In black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman’s seminal 2008 essay, “Venus in Two Acts”, she raises the pertinent question, “[h]ow can narrative embody life in words” (3). She follows on to question, “[h]ow does one listen to the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the cackle of fire in the cane field […] and then assign words to all of it”. Hartman’s evocative statements speak to a continuously deferred and unspoken absence in the American literary and cultural canon. Whereby language cannot bear witness to the incommensurable sufferings, legacies, and hauntings of chattel slavery and the middle passage that repeat like rhythms through America’s history. Building on Hartman’s argument, this essay will explore how Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved Trilogy works within the locus of a so-called impossible speech to attempt to “embody life in words” (Hartman 3). In Morrison’s 1987 Beloved, she attempts to map the hauntings of slavery onto the ontologies and bodies of African Americans living in the Reconstruction era. It is a ghost story that embodies the proclamation made by Afro-pessimist scholar Frank. B Wilderson III, “[b]lackness is coterminous with slavery; Blackness is social death” (102). However, this essay will shift away from Afropessimist readings of the Beloved Trilogy and focus on how Morrison’s 1992 “sequel” Jazz attempts to map love and beauty as metaphors for exploring blackness.

            In the foreword to Morrison’s Jazz, she writes how she wanted the novel to represent an attempt to work through the hauntologies of slavery to move beyond a further negation of the future. She describes how jazz music “demanded a future — and refused to regard the past as ‘… an abused record’” (x). She goes on to describe how that “[r]ather than be about those characteristics [of jazz music], the novel would seek to become them […] the structure would equal meaning” (xii-xiii). Morrison’s reflective analysis indicates the traces of what French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida called the metaphysics of presence. Jazz is a novel that plays with the binaries of absence/presence, thus leaving the novel as an open entity for which there is no-outside text (Of Grammatology). They only leave routes or traces to follow, never to one definitive destination or interpretation. This essay will analyse how Morrison threads narrative traces and words that go beyond the confines of the text as an attempt to “embody life in words”. Through this, I will focus on how Morrison attempts to fill what Hartman calls the “silence in the archive” (3) by weaving a more positive aesthetic of love and beauty.

The “silence in the archive”.

In this essay section, I would like to explore the importance of Hartman’s “silence” by examining the philosophy of Derrida’s metaphysics of presence. I will reference Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy [Margins], and Writing and Difference [Writing] to explore the terms “différance”, “trace”, and “breaching” as examples of how Morrison plays with language in Jazz.

            The term différance is, as Derrida describes, “neither a word nor a concept” (Margins 3); it is, instead, both a misspelling and a pun of the French word différence (difference, to differ). In French, the two are pronounced identically, and it is through this play between the silence of “a” when spoken that Derrida begins to question and disturb hierarchical binaries in language, French jurisprudence, and philosophy. For Derrida, historical precedence is given to speech over speech, through which the latter is deemed lesser. By inserting the “a” into différance, the imagined power of speech is disturbed, as there is “no phonetic writing” (Margins 3) to notice the difference when spoken. Consequently, silence or absence is represented in this “a”, thereby rendering différance an in-between term that arises from fissures in language. An absence which escapes from representation in speech and writing. Contrary to Saussure’s structuralist theories, Derrida maintains that meaning is not pre-determined through the inter-relation of the sign and the signifier; words and signs only acquire meaning through their absence. Therefore, for Derrida, meaning is not pre-determined and is never fully acquired because no transcendental signifier exists.  

Consequently, any word or sign is continuously deferred and differed as différance, which occurs through what Derrida describes as “[d]ifférance as temporisation, différance as spacing” (Margins 9). The absence of presence in “a” allows for three simultaneous potentials to occur. The first is to oppose (to differ), the second is to disperse (diffre) or “spacing”, and the third is to postpone or delay (to defer). All three exist simultaneously in différance and indicate how a word or sign is always spatially and temporally differed/deferred. Thus, locating a meaning or endpoint to a word or sign is impossible as they continuously differ along a chain of signifiers. Therefore, différance is, as Derrida claims, “literally neither a word nor a concept” (Margins 3); it is a cartography of meanings that is opened by Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.

