This week, let’s look at one of two major themes in Normal People, social class. I realize that last time, I left off with the threat to get into a mysterious issue, the role of dialogue and whether it may represent the characters speaking directly to the reader rather than through the narrator. I don’t wish to dodge this, but I’m not sure that Normal People is a clear example, so I will postpone the matter. (Yay!) Thematically, Normal People is a lot about sex and social class. Ms. Rooney, the real author, has an agenda here, I think. It’s gently put, but there’s a value judgement that sex is positive and even healing but can also be an expression of personal problems, and that some people judge others on the basis of social status and shun them unfairly. More on sex later. (Yay!) Class, like ethnicity and gender, is one of those issues not usually addressed in polite conversation in terms of recognizing and discussing differences. Money too. We like to pretend that social class doesn’t matter but Normal People does a nice job of showing that it does—especially on an emotional level. In polite conversation, and perhaps in polite books, there’s an attempt to smooth over differences and deny them. Of course, Normal People concerns an ultimate difference, the one between males and females, but addresses it more in terms of Marianne and Connell being different, particular people rather than representatives of two different genders. Perhaps class gets the same treatment. In an amusing passage early on, Connell recommends The Communist Manifesto to Marianne, thinking, he says, she would like it. He offers to write down the title, but she assures him she already knows it. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx argues that the goal of the working class is to displace the capitalist system with socialism, changing the social relationships underpinning the class system and then developing into a future communist society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. This would mark the beginning of a classless society in which human needs rather than profit would be the motive for production. In a society with democratic control and production for use, there would be no class, no state and no need for financial and banking institutions and money. Is this what Connell is advocating? No, he’s making an ironic joke pointing out the differences between he and Marianne. A flirtation, my dear. Although at the beginning of the book they attend the same high school, Marianne and Connell have a different social status, which is determined by social prestige rather than difference in wealth. They are both white Irish people, but Connell is from a single parent family; his mother was an unmarried teenager when she had him and works as a cleaning person in Marianne’s mother’s house. His family, the Waldrons, have a reputation in the community of being “bad” although Connell is seen as one of the “good’ ones. He works and goes to school, and there is not a sense that he and his mother live in poverty—they are just significantly less well-off than Marianne’s family. His intention has been to go to law school after graduation, despite an interest in literature. It is Marianne who persuades him to go to Trinity College in Dublin to study literature, even though this may lead to less monetary success. Marianne is the youngest offspring of a wealthy family, the Sheridans. Her father recently died; the implication is that he was older. Her mother, Denise, is a lawyer and works full-time. The family lives in a sort of mansion. In terms of social status, it is Connell who is “top dog.” Marianne, although coming from a wealthy family, is regarded in the high school caste system as being odd and marginal—because of her behavior and maybe her wealth. Connor is handsome and athletic. So, Marianne and Connell are from different backgrounds but are drawn to one another as friends and as lovers; Connell’s mother being the connection. Connell is self-conscious about his humbler background; Marianne seems somewhat embarrassed about hers. Although Marianne and Connell tend to deny and play down their class differences, their friends accentuate them, creating a meaningful context for the theme. Once they had off to University in Dublin, their social status is reversed. Now Marianne is part of a circle of other wealthy friends, who tend to look down on Connell’s humbler roots. The book is well along when Marianne and Connell finally address the issue directly. When they both receive merit scholarships at the university, Connell says, I guess we’re from very different backgrounds, class-wise. I don’t think about it much, she said. Quickly she added: Sorry, that’s an ignorant thing to say. Maybe I should think about it more. You don’t consider me your working-class friend? She gave a smile that was more like a grimace and said: I’m conscious of the fact that we got to know each other because your mother works for my family. I also don’t think my mother is a good employer. I don’t think she pays Lorraine very well. No, she pays her fuck all. … I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before, she said. I think it’s totally fair if you resent me. … I just feel weird about all this, he said…You know at the dinner last night, those people serving us, they were students. They’re working to put themselves through college while we sit there eating the free food they put in front of us. … The whole idea of “meritocracy” or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that. But what are we supposed to do, give back the scholarship money? In excellent fashion, this conversation is not resolved in any substantive way, it’s left open which is, I believe, how “real” conversations tend to go. Our thoughts and feelings linger afterward, re-casting the original experience. In this one, Marianne reminds Connell that in high school, she was treated badly by other students in a sort of reverse discrimination, and Connell guiltily recalls that he too mistreated her. At that moment he thought: just as their relationship in school had been on his terms, their relationship now was on hers. But she’s more generous, he thought. She’s a better person. I think what we see is that Marianne and Connell are from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are aware of it; it effects their relationship but does not prevent it from deepening. In a sense, they overcome whatever limitations their social status and class have put on them. ‘Kay. Next week—sex! I promise. Till then. (We have to wait?) #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

We’ve talked about how, at times, the locus of narration in Normal People can be hard to determine. That first sentence, “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell,” could be the narrator’s perspective reporting about Connell, or about Marianne’s perspective. It’s ambiguous, and I believe it’s deliberate. Because the two characters are so intimate, their perspectives blur. But, as the first chapter develops, it becomes clearer that it’s from Connell’s perspective. “To Connell, this seems like something she could accomplish in the car…In school, he and Marianne affect not to know each other.” But at the end of page two, we find, “She exercises an open contempt for people in school. She has no friends and spends her lunchtime alone reading novels. A lot of people really hate her. Her father died when she was thirteen and Connell has heard she has a mental illness now or something.” I’m reading this as a shift to the narrator reporting about Marianne—kind of from Connell’s perspective still. But this is not the sort of comment a real person would probably make. Like you know someone, and you think—they have no friends and are contemptuous of everyone. It’s too well-formed, as an inner thought and attribution about someone. It reads more like the narrator commenting, even commenting on Connell’s experience of “hearing” about Marianne. This chapter is the narrator showing a scene between Connell, Marianne, and Connell’s mother, Lorraine. It is all about Connell reacting to Marianne, and culminates with him saying, “I never said I hated you…” And then the narrator says, describing Marianne, “That gets her attention, and she looks up.” This may be the only instance of the perspective shifting to Marianne. Connell might infer that he got her attention, especially by her behavior of looking up, but he wouldn’t know this for sure. The story doesn’t say, “Because Marianne looked up, Connell figured he’d gotten her attention by saying he never said he hated her.” Then Marianne says, “Well, I like you…” and this is significant. The chapter describes how Connell is attracted to Marianne, albeit in a conflicted way. And he is shown as having rather constrained experiences of sex. “Any time he has had sex in real life, he has found it to be so stressful as to be largely unpleasant, leading him to suspect that there’s something wrong with him, that he’s unable to be intimate with women, that he’s somehow developmentally impaired.” Chapter Two, entitled, “Three Weeks Later (February 2011) shifts to Marianne. “She sits at her dressing table looking at her face in the mirror.” She encounters her loathsome older brother, Alan. Here’s a description of him. “Though he’s grinning, the force and extremity of this impersonation makes him look angry.” This is the narrator using elegant