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CAROLINE RODY Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ome well-meaning adult gave me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions when I was fifteen years old. An odd choice for a Sunday School graduation gift, I thought at the _»* . time, butit turned out to bea wholly appropriate one, for that book was to end the era of my literary innocence and make of me an adult reader. This momentous change occurred as a result of a sur- prising twist in Vonnegut’s use of narrative voice. Breakfast of Champi- ons is a bleak and playful postmodern satire that casts its scorn broadly and erratically upon a debased, violent American culture. It is narrated, for the first three-quarters of its length, by a third-person omniscient voice. The unexpected twist comes late in the novel, when the narrator points our attention to a minor character named Wayne, just out of prison with nowhere to go, as he stands in the parking lot behind a cocktail lounge, idly overhearing a waitress calling drink or- ders to the bartender. “‘Give mea Johnny Walker Rob Roy,’ she called, ‘and a Southern Comfort on the rocks,” and so on. A few lines later, the omniscient voice continues: “Give me a Black and White and water,” he heard the waitress say, and Wayne should have pricked up his ears at that. That particular drink wasn’t for any ordinary person. That drink was for the person who had created all Wayne’s misery to date, who could kill him or make him a millionaire For their invaluable encouragement in the development of this essay, I thank Jay Clayton and Jahan Ramazani. [also thank my anonymous readers at Contemporary Literature for rais- ing stimulating questions about Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, as well as about relationality and difference. RODY + 619 or send him back to prison or do whatever he damn pleased with Wayne. That drink was for me, (191-92) The shock to my youthful readerly expectations was the sudden in- trusion of a voice called “me” into the bar scene, into the narrative world until now enclosed in third-person omniscience, and, more- over, the eruption of that first-person’s desire into the scene which, it now seemed, he had only been pretending to stage at a decent and disinterested distance. It was as if a hand had suddenly shot through the wall of the page to claim that drink, and for me, the image of that intrusive hand amid the dismal bar surroundings cast a sort of shod- diness over the entire enterprise of literature. The realization dawned on me that you could write a book in order to make it give you the drink you wanted. Now, ordering a drink in a bar, something I had never done at the time, and which I associated with a somewhat suave, slightly seedy, especially male sort of operation in the world, became for me perma- nently associated with authorial prerogative. From that time forward it has been hard for me not to think of literature as created primarily to give writers the drinks they want. Whether readings produced in this conviction are deconstructive or merely obsessed with authorial intentions, I cannot help but think that Vonnegut wrote this novel so as to get himself a deep draft of the elixir of authorial power. Indeed, from the moment that he orders that drink, the author becomes the most powerful figure within his own novel, entering the scenes, speaking with an “I,” and overtly manipulating his characters for their good or ill. The latent possibility of such an authorial eruption into the text haunts my reading of fiction to this day, and so still find it interesting to speculate in the middle of the most conventionally re- alist novel, Now what sort of a drink is this one going to want?! A narrative voice is always an elusive figure of a fiction. It mimics the presence of a storytelling person, and yet, through all the varieties of tone, claim, and mastery a narrator can display, our sense that the 1. Vonnegut’s entrance into his own text is an instance of what Jon Thiem has called the topos of “textualization.” In twentieth-century literature, the transport of the author—or 6200 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE speaking voice possesses “an identity distinct from the world it de- scribes” is, as one critic has put it, simply “an illusion of difference” (Hayles 26). At the heart of my readerly initiation story is the expecta- tion that a third-person omniscient narrative voice should present it- self consistently as the locus of the knowledge it took to write the text, and not become a participant in the desires in which the world of the text is awash. Vonnegut, by casting off the mask of objective omni- science to reveal a designing, desiring individual, a thirsty author, un- dermines the illusion of a narrating voice and at the same time mag- nifies the effect of authorial power. This form of play with narration belongs to the postmodern mainstream, that of John Barth or Italo Calvino, manipulators of the smoke and mirrors of mimesis, revelers in their power to raise wonder by sleight of hand with fictional worlds. Such novels often seem to deconstruct the traditional narrative powers of authority and knowledge, only to reassert them in other ways. For example, the authorial self that Vonnegut figures seated at a table “in a cocktail lounge of my own invention” is so afraid of com- mitting suicide that he is downing antidepressants with his drink (194). But such evidence of impairment only enhances a certain ro- mance of authorship. Indeed, depression does not prevent this “I” from staging a proof of his absolute power, as “Creator” (292), over his main character Kilgore Trout; in the final pages, he transports “the poor old man” wildly around the world, “to the Taj Mahal and then to Venice and then to Dar es Salaam and then to the surface of the Sun, where the flames could not consume him—and then back to Midland City again,” and ends by addressing him: “Mr. Trout, I love you,” I said gently. “I have broken your mind to pieces. Iwant to make it whole. I want you to feel a wholeness and inner harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before. ... “Lam cleansing and renewing myself. .. . Under similar spiritual con- ditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career. “You are the only one I am telling. ... Arise, Mr. Trout... you are free.” 292-98) Prospero’s rhetoric of enslavement and freedom makes it clear that the novel’s parodic manipulations of the narrative voice remain en- RODY * 621 meshed (as did Jefferson, actually) in a politics of domination. This is so despite the sustained critique of racism Vonnegut pursues in the book through relentless satire, for instance, comically foregrounding the whiteness or blackness of even the most unimportant “walk-on” characters. But the attempt to display and repudiate racist logic ends up