“Let Them Call It Jazz” by Jean Rhys: From Precarious to Ordinary Life
The article discusses one of Jean Rhys’s short stories, “Let Them Call It Jazz,” included in Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and originally published in 1962. The humble provides an interesting framework to account for Jean Rhys’s “subtractive” writing techniques and for her obsessive concern with...
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| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
| Publicado: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2023
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | The article discusses one of Jean Rhys’s short stories, “Let Them Call It Jazz,” included in Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and originally published in 1962. The humble provides an interesting framework to account for Jean Rhys’s “subtractive” writing techniques and for her obsessive concern with vulnerable outcasts who go through extreme experiences of deprivation. In “Let Them Call It Jazz,” the protagonist, a mixed-race young woman who has come to London to find a good job, is subjected to the dehumanising experience of precariousness, becoming both conspicuous and invisible, too loud and yet inaudible. Arrested for being drunk and disorderly, she is sent to jail where she hears a deterritorialising song which takes her out of precariousness and into ordinary life as Guillaume Le Blanc understands it. Journeying from conspicuousness to discretion, Selina Davis devises a humble style, a form of empowering withdrawal which allows her to live in the midst of others while preserving her dissenting self. |
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