| Black music as art is one of the black traditions that have been transmitted to provide a safe location where black people have come to voice. Black music unites the joy and the sorrow, the love and the hate, the hope and the despair of black people. Blacks sing everything in music when spoken language fails to communicate since music provides the African Americans with the adequate expression for the deepest and most complex spiritual and emotional realities. Music is not only a healing and therapeutic power, but also an effective survival technique to them, which can be found in jazz and the blues. Many African-American writers have employed music in their literary medium and state with remarkable pride that their work is definitely informed by African-American music since in an act of transcendence, song can record the terrible price of slavery while sustaining a spirit that might otherwise, and sometimes does, break. As a historic process of acculturation and cultural identification, black music, especially jazz, bears such qualities as " 'swinging,' improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being 'open' to different musical possibilities."As the first African American Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Toni Morrison made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for their inventive blend of realism and fantasy, unsparing social analysis, passionate philosophical concerns and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depiction of Black America. However, no one has ever attempted to probe systematically into the music motifs embedded in her eight novels published up to now except for a few articles briefly mentioning the music qualities in her Beloved and Jazz.~1 That's why this dissertation comes into being—to study systematically how Morrison's music aesthetics influence her motifs and her philosophy, or rather to say, how these qualities interact with one another to form her soul-liberating texts.Knowing the importance of music, Morrison skillfully employs music in her texts to form intricate connection with cultural patterns for communicating ideas that are commonly found in black music as representative of the African-American oral tradition. Like black music, her stories should, as is maintained by Morrison, solicit a dynamic response. Based on three musical forms in black music, she deliberately engages in a process of assimilating form and altering content that is consistent with an established pattern of adaptation in African-American culture by modeling her texts on black music. The three motifs in accordance with the three black musical forms in her fiction are: the spirituals, which express the longing for, and assurance of, a home, a resting place in the wilderness; the blues, which wail through pain and turmoil to a release; and Jazz, which echoes familiar themes toward a new re-cognition.Music has occupied a special place in black people's expression of their self-definitions. In Morrison's fiction, jazz and the blues presence and influence are constantly felt, some way or other. Through the music, Morrison lets the marginalized group utter their voices. On the one hand, since Black people's aesthetic sensitivity is closely related to the conservation of culture and community value, Black music is the source for the culturally displaced, alienated and fragmented Black Americans to heal themselves of their wounded psyche. On the other hand, since the formation of Black music points to the fact that it's a process of acculturation and cultural identification, and it poses a way to de-center the white logos and to create a universe where blackness will no longer connote absence, negation, and evil but will come to stand instead for affirmation, presence, and good. Through writing on motifs based on Black music, Morrison is in fact writing to lift the black self out of the hole, to bring Black meanings out of the semantic shadows of the Master's language and to affirm these meanings in a medium which can truly be called a black text, a text whose margins are ruled by the black logos.Accordingly, the structure of this dissertation is also based on the relationship of Toni Morrison's fiction and her three musical motifs. Apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion, Chapter One through Chapter Five forms the main body of the dissertation, with Chapter Two through Chapter Four focusing on the thematic correspondence of Morrison's fiction with Black music and Chapter Five discussing narrative correlation of her fiction and black music on the level of structure and language.In Chapter One "Healing the Wound through Music: Aesthetic Sensitivity and Cultural Conservation," functionality of music as appears in Morrison's Black people's daily lives is examined. Black music as a historic process of acculturation and cultural identification in collaboration with Morrison's music aesthetics points to the fact that Black people's aesthetic sensitivity is closely related to the conservation of culture and community value. Therefore, Black music is the source for the culturally displaced, alienated and fragmented Black Americans to heal themselves of their wounded psyche. In her fiction, those who can express their feelings from confinement toward release form sharp contrast with those who are devoid of an artful expression to either release their pains or integrate into the Black community when suffering from frustrations and setbacks or failing to connect themselves to their people. Any lack of musical expression seems to have a serious effect on Morrison's characters, preventing them from developing an identity and cultivating a communal relationship with other people, while those who are capable of expressing themselves through music and other art forms can also form reciprocal relationships with their ethnicity and their community. The cases of the MacTeers, Nel Wright, Baby Suggs, Paul D and the slaves, who can express their feelings from confinement toward release, form sharp contrast with those of the Breedloves, Sula Peace and the Childs, who are devoid of an artful expression to either release their pains or integrate into the Black community when suffering from frustrations and setbacks or failing to connect themselves to their people. As Black music is also a certain kind of collective community expression, it certainly helps the spiritual transformation of its members such as Milkman Dead and Sethe. Milkman Dead finds his genealogy and further his lost identity through the song his aunt Pilate sings and thus becomes "undead" spiritually; the chorus of the Clearing People baptizes and restores Sethe into a new life of wholeness and a radical spiritual transformation. Therefore, in Morrison's works, the Black community and the musical narrative are described as matrixes of conservation for African-American culture and two of the methods to heal the wound.Chapter Two "Morrison's Spirituals: a Home, a Resting Place in the Wilderness" focuses on the Spiritual