prose to show Marianne’s reaction. A real person probably wouldn’t think this thought, only that “he looks angry, he’s pretending to smile. What a lout.” After a paragraph break, time shifts to the past three weeks. From Marianne’s perspective, we learn about her watching Connell playing football (not American football), and lusting after him. We learn about what’s been happening in the past three weeks. “After their conversation in the kitchen, when she told him she liked him, (Chapter One), Connell started coming over to her house more often. The narrator comments, “She had to laugh then, and he had to laugh because she did. They couldn’t look at each other when they were laughing…” This represents a slight intrusion into Connell’s head, I believe. An explanation of his behavior. The next paragraph re-establishes the focus on Marianne’s perspective by using the word “seem.” “Connell seemed to understand how she felt about school…He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities…This surprised her.” (that he seemed to think that). The use of “seemed” establishes that through the narrator, Marianne’s thoughts about Connell are being described. As things continue in the story’s recent past, we read about the couple’s first kiss, the powerful attraction Marianne feels towards Connell, and this culminates in a paragraph break and shift back to the present where Marianne leaves after fending off Alan and going to Connell’s house for a sexual liaison. This is the narrator showing her perspective on things—almost all. This pattern of the narrator alternating between showing Connell’s perspective, then Marianne’s, continues throughout the book, giving the reader a double description of a relationship. It makes me remember the novel’s epigram from George Eliot: “…to many among us neither heaven nor hell has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence…” (whiny voice—‘scuse me, Mr. Pretentious Bully—‘scuse me!) You again? Security! (You’re making this too complicated, as usual. Isn’t the narration just omniscient? Hah, I’ve caught you making a mistake—hey, hey, hands off, I’ll go quietly. I’ll take my answer off the air). Thank you. I thought the door was locked. Let’s move on. (cool professional voice—But Mr. Bray, doesn’t the whiny voice have a point? Could you explain?) ‘Kay. The question concerns different kinds of narration. Omniscient narration is when the narrator entity can show all the different characters inside and out. The omniscient narrator knows the whole story from beginning to end and is relating it to the audience. In Normal People, the narrator presents one of two characters at a time, first showing Connell’s experience of the story, then Marianne’s. And as we discussed last week, there’s a sense that the story’s narrator doesn’t “know” the story from beginning to end; it’s more that the narrator is showing the on-going story of two people. Of course, that is illusion. We’ve also talked about how the story makes considerable use of free indirect style, which blurs the distinction between narrator and character. This is close to what’s called “third person limited point of view,” a style where a narrator sticks to one character but remains in third person. Normal People is in third person, the difference is that the narrator presents the alternating perspectives of two characters. There is another issue lurking here, my friends. The issue of dialogue. Is dialogue merely another aspect of the narrator showing the reader the behavior of the characters, or is it the characters themselves taking over the storytelling? Let’s wrestle with this next time. Till then. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, let’s look more closely at the role of the narrator in Normal People. A definition, please. A person who narrates something, especially a character who recounts the events of a novel. So, the narrator entity tells the story, right? I’m afraid it’s more complicated. Are we going down the rabbit hole? Hang on. Long time readers of this blog will recall that I like to make a distinction between the real author of a story, the implied author, the narrator, and the protagonist(s). Generally, the narrator tells the protagonist's story, or may even be the protagonist or some other character. (Nick in Great Gatsby). There are certain books, Dostoevsky’s come to mind, where the characters vie with the narrator in telling the story (polyphony, y’all). The implied author is a separate entity from the real author. This is a controversial and paradoxical stance that I have attempted to explain before. Let’s just say that the implied author structures a particular story, choosing the way the story is told, including who and what the narrator is. Let’s examine a particular scene in Normal People. Midway through the chapter entitled, Two Months Later (April 2012), we have a paragraph break, and then this passage: “Marianne went home for a couple of days this week, and when she came back to Dublin last night she seemed quiet. They watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg together in her apartment. At the end Marianne cried but she turned her face away so it looked like she wasn’t crying. This unsettled Connell. The film had a pretty sad ending but he didn’t really see what there was to cry about.” Appropriately, this passage is in past tense, as the previous section was in the present. However, I’m finding it difficult to contextualize things. In this passage, the use of the word “this week” fixes the time as relating to the previous scene but I don’t know if it was before or after. I think before. It probably should be said, just to be clear, that Connell and Marianne are sexually active with each other. Because of Marianne’s tears, Connell decides she's upset about something. “The character in the film had become pregnant unexpectedly, and Connell was trying to remember when Marianne has last had her period…Eventually, in a panic, he said: Hey, you’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” Is this evidence of the dim-wittedness of young men? Prraps, best B. But Connell’s a good sort, maybe a bit emotionally constrained. Marianne laughs and assures Connell she is not pregnant. “No, she said, I got my period this morning…What would you do if I was?” Connell states that he would support whatever decision she made. And Marianne says she probably would like to keep a baby but adds: “Do you think I’d be a bad mother?” Connell assures her he thinks she would be a good mother. They talk about their respective families and how they’d react to Marianne being pregnant. Connell assures Marianne that his mother would also be supportive. “She loves you, don’t worry.” But about her own family, Marianne says, “I don’t think they care very much what I do.” Connell thinks about how Marianne has described having “strained” relationships with her family. Of course, we the readers know it’s a bit more serious than strained. Marianne’s father was physically abusive to she and her mother, and we’ve seen evidence that her older brother Alan is rather like dear old dad. Connell thinks: “…she almost never goes home, or she goes and then comes back like this, distracted and sullen, saying she had a fight with her family again, and not wanting to talk about it.” He says: “You had another falling-out with them, did you?” Marianne acknowledges that she did. They go to bed, and Connell gives her an orgasm (I know you’re curious—read the book). Then she seems happy, and Connell is happy because he can make her happy. “He was the only one who knew her like that.” I do not summarize this scene at length to poke fun. I have another purpose, best B. The scene is interesting because we have the mysterious narrator entity showing us Connell’s perspective, including his inner experience. However, we the reader also possess lots of other information to contextualize things. We know things Connell doesn’t know, things Marianne knows and doesn’t know. Things the narrator doesn’t know. Really? How could that be? I kind of slipped that in there. Heh, heh, heh. Connell doesn’t know just how bad Marianne’s family is to her; he seems to have a need to think they “love” her, which is not her experience at all. Marianne doesn’t know all about Connell’s feelings about his family, about how he feels about his father (I’m not sure Connell knows this himself). She might guess that Connell feels badly about not being able to support a baby, but she doesn’t know this in the sense of Connell having told her. He didn’t. And the narrator? How could a narrator not know what’s going on in its own story? Well. This reader, reading this scene, immediately wonders if the reason Marianne is crying while watching the film is not because she’s pregnant but because she isn’t. Her period represents the loss of the possibility that she was pregnant. Of course, I am unusually sensitive and know all about women. (raucous laughter in the background. Women’s voices. Sound of a chair thrown). ‘Kay. But this was my interpretation, okay, maybe not the only possible one. But not Connell’s and not I think, the narrator’s who’s showing the scene from Connell’s perspective. It is the implied author who is communicating here with the authorial audience, the audience that reads critically and doesn’t just accept whatever the narrator says at face value. Also, it could be said that the narrator doesn’t know the title of the story or how it’s structured, meaning the long passages of time between the chapters. And what did happen when Marianne visited her origin family? She never says exactly, the narrator never describes it. Connell is shown inferring things about it. Does the narrator know and is refusing to tell? I don’t think so; I think the implied author is showing that the narrator has limits, that there are things outside of the narrator’s awareness. We are dealing with two levels of communication here. First there is the narrator of Normal People speaking to its ideal narratee, the audience who will “get” all the narrator says and not what it doesn’t. Then there is the authorial audience, whom the implied author is addressing. This is the audience that, while reading, is aware they are reading fiction, that the story has been contrived to produce certain affects, certain questions. And membership in these audiences can overlap. It is perhaps another paradox, but there is more in the book than what the narrator shows. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

