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Big Breakfast #1: “crooner”

As you know, I’ve put a book club together and it’s… well, it’s moving along. We’ve started with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and here are a few thoughts on the opening story “Crooner”. It was written in a hurry, so it’s a little messy and probably full of errors, but in a way, it’s the best I can do with the time I have. In any case, I’m putting this up at the book club and thought it would be nice to have it here as well.

On the surface, “Crooner” has quite a simplistic plot. It seems to have a direct message about love and practicalities, and I think it’s fair to say that that’s a description that’s perfectly reasonable. Yet, the story also presents us with a number of slightly unusual elements, like a curious fixation on nationalities and a rather implausible excuse for the whole divorce. In a sense, the story works fine if you take it at the surface level, but it also makes certain implications that may hint at a more complex truth. In fact, this image-truth duality is found within the story as well, and it’s what we’re going to talk about in our inaugural edition of this commentary column.

“Crooner” is a story built on—for the lack of a better word—images. There is a sense of fabrication that permeates the tale. In particular, Venice has turned into a farce. It builds itself on the expectations of tourists. As a result, musicians are selected based on the modernity of their instruments as well as their nationality. Poor Jan is forced to play through a boring repertoire that’s not quite the “classical stuff” or the “latest pop hits” but something that the audience will recognise, like music from “The Godfather” (which almost seems to mock the fact that this takes place in Italy).

On the other hand, consider Jan, who lives by forging an image for and of himself. He is compelled to do so because he’s not well-liked but also indispensable. (Speaking of which, consider the somewhat contradictory nature of how it is perceived that tourists will not like guitars even if guitars are indispensable.) He has to get himself a jazz model guitar so he doesn’t come across as being a rock n’ roll musician. He even has to disguise his real name Janacek as a nickname. Jan is a foreigner even if he does everything in his power not to come across as one.

One of the things that I found difficult to reconcile at first was the nationalities. It’s harped on again and again by Tony Gardner, who insists that there are things Jan will not understand because he came from a “communist country”. Think also of the scenes on the gondola, where the three men are of completely different nationalities. What’s particularly interesting to me there is Jan’s relationship with Vittorio—the foreigner becomes the insider because of the presence of the American. The idea of foreigners first appeared significant to me because of how Ishiguro goes back to it time and again. If you look at it this way, “Crooners” is really a story of two foreigners—a guitarist attempting to fit in among the Venetians and an American tourist who cannot resist distinguishing himself from the people he comes across on the basis on nationality.

In the context of what I’m saying here, perhaps Ishiguro is pointing out to us that people react to others based on such generalisations, that there is significance in a person’s image (or the lack of one). This whole idea is reinforced with Tony’s Pork Chop Tutorial, which is essentially a hilarious generalisation of Milwaukeeans.

To put it simply, one’s image has definite power, and this is why nationality matters so much. Generalisations such as those we make based on nationality allow someone to shift in identity, in image (as Jan attempts to). I’d like to think, therefore, that it’s a signal from Ishiguro to realise the dual nature of an actual object or person and the corresponding image.

The relationship between an image and a true self—if it may be described as such—is explored throughout the story. In a way, things are never what they appear to be on the surface. There is the farcical Venice of tourism; there is Jan the faux Venetian; and there is the way in which love is never like in the love songs. Most cutting, perhaps, is the scene in which Jan proclaims, “We did it. We got her by the heart.” In a cruel turn of events, he finds that he’s right, but just not in the way that he had initially imagined—first the image, and then the truth.

The most fascinating presentation of this image-truth pair to me is presented in Lindy. When we first meet her, she is talkative, rude, and almost a caricature of a person. This side of Lindy seems to be more of a symbol than a human being. In fact, when the trio in the gondola see her at the window, Jan comments that she “wasn’t much more than a silhouette.”

Yet the moments where Lindy really comes alive are in Tony’s stories of her. Here we see her more thoroughly characterised. We see her ambition, her charm, and why Tony fell in love with her. It is curious to think, then, that it is this version of Lindy, living in imaginations and stories, that comes off more vividly.

More than with anyone else, of course, the image-truth idea surfaces with Tony Gardner. In fact, it practically defines him. Gardner is right at the heart of the story, but who is he, really? To me, he is first and foremost a man intending to leave things behind. The question then becomes if he actually manages to do so. It’s an easier-said-than-done task, as Jan’s mother will tell you. “If only we could leave things behind like that.”

The two Tony’s in this story are easily identified. First of all, there’s the human Tony. It is he—not the guy on the cover of those records—whose hair turns grey. Consider Tony in the gondola. At first, he sits down so hard he nearly makes it capsize. Then, as he calls out to Lindy below the window, he rocks the gondola “alarmingly”. While singing to her, his posture is such that Jan fears he will lose his balance. Tony the human being is a clumsy old man whose best years are past him.

Compare this to the Tony who sings, whose “voice came out just the way [Jan] remembered it.” This is the same Tony who will live in the memories and imaginations of Jan, Jan’s mother, and all of his fans. This is a Tony of importance. Even the title is telling. It is not Tony the lover, Tony the humbled man that survives, but rather, Tony the crooner, the celebrity, the star. This is Tony’s image, and it is powerful because, in a way, Tony the crooner is deathless.

Yet the question returns: Does Tony succeed in leaving things behind?

The implausibility of the notion that he has to go ahead with a divorce in order to make his comeback successfully disturbed me to no end initially. (It still disturbs me now, though to a lesser degree.) How could he possibly even think that it’s a good idea?

To justify that, it’s imperative to keep in mind that, if we are to believe everything he’s told us, he clearly loves Lindy a lot. This whole incident torments him, and I think it’s clear how distraught he is by the end of the story. With that in mind, losing Lindy is a painful price to pay for Tony to return to being a star. It’s not something he manages without reluctance. He has a very callous way of putting it all—what with the new young girl he has his eyes on and all his that’s-just-the-way-things-are explanations—but it seems to me that it’s actually agonising for him.

Having established this, I propose that the whole conceit of the divorce being related to his comeback succeeds best when you think of Tony’s image and his true person to be so removed (or, ahem, divorced) from one another that he sees it as a necessary step to lose all traces of Tony the human being in order to make his comeback. The divorce is more painful for him than he tries to make it sound, and if you follow this train of thought, it then becomes a price that he’s willing to pay, but for what exactly? Well, if we go along with that, then it becomes logical to think that what Tony cannot let go of is in fact his former stardom.

In the choice between true love and his comeback, it is the latter which Tony Gardner fails to resist. He explains it quite clearly to Jan, that he’s not finished yet, always seeming to be in control, but I am of the opinion that this is in fact the thing that he has to leave behind. And having seen a more vital Lindy thriving in memories rather than real life, who is to say that he’s making the wrong choice?

Ultimately, what emerges is a picture of Tony as a man in love with the idea of what he could be, a man intensely attracted to his own constructed identity, and perhaps most of all, a man attempting to resist his own humanness. He is an old man, a clumsy man, and arguably an unhappy man, but these are elements that affect Tony the human being, not Tony the star. In a manner of speaking, this fear of his is greater than his love for Lindy. Or to put simply, he does what he does because he isn’t able to let go of his towering image as a star.

In this respect, Tony may not be at all different from Jan’s mother, a woman who “never got out”. He is a man unable to get out of the trap of his own image and therefore unable to leave things behind. The relationship between Tony’s image and Tony’s true self is comparable to the beautiful image of the gondola and the restaurant of lights. He appears to be in control of his own trajectory, but that control may be entirely illusive. Much like the gondola and the “party boat”, it is hard to tell who is leaving whom behind.

© 2010 a modest odyssey.