Jazz in the Time of the Novel. The Temporal Politics of American Race… by Bruce Barnhart (2013)

When modernism with all of its aspects surfaced in the US, a number of innovations in various artistic fields turned up, be it painting, literature or entirely new inventions such as film or jazz. Jazz as America’s only real contribution to modernity, as some argue, was born in the 1920s and strongly  influenced other art forms.

Not only did it incorporate a number of innovative features and revolutionary aspects of interpretation and thereby proved its ability to assimilate diverse other musical impulses, but the feature foremost affiliated with this new musical style was an entirely different rendering of time. This, however, is what Bruce Barnhart sees as the most significant change that was brought to the attention of the public. Furthermore, one popular prejudice emerged with the advent of jazz music, namely that jazz syncopation, rhythms and improvisations were part of the inability of the predominately black performers who just could not comply to Western standards of music performance and ,hence, as argued some so-called music experts, played “badly.”

It is Barnhart’s main thesis in Jazz in the Time of the Novel that the freshly introduced notion of time as experienced in jazz, hence off-beat, before the beat, double time or improvisation on a theme shook the traditional concept of time and timing of the white audience completely, provided one could grasp the meaning then.

The author sees one of the reasons for the different experience of time for black people in the extremely quick development from an agrarian and rural environment to a modern city-based life strongly connected to the Great Migration: that during that period, African Americans made the transition from country life to city life in very few years. The same transition took white people about a century in little steps. Hence, a different and richer sense of timing developed for black musicians, and it was audible in the jazz performances of the time and continued as a dominant feature of swing and future styles of jazz to come.

That much taken into consideration, the novel of the same period, strongly governed by a mostly linear concept of time, was also influenced by the new music. For time and its rendering, measurement, and general meaning – including the repetition of events past, a chronology that could be altered and the repetition of precise incidents, and the improvisation based on perfect events in African-American music, particular in jazz – has had quite an effect on the novel.
At least on some novels written by African Americans and very modern white American authors as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stein, as Barnhart points out. Repetition in novel writing then, was usually disapproved of, labeled bad style, since it disturbed the flow and development of plot and time, hence was stopping the present and most of all the future from happening.

The body of fiction analysed closer here – after having made clear what timing, sound, presence of a rhythm as well as its absence in music and fiction would be like – consists mostly of  The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose short story “the Offshore Pirate” gets more and more attention in jazz studies during the last years). Other novels such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes and some brief excursions to Gertrude Stein and the works of Hemingway receive less attention. (Toni Morrison’s Jazz with its many twists, flashbacks and alternative versions of time and events may have produced a study even more interesting).

However, the key objective of this book is (I guess) not the analysis of a few novels. What makes the book newsworthy is the emphasis on time, timing, the adjustment of a new experience of “industrial” time that influenced not just labor, but also music and art in general.

Jazz music is at the core of the individual experiments of a number of American authors to embrace this new notion of time, rhythm, a strong audible and visible presence of African American innovation into the hitherto explicit blueprint for novel writing.

Bruce Barnhart is the author of several articles on race, music, and American literature. He  has published in Callaloo, Novel, African American Review, American Literature, and American Quarterly.

Review by Dr. A Ebert © 2014

Bruce Evan Barnhart. Jazz in the Time of the Novel. The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture. University of Alabama Press, 2013, 264 p.