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Example research essay topic: Words And Phrases Toni Morrison - 2,080 words

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Jazz by Toni Morrison Toni Morrison, a brilliant author of Jazz, has been immersed into a wonderful world of music since her very early childhood, which she spent in Lorain, Ohio. Morrisons mother, Ramah Willis, was a true musician, who was a jazz and opera singer and also played piano for a silent movie theatre. Toni was growing up listening to her mothers singing from Ella Fitzgerald and the blues to sentimental Victorian songs and arias from Carmen (Fuel 284). Who knows, may be the years that the author spent in this music-loving environment, played their role and became inspiration for the Morrisons writings. Virtually, all of her novels touch upon music in some way or another. And whether that music is slave work songs, spirituals, gospel, or the blues, and whether the vehicle she uses to convey this musical experience is content, language, form, or a blending of all three, the musical motifs are unmistakable in Morrisons writing and inextricable from it.

Jazz breathes with the rhythms, sounds, and cadences of jazz music, radiating and enunciating, reflecting and recreating the musics central ideas, emotions, and aural idiosyncrasies perhaps as well as written prose can. In investigating the topic of the novel, it is interesting to particularly concentrate on the two issues. The first one concerns an attempt to find out exactly how and to what extent Morrison incorporates elements of jazz music in her novel Jazz. The logical continuation is the second issue of interest. It attempts to understand why the author establishes jazz as a central topic of the novel. It is even more exciting to follow why the novel is called Jazz and how the title relates to the context.

To demonstrate how jazz manifests itself in the novel, the following three areas are examined: 1) the content of the novel itself; 2) the stylistic techniques and language of the novel; and 3) the structure of the novel. Only after finding out the ways in which Morrison uses and recreates the effects of jazz, the reader can start analysing the significance of this topic and speculate about how jazz clarifies Morrisons vision and overstates the meaning of the whole novel. The very subject matter of Jazz provides the evidence to indicate the presence of jazz music in Morrisons novel. The first thought that comes to anyones mind is that the actual word jazz does not appear not in a single place in the text of the novel. Despite of that, numerous suggestions of the music are seen throughout the entire novel. This hidden music is mentioned very superficially at times; on other occasions, the author discusses it in a great depth, giving a variety of names to it: for example, it is called the race music (79) by the narrator.

The fact that Morrison never refers to the music specifically as jazz simply adds to the mystery and uncertainty that saturate the novel and give the distinctive flavour to it. The description of the music comes in many different ways and a number of contexts in Jazz. The Fifth Avenue drums sometimes show up, creating the background for the belt-buckle tunes vibrating from pianos and spinning on every Victrola" (59) in the City. The sounds of the jazz music fill the City streets day and night, ripping the roofs of the houses, where the makeshift juke bands play, off. Sure of themselves, sure they were holy, standing up there on the rooftops, facing each other at first, but when it was clear that they had beat the clarinets out, they turned their backs on them, lifted those horns straight up and joined the light just as pure and steady and kind of kind. (196 - 197) Here, by calling these rooftop musicians holy, Morrison actually idealizes them. This passage, if taken more seriously, can demonstrate the authors knowledge of the instrumentation of combo of the 1920 s.

Early jazz bands usually represented a mixture of the following instruments: trumpet or cornet, clarinet, trombone, tuba, piano, drums and occasionally saxophone, guitar, and string bass. Through the whole course of the novel, Morrison logically follows the jazz history she mentions and describes only the instruments that were used at that time, never jumping to anything that had not yet come on the jazz scene. The other very distinctive feature of the novel is the language it uses. It is composed of an unusual punctuation, interesting repetition of words, and a very distinct rhythm which are all characteristic to jazz music.

It is Alice, through whom the readers perceive jazz in the novel. In some passages, for example, Alice comments on the effect that jazz makes on her, and she suggests that it is really an overpowering music. Readers, therefore, can make an inference about the power that the jazz music has. Alice is a simple girl, and yet she understands it, which tells us that this music is accessible to everybody, that one does not need to have a special background to like and understand jazz. Throughout the entire novel Alice tries to keep her niece Dorcas, for whom she has been caring care for a long time, away from the City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day (67). Dorcas, however, gets seduced by the music, which is well illustrated in the party scene, where Dorcas and her friend, Felice, fall under the spell of the fast music (64).

In this very episode, the author reveals that illusion is the musics secret drive: the control it tricks them into believing is theirs; the anticipation it anticipates (65). Alice, however, does not share her nieces attitude for jazz, and concludes that the music induces people to do wrong (67) and that it made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law (58). Even the jazz lyrics, in Alice's view, are greedy, reckless words, loose and infuriating (60). At the same time, Alice also feels enormous anger and hostility towards the flourish and roaring seduction (59) of the music; she even thinks that jazz had something to do with the silent black women and men (56 - 57) protesting in July of 1917 in the race riots in St. Louis.