Normal People, I’m going to say, is a book of recollection. A story of two people, told from a future vantage point and ending in a way that indicates the story will continue. One of the chief ways the author gives this effect is in the use of time. Time is handled in an interesting and skillful fashion. The reader notices right away that each chapter of the story is identified by a reference to a date and period of time. Thus, the first chapter is “January 2011,” the second chapter is “Three Weeks Later (February 2011),” and so on. The story is episodic; it is told in episodes or discrete scenes. The scenes that occur in the present are told in present tense, those in the past, in past tense. There are also scenes that collapse time; they are in imperfect tense and signify on-going actions or thought. Let’s look at how this works. The fifth chapter is entitled “Two Days Later (April 2011), which we might note is four months after the beginning of things. “He stands at the side of the bed while his mother goes to find one of the nurses.” Present tense—the implied author is cueing us that we are in April of 2011, the action is happening right now and it’s from Connell’s perspective. It is not the reader’s present—more on this later. We could say that the narrator wants the narratee to accept that this is the present, the authorial audience knows that, as the book was written in 2018, the story is actually looking back, recollecting, if you will. More on this later. Then without a paragraph break, a shift to an imperfect tense: “No one except Lorraine knows who Connell’s father is.” And then a shift to past, again without any paragraph break. “He drove Lorraine to the polling station to vote at the end of February.” Here Connell is apparently remembering an incident that occurred two months before. Then, “The other night Marianne told him that she’d thought he’d turned out well as a person…he wished he could tell Lorraine what she’d said…That her only son was not a worthless person, after all. That she hadn’t wasted her life.” Then it goes back to the present scene at the hospital. So, within two or three pages, without the visual cue of a paragraph break, the story has referred to four different instances (episodes) of time and space: The present of Connell and his mother visiting grandmother in the hospital. An imperfect time of thought about his father and mother, leading to— A memory of driving his mother to vote. A memory from “The other night,” of Marianne telling him he has value as a person. A return to the present at the hospital. I think we could say thematically that this passage is about Connell reacting to the encounter with Marianne in the context of being with his mother and grandmother, who tend to disconfirm him (or at least he thinks they do, or the book shows this). Marianne affirms him. But it’s told as four discrete events in time, it’s episodic. Complex and elegantly done. But wait, are you saying the use of the present tense is an illusion? Yup. After all, the story is written after the fact. Always, best beloved. What affect does this use of time have? The present tense, illusion or not, gives an immediacy to the writing. If the past tense refers to events that have already occurred, the present tense is about what’s happening right now, as the reader reads. I think what Sally Rooney does in this book is to show a recollected story, much of it as if it were happening right now, even though it’s a recollection of episodes. A recollected story elicits the retrieval of contextual information pertaining to a specific event or experience that has occurred (not that is occurring). It includes such features as visual imagery, narrative structure, and feelings of familiarity. 'Kay, this is from a cognitive psychologist’s description of episodic memory but it sure sounds like a description of a lot of fiction writing. As I understand it, humans have two broad types of memory; we remember discrete facts like telephone numbers, names, directions, and we recollect episodes. These episodes are remembered as narrative stories and often as visual images. These episodes involve an emotional context, happiness, fear, sadness, etc. Dreams are like this too. Fiction, with its use of narrative structure, emotional context, and visual imagery, is very congruent with human experience. At its best, we read a work of fiction and think, this is exactly the way I’ve felt. And Normal People is a fine example of this, of getting very close to “normal” experience. The story accomplishes this by using the mechanisms of recollection that humans use in “real” life. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

As we continue our exploration of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, let’s take a look at some structural issues. The story concerns two main characters, Marianne and Connell, and is told by an unnamed narrator in intriguing and adept fashion, a narrator who is able to whiz around and get inside all the characters’ heads. This busy and dare we say omniscient narrator entity however, is not an “I” in the story. It is not a character narrator as we have encountered before, actually just last time when we looked at Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. The narrator remains anonymous and apart and is pretty close to our old friend the implied author. Your old friend. There is liberal use of an element called free indirect speech or discourse. We’ve encountered this before too. Mario Vargas Llosa, in his book The Perpetual Orgy (a favorite at my house), writing of Gustave Flaubert, writes, “Flaubert’s great technical contribution lies in his bringing the omniscient narrator so close to the character that the boundary lines between the two vanish, in his creating of an ambivalence in which the reader does not know whether what the narrator says comes from the invisible teller or from the character…” It should be said that the device of free indirect speech was not invented by Flaubert; it goes back to at least the eighteenth-century and was used brilliantly by Jane Austen. What is it and why are you talking about it in the context of Normal People? What is the point? ‘Kay. Free indirect speech is what happens when the subordinate clause from reported speech becomes a contained unit, dispensing with the “she said” or “she thought.” For instance: Kate looked at her bank statement. Why had she spent her money so recklessly? Who the devil is Kate? She’s an example. More to the point, who is speaking here, Kate or the narrator? Or both? Normal People begins with this passage. Although I don’t think it’s free indirect speech, it is ambiguous as to who is speaking. “Marianne answers the door when Connell rings the bell.” Pretty straightforward, I suppose—but whose perspective is being described here? It could be that Marianne is shown answering the door when she is alerted by Connell ringing the bell. Or it could be that when Connell rings the bell, he perceives Marianne answering the door. Oh, oh. Down the rabbit hole, my friends. In a third reading, it could be that the narrator is showing this sequence to the reader. The passage continues: “She’s still wearing her school uniform, but she’s taken off the sweater, so it’s just the blouse and skirt, and she has no shoes on, only tights.” ‘Kay, who’s noticing this? Is it the narrator telling the reader what Marianne is wearing, or is it the narrator describing what Connell notices about Marianne? Or is the narrator describing Marianne’s own awareness of her attire? And this is just the first paragraph. But, you say (you actually did say) why is this important? The reader could blissfully read this paragraph with the belief that she/he knows exactly what’s going on. No need for some “pretentious bully” to ‘splain the hidden meanings. The point is that there’s a lot of ambiguity here, and it creates an effect. At the very least, it brings Connell and Marianne close together; it puts the focus on their relationship, and this, we shall see, is the point of the book. Still on the first page, we have this passage: “Lorraine folds the rubber gloves up neatly…” Lorraine is Connell’s mother, an important but not central character, so it’s probably the narrator here who’s describing her folding the gloves “neatly.” This use of an adverb is what we get from a narrator describing something