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JAZZ. . ON "THE SITE OF MEMORY"'
. . . on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. -Toni Morrison 2 In Jazz, Toni Morrison identifies and explores the mechanisms by which Black people have been able to re-make themselves again and again on the site of exile-in the American South, in the American North, and elsewhere in the "New World." This essay examines the philosophy of form, the improvisation of possibilities, the sounding of transformation, and finally, the re-sounding of purpose, in Jazz. Specifically, it traces Morrison's exploration of the philosophical and epistemological potential of a diverse range of African diaspora expressive arts, all informed by the principles of improvisation and "truth in timbre" that perhaps achieve their greatest articulation in jazz. It demonstrates that through this exploration Morrison reveals how these expressive arts have functioned as a mode and institution of intervention and, therefore, as a blueprint and resource for re-creating a whole self. I. ART AS AGENCY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FORM Literature, accordingly, is the verbal organization of experience into beautiful forms, but what is meant by "beautiful" and by ' forms" is to a significant degree dependent upon a people's way of life, their needs, their aspirations, their history-in short, their culture. -Stephen Henderson3 The artistic goals informing Toni Morrison's fiction have been amply described by her in numerous works. In "Memory, Creation, and Writing," Morrison explains: If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its relationship to audience performance, the critical voice which upholds tradition and communal values and which also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restriction. (388-389) In "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," Morrison identifies the function that these aesthetic characteristics serve in advancing her goal to draft the reader into the role of collaborator in the creation of the text. She explains, "to have the reader work with the author in the construction of...