Trainspotting Post #2

In Kicking Again we get a chance to see just how terrible Begbie really is.  His girlfriend is pregnant with his kid and when he becomes annoyed of her he “boots [her] in the fuckin fanny” (110) without remorse.  The thought of being a father pains Begbie and he warns that he is not going to be a good father to him.  This moment foreshadows a later moment when Begbie is at the train station and he encounters his father.  We understand later why Begbie has such a disdainful view of parenting.  

These chapters also provides a much closer look into the character of Spud, who has been a peripheral character so far in Trainspotting.  We learn that he is quite sentimental and values family.  Furthermore, that his family is comprised of both Irish and Scottish blood.  When he goes to a pub with his Uncle, who is also mixed.  When the two go to a pub they encounter Orange men, who Spud refers to as Nazis.  They Orange men are enthusiasts of claiming Northern Ireland as British.  When a fight breaks out Spud believes all the fighting as nonsensical.  The conflict in Northern Ireland returns over and over again in the novel, most notably when Billy, Renton’s older brother, is later killed defending Ulster.

This section of the novel contains one of the funnier and more awkward moments of the text.  Renton goes home with a girl from a club and has sex with her, but she does not let him sleep in her room so instead he sleeps on the couch downstairs.  When he wakes up he notices that her roommates are very old, only to find out that they are actually her parents.  This scene is funny because he had no idea just how young the girl was.  His relationship with Dianne is a much more important part of the movie, but in the book their relationship is short-lived and plays only a small role. 

Trainspotting Post #1

Welsh wastes no time before throwing us into a world of drugs and the pursuit of more drugs.  Although the novel does not have a traditional main character because the point of view is constantly changing, Renton is the closest thing to it.  His point of view provides the reader with a unique experience because it allows for us to experience Leith and the world of drugs in which they live from the perspective of a junky.  Certainly the language itself is difficult to understand at times, but this is not the strength of the Renton chapter.  The strength of his point of view is in conveying the anxiety he, Sick Boy, and the others experience in their unending pursuit of heroine.  Their appetite is insatiable, and their addiction is the conflict throughout most of the opening chapters of the novel. 

What is off-putting about the group is their complete neglect for those around them.  Begbie in particular is off-putting because he bullies people indiscriminately.  Not only does he torture his friends with constant threats, but he picks on tourists and robs them for fun.  But Begbie is not the only one who is off-putting.  In fact, the whole group of them were so high for so long that they allowed for a baby to die from such an extended period of neglect.  It is likely that the kid had been dead for days, but no one was sober enough to realize it. 

The book is totally a critique of the state.  Drugs and the state come up together all the time, which suggests that the Renton and the others were using drugs, among other reasons, as a form of protest. Renton says: “On the issue of drugs, we wir classical liberals, vehemently opposed tae state intervention in any form.” (53) But the state comes up elsewhere in the novel, even when drugs are not involved.  Stevie at the New Years party finds a way of relating football to what he believes is an oppressive British social structure.  He says: “Football divisions were a stupid and irrelevant nonsense, acting against the interests of working-class unity, ensuring that the bourgeoisie’s hegemony went unchallenged.” (48)

 I’m not sure I detected Welsh himself in the first two sections.  Later on in the novel we encounter a lot more third person objective narration, and I suppose that those chapters are more Welsh.  

Bull's Vagina and his Cocky Doc

The second section of our Bull reading begins in Dr. Margoulies office.  Bull is hoping that the doctor reaffirms his diagnosis that the growth on the back of his leg is only a burn, which he does.  Dr. Margoulies feels his lie is in the best interest of Bull because if he were to tell him the truth – that it was, in fact, a vagina – Bull would be worse off.  We get the sense, however, from that moment on that Dr. Margoulies is drawn/sexually attracted to it. 

When Bull on being examined he experiences another moment like the one at the comedy show in which he feels the anxiety of being a woman.  He says:  “But this dread was something different.  It was a fear of intrusion into himself, rather than of expansion into the World’s gaze.” (179) He does not explicitly make the connection between his vulnerability and fear to an woman’s experience, but it is implicit to the reader.

This examination scene is also comedic, as Self continues to play with language in a way that makes situation ironic at times and just plain juvenile at times.  For example: “Margoulies used the balls of his thumbs gently to prise apart the outer lips of the vagina.” (183) This language is suggestive.  Self makes the choice to include “balls of his thumbs” instead of just thumbs, making the hand a phallic symbol.  It also foreshadows the doctor’s rape.