replicating it in various ways, I think, not least when the depressed white author makes his dramatic entry as “Creator” into the bar scene by invoking the ignorant witness of the hapless black character Wayne—whom he could kill or send back to prison and so on? The drink this author wants is a seemingly equalizing “Black and White and water,” but when he discards third-person narration to order it, only to allow a drunken, personified, omniscient Creator to run amok on the scene, any gestures toward justice and liberation are over- whelmed by the comic performance of distinctly self-interested au- thorial power. When I observed a differently inflected experiment with narrative voices, authority, and desire in recent postmodern fiction by ethnic American women writers, I naturally wondered what different au- thorial thirsts are at work on the American literary margins. I am speaking not simply of the emergence of powerful ethnic female tellers in formally experimental fiction by writers such as Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Gloria Naylor, Grace Paley, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Sherley Anne Williams. Rather, I refer to postmod- ern play with the convention of the omniscient speaker that works to reconfigure the relationships among narrative knowledge and power, identity and desire. I turn to two novels that demonstrate identifiably postmodern play with narrative voices, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Karen Tei Ya- mashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. In both texts, the narra- tor’s knowledge and power are not flaunted but unsettled or de- 2 Inanother parodic device, Vonnegut gives the wealthy white character Dwayne Hoover a double in the poor black “jaitbind” Wayne Hoobler (189); the two would share names even more closely had Dwayne’s father not discovered some years earlier that Hoobler was a “Nigger name” and changed it (130), But the evident antiracism of this conceit is defeated by the disparity between the two characterizations; the limitations of Wayne's character make him seem less oppressed than moronic. Moreover, the repeated parodic use of the word “nigger” loses its comedy. 622+ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE constructed by the force of desire, specifically, the desire for a human relationship. These novels personalize the omniscient narra- tor not by substituting, a subjective I, but—in a spirit that is distinctly ethnic, “marginal,” and oppositional—by replacing the all-powerful knower with a desiring phantom. In the following pages I will ex- amine a form of narration we might call the first-person omniscient anonymous and will attempt to name the thirst that moves a myste- rious, relational personality into the seat where abstraction and ob- jectivity have conventionally reigned, making the identity and the status of the knower a central puzzle of the story. Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz is narrated by an impossible speaker: an anonymous first-person voice who seems to know everything. His—or more plausibly her—knowledge recalls two irreconcilable kinds of nar- rators: first, the confiding tones of the subjective, limited, and personi- fied first person, a voice like Nick of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “I know that woman,” she begins, “She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too” (3); and, second, the capa- cious, all-knowing, objectively instructing voice of the third-person omniscient anonymous speaker, one like a George Eliot narrator: 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. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, itis for forever. ... 63) The combination is a logically infeasible voice: that of an individual present on the scene who yet can see through walls and across time to report everything from the private lives of individuals to the epic his- tory of a people. Critics of Jazz have drawn out the provocative elements of this nar- ration. Philip Page traces the voice’s sporadic failures of omniscience and its tendency to speculate, as well as its transgression of the boundaries that would separate it from both characters and readers. “[N]ot confined to ‘a simple ‘either/or’ structure/” he writes, “the narrator is knowledgeable and limited, reliable and unreliable” (61-62). Remarking upon the way this voice “slips easily and guile- RODY + 623 lessly from third-person all-knowingness to first-person lyricism,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that it “serves to redefine the very pos- sibilities of narrative point of view” (54-55).3 In spite of, or perhaps because of, the way it keeps us puzzling over its identity and nature, this voice and its sensuous, rhythmic, brooding pleasure in the life of the city is the text’s dominant note; interludes in which the narrator says things like, “But I have seen the City do an unbelievable sky” are more compelling (35), finally, than the poignant but tired plots of Vio- let and Joe Trace in their Harlem apartment, or even the first-person narrative segments given to several characters. Indeed, the only forces in the text strong enough to match the voice are the dead girl Dorcas, the lover whom Joe murders and whose photograph haunts the apartment and the novel, and the wild, naked, insane woman who lives in the woods of Joe’s country home, and who may be his mother. In mentioning these two mysterious women I want to imply a deep connection between a mysterious narrative voice and a mystery at the heart of a text. Both the dead girl Dorcas and the woman called an “indecent speechless lurking insanity” (179) link Jazz to Morrison’s previous novel, Beloved, also obsessed with the figure of a dead girl. Morrison hinted in a 1985 interview with Gloria Naylor that she would some- how extend the figure of Beloved into Jazz (208-9). And as critics have begun to suggest, more than a few clues point to the wild woman's re- semblance to the wild, naked, pregnant woman last seen running to- ward the stream behind 124 at the end of Beloved, that is, the resur- rected ghost herself. That would make Joe Trace, the hero, the trace of slavery’s horrors in this novel of Harlem in the 1920s.