Reading

Just finished reading Agnon's novella 'In the Prime of Her Life', included in the collection 'Two Scholars Who Were in Our Town' (Jeffrey Saks, ed.), published by Toby. I'm tempted to say that the moral is "be careful what you wish for" but of course there's a lot going on here. Why was the narrator Tirtza obsessed with finishing what she sees as the unfinished business between her mother Leah and Leah's old flame Akavia Mazal? Why does the end result leave her miserable? Fascinating story, I want to dig deeper into it. But there's one more story in the volume that I haven't read yet - 'Tehilla'.

I want to come back to Genesis Chapter 3 and do a quick write-up here in my journal. It'll be out of sequence because I skipped from 2 to 4. I've written up the notes for it already, just need to organize and post them here. Then on to Chapter 5.

Toni Morrison's 'Jazz' - another story about love triangles, unfinished business, and death - sits on my shelf and on my list of books to do a write-up on.

Books I brought home from storage last weekend include 'Leaves from the Garden of Eden', a collection of Jewish folktales retold by Howard Schwartz; and 'The Book of Legends' (in both the English and Hebrew edition) by Haim Nachman Bialik. I bought the Hebrew book at the Bialik House in Tel Aviv a few years ago.

Genesis 03: Life and Knowledge

The first recorded conversation in the Bible neither involves nor concerns a man, and therefore almost passes the Alison Bechdel test. Why did Eve speak to the serpent? Maybe because it spoke to her.

Why does the serpent tempt Eve? Because it can.

People sometimes ask why the serpent, specifically, had a motivation to cause man’s fall. But I think this is the wrong question. What the text actually tells us, the very first thing it tells us about the serpent, is this: “The serpent was the most cunning of all the beasts of the field.” This answers the question, Why could the serpent, specifically, cause man’s fall? Nowhere does the text ask why the serpent wanted to, because we’ve already been told that – in 1:28.

What the text tells us is that the serpent was unique in its capabilities; it does not say that the serpent was unique in its motives. I think the serpent’s motive was shared among all the animals: resentment towards man for man’s having been given dominion over all other life forms. (Steinsaltz on 3:1: "Perhaps it sought to usurp man's position atop the hierarchy in the Garden of Eden.")

All the animals had the motive, but only the serpent had the method; all had the intent, but the serpent alone had the capability.

This, then, is the first instance of envy and jealousy in the Bible, even before the well-known brothers whom we’ll meet in the next chapter. And it is also of the same theme: rather than wanting to better itself and improve its own standing, the serpent wants to bring the other guy down. This is the nature of envy and it’s an all too common human weakness.

Venturing just a little bit into symbol, we might take the snake – and, in my reading, the putative rebelliousness of the animal kingdom generally – as a metaphor for how our lower nature, our animal instincts, will often use rationalization to get us to do things we know we shouldn’t do.

*

“He named her Life [chava]” – as Steinsaltz drily observes, he could have called her a lot of things at that moment. But he didn’t. He named her Life.

“- because she was the mother of all life.” I think the verb here [hayetah] really wants to be translated as “had become” – “she had become the mother of all life.” And indeed that’s exactly how Steinsaltz reads the later verse, “the man had known his wife”.

So, what is really going on here? I think she must have been already pregnant, and perhaps she told the man her wonderful secret right then and there. And now, suddenly, the fruit, the fall, the curse – none of that matters now, because they are about to bring a new human life into the world.

In the Prime of Her Death: 'Jazz' by Toni Morrison

IN THE PRIME OF HER DEATH
'Jazz' by Toni Morrison (1992)


In jazz-age Harlem, in the winter of 1925-26, a married, middle-aged man named Joe Trace has a fling with eighteen-year-old Dorcas. Inevitably, she leaves him for a more exciting man her own age; Joe tracks down Dorcas in a speakeasy and kills her - and then Joe's wife Violet attacks Dorcas's body at the funeral. And that's where the story starts.