Before the rape however, I found it strange that the doctor was concerned with his sexual orientation and not just at the strangeness of the situation.  He was planning on raping the back of another person’s (lets not engender Bull right now) leg, and what he was worried about if it made him queer or not?  He says: “I fancy him, it’s true.  But damn it all, I’m not queer, I’m just not.” (221) Self is purposefully undermining the seriousness and the strangeness of the situation.  And then later, after the doctor has raped Bull, instead of contemplating the strangeness of what had just occurred, he worries about his career. “Worse still, the man was his patient.” (233) 

Self's Bull + Gonzales

            Bull is the story of Bull, who discovers a vagina on the back of his leg.  He is curious about it but is more fearful than anything else.  Not much happens in the present: Bull discovers the orifice and rushes to the hospital instead of going in for work.  On his way to the hospital, however, we are given exposition that better contextualizes Bull’s current crisis. 

            Although Self is poking fun at the notion of “raised consciousness” (171) as the result of such a metamorphosis, it is, in fact, what is happening in the story.   Bull, for the first time in his life, is forced to contemplate the experience of the opposite sex.  He is “…imprisoned in a stereoscopic zone where a shift in angle is all that’s required for free will to be seen as determined.” (156) This becomes evident when he remembers his experience at a bar after discovering the vagina.  A comedian named Razza Rob is relentlessly making jokes about vaginas and even singles out Bull as the subject of a joke.  He feels awkward and self-conscious and wants to escape the bar, but if he had not sprouted a vagina he would have been perfectly content in participating in the vulgar and insensitive humor: “Given the right circumstances Bull could appreciate a good joke at the expense of women’s genitals just as much as the next man.” (169) This moment underscores Bull’s hypocrisy.  We also learn about Dr. Margoulies, who is a womanizing and cheating man, but he’s a nice doctor!  A saint!

            Madelena Gonzales, in The Aesthetics of Post-Realism and the Obscenification of Everyday Life: The Novel in the Age of Technology, asks: “…how does the novel, a traditionally low- tech form, requiring only pen and paper, interact with this new state of af- fairs or state of the art?” (115) Although the technique of free-indirect discourse is not a very recent development, it is a modern technique that is represented in Self’s Cock and Bull.  On his way to the hospital, Bull thinks about all the people that have committed suicide from the building (bridge) in front of him.  We are experiencing this moment from the third person perspective, but then suddenly, without introduction that we are entering Bull’s mind, Self adds: “I mustn’t keep thinking like that.” (161) This internal monologue illustrates things about Bull that would otherwise have been inaccessible.  This technique, especially in an age in which “television and cinema have taken over the narrative function of the novel” (Gonzales), is particularly useful.  

Will Self Style

For Susan, sex with men had felt like riding a bike down a cobblestone street: she, mounted on an unwieldy and foreign object, would hang on for dear life as her body shook from shallow, unforgiving jabbing.  Now, with many years between her and her attempts with men, she sat on her Savanna porch with her girlfriend, Melissa, and remembered the way her substitute teacher’s face had appeared that afternoon when he forced his way into her.  She could have sworn his skin had resembled the texture of stone: it was cracked and reddening around the eyes and nose and when he told her to lick it, it tasted like chalk.  But Mr. Chalky was only a distant memory to her, and, besides, was sex with men really that bad?  After a while she had developed ways of coping with them.  Like the Mercedes Bens that her father drove her to school in, she had built within her self an intricate system of shocks and pulleys that absorbed even the most jagged and ruined of men.  

Cock[y] Book Review

Will Self’s Cock is the story of Carol and Dan, who meet during a pub-crawl in college and get married.  The story is told from Carol’s perspective.  What begins as a mildly unfulfilling sex life worsens into one Carol cannot tolerate.  Her dissatisfaction with Dan, who has grown to be a burden because of his alcoholism, leads Carol to explore alternatives for sexual satisfaction.  She discovers the joys of masturbation, but soon thereafter stumbles upon a growth above her genitals, which is later determined to be a penis.

            Carol carries on with her life, and attempts to fix her husbands problems by participating in AA meetings with him and his mentor.  While she uses these meetings as a platform through which to vent her own anxieties about her secret down below, Carol ultimately finds both Dan and her mentor intolerable and rapes both of them. 

            Cock is the story of a metamorphosis, but not in the traditional sense.  It is both comedic and serious.  The subject matter alone undermines that great literary achievements that utilize the same theme of metamorphosis, like Kafka’s and Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Self’s Cock is a satirical piece not only meant to undermine traditional literary themes, but it is transgressive in its attack on contemporary gender roles.  His story demands the questions: How does Carol’s penis change her?  Are genital parts correlate with masculinity and femininity? How much of our everyday behavior as male and female is performance?  Why are we so obsessed with our genitals?  

Self's Cock

Will Self’s article “Some Like it Hot” appeared on The Independent website.  What Self is essentially doing is poking fun at people’s laziness when it comes to traveling.  He discusses how people, instead of traveling to “diminishing equatorial rainforest,” just go to the local sauna, which reproduces a similar climate.  Later in the article, Self tells the story of when he got a massage only to realize, when he turned around for a little “something extra” that it was a boy who was giving him the massage.  While the tone is certainly comedic and ironic, it seems that Self is trying to shed light on more important social behaviors. 

