Journal of the Short Story in English

Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

77 | Autumn 2021
Double Issue: Special Section and Varia

“Let Them Call It Jazz” by Jean Rhys: From

Precarious to Ordinary Life
Sylvie Maurel

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3666
ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher
Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version
Date of publication: December 1, 2021
Number of pages: 183-197
ISBN: 978-2-7535-9378-7
ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference
Sylvie Maurel, ““Let Them Call It Jazz” by Jean Rhys: From Precarious to Ordinary Life”, Journal of the
Short Story in English [Online], 77 | Autumn 2021, Online since 01 December 2023, connection on 01
December 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3666

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 “LET THEM CALL IT JAZZ” BY JEAN RHYS:
FROM PRECARIOUS TO ORDINARY LIFE

It would be fair to say that Jean Rhys, considered as a minor modernist

for a long time and not the most prolific writer, is mostly remembered for her
novels. Yet, apart from her five short novels and her unfinished autobiography,
she wrote short stories all her life—quite many of them by Rhysian
standards—and published no less than three collections of short stories in
her lifetime, The Left Bank (1927), Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) and
Sleep It Off Lady (1976). Although her stories never went unnoticed, they
have to this day attracted less attention than her novels: some of her short
fiction is regularly discussed in scholarly articles but most full-length studies
of Jean Rhys’s Ïuvre mainly focus on her novels, with passing references, if
any, to her stories. In this sense at least, Jean Rhys’s low-key stories may be
considered as humble, minor texts. Her correspondence also tends to present
her short fiction as lesser fiction. About the stories that were to be included
in Tigers Are Better-Looking, she writes in a 1959 letter: “[l]ooking at the
book again I feel that most aren’t real short stories at all—more like unfinished
novels or parts of a novel” (Letters 169). It is almost as if her stories were
rough drafts which, abandoned in mid-sentence, had failed to develop into the
supposedly more accomplished form of the novel. Moreover, while she was in
the slow process of working on Wide Sargasso Sea, short story writing appears
to have been an escapist activity taking her mind off the daunting task. About
“Let Them Call It Jazz,” for example, the story discussed in the present essay,
Jean Rhys wrote in a 1960 letter: “The other day I wrote a short story as a
holiday. It’s called ‘They thought it was jazz’ and is not typed. A bit of a crazy

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story. For fun” (Letters 184). Incidentally, those recreational stories were also
a welcome source of income for a writer who was in financial dire straits
most of her life. Although they were by no means mercenary undertakings, the
stories became, between the end of the Second World War and the late 1960s
when Wide Sargasso Sea was eventually published, diminutive potboilers
which earned her what she called her “runaway money” (Letters 211).
Of course, Jean Rhys’s relation to short fiction was not merely
dependent on writerly frustration or financial predicament. Her writing style,
characterised by a great economy of means, is actually tailored to short fiction:
her bare, uncluttered sentences and her predominantly monosyllabic words
produce maximum effect with fairly little, although this “little” was achieved
at the cost of obsessive, punctilious revision and ruthless trimming. Jean Rhys
had a habit, developed under the aegis of Ford Madox Ford, of downsizing her
novels and stories. In a 1960 letter to Francis Wyndham, for instance, she says
that “Till September Petronella,” also included in Tigers Are Better-Looking,
“was once a full length novel. Almost. I cut it and cut it. Was that right
or wrong? Don’t know” (Letters 185). If some of the stories were, she felt,
abortive novels, others emerged as more refined versions of a novel.
Thus, Jean Rhys’s stories are often unassuming texts, sometimes
written “for fun” in a self-effacing, minimalist style that cuts down on
unnecessary expenses, stories which are clearly shaped by what Pierre Tibi
calls “a subtractive aesthetics” (33).1 As such, they may already qualify as
humble fiction but they also repeatedly focus on humble characters, a protean
cast of paupers ranging from impoverished planters to unsuccessful chorus
girls, to single, aging or sick women, in short a crowd of destitutes who are
relegated to the margins of the world they precariously inhabit, whether it be
the distant colony, the European capital or the small West Country village. The
stories often relate failures, falls from social grace—topics that are consistent
with the Latin root of “humble” which comes from “humus” for
“ground”2—showcasing dispossessed characters who are exposed to social
scorn and humiliation, characters who lead subtractive lives, penni-less and
sometimes home-less down-and-outs. In Jean Rhys’s stories then, humble
characters enjoy literary visibility and voice, where society and relations of
dominance make them invisible and voiceless. To borrow from the title of

