Jackie KayTRUMPET

See:Diane Middlebrook, Suits Me: The Double

Life of Billy Tipton, (Virago, 1998).

 Trumpet is a ‘poetic’ and polyphonic novel, presenting multiple perspectives.

 

First person present tense (for example, 1 ff.) First person past tense (for example, 166-7) Third person present tense (for example, 216) Third person past tense (for example, 41-4) Newspaper obituaries (208) Extracts from letters (159-60) and so on

In these ways, the novel suggests that the way in which something is presented is all-important.

 

‘Music’ (131 ff.) The Envelope (65 270 ff.) 

The contents of the envelope remind us of the complexity of identity: that the individual cannot easily be pinned down and labeled. Identity is fluid, provisional and overdetermined.

 

‘He goes into this long thing about jazz being improvised and being different versions of the same thing.’ (163)

 ’He looked real enough playing that horn in those smoky clubs; he looked real and unreal like a fantasy of himself. All jazz men are fantasies of themselves, reinventing the Counts and Dukes and Armstrongs, imitating them. … Black people and music … Slave songs, work songs, gospel, blues, ragtime, jazz.’ (190)

This novel suggests that all identity (like jazz) is about performance and improvisation.

 ‘He looked real enough

playing that horn in those smoky clubs; he looked real and unreal like a fantasy of himself.’ (190)

The trumpet – the horn – might be read as signifying the brio, the flourish, the jouissance, the loud and confident display of Joss-the-Jazz-Man. It is key to the way he performs his identity / displays his masculinity.

  Perhaps the novel asks us to see the

trumpet as a phallic symbol (see 49 and 55).

 ’the phallus is positioned as the primary signifier, privileging masculinity at the expense of femininity. According to Lacan, the phallus is distinct from the penis; however, while no on possesses the phallus as such, men and women occupy a different relation to it owing to their asymmetrical positions in the symbolic order.’

 Joss’s ‘phallus’ is not biological or anatomical: it is a signifier.

 

In a patriarchal culture, the phallus is a cultural signifier of masculine power against which women are defined as lacking (NB Freud’s notion of penis envy).

  But in Kay’s novel femaleness is

most often seen as excess or extra, not deficit or lack. [21 cf. 109]

So Jackie Kay takes the Freudian model and reconfigures it to suggest that:

 

1. Sexual identity is more about cultural signification than biology.

2. It cannot be reduced to a binary opposition of haves and have-nots.

 

 Origins vs. Adoption:  

‘Before I became Colman Moody, I was William Dunsmore. If I’d stayed William Dunsmore all my life I’d have been a completely different man. Definitely. ….All my facial expressions would have been different. I bet even my walk would have been heavier if I’d been William Dunsmore. Heavy-footed. …. I remember the day she first said the name. It seemed incredible that I could have ever been William Dunsmore. I laughed and said the name again and again. ‘William Dunsmore? Are you sure?’ (56)

So perhaps what you were ‘originally’ carries less weight – is less ‘real’ - than what you are now.

Origins = Essence ??

 `He never hit me. Never raised a hand or fist …. Hardly ever raised his voice. Didn’t need to. He’d hold my hand in the street for people to see. Father and son out and about in the street. People that didn’t know I was adopted said things like, ‘You’re your father’s spitting image, you are.’ What I wanted when I was a kid was to look like my father. You could write a list of things after his name. Good looking. Talented. Charismatic. When I was little, I could coast, bask in his glory. ‘Joss Moody’s son.’ (45)

 

Joss is not Colman’s biological father. Does this mean that he’s not Colman’s ‘real’ father?

What’s more ‘real’ to us: the biology or the role?

 

Similarly: Joss is not biologically a man. But he

has adopted the role of man, and has lived most of his life as a man.

What’s more ‘real’ to us: the biology or the role?

 

‘We question this notion that somebody who lives their life as a man and is discovered to be female at the time of death was really a woman all along. What is ‘really’ in this context? What is the force of that reality?’ (‘Letter from Transvestites Anonymous’, 159 –160)

Diane Middlebrook asks in her biography of Billy Tipton:

 

‘After all those years of playing a man, was Billy a woman, or just female?’

 

‘When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one.’

(Gender Trouble, 6)

Joss Moody is not biologically a man, nor is he biologically Colman’s father. But perhaps ultimately – in effect – he is both of these things.

 

Assuming identities is something we all do. Perhaps it’s what human culture is all about.

  We all adopt our genders.

Sophie Stones has ‘the wardrobe of the woman I’d like to be. I know I’m not her yet; but the clothes can lie.’ (233)

 

On page 236, she has a bath and says, ‘I try to act the part of actresses I’ve seen in foamy baths in the movies.

 

Sophie creates herself as a woman through the way she dresses and presents herself.

 What’s the difference between what

she does and what Joss does? 

 ’all gendering is a kind of impersonation or approximation. …. [T]here is no original or primary gender … gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.’ (1991, 21)

 

‘A perpetual performer, never out of character, Billy drew her material from the gender fundamentalism of everyday life: the general belief that gender difference arises from anatomical sex difference in human beings and that gendered behavior is the natural outcome of sex difference.

‘Playing a sequence of roles historically reserved for the ‘opposite’ sex, Billy demonstrated by her accomplishment that gender, unlike sex, is in large part a performance … And if her first act of cross-dressing was a brilliant, problem-solving prank, Billy quickly found that being taken for a man provided access to almost everything she wanted – music, travel, the love of adventurous and caretaking women.

 

‘Billy … reveal[ed] by her nakedness in death that the ‘difference’ between men and women is largely in the eye of the beholder.’