‘ Similarly, Jazz’s narrator begins the tale, “STH, I know that woman.” That first word, “STH,” is probably Morrison's best approximation of teeth-sucking, but it may also remind readers of the name of the heroine of Beloved, 3. One such possibility is suggested by Paula Gallant Eckard, who reads this voice as a "jazz narrator.” embodying or speaking for jazz itself, especially in the way it seems to in- tegrate individual and collective entities in one “performance” (13) 4, See Aguiar fora detailed argument that Wild is “a manifestation of Beloved” (12), and McDowell (3). If Joe is the son of the resurrected Beloved, then his murder of a young woman becomes symbolically intelligible asa reiteration of the murder of Beloved, an act which itself repeats the infanticides committed by Sethe’s mother—this tragic chain a trace of traumatic history, 624+ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Sethe, which adds two e’s to STH. Beginning with a vowelless trace of the name of the “historical” heroine, this narrator transforms her to just the trace of inherited orality, as she goes on to tell us another woman’s story Traise these connections to Beloved here because the narrative voice of Jazz seems to inherit the ghostlike presence, the here-but-not-here, human-but-not-human quality of that celebrated novel's ghost. That is, Morrison seems to have arrived at the possibility of Jazz’s contra- dictory narrative voice—at once intimate and abstract—through the work of imagining slavery’s undead baby ghost at large among the living. It may be useful then, in pondering the import of a narrating phantom, to consider the relationship of the phantom Beloved to nar- rative knowledge and desire. In her 1985 “conversation” with Naylor, Morrison remarks that as she was developing Beloved, she imaginatively conceived the “self” as a separate entity, like “a toin or a thirst or a friend or something that sits right next to you and watches you”; “I. . . just projected her out into the earth,” she explains, in the form of “the girl that Margaret Garner killed” (208). (Garner is the historical model for Sethe, who kills her daughter Beloved in the novel.) Ifthe ghost Beloved, who embodies numberless lost African Ameri- cans of the slavery era, is also a “projected” figure for the dead girl who is the self, a twin, a thirst, a friend, if Beloved embodies a thirst- ing aspect of the self, for what does she, or her novel, or her author, thirst? Those who know the novel will know the answer must be mother’s milk. Sethe as a child was suckled by the plantation nurse while her mother worked the fields and recalls, “The little whiteba- bies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that be- longs to you” (200). Echoing through Morrison’s “history” is a cry for mother’s milk, fusing the historical, mass-scale deprivation of black children under slavery with that of the “thirsting” self, the daughter- writer deprived of her matrilineal inheritance. This is to say that Beloved rewrites history as a space of mother- daughter desire, and, as I have argued elsewhere, that the phantom Beloved, who travels through time to reclaim her mother, embodies 5, Page writes that “STH” “implants [al sense of orality” in the text’s opening (64). RODY + 625 not only the haunting return of the African American past, but also its mirror image: a present-day daughterly desire to reclaim the black mother-of-history, and a lost maternal past. Such a figure—and there are now a host of magically returning daughter figures in African American women’s literature—personalizes but never claims full knowledge or mastery of a traumatic, unresolved history.° Rather, she bears witness to an ineffable possession of (or by) the past, in an allegory of daughterly historiographic desire, a “thirst” that goes be- yond objective knowledge, beyond the rational, the modern. I want to argue that, just as Beloved’s allegory of authorial desire personal- izes the relationship of historical “knowledge” to “content,” Jaz2—by personifying omniscience—recasts narration itself as a terrain of human longing. The narrator of Jazz resembles especially the Beloved of that novel's coda, which reduces the ghost’s embodied form to a haunting; a “girl who waited to be loved,” “a loneliness that roams” (274). Like that ghost, Jaz2’s narrator, too, last appears after the romantic reunion of the main characters, in a strange coda about loneliness and longing to be loved: “I missed the people altogether,” she admits; “I thought I knew them,” but instead, “they knew me all along”: And when I was feeling most invisible, being tight-lipped, silent and un- observable, they were whispering about me to each other. They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all-self covered helplessness. 220) Exposing its “know-it-all” omniscience as a sham, this narrator re- veals itself as vulnerable, limited, personal. Indeed, in moments Mor- rison seems to conjure the personal, never-before-heard voice of The Narrator, that famed but elusive speaker in the text with whom all novelists collaborate: People say that I should come out more. Mix. I agree that I close off in places, but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays at another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive at- tention after supper, but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak— 6. I develop these ideas in The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fictions of History. 626 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE well, it can make you inhospitable if you aren’t careful, the last thing I want to be. o A voice that evokes its partnership with a writer—who may fall asleep after supper though she had promised to get back to the writ- ing—is one that insists on its separate identity, even its personality, while indicating too its dependence on a relationship with a creative counterpart. Strangest of all, however, is the very end, when the voice goes on to confess that it is lonely and longs above all for love. It says of the protagonists Joe and Violet: Lenvy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That Twant you to love me back and show it tome. That I love the way you told me, how close you let me be to you, 1 like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that's the kick. (229) Morrison has remarked that she likes her writing to leave spaces for the reader, like a “Black preacher [who] requires his congregation to .--join him in the sermon” (“Rootedness” 341). But she goes beyond such dialogics here in presenting a narrative voice that would give up all its knowledge for love—for love of the reader, whose fingers she has felt turning her pages, whose face she has watched, whose reading eyes she has missed when they've gone. The final lines make it impossible not to acknowledge this speaker as a desiring subject: “If | were able I'd say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now” (229). In this suggestive ending, the speaker addresses us as “you” and alerts us to our role in this performance, urging us to do something with the hands we hold around her, as it were. We hold the book, so we can offer or withhold the response—that “kick” of an answer— for which this speaker longs. Or, as Paula Eckard suggests in a read- ing of the voice as a “jazz narrator,” “make me, remake me” is music’s entreaty to a musician “to continue the improvisation” (19). RODY + 627 Like listeners drawn into the music, our position as story-receivers is transformed by a teller