Customer Reviews

The Story of Ja: Toni Morrison's Dialogic Imagination (Forecaast, V. 7)

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This is the most inclusive and interesting scholarly account of Jazz I have read so far. Unlike many scholars who have adopted Bakhtin's theory of dialogue wholesale in their discussion of ethnic women's writing, Tally supports all her arguments with unique clarity and consistency. Her book also gives a detailed overview of earlier critical responses to Morrison's Jazz.
The most intriguing is Part Two, where in her chapter-by-chapter analysis Tally demonstrates the manifestation of Morrison's dialogic imagination in Jazz. In disagreement with so-called "jazz critics", she examines jazz "not as the structure, strategy or aesthetic behind the creation of the novel, but as a perfect metaphor" underlying the novel: stories and the language used to tell them (61).The interpretation of generic intertextuality in the novel is most interesting, Tally notes that "the voice of the narrator is an imitation of hard-boiled fiction" (32)whose representative is Raymond Chandler.
In the book Tally explores the subtle ways in which Morrison is preoccupied with story-telling making at the same time room for the narrator's and other characters' voices "via the inflection of the words and phrases that call to intertextual references, or via the techniques of hybridizing which include other types of discourse within the surface narration"(138). Tally also highlights Morrison's narrative strategies which require active readerly participation such as the delaying of critical information, the extensive use of repetition, the narrator's intrusiveness, free association and circularity.
On account of its merits, I wish to recommend this book as a significant introduction to understanding Morrison's most complex novel for both scholars and "common" readers.

First of all: Tally's book is listed in the wrong category - it has nothing to do with music but is a study of Toni Morrison's novel 'Jazz'.
The Story of 'Jazz': Toni Morrison's Dialogic Imagination, is a worthy sequel to Justine Tally's previous monograph on Toni Morrison's 'Paradise'. With refreshing clarity Tally discusses structure, theme, and the intricate subtleties of Morrison's literary discourse in this novel, without ever losing sight of her main hypothesis, i. e. that 'Jazz', though set in the Harlem of the 1920s, is not primarily a book about African American music or the Harlem Renaissance, but rather one about story-telling itself, about how our knowledge of events is created, changed, received, and (mis)understood. Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about the 'dialogic imagination' in literature serve as congenial theoretical tools for this analysis. In fact, Tally's use of Bakhtin's theories is one of the most convincing and illuminating applications of Bakhtinian thought one can find in the fields of literary criticism. On the side, Tally also makes readers aware of the affinities of 'Jazz' to the 'hard-boiled' detective novels of Raymond Chandler, whose laconic style and implicit social criticism Morrison employs but also subverts in the second novel of her trilogy. At the end, the narrator has no definite story but rather acknowledges the importance of the dialogic nature of language and its consequent shaping of our perception; this includes the recognition that the "self" can only be formed and perceived through the "other." The story of 'Jazz' is ultimately the story of the relationship of language to the conceptualization of the self. For Morrison as for Bakhtin, "[a]n independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being."
A very rewarding read, highly recommended for everyone who is interested in literature and stimulating scholarly criticism.