Jazz:  A word which, like the characters in its novel, seemingly without a true origin or definition, is defined in the novel according to Toni Morrison’s standards.  She offers it as a statement of love. The purpose is not to solve the mystery, but to celebrate it.  The boiling hot music, spiced with red colored passion and seething temptation cooks together like an “old Charlie Parker solo” as a presentation to the world: “I am not like James Joyce, I am not like Thomas Hardy, I am not like Faulkner. I am not like, in that sense…My effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed through [black] music” (McKay 1). In Jazz, music is her tool, alongside Paradise Lost imagery, to prove this point: This musical love is to be felt, not understood. It is without consistent definition and is as original and as tempting as a distant improvisational jazz riff.

            Temptation serves as a major defining roll of the love discovered in Jazz. Compared to the story of Adam and Eve, the characters themselves have a sort of “Paradise Lost.” Temptation was fueled by the inescapable power of music throughout the novel and it often dictated the actions of the characters.  “The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don’t you? The music will solve and dissolve any question” (Morrison 188).  The music serves as a devil’s advocate of sorts. It encourages sinful behavior and melts away any doubt, conveniently leaving out such repercussions as the downfall of their marriage or perhaps even worse the downfall of the self.

            In the Garden of Eden, Eve’s Tempter was the serpent, he reassured her of the benefits and beguiled her to eat of the apple and commit the first sin. The music in the novel is the serpent of Eden. “Eve ate of the apple because she was tempted. The snake promised her that such food would give her insight and knowledge; it would make her like God. In part, the snake is right. Her eyes were opened and so are Adam’s” (Rice 131).

 Dorcas, an innocent little girl with desire running rampant through her veins, was naïve and succumbed to the temptation. The music lit a fire in her and “the drums assured her that the glow would never leave her, that it would be waiting for her and with her whenever she wanted to be touched by it, and whenever she wanted to let it loose to leap into fire again” (Morrison 61). For the first time, Dorcas discovered sexuality in the form of “knees in full view; lip rouge red as hellfire; burnt match sticks rubbed on eyebrows and fingernails tipped with blood” (Morrison 56). Splattered with references to red (a passionate and hellish color), Dorcas’ discovery of fake beauty was a signal to her loss of innocence.

Before meeting Joe, Dorcas had neither worn silk stockings nor red lipstick. Her desire and her sexuality budded with him and she thought the world could no longer say she was a little girl. Dorcas believed she was neither beautiful nor desirable until she had sexuality through material possessions. Joe bought her many presents and, in exchange, she gave herself to him.  With her clothes and possessions, she viewed herself as sexually desirable. Her love with Joe was more of a lust, a fake love, because it revolved around a fake image and a false idea of what love encompasses; to her, love is a fulfillment of desire.

            After Eve committed the first sin, she offered the fruit to her mate, Adam. Eve was Adam’s temptation. She held a power over him, “the girls have red lips and their legs whisper to each other through silk stockings. The red lips and the silk flash power,” the power to protect him from sin or allow him to indulge in it; to save him or kill him (Morrison 181).   “Girls can do that. Steer a man way from death or drive him right to it. Pull you out of sleep and you wake up on the ground under a tree you’ll never locate again because you are lost” (Morrison 173). After his sin, Adam was banished from the paradise of Eden, forced to wander the earth, never to locate his utopia again. This is the imminent doom that Joe faced on his current path.

            Joe had aged into a tired, yearning, sixty-year-old man upon meeting Dorcas. Dorcas was symbol of the youth he lost and a love he never discovered. He was suffering from a “weary familiarity which threatens any marriage” (Furman 95). She aroused a desire in him he never discovered before, he was entranced by her imperfections. Tempted by Dorcas, he indulged in the sin she offered to him. Joe describes Dorcas as the apple, the embodiment of the first sin, the beginner of the cycle of sin, and the source of downfall to its consumers. “I told you again that you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core. That when he left Eden he left a rich man. Not only did he have Eve, but he had the taste of the first apple in the world in his mouth for the rest of his life. The very first to know what it was like,” (Morrison 133). Joe was the first to experience Dorcas, he had not only bitten the apple he had eaten the whole thing; he indulged in sin.  “He knew wrong [was not] right and did it anyway” (Furman 94). Why?—Because the music had hit him just so.

            Dorcas gave Joe newfound strength and rediscovered courage. “You looked at me like you knew me, and I thought it really was Eden, I would strut out the garden, strut! As long as you held on to my hand girl” (Morrison 135). Love, in the case of Joe and Dorcas, was discovered through a seething desire that, like the love bug, bred and colonized inside both of them. But their relationship was purely sexually based,

if jazz music implies sex, then the relationship between Joe and Dorcas is a kind of jazz. This is a novel written about the kind of love we find in Jazz and blues songs. In such songs desire and violence are an expected part of the setting. Moreover, they are often intermingled (Rice 121).