who urges us to enter with her into the work of creation. Where Vonnegut startled me with an “I,” Morrison startles with a “you,” seen holding the book, that is, a readerly “I.” This recalls Walt Whitman's address to “Whoever you are holding me now in hand,” as well as the closing words of Ralph Ellison's invisible narrator, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (568). But Morrison’s invisible narrator leaves us more likely won- dering, Who is speaking fo me? We are left to ponder a character who seems trapped beneath the surface of the words, longing to realize herself in dialogue with us. In Morrison’s first-person omniscient anonymous, omniscience, unmasked, reveals neither a hollow ab- sence nor a simple speaking storyteller, but the site of mysterious personality that desires to realize itself in relationship, in community. Published in 1990, Karen Tei Yamashita’s little known but extraordi- nary satiric novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest presents an even more bizarre narrative voice. After a brief first-person prologue, an omniscient narrator tells of a thunderclap over the sea that rains fiery debris upon the boy Kazumasa Ishimaru at play on a Japanese beach, leaving him with a permanent cranial satellite—a small black ball that continually whirls in orbit on its axis about six inches in front of his head. The narrator recounts the family’s adjustment to this phenom- enon, Kazuumasa’s growing friendship with his ball, the ways it brings him interesting employment, and his eventual decision to emigrate to Brazil—"the sort of place,” his mother thinks, “that might absorb someone . . . different” (9-10). But after the few pages necessary to tell. this much of the tale, Yamashita’s narrator suddenly addresses the reader: “Well, by now, perhaps, you may have realized that I was that very ball, that tiny satellite whizzing inches from Kazumasa’s fore- head” (8). No, the reader could not possibly have realized the outra~ geous fact that the narrator and the ball are one, and Yamashita knows: it. This truly original narrative device raises wonder and perplexity it never fully explains or satisfies. Readers must simply accept the fact that we learn the stories of Kazumasa and all those he meets in Brazil. from an omniscient ball. 628 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE ‘The story of Kazumasa’s immigration gradually becomes an ebul- lient, heteroglossic Brazilian telenovela, in which the lives of the poor Brazilian masses—and of their rain forest—become entangled in com- ically hyperorganized global networks of commerce, communica- tions, science, and religion. Thus Yamashita, a Japanese American who lived for ten years in Brazil, demonstrates the vibrant transna- tional imagination that would also shape her next novels, Brazi!-Maru (1992), a realist historical fiction about an experimental community of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, and Tropic of Orange (1997), a tragi- comic, magic realist prophecy in which the Tropic of Cancer creeps northward all the way to Los Angeles, bringing with it the illegal mi- gration of the entire culture and history of the South. Writing for American audiences, Yamashita invents narrative strategies that en- rich and complicate our sense of interdependence across national boundaries. In Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, a feather, a pilgrimage, a love for pigeons, and other simplicities go through processes of absurd, then poignant, then grotesque transformation as global commodity capitalism seizes upon tropical nature. The products of human inge- nuity evolve and proliferate as if imitating the great rain forest, the book's sublime model of living process. But at the heart of this carni- valesque novel, a gleaming, diamond-hard, unidentifiable black sub- stance called the Matacao expands to fill every square foot of rain for- est as it is felled, bringing the whole world—its avarice and its best intentions—to Brazil. When this substance is found to be endlessly re- shapable, to have “the incredible ability to imitate anything,” even “the natural glow, moisture, freshness—the very sensation of life” (142), readers’ wonder about the great black Matacao—about its har- vest of comedy and of menace—matches our wonder about the ball. And when these two enigmas turn out in the end to be made of the same material, we encounter another link between mysteries of nar- ration and content. Who is this ball? As I discovered in teaching Yamashita’s novel, Kazumasa's ball is a veritable magnet for interpretive theories. As an element of the narrative structure, the ball seems to function as the mi- gration story initiator, zooming down from the heavens to select Kazumasa as hero of an immigrant’s picaresque narrative. This sense of the ball’s role is borne out when the ball disintegrates at the novel’s RODY + 629 end, whereupon Kazumasa acquires for the first time a “tropical tilt [to] his head” (211); the immigrant has become a Brazilian. As the presiding omniscience, the ball is a distinctive kind of knower, specializing in alertness to public danger? Early on, it earns Kazumasa a living by its uncanny ability to detect the industrial-age danger of railroad track deterioration, and later, its strange attraction to the Matacao signals the postmodern danger of global environmen- tal destruction. In this vein, the thunder and “flying mass of fire” that bring the ball to Kazumasa’s head surely recall the atomic bombing of Japan and the mutations it bred (3). Yamashita thus grounds the post- modern nature of this narrator, his knowledge, and his plot in a post- Hiroshima consciousness of the threats of human excess to a fragile environment. More saliently for our purposes here, the ball seems a parodic lit- eralization of narratorial omniscience itself. Who is that grand nov- elistic narrator, anyway—some sort of ball spinning in front of the head of the hero? Yamashita figures the glorious authority of a George Eliot speaker as an absurdly visible, undeniably goofy, and fi- nally impossible spherical attendant to the selected aspiring head, as- signed to him by some force beyond them both, by the cogs and wheels of literature. What turns the old-fashioned narrator into a ball here must be the thunderclap of postmodernity, arriving to disrupt any earlier story or identity of which Kazumasa might have been a part and to spin him into a realm of destabilized literary possibility, not to mention a realm of migrancy, interethnic encounters, global- ized systems, an international trade in simulacra and rip-offs, and competing religious, scientific, and touristic engagements with a col- lapsing environment. What is the difference, you may wonder, between “Reader, that 7. 