Similarly, in Cock and Bull, there are many instances of humor that are undercut by more serious social criticism.  Certainly Carol’s dilemma of sprouting a penis is amusing because it is so strange and uncomfortable, but it is clearly, like The Metamorphosis, a manifestation of, a reaction to, something more serious in her life.  She struggles to find happiness as a married woman and is fed up with Dan’s drunkenness.  When she finally begins to explore her body through masturbation she discovers that she is also growing a penis.  Is the penis a reaction to the masturbation, and the empowerment she experiences as a result of self-given orgasms?  Perhaps the penis is a manifestation of her independence from Dan – of he autonomy as a woman?

Biographically speaking I could not find an article that shed light on Cock and Bull, but it is clear that Self’s work is provocative and controversial because he explores things that most people would rather not recognize as real.  A woman sprouting a penis is very unlikely, but the feelings Carol experiences are very real.

The article I read can be found here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/will-self/will-self-some-like-it-hot-897322.html

No Guts No Glory

Palahniuk’s “Guts” is a rollercoaster ride.  The first portion of the piece is full of embarrassing anecdotes of boys trying to “get off.”  These masturbation stories, as we learn from Palahniuk’s essay, are meant to be both funny and scary because they involve nothing supernatural or even out of the ordinary.  These boys are using household things like vegetables, clothing, and pools to explore the limits of masturbation.  Part of the reason why the first two instances of masturbation are so funny is because we are not really invested in the characters.  One of them escapes unscathed but carrying with him the embarrassment of knowing his mother found the carrot, but the other one dies.  Why is it that we feel very little for the boy that dies with a noose around his neck, yet we feel sympathy for subject of the final story?

I think the most obvious answer is that the final story is the narrator’s story.  What begins as just another day pearl diving in the swimming pool becomes an incident that would radically alter the rest of his life.  His large intestines are literally sucked into the pool gutter and he is left trying to reach the surface for oxygen.  Palahniuk takes a moment of humor – a moment not dissimilar to the ones that introduced the theme of masturbation – and makes it serious.  But the piece does not come off as a warning to others.  How many people use pool suction mechanisms to masturbate? 

I think what Palahniuk was ultimately trying to accomplish in Guts is to shock people.  The subject matter alone is one that makes most people uncomfortable (and this, no doubt, plays a role in the humor of the piece but also in the fainting later on).  Is the story transgressive because the subject matter is so unexplored?  Masturbation is not something people tend to discuss, especially publically, and Palahniuk does so to the extreme.  A boy masturbating while his mother calls him down for dinner may be funny, but a boy who has to live the rest of his life watching what he eats because he destroyed his intestinal track is another. 

The style is informal.  Often times the author addresses the reader in the second person, which seems to implicate the reader in the story.  Are we all guilty of certain strange masturbation techniques?  Is that what he is getting at?  In addition, the sentence structure is short and choppy.  Most paragraphs are no longer than just a few sentences.  This structure helps control the overall pace of the piece.  

Circus thoughts, and Food.

The second half of Nights… remains consistent with the first in that it is also high allusive.  Carter’s allusions, which pervade every scene in the novel, refer to biblical passages, contemporary folklore, song and dance, and even pop culture.  These allusions complicate on a literary level a story that is already complicated in and of itself.  The plot is not strictly linear as Carter continuously refers back to the lives of certain characters.  These not so brief expository passages in Nights…, as when we learn the stories of The Princess, Mignon, etc, are not meant to interrupt the narrative.  On the contrary, the experiences of these protagonists inform the present story, and give us insight as to what Carter’s intensions are.  For example, the Princess’s and Mignons exploitation as women forces the reader to consider Fevvers’ own exploitation as a female character, or, conversely, her exploitation of men. 

The apes escape (legally) from the circus, Buffo the clown goes crazy and literally summersaults out of the circus, the Strong Man is revealed as weak, The Princess and Mignon fall in love, yet all this disorder – both productive and tragic – does not stop the inevitable from happening: all those members of the circus were to become trapped in route to Siberia, a train crash that leaves its members in a state of existential limbo.  The Princess and Mignon progress so much in the novel and emerge, like Fevvers, as powerful female characters, yet all three of these women are left helpless in the Russian wilderness.  Neither of the three, like the rest in the caravan, are able to transcend the life threatening situation they are in.  Does Carter purposefully undermine their progress?  What was the point of the novel if, after Mignon and the Princess find solace from the hectic world and their mutual love for each other, they are left to die, wandering in the icy dessert? 