Morrison correlated sex, desire, and violence into her work to brace the idea of it flowing and touching like a jazz piece which wraps itself around the listener and grabs their soul.

            Eventually, Dorcas came into her own and grew tired of a frail old man. She rejected Joe. Joe, not believing he could live without her, kills her so that she cannot live without him.  Joe rose into sin as he had rose into love with Dorcas, “don’t ever think I fell for you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and I made up my mind” (Morrison 135). And he later confesses that by Dorcas’ hand he had fallen into the cycle, or trail, of sin.  “If the trail speaks, no matter what’s in the way, you can find yourself in a crowded room aiming the bullet at her heart, never mind if it’s the heart you can’t live without” (Morrison 130).

             Defenseless from the spoils of sin, love fears the demeaning nature of lust trying to take its place. The love between Joe and Dorcas was a fake love, because it was surrounded by lust thus brought upon the downfall of both. Joe simply did not know “when to love something and when to quit” (Morrison 9). He discovered strength in himself through Dorcas that he had not experienced for many years. With that he held onto the idea of being young again. Love for Joe was a defining and eye opening force, it made him realize a love like the one with Dorcas embodied superficiality and in the end his love for his wife was renewed.

            Love became a simple and pure thing for Joe; but Joe felt he had to end it to keep the feeling going after the fact. He and his wife Violet then shared not only their lives together, but discovered that their love blossomed in things like a shared milk-shake and merely sitting next to each other.  They felt the love emanating from their pores. Dorcas’ opinion of love was a jaded one, and her naiveté played a role in her death. Her materialism and pure lust for sexuality drove her into the downward spiral until she unyieldingly “let herself die” (Morrison 204). The bullet wound she suffered was not deadly, but she refused to seek medical care and bled to death.

            Violet’s love for Joe was purer; she loved him for the light he had inside of him, a light that had dimmed over the years. She wondered,

Maybe that is what she saw. Not the fifty year old man toting a sample case, but my Joe Trace, my Virginia Joe Trace who carried a light inside of him, whose shoulders were razor sharp and who looked at me with two-color eyes and never saw anybody else. Could she have looked at him and seen that? Did she feel that, know that? (Morrison 96).    

The characters in Morrison’s novel are left to wonder what can make all these things complete. Their lives lack something and they try to fill them up with an indefinable love. The idea is “that, of course is the message of the blues: there is no completeness, only the story of its absence, whether the characters are Adam and Eve or Joe and Dorcas or Joe and Violet, or whether the story is just the sounds of a saxophone” (Rice 132).

            Joe and Violet’s love was surely more innocent and pure than the lustful relationship of Joe and Dorcas.  Their love was renewed instead of destroyed by the events of the novel, like a new beat to live their lives by.  “To the musician [like love] jazz is something he or she seeks. To get the elusive beat, a jazzman will do anything, without it he cannot do anything. The implication here is that the musician constantly [seeks] something that he finds only for a moment, something that is never caught but always to be caught” (Rice 123). 

The cycle of desire, indulgence, downfall, and rebirth in this novel is similar to a jazz beat. Even the chapters’ beginnings and endings reflect a jazz song; the end of one chapter is the long lingering note of a jazz piece and serves as the opening note for the next piece played. “Jazz always keeps you on the edge, there is no final chord…a long chord but no final chord” (McKay 1). A jazz song is rarely the same two times around, it tends to be purely improvisational, if the perfect beat/love is discovered it will not be unearthed again, “or if you do find it, it won’t be the same” (Morrison 173). Much like Joe’s utopia. “Our first two parents, yet the only two of mankind, in the happy garden placed, reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, uninterrupted joy, unrivaled love, in blissful solitude” (Milton 935). This feeling continues until the “beasts desire for its own filth, smelling good and looking raunchy,” (Morrison 78) overcomes the happy paradise, one thinks they have found the love they have sought.

Love, is an inconstant force as wild and transient as the wind, it hangs as one of life’s mysteries.  In the end the fruit is left hanging on the tree for the next beast to come along and fall into temptation. Love is a force, which is always desired and never really brought into full fruition. “The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone form there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like?” (Morrison 228).  Love is indefinable and can never be truly captured. Like Jazz music, it stands as a mystery, a force that fulfills, fascinates, and quenches the lives it touches. 

Works Cited

Furman, Jan.  Toni Morrison’s Fiction.  University of South Carolina Press, Columbia: 1996.

Leonard, John. “Jazz.” Toni Morrison -Critical Perspectives Past and  Present. Ed.  Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Amistad, New York: 1993.

McKay, Nellie Y.  Critical Essays on Toni Morrison.  G. K. Hall and Company,   Boston:1988. 

Milton, John.  “From Paradise Lost.”  The Norton Introduction to Literature.  Ed. Beatty and J. Paul Hunter.  W. W. Norton and Company, New York:       1998.

Morrison, Toni.  Jazz.  Plume, New York: 1992.

Rice, Herbert William.  Toni Morrison and the American Tradition.  Peter  Lang, New York: 1996.