vs. a character’s own thoughts. “We” don’t usually think using adverbs. On page two, we have: “He (Connell) presses his hands down further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets all at once.” Huh, again this is probably not something Connell would think about himself unless he’s unusually poetic. It could be the narrator describing how he’s arranging his hands using a metaphor, it could also be the narrator showing Marianne’s perspective on Connell’s behavior. Most of chapter one is the narrator observing the encounter between Connell and Marianne and generally showing Connell’s perspective and reactive thoughts. There is a skosh of exposition: “People know that Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway and that Connell’s mother is a cleaner, but no one knows of the special relationship between these facts.” Marianne and Connell may “know” this but wouldn’t “say” it in this way. It is the narrator’s language and perspective. What about free indirect speech, you say. Well, here’s an example from later on in the first chapter. “When he (Connell) talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a doorway from normal life and then closing it behind him.” Yes, the narrator is showing Connell’s inner experience, but it’s in his language (“weird things). Please contrast this with a more traditional showing of inner-ness. “Connell thinks, when I talk to Marianne, I have a sense of total privacy between us. I could tell her anything, even weird stuff, and she’d never repeat it.” Incidentally, the quoted passage mentions “normal life,” which refers to the title. We will investigate this theme of “normal-ity” as we go. I promise you. Perhaps this is a good time as any to bring up Gérard Genette's distinction between “the world in which one tells” and “the world of which one tells.” This refers to two different modes of storytelling, one in which the storyteller is part of the story being told and one in which it is outside of it, showing and describing. The narrator of Normal People is outside in the sense of not being a character in the story whom the other characters affect but who is right there in the room like a phantom the other characters are not aware of. There is a boundary between the narrator, and Marianne and Connell, and it is different from the boundary between the story and the reader. Marianne and Connell are not shown affecting the narrator, but Normal People affects me. Ooh. Till next time. #NormalPeople #SallyRooney #AlanBray

This week, a new story, my friends, Irish author Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, Normal People. Normal People was a bestseller in the United States and won critical acclaim, including being longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Set in Ireland during the post 2008 economic downturn, it concerns two young Irish folk, Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, and their relationship over time as friends and lovers. An Emmy nominated television adaption of the book aired in 2020. After the title page, we find an epigram, a quote from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “It is one of the secrets in that change in mental poise which has been fitfully named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.” It’s no accident that this quotation appears at the beginning. Let’s keep it in mind as we study the book, and perhaps return at the end to consider its meaning. The title too—Normal People—is it meant ironically or more literally? We’ll see, as the orange demon used to say. Writing about a different book in The New York Review of Books, Anahid Nersessian makes an interesting comment, “…the romances of Sally Rooney seem aimed at readers who, like her characters, have sex with the austere diligence of a high school valedictorian. What sets Rooney apart is that she makes what ought to be the most ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational, as if consent and mutual gratification—however defined—were the summit and not the ground of erotic possibility.” At first, this seems rather negative, painting Ms. Rooney’s work as romance, an implicitly lessor genre, and then describing her characters as austere and diligent in sexual matters, suggesting they’re a joyless lot. Valedictorians might object! However, the full quote actually offers praise, saying that Ms. Rooney is set apart from other writers in that she makes ordinary aspects of intimacy seem aspirational. Consent and mutual gratification are the summit of erotic possibility. Well, yes, Connell and Marianne have sex a lot. Yay! And they are not particularly wracked by guilt about it. Double yay! Some critics have praised Normal People for being a realistic depiction of contemporary men and women in their teens and twenties, particularly regarding their sexuality. Prraps so, best beloved. Right from the beginning, there is a sexual tension between Marianne and Connell; they are attracted to each other, despite class differences and the issue of Marianne being a sort of pariah at the private school they both attend. This is not a traditional heterosexual tale of the man pursuing the woman who must finally offer consent to do the deed. Indeed, Marianne seems to be good-naturedly reveling in the power of her sexual attractiveness, in the way Connell’s face turns red around her. Connell is the one who seems somewhat embarrassed by his lust. And, I’d say, Ms. Rooney, a woman, writes empathetically about Connell, a male character. There are some interesting structural issues in the book having to do with the narrator and the use of time, and rest assured we will be getting into those. Yay? At this point, let’s say that the connection between Connell and Marianne is that Connell’s mother Lorraine, cleans house for Marianne’s mother, and that the two young folk attend high school together. In the first chapter, there’s an interesting passage where Marianne and Connell are talking about school. Marianne seems flirtatious and confidant. Connell “dreads being left alone with her like this, but he also finds himself fantasizing about things he could say to impress her.” His dread is due to his concern over being identified with social pariah Marianne by his very caste-conscious schoolmates. In this scene, he points out in the context of talking about tests that Marianne isn’t at the top of the class in English, and she responds, “Maybe you should give me grinds, Connell.” Connell finds this interesting and anxiety provoking. “Giving grinds” is ambiguous; in British/Irish slang, it can mean tutoring, taking extra lessons outside of school hours, and it may also refer to sexual intercourse. Then Marianne (that scamp) introduces a mise en abyme, a story within the story, a part that is emblematic of the whole. One of the teachers, Miss Neary, is apparently lusting after Connell and this embarrasses him—the same structure of Connell being embarrassed over Marianne’s advances. Marianne tells Connell she likes him and this leads to the two of them arranging for Marianne to come to Connell’s house when his mother is gone so that they can have sex. And this is presented in a refreshingly straightforward manner. Marianne escapes her loathsome brother Alan (more on him later) and sends Connell a text—on my way, and he replies, cool, see you soon. Sex ensues. “Kay. Let’s talk about sex a minute (or two). I’m going to say that in Normal People, Marianne and Connell present a generally positive view of sex, although we need to talk about Marianne more in this regard (her choice of partners and certain…behaviors, in particular.) In fairly modern parlance, they are both sex positive people, meaning that they consider sex a beneficial and healthy part of being human. This would be in contrast to sex negative people who deem any sexual behavior outside of procreation to be evil or forbidden. Sex negativity restricts the establishment of an inclusive world in which everyone can express their sexual and gender orientations without fear or judgement. It may make people feel depressed and guilty about not thinking a certain way about sexual matters. Connell and Marianne frequently have sex as part of their caring relationship—and not to procreate, Connell uses a condom. Normal People shows sex as essentially joyous and meaningful, an attitude that gives yours truly hope for the future, as well as validating Ms. Nersessian’s comments. Till next time. #NormalPeople #Sally Rooney #AlanBray

