Big Breakfast #03: art and authentication

As usual, written in something of a hurry. And certainly with a more rambling attitude than before.

Today’s edition of the Big Breakfast takes on a less critical and more personal tone because the past two stories have dealt with something of considerable importance to me. Both “Malvern Hills” and “Nocturne” deal in part with the cost of making music, and in that way, explore the nature of art-making. So it’s going to be less critical and more reflective (or rambling, depending on your mileage).

In “Malvern Hills”, the narrator—I don’t remember him having a name—struggles to find acceptance among the music circles. The first reason that he proposes is that he doesn’t have the equipment, which is all quite fair, to say the least. The second reason perhaps comes across as being more perplexing. One would think that the fact that he writes his own music should be something of a bonus. That creativity is frowned upon seems inherently self-defeating in the field of music.

Whatever the reasons, it leaves the narrator more than a little frustrated with the state of affairs. He doesn’t give up, though. He retreats to the hills with every intention of writing more music and even starting his own band when he leaves the hills. It’s a position that involves quite a bit of confidence, and it says something that he keeps going. “If disappointments do come, you will carry on still.”

If you think about it, he must have some remarkable sense of self-confidence if he carries on in the face of such persistent disappointment. It is a hard thing to trust yourself; it’s easier to have someone to tell you that you’re on the right track. For the most part, the narrator doesn’t, and in spite of this, his passion for making the music that he wants to make subsists.

Whether you like him or not, the narrator stands firmly for what he believes in. It is a stance that causes him much frustration, as epitomised by the encounter when Maggie asks that he stop practising. Her manner comes across as condescending, which infuriates the protagonist. At this point, there is no question of the selfishness exhibited in his reaction, but his anger suggests a permanent friction—permanent, that is, as long as he stays the course.

The world around us is a practical one. Pragmatism is in fact sensible. The making of art, on the other hand, requires a definite degree of romanticism and dreaming. In an artist, the two necessarily have to find a balance, a task that can seem all rather Herculean. To me his indignation is promising because it means he hasn’t yet given into fear. (Compare this sense of coherence to Steve’s uncertainty.)

In short, the narrator in “Malvern Hills” has a stubborn insistence on making music his way. There is nothing to suggest that he is on the right track. In fact, almost everything seems to tell him otherwise. Therefore, it stands to reason that he persists out of belief in his work and his fairly tremendous self-confidence. The truth is, he may have no choice. No matter what happens around him and to him, his mind will always return to “that bridge passage that [he] still hadn’t got right.”

On the other hand, we do not find the same courage in Steve from “Nocturne”. If anything, these two protagonists share similar beliefs in terms of their music, but differ Steve is not quite as brave as his songwriting friend. To my mind, Steve sees the worth and measure of art, despite the admission that he’s “no stickler for artistic integrity”. Yet, not being quite as confident as the songwriter, finds himself hoping to get into the “big league”

Surely I can’t be the only person in recognising that this “big league” is nothing but the price of admission. If he doesn’t make it to the big league, Steve will essentially find himself left with the odd jobs and daily rehearsals. In effect, he will just remain trapped in his soundproof room, oblivious to the rest of the world as it is oblivious to him. It makes one ask: is it enough for a musician to hone his craft all by himself, to hear himself approach some kind of greatness alone? And how does a musician know if he’s any good anyway?

If you look at it this way, Steve’s ambition to make it to the “big league” is nothing more than a method of authentication—it allows him to say that there is some universal or even artistic quality to his work, that it’s no longer simply a functional undertaking. His aspiration to succeed is arguably driven by the want to prove—to others and to himself—that his music is more than just a form of employment.

So, poor Steve, left with little choice, it seems, buys into the commercial world—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he sells himself to the commercial world. After some halfhearted displays of defiance, Steve finally agrees to an op. Admittedly, he seems to have been duped into doing so by the preposterous lure that his manager lays out for him—“Once you’re healed up, she comes back…” It’s so preposterous that I cannot bring myself to believe that Steve seriously buys it. It appears to be more of an excuse, a shield to hide behind in case anything goes wrong or if he changes his mind. It allows him to hide his shame should he have to—notice how he blames Bradley for talking him into it near the end of the story.

Steve is a man who is not willing to allow his music to speak for itself. Fair enough, since this approach has never got him anywhere. It has, in fact, left him quite aggrieved, as with the case of Jake Marvell. Yet he forgets that in our world, popular opinion does not often affirm artistic merit. Nevertheless, very little avails him, and if he doesn’t have the nerve to believe in the isolated music of his soundproof room, then he’ll have to buy his metaphorical ticket and get his true and unappealing looks altered into the constructed image of a popular musician. The “real world”, so to speak, forces him to forge an artificial self.

The thought of it is somewhat depressing. After all, what sort of perverse game would have you sell your artistic dignity and integrity in order to prove your artistic merit? Musicians struggling to find validity in a society of commercialism; art fighting for its life in the face of pragmatism. It’s not a theme that’s by any means new to fiction, but it remains a compelling one because it describes part of the process of creating art.