In Derrida’s discussion of Freud’s analysis of writing and memory, he translated the Freudian terms Bahn (path) and Bahnung (pathbreaking) into entamer (cutting-through) and frayage (breaching) as methods for exposing the inner contradictions of language. When language attempts representation or interpretation, it is disrupted by a “breaching, the tracing of a trail, [which] opens up a conducting path”, the result of which is that “[t]he path is broken, cracked, fracta, breached”. (Writing 252). However, Derrida’s analysis of language breaches is not restricted to purely linguistic spheres. In the context of Morrison’s Jazz, jazz music is an example of extra-linguistic or sonic breaching. Jazz music exposes the inner contradictions of the hierarchical binary between the ordered conventional nature of white European and American classical music and jazz’s inner playfulness and spontaneity. Jazz music playfully breaches traditional time structures, rhythms, and composition, thereby exposing the différance present in music. The spontaneity and collectivised instrumentation breach the listener’s attempts at defining and predicting the meaning behind a jazz piece, thus allowing a multitude of paths or interpretations that can never be authoritative, only deferred. However, jazz music breaching traditional music does not remove the trace of what Hartman calls the “[s]hrieks that find their way into speech and song” (4). As Derrida writes, “[t]here is no breach without difference and no difference without trace” (Margins 18); there are always traces in these “undecipherable songs” (Hartman 3).

The trace, like différance, is a fickle, elusive, and ethereal term; it signifies, like footprints in the snow, the presence of meaning that is never directly present and continually in flux in Jazz. Therefore, it is a term that we must grapple with and hang on tightly. The trace functions inseparably to différance in that the two reiterate the ineptitude of language to encapsulate what it represents. The trace is left behind when language attempts representation; therefore, it “designates the play or oscillation between a present, a thing-as-it-is, and an absence, an other” (Page 56). Let us investigate the trace through some examples; Derrida analyses his concept of the trace through a deconstruction of Freudian psychoanalysis. Language and speech cannot represent the patient’s thoughts; they only defer the meaning, leaving behind traces or remnants of their thoughts for the psychoanalyst to collect and interpret.

Memory is another example of the trace that is felt throughout Morrison’s Beloved Trilogy. These traces of memory attempt to work through what Hartman calls the “silence in the archive” (3). The legacies and horrors of the middle passage and chattel slavery create an impossibility of memory existing as a trace, whereby blackness is codified as an absence with no trace. No form of language can attempt representation or semblances of meaning, as there are no traces of this absence. The result of this ossifies the black body as a “plastic subject who suffered a process of transformation by destruction [—] the ghost of modernity” (Mbembe 129). Therefore, Derrida’s claim that the trace is the “arche-phenomenon of ‘memory’” (Of Grammatology 70) is refuted by the impossibility of locating any traces of memory in the wake of slavery. The snow is obliterated, and there are no footprints to be tracked, thereby signifying the “erasure of the present and thus the subject […] the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence [—] death itself.” (Writing 289). The trace is non-existent, resulting in neither presence nor absence, a “silence in the archive” (Hartman 3).  

The “structure would equal meaning”.