Last week, due to constraints of space and time, we interrupted our discussion of Cellists, the last story in Nocturnes. Let’s continue where we left off. In September, Mr. Kaufman says there’s an opening at a hotel in Amsterdam for a cellist, with “light housekeeping duties.” Tibor asks for a couple of days to decide. His hesitation makes the fellas in the band angry. “That woman’s turned him into an arrogant little shit.” So the fellas are perhaps jealous/envious. They think Eloise is like a flirty actress, they’re mad at Tibor for not accepting his lot, which is theirs as well. They’ve all had the same dreams as he but apparently without such a mentor. Tibor had never told Eloise about Mr. Kaufman, feeling ashamed. Now he doesn’t want to tell her about the job offer. In a scene where he’s playing for her, she stops him, saying there’s something wrong. But she thinks it’s because he’s realized she can’t play the cello, which she admits to Tibor, saying she is a virtuoso, but is yet “unwrapped.” Tibor is almost “unwrapped,” thanks to her help. Tibor shows anger at her deception but quickly forgives her for misleading him. However, he decides to go away on a short holiday, and before leaving, lets Mr. Kaufman know he’ll take the job. So, something occurs when he’s confronted with Eloise’s lies. It’s a turning point. Maybe he decides she hasn’t really been teaching him anything, that it’s all been a sham. And he’s running out of money. So he takes the job. But it’s more than the money issue. Maybe he’s accepting that he’s not the virtuoso he thought he was. If Eloise can lie about herself, maybe she’s been lying about his potential too, lying in order to be intimate with him. When he returns after a week, she welcomes him emotionally, wants him to play for her, he does. They have “a wonderful afternoon together,” and are closer than ever. They don’t allude to her confession or to his absence. Then, Peter appears. Peter—the man who loves Eloise and from whom she’s been hiding. Eloise wants to talk to Tibor alone while Peter gets ready for dinner. She says she’ll probably marry Peter. Tibor tells her he has taken the hotel job, they wish each other happiness and part. Para break. “Tibor left our city soon after that.” The guys have drinks with him a last time. “Like I said, this all happened seven years ago. Giancarlo, Ernesto, all the boys from that time except me and Fabian, they’ve all moved on. Until I spotted him in the piazza the other day, I hadn’t thought about our young Hungarian maestro for a long time. He wasn’t hard to recognize…And the way he gestured with his finger, calling for a waiter, there was something—maybe I imagined this—something of the impatience, the off-handedness that comes with a certain kind of bitterness. But even that’s unfair…it seemed he’d lost that youthful anxiety to please, and those careful manners he had back then…perhaps he has a day job behind a desk somewhere. Maybe he had some business to do nearby and came through our city just for the old time’s sake, who knows? If he comes back to the square, and I’m not playing, I’ll go over and have a word with him.” Seven years ago, the band blamed Eloise because they believed she’d made Tibor think he was talented and then abandoned him. The reader sees a different story—so does Tibor, I think. The story about the connection between Eloise and Tibor doesn’t have that much to do with the music. She needed him, he needed her. He needed her to make him feel special, and she needed him as a way to hide from and delay the inevitable marriage to Peter which represented something, a compromise, a settling for something less than what she’d dreamed of. So both Tibor and Eloise transform in the story, accepting less and giving up on their dreams. At the end, we don’t know how Tibor himself feels about the encounter with Eloise, and we know nothing of Eloise. We do know they had a powerful connection that the narrator didn’t understand. The narrator, as is true in the other stories, does not change. He is the storyteller. We might recall from the first post about Nocturnes that Ishiguro stated the book was not comprised of short stories, on the contrary, he saw the sections linked like movements in a symphony. How about this? As we’ve gone through Nocturnes, I’ve mentioned themes and motifs that recur. Each story makes some mention of windows and doors and features a first person narrator who is a musician; the action in each story often culminates in a scene set during the early evening, the end of the day. The narrators are unreliable and clueless about the characters and events they storytell about. And these character subjects are typically a couple or a part of one, who are experiencing stress and heartbreak. These are the elements that connect the five parts. But is there a progression, the way there would be in a musical piece? Or a novel? Crooners tells the story through Jan of a cold and cynical arrangement made of their marriage by Lindy and Tony Gardner. Come Rain or Come Shine has glimmers of sincerity between the characters, despite Ray’s shenanigans. In Malvern Hills, the couple who are the subject of the story, Tilo and Sonja, are sincerely touching and tragic as they confront long-standing problems in their marriage. Nocturnes is funny and slapstick, but ultimately sad as the narrator, Steve, winds up alone. And in Cellists, we read about a real, although fleeting, connection between Tibor and Eloise. So it seems Nocturnes begins with a revelation of considerable cynicism about love, and conclude with a multi-layered showing of tenderness between people who sincerely connect and part. Between these, we have a tale of a marriage in which the partners try to trick each other into reconciliation, one of two people facing the dissolution of their marriage, and then a story about the relationship between two people who clumsily try to help each other but eventually part ways. A complex and satisfying book, my friends. Till next time and a new book, Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Ooh! #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

In Cellists, the fifth and final story in Nocturnes, we return to the city of Venice but with new characters. The complex narrative structure involves the story of a young musician, Tibor, told by a first-person narrator, another musician who is an unnamed saxophonist, although it could be someone who played with Jan in Crooners. It begins with the narrator telling a story about how he was performing in the piazza and saw a man whom he recognized from seven years earlier, Tibor, a cellist. At that time, the narrator and the other fellas in the band had befriended Tibor, who had come to Venice to perform in a summer arts festival. The story looks back in time from at least two vantage points; one, when the narrator sees Tibor again, and two, when the events of the story occurred, seven years before. The narrator tells both stories, but the older story is one that Tibor related to the narrator. That’s pretty confusing. ‘Kay. Tibor has had good training and a few gigs, but they’ve petered out and he is struggling, The musicians decide to help him and introduce him to Mr. Kaufman, a sort of agent. The band members who’ve had formal musical training feel a kinship with Tibor. “But to be fair, I think it was just that they liked to take the Tibors of the world under their wing, look after them a little, maybe prepare them for what lay ahead, so when the disappointments came they wouldn’t be quite so hard to take.” This is a nice mise en abyme—an encapsulation of the whole story, a story of someone helping Tibor and trying to prepare him for the inevitable disappointment. The story of what occurred seven years before gets going. “When people say Tibor changed for the worse that summer, that his head got too big for his own good, that this was all due to the American woman, well, maybe there’s something to that.” After a paragraph break, we read: “Tibor had become aware of the woman while sipping his first coffee of the day.” The story enters Tibor’s “head,” although the narrator continues to tell the story to his narratee. The woman accosts Tibor, saying she’d heard his recital of the previous day. She flatters him, tells him he has potential. “At this stage, what you’re doing is waiting for that one person to come and hear you.” “She looked very pleasant, beautiful even,” he told us at the time. “But as you see, she’s ten, fifteen years older than me. So why would I think anything was going on?” So, at some point, seven years ago, Tibor had told the guys this story and now it’s being related by the narrator to the narratee. Huh. The woman, Eloise McCormack, implies that she is an accomplished cellist who can help him to play better. “Like you,” she said quickly. “I have a sense of mission, I guess.” She is not telling the truth; she does not play the cello, although at this point, the reader has no reason for doubt. As in the other stories in Nocturnes, sexuality doesn’t factor in here, although the reader may wonder. What is going on with the two levels of narration? The narrator is telling a story to his narratee, and the implied author is telling the story to his audience. I don’t think at this point, there’s a lot of divergence. The mystery of Eloise is intact on both levels. She is lying about herself, but no one knows that—except the implied author who doesn’t reveal it. Tibor is perhaps unreliably overestimating his talent, but again, that’s not clear. The narrator knows the truth and is withholding some information. Tibor, after two days of indecision, goes to Eloise’s room (the bedroom is closed off) and plays for her. She critiques his playing, and as a result, he feels he’s playing better than ever but struggles, wanting to leave, wanting to stay. He tells his friends (after the fact): “I could suddenly see everything,” he explained to us. ”A garden I’d not yet entered.” He returns over several days and plays. “…to an outsider, had there been one, (her comments) might have seemed presumptuous.” An interesting passage—who notes this? The implied author, not Tibor—“Tibor was no longer capable of regarding her interventions in these terms.” “But what’s she like herself?” we kept asking him. “On the cello?” This implies he is leaving the sessions with Eloise and going to tell the guys about it