Hidden Text In Morrisons Jazz Essay - 1135 Words

In an essay that discusses Toni Morrisons authorial voice and her deconstruction of Western realist epistemology Susan Sniader Lanser focuses on the two areas that Morrison highlights in her depiction of human life and behaviour - the inexplicable, and the unknowable. The first revolves around the idea that characters and events cannot be explained with certainty because it is impossible to assign causes to effects or to delineate clear boundaries of responsibility (Lanser 131); besides, human behaviour remains only partially amenable to explanatory forms (Lanser 132). The unknowable, meanwhile, has to do with the inarticulable or what realism has designated non-existent or impossible (Lanser 133). On the one hand the inexplicable†¦show more content†¦The diction and syntax accentuate the paradoxical and the strange: Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, I love you. (3) Near the end of the novel the narrator realises the limitations in the depiction of character and event: Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out. (228) The attempt to delineate responsibility and blame leads ultimately to an admission of helplessness. The narrator remarks: I missed the people altogether.... Now its clear why they contradicted me at every turn... They knew how little I could be counted on.... That when I invented stories about them - and doing it seemed to me so fine - I was completely in their hands.... Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable - human, I guess youd say, while IShow MoreRelated Michael Ondaatjes The English Patient and Toni Morrisons Jazz2409 Words   |  10 PagesMichael Ondaatjes The English Patient and Toni Morrisons Jazz      Ã‚   Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps leave room in which identity is found through body and environment in Michael Ondaatjes The English Patient and Toni Morrisons Jazz. Ondaatjes characters retrieve their absent personas by mutually colonizing lovers bodies, thus developing a metaphor for the body as topography. Morrison spins this in reverse, personifying and merging the Citys infrastructure with human structureRead MoreElements of Postmodernism in Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo, Don Delillos White Noise, Toni Morrisons Beloved and Thomas Pynchons the Crying of Lot 496348 Words   |  26 PagesToni Morrisons Beloved and Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 are only a few of many which contain all or some of postmodernisms most distinguishable elements. Throught these four novels one can perceive the concepts of potmodernism, from its assault upon traditional narratives to the role of the individual in an impersonal, emotionless society. The narrative techniques applied by the authors are entirely consistent with the postmodern strive to break up the structure of the text and