I have a lot of thoughts that need further exploration, but I want to address the critical essay assigned for this class.  Abigail Dennis, in “The Spectacle of her Gluttony,” addresses the novels ambivalence.  The novel contains within it individual stories that introduce whole new sets of ideas and interpretations.  It is complex and highly metaphoric and allusive, and for this reason I would agree that Carters’ intentions are HIGHLY ambivalent.  I enjoyed trying to deconstruct the metaphors and to decipherer their meanings within the larger context of the story, but at times I found it difficult to grasp what Carter was trying to do.  I, however, am not sure I agree with Dennis’ interpretation Carter’s use of food, eating, and appetite, or her “literary food ethos.” (119)  Excessive eating certainly feeds into the Bahktian notion of the grotesque body, and Fevvers certainly indulges herself in ways that we are not used to seeing women portrayed (especially when we consider the archetypal Victorian female character), but is her overeating political? Dennis says:

The animalistic, carnal relish with which she attacks her food signifies an earthy sexuality, and her blatant disregard for feminine niceties, from basic etiquette to the Victorian habit of pretending that one does not, in fact, engage in the act of eating… (121)

…but should we understand her eating habits as a central detail of the story?  This added layer is fun to entertain, and knowing that Carter herself suffered with eating disorders throughout her life certainly adds credibility to the argument, but food/eating as playing a major function in the novel is something I am unsure I am willing to buy into.  

Carter's Artifice and Feminist Agenda

         Carter forces the reader to question the validity of Fevvers’ story from the very beginning, and it is precisely because of Walser’s investigation that we come to know Fevvers’ story.  He says: “Though do not think the revelation she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it.  If she isn’t suspect, where’s the controversy?  What’s the news?” (11) Because we are primed with the seed of doubt by the narrator, subsequent moments of supernatural happenings – like the moment in which Fevvers sprouts her wings – become increasingly questionable.

         For example:

“She let out a great shriek,” said Lizzie, “that brought me up out of a dream – for I shared the attic with her, sir – and there she stood, stark as a stone, her ripped chemise around her ankles, and I would have thought I was still dreaming or else have died and gone to heaven, among the blessed angels; or, that she was the Annunciation of my menopause.” (24)

         The first things about this passage that caught my attention was its reliability – not even Lizzie knows if what she saw was really happening, or if the sprouting of wings was just a dream.  This ambiguity feeds back directly into Walser’s initial skepticism, and reinforces the potentially artificial nature of the story. 

         This particular moment in the story is very much concerned with feminist themes.  In many ways, Fevvers wings symbolize the beginning of her transformation from ordinary child to “…the pure child of century...[in a] New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground.” (25) But what if this transformation never took place?  Does this debunk the story’s potentially feminist agenda?  Carter clearly intended for the reader to also question the verisimilitude of Fevver’s and Lizzie’s stories, but why?  Carter’s ambiguity suggests that the story could take place even if Fevver’s story isn’t true.  Perhaps Carter is suggesting that a winged woman does not do anything to directly change a woman’s role in society.  It certainly has changed Fevver’s circumstances by providing her with wealth and fame, but winged or not, she still endured certain female experiences – both bodily and at the hands of men – in which her wings played only a minor role.  For example, she grew up in a brothel and witnessed the way women were treated.  She learned from these experiences.  And this was well before she sprouted her wings. 

Malapropism and the meaning behind Carter's language

            One way to consider Carter’s “delicate malapropisms” in Circus is as divisive, and one that contributes to a feminist reading of the text.  In other words, Carter purposefully misuses words to alert the reader of both the subtext of the moment and satirical implications of the passage in relation to the story as a whole.  For example:

“Oh, her little plump thighs like chicken cutlets in her doeskin britches!  What a quaint figure she cut!  He was a Scottish gentleman with a big beard.  I remember him well.  Never give ‘is name, of course.  Left her his library.  Our Fevvers was always rooting about in it, nose in a book nothing but a poke of humbugs for company.” (40)

            “Chicken cutlets” and “doeskin britches” is diction most commonly associated with food, yet Carter uses it here to describe Ma Nelson.  This objectification of Ma Nelson, a heroic heroine in the story, by Carter suggests that she is mocking the kind of language men like the Scottish gentlemen use to describe women, and, furthermore, the way men perceive women: as meat.  This language informs the sarcasm we encounter in the subsequent sentence: “What a quaint figure she cut!”  We know that the two are directly related because the latter maintains the same diction is the former. 

            Lizzie, Fevvers’ companion in the novel, is telling this excerpt and we learn that Fevvers uses the library donated by the Scottish patron to educate herself.  This performance is ironic because a man who is clearly depicted as one of their many oppressors donates the library, an understood source of knowledge to the whorehouse.  This knowledge seems to be an important contribution to Fevvers’ feminism in the story.  And if the characters (whores) within the home are meant to represent all women in the world, Carter may be suggesting that education is the key to liberation.  Just moments earlier, Ma Nelson’s house is described: “Yet we were all suffragists in that house…it was a wholly female world within Ma Nelson’s door.” (38)

The final sentence of the chosen excerpt illustrates both Carter’s sarcasm and manipulation of words to connote certain intended meanings.  The use of “poke” is purposeful as it has sexual connotation.  But not sexual connotation in its grandest.  “Poke” suggests the meekness of man – his furtive attempts at intercourse; it suggests repetitive sexual shortcoming.  


