In Jazz by Toni Morrison, “The City” becomes something more than a mere frozen setting or historical background – it fizzes and hums with breathtaking energy, dense layers of past and countless faces composing and recomposing the ever-evolving definition. By using her masterful yet uncompromising, bold prose, Morrison humanizes the City as much as one can get, evoking extremely uncanny and even human-like qualities in it and undeniably making it the central character. “The City” in Jazz becomes a kind of metaphor for the ceaseless flux. The multifaceted complexity of a thousand different stories written upon its street and alley looking back for centuries, and the lure of liberty and a new start that drew multitudes here, as well as the uneven social and racial structures in the cities of the early 20th century.
The City is portrayed by Morrison from the very start as a mighty, sentient entity that pushes its inhabitants’ lives along myriad paths. The narrator proclaims with much passion, “I’m crazy about this City,” and later defines the City with her own unique “herself notions of time and behaviour and potpie hats” (Morrison 7). The careful and delicate application of the feminine pronoun “herself” with intricate, homely imageries such as “potpie hats” contribute to the City with an inexplicable human quality, maybe that of a strong and motherly demeanour. Morrison further amplifies and enriches this trenchant personification by granting the City a stream-of-consciousness inner dialogue, as if it is an omniscient narrator privy to all its deepest secrets: “My secrets, just like yours!” (Morrison 31).” The poet used an inspiring likeness of “dancing skirts” to portray a lively contrast in nature of the City that has a magnetic power of attraction over its residents who go through the fluxes of its parameters.
In the core element of the City, Morrison’s depiction is its importance as a treasury of communal memory. A reversible catalogue deeply carved with the achievements, hardships, and injustices of the African-American experience in the U.S. Morrison talks about the streets which are splitting ” buckle…between the memories of those who ruled the streets and….the insomnias of those who knew every past and future abuse (42). In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the physical infrastructure is a vivid reminder of the struggles of yesterday and the tragedies that lie ahead. Yet the City also represents freedom, as in Violet’s perspective after her migration from Virginia: ” She was through with licking… envelopes for a living and wanted her version of the City where a clawfoot bathtub could be pulled in for a proper soaking on Saturday nights” ” (33). Violet, who headed to the North together with her fellow migrants, believed that the City would set her free from the oppression of her previous dwellings by giving her a greater chance to build her own story.
What Morris finds in the City is both the love and the hate, the difficulties and the future opportunities, the latter being the essence of her artistic priorities. To the characters in her book who left for the Great Migration, the City became a layered document, which provided space for these people to inscribe their own stories. Through Morrison’s interviews, she says her intention is to have her characters not be bound and be able to reconstruct themselves and reinvent themselves anew continuously (“Interview” 126). The morphing physicality of Morrison’s City becomes a symbolic landscape where her characters find the source of freedom from societal confinement and seal their destinies with new chapters.
However, she does not even ambiguously depict the City’s incorruptible delight rumbling under its oppressive succession of beatings, loadings, strippings, and a bunch of other “stashed-away cruelties” (Morrison 35) in the hands of unforgiving power structures. In one particularly haunting and gut-wrenching passage, the all-seeing narrator ruminates with bitter pathos on the stark iniquities perpetrated by the City itself in its systemic oppression: “How practised this City is in loving something by hurting it. Who knew what went on in the cramped little throbbing rooms in the redbrick Villain…It never had a chance to say no…”.” (39). Additionally, the personification of the City as an object of monstrous victimization that brings forth the massive systemic racism, economic injustice, urban blight, and exploitation is considered to be one of the most disturbing representations of where Black communities were trying to fight for their dignity and self-determination. Through the incessant exhibition of the very real and palpable “cruelties” of her characters, Morrison displays that her characterization of the City remains true to the grim history as the beating heart that invokes in the reader admiration and awe.
The City emerges as a multifaceted symbol whose symbolic character and eternal allure reach its zenith through Morrison’s nuanced portrayal of the variegated and, at times, contradictory feelings produced in the characters that she brings to life in such an effective manner. For the young and beatifically innocent Dorcas with shallow roots in the urban milieu, the City emerges as a realm of unbridled personal freedom and the ability to eschew societal conventions. As quoted in the narrative, “For Dorcas, it became a way to be in the City and be lonely or be in the City and be gay; it was a neighbourhood of solitary individuals also” (184). Violet Irvine, the middle-aged world-veteran, on the other hand, perceives the City mainly as a multitude of senses and personified traits that are mean and arrogant, but at the same time resilient with their essence, no compromise. Morrison vividly depicts Violet’s visceral impressions of the City’s gritty majesty: “…old, raunchy, having been there forever with her hot wickedness, her potholed pits, arresting, scarred, rank ways” (90). On the one hand, the City also appeals to Joe Trace, who seeks anonymity, a place where he could turn into just another face, a place he can hide from his past in his search for redemption. On the other hand, there is an underlying desire for deeper communal interactions, which can help him overcome the demons engulfing his mind (Morrison 129).
Morrison makes a stirring use of a depiction of such reactions to the phenomenon of the City to subtly reveal her central, deeply personalized theme of the overlapping yet separate characters of private and communal identity. As the astute literary scholar Nellie McKay asserts, The City in Jazz is no inert background: this is the best manifestation of inconsistency and uncertainty in the struggle and desperation of the characters to continuously discover and truly believe in themselves through this transformation of their identities (McKay 371). Just like its inhabitants, the City’s existence itself continuously and rather unpredictably mutates and transitions, as if any attempt to pinpoint its core in a simplified way were meaningless.
Ultimately, Morrison’s heaven-like illuminating of “The City” takes it from being just a backdrop to a main character with lots of energy as it drives the story. By projecting City as a person who could speak for himself and display human weaknesses, Shakira highlights the intimate relationship between the environment and the sense of identity. The City, however, is more than just a place – it is an always improvising, perpetually reinventing domain where one can improvise and create oneself in the most circumstantial of situations. Through the Jazz novel, Morrison enigmatically embodies the threads that make city life complex and the determination of the human soul that always yearns to rise above the adversities of life.
Works Cited
McKay, Nellie. “Morrison’s Jazz: Metaphorical Transformation.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie McKay, G.K. Hall, 1988, pp. 371–386.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Vintage Books, 2004.
“Interview with Toni Morrison.” Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, editor. Conversations with Toni Morrison. University Press of Mississippi, 1994, pp. 123-138.
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