1am indebted to Michael. Awkward for pointing out the intriguing connection between Yamashita’s bal and the “gray ball... of fur and string and hair” that hovers for “a whole summer” “just out of view” of Morrison’s Nel after her husband Jude leaves her for her best friend, the title character of Sula. Unlike Kazumasa, Nel produces a ball from her own mind; “fluffy but terrible in its malevolence,” her ball extemalizes and embodies her repressed grief and horror (108-9), Kazumasa’s ball, on the other hand, has a mind of its own. But it is striking that both authors suspend a ball before a character's head to embody strange states or forms of consciousness and to portray destabilized selves. Perhaps Morrison is on her way, in this early novel, from her characteristic Woolfian figures for phases of mind to the disembodied mental presence central to Jazz 630+ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE drink was for me” and “Reader, that ball was me”? The two could not differ more. In the first instance, Vonnegut’s authorial hand enters, late in the text, “on a par with the Creator of the Universe” (200), mani- festing his mastery, getting the drink he wants. Yamashita, by con- trast, switches from third-person narration toa startling spherical first on only her novel's sixth page, undercutting our comfort with the masterful voice by linking narrative knowledge with absurdity. This ball is not for me or from me but is me: “I” am a captive, rather silly subject of the text, and you will not be able to conceive omniscience here without noting the convention's absurdity, just as the characters in the book cannot ignore Kazumasa’s ball when they speak to him, try though they politely might. While Vonnegut's play with the voice ultimately celebrates authorial power, both Morrison and Yamashita shift the focus away from the author, onto the enigma of the voice in the text. Certainly the genre of the novel has teased the convention of omni- science from the outset, starting with the comically intrusive narrators of Henry Fielding and Laurence Stee, who frequently and blithely blur the lines between the personified and the omniscient, the de- tached and the desirous. And in the aftermath of the nineteenth cen- tury’s solid-citizen narrators, a host of modern and postmodern in- ventions have played out the possibilities of an unfixed or unstable narrative perspective. Indeed, Roland Barthes would have us “listen to the text as an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths,” as “a glistening texture of ephemeral origins” (41-42), But itis notable that these novels by Morrison and Yamashita by no means abandon the singular, controlling narrator; indeed the degree of attention that they call to the figure of the narrator is the crux of the matter. Each book is dominated by a presiding phantom, 8. Notably, however, when asked in an interview to name some precursors of her satiric handling of serious political issues, Yamashita named first John Irving and then Kurt Von- negut, the second of whom “has an ‘off’ sort of humor that’s always there, sort of jarring, and fun to read.” But she has “traditionally read more Latin American writers,” important ‘among them the Brazilian Moacyr Scliar and the Argentinian Borges (52), 9, Of relevance here is the perhaps surprising but fairly common us omniscient narrator, the kind Dorrit Cohn describes as “prominent “emphatically distanced from the consciousness he narrates” in postcolonial and ethnic fiction (26), where it might seem outdated or seem to carry traces of oppressive narrative structures. As I have argued elsewhere about Michelle Cliff's Abeng, such a narrative RODY + 631 invested with impossible knowledge, whose identity becomes a cen- tral mystery of the text. Surely they perform the role of the masterful narrator in order to examine and/or parody it, but to what end? Connections to Virginia Woolf may be revealing here, as so often in discussing contemporary women’s fiction. Among Woolf's fertile experiments with narrative voices is one that repeatedly skewers the pose of omniscience as it muses upon a problem recurrent in her oeuvre—the impossibility of truly knowing others: It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fel- low-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental, Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly. . . (68) Jacob's Room circles about its hero, playfully worrying its inadequacy to know or represent Jacob, and the challenge provokes wonderful ac- robatics in Woolf's narrative perspective. In one moment, as Jacob stands on a London street at night, stunned at the sight of his girl- friend walking by on another man’s arm, the narrator drops omni- science for first-person (plural) speculation, and then oscillates among observing, participating, and creating stances: This was in his face. Whether we know what was in his mind is another question. Granted ten years’ seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first; this is swallowed up by a desire to help—overwhelming sense, reason, and the time of night; anger would follow close on that... then up would bubble an irresponsible optimism. “Surely there’s enough light in the street at this moment to drown all our cares in gold!” Ah, what's the use of saying it? Even while you speak . .. destiny is chipping a dent in him. He has turned to go. As for following him back to his rooms, no—that we won’t do. Yet that, of course, is precisely what one does. He let himself in and shut the door, though it was only striking ten... (59-90) strategy may derive from the need for a polemical voice that can tell new truths and yet may also work, in an ironic doubling, to expose the implication of discourses of authority in the colonization of others (as in Cliff's pairing of a history-teaching omniscience with a young female protagonist who, we are continually told, knows nothing of the history the narrator relates), 632 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE These shifts are so nimble we may scarcely follow them on first read- ing, but in this passage Woolf first exposes the artificiality of conven- tional narrative omniscience before the truth of her own embodied, gendered, aged, and experiential knowledge; then imagines but re- jects—on those specific terms—a Vonnegut-like entrance into the text to encounter Jacob; then happily reclaims the greater imaginative power and mobility afforded an older woman by the role of disem- bodied narrator or author, who may indeed follow this young man to his rooms if she chooses. Omniscience is both a false, inadequate perspective and a strategically valuable tool for the female writer. Woolf acts not entirely unlike Vonnegut in displaying the pleasures of authorial privilege, albeit to a lesser degree, but her difference from him is clear when she unmasks authorial omniscience as a fic- tion with no resemblance to her actual, personal powers of knowl- edge and action. Woolf’s modernist, feminist experiment