Toni Morrison’s playing with language throughout her oeuvre might be considered postmodern or poststructuralist insofar she becomes an “’author’s author’” for her willingness to discuss the process through which her works develop” (Stave 59). This notion of an “’author’s author’” is exemplified in Morrison’s foreword to Jazz, where she describes how the novel’s “structure would equal meaning” (xiii). In Jazz, Morrison contrasts her earlier Beloved, whereby the structure of Jazz is a meaning or interpretation in its own right, independent of the story. Jazz, therefore, becomes emblematic of Derridean deconstruction, as the novel continuously embraces a différance of meaning. Morrison uses the imagery of the past as a broken or “abused record” (221) as a metaphor for how the various narrative or solos interplay as if the needle cannot find the correct track and plays all the voices simultaneously. This interplaying of various voices occurs due to Morrison’s temporisation of the novel in 1920’s Harlem; it is as Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris notes: “the City of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s is some sort of ‘zero moment’ in black history” (219). Whereby similar to the murder of Sethe in Beloved, the murder of Dorcas is similarly “zero moment”, which allows différance to flourish in the novel through Morrison’s playing with the structure of language to allow it to “equal meaning” (xiii).

            This establishment of structure as meaning allows Morrison to breach conventional literature and fractures singular narratives into multitudes of traces we must follow. However, these traces are difficult to track, as Morrison describes Violet’s life, “[t]he snow she ran through was so windswept she left no footprints in it, so for a time nobody knew exactly where on Lenox Avenue she lived” (4). It is only through the murder of Dorcas by Violet’s husband, Joe Trace, that the narrator can find traces beyond the “broken record” (221) of the footprint-less snow. This murder acts as a breach of Joe and Violet, but it functions as a pure chronological breach; it allows narrative traces and cracks that flourish across spatial and temporal spheres. Consequently, the narrator(s) of Jazz has been argued to embody the spontaneity and improvisation of jazz music, whereby the narrator(s) “functions both as the pulse of life, the metronome determining human action, and the rhythm of narration” (Stave 63). However, such definitive interpretations commit a disservice to the slippery and intricate voices woven by Morrison. These voices are seemingly ungendered, unreliable, and simultaneously within and outside the text. The narrative voice(s) is neither a conductor at a symphony nor a jazz band leader, too, is also surprised when new solos breach the story and must re-adjust with and for the reader. These shifts occur, allowing new soloists to explore their own stories and traces, independent of the novel and at times the text itself. Morrison is, therefore, constantly playing with the idea of a conventional omniscient narrator. 

            In the first few pages of the novel, Morrison lays out the melody for Jazz, insofar as it becomes what Justine Tally describes as a “hard-boiled detective novel” (76). However, Tally notes that, unlike conventional detective novels, Morrison lays out the crime, perpetrators, and resolution in these opening pages and allows a narrative of différance to riff off and explore rhythms around this absence, Dorcas’ murder. The narrative voice introduces the protagonists of Joe and Violet Trace as melodies or notes on a stave that existed in Harlem in 1926. However, the characters are not fixed on this stave; they break out through Morrison’s attempt at melodising language equalling music, rather than musical descriptions simply accompanying the language of Jazz; the language becomes musical in its own right.

            This melodising of language continues throughout the novel, as almost an absence; musicality is generated independent of musical references. Music does not enhance the narrative; instead, it equals and becomes a part of the text. This is signified in the opening sentence, “Sth, I know that woman” (3), the first word of the novel is a metatextual reference to the character of Sethe from Beloved. “Sth” is also an aural and oral sound that can only be appreciated when spoken aloud. This “Sth” is an example of différance, whereby Morrison plays around with the literary binary of printed and spoken language. In contrast to Derrida’s claim of philosophy taking precedence in speech rather than language (Writing 252), there is a literary hierarchical binary between the spoken and written word, where the latter is dominant. The “Sth” is the sound of sucking one’s teeth; it is an extra-textual, aural, and oral element that confronts the literary hegemon of reading alone. We are invited to join with the text and suck our teeth too. Consequently, in this first sentence, Morrison challenges the quietness of reading, inviting the reader to embrace Jazz through our teeth and our eyes.