Related moments:

1.     “The room, in all, was a mistresspiece of uniquely feminine squalor. (9)

2.     “She invitingly shook the bottle until it ejaculated afresh.” (12)

3.     “…every morning…I lit the fire…until…the drawing-room was snug as a groin.” (27) 

“…this lumber room of femininity, this rag-and-bone shop of the heart…” (69)

Amis and Shakespeare

Acting becomes a motif in Money.  The impetus for Self’s experiences in New York is work-related, and what he does for work involves actors.  Most of his time is spent tracking down and talking to actors – discussing their roles, their compensation, and what they will and will not do on screen.  But his occupation is merely a way of introducing acting as a theme in the novel. 

This theme is explored in several additional ways.  He observes people both in New York and London, describing them as actors or artificers in some capacity.  He warns (rhetorically) several times that one should always watch out not for the professional actors, but for those who act not as an occupation.  Why are they more dangerous?  Is Self calling himself out as just another actor in the novel? 

Martin Amis himself appears as a character in the story.  This suggests that the novel may be metafictional, in that it is aware of itself of an artificial creation.  Furthermore, is Self aware of his own artifice?  It seems as the story progresses that he becomes more aware that the world he is in, although real within the rules of the story, is made up.  Martin Amis, the character, seems to know way too much about Self as a character, yet self does not question this authority.  In fact, he reveres Amis almost unquestionably: what begins as a frustration with Amis becomes a strange admiration. 

This kind of logic coincides with Shakespearean logic: that we are all players/actors upon the world stage.  I don’t think it’s an accident that the bar Self frequents is called the Shakespeare – although in that particular situation I think we are meant to understand it somewhat ironically – or that Shakespeare in constantly referred to.  Amis and Self are calling our attention to that kind of Shakespearean logic. 

Begley and Amis in conversation

            If we had any doubts up to this weekend’s reading, now it is certain that Amis is painting a dystopian picture of society. In Jon Begley’s Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism… he suggests (among other possible interpretations) that Money may be a “dystopian representation of a collective postmodern condition.” (80) It is important to consider, however, that this “dystopian” world that Amis creates is one we experience through Self’s eyes.  He takes us to the darkest, most sex-obsessive, money-hungry confused places – both real places and to states of mind.  Yet Self also feels shame.  He does not pride himself in these compulsions, but rather runs away from them: drinking himself into stupors to avoid coming to terms with his behavior and understanding himself better.  Furthermore, in Begley’s essay, he considers Dostoyevsky and his view of character: As in Dostoyevsky, what is important for Amis is “not how his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appears to his hero, and how the hero appears to himself.” (Bakhtin, Problems 47) Self appears to himself as he does to the reader and to the world – ugly, fat, greedy, drunk – and this influences our understanding and interpretation of the world around him.  Is New York really dystopian? Or is this feeling we get when reading the story just a product of Self’s point of view?

            The corruption is not contained in New York, however.  When Self returns home to London, he finds that London, too, had begun to adopt some of the capitalistic, “consumer culture and symptoms of global tinnitus, temporal disorientation, and psychic fragmentation.” (81) Describing his neighborhood in London, he says, “There has recently been a wavelet of fag murders in my neighborhood… Three weeks ago a girl was found strangles in a stolen car… That is the business, isn’t it, paid risk, paid fear?” (215-216) Did Self’s from his experiences in New York with him to England?  Is England really changing or is it just Self’s changing interpretation of his surroundings?  

            Lastly, throughout the novel we experience moments that are often strangely associated with money.  Self will describe a moment that seemingly has nothing to do with money in fiscal terms, resulting in money as motif in the novel (hence the title, I suppose).  For example: “They didn’t need prompting: you see, they really did think it was possible, likely, certain that money and fame had fingered them, that exceptionality had singled them out.” (184) In this way, money is not only how we understand it – as a physical, tangible means or currency.  In Money, money becomes a way through which emotions, actions, thoughts, and events are understood.  It becomes a new kind of currency.  Money pervades through boundaries in ways that only Self could illuminate. 