with narrative voice is among the twentieth-century innovations that have enabled Yama- shita and Morrison to parody the absurd abstraction of narrative omniscience. But important differences emerge in their experiments. Woolf ruptures the fiction of omniscience to foreground the limita- tions and nuances of a socially positioned consciousness like her own. But the two late-century, “minority” American women writers considered here—indebted of course not just to Woolf but to a het- erogeneous body of mid-to-late-century ethnic and feminist Ameri- can literary texts—no longer need to work to assert the difference a gendered or raced perspective makes. Treating the fakeness of the convention of omniscience as a given, Yamashita and Morrison in these nineties novels are interested not in supplying their own “identity politics” as substitutes for it, but in pursuing another pos- sibility altogether—the potential of omniscience as an identity one can perform." Both authors investigate the mysterious, solipsistic existence of the abstract, fictive personality that can speak omni- science, seeming to muse upon what is gained and lost in deploying such a strangely powerful voice. These gains and losses crystallize in the two novels’ conclusions. For both Through the Are of the Rain Forest and Jazz, conflating first 10. On postmodernity and performative identity, see Butler, RODY + 633 and third persons, end up addressing the second; both first-person omniscient anonymous narrators press the enigma of the “I” upon us ina direct address to a readerly “you” at novel's end. In Yamashita’s opening paragraphs the speaker tells us, “By a strange quirk of fate I was brought back by a memory,” was “reborn like any other dead spirit in the Afro-Brazilian syncretistic religious rite of Candomblé,” and now “am commissioned to become for you a memory” (3). Then ina matching epilogue, the book’s final page begins, “But all this hap- pened a long time ago” and goes on to locate us in a moment after en- vironmental apocalypse, when the destroyed rain forest is attempting a return; “But it will never be the same again.” The speaker closes, “Now the memory is complete, and I bid you farewell. Whose mem- ory you are asking? Whose indeed” (212). It is a very odd thing for a novel to leave us wondering “who”? Who speaks? Who could know this story? Who could tell it? Empty- ing out our storehouse of associations with narrators and their knowl- edge, Yamashita’s book, like Morrison’s, leaves us asking an existen- tial question: what mind exists here? Long novelistic tradition has trained us to listen for a presence called the narrator, and though post- modern variations encourage our comfort with a destabilized speaker, a voice that addresses us as “you” seems to deserve our re- turning the courtesy, and hearing it as an individual speaking to other individuals. An apostrophe to “you” can of course be seen merely to set up a mirroring structure that rhetorically reinforces an “1.”" But I take seriously the relationality of these narrative identities. Locating a phantom communicator within the workings of literary language, these novels suggest, as does Beloved, that what moves storytelling is not knowledge but desire, that writing is the trace of the desire for a relationship. In contrast to the narratorial domination model, then, this form of play with the speaking voice conveys a longing for com- munity.? It suggests at once a ferninist relational desire to speak to someone, and the ethnic literary tendency to embed stories in com- 11. On the mirroring structure of apostrophe, see de Man. 12. One might say the same of Woolf’s narration in Jacob's Room, in which the frequent use of “we” seems to point toward a commonality of vision: “and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly. ... Such is the manner of our seeing, Such the conditions of our love” (68). Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes on Woolt’s late experiments with a collective nar- rative voicein Writing Beyond the Ending. 634 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE munal telling situations, to return the relationship of teller and lis- tener to the written text from which it has been absented.13 The femi- nist, ethnic perspective of these novels seems to find the omniscient voice attractively powerful but isolated, and most likely in need of partners to a collective creation. In her feminist critique of objectivity in the discourse of science, Donna Haraway has argued along strikingly similar lines. Indeed, we might compare the convention of the omniscient narrator to that of the scientist's objective “eye,” both what Haraway calls “ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively” (584). Har- away champions “the view from a body, always a complex, contra- dictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.” The point of such an over- throw of “the god trick” is not “partial sight” “for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situ- ated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals” (589-90). I would claim that Morrison and Yamashita work within the same logic when they experiment with structures of narration that situate omniscience and make it vulnerable to relationality. Something is lost, both nov- elists suggest, when a self-sufficient omniscience holds sway ina nar- tative. And both richly demonstrate that loss by confounding our de- sire to know the speaker; challenging our own desire for mastery, knowledge, and coherence, they leave us at book's end longing to know a person. But to say that these novels foster relationality is to raise the ques- tion, Relationality with whom? Both novels seem to defer commu- nity beyond the text’s ending to our readerly response. Does it mat- ter who the readers are? The strange devices of these phantom narrators complicate the already complex question of the address of ethnic literature; ethnic texts often interpolate heterogeneous audi- ences, but in different ways and to varying degrees. Morrison has long said that she writes mainly for black readers (although “[i]f I’m specific, and I don’t overexplain, then anybody can overhear me” 13. The now-classic American ethnic feminist example is Janie’s address to her friend Pheoby in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; one also thinks of Native American women’s fiction in which oral teller-listener relationships frame the narrative, in- cluding Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony ane Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. RODY + 635 [gtd. in Clemons 75]), and her recorded comments suggest a desire to recover a black communal orality through the transaction of writ- ing.'