Sensuous, Musical, Stream-Of-Consciousness
When you're writing a novel based on a musical form, you bet your novel is going to end up being musical. What ever do we mean by this, though? Well, one of the main reasons prose is ever called musical is because of the way it sounds poetic through its use of repetition and rhythm. Take a gander at the following quote:
Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help-stuff.
It's a short quote, but holy cow is it musical. Repetition? Yup. We count three stuffs in three sentences. Rhythm? Absolutely. Say it out loud, and feel the way you chant those last three sentences like the lines from a nursery rhyme. This musical language punctuates Jazz like a snare drum.
Sensuousness is also seriously huge in Jazz. We're not talking sexiness (although that shows up a ton in Jazz, too); we're talking about the senses. You really use all freaking five of your senses when Morrison is at the helm. Check it out:
And the city, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corners. Racks of yellow headscarves, strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors and speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat…
Let's just break this beauty apart by the numbers. We count two colors, two smells, four tastes, a myriad of touch-related words, and two sounds. That's one-third of a paragraph, folks. One-third of a paragraph describing one-one-thousandth of New York City, and you have a feast for the senses.
The style word we're going to throw at you is nifty and very capital-L Literature: stream-of-consciousness, a.k.a James Joyce's best friend. Here's a taste:
Nothing complex; you'd have to fight your own self to miss, but he isn't going to miss because he isn't going to aim. Not at that insulted skin. Never. Never hurt the young: nest eggs, roe, fledglings, fry… A wind rips up from the mouth of the tunnel and blows his cap off.
We're right there in Joe's head. His thoughts are thrown at us as he thinks them, and given without context. He moves from a thought about the quality of the gun in his pocket, to the possibility of killing Dorcas, to the hunting lessons Hunter's Hunter gave him to the wind kicked up by an oncoming train—and we're expected to keep up.
We do, of course, because Morrison knows what she's doing, but we're not led along as Joe's thoughts proceed. Stream-of-consciousness is arguably the best way to get close, maybe too close for comfort, to a character and the inner workings of their mind.