1. This “subtractive aesthetics” (“esthétique soustractive”) is part of the economy of means

that characterises the short story, according to Pierre Tibi, a genre which makes the most of
silence and of the implicit (33).
2. “Indeed, the term ‘humble’—from Latin humilis, ‘low, lowly,’ itself from humus
‘ground’—refers to those who are low in rank, quality, or station, who are unimportant and
obscure” (Brasme, Ganteau, Reynier 11).

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Pierre Rosanvallon’s book, the collected stories form a “parliament of invisible
people” in which humble voices make themselves heard.
“Let Them Call It Jazz,” which is part of the collection Tigers Are
Better-Looking and was originally published in The London Magazine in
February 1962,3 combines several contributing factors in social relegation,
poverty, gender and ethnicity, and exemplifies Nick Couldry’s observation
that “inequality becomes particularly durable when two major categories (for
example, gender and ‘race,’ or gender and class) are overlaid in everyday
interactions” (124).4 The story rests on interesting paradoxes when it comes
to the representation of precarious lives and the invisibility and voicelessness
that are associated with them. The heroine, Selina Davis, is both hypervisible
and invisible, loud and voiceless. I will start with a discussion of these
paradoxes, and will then argue that, after her forced journey into
precariousness and invisibility, the protagonist finds a way into discretion and
ordinary life.

HYPERVISIBILITY AS INVISIBILITY

Selina Davis is a mixed-race woman who lives alone in London, a

humble seamstress who has come to the “mother country” to find a good job,
only to realise that her handsewing is too slow for the fast-moving pace of the
city: “[h]owever here they tell me all this fine handsewing take too long. Waste
of time—too slow. They want somebody to work quick and to hell with the
small stitches” (Rhys, Tigers 51). Running out of money, she is kicked out of
her Notting Hill flat and is offered temporary accommodation in the basement
flat of a dilapidated house out in the suburbs, in the margins of the metropolis,
where her presence disturbs and angers her “respectable” neighbours.
As a mixed-race girl in Britain, not so long after the docking of the
Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948, Selina Davis is one of Jean Rhys’s most
conspicuous characters. She is in fact both conspicuous and invisible,
conspicuous in the sense that her skin colour draws attention to her, and
invisible in the sense that her very skin colour confines her identity within a
racial stereotype, the self disappearing behind the ethnic other. She suffers
from the kind of hypervisibility that Ralph Ellison famously defined as a

3. There is evidence in Jean Rhys’s letters that she started writing it in the late 1940s,
dropped it, and worked on it again in the late 1950s (Jean Rhys, Letters 66).
4. In this passage, Nick Couldry is referring to Charles Tilly’s book, Durable Inequality
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).

185
form of invisibility in Invisible Man (1952). In her book about contemporary
diasporas, Françoise Král explains the paradox as follows: “Ralph Ellison’s
novel chronicles the trajectory of a black man who is aware that his ethnic
conspicuousness consigns him to social invisibility in the eyes of white
Americans with racial prejudices” (Král 19). In Le Parlement des invisibles,
Pierre Rosanvallon makes the additional point that Ellison’s hero is invisible
because people will not see him but also because they are incapable of seeing
him: in Ellison’s own words, it is “a matter of the construction of their inner
eyes” (qtd. in Rosanvallon 47). Thus, visibility is also dependent on available
frames of recognition. As Nick Couldry puts it, “to be understood,
acknowledged and recognized as a subject, ‘I’ have to satisfy certain ‘norms of
intelligibility’” (120).
In “Let Them Call It Jazz,” Selina’s ethnic hypervisibility colludes with
economic deprivation to make her invisible and unintelligible. As Mr Sims, the
shady man who provides temporary shelter, reminds her, money plays a very
important part in the distribution of visibility and recognition:

“I don’t think so much about money. It don’t like me and what do I care?”
I was joking, but he turns around, his face quite pale and he tells me I’ll
get pushed around all my life and die like a dog, only worse because they’d
finish off a dog, but they’ll let me live till I’m a caricature of myself. (Rhys,
Tigers 49)

Poverty, Mr Sims claims, makes one doubly invisible in that it reinforces

the power of stereotypes (“caricature of myself”) and dehumanises the self
(“die like a dog, only worse”). It also deprives the self of agency (“I’ll get
pushed around all my life”). Selina’s existence proves Mr Sims’s admonition
right. From the moment she leaves her Notting Hill flat, and partly because
of Mr Sims’s helping hand,5 she engages in a process of social erasure and
self-destruction. In the house which is no home, objectified by the
dehumanising gaze of her neighbours and by her dependence on Mr Sims,
Selina’s life comes to a standstill, and the young woman loses all capacity
for productive action: she lives a life of waiting, of free-floating immobility,
disempowerment and heavy drinking, against her better judgment, this
“restless immobility [being] another paradox of the homeless condition”
according to Georg Zipp (Korte and Regard 175). Selina gradually turns into
a conspicuous but invisible outcast who no longer authors her life. Once in

5. Perhaps because the hidden agenda of this generous assistance is sexual exploitation. No
such thing is explicitly represented in the story but the reader learns through the neighbours’
hostile voices that Mr Sims has previously kept other “tarts” in the house: “‘At least the other
tarts that crook installed here were white girls,’ she says” (Rhys, Tigers 54).

186
the suburbs, she is bound to be even more conspicuous, therefore even more
invisible; as expected, her middle-class neighbours cannot take their eyes off
her: they stare at her “as if I’m wild animal let loose” (Rhys, Tigers 47), see
her as a black “tart” (54) and, at the end of a period of mounting tension
culminating in violence, she is disposed of, sent to jail for being drunk and
disorderly. Most of the story could therefore be described as a process of social
erasure, metaphorized by Selina’s getting thinner and thinner, to the point
of no longer recognising herself in a mirror: “there’s a small looking glass in
my cell and I see myself and I’m like somebody else. Like some strange new
person. Mr Sims tell me I too thin, but what he say now to this person in the
looking glass?” (60). Locked up in jail, she is also a prisoner of the white gaze,
becoming invisible in her own eyes.
The story dramatizes the way in which precariousness—compounded
by ethnicity—transforms an ordinary life into a ghostly one, hidden from view
by the very society that produces this ghosting. As Le Blanc explains in Vies
ordinaires, vies prŽcaires,

there is indeed a social status of precariousness: non-existence. Precarious

people do not live outside society. They are not excluded but they are
dispossessed of themselves by the society that produces them and keeps
them afloat, one foot in, one foot out, thus creating the army of reserves
that capitalism needs to prosper in an unlimited way. The dispossession
of the precarious culminates in their being deprived of voice and face.
(Le Blanc 19-20; my translation)6

By the time Selina finds herself under lock and key, she has become faceless,
and is surrounded by a spectral, faceless army of other precarious women. One
of the girls waiting with her in a long line, for instance, seems to lose substance
as she starts speaking to her: “She stop crying and start a long story, but while
she is speaking her voice get very far away, and I find I can’t see her face clear
at all” (Rhys, Tigers 58).

LOUD VOICELESSNESS

In the same way as Selina is both hypervisible and invisible, she is

both loud and, paradoxically, voiceless. Speaking in the first person in what
6. “Car il existe bien un statut social de la précarité : l’inexistence. Les précaires ne vivent
pas hors de la société. Ils ne sont pas exclus, mais ils sont dépossédés d’eux-mêmes par la
société qui les fabrique en les maintenant à flot, un pied dedans, un pied dehors, et en créant
ainsi l’armée de réserve dont a besoin le capitalisme pour prospérer de manière illimitée. La
dépossession de soi culmine dans la privation de voix et de visage du précaire.”

