"A music seeking its words": double-timing and double consciousness in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz.'

W.E.B. Du Bois claimed that American blacks possess a double-consciousness, "two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body," with neither necessarily triumphant.(2) Representing an African, an American, a male and a female, this African-American body becomes the site of endless, dialectic hierarchy. Blackness is associated with violent dichotomy, with what Charles Johnson in Middle Passage refers to as the transcendental American split between spirit and matter, and between observer and observed. As the unreliable Captain Falcon articulates the stakes, the self always contains a double at war with itself:

For a self to act, it must have something to act on. A

non-self -- some call this Nature -- that resists, thwarts the will, and

vetoes

the actor.... Well, suppose that nonself is another self? ....

Conflict is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody

structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and

perceived, self and other -- these ancient twins are built into the

mind .... They are signs of a transcendental fault, a deep crack

in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if

you think this through ... is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic

wound.(3)

Johnson's book makes these crucial connections between white representations of an allegedly transcendental nature and the dualistic consciousness of slavery. For Johnson, the white conception of a unified nature fails because American society has always been fragmented racially. Where Middle Passage ostensibly focuses on the American Renaissance, and its transcendental faults, to depict contemporary America, Morrison's latest novel more pervasively roots American modernism and postmodernism in the interplay of two American Renaissances. In Jazz, through an even more complexly unreliable narrator, Morrison reconfigures Johnson's transcendental American fault, this crack in language and space, as a projected attribute of a Modernist black consciousness. With some reservations, Johnson argues that the African mind, before its exposure to the West, only experienced a "Unity of Being -- one suspiciously reminiscent of an imagined but never achieved transcendental American sublime -- and no split between self and world. When rendered dual, i.e. American, this mind is remade for murder. By contrast, Morrison initially accepts and uses the attributed double-consciousness of Western blacks to launch a critique back at the West; once that end is achieved, she removes the onus of double-consciousness from her characters and leaves it to be divided between her narrator and readers.

For the characteristically transcendental American mind, double-consciousness always entails a metaphoric bondage to some overriding other -- one's violent possession by an other self, a sentient Nature or City, or a phantom narrator. In Symbolism in American Literature, Charles Feidelson identifies these possessive Modernist traits as already emergent in American Renaissance literature; as he writes of the transcendental pantheist, "in order to become-god possessed, [they] deny a personal god. By the same token, in order to unite themselves with nature, they also deny personal identity."[4] American transcendentalists and pantheists imagine a self possessed by the transcendent force of nature, and thus a fragmented and often amputated or literally divided self whose body and will are almost entirely possessed by external agency. Transcendentalism and Modernism are then two stages of an exigent American double-consciousness, both of which generate a series of ungoverned bodies, of arms and hands with wills of their own. Double-consciousness becomes a form of endemically American self-alienation and self-expression. In Morrison's conception, blacks become nature-possessed, City possessed, narrator possessed, and music possessed, and seem to be denied personal identity and bodily integrity as a consequence.

In its broadest sense, double-consciousness demarcates the American psyche as a house divided. America is the nation that fragments itself from its mother country and thus becomes an orphan/amputee; it wages war upon its own house; and it is perpetually doubled and divided from itself. Black double-consciousness then updates, and for Morrison emerges coterminously with and is indissociable from, what Emerson and Melville perceived as a "truncated society" of the walking wounded; their 19th-century works are populated by amputees whose physical wounds reflect a fragmented American self well before any Modernists had disconnected pen from paper. Throughout Melville's fiction, for example, characters lose control of their bodies, whose borders they often can no longer determine. The fragmentation of the American Renaissance is re-staged in the period of American Modernism -- not surprisingly when Melville is himself effectively resuscitated or reborn -- and particularly during the Harlem Renaissance.