# But in the narration of Jazz | think we find an abstraction of the relational. Though the narrator depends on relationships—to the writer, to the characters and their city, and to the reader she ad- dresses as “you'—this “you” is generalized. Correspondingly, de- spite the sexual suggestion of this voice and the racialized plot she tells, this narrator, too, is pointedly ungendered and unraced, an un- categorizable speaker. The relationship of book to reader, narrator to listener evoked here attempts to be both about gender and gender- less, about race and raceless, to exist within and yet beyond identity markers. In this sense Jazz seems neatly placed between the ab- solutely raced Beloved—embodiment of her lost people—and the racial indeterminacy Morrison cultivates in the novel that followed. Jazz, Paradise (1998). Though centrally concerned with gender rela- tions in the history of a black community, Paradise begins, “They shoot the white girl first” (3) and then deliberately frustrates read~ ers’ attempts to discern, over the course of the book, which of five possible women is the “white girl,” defeating our confidence that we know what race means. In 1989, between the publication of Beloved and Jazz, Morrison asked Bill Moyers, “can you think what it would mean for me and my rela- tionship to language and to texts to be able to write without having to always specify to the reader the race of the characters?” (266). In Jazz, I would argue, Morrison moves toward constructing the literary as a realm that can refuse to speak race and gender, here as in Paradise a place where she can pursue the free play of language in and out of racialized narratives and identities.'> Indeed, the epigraph that opens 14. In an interview published in 1984, Morrison says: “For a long time, the art form that ‘was healing for Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours... itis the mode of contemporary music everywhere. So another form has to take that place, and it seems to me that the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before . .. We don’t live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories that ‘we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out” (“Rootedness” 340), She contin- if anything I do, in the way of writing novels . .. isn’t about the village or the com- munity or about you, then itis not about anything” (344) 15, Notable in this regard is the mulatto figure Golden Gray, an unusual character in Mor- rison and the novel's figure for beyond-race identity, Son of a plantation owner's daughter 636 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Jazz seems to evoke a personalized impersonality, an abstracted voice of language: 1am the name of the sound and the sound of the name. Tam the sign of the letter and the designation of the division. “Thunder, Perfect Mind” The Nag Hammadi To place such a voice in Harlem is to speak, from within a history of race, with a free and unfixable tongue. Here we encounter a quite different possibility afforded by the first-person omniscient anonymous voice—different, that is, from the privileging of relationships over power. A voice that resists the limitations of identity markers may be, in fact, a powerful one for the writer. As | have argued, the personalized omniscient voice that reaches out to the reader suggests an impulse to make impersonal authority vulnerable to personal relationships, and in the process implicates its readers in relational desire too. But in the way that it refuses to “race” those relationships with readers or in any satisfac- tory way to account for its identity, this voice makes itself invulner- able to our desire to identify it. And in the process, it exposes to us both the privilege of invisible (dominant) identity that omniscience has conventionally upheld and the inadequacy of the familiar cate- gories of identity to account for the multivalent possibilities of a lit- and a male slave, he is raised as white; shocked to learn of his black father, he goes in search of him and finds that his longing for a father transcends race. Interestingly, this ambiguously colored and named character is the figure who links the histories of the protagonists Joe and Violet; Violet's grandmother helps raise him and often speaks of him in Violet's childhood, and he rescues Wild on the night she gives birth to a baby who is probably Joe. So though Golden Gray is neither protagonist's literal ancestor, he provides the novel with a kind of mixed-race ancestral figure. ‘When the narrator, chastising herself for “imaginling] him so poorly” and not noticing, “the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin” (160), rethinks her position in relation to Golden Gray, she says, “I want to be the language that wishes him well” (161). Creating € voice that wants tobe the language that wishes well the yearning, mixed-race figure at the root of the novel's stories, Morrison seems to look back at the African-American history she has long been reimagining with a very different, postracialized glance. Indeed, the sugges- tion that Golden Gray becomes the lover or at least the friend of Wild—who may be Beloved—gives his plot a dimension of deep return to black ancestry, but hers (intertextu- ally) a trajectory from wholly racialized to extraracial community. RODY + 637 erary voice. Conjoining these two effects, first-person omniscient anonymous narration suggests a desire for release both from false universals and from “difference” or “identity” as absolute values, in favor of a mobile, indeterminate voice that, transmutable as the Mat- aco, retains its mystery even as it imitates “the very sensation of life,” and that projects its full realization onto a sympathetic and cre- ative readership. If it is time, finally, to give names to the drinks on order in these texts, | would put it this way: the peculiar voice of Morrison's Jazz evinces a deep thirst for release from mere (historicized, racialized, in- dividual) speech, from the storyteller’s art, and into the shared life of language, thirsts like a long-jailed horn soloist for release into the transforming arena of communal jazz.'® As for Yamashita, her bizarre ball seems to me born of a thirst for a global voice—a postcolonial, postmodern, “postethnic” global voice, that is, one that readers could be persuaded to follow across the divides between old narratives of North and South, East and West, and so come to conceive a global eco- logical imperative.!? For whose memory does Through the Arc of the Rain Forest claim to convey? Beginning, “{I] am commissioned to become for you a mem- ory,” the novel ends, in its epilogue, “Now the memory is complete. .. Whose memory you are asking? Whose indeed.” Perhaps, located in a moment after environmental disaster when humankind is a mem- ory, we are addressed by a post-rain forest omniscience with nobody to know; “Whose memory?’