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sounds like Caribbean English or what Jean Rhys calls “a stylized patois”
(Letters 197), she is endowed with a very distinctive narrating voice, and likes
to sing at the top of her voice when she is drunk. As Kristin Czarnecki notes,
Édouard Glissant once described Creole as “a blast of sound”; the trouble
is that Selina’s neighbours are “unwilling to acknowledge her ‘blasts’ as
legitimate language” (22). The story suggests that she is metaphorically
inaudible and is gradually silenced as a result, establishing a link between
precariousness and voicelessness, as Le Blanc does in Vies ordinaires, vies
prŽcaires:

Ultimately, precarisation jeopardises the narrative shell of the self. The latter
is embedded in a series of linguistic skills which disintegrate proportionally
to the degree of precarisation to which it is subjected. What is undermined
by the more extreme forms of precarisation is not only the possibility of
addressing someone, but also the wish to gather one’s life into a life story that
is indispensable to the arts of doing. (Le Blanc 107-08; my translation)7

In “Let Them Call It Jazz,” Selina explains how, on many occasions, she has
simply given up speaking up or back because nobody would hear what she
had to say. When she is unfairly kicked out of her flat for example, she just
packs up and goes without a word, feeling certain that nobody will listen to her
grievances, no matter how abusive and dishonest her landlords may be: “Any
complaint—the answer is ‘prove it.’ But if nobody see and bear witness for me,
how to prove anything? So I pack up and leave” (Rhys, Tigers 44). When she
is taken to court for breaking her neighbours’ stain-glass window, she tries to
explain herself but, as often with Selina, she becomes too loud to be audible:

I want to tell him the woman next door provoke me since long time and call
me bad names but she have a soft sugar voice and nobody hear—that’s why
I broke her window, but I’m ready to buy another after all. I want to say all I
do is sing in that old garden, and I want to say this in decent quiet voice. But
I hear myself talking loud and I see my hands wave in the air. Too besides it’s
no use, they won’t believe me, so I don’t finish. (57)

As this quotation shows—as indeed the choice of a first-person narrator

suggests—the precarious individual is not entirely voiceless but her voice is
covered over by the “soft sugar voice” of her opponent, her respectable
neighbour. In Le Blanc’s words,

7. “À terme, la précarisation compromet l’enveloppe narrative du ‘soi’. Ce dernier est en effet

enveloppé dans une série de compétences linguistiques qui se désagrègent en fonction de la
précarisation subie. Ce qui est miné par les formes extrêmes de la précarisation, c’est non
seulement la possibilité de s’adresser à, mais c’est également le vœu de rassembler sa ‘vie’
dans un récit de vie indispensable aux arts de faire.”

188
 if the absence of voice is not synonymous with the absence of language, it
does, on the other hand, bear witness to ordinary language games redefined
by the forms of language of the social institution on which the precarious
depend, in such a way that their voices are ultimately made inaudible by the
overlapping that the voices of others produce. To be voiceless, then, does not
amount to being deprived of a voice altogether but to being deprived of an
audible voice, including for oneself. (151; my translation)8

In the courthouse scene, Selina has internalised her own inaudibility to the
point of performing it herself, a process of self-silencing which Nick Couldry
accounts for in a section about social and political misrecognition: “[t]he
status of voice as achieved in politics depends, then, on becoming ‘visible,’
not in the sense of being physically seen—any more than voice itself, as we
noted earlier, depends necessarily on being physically heard—but in the sense
of being regarded as relevant to the distribution of speaking
opportunities” (107). Being invisible, Selina is not recognised as a legitimate,
therefore audible voice, even by herself.
The institution of law enforcement is quite central to the story and
the inaudibility of Selina’s voice in court is symptomatic of how, instead of
being offered the possibility of giving an account of herself, she is just held
accountable for trouble-making and for disturbing the hegemony of social
norms. Here and elsewhere in Jean Rhys’s stories, precarious characters are
deprived of voice or cannot give an account of themselves but are
simultaneously held accountable by law and order, forced to speak or to
explain themselves.9 What the story suggests is that Selina finds herself in
a society where humanising forms of address have yielded to a type of
accountability that “follows only upon an accusation or, minimally, an
allegation, one made by someone in a position to deal out punishment if
causality can be established” (Butler 11). Representatives of the norm coerce
humble people into retributive accountability, a dehumanising defacement of
the other: in court, Selina appears as nothing but a mixed-race troublemaker,
cursing, singing and dancing in “obscene fashion” (Rhys, Tigers 56). The
demonised other returns with a vengeance.

