In “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning,” John Donne famously cautions his beloved to keep composed and
quiet – like a dying “virtuous” man – as they part from one another:
So
let us melt, and make no noise,
No
tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere
profanation of our joys
To
tell the laity our love.
Rarefied, sinecured,
privileged and private, their bond differentiates itself, at least as far as
the poem’s speaker is concerned, from “[d]ull sublunary lovers’ love.”
Refurbishing clichés of neo-Platonic idealism, Donne labours to distinguish
their joys from vulgar heterosexual desire – his opening conceit enacts,
literally, a mortification of the flesh – by linking love parasitically to a form
of spiritually-ascendant class mobility. That elitism, moreover, is tied
directly to a contradiction built into the poetic speech act: he’s telling her
not to tell, creating an exclusive circle of two – speaker and listener – as
his poem’s contingent public domain. Or maybe even a circle of one, himself,
since the poem’s success depends wholly on whether his audience, the beloved
interlocutor hailed by his lines, is even willing to listen, and to be correspondent
to his desire, to do as he tells her to. There is a doubled model of listening
articulated through the poem that seems to me to hinge on what its reader, its
audience, is inclined to do with its profanity, its repurposing of the sacred
for its own persuasive ends. Donne’s inflated coinage “profanation” casts our
inner ears back, I think, to the word’s Latin etymology: the verb profanere (to desecrate, to violate, to
make unclean) suggests being outside or before (pro-) a temple (fānum),
which at least implicitly prods its listeners to consider the ersatz sacredness
of this or any poetic text: how metaphysical, how hermetic, how divorced from
this world, can such words ever be? The hyphenated compound nouns
(“tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”), while presented under prohibition, also
make audible in their clashed, clumped consonants (rfl, dsn, stsm) the very – and very human, embodied – noise that
Donne wants to suppress. The poem tends to profane itself, I mean.
I am teaching The Commitments
by Roddy
Doyle this week, and part of the
reason I have started off with this excursus through Donne is that the novel is
one of the most profane and noisy texts I have encountered. Reading excerpts
and examples aloud in class, in public, activated some shame in me that’s most
likely connected both to my own well-spoken intellectualism – despite common
sense and academic privilege, it still felt a bit wrong and even a bit
dangerous to utter all those “fucks” and “shites” and racist epithets in front
of students – and to a hackneyed moralism circulating around how we listen to
popular music, which is arguably the governing trope of the book as well as the
focus of my course (and I’m thinking of how iTunes, for example, labels its
downloaded songs, based on assessments of the lyrics, as either “clean” or
“explicit”). The Commitments, at its
heart, is an explicit, expletive text.
It’s hard to gauge student reactions sometimes, but this
class on the literature of popular song has tended so far to be a bit quiet,
and who knows exactly why. Faced with reading Doyle’s novel, however, I can
imagine they might feel a little shouted down, and a little affronted. In the
book, as the band is cobbled together and starting to rehearse, they’re
presented as Jimmy Rabbitte’s students. The book opens with Outspan and Derek
asking for Jimmy’s musical advice, a moment that leads directly to the
formation of The Commitments:
—We’ll ask Jimmy, said Outspan. —Jimmy’ll know.
Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff.
Jimmy is the discursive
centre for this particular configuration of Barrytown, this orchestration of
their disenfranchised urban space, their north Dublin, and the vocabulary, the
knowledge, in which he trades and which constitutes his cultural capital, is
pop music. Jimmy, it’s worth noting, doesn’t play an instrument (well, none of
them do, at first, except maybe for Joey The Lips Fagan), and he never performs
on stage with the band; his music consists of talk, and his way of organizing
the band involves giving lectures, correcting and managing what they “know”
about and what they can learn through African-American soul music: “They loved
Jimmy’s lectures,” the narrator tells us, although it’s not always clear that
Jimmy has any more privileged access to Black music than anyone else. Even Joey
The Lips’s stories of playing with Otis Redding, James Brown and just about any
other “name” in R & B canon seem like a mix of fiction and wishful
thinking; he claims to get a call to play with Joe Tex, but after he leaves
Jimmy remembers that Joe Tex had died in 1982. When Joey The Lips confesses
that “The biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t born black,” the insurmountable
disconnect, around race, between the given and the made, between provenance and
aspirational self-fashioning comes crashing to the fore. The learning project
in which Jimmy has the band engaged is doomed by its inherent dislocations, by
its insurmountable, racially marked otherness. If “soul is community,” as Jimmy
and Joey both contend, the success of their common project, the outcome of
their commitment to any “real” provocation to social or cultural transformation
through what Jimmy keeps calling “sex and politics,” remains inexorably out of
reach.