'Jazz' is Toni Morrison's sixth novel, first published in 1992 and following the critical and popular success of 'Beloved'. Like 'Beloved', the story is haunted by a ghost - not the literal ghost of a baby, but the memory of an eighteen-year-old girl. In the 2004 foreword, TM writes that the inspiration for the story came from a James Van Der Zee photograph of a pretty girl in a coffin, and from the discovery of a trunk filled with her mother's memorabilia from her own youth.

Even more than most Toni Morrison novels, 'Jazz' is narrated in the author's flashback style. The real story of the novel - until the very last section - is the story of the events that led up to the bizarre love triangle of Joe-Violet-Dorcas: the lives of the characters, their experiences, their losses and their longings.

Joe Trace, born in Virginia in 1873, never knows his father and is separated from his mother at an early age. (As with most Toni Morrison characters, there's a story behind his name: "I'm Trace, what they went off without.") He forms close bonds with his stepbrother Victory and father figure Frank "Hunter" Lestory, but is obsessed with finding his mother. Growing up, he hears tales of a madwoman living in the wilderness, known simply as Wild, and Hunter intimates to the thirteen-year-old Joe that there is a familial connection between them.

Violet is born the third of five children to her mother Rose Dear and a mostly absent father. Following Rose's suicide, she is raised by her grandmother True Belle, who tells stories of the blond-haired boy she raised with her white former mistress. Violet develops a fascination for this boy - Golden Gray - whom she has never met. (It is hinted that Golden may also have some relationship with Joe, through Wild.)

They meet under a walnut tree in Virginia, working after a surprise cotton harvest, and travel north by train to New York in 1906 in the later years of the Great Migration. ("The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it.")

Both Joe and Violet decided early on never to have children, and in the end this decision haunts them. Onto the scene comes Dorcas - herself orphaned by racist violence in the 1917 East St. Louis riots, now living with her overprotective aunt Alice. Alice, determined not to let herself or her niece become a victim like so many black women and men of the time, muses on various forms of physical and spiritual defense. "All over the country, black women were armed" - and the ones who were not, sought strength in faith or in community (pp. 77-78). Alice sees the popular music of the book's title as a vehicle for the many spiritual threats to black youth. She takes Dorcas to a parade of black veterans, with a military drumbeat solemnly calling out protest against discrimination, hoping the sight will inspire the girl. It does - but not in the way Alice intended.

Dorcas ultimately finds the relationship with Joe unsatisfying precisely because he has no expectations of her. Even Acton's narcissistic demands are better than none at all: "He [Joe] didn't even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything - and it pleased him. ... Acton, now, he tells me when he doesn't like the way I fix my hair." (p. 190.) Joe, for his part, is enamored of Dorcas's skin blemishes - which, as a cosmetics salesman, Joe knows could be easily remedied. But he's insecure and he's afraid of letting Dorcas become too attractive.

Joe, Violet, Dorcas - all in search of something they've lost. "[F]rom the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he." This is Violet's devastating realization after contemplating her own, and Joe's, private obsessions in the wake of the tragedy with Dorcas.

And yet the book ends on a note of triumph and redemption. Dorcas' friend Felice, who appears early in the book as a side character, now moves to center stage. Felice is not only a foil to Dorcas, but also a healing force for Joe and Violet. In a narrative "mistake", the second shooting hinted at on p. 6 never happens; instead, the mysterious voice of the never-identified narrator seems to step back in amazement as Joe, Violet, and Felice take over the story.

The narrative voice of 'Jazz' is unique and enigmatic: an omniscient first-person narrator who frequently addresses the reader directly. In the foreword, TM writes that the book's style was born of frustration - and of a moment of epiphany and liberation.

The story of Joe, Violet, and Dorcas unfolds at a deliberate pace. All the forces of family love, loss, violence, prejudice, passion, and forgiveness that shape the characters and their relationships are told, bit by bit, in Morrison's spellbinding prose.

In its final pages, the writing is perhaps some of Morrison's most explicitly spiritual. Dorcas' last words remained with me long after I put the book down, as did the closing words of the lonely and disembodied narrator. I got the feeling that the voice of the narrator echoes not only the writer contemplating her characters, but also our own Author contemplating us all.