isolation in the city. Harlem used to be such a capital city to African Americans who had longed financial stability as well as being wholly free from the pressures of the white majority, despite the emancipation. It seemed that Harlem promised African Americans’ fulfillment of their ideal future. However, in fact, it was not the truly promised paradise to African Americans. African Americans in Harlem wander the city veiling their tortuous memories which cannot be expressed because of the pain they cause. Their fragmented lives just like a jazz performance—improvisational, call-and-response, solo, etc. The life in the city full of gossips, sexuality, love affairs, and murders could be the only exit to comfort and relieve African Americans wandering in the city and jazz is medium through which the process happens. The characters including Joe, Violet, Dorcas, and Alice live those lives in Harlem. Their sorrow and solitude are not simply figured out because they have their own traumas from the past and lack the means to express them, or understand one another. However, Morrison has found the positive possibility of the African Americans’ future through communication which reminds them of motherhood, friendship, and love. The characters just dare not escape from the memory and insecurity from not only the past but the present. The passion about life is still glowing in African Americans’ hearts and they just waite for someone to come and begin the conversation.