Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century US Literature and Culture (review)
the music's expression and circumstance, its various idioms, styles, or movements; indifferent to the concrete poetics and politics of its conception—its soundings. No historicizing account of American jazz is necessary to think through its centrality in the work of Ellison. What is necessary is to find within the fissures and abysses that structure jazz experimentation the artist's nonending negotiation with nothingness, the poet's dialogue with chaos, the soloist/composer's sonic ritual of risk that finds a vivid literary analogue in the strongest moments of Ellison's fiction. For Ellison the artist, jazz can be no metaphor, can be no mere agent of academic instrumentality, because it is always already a paradoxical, transfiguring way of imagining and rendering life. Jazz is a way of thinking in sound that by its contingent nature, its inability to be accounted for by any dogmatics of definition, threatens to undermine every ideological ordering of life. A study of Ellison's relation to jazz that reduces the music to an explanatory metaphor, therefore, gives the appearance of being shaped by exactly the literary protocols of valuation and meaning that Ellison's art relinquishes to the impressions of style, sound, and movement in the moment that question ignites into performance.