1 - Jazz Fictions and the French Novel: Four Cases

Summary

As we saw in the introduction, the manner in which jazz became ‘black,’ what is here called the scoring of race, cannot be understood merely as a twentiethor even a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Indeed, the mechanisms by which music in general became the aesthetic category in which and through which difference would be articulated and naturalized find their origins at the very inception of Western thought as Western. To the extent that the West lays claims to Greek philosophy as its epistemological origin and the origin of its epistemology, we can already locate there the construction of an aesthetics in which media of expression are categorized and located hierarchically in relation to each other. This formal order gains strength and precision throughout the history of philosophy and is finally consolidated in the nineteenth century where it is recuperated and redeployed in a now overtly racialist, not to say racist, project by the racial scientists – anthropologists, historians, ethnologists, and biologists – for whom dividing humanity into categories of merit becomes the central preoccupation. While the vast majority of these thinkers were white supremacists for whom science was an instrument justifying various oppressive projects, the language they developed and the constitutive tropes to which they repeatedly returned remain with us to this day and became the principal lens through which jazz would be comprehended in the twentieth century. That jazz was largely given positive valence by those most interested in understanding it has made any kind of recuperation or counterdiscourse all the more difficult. In a sense, because jazz was circumscribed by white critics through the revalorization as positive of what were originally negative racist tropes, these terms were seen as somehow less offensive and therefore worked their way into the very understanding of what the music is and what makes it important. One of the most radical and vexing ways in which this happened was in a French literary tradition in which jazz played (and continues to play) a significant symbolic role.