8. “Ainsi si l’absence de voix ne correspond pas à une absence de langage, elle atteste en
revanche de jeux de langage ordinaires redéfinis par les formes du langage de l’institution
sociale dont dépend le précaire, de telle sorte que sa voix est finalement rendue inaudible par
le recouvrement que produit la voix des autres. Être sans voix, c’est alors se trouver non dans
l’absence de voix, mais dans l’absence d’une voix audible, y compris pour soi.”
9. This form of oppressive accountability is also present in “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers,”
“Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose” or “Fishy Waters,” included in Sleep It Off Lady. I
discuss this further in another article (see Maurel).

189
ORDINARY LIFE

Precariousness is the flip side of everyday life. If the latter attaches man to his
capacities thanks to the incorporation of norms that ensure the visibility and
legibility of each life in social life, precariousness, on the contrary, detaches
man from his capacities through the decorporation of norms, making his
capacities opaque and hardly usable. (Le Blanc 103; my translation)10

Unexpectedly enough, in its last third, the story develops towards a reasonably
happy ending. Once precariousness has run its destructive course, dissolving
face, voice and creative action, the denouement—which is not entirely devoid
of ambiguity—returns Selina to ordinary, liveable life. In jail, Selina first goes
through a kind of symbolic death, not saying anything, not eating anything,
not feeling anything, not wanting anything (Rhys, Tigers 59-60). Then, she
hears an empowering song that awakens her from this social slumber and
brings her back into the world:

It’s a smoky kind of voice, and a bit rough sometimes, as if those old dark
walls theyselves are complaining, because they see too much misery—too
much. But it don’t fall down and die in the courtyard; seems to me it could
jump the gates of the jail easy and travel far, and nobody could stop it. I don’t
hear the words—only the music. (60)

Selina hears the song for the first time as she is going round in circles in the
prison yard. Coming from an invisible source but very audibly broadcasting
a message of hope and defiance—the song is known as the Holloway Song
and it says “cheerio and never say die” (60)—it rather miraculously provides
an alternative to social death and allows Selina to sound her own
song—ultimately the story she tells in the first person. The Holloway song
brings down walls and opens up a world of possibilities (“anything can
happen” [61]) where Selina feels she can intervene. She starts eating again
and retrieves her voice, articulating a short narrative of what happened to
her: “[t]hen I’m hungry. I eat everything they bring and in the morning I’m
still so hungry I eat the porridge. Next time the doctor come he tells me I
seem much better. Then I say a little of what really happen in that house.
Not much. Very careful” (61). The visit of the doctor, a figure of care in the
repressive environment of the prison, now creates a scene of address which
performatively produces a self with voice and agency: “[t]he felicitous address

10. “La précarisation est le revers de la quotidianisation. Si celle-ci attache l’homme à ses
capacités par l’incorporation des normes qui assurent une visibilité et une lisibilité de chaque
vie dans la vie sociale, la précarité, au contraire, détache l’homme de ses capacités par la
décorporation des normes, rendant les capacités opaques et guère utilisables.”

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produced by the physician’s ‘you’ causes the ‘I’ to emerge in a narrative sphere
that is, in itself, a performative scene” (Le Blanc 240; my translation).11
Thus, the Holloway song is a deterritorialising song that brings down
walls, that is to say challenges the compartmentalisation of social space, whose
“lines, invisible in certain cases, ground and validate the existence of certain
people while condemning those who are stranded in unacknowledged
avenues, between two countries and awaiting a new status as residents for
example, to sink into oblivion” or to live invisible lives (Král 3).12 The song
is an act of resistance that subverts the coercion of the prison and, beyond
this, that of the dominant order embodied in language, the stereotypes, the
injurious addresses, the retributive accountability which make Selina invisible
and inaudible. The Holloway song can be regarded as what Jean-Jacques
Lecercle calls a “counter-address” (15):

there is no address that does not elicit a counter-address (of ideology by the
subject it addresses). . . . Between the various addresses that constitute me as
a subject, there is a certain amount of play, both space- and time-based—this
amount of play is the breeding ground of my freedom and it is what enables
me to counter-address. (15; my translation)13