The most interesting side of the Jazz's musical subject matter, though, is not its complete vagueness, but rather its distinctive changeability. Different people, as described in the novel, perceive jazz in completely different ways. This music might even seem to some as being very mutable, inconstant. It can be identified differently depending on the perceiver and the circumstances that surround it.

Jazz may be ignoble, annoying, chaotic and confusing. In other situations it may seem ideal, thrilling, stimulant and exciting. The scene that is completely opposite to the Alice's fire-and-brimstone view of jazz music is the penultimate scene of the novel, which suggests that jazz has a great restorative power. In this scene, Violet and Joe have, apparently, come to the end of their relationships, which have never been particularly happy. At the moment when Violet, Joe, and Felice talk in their apartment, the sounds of a jazz song that is being played in the neighboring house reach them.

The music helps the couple to renew their love for each other, making them dance and promising happiness or felicity to them. It is Felice, in fact, who, in the following passage, recounts this episode: ... the music floated in to us through the open window. Mr. Trace moved his head to the rhythm and his wife snapped her fingers in time. She did a little step in front of him and he smiled.

By and by they were dancing (215). The rooftop passage, which was mentioned earlier, represents another counterpoint to Alice's views. In the glorification of the jazz musicians, Morrison introduces the calming effect of jazz music: You would have thought everything had been forgiven the way they played, these holy rooftop musicians (196 - 197). Therefore, it could be argued that the notion of jazz music is used in the Morrisons novel as a metaphor for the unstable, constantly changing conditions of life of the African American people in the 1920 s. When Violet and Joe train-dance (36) into the City for the first time, for example, the sounds of jazz become louder and more chaotic to signify their movement from the rural area to city, from the South to the North. Such musical accompaniment reinforces the change in characters lives and brings a feeling of newness, hope and anxiety, which is present throughout the entire novel.

The author, however, does not stop at recreating the real jazz feel in the content of the novel. Morrison, tries to pass to the reader this very feel by the unique style and structure of the novel. She uses repetitions, distinct punctuation, and internal rhyme to create a poly rhythmic background for narrative improvisation. The call-and-response techniques, verb tense shifts, and jazz imagery are also used in the novel, which helps to create the feeling of the jazzy environment even stronger. The first kind of repetitions that is used in Jazz is the repetition of words and phrases between and within the certain lines, which is similar to the repetitions used in the actual jazz riffs. A good example of this technique is the Golden Grays description of his sufferings because of never meeting his father.

He compares this feeling to the one of a person with a severed limb. This description contains certain words and phrases that are repeated and this repetition contributes greatly to enhancing the rhythmical effect of the novel as well as brings the emphasis to the meaning. Golden Grays singing pain echoes throughout this whole passage, while the phrase where he used to be is contained in two consecutive sentences. The word blood is used two times within the six-word interval in the second sentence of the passage.

An emphasis is also added to the phrase dangling and writhing of nerves through the repetition. A very strange, even provocative repetition also occurs in the mentioned above rooftop passage in the phrase kind of kind (196 - 197). The repetitions and riff-like passages are very important feature for this novel, since according to Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey, the riff is the central component of jazz improvisation. It is a figure, musically speaking, a foundation, something you could walk on (105). Thus, in the same manner as jazz riffs lay a solid foundation for the jazz solo, the language repetitions used by Morrison in her Jazz, provide a solid foundation for her otherwise circuitous narrative. Furthermore, these repetitions add to the novels rhythmic movement, literally pushing us to read the text aloud in order to get the full effect of the languages musicality.

In fact, Alan Rice affirms that the rhythmic movement put in Jazz through the usage of repetitions is the most important peculiarity of Morrisons total jazz aesthetic (424). Moreover, Morrison skilfully manipulates the structures of the sentences sometimes leaving them abrupt, and sometimes making them run-on, which enhances even more the jazz like tone in the novel. An example is the following passage, in which Alice is imagining Joe murdering her niece. The author intentionally breaks up nouns and adjectives with periods, leaving them to stand on their own as complete syntactic units: It [the killing] had not been hard to do; it had not even made him think twice about what danger he was putting himself in. He just did it. One man.

One defenceless girl. Death. A sample-case man. A nice, neighborly, everybody-knows-his name man (73). Despite the presence of a stop-start flow, the passage is transformed into a multi-rhythmic unit, which reflects directly the African American tradition to blend elements of language and music. Jazz is a unique novel even in the very way one literary phenomenon alternates with the other.

The fragmented phrases and sentences that were used in the previous passage give place to the long ones, which use almost no punctuation at all in the next several phrases. In addition, this run-on segment ends with rhymes to moans and own, which, again, makes the jazz flavour even more explicit in the novel. The linguistic techniques used by Morrison in Jazz really imitate the jazz music in many ways. In playing a solo, a jazz musician might intentionally omit some notes.

Then, while playing the same solo, this musician might turn to long notes and sounds which very much...


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