motifs in Morrison's fiction. In correspondence with the Spiritual's function as an expression of Black's longing for a resting place in the wilderness, Morrison's fiction creates a variety of people who are in their respective spiritual wilderness therefore both in want of and in search of a spiritual home. These people have either lost their subjectivity or lost their black identity. Among the former, there are women who have lost their female subjectivity by losing their me-ness (Nel), by suffering from bad faith (Pecola and Pauline Breedlove, Helene Wright), by confining themselves in their patriarchal houses (the Dead women and the Cosey women), by waging war against each other (the Cosey women) and by exerting their wild subjectivity over others (Eva and Sula), which is another expression of loss of subjectivity; there are also men who have lost their male subjectivity because of being "emasculated" by the denial of the whites. Among the latter, while there are people who are unable to realize the beauty of their black images (Pecola and Pauline Breedlove, Geraldine, Helene Wright), fail to defend their rights (Pecola), and finally isolate themselves by breaking off with their families and communities (Macon Dead II, the Childs); there are also people who practice the wild racism (the Seven Days, the Ruby Patriarchs) which harms both the whites and the blacks alike without any benefits for themselves. In spite of their state of being in the spiritual wilderness, some of them still fight against the darkness by trying to look for a spiritual home.Chapter Three "Morrison's Blues: Wailing through Pain and Turmoil to a Release" examines the pains and turmoil suffered by Black people as described in Morrison's fiction, providing the reasons for Black's being in spiritual wilderness. In correspondence with the blues' function as an expression of people's painful feelings and the release of such feelings, Morrison expressed the pains suffered by Blacks by first examining the reasons to cause these sufferings and then describing their efforts trying to vent their painful feelings. Slavery renders the slaves (Sethe) and their descendants to suffer not only from physical abuses, but also from psychic violence; As a manipulative instrument, misnaming and naming under slavery further render them to lose their true identity; Commercial society in which they live popularizes the dominant culture's values, brainwashing and pressuring such people as Pecola, Hagar, Pauline, Elma Estée, Jadine into accepting cultural dominance and controlling images disseminated by mass media; Double consciousness renders their racial identity into perplexity, thus failing in deciding whether to extol the ethnic culture of Africa or to fit into the Euro-American culture; the Great Migration and cultural orphanage bring about the destructive and distorting effects of physical and emotional dislocation on culturally mobile blacks. All these combined together to throw Blacks into the "bluest" state. Some of them vent their anger and express their miseries by resorting to violence; still others transcend and release their pains by restoring and re-clothing their wounded psyches.Chapter Four "Morrison's Jazz: Reconstituting Identity through Cultural Hybridity" probes into the solution offered by Morrison through her fiction in reconstituting the Black's identity. Morrison's literary jazz tries to tell the traumatic experiences of black people in America and tries to break the binary boundary by writing about Blacks' effort to reconstruct identity through cultural democracy. She makes use of jazz as the framework to reconstitute identity through cultural hybridity or as the consequence of cultural interaction and assimilation. Jazz is a musical form incorporating disparate cultural, stylistic, instrumental and performative elements into its diverse repertoire while still remaining essentially itself. Morrison's literary jazz also tries to break the binary boundary of white and black, men and women, individual and community, south and north, countryside and city. Therefore, she writes about their re-inheriting black cultural heritage and awakening black cultural consciousness, their effort to fuse African culture and Western culture, their resolution to create future out of shadows of history, their determination to participate in communications and bonds and to reconstruct identity through transcending their given names. Only in this way, can Black Americans remove themselves from marginalized position into the mainstream.Chapter Five "Music Reflected in Morrison's Narratives" focuses on the specific use of black music techniques in Toni Morrison's fiction as represented by The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved and Jazz. Morrison not only bases her themes on black music, but also bases her narrative techniques on it. These techniques include call-and-response, improvisation, repetition, jam session, cutting contest, open ending on the narrative level; onomatopoeia, repetition, and punctuation on the language level.The above analysis logically leads to the conclusion that what Morrison asserts and preaches are greatly influenced by Black music. Morrison's fiction narrates a resurrection ritual of people called to make a home on the site of exile and lift/remake themselves from the pain of loss and longing through cultural democracy based on cultural independence, cultural hybridization, openness, amalgamation as well as pluralism, communication among community members, solidarity, collectivism and unity. As distinct characteristics of African-American music, these are also solutions to African-American people's dilemma of being both Africans in culture and Americans in citizenship. Therefore these solutions embody a powerful critique of dualistic thinking and exclusionism.As far as the process of the argument is concerned, it is guided by the detailed analysis of Morrison's works. By analyzing her fiction in detail, the author attempts to find out Morrison's assertion and preaching in literary creation. This dissertation does not base its argumentative order according to the publication order of Morrison's fiction, but according to the chronological order of the appearance of the three musical forms. This also helps to structure the thematic concerns of Morrison's fiction (as well as the dissertation) into three main questions: the what (What situation are Blacks in?), the why (Why are they in such a situation?) and the how (How to solve this problem?).This dissertation is not dwelling much on the Whites' participation in the reconstruction of the Blacks' identity except for Amy's sisterly help extended to Sethe. As a matter of fact, black people cannot reconstruct their identity to the full extent without the cooperation of white Americans. It remains a question deserving our consideration and exploration in the future as to how Morrison writes about the cooperation of white Americans.
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