Pynchon's "White Negro" Jazz?

[Campbel Morgan]

In vhapter 5--General Rules IV: Emotions, Beliefs, and the Reader's
Objectivity, Wayne C. Booth provides an excellent scheme that applies
to questions we have raised about Pynchon's heartless characters and
the heart that beats in his books even though we can't locate in a
character. Under the subchaoter heading, Types of Literary Interest
(And Distance) Booth sets out the following scheme:

(1) Intellectual or Cognative
(2) Qualatative
(3) Practical

1) Pynchon's texts invite Intellectual and Cognative readings, discussions.
2) Pynchon's texts, while they do have elements of the quest
narrative, frustrate the Qualatative readings; such readings usually
require cause and effect, but Pynchon does invite Qualatative or
Aethic readings of the development of qualities.
3) Novels of ideas frustrate of undermine the Pratical or Human readings.

Now, it could certainly be argued that those who can not hear the
hearts beating in these books are not listening to the Jazz.

Maybe it's the music, the jazz music of Pynchon's prose that some hear
and others don't. I hear it in Ralph Ellison and others. I'm not tone
deaf to the beauty of Pynchon's prose, but it rarely reads like Monk
or Coleman or any other Jazz I know of. Maybe it's a white thing.


Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in
our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance,
when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a
white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little
nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In
the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a
number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to
business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo
and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on
its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending
it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow
those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I
yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true
to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way.
My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My
pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter
something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece
ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers.
I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last
tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking
calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his
fingertips.

Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly
across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is
so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.


At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a
certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as
snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for
instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on
the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees
knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me.
The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the
eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and
colored. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the
pleasure of my company! It's beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against
a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and
yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of
small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty
spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long
since crumbled away, a rusty knifeblade, old shoes saved for a road
that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of
things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little
fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is
the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be
emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags
refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored
glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great
Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?

[--Zora Neale Hurston (from The World Tomorrow, 1928.]