In Selina’s prison-cell and in the confining social world she inhabits, the
Holloway song creates—or helps reveal—space in the criss-cross of norms
that determines the self, introduces freedom and possibility, points to an
escape route or a line of flight: it suggests to her that she can appropriate
the norms and be creative with them, from within them. In other words, it
shows her the way to ordinary life as Le Blanc understands it, that is to say a
life in which the self can be creative and cunning enough to bend norms and
produce new sustaining ones: ordinary life is “a creative force, a craftiness that
reroutes the meaning of norms and makes new ones emerge”; “ordinary life is

11. “L’interpellation bienheureuse produite par le ‘tu’ du clinicien fait surgir le ‘je’ dans une
sphère narrative qui est, en elle-même, une scène performative.”
12. In this particular section, Françoise Král is speaking about the invisibility and even
spectrality of migratory movements nowadays but the invisible lines which compartmentalise
space and categorise certain lives as invisible ones were already dividing the social space
of the 1950s in which earlier migrants such as Selina Davis landed, and are more generally
relevant to the social relegation of precarious people. See in particular chapter 5 of her book
(“Nation Building and Home Thinking” 133-52).
13. “Il n’y pas d’interpellation qui ne suscite une contre-interpellation (de l’idéologie par le
sujet qu’elle interpelle). . . . entre les diverses interpellations qui me constituent en sujet, il
y a du jeu, à la fois topique et temporel—c’est ce jeu qui fonde ma liberté et me permet de
contre-interpeller.”

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like poaching inside the forest of norms” (Le Blanc 20, 44; my translation).14
After her release for example, Selina is able to have a normal conversation
about the weather with a woman at the station (“I know what to say and
everything go like a clock works” [Rhys, Tigers 62]), and she is later able
to secure a job by lying about her work experience (“I lie and tell them I
work in very expensive New York shop. I speak bold and smooth faced, and
they never check up on me” [62]). She now has enough resourcefulness to
make her own creative way “inside the forest of norms” while staying within
normative frames of recognition. Interestingly, her new job consists in altering
ready-to-wear dresses; in other words, she is now possessed of the marketable
skill of adjusting general, collective patterns to particular bodies (63).
One way of accounting for Selina’s development would be to say that
she manages to convert hypervisibility, invisibility and humiliation into
discretion, the art of disappearing according to Pierre Zaoui. Discretion is
a form of self-effacement that should not be mistaken for self-denial or
selflessness; it is a temporary experience of withdrawal that opens the self to
others and to the possibilities available to ordinary life: “it is an experience in
the midst of and close to beings and things which requires the laying down of
all sovereignty in order to open oneself to the legally unlimited possibilities
of anonymous life” (Zaoui 135; my translation).15 As well as being one of
the conditions of dissent—“[A]ll serious and humble resistance has always
begun with the acceptance of a certain clandestinity, that is, the art of hugging
the walls and of keeping a low profile, the art of discretion” (17; my
translation)16—discretion is more or less the opposite of the non-chosen
invisibility of the precarious; it is a humble form of visibility or invisibility
that allows the self to navigate the social world safely, positing and resulting
in a more peaceful and symmetrical form of relationality. In Zaoui’s words,
discretion is a way of “letting the world be” (91), a turn of phrase which brings
to mind the title of the story, taken from the ambiguous ending. At a party,
Selina whistles the Holloway song, and one of the guests “jazzes it up” on the
piano:

14. “[L]a vie ordinaire est puissance créatrice, ruse pour détourner le sens des normes et
faire advenir de nouvelles normes”; “La vie ordinaire est comme une série de braconnages à
l’intérieur de la forêt des normes.”
15. “C’est une expérience au milieu et auprès des êtres et des choses, qui exige de déposer
toute souveraineté pour s’ouvrir aux possibilités en droit illimitées de la vie anonyme.”
16. “[T]oute résistance sérieuse et modeste a toujours commencé par l’acceptation d’une
certaine clandestinité, c’est-à-dire l’art de raser les murs et de ne pas se faire remarquer, l’art
de la discrétion.”

