Nonsynchronism and Narrative Techniques in the MTV of

Jay Chou’s “Listen to Mother”

Abstract

    The essay intends to adopt the concept of nonsynchronism and the narrative techniques in reviewing a short Music Television video, the singer Jay Chou’s “Listen to Mother”（周杰倫的聽媽媽的話）. Basically, the essay on this research will at first hand give the introduction of the idea of nonsynchronism and make a specific exploration on how the concept is applied in some exemplary texts and films. For the second part, the some narrative techniques will be specified in a brief explanation, and in the third part, the essay will focus on the discussion of nonsynchronism and the narratives in “Listen to Mother.”

The concept of nonsynchronism is once thematically discussed by Bliss Cua Lim, in Literature and Film, on his essay about Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives, which was adapted by director Bryan Forbes for a film titled The Stepford Wives. For the definition of the concept, as in the Literature and Film, Bliss Cua Lim “uses the term nonsynchronism to designate a fractured sense of time evoked by the figuration of competing contexts of experiences, or discontinuous epistemological paradigms, in fantastic narratives.(163)” Also, the concept of “nonsynchronism” is specified to “designate a recurring notion, in the fantastic, that people do not all dwell in the same Now; that there is more than one time in any one time, that past, present, and future modes of being in the world are neither securely moored nor absolutely differentiated, but are mutually entangled.(164)” In Stepford Wives, as the Bluebeard plot, the uncannily prophetic experiences of the female victim “belongs to narratives of fate, which has cast the present as the already-past of an inevitable future.(171)” In other words, Joanna, the victim of the narratives of fate, “seeing the downfall of other women as the portent of her death,(171)” is at the moment of nonsynchronism as she is destined to see her future self while she thinks of herself as a present self and simultaneously she has been taken to be an already-past of an inevitable future.

For general definition by most narratologists, “all parts of narratives--characters, narrators, existents, actors--are characterized in terms of diegesis.” Diegesis can be divided by Gerard Genette, a French literary theorist, to certain levels in narrative fiction." The extradiegetic level (the level of the narrative's telling) is "external to any diegesis." One might think of this as what we commonly understand to be the narrator's level, at which the narrator is not part of the story he tells. The diegetic level is understood as the level of the characters, their thoughts and actions.

In Jay Chou’s “Listen to Mother（周杰倫的 ”聽媽媽的話”）,” there is a discussion of the two techniques. My contention aims at a nonsynchronous interpretation in the dialogue of the two characters, Jay and the boy, in a bedroom teeming with toys. Meanwhile, I will make an analytical work on the diegetic levels that “Listen to Mother” would have used, and the identities Jay has impersonates. I would like to presume that the dialogue between the two characters is, in fact, the dialogue between the present Jay and his self in childhood as well as a past-self. This presumption relates my contention of nonsynchronism by the probe not only of the contexts in the two characters’ dialogue but of their gestures and some objects of the room in term of certain images. In the interpretation of nonsynchronism, if with a narrow sense, the boy impersonates a past-self of the present Jay and Jay Chou a present Jay when they are in a（historical）room of nostalgia. However, the broad interpretation of the characters and their dialogue lead us to a space of many more identities for “Listen to Mother;” for the boy, the present Jay is his future-self while the present Jay is a narrator of the story and a character of the present Jay to the boy, and he also plays a mother-figure to the boy as a past-self. Besides the roles, the present Jay, simultaneously, is characterized by a role of his being a child of a mother, which is indicated in the context of the narrator’s diegesis. Hence, it could be confusing by the way the narrator(s) tells the story. In fact, in the present Jay’s role playing, there is a symbiotic situation that we may be led by the character’s context that at times the character-narrator, or narrator of diegetic level, of the present Jay narrates in symbiotic or ambiguous voices of character of the present Jay and of a mother-figure, and at times voices of the present Jay and a child-figure.