Clothing the Spirit: Jackie Kay's Fiction from Trumpet to Wish I Was Here

Abstract

Literary characterisation, like all artistic representation of the human figure, has to some extent always involved dressing the body while referencing the person's underlying nakedness as a foil to the costume. In poem after poem and story after story, Jackie Kay has commented in provocative ways on the symbolic function of appearances. Many critics have examined how in Trumpet and other works Kay illustrates the way identity is performed and construed. Kay opens out the space between the characters’ private spirits and their façades: identities variously described and ranging from a deliberately cultivated and projected image of the ‘self’ to a bathetic figuration projected unselfconsciously. When Kay examines self-fashioning and the problematics of the persona, she sounds a timely sub-theme: that people generally can neither fathom nor control the way others read them. In Wish I Was Here, Kay's emphasis rests—and more emphatically than ever before—on the question of creaturely authenticity.

Keywords:

• authenticity
• clothing
• identity
• nakedness
• pellicular sign
• persona
• self-fashioning
• skin colour
• spirit

Notes

¹See, for instance, Barthes, Bruzzi and Lurie; also the magisterial and inspiring study Fabric of Vision, in which Hollander focuses on the relationship of nude skin to dress and drapery in a wide spectrum of artworks, and discusses ‘the amount of suggestive freight that clothing can carry’ in relation to bare skin, p. 9.

²For discussion of Kay's treatment of race and sexual identity in Trumpet and Why Don't You Stop Talking, see Arana (2006), pp. 19–31; Enisuoh (2001), pp. 1–2; Halberstam (2000), pp. 13–37; Lumsden (2002), pp. 80–91 and, especially, Williams (2005), pp. 43–5. Cogan's sociological study of body norms in lesbian culture casts pertinent light on Kay's descriptions of lesbian lovers, especially as regards their weight, make-up, choice of clothes and attitudes towards corporeality.

³ Derrida uses the term pellicular, as found here, to refer to any readable surface or ‘skin’. See Culler (2003) for discussion of Derrida's debt to Freud in theorising ‘pellicular surfaces—the skins, membranes, films, crusts, veils, folds, envelopes, tympanums, parchments, phylacteries and hymens [and foreskins] that weave through the rhetoric of deconstruction’, pp. 9–10. Kirby (1997) also discusses ‘skin as a site’ of signification and Derrida's provocative notion that skin is ‘a perfectly superficial exteriority’ with ‘infinite depth in the implication of meaning’; she also discusses ‘the Foucauldian understanding of the body as a skin-like surface … inscribed by constructs of interiority’, p. 78. For more on this topic, see Winter (2001), especially the first four paragraphs of her thought-provoking article. Kay's insistence on skin as a functioning organ distinguishes her treatment from that of the writers mentioned by Kirby, Winter and Curtin.

⁴See Arana (2006), pp. 20–1.

⁵For a concise introduction to Karl Jung's theory of individualisation, relevant here, see Sharp (1991), esp. pp. 60–9, 99, 103. While representing another study altogether, to the degree that Kay's characters realise the difficulty of controlling their own personas, and of reading those of others, they are engaging in the process that Jung characterised as individuation and moving towards a condition that other psychoanalysts have termed self-actualisation.

⁶Of course, the story can also be read as a spoof on aging women who treat their pets as if they had given birth to them, clothing them in coats and booties and parading them about in prams.

⁷Kirby, p. 78.

⁸Curtin (2003), pp. 5–13. See also Conner (1999), pp. 52, 79, 102–03; the literature on the topic has burgeoned in recent years and includes, to name just a handful of studies, Allison's Skin: Talking about Sex, Class & Literature (1994), Anzieu's The Skin Ego (1989), Du Cille's Skin Trade (2007), Gilroy's ‘Scars and Eyes’ (1997) and Halberstam's Skin Shows (1995).