They can’t help but profane their lofty goals. The
alteration they want to bring about by singing about “real” love is framed, as
in the Donne poem, by the negation of overwrought, mundane clichés and by the
evocation of a transcendent ideal – an African-American idiom that inherently
resists the idioms of both saccharine top-of-the-pops and Irish folk: “—All
tha’ mushy shite abou’ love an’ fields an’ meetin’ mots in supermarkets an’
McDonalds is gone, ou’ the fuckin’ window. It’s dishonest, said Jimmy.” But
performing covers of James Brown or Wilson Pickett hardly seems any more
honest, any closer to the lived realities of Barrytown: “— It’s not the other
people’s songs so much, said Jimmy. —It’s which ones yis do.” Connection and
commitment means finding material that somehow speaks to their experience, and
for Jimmy, that speaking means a felt connection at the level of a
pre-articulate viscerality, something he hears, for instance, in the rough
“growl” of Declan Cuffe’s voice. Jimmy links this fleshy throatiness both to
James Brown’s thoroughly sweaty, embodied performance – the grain of his voice,
an association mired in sexual stereotypes around black masculinity – and,
compellingly, to the band’s obvious inability to get beyond imperfect mimicry
of that style; their cultural “politics,” inured in an experience of pervasive
alienation, seems best represented by their failure to represent themselves
musically in any idiom. Everything is imperfectly borrowed, mistaken, and
troubled. In Jimmy’s bedroom, listening to the record of James Brown’s “Sex Machine,”
the complexities and complicities of musical and racial appropriation emerge in
a mix of sacrilege and idolatry, in a prose that both mimes what it hears and
disrupts any easy mimesis:
—Funk off, said Deco.
Outspan
hit him.
Jimmy
let the needle down and sat on the back of his legs between the speakers.
—I’m
ready to get up and do my thang, said James Brown.
A
chorus of men from the same part of the world as James went: —YEAH.
—I
want to, James continued, —to get into
it, you know. (—YEAH, said the lads in the studio with him.) —Like a, like a sex machine, man (—YEAH YEAH,
GO AHEAD.) —movin’, doin’ it, you know.
(—YEAH.) —CAN I COUNT IT ALL? (—YEAH
YEAH YEAH, went the lads.) —One Two
Three Four.
Jimmy positions himself
dead-centre, as if to co-opt the sonic space of the recording, to claim it and
manage it. The French-Joycean punctuation of dialogue with em-dashes tends to
blur the distinctions between voices, to create a polyphonic overlay, a
palimpsest. The identification of Jimmy with James manifests itself not only spatially
but also in the collision of idioms from different “parts of the world”: James
Brown’s sidemen aren’t Irish “lads” in any sense of the word, and when James
Brown says “you know,” the point-of-view implicitly shared with Jimmy, the
fella in the novel who, more than any other, presents himself as in the know,
is both shared and dismantled; it’s worth noting how the transcription of the
words in interrupted by editorializing and by typographical
juxtapositions, but also how the
original record itself involves call-and-response banter that cuts across and
disrupts closure. That disruption is also audible in the textures of the
transcribed words: “— GER RUP AH——“ they
hear James Brown intone, abrading his words in a manner not too far removed
from Donne’s noisy consonants.
If this record, though, is about affirming rough and vital
cultural energies (YEAH YEAH YEAH), if it’s about the “politics,” of movin’ and
doin’, Jimmy’s listening remains caught in a dynamic of negation and
difference: “—No, listen, said Jimmy.” Making black music more “Dubliny” – by
substituting, for example, the names of the stops on the DART line, moving
North toward Barrytown, for the improvised train stops up the Eastern seaboard
of the United States, tracing a kind of second-hand root for post-Civil War
reconstruction, in James Brown’s improvised words for “Night Train” – enables
what Jimmy wants to call “Dublin Soul” to be born, but those words also offer a
fragile and finally untenable amalgam, as the band breaks up before it’s able
to make even its first single on “Eejit Records,” and as Joey The Lips comes to
realize that “Maybe soul isn’t right for Ireland. So I’m not right.” Their
music, in its wrongness, is inherently profane, monstrous. But it also attains,
in passing, in rehearsal, a kind of nascent greatness:
By
now, The Commitments had about a quarter of an hour’s worth of songs that they
could struggle through without making too many mistakes. They could sound
dreadful sometimes but not many of them knew this. They were happy.
Though they’re unable to hear
themselves, to “know” themselves for what they are – even when “[t]hey taped
themselves and listened” – they still embrace the rough misprisions and
imperfect “Dubliny” slippages and derive a happiness, a profane joy, in the
struggle to connect with each other. The agon
of music making, the profane and profaning effort to play together, forms a
contingent community within that difficult nascence: “There were mistakes,
rows, a certain amount of absenteeism but things were going well.” If the point
seems to be not to put too much weight on the inevitable failure of their
awful, unruly, “racialist” appropriations, neither is it to overlook or sanitize
their offenses. Rather, we’re meant to bear witness to the possibility of
creative coexistence, of producing a shared, poorly-recorded, mistake-ridden
music that manages still, in its noisy and troubling way, to enact a poetry.
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