            Despite this aural and oral first word, “Sth”, the novel is not entirely preoccupied with creating a sonic scape in written language; Morrison flirts with silences or the absence of sound as an equally important element to the presence of sound. The most notable silence in Jazz is the silence from Joe’s gun; Morrison writes, “‘I wanted to stay there. Right after the gun went thuh! And nobody in there heard it but me” (130). This passage is written in reported speech; however, the speech marks remain open, as if the gun has breached the speaker, leaving them in situ, while everyone else is “locked together by the stream of their dancing and the music”. Further still, the usage of the phonetic “thuh!” emphasises what should have breached the dancing but does not — the sound of the gun has generated a silence, a silence that permeates the novel, thus equating absence with presence and making the binary indistinguishable. Therefore this playing with the presence of music/sound with the absence of silence creates a structural melody that “constitutes a history in an archive for moments that have been erased” (Rogoff 21:50), whereby “even erased memories leave behind a rhythm” (24:14). These two sounds “Sth” and “thuh” (Morrison 3, 130) are non-musical noises that generate their own peculiar melodies of “erased memories”.

            While the trace of Dorcas’ murder permeates through rhythms and silence in the novel, there is also a breaching of the text itself as a physical entity. By this, Morrison embraces Derrida’s most famous and often misunderstood and understood statement, “il n’y a pas de hors­ texte”, or “there is nothing outside the text [there is no outside-text]” (Of Grammatology 158). Whereby Derrida argues that language has been historically and philosophically rendered as existing only within the confines of the written, physical text. Consequently, Derrida mediates on the ontology of the text or the authority of the text’s author, through which the reader joins with the author to generate traces of meaning with the text. Morrison allows this co-authorship by breaching traditional literature, whereby a breach signifies a “track, fracture, fault, split, fragment”. (Of Grammatology 65). However, as Phillip Page notes, “yet a breach is also a hinge or joint” (59), whereby the binding of the pages acts as its own breaching for the reader. A breach is not only a crack but a connection or Bahn to continuous interpretations. The result of which allows for Jazz to become a novel which has always been thumbed and never closed. This is acknowledged when the narrator addresses the reader in the novel’s final lines: “Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because, look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” (229). This final line of “[l]ook where your hands are. Now” breaches outside the confines of written languages and allows traces of Jazz to flourish through the reader. It functions as a metatextual reminder of différance, that meaning is not pre-determined but emerges through cracks, deferrals, breaches of language and the text itself.

“Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor”?

Both Beloved and Jazz are stories about representing “zero moment[s]” (Deyris 219) in African American history; however, unlike the haunting legacies of Sethe’s murder of Beloved, the murder of Dorcas breaches the “abused record” (Morrison 221) of what Wilderson claims that “[b]lackness is coterminous with slavery” (102). The protagonists of Joe and Violet Trace are positioned as traces of love and beauty that attempt to work through the question of “[c]an beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to ‘exhume buried cries’ and reanimate the dead” (Hartman 3). This notion of “reanimating the dead” is the crux of how Morrison attempts to “embody life in words” (3), through which Morrison describes how the James Van Der Zee photograph prompted the creation of Jazz. Morrison writes how she saw “a photograph of a pretty girl in a coffin” (xi) and how the novel’s melodies and rhythms riff off this photograph.