Ishiguro’s musicians are not saints—they shouldn’t have to be. It’s true that they’re not always likeable, that they are often morally challenged, and also that they’re sometimes infuriatingly impractical. Maybe it is in this way that Ishiguro reminds us that they are human, as all artists are. That art is a human endeavour is fundamental to understanding why we champion it.

It is in this way that we find some of the challenges of making art illustrated in reading these two stories. In particular, they show how difficult it is to authenticate the value of one’s work—that is to say, how difficult it is to tell how you’re making anything that’s of any good. Steve chooses to do so by chasing after the “big league”. The songwriter in Malvern Hills is stubborn enough to stick to his guns. Whether or not either is ill-advised is up for debate, but what is clear to me is that they’re both going to keep going. Perhaps that is the nature of art, and, as Beckett would have it, even when we can’t go on, we’ll go on.

I’m reminded of the courage that the artists I admire possess. It is the courage to dream and to remain defiant. It is the courage to stand against the tide when you have to, even with the looming possibility that you’re on the wrong track. Most of all, it is the courage to face the soundproof silence, the blank page, the empty stage, and come out with the confidence that you can and will say what you have to say.

There is a scene in “Nocturne”, the most absurd scene, in which Steve, face bandaged, stands on stage with a turkey in his hand—or rather, his hand in a turkey—and is faced with a stranger talking on the phone. The stranger dismisses this curious sight as “some kind of magic show maybe”. I wonder how differently he would think if he had heard—or, indeed, read—the whole story.

It’s probably not so far removed from watching one of his performances. Imagine that: an anonymous man on a stage stands with a saxophone, an instrument that you recognise but can’t quite identify with—a metal turkey, if you will. If you don’t dismiss it all as just some kind of magic show, how he got there and what he’s going to tell you could actually be magic. It could be a jazz piece, a ballad, or indeed a nocturne.

But until he gets that affirmation, this anonymous man will have to find hope in the hopelessness. Whether or not he does so by staying true to himself may be a secondary point, because whatever it is, an artist must first be able to keep going.

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Big Breakfast #2: thoughts on “come rain or come shine”

Here are some random thoughts on the second of Ishiguro’s stories in Nocturnes. Again, it was written in haste and probably riddled with mistakes. Furthermore, it’s not meant to be an essay, just a collection of things I thought of, so don’t go expecting very much. It’s for the book club, as you know, but the book club may soon meet its demise. Meanwhile, here goes.

In “Come Rain Or Come Shine”, we are presented with a story about unfulfilled potential. It is a tale that uses the idea of what could be and what is to illustrate the nature of life in terms of how we find—or fail to find—meaning and completeness in living.

What was perhaps most striking to me about the story at first is that it’s steeped in artificiality. Characters, for instance, keep the truth from one another. Charlie adds something to Raymond’s room every time he visits, but the addition is typically superfluous and therefore pointless. The apartment seems to us contrived, bought, manmade. Charlie also makes up excuses to visit the dentist, as you will recall. One may even argue the way in which Raymond is used “as a tool to express your rage and frustration” (and more) carries with it a certain sense of falseness. Initially, no one wants Raymond there just because they want Raymond the person there. He is simply an apparatus for Charlie and later Emily.

At first glance, this appears to be used in order to criticise hypocrisy and dishonesty, in terms of how people lead their lives. For one thing, the deterioration of Emily—forgive me the avarice to say so—and Raymond’s increasing age seem to make their lives appear even more hollow when placed side by side with all of these deceits.

Interestingly, however, the story is concluded with a lie. Raymond has to pretend that he has forgotten about the music he used to listen to for the sake of his friends. The entire resolution is supposed to hinge on this. It all works out, but it then that asks the question of what is more true: that Raymond tells the truth and remembers all that music in front of Emily or his friendship and the sacrifice that he ends up making. The truth, it seems, might have kept Ray from truly fulfilling himself. A lie can be more than a lie; in this case, it can reveal Ray’s true nature, intentions, and the things that are important to him.

This sort of doubling effect occurs throughout the entire story. Ishiguro provides an early indication of this through his descriptions of music—a line that is sung ironically; Georgia as being a place and a girl; and Ray Charles singing the happy lyrics of “Come Rain Or Come Shine” as “pure heartbreak”.

In a similar way, Raymond somehow threads the fine line between being a friend and a lover to Emily, and if you look at it, it’s a little hard to divorce Raymond from Charlie. The two of them define one another. Charlie is what Raymond ought to become, with all of his success and money and all that, but he doesn’t; Ray has the one thing that Charlie can never have, a supposedly good taste in music. They’re only complete with one another, and it’s little surprise, then, that Ishiguro picked the names—ahem—Ray and Charles for his two leading men.

This raises the important notion that something can be described in two seemingly opposite ways simultaneously without a contradiction. “Come Rain Or Come Shine” can be both happy and heartbreaking. Similarly, the people in this story have to juxtapose what could be and what is, because it is only thus that they become complete.

