The Rhetoric of Unreasonable Optimism: Toni Morrison's NovelJazzand the Jazz Age

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance offers many aesthetic and rhetorical strategies for persevering in the face of life's difficulties. Set in Harlem during that period, Toni Morrison's novel Jazz combines music and literature to similarly explore the cultural resources that characters like Joe and Violet utilize to endure hard times. However, since the book is jazz music embodied in literature, extant criticism fixates disproportionately on finding musical resemblances in the novel, obscuring other perspectives and important insights. 1 In a reversal from most scholarship on Jazz, my article does not concern what the music reveals about the novel, but instead what the novel reveals about the music. This perspective illuminates that Morrison's concept of "unreasonable optimism" (xvi) was a cultural resource of the African Diaspora that functioned rhetorically as a perspective by incongruity, served as equipment for living during the Jazz Age, was point of fascination for Harlem Renaissance thinkers, and continues to linger in jazz music today. This understanding of unreasonable optimism is not only insightful for Morrison's novel, jazz music, Black experience, and the Jazz Age-it also has contemporary implications as a resource of American culture that can help people "keep on going" despite life's difficulties (Morrison 137). 2 The phrase "unreasonable optimism" was first coined by Morrison in her foreword to Jazz (xvi). There, she explains her project: "Rather than be about those characteristics [of jazz], the novel would seek to become them" (xviii). Her novel aims to describe "a period in African American life through a specific lens-one that would reflect the content and characteristics of its music and the manner of its expression" (xv). She continues: "I had written novels in which structure was designed to enhance meaning; here the structure would equal meaning" (xix). That meaning, "where the project came as close as it could to its idea of itself," would aim to capture "the essence of the so-called Jazz Age" (xviii). During the process, Morrison says that she was particularly "struck by" the "unreasonable optimism" of jazz music (xvi). Notably, this means that Morrison sees "unreasonable optimism" as both an element of jazz music and an indispensable component of "the essence" of the Jazz Age. Thus, unreasonable optimism becomes a prime candidate for analysis in the novel and the music and, accordingly, is the concept that drives this article. Unreasonable Isaac James Richards is a graduate student in BYU's English M.A. program and winner of the 2022 James L. Golden Outstanding Student Essay in Rhetoric award from the National Communication Association. He is also a student fellow for the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies and a Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Student Award recipient. His work has been published in The Journal for the History of Rhetoric and other venues. He would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, and he would also liketo thank Gregory Clark ...