Humor in "Money"

We stood in the hot sandy bucket of the street, watching First Avenue’s wall of death. …You know, the minute we got there, the studs in my back had started to tickle, to rustle hatefully.  Maybe it would be smart to let a medic in on this – there might be dirt in those wounds.  Or maybe I could guts it out with penicillin, from my personal supply.  In California, how much are backs?  A night spent gummed to the plane’s polyester would give me the fully story either way.  Home.  Go home.  (134)

This passage is funny, first and foremost, because we understand John Self.  We are familiar with his perception of New York – its nuances, aesthetics, wonders and difficulties – and the way he relates to and interacts with these elements.  Therefore, when he refers to the “hot sandy bucket” streets and First Avenue’s “wall of death,” we know it is meant as humorous and nothing else.  If this were the first line of a story, a reader would likely understand the tone as ominous and frightful, but we know Self to be very sarcastic and dramatic.  The “wall of death” is not something he is actually afraid of, but his melodramatic way of relating to the Manhattan landscape. 

This moment also exemplifies one of the elements of humor in Humor in Rhetoric.  Amis is “cheating the expectations of the audience through clever use of language” when he refers to First Avenue in such a way.  I have encountered many descriptions of New York, but never have the streets been described as “hot sandy bucket[s]” or as “wall[s] of death.”  These descriptions may not necessarily be funny independently, but they inform the subsequent sentences.  In other words, they inform the reader on how to read the paragraph.

Thus, when Self describes his back injuries as containing “dirt in [the] wounds,” and when he considers going to LA to get a back transplant, we know that he is not being entirely serious.  He is, perhaps, “dispel[ing] [a] more serious emotion.”  We see here that Self is trying to cope with both the pain and fear of his wounds through humor.  He can’t take anything serious seriously, and in a self-deprecating way, this is funny for the reader. 

            Furthermore, a night spent “gummed to the plane’s polyester” is another moment that surprises the reader.  Being stuck in an airplane seat has been described a million different ways, but I have never encountered it in this way.  “Gummed” is not only a funny and dramatic word, but it is consistent with the diction of the story.  Gum feels to me like a very urban phenomenon: not only is it something people chew, but we encounter it on the streets, under chairs, and in all sorts of places only found in urban contexts.  It is consistent with the kind of subversive, transgressive life that Self leads in "Money." 

Money excerpt and analysis

Something that I don’t find myself questioning is the plot of Money.  As with Ballard’s Crash, Money is less concerned with plot, a more so with voice.  John Self’s voice is the driving force behind the Money: it gives the story texture and momentum; it is, in and of itself, a character in the story.  Furthermore, because Money is such a close first person narration, we get to know so much about Self even though nothing exciting may be happening exteriorly.  For example, in the following passage, Self is about to get his teeth examined, yet he couldn’t be further away: contemplating his behavior, Selina, and his happiness.

Deep down, I’m a pretty happy guy.  Happiness is the relief of pain, they say, and so I guess I’m a pretty happy guy.  The relief of pain happens to me pretty frequently.  But then so does pain.  That’s why I get lots of that relief they talk about, and all that happiness. (74)

Initially, I found the content to be most striking.  It reveals so much about Self: not only his cognition but his insecurities and desires.  His logic is interesting: he feels that because he suffers so much and is constantly recovering from that pain, that he is happier than most, because one derives happiness by recovering from pain.  But then I broke it down and tried to figure out why this particular passage worked structurally. 

Martin Amis is a master of controlling the pace of the story.  One of the ways he does this is by using short and choppy sentence structures.  The excerpt above could easy be read quickly: the alliteration (repetition of sounds) and repetitive of words invite a reader to skim through the sentences.  But this does not happen.  Why? 

Because Amis uses punctuation purposefully.  Amis made a decision to punctuate certain moments with periods instead of with commas, and this forces the reader to pause, to wait, to contemplate.  “But then so does the pain” could easily have been connected via conjunction, but it was not.  This is intentional, as it forces the reader to slow down.

In addition, the content of the excerpt influences the way we, the readers, interact with and understand Money.  The five sentences above are Self’s ruminations.  Every sentence informs the last.  In other words, each sentence only makes sense when considering the logic of the previous. 

John Self reminds me Raoul Duke in Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Self is drunk and out of control, but surprisingly introspective.  Like Duke, he is thrown into a crazy city, vulnerable due to outside circumstances.  In Self’s case, he is preoccupied with his relationship with Selina, who is back home in London.  He is insecure about the state of their relationship, and this is his main preoccupation through the first 50 pages of the book.

John Self is a sympathetic character.  But Martin Amis forces the reader to relate, or at least engage, Self intimately because Self addresses the reader directly.  With questions like – You know something? or Wouldn’t you think? – the reader can’t help but feel somewhat implicated in the hysteria.  That being said, I’m not sure Amis appears as a presence in the novel.  Self is the conduit through which he communicates certain ideas and emotions.  Amis, as the architect, certainly dictates tone and plot, but I’m not sure I feel him directly in the novel.

Self is a sympathetic character because he is not afraid to admit his flaws, yet he behaves in ways that wouldn’t indicate he wants to change.  He is an alcoholic and he knows he is dysfunctional when drinking, yet for most of the story he is drunk and roaming the streets of New York. 