In a sense, it can be argued that the greatest juxtaposition occurs between the unfulfilled potential of the people within and the reality of what they already have.

There are so many things in the story that are presented as things that could have been. A child never comes along for Charlie and Emily, for example, and Raymond never gets to be godfather. Speaking of Raymond, he is a guy who is essentially a failure. Charlie even comments on him and tells him what to do and what not to, but he just never gets to it. Meanwhile, Charlie has a pursuit of the “other” him, or maybe we can just say that he’s just interested in someone else, even knowing that it is never going to work. Emily too has similar dreams, hoping that one day she will find the ultimate guy, someone even more successful than Charlie.

This extends to the images used. Notably, there is the image of the roof terrace, complete with two picture-perfect lovers in the imagination of Raymond. Then there is Emily’s party image, where you’re dancing and the people don’t go away as you’d expect them to. It is an image made for a motion picture, and perhaps that is precisely why it fails to materialise.

And ultimately, Raymond has to become less than he could be—by feigning ignorance—in order to help his friends.

In summary, the folks within this story are always left to rue what could have been, which also explains why they always seem to be looking for some more. The irony is, these are people who keep looking, just barely realising that they’ve always had what they needed. Raymond the Prince of Whiners is really the best friend that Emily has and the sort of friend that she needs. Emily is the girl for Charlie, always has been, even if he’s convinced that there’s an “other” him. Similarly, Emily knows she’s always loved Charlie, even as she looks at men with even more success.

So look at it this way: “Come Rain Or Come Shine” is not a story about artificiality. It is also simplistic to suggest that it is a story about tearing up the constructed and manmade beauty of the apartment to get to the truth—the metaphorical destruction of artificiality, if you will. It is clear that life is rarely black-and-white, but Ishiguro takes us further into a meditation on the nature of life.

In this story, lies become necessary, living is characterised by failure, and the world around us seems almost entirely artificial. It is tempting to think that the story describes life in this sort of miserable way—albeit with a sense of humour. Yet, remember that Ishiguro still provides a measure of hope, because while these people (and we) never actually find the perfect things and fulfil the perfect destinies, they find love and friendship. Perhaps it is in this way—a combination of idealism and reality, aspiration and failure—that we complete the human experience. Life is, after all, more than a single thing at any one time.

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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.

And Never Let Me Go

“It wasn’t that I thought I’d burst into tears or lose my temper or anything like that. But I decided just to turn and go. Even later that day, I realised this was a bad mistake. All I can say is that at the time what I feared more than anything was that one or the other of them would stalk off first, and I’d be left with the remaining one. I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me. So I turned and marched back the way I’d come, past the gravestones towards the low wooden gate, and for several minutes; I felt as though I’d triumphed; that now they’d been left in each other’s company, they were suffering a fate they thoroughly deserved.”

Before this, I’d never read an Ishiguro book before. I had always wanted to try Remains Of The Day, but that title always got to me. It always seemed a bit distant somehow.

Then one day I was at Borders, and I wanted to get the Borders panda plushie, called Beckett because it reminded me of someone, and they were having a promotion and I could get it for cheaper if I bought some books. On a whim, I decided to get my very first Ishiguro, and it just happened to be Never Let Me Go because (if memory serves) that’s all they had in stock. And I’m glad it turned out that way.

Never Let Me Go is a story set in a slightly fantastic 1990s England. I didn’t realise this at first. In fact, it took me a while to realise the premise of what I was reading. (Much to my embarrassment, it took me a bit of time to realise that I was not reading about ordinary nursing students.) Yet, beyond this strange setting, the novel works its way into being a story about love and friendship and the very nature of being. It’s a glorious book, written with a gentle elegance and a faint strangeness, and is clearly at its best when characters are forced to deal with living with respect to themselves and also each other.

At times it did feel as if the setting was a bit of a contrivance, which was a little jarring because I couldn’t help but feel a bit removed from it all whenever I thought about this. It just occasionally felt as if the story could achieve what it was intended to achieve without moving into such territory. But it was just a slight feeling, and it didn’t happen very often.

The pages leading up to the conclusion did seem to me a little deus ex machina-ish. I didn’t quite like one portion of it because it reminded me of the overly talkative part The Matrix just before the finale. It just seemed disconnected somehow. Maybe it was the whole gigantic thematic sequence that it tried to have. It seemed to overstretch, to extend itself into an area that it didn’t do so well. Or maybe it was how the section came across to me like the big reveal in some crime novel when it really wasn’t one. That said, that felt like more of a blip than anything else in an otherwise remarkable stretch of writing. The conclusion itself was very elegaic and proper, and I didn’t feel let down one bit.

It’s a gorgeous book. Its finest moments are in the delicate bits, when the frailty of the characters is undeniable and their confusion or futility is reflected in Ishiguro’s wonderful prose. These are the points at which the novel proves most revealing. These are the portions that elevate the novel into its own special realm of greatness.

And with that, I suppose I’m done gushing. What a great way to start the reading year.

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