Skip to main content

"Angry and Buzzing"

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a short story with a title that borrows from a musical: “Getting to Know All About You”.

In this story, we follow the fates of four family members as they move from Schenectady to Utica to Rome (New York State). The narrator, a teenage girl named Judith, lives with her older brother Wesley and their two parents, Darrell and Trix. The adults who used to be dancers had to give up their dreams of show biz fame. The themes here are blasted ambitions, social decay, but also love and sexuality. Mentioned in the story are singer Nina Simone, dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, actresses Doris Day, Dorothy Collins and Grace Kelly. Apart from its title, the text contains no song references.

Trix, whose real name is Trish, refuses to be called “mom” or “mommy”. We learn that her stage name used to be Roxanne, which, according to the narrator, seemed “to best suit her.” Right from the start, this ubiquity creates much unease. The daughter's confusion is evident as she muses over the old snapshots of her parents, dating back from their dancing days. To talk about the woman in the picture, she uses her mother’s household nickname as well as her stage name, which is placed in parentheses and followed by a question mark. So the title resonates ironically at first.

As she introduces her parents, the narrator says that her mother had “a beautiful throaty alto voice”, which “resembled Nina Simone’s.” On rare occasions, husband and wife have the opportunity to work together, as organist and singer. Most of the semi-regular jobs that the parents get have nothing to do with dance or music. For most of the story, Trix is a cocktail waitress. Darrell tries his hand at a variety of small jobs.

The only moment readers hear Trix sing is a stolen moment. As the family affairs are taking a turn for the worst, the narrator and her brother eavesdrop a late-night drunken discussion between Trix and Darrell. Trix’s new place of work is the seediest so far in the story; she has also become notoriously unfaithful. Darrell is getting into more and more troubles with the law: He is becoming violent and unpredictable. Late that night, as the parents are trying to make sense of their relationship, its nature and evolution over time, Trix breaks into song. She sings the eponymous number from the musical The King and I. The pair starts to dance. Unbeknownst to them, their children are watching. The narrator knows it is wrong but admits that the scene is magnetic.

By the end of the story, the only sound to escape Trix’s mouth is a strange humming. This sound has nothing to do with the one Judith, our narrator, emitted earlier in the story, when she was alone in the apartment in Utica. Well-fed, listening to the radio, she was “humming to herself” in a solitary happiness. Now that things have unravelled, Trix craves another kind of solitude. She avoids visual contact with her children who have come to visit her and begins to hum: “No melody I could recognize, just sound, angry and buzzing.” The Broadway number has come to a close: Trix, we are told, is satisfied to find herself in a place where no one knows her.

Oates, Joyce Carol, “Getting To Know All About You”, (pp 241-261) Heat and Other Stories, Plume, Penguin, 1991

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"A new and ominous drumbeat"

Ian McEwan wrote a novel entitled Nutshell . An unborn child realizes that his mother, Trudy, is plotting to murder his father, John. She has a co-conspirator who is none other than the child's uncle, Claude. Sounds familiar? In this insane take on Hamlet, we must first acquaint ourselves with the mother. She doesn't listen to music very much, but is certainly fond of podcasts. One imagines our narrator-fetus entering a world of jingles. “I even tolerate the BBC world service and its puerile blasts of synthetic trumpets and xylophone […].” (Chapter One, p. 4). Our narrator-fetus is tormented by his mother's murderous intentions. But even amid the fear and chaos, unidentified music of the spontaneous kind can signify unity and love. Quite late in the story, our narrator finds solace in the “tuneful humming” of his mother (Chapter Seventeen, p. 161). The combined pleasures of sound and warmth (she is in the shower) leads our narrator to speculate on a phenomenon he has ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quarante musiciens

Tourgueniev a écrit une nouvelle intitulée "Eau de framboise". Ce nom désigne une source qui se jette dans la rivière Ista. Nous retrouvons le chasseur-narrateur en une chaude journée d'été. Il rencontre deux vieillards appelés Stiopouchka et Mikhaïl Savélitch, alias "Brouillard". Le premier assiste le second dans sa partie de pêche. Stiopouchka est un être peu considéré par sa communauté. Il mène une existence de marginal. "Brouillard" était majordome avant d'être émancipé par son maître, le Comte Piotr Ilitch. Pour vanter la « fastueuse hospitalité » du comte, le narrateur nous parle de ses musiciens et de leur « bruit assourdissant » (p. 100). Nous apprenons un peu plus loin que l’orchestre comptait quarante musiciens. C’est « Brouillard » lui-même qui apporte cette précision.   Cette évocation nous entraîne sur le terrain de l’anecdote. L’orchestre était dirigé par un maître de chapelle venu spécialement d'Allemagne (p. 103). Le jou...
Post a Comment
Read more

"A Celestial Ship"

Akira Mizubayashi wrote a novel entitled  Âme Brisée . We first follow a young boy named Rei Mizusawa in Tokyo, before focusing on a luthier named Jacques Maillard in Paris. In the opening section, a military man, whose name we do not know, places in Rei's care a violin that's been almost completely smashed. What expressions does the author use? The instrument is a “little dying animal” (“petit animal agonisant”, p. 17), “a dying animal” (un “animal mourant”, p. 19, 57), a “mutilated violin”, (un “violon mutilé”, p. 69-70), a “wounded animal” (un “animal grièvement blessé”, p. 72). The author wants us to view the instrument as a creature whose life is slowly ending. Consequently, Rei feels sadness, injustice and powerlessness. One can indeed feel emotional. As lieutenant Kurokami remarks, too few people understand the human effort (“l’effort humain”) behind the creation of a violin (p. 60). The instrument even has a name, that of his luthier, Nicolas Vuillaume (p. 61). T...
Post a Comment
Read more