192
 I say, “No, not like that,” but everybody else say the way he do it is first class.
Well I think no more of this till I get a letter from him telling me he has sold
the song and as I was quite a help he encloses five pounds with thanks.
I read the letter and I could cry. For after all, that song was all I had. I don’t
belong nowhere really, and I haven’t money to buy my way to belonging. I
don’t want to either. . . .
Now I’ve let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other
songs—like everything. Nothing left for me at all.
But then I tell myself all this is foolishness. Even if they played it on trumpets,
even if they played it just right, like I wanted—no walls would fall so soon.
“So let them call it jazz,” I think, and let them play it wrong. That won’t
make no difference to the song I heard.
I buy myself a dusty pink dress with the money. (Rhys, Tigers 63)

The transformation of the Holloway song into jazz at the close of the story
may be read as a final act of deprivation: Selina feels she is being dispossessed
of her own transformative song, now commodified by and reterritorialised
as mass entertainment. From this perspective, “‘[s]o let them call it jazz’”
could be interpreted as a bitter dismissal of dominant discourse and, because
the phrasing implies an abdication and delegation of the power of naming,
it could be seen as the final surrender of the precarious self to the silencing
and invisibilising of the dominant order. In addition, jazz music, very popular
since the interwar period, owes much to “foreign” influences and yet has been
incorporated into mass culture, an ironic counterpoint to the treatment to
which Selina, herself a cultural hybrid, has been subjected.17 The cruel irony
is probably not lost on her. However, after her initial despair, Selina shifts
to a more detached, almost indifferent mood which alters the meaning of her
words: in the last analysis, “So let them call it jazz” may express a temporary
withdrawal of the discreet self and a discreet rather than resigned acceptance
of the jazzy version, as long as the original meaning and the emancipatory
power of the song endure. Far from being an admission of defeat, her discreet
withdrawal preserves the private space of the self (“That won’t make no
difference to the song I heard”) while accommodating the collective space of
others: Selina, as Zaoui puts it, “lets the world be.” A token of her newfound
discretion is the “dusty pink dress” she treats herself to with the five pounds.
The subdued colour signposts her entry into discretion, while the new dress
marks the recovery of social visibility and viability. The “dusty pink dress” is a
metonymy for the humble but empowering style which Selina achieves at the
end and which protects her from social annihilation.

17. On the cultural hybridity of jazz music and its signalling “the transformations of postwar
English culture through the literature and popular music of a new wave of immigrants,
beginning with the Windrush Generation,” see Zimring (41).

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 ¥

Jean Rhys, Helen Carr argues, “writes in the voice of the

disempowered” (44). In “Let Them Call It Jazz,” this voice speaks patois, a
dialect which is immediately perceived as “culturally inferior or low-class,
the common English perception of patois” (Czarnecki 21). Thus, Selina Davis
speaks in the voice of the humble but this humble idiom is not the language
of disempowerment in this story, nor does it simply perpetuate debasing
stereotypes.18 It is part of Selina’s humble style, her modulation of standard
English—Le Blanc defines style as “the modulation of norms” (44). This is
perhaps where the humble, the ordinary and the minor modes cross paths.
Not unlike Selvon’s in Lonely Londoners (1956), analysed by Lecercle (9-10),
Jean Rhys’s imitation of the minor dialect of Caribbean immigrants effects a
“becoming-minor” of standard English (Deleuze and Guattari 27). It is minor
in the sense that it is spoken by a community of immigrants but also in Deleuze
and Guattari’s sense of the word:

The first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language

is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization. . . . The second
characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is
political. . . . The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary,
indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within
it. . . . The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes
on a collective value. . . . literature finds itself positively charged with the role
and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. (17)

Flouting the grammaticality of standard English—the idiom of Selina’s

oppressors in the story, landlords and landladies, white neighbours, law
enforcement—the minor or humble dialect subverts linguistic and social
power structures and sounds the “blasts” or the “counter-address” of a humble
but audible, creative voice through which other voices make themselves heard.