after. Tibor is curious and then suspicious about Eloise’s playing. Where is her cello? One day, the bedroom door is ajar, and he looks in but sees no cello. “Would a virtuoso, even on holiday, go so long without touching her instrument? But this question, too, he pushed out of his mind.” “As the summer went on, they began to prolong their conversations by coming over to the café together after their sessions, and she’d buy him coffees, cakes, sometimes a sandwich. Now their talk was no longer just about music.” She asks him about a girlfriend. He’s reluctant to ask her personal questions but learns a little. She’s American, has moved from Boston to Portland, dislikes Paris. “She would laugh much more easily now than in the first days of their friendship and she developed the habit, when they stepped out of the Excelsior and crossed the piazza, of linking her arm through his. This was the point at which we first started noticing them, a curious couple…a flirty actress, as Ernesto put it…In the days before we got to talking to Tibor, we used to waste a lot of idle chat on them, the way men in a band do.” So the narrator is observing them some time after the sessions have begun. The “flirty actress” remark is interesting as it will be revealed that Eloise really is acting the role of a musician. But we the readers see that she is not so much flirty as anxious and needy. Then, Eloise says that she is involved with a man named Peter Henderson, who wants to marry her. She is hiding from him in Venice, out of apparent ambivalence. “She didn’t bring up Peter again, but now, after that exchange, a new dimension had opened in their relationship…he (Tibor) knew his presence there beside her was appreciated.” So her revelation helps Tibor to make sense of what’s happening. She’s involved with Tibor and the intimacy is helping her because she’s hiding out from Peter, postponing a decision. This makes Tibor feel more comfortable. This is one of the book’s themes—the narrator (here once removed) is confronted with a male/female relationship in stress. Also, it should be noted that, like many of the characters in the book, Tibor is an immigrant from another country, Hungary. They continue their relationship. Eloise suggests she play passages he’s having trouble with, but he resists this, saying that if she played, he would just be copying her, when she talks, in contrast, it “opens windows.” There’s a sense that Tibor knows Eloise is lying about being a cellist and is trying to protect her. And here is another theme in the book—windows, portals. ‘Kay. I think we should stop here for this week and conclude our discussion next time. Till then. #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

The fourth story in Nocturnes is entitled Nocturne and is the longest of the five contained therein. Does this have meaning? I don’t know, my friend. I don't know. Some things don’t. Nocturne concerns a first-person narrator, Steve, who is a professional saxophone player, which satisfies at least two of the requirements for stories in this book—that they present first-person narrators who are musicians. Steve tells a story to his narratee that begins: “Until two days ago, Lindy Gardner was my next-door neighbor.” This is very interesting because it’s the only time characters “migrate” across the stories, Lindy being a character from the first section, Crooner. We know a bit about Lindy from that story, and this knowledge informs our reading of Nocturne, which takes place some months after the events in Crooner. This is a good example of there being more than one audience for a story. In this case, we have the narratee, the person whom Steve is addressing in his narration, and we have the authorial audience who knows things Steve does not, and who is addressed by the implied author. Steve is not as successful in his career and marriage as he’d like to be. Somewhat like the narrator of Malvern Hills, he is resentful about this and bemoans “fake” success—success that is not based on real talent but connection. His manager suggests he get a facelift because it’s felt that Steve’s physical unattractiveness is holding back his real talent. Of course, he resists the idea as fakery and also has no money, but his wife supports the scheme, and then leaves Steve for another fellow who, perhaps improbably, agrees to pay for Steve’s cosmetic surgery. Yes, the story has a slapstick feel. Steve decides to get the surgery, hoping that his wife will return to him if he’s more attractive and successful. The procedure is done, and Steve goes to recover in a posh Beverly Hills hotel where his next-door neighbor is—you guessed it—Lindy Gardner, also recovering from cosmetic surgery. Both characters have bandages covering their faces except for eye slits. Lindy invites Steve over; Steve is reluctant because he feels Lindy is a poster child for fakery, a no talent person who has become a celebrity due to connection but agrees to visit anyway. Well. We can see right off that there is a lot of irony in this tale. Steve, who rails against fakery and nurtures his authenticity as an artist, agrees to undergo a “fake” procedure not to make his career a success but to win back his wife. And, although he dislikes Lindy Gardner (her commercial image) he’s willing to engage with her when he realizes she’s a neighbor. Steve and Lindy hang out, play chess (there’s no romance at all, never comes up). At Lindy’s request, Steve plays her one of his CDs but this provokes a curious reaction—Lindy turns cold and dismissive. Steve is hurt, but Lindy apologizes, saying that she always has a negative reaction to real talent. Steve’s playing moved her, but also made her angry because it was so genuinely good. (we know from Crooners that this is an issue for Lindy; Steve does not know because he hasn’t read Crooners). Steve learns that a colleague, Jake Marvel, is going to receive an award for Jazz Musician of the Year during a ceremony at the hotel. He is resentful, believing that Jake, unlike him, lacks talent. He complains to Lindy about this. Lindy reveals that late at night (nocturne-ally) she likes to prowl around the huge hotel. She steals the award Jake is supposed to receive, and gives it to Steve, saying that he is the rightful honoree. Steve is upset and convinces her they must return the award. This leads to a long slapstick scene wherein Steve and Lindy, their heads bandaged and wearing dressing gowns, search the darkened hotel for the place Lindy took the award. Along the way, they get into a huge argument over—you guessed it—fake vs, authentic success. When Steve vacillates over whether or not they should return the award, Lindy questions Steve’s belief that Jake is unworthy. “The trouble with people like you, just because God’s given you this special gift, you think that entitles you to everything. That you’re better than the rest of us…you don’t see that there’s a whole lot of other people weren’t as lucky as you who work really hard for their place in the world…” Steve responds: “I sweat and heave and break my balls to come up with something worthwhile, something beautiful, then who gets the recognition? Jake Marvell! People like you!” More comedy: Lindy stuffs the award inside a turkey carcass about to be served at the buffet. Steve has difficulty getting it out because it’s stuck way inside. He finally does; he and Lindy hurry upstairs. They leave the award on someone’s room service tray and go to Lindy’s room. Steve confesses to Lindy that he’s been hoping the facelift will bring his wife back to him. Lindy says life is bigger than just loving one person, that he should pursue success. Steve says goodnight. And when they see each other again, just before Lindy goes home, everything feels different. Lindy seems unfriendly and dismissive. Steve concludes “So that’s the story of my time as Lindy Gardner’s neighbor.” He talks to his wife Helen again, and tries to determine whether she might be interested in reconciliation but receives no clear signal. “Maybe Lindy’s right. Maybe, like she says, I need some perspective, and life really is bigger than loving a person. Maybe this really is a turning point for me, and the big league’s waiting. Maybe she’s right.” Huh. An intriguing tale, especially as it’s arrayed with the others we’ve discussed. Is Steve unreliable as a narrator? Prrapps so, the maestro says. I wonder about that ending—it seems like a huge change of heart for Steve to say maybe Lindy’s right, and that the whole story is a turning point for him. The big league’s waiting. It’s waiting, but I don’t see Steve joining it—despite the face lift and the way he claims he’s transformed after the encounter with Lindy Gardner. Maybe Lindy’s distance at the end means something—she knows that Steve’s unable to take her advice. Hold up! you say. It could be that Steve really has reached a turning point and will now embrace “fake” success. Maybe, I say. But maybe not. Such a transformation would go against the way his character is shown in the whole story. I imagine Steve sitting alone in his hotel room, head still covered in bandages, telling this story about how Lindy Gardner was his neighbor. Telling it to himself because there’s no one else there. ‘Kay. Next week, we’ll look at the last story in the book, Cellists. Till then. #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