“Where is she now?  It is six o’clock over there, when the dark comes down.  She is dressing herself for the evening, and she is worried.  She is worried.  The night is young over there, but Selina Street is not so young, not any longer.  You know something?  I’ve got to marry her, marry Selina Street.  If I don’t, probably no one else will, and I’ll have ruined another life.” (Amis 46)

I find this passage to be very exemplary of Amis’s style.  He has created a character who constantly repeats himself.  We know this to be a symptom of either his drunkenness or his insecurities.  In addition, this passage shows us erratic nature of Self’s thoughts.  One second he is suspicious of what Selina is doing in London, and the next he is right there with her sympathizing with her.  She is aging and someone needs to marry her so it might as well be him?  Sure, we follow Self’s logic, but we also are forced to ask the question: does he really want to marry her just because she is getting old and he might as well, or is he madly in love and unable to confront his obsession with her?  

Cronenberg's Adaptation Review

Ballard successfully illustrates a new sexuality – one oriented around car collisions and technologies.   Whether or not one finds these sexualities to be perverse or extreme, it is hard to deny that Ballard describes them compellingly.  There are moments in the beginning of the novel when I doubted the characters’ capacities to be stimulated by the material components of a car.  Furthermore, that one could literally engage the car sexually.  But Ballard does just that, and he does so successfully.  His descriptions are at times vague, but as a reader I got a real sense of the sexuality and longing of the characters and the way they expressed these desires both in cars with each other, and to the cars themselves.

This is where the adaptation falls short.  I feel that Cronenberg’s Crash is unable to illustrate the intimacy the characters feel with the cars themselves.  We talked in class about how the sexual encounters in the book were void of any real intimacy and, at times, sexuality.  The movie, however, felt to me like a series of strange and awkward porno scenes that happen to take place in and around cars.  There was something lacking there.  The scenes in the movie were entirely about sexuality and a desire for other breathing, living people. 

I did, however, appreciated moments when Vaughan got his sexual partners into the positions of crash victims.  These instances were true to the book.

I suppose this can be explained pretty simply: you lose a lot when converting something written to a visual medium.  Writing allows for a more omniscient and deeper exploration of the characters.  We understand their motives; their hopes and fears; and their unreliability.  For example, at no point in the film did I get a real sense that Cronenberg was questioning Ballard’s sanity.  In the book, however, we are constantly asking ourselves the question: is Vaughan even real or is he just a creation of Ballard’s imagination? 

Final Post on "Crash"

     

            Ballard is being disruptive in a Swiftian manner.  He creates a world in which the relationship between humans and machines is exaggerated and confused: a world that resembles our society, but one that must be understood metaphorically by the reader in order to grasp Ballard’s message.  He wrote Crash to provoke, and provocation was a part of his formula for satire.  He is critiquing contemporary societies by reproducing one that ostensibly bends the rules and logic of the former.  “The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.” (151) I guess we are forced to ask the question: how different is Ballard’s London from our cities? and how different are we from Ballard or Vaughan? Does Vaughan exist in all of us?

            Building off that last point: does Vaughan exist or is he a character that Ballard (the character) creates after his car crash with Helen?  One of the many clues that suggests Vaughan’s artificial existence is his relationship with Ballard.  It’s as if the stronger Ballard gets, the weaker Vaughan gets: “…accepting now his own failure and my authority over him.” (195) This inverse relationship may suggest that Vaughan was a part of Ballard personality, and that as Ballard began to regain his own strengths and confidence, the weaker Vaughan became.  Ballard says, “Increasingly I was convinced that Vaughan was a project of my own fantasies and obsessions, and that in some way I had let him down.” (220) Also, I kept asking myself the question: how does Ballard (the character and not the narrator) know Vaughan's thoughts?  Especially as the novel develops Ballard becomes more and more omniscient in his relationship with Vaughan.  

In addition, time is confused purposely to create a disorienting affect.  At the end of chapter 19, Ballard is with Catherine in their apartment, or so we think.  He watches her as she moves about the apartment, and then she is suddenly in bed with him.  Although this transition is abrupt, the two moments are contained within the same room.  Then suddenly, as if the latter moments were imagined, Ballard is suddenly in his car with Catherine speeding “along the motorway together.” (181) This technique of confusing time to confuse the stories logic and chronology suggests that Ballard may have been imagining certain, if not all of the events that transpire in Crash. 

Playing with Ballard's Style

I did not realize my attraction for the bartender until I came back a second time.  Waiting for her to prepare my cocktail, I watched her legs – smooth like the steel of the lowboys – pacing back and forth provocatively.   In her hand was something Old Fashion, but her hair was the color and smell of fresh pale ale, and her skin like the soft glow of hefeweisen.  I wished at that moment that we were far away from this place: the smell of fermentation and hops lingered inside the nostrils of every patron.  And there were so many.  How many hours would I have to distill in this wet and wooden tavern until I was the only one left?  The men next to me were probably here for the same reasons.  But I did not look like them – a row of house liquor in a line and used for just about anything.  No.  I was like the finest whiskey around: a single malt scotch, and the bartender: my elderflower liquor. 

