Theme and Variation
Well, also like a jazz composition, our course and our readings should now be suggesting to you the organizing principle of theme and variations, which should increasingly move you towards ideas for papers. For example, I was thinking some more about our discussion of the title yesterday, and specifically of the appendage "a novel," which led me to think comparatively about the stream-of-consciousness, ballad-like, calypsonian section of The Lonely Londoners and the "Music" chapter of Trumpet. From the perspective of technique, this could be a rich novelistic equivalent of "fusic," and could allow you to pose some promising questions-at-issue for a paper. And the issue of names, wow, isn't this just getting to be a longer and longer trail: from Antoinette Bertha Cosway Mason Rochester, to the unnamed Rochester, to the role of nicknames in both The Lonely Londoners and Trumpet, to Millie MacFarlane Moody (losing that "Mac," especially, in the transition to Moody signals a kind of escape from paternal/patriarchal identificatory schemes. And then there's Colman, combining as he does the jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the implied cultural intermixture between Scotland and Ireland, the white jazz-influenced songster, Cole Porter, etc. Think about the Big Red section, too, where he and his jazz mates each have a "proper name" but "never answered to it" (145). In any event, I hope you're starting to form some webs of inquiry across these texts; maybe we'll do a whiteboard mapping exercise of these kinds of connections later in the semester.
For now, though, a bit of a breather after Trumpet and before we take on our most imposing text of the semester, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Over the next two class periods we'll watch Stephen Frears's film, My Beautiful Laundrette, which will focus on south Asian immigrants in working-class south London and continue our investigation of hybrid, intermixed, cultural forms and identities (what text doesn't do that in this course?!). Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbian, an important novel that I wish could be on our semester's schedule, was barely thirty when he wrote the screenplay for this film, which brings British Asian experiences the wider public's view.
But what remains with Trumpet? What did you think, for example, of the final two sections, "Last Word" (involving the revelation of Joss's letter) and "Shares" (when Millie and Colman converge in that elegant last paragraph)? Did you see Joss's narrative in the letter in any way revising his previous investments in making up one's own family tree earlier in the novel? What are the messages of that letter?
For now, though, a bit of a breather after Trumpet and before we take on our most imposing text of the semester, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Over the next two class periods we'll watch Stephen Frears's film, My Beautiful Laundrette, which will focus on south Asian immigrants in working-class south London and continue our investigation of hybrid, intermixed, cultural forms and identities (what text doesn't do that in this course?!). Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbian, an important novel that I wish could be on our semester's schedule, was barely thirty when he wrote the screenplay for this film, which brings British Asian experiences the wider public's view.
But what remains with Trumpet? What did you think, for example, of the final two sections, "Last Word" (involving the revelation of Joss's letter) and "Shares" (when Millie and Colman converge in that elegant last paragraph)? Did you see Joss's narrative in the letter in any way revising his previous investments in making up one's own family tree earlier in the novel? What are the messages of that letter?
posted by Eric at 12:27 PM
1 Comments:
OK, I'll take the bait of this Eric character and add a few words (!). No, actually, I just feel inclined to keep trumpeting some possibilities about Kay's novel ... I have a hard time leaving any novel behind, I guess!
Going back to that red pen thread again, I wanted to share with you this passage from an article by Irene Rose that I think is really interesting (and smart criticism):
"Kay's narrative works to undermine the presumptuous authority of the patriarchal red pen.... In its haste to stamp its will upon Joss's identity, it transpires that the 'cheap impostor' (77) that is the plastic, disposable biro has come undone and left a rather unsavory mess that is an 'embarrassment to the fine quality paper used on such certificates' (77)... In contrast to the evidently ephemeral authority of the pen(is) Kay goes on to emphasize the perpetual destabilizing power of the semiotic by juxtaposing the demonstrably impotent red plastic pen(is) with the continually renewable resource of the registrar Mohammad Nassar Sharif's fountain pen and his 'beautiful, black Indian ink' (77). As Mohammad hands the pen to Millie, Kay creates an unusual analogy between the symbolic and the sentient as she has him note that 'it was as if the pen was asking her to dance' (81). Conflating writing and dancing she imbues the passage with a sense of corporeal liberation ... employing an analogy to foreground the possibility of evading the blind, patriarchal yoke of the symbolic by releasing the semiotic through artistic expression."
Pretty good stuff, isn't it? There seems to be a paper idea in here somewhere with all these pens: pens of categorizing power (think, too, of the pens that will fill in those discriminating employment forms on The Lonely Londoners, maybe the pen implied by Rochester narrating and recording his story, etc.) and pens of liberation (such as the pen Moses will presumably use to write the story of the West Indian immigrants in London).
We still have said very little about the crucial "Last Word" chapter of Trumpet) (Joss's letter to Colman), with all of its many suggestive phrases and images: "ghost country," "mist, fog, and lack of substance," that Scottish folk song Joss's father sings (and that Joss then imagines his father sings to him, perhaps indicative of "fusic," or some kind of Afro-Scottish hybrid identity), the "loop stitch" of time, and the richly evocative final line: "My father came off a boat right enough" (277). Boats, I guess, carry connotations of trauma and being unhomed, but they're also symbolic of transformative mobility and passages.
Well, anyway, I thought I'd see if any of you out there still have a retrospective thought or two in the queue about Trumpet.
Post a Comment
<< Home