In the third story of Nocturnes, Malvern Hills, we immediately come on a first-person narrator who is never named. “I’d spent the spring in London, and all in all, even if I hadn’t achieved everything I’d set out to, it had been an exciting interlude.” We learn that this fellow feels the weeks are “slipping by” and that he’s “vaguely paranoid about running into his former university friends, asking “how I was getting on since leaving the course to seek “fame and fortune”…with a very few exceptions—none of them was capable of grasping what was or wasn’t, for me at this particular point, a “successful” few months.” We learn that the narrator is a musician—like all the narrators in the book—and that he has unsuccessfully been trying to find work. He’s gone on many auditions and had not been hired. Instead of doing covers (which is what is wanted), he performs his own songs and feels resentful at the lack of recognition he’s getting. When he angrily asks at one audition why the band isn’t hiring him, he receives the answer, “No offence, mate, It’s just that there are so many wankers going around writing songs.” The narrator apparently doesn’t believe he’s a wanker and dismisses this attitude as “stupidity.” He decides to spend the summer at his sister and brother-in-law’s B&B in the Malvern Hills, a scenic parkland in the country. There’s a sense that he is going there to get away from his problems; he has fond memories of the place. “That summer, though, I felt this was the most beautiful place in the world; that in many ways I’d come from and belonged to the hills.” We learn that, in the way of background, his parents divorced when he was a child, and the family house was sold. In short, he is adrift although has difficulty admitting it. Here we have this story’s iteration of one of the themes of the book: the yearnings that exiles feel toward home. Mention is also made that his sister and brother-in-law expect him to work in exchange for room and board. This arrangement, “suited me just fine because it meant I couldn’t be expected to work too hard…The work was easy enough—I was especially good at making sandwiches—and I sometimes had to keep reminding myself of my main objective in coming out to the country in the first place: that’s to say, I was going to write a brand-new batch of songs ready for my return to London.” It should be noted that this element is a steady one for Ishiguro—a story of someone working for someone else, a servant or assistant, in this case in a resentful and passive-aggressive way. The main part of the story concerns the narrator’s encounter with a Swiss couple, Tilo and Sonja, who come into the restaurant. They are on vacation and staying nearby so that the narrator runs into them as they hike in the hills. They overhear the narrator playing one of his songs and praise it, wanting to hear more. They reveal they are musicians who have gradually given up some of their original musical dreams to make money by playing pop songs in restaurants. (including ABBA). However, the couple seem to be polarized, in that Tilo, the husband, is completely positive about everything: the lunch they have at the B&B, their lodgings, the vacation they’re on, the state of their career, and even the apparent neglect from their adult son who doesn’t return their phone calls. Sonja, the wife, is equally negative about all these things, complaining angrily about the vacation, their lifestyle, and their son. Eventually, the narrator (who seems oblivious to the couple’s discord) runs into Sonja who has just had an argument with her husband. Tilo has gone alone for a hike, saying the couple should probably break-up because they are so different. Sonja, who doesn’t want this, is upset and tries to escape her usual pessimism to encourage the narrator to pursue his musical dreams. They story ends with the narrator seeing Tilo at a distance and thinking he seems to be “re-appraising” the hills. The narrator concludes he needs to work more on the bridge of the song he’s writing. Hmmm. What we have here is not only the usual theme of an exiled narrator musician who is unreliable in his judgements, but also the consistent scenario of the narrator faced with a married couple—in this case, Tilo and Sonja—who are transforming. The narrator doesn’t seem to transform and appears rather clueless about the depths (or shallowness) of his talent. In a self-centered way, he angrily rejects any criticism and misreads the expectations of his sister and brother-in-law. If we think about the first two stories, Crooner and Come Rain or Come Shine, we may recall that each narrator’s chief concern is the story he’s telling his audience—not necessarily the story we the readers are getting. These narrators are concerned with how they come off, their appearances. Jan, in Crooner, wants to tell the story of how he helped the famous musician Tony Gardner, and how Tony complimented his talent. Ray, in Come Rain or Come Shine, shows himself just needing comfort as he visits his somewhat dense and troublesome friends, and how he will go to extreme lengths to get it. The narrators are talking to their imagined narratees, not to us. They want to convince their narratees and see them as sympathetic to their problems. The narrator of Malvern Hills also wants a respite from the stupidity and rejection he faces. He tells the story of Sonja and Tilo but is not really concerned with their pain, only that they seem to appreciate his talent. (much like Jan). What we the readers receive from the implied author, just as in the other stories, is a tale of tragedy about long term lovers failing (to various degrees) to work out their differences, a story told by an oblivious narrator. So is he under-reading or under-reporting? Under-reading, I think. He is oblivious to his own narcissism and to the complexities of others. Perhaps the ending does represent some change though. After thinking that Tilo must be re-appraising things, the narrator decides maybe the bridge of his song needs a little more work. Till next time. #Noctures #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

The title of the next story in Nocturnes contains another musical reference, Come Rain or Come Shine, the title of a famous American song standard. It is narrated by Ray, who, like Jan in Crooner, is someone living abroad, away from England, his country of birth. The story continues to incorporate motifs of music, evening, immigration, and portals. It begins with Ray describing how he’d become close with a couple, Emily and Charlie, in university days, apparently twenty-five years before the present of the story. At that time, Charlie was his best friend as was Emily—although there’s no mention of any sexual attraction on Ray’s part. He describes how he and Emily bonded over their appreciation of American standard songs performed by artists like Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday. Ray then relates how, after university, he took up teaching English in Spain and is still there. “…I’ve been stuck in the same humid buildings year after year, setting spelling tests or conducting the same conversations in slowed-down English…When I first took up English teaching after university it seemed a good enough life…if the teaching was tedious and the hours exploitative, at that age you don’t care much…In the late 80s, there was still talk of making a lot of money teaching in Japan, and I made serious plans to go, but it never worked out…then before you know it, you’re forty-seven years old and the people you started out with long ago have been replaced by a generation who gossip about different things, take different drugs, and listen to different music.” After “a few months that hadn’t exactly been the best in my life,” he goes to visit Emily and Charlie (who have married) in London. He goes with a sense of desiring connection with the past, with England, and his old friends. But he’s immediately disappointed—“his” room at the couple’s house is untidy, Charlie is distracted and critical of his life. In fact, both Charlie and Emily are concerned and critical over Ray’s existence. “…he (Charlie) fired questions at me about my life in Spain, and each time I told him anything, good or bad, he’d do this sour little smile and shake his head, like I was confirming his worst fears.” Charlie says: “Listen to me…your situation’s hopeless. You’ve got to hand in your notice…I can tell you won’t do any of this…You’ll go back and carry on just the same…in a year’s time, you’ll be moaning about exactly the same things.” Emily says: “Oh, honestly, Raymond. You let yourself be exploited left, right, and centre by that ghastly language school, you let your landlord rip you off silly, and what do you do? Get in tow with some airhead girl with a drink problem and not even a job to support it. It’s like you’re deliberately trying to annoy anyone who still gives a shit about you!