—I can’t imagine anyone's. But more compelling is the sense that the novel leaves memory in our hands. It hands memory over to “you.” Who is responsible for the memory of human life on Earth? You are, now. Thus we observe memory, con- ventionally a most powerful property of an “ethnic” text, being trans- formed, Handed over to a community of readers constituted as “you” 16, This desire recalls a longing expressed in the 1984 Morrison interview cited earlier: “There must have been a time when an artist could be genuinely representative of the tribe and in it; when anartist could have a tribal or racial sensibility and an individual expression of it. There were spaces and places in which a single person could enter and behave as an individual within the context of the community” (“Rootedness” 339). 17. Lrefer to David Hollinger’s concept of a “postethnic perspective,” which “favors vol untary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (3), 638 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE because of an urgent imperative to save the planet, memory becomes a property that must be shared by everyone. Numerous indications in the text suggest that Yamashita addresses readers in the United States above all but addresses us in order to en- gage us in a global community of concern. And how better to do this, than with a narrator whose winning personality is unhampered by markers of national or ethnic identity? Yamashita and her hero Kazu- masa Ishimaru may have evident ethnic origins, but the ball appears origin-free, and its bouncy conduct of the plot around the globe man- ages to transform an ethnic perspective into a credibly global histori- cal witness. Yamashita’s ball, then, is a performance of objectivity that retains the trace of its historical origins: in the head of a writer who is American, Japanese, and Brazilian; ethnic, postcolonial, and a citizen of Los Angeles; at home in both hemispheres; and by birthright skep- tical of but wholly dependent on faith in universals. Well, by now, perhaps, you may have realized that that very ball, like the vast black Matacao, tums out to be an eruption of nothing other than first-world waste plastic. With this dazzling turn, Yama- shita’s miniature globe-narrator—far from escaping identity—further implicates itself in the forces of postmodenity. This voice is, finally, a postmodern paradox: a good old-fashioned narrator composed of consumer refuse; a sympathetic consciousness who nearly kills the hero by smashing him into the magnetic waste-field to which it is helplessly attracted; a cranial satellite reincarnated in a Candomblé ritual; a global omniscience stuck in orbit before a single human body; an ethnic cyborg, Like Morrisons narrator, it speaks a text deeply in- vested in gendered, ethnic, racial, and national descriptions, but both narrators themselves exceed such marks of identity, Not merely am- bivalent or self-hating ethnic voices, or cross-dressed feminist ones (though the name George Eliot does keep occurring when I think of the ball), these are unfixable, transgressive, postmodern perfor- mances, always beyond what we can say they are. So, though we read these final addresses to “you” and close both books wondering, Is she talking to me? we wonder even more, Who is it that’s talking? The absence of a named person paradoxically en- hances the allure of personality, makes us wonder more about the de- sirer of our attention. Who speaks? The answer is a person who es- capes us in the experience of literature, like the phantom Beloved, lost RODY + 639 to history, and in the novel that bears her name reconjured, then lost again, and finally reclaimed in the last word. These novels leave us with the mystery of the subject—still worth cherishing, as so many black, feminist, and otherwise “other” critics of the postmodern as- sert.!8 At the same time, they reveal that the difference between the voice and the tale is just “an illusion of difference,” for their narra- tors are made of the very substance of the texts: Jazz's narrator voices the banished, transgressive female desire embodied in Dorcas and the wild woman; and Yamashita’s speaker turns out to be made of the same trash that engulfs the planet in the story it tells; both speakers are deeply connected to the repressed heart of the matter. And this is what is most haunting about these voices: they seem persons half- emerged from matter, like Michelangelo's slaves, or again like Beloved. They are desires entrapped in language, whom only readers—not some higher Prospero—can aspire to free. For if they are in some sense deconstructed into textual desires, these postmodern voices remain valued, abiding, precious, and knowable above all, through the screen of words, in their desire to know another, University of Virginia WORKS CITED Aguiar, Sarah Appleton. “‘Everywhere and Nowhere’: Beloved’s ‘Wild’ Legacy in Toni Morrison's Jazz.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 25.4 (1995): 11-12. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill, 1974. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990. Clemons, Walter. ‘A Gravestone of Memories.” Rev. of Beloved, by Toni Morrison. ‘Netwosweek 28 Sept. 1987: 74-75. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. 18. bell hooks notes, “considering that itis as subject that one comes to voice,” the post- modern critique of subjectivity or identity can seem a threat to blacks and others tradition- ally excluded from public voice (425). Similarly, Bonnie Zimmerman writes, “the task of feminist fiction has been to create an authoritative voice, not to undermine an already ex- isting one” (176). ‘Writing on the narrator of Jazz, Gates comes to a conclusion in the same vein as mine: “it remains indeterminate: it is neither male nor female; neither young nor old; neither rich nor poor. Its both and neither. But itis alive” (54). 640» CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE de Man, Paul. ‘Autobiography as De-Facement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth- Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 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[New York: Oxford UP, forthcoming 2001.] Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: UP of Mis- sissippi, 1994. Thiem, Jon. “The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 235-47. Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell, 1973. Whitman, Walt. “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand.” The Complete RODY = 641 Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1975, 148-50. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob's Room. 1922. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1965. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1992. . "Karen Tei Yamashita: An Interview.” With Michael S. Murashige. Am- erasia Journal 20.3 (1994): 49-59. —— Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1990. ——. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1997. 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