            The murder of Dorcas is not the only “zero moment” (Deyris 219) of the novel, it is simply the bullet that cracks the glass, and through these cracks, the narrative delves into the memories of Joe and Violet. These cracks and traces are further opened by the memories of Wild and Golden Gray. Joe and Violet are raised motherless, with Violet’s mother’s suicide and Joe’s mother, Wild abandoning him at birth. Both characters spend their lives attempting to find these obliterated footprints in the snow. Morrison, similar to how Derrida plays with the “a” in différance, inserts an “n” into Violet’s name, “Violent they called her now” (75). Further still, for Violet, Harlem is rendered silent compared to the deafening noises of her rural home of Vienna, Virginia. By rendering the city quiet, Morrison opens up Derrida’s notion of spatial absence/presence by usurping what a melting pot of culture, music and literature of the Harlem Renaissance was with the quietness of rural Virginia. However, both in the City and in Vienna, Violet is infatuated with the concept of motherhood and constantly grapples with the question of “[w]as she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb” (219). Violet’s infatuation with motherhood goes as far as an attempted kidnapping of a child, with Violet sleeping with a doll in her arms and placing a portrait of Dorcas on the mantlepiece. All these events coincide with Violet’s memories of her grandmother, True Belle, telling stories about Golden Gray, the biracial child of beauty that haunts Violet’s life. Carolyn M. Jones claims that “Violet is overweighted by this image; it causes a crack in her self. “(482-3). Golden Gray is a character or fragmented image that signifies the impossible logic of slavery, as if were born darker, he would be enslaved; however, he was “bathed three times a day” (142) and serviced by True Belle. Golden Gray undergoes an identity crisis when his father’s race is revealed, he represents the contradictions of slavery. These contradictions are split further when he attempts to “find, then kill, if he was lucky, his father” (143), leading him to Joe’s mother, Wild. Golden Gray assaults Wild but is present for Joe’s birth, thus raising the possibility of him being Joe’s father, a question that is never answered, only differed.

            Wild is a character known only by her absence; she is simultaneously “[e]verywhere and nowhere” (Morrison 179). She is felt only through Morrison’s playing with the signifiers that denote her existence, insofar that Page argues that Wild becomes emblematic of the Derridean “(non)existing state by placing a word under erasure, as in thing”, insofar that “she might be inscribed as Wild.” (57). Wild, therefore, the trace of the absence of slavery that creates more traces; the surname of Joe is a not-so-subtle reference to Derrida. She becomes the absence that Joe attempts to track; he is fuelled by abandonment and begins to view Dorcas as a substitute mother. Joe claims, “‘I tracked my mother in Virginia, and it led me right to her [Dorcas]” (130); he is, therefore, a character who embodies the Derridean trace.  Consequently, when Joe falls from the tree into Violet’s lap, the two are enmeshed in the rhythmic memories of Golden Gray and Wild, whereby Golden Gray signifies an ideal of beauty and love (presence) and Wild the absence of it. Joe and Violet are unwittingly searching for each other through traces of Golden Gray and Wild, as Violet notes, “[f]rom the very beginning I was a substitute and so was [Joe]” (97). Therefore, the character of Dorcas and her death becomes a breach and path for the two to rediscover their love.

            Jazz does not end when we look at our hands, the book’s closing, or placing it back on the bookshelf; its melodies continue to play independently of a reader and author. Consequently, through Morrison’s continuous employment of différance, playing with structure, and intricately weaving the cracks and traces of Joe and Violet’s life that the narrator can confront the notions that the “past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack […] I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me” (221). The narrator admits their mistake in the novel’s final pages by addressing the reader, “I envy them their public love” (229). Despite the traumas that haunt their life, Jazz represents how the love between Joe and Violet can “embody [a] life in words” (Hartman 3).

Works Cited

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Jones, Carolyn M. “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review, vol. 31, no. 3,  1997, pp. 481–495. JSTOR. <https://doi.org/10.2307/3042574&gt;.

Mbembe, Achille. “The Requiem for the Slave.”, Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois. Duke UP, 2013, pp. 129–151.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 2004.

—. Jazz. Vintage, 2016.

Page, Philip. “Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” African American Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 1995, pp. 55–66, JSTOR, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3042428&gt;.

Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie. “Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the City.” African American Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 219–31, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2903254.

Rogoff, Irit. Irit Rogoff — Becoming Research. YouTube, uploaded by Sonic Arts, 3rd Apr 2019. 14th Aug 2023, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3AcgQoGaSU&gt;.

Stave, Shirley Ann. “Jazz and Paradise: pivotal moments in black history.” The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, edited by Justine Tally,  Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 59–74.

Tally, Justine. “The Morrison Trilogy.” The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, edited by Justine Tally, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 75–91.

Wilderson III, Frank B. Afropessimism. Liversight, 2021.