…Raymond, don’t you ever stop and ask yourself who you are?” Emily asked. “When you think of all your potential, aren’t you ashamed? Look at how you lead your life! It’s…it’s simply infuriating! One gets so exasperated!” Not only are his old friends disapproving of the way he’s living his life, but they are also having marital problems. In fact, in a comedic twist, Charlie—who has to go away on a business trip—wants Ray to stay with Emily, believing that Ray’s presence will show Emily that he (Charlie) is not so bad by comparison. There follows a slapstick scene that comprises the bulk of the story. Ray accidentally damages Emily’s diary after discovering it expresses dismay over his visit. “Raymond coming! Groan, groan!” Then he tries to hide the evidence. With Charlie’s help (by phone) he attempts to create the impression that the neighbor’s unruly dog burst into the house and tore up the diary. This ruse involves breaking vases and cooking an old shoe in order to get the proper dog smell. (Dogs smell like popcorn). Please pay attention. Emily returns from work and, appalled by the chaos, takes it as confirmation that Ray is deranged. However, she decides to cook dinner, and the pair listens to old vocal jazz records the way they used to. However, in a change, Ray does not wish to argue with Emily about which interpretation is better—the way they used to do. Ray tells Emily that Charlie loves her and doesn’t want to divorce. The two of them wind up dancing together out on the terrace. “You’re right, Raymond,” she said, quietly in my ear. “Charlie’s all right. We should sort ourselves out.” “Yes, you should.” “You’re a good friend, Raymond. What would we do without you?” Ray remembers the song they’re dancing to is eight minutes long. He thinks after it’s over, they’ll go inside, and Emily may become angry again because of his destruction of her diary and the cooking of the smelly shoe. “What did I know? But for another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky.” It appears that Charlie’s scheme may indeed have worked. Compared to Ray, Charlie seems better to Emily. Ray represents another unreliable narrator who underreports—at least to his friends. He acknowledges to his narratee—the entity he’s telling the story to—that he’s been stuck in an unsatisfying job and that the recent few weeks have been particularly bad. He wants to visit his old friends as a kind of re-charging. He thinks of them as happily married, solid and respectable. Grown-up—perhaps the way he’s imagined himself becoming. However, when they point out the deficiencies in his life, he denies them, saying rather that he’s doing just fine—and the reader knows this is not the case. There is a strong theme here of someone living a sort of exile and longing for home—at least the illusion of a home that once was. But Ray is confronted with change; Charlie and Emily are not the same people he knew in university. And they are not accepting of his perhaps younger lifestyle. Yet, at the end, there’s a sense that Ray has transformed in that he’s no longer interested in entering into arguments with Emily over old standard jazz songs. But he is consistent in just wanting things to be “nice” for the eight-minute length of the song they’re dancing to. He remains nostalgic for the way they all used to be. The title Come Rain or Come Shine is probably meaning-laden, my friends. There are no coincidences, as Don Juan used to say. The implication is that Emily and Charlie love each other no matter what. And Emily can accept Ray with all his problems, and still see that he is a good friend. However, I think in Ray’s case, the song title has a twist. Emily and Charlie may be mistaken in thinking that Ray cares for them. We the readers know that Ray is self-centered; he goes along with the couple’s schemes and endures their criticism because he desires the comfort of the past, not because he’s such a good friend. At the end, he wants the romantic song to continue. Ray remains the same, come rain or come shine. Like Crooner, Come Rain or Come Shine uses romantic music in an ironic way. (To quote Jordan Catalano). Till next time. #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray

Last week, we began to look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, specifically the first tale, Crooner. I cut the diamond in stating that I thought the narrator, Jan, was underreading vs. underreporting. Let’s look at this more closely. (whiny voice: Why is this even important?) For a deeper understanding of the story. Please settle down. James Phelan talks about this distinction in depth. To review, underreporting is when a character narrator does not admit to his narratee what both he and the authorial audience know about his personal interest. What does this mean? A simple example would be where the reader of a story knows that the narrator hates broccoli, let’s say because the narrator has reported in several scenes that reliable characters have said this to the narrator. You hate broccoli. But the narrator then says in his narration, “You know, I love broccoli.” The reader immediately wonders why the narrator is saying this, since it isn’t “true.” Underreading, on the other hand, is when a narrator does not consciously know—or is not able to admit to himself—what we infer about his personal interest. In the above example, let’s say the narrator has showed himself as being nauseous every time he eats broccoli. However, he keeps eating it and doesn’t seem to make the connection. Again, the authorial audience might wonder why is he doing this? Why can’t he admit he hates broccoli? (That’s ridiculous). A careful reader might say of the above examples that they seem pretty similar. On the face of it, it is difficult to distinguish between underreporting and underreporting. An effective way to determine whether a character narrator is underreading or underreporting is to link the unreliability to inferences about the narrator as character. In Crooner, what do we infer about Jan as a character? We know that he plays guitar in café bands in Venice, Italy, that he has a young and informal way of narrating. He’s different from other musicians he works with in that he plays guitar, a non-traditional instrument, (for the café bands) and he’s not Italian. He’s from an eastern European country and grew up under a communist government, raised by a single mother who has since died. He says, “Years later, when I was working in Warsaw…” and relates a story of buying his mother Tony Gardner records to replace those he accidently scratched as a child. “It took me over three years, but I kept getting them, one by one, and each time I went back to see her I’d bring her another.” When he spots Tony Gardner, “…I couldn’t quite believe it…Tony Gardner! What would my dear mother have said if she’d known! For her sake, for the sake of her memory, I had to go and say something to him…” Jan’s mother is his connection to Tony Gardner. “So I sat down and told him some more. About my mother, our apartment, the…records.” He can’t recall the titles of the records but describes the pictures on the sleeves, and Tony remembers the titles. There are some similarities between the two men. Tony is in a close relationship with Lindy, Jan with his deceased mother. Tony reveals he’s discarding Lindy for the sake of his career, Jan (we can infer) left his mother for the sake of his career and to become an adult. Eventually, Jan expresses disbelief at Tony’s coldness. When you love someone the way you’ve sung about, you stay together, he says. Jan is discovering that Tony doesn’t live the life he’s conveyed in his songs, he is much less romantic and more mercenary. (If Tony were an author, we could say that the “real” author is very different from the implied author. Heh, heh, heh). It’s disillusioning for Jan, who grew up admiring Tony, experiencing his mother’s love for the healing romance of the music. Tony isn’t like the “narrator” of his songs. This gives the story’s climax new meaning. Jan’s mother “never got out.” Tony wants Lindy to “get out.” Does this mean that Jan’s mother never got out of the romantic illusion? Persisting in tragic love affairs and listening to sad romantic music? Tony is apart from this and wants Lindy to escape it too. Yet, he serenades her with sad, romantic songs and she cries. Sobs—is this evidence that she hasn’t gotten out? Yet? Mebbe. Maybe that’s why Tony seems disappointed after the serenade. Hmmm. Tony is cold and calculating about his career. He tells Jan a story about tricking the maid when he and Lindy made love—tricking the help. He is tricking Jan too although Jan sees through it and is mad. Tony tries to project a romantic persona congruent with his singing, but he is not really like this and finally reveals it. The sardonic laugh. So Jan goes through a process of disillusionment that is more than just about Tony and his music; it’s about Jan’s whole life, the illusions he shared with his mother. But is he underreading or underreporting? Both I think, or it’s pretty hard to tell. Jan may not be admitting how he feels about his mother, perhaps out of guilt that he left her, perhaps still out of grief. Or he may not be aware of it—we just don’t know. He’s telling a story and wants his narratee to believe him, to accept what he’s saying, kind of on the level of: one time I met this celebrity, Tony Gardner, and he was “basically a good guy.” Is this denial? Or is it that he’s telling the story to the narratee and doesn’t want to spoil it by telling the truth—that Tony was a jerk. That’s what the story shows, what—best beloved—the implied author shows. I suppose that is underreporting. I think Jan is angry at Tony Gardner but will not admit this to his narratee because he wants to share in some of the celebrity glow. Let me tell you about the time I met Tony Gardner, the time I played with him, and he said I was pretty good. He was a good guy—that’s Jan’s story. Till next time. #Nocturnes #KazuoIshiguro #AlanBray