The implicit connection between transcendental/Modernist fragmentation, violence, and the site of the involuntary has been recently reinforced and rendered explicit in Morrison's Jazz. Morrison asserts that the violent fragmentation of the American character -- in Melville's Pierre, who loses control of his body, and in Billy Budd, who kills without intention, in Norris' McTeague or De Lillo's Axton in The Names, or in any of a plethora of American characters who are defined by what is in some context an act of involuntary or unconscious violence -- is foremost a projected attribute of American blackness. For many white writers, race is used to express a universal American splitting; for many black writers, universal American fragmentation reflects their specific and representative role in American culture. For Faulkner and Morrison in particular, blackness finally becomes the heuristic emblem of a fragmented American modernity.

For many twentieth-century black writers, alienation from an allegedly universal model of self-representation provides a more immediate access to the depiction of dual identities. Throughout The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, for example, James Weldon Johnson, an emblematic black Modernist, marks modern black self-representation as split, as always containing an other. For Johnson's protagonist, the division between the races "gives to every coloured man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality." Not just in passing for white, but in the very delineation of his blackness, Johnson's character winds up feeling "that I have never really been a Negro, that I have been only a privileged spectator of their inner life."(5) Double-consciousness thus generates an unobserved observer, the ghostly narrator, the phantom other in black narration. This privileged spectator, the voice of double-consciousness, also stands behind Morrison's narrator in Jazz, who is omnipresent yet never tangible, who shapes the narrative yet must remain a passive and spectral observer of human affairs. (Though a version of this duality is present in the perpetual third-person representation of the self throughout American autobiography, from Benjamin Franklin to Henry Adams and Gertrude Stein, this more general form of narrative ventriloquism needs to be distinguished from double-consciousness itself; as Du Bois states, blacks experience a particular and always racially inflected "sense of looking at one's self through the eyes of others.") Black American characters often see themselves, and even their bodies, as others, internalizing their attributed roles as spectral observers of themselves. Faulkner's Joe Christmas and Wright's Bigger Thomas, for instance, incessantly watch themselves from afar, locating a self split into parts.

For many American writers, the involuntary also serves as the secondary reification of double-consciousness. Characters who are split into observed and observing selves, into racial halves, into parts of lost familial and cultural wholes, lose conscious control of their bodies. In seeing themselves from afar, they also lose the ability to identify absolutely with these bodies, which often become fragmented and amputated doubles, of themselves. As a result, they begin to observe themselves acting in an involuntary, and often expressly violent, manner. In Light in August, Joe Christmas continually "[sees] himself as from a distance."(6) Christmas wanders through the text brandishing weapons he doesn't even realize he possesses; he is described as descending into an unconscious, or black, phantom state of mind whenever he commits acts of violence, a state from which he emerges with no clear memory of what he has done. Writers from Poe to Conrad to Faulkner project desire, the white unconscious, and in effect white violence, onto non-white characters, and American black writers at times perpetuate this association.

Throughout Native Son, Bigger Thomas acts, speaks, and even kills involuntarily, without conscious will: Bigger, for example, "struck Gus before he was conscious of doing so."(7) Repeatedly "possessed by a force which he hated, but which he had to obey," Bigger acts at each crucial moment of his life as if the decision were being handed down to him by some logic not his own, over which he had no control, but which he had to obey" (162,215). Hearing "his words issue in voluntarily from his lips, as of a force of their own," Bigger embodies a man divided from himself, whose consciousness, particularly his consciousness of violence, is dual (47). His "involuntary" words and his violence have an identity of their own, one which Bigger does not possess. Though his "reclaimed" murder of Mary becomes the defining, existential act of his life, Bigger tells Max, "I couldn't help it . . . It was like another man stepped inside of my skin and started acting for me" (326). Finally, Bigger's self-same desire to kill, to tell his story, and to confront himself, "sprang up of itself, organically, automatically" (255).(8)

In Jazz, Morrison takes this uneasy conjunction of the natural and the mechanical, this highly specific double-hybrid of the organic and the automatic, and translates it into a narratized emblem of black consciousness. (And Morrison's narrator tries to exert a greater influence over her characters than even Wright, in his introduction, does over the reader's interpretation of Bigger Thomas; Morrison thus takes the black writer's attempt to dramatize yet also control…