Sylvie Maurel
UniversitŽ Toulouse Jean-Jaur•s

18. Kristin Czarnecki studies Selina’s patois in the context of dialect usage during the
modernist period and explains that “African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance
deliberated over dialect and often eschewed it in their works for fear of propagating base
stereotypes. . . . dialect often confined black writers within an exotic, folksy, or humorous
framework, contrary to the principles of racial uplift outlined by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain
Locke, wherein African Americans would gain an entrée into mainstream society through a
black aesthetic founded on sophisticated cultural accomplishments” (23).

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 WORKS CITED

Brasme, Isabelle, Jean-Michel Ganteau, and Christine Reynier, eds. The

Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts.
Montpellier: PU de la Méditerranée, 2017. Print.

Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham UP, 2005.
Print.

Carr, Helen. “‘Intemperate and Unchaste’: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole
Identity.” Women: A Cultural Review 14.1 (2003): 38-62. Print.

Couldry, Nick. Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism.
Los Angeles: Sage, 2010. Print.

Czarnecki, Kristin. “Jean Rhys’s Postmodern Narrative Authority: Selina’s

Patois in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz.’” College Literature 35.2 (Spring 2008):
20-37. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan and Réda Bensmaïa. Minneapolis: The U of Minnesota P,
1986. Print.

Král, Françoise. Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature

and Culture: The Fractal Gaze. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
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Le Blanc, Guillaume. Vies ordinaires, vies prŽcaires. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Print.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “Qu’est-ce qu’une langue mineure?” PŽriode 7 (janvier

2016): 1-18. Print.

Maurel, Sylvie. “Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady.” Women: A Cultural

Review 31.2 (2020): 138-48. Print.

Rhys, Jean. Tigers Are Better-Looking. With a selection from The Left Bank.
1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print.

---. Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Print.

---. Sleep It Off Lady. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Print.

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Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le Parlement des invisibles. Paris: Seuil et Raconter la
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Tibi, Pierre. “La nouvelle : Essai de compréhension d’un genre.” Cahiers de

lÕUniversitŽ de Perpignan 4 (1988): 7-66. Print.

Zaoui, Pierre. La DiscrŽtion ou lÕart de dispara”tre. Paris: Autrement, 2013.

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Zipp, Georg. “Life on the Streets: Parallactic Ways of Seeing Homelessness

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LÕarticle porte sur une nouvelle de Jean Rhys, ÒLet Them Call It JazzÓ publiŽe
pour la premi•re fois en 1962. LÕhumble est une catŽgorie qui convient ˆ la
fois pour dŽcrire ÒlÕesthŽtique soustractiveÓ (Tibi) des textes de Jean Rhys et les
thŽmatiques quÕelle affectionne : elle met frŽquemment en sc•ne des personnages
vulnŽrables qui font lÕexpŽrience dŽshumanisante de la pauvretŽ et du mŽpris
social. Dans ÒLet Them Call It JazzÓ, une jeune CaribŽenne sÕinstalle ˆ Londres
en qu•te dÕun avenir meilleur. Ë la fois trop visible et invisible, trop bruyante
et inaudible, elle est soumise ˆ une forme extr•me de prŽcaritŽ. JetŽe en prison,
elle parvient, gr‰ce ˆ la puissance dŽterritorialisante dÕune mŽlodie, ˆ sortir de
la prŽcaritŽ pour renouer avec la vie ordinaire (Ç le revers de la prŽcaritŽ È,
selon Guillaume Le Blanc) et Ç lÕagir crŽateur È. LÕitinŽraire de Selina Davis la
conduit de lÕhypervisibilitŽ et de lÕinvisibilitŽ ˆ la discrŽtion, lÕart de la disparition
selon Pierre Zaoui. LÕhumilitŽ devient alors un style, modulation des normes qui
permet au soi de se dŽployer dans lÕespace social.

196
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.

197