Ballard's Deepening Involvement with Vaughn

What first struck me about Vaughn’s reintroduction into the story is what it indicated about the chronology of the piece.  In the opening pages of Crash, Ballard’s ruminates on Vaughn’s death.  We know, therefore, that Vaughn influenced Ballard and that his death will plan an integral role in the story.

Ballard’s relationship with Vaughn is at times sexual.  “This absence made a sexual act with Vaughn entirely possible… The placing of my penis in his rectum as we lay together in the rear seat of his car would be an event as stylized…as those in [his] photographs.” (103) At another instant, Ballard finds himself staring at Vaughn’s penis while the two are peeing, curious to see if his partner had similar scars as the ones on his own penis.  In a story in which the character’s sexualities are so closely linked with the mechanisms of cars, I don’t find it at all odd that Ballard would be attracted to both men and women.  Although Ballard understands his attraction to Vaughn to be an exceptional case, I don’t see how his attraction to Vaughn is any different from his attraction to Helen or Catherine.  Ballard is excited by the way human’s interact with their cars regardless of sex.

When Vaughn appears in the second part of our reading, I expected Ballard to emulate Vaughn’s behavior, but it’s clear that Ballard had already developed a sexuality of his own before meeting Vaughn.  In fact, most of the characters involved in the story developed their unusual behaviors independent of Vaughn.  Vaughn does, however, come across as a teacher-like character: like the one among them that understands most deeply their mechanical sexualities.  “Vaughn stood at my shoulder, like an instructor ready to help a promising pupil.” (102) But Ballard does not speak of Vaughn with reverie, but with a sense of caution: “Vaughn had frightened me.  The callous way in which he had exploited Seagrave… warned me that he would probably go to any length to take advantage of the immediate situation around him.” (106) 

Apophasis and motifs in Crash (2nd Reading)

Apophasis is “absence of belief.” (18) I found this notion to be fundamentally contradictory because, by definition, apophasis also suggests an unnamable belief.  An unnamable belief, while abstract and unspecific, is still a belief in something.  I like the term anarchistic here, because while an anarchist may be anti-establishment and anti-just-about-everything, an anarchist is firm in his or her opposition.  In other words, the stance of opposition alone, even in the absence of clear-cut goals in mind, is still a belief.  So can an apophatic believe in his or her apophasis?: I guess the answer must be YES.

I think Ballard in Crash certainly illustrates “a warped view of conventional literary forms and societal beliefs.” (18) One could argue that Ballard is an apophatic writer, and that the way he expresses this disposition is through satire.  If satire “mocks through exaggerated mimicry,” (5) Ballard writing qualifies.  He exaggerates human sexuality and presents it in ways that are not only new, but offensive to most readers.  Ballard is commenting on a society whose relationship to technology is codependent and confusing: he says, “…the failure of the technical relationship between my own body, the assumptions of the skin, and the engineering structure which supported it.” (68) Furthermore, Ballard also considers the severe restrictions in place on social behaviors such as sexuality and the effects thereof.  Maybe Ballard apophasis is his absence of belief in British social norms, but he certainly believes it needs to change.

More generally: the plot has developed tremendously in our second set of reading in Crash.  We are reintroduced to Vaughan: we learn he is a photographer of sorts and that he keeps reappearing in Ballard life.  Vaughan’s appearances suggest that he may be following Ballard, or that Ballard is seeking out Vaughan?  In addition, Ballard interacts intimately (and sexually) with Helen, with whom he crashed and sent to the hospital.  Their relationship is extraordinary, because she willingly engages with the man who is responsible for the death of her husband.  Helen comes across as apathetic, as one who shows no remorse for the death of her husband.  I’m interested to figure out how alike she and Ballard are, and if their relationship is possible.  I also believe that Ballard the author communicates certain ideas through Helen that he had not done with Ballard’s character.  For example, Helen says, “There’s a certain moral virtue in being materialistic.” (78) How much of this is really Ballard, and should the reader understand this statement through a satirical filter? 

I have noticed several motifs, but the one that continues to reappear is the motif of thighs.  Ballard is obsessed with thighs indiscriminate of gender.  At one point, Ballard demonstrates a lust for Vaughan’s thighs.  He repeatedly speaks of the thigh of the women he encounters: Catherine and Helen (more obviously), but also of those he encounters briefly, like the nurses at the hospital.  Perhaps Ballard is taking something that he knows many people believe to be inherently sexual parts of the body and using this assumption to catch the reader off guard.  He begins many of the sexual moments in the story with a description of thighs, but then he quickly relates the flesh to the mechanisms of cars, to the technology surrounding the bodies which inhabit the vehicles.