CRASH initial reaction

Crash took me completely by surprise.  While some of the more common adjectives used to describe it have likely been shocking, perverse, and disgusting, I found the premise of the novel – characters who “accept the perverse eroticism of the car crash,” who obsess with the infinity of sexual possibilities and sexualities – to be refreshingly daring, especially when you consider the context in which the piece was written (1970s).  It is gross, but equally fun: novels don’t get more graphic than this.  I give Ballard credit for making the most unusual of sexual acts, and the most horrifying and bloody events, sound poetic.  He is very aware of how the words both look and sound, and of the way his readers will react to them, and thus organizes them in a way that entices the reader to keep going.

I do not think that the novel takes place is “actual” London.  The settings and characters seem like our society, but strange: an exaggeration or dramatization.  I believe the story to be allegorical.  It explores the relationship between modern man and technology in perhaps an exaggerated way, but it is grounded in what, for the most part, appears to be the physical society in which we live.  “For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.” (13)

Ballard the author is aware of his initial skepticism.  He writes the piece with his acquired taste for such sexuality, aware that it was also very unusual for him at first.  He does not waste much time, however, for by the second chapter we are well immersed in the world of his and Vaughan’s sexualities. 

I believe that our relationship with technology is ripe for exploration.  It does appeal to a part of the mind not yet discovered, if simply because it describes objects we are so familiar with in such new ways. For example, when Ballard describes a fantasy he has of his wife engaging in sexual acts with another woman, he says: “Now and then I glanced through the curtains and watched them together, their bodies and fingers involved in the soft technology of Catherine’s breasts…” (33)

Burrough's Poetry and Prose

William S. Burroughs’ work is unlike the prose/poetry of his contemporaries.  His work differs in structure, content, and style.  The structure of his poetry is chaotic.  He breaks his lines at moments that surprise the reader, and this constant interruption dictates the pace at which the reader is forced to read the piece.  The stanza lengths are inconsistent, which keeps the reader guessing.  The content, or subject matter, is highly scientific.  Both his prose and his poetry are extremely ripe for allegory: at every turn the reader gets the impression that he is not just, or necessarily, talking about surgeons and radiologists, viruses, and addiction.  I got the feeling Burroughs was attempting to comment on the world in which he lived, and not the fantastical, cut-up, perhaps exaggerated (?) world in which his work takes place.  His work is very transgressive.  It pushed the boundaries that, decades later, beat writers were still trying to do.  His work is still very extreme and surprising to today’s readers.  I can only imagine how controversial his work was 70 years ago. 

Cut Up Composition Poem

EGGHEAD

Inside the test bungalows, a dweller

With his rearing circulation bioenginnering veins

Stiff on the waning floor

Stuck on the maggoty shelf fear

The sheen church stood seventeen feet away

But the rhymed hirudin stubbed upwards

Towards a ripple relation hallelujah

Leaving the replacement major –

Stuck on the ingate silt inside his bungalow –

Waiting desperately for the suffering

To bring back home with them the glossy syntax

Nabokov's "Natasha," and Bakhtin commentary

Nabokov’s Natasha is the story of Natasha, her father Khrenov, and their neighbor Wolfe.  Khrenov is very sick and believes he will die soon.  Natasha is his caretaker.  We first encounter the Khrenov with Wolfe, as he enters the apartment, insisting that Khrenov is not as sick as he claims.  From the outset of the story, Wolfe is drawn to Natasha.  “Leaning over the banister, Wolfe glanced back at her.” This fascination develops into romance when the two – Natasha and Wolfe – take a trip to the countryside and create imaginary worlds together.

The creation of imaginary worlds and fantasy reoccurs throughout the piece.  Wolfe admits that he has never been to India or The Congo or to any of the places about which he boasts.  When hearing this, Natasha does not “despise [Wolfe] very much,” but instead embraces the idea of created fantasies.  She admits that her story of seeing the Virgin Mary as a child was, too, made up; that it became more real to her after the passage of time. 

The piece maintains a nostalgic tone.  The characters are very much invested in the past.  Whether or not these memories are false and created, every character seems to be living both in the moment and in memory.  The piece is also classically romantic.  For example, the weather outside the apartment is a reflection of the characters’ internal struggles and states of mind (dark, misty, blue).  Conversely, when Natasha and Wolfe go to the country, the weather is a reflection of their gaiety: gold, clear, and airy.  

As in Joyce’s work, the reader understands the characters from a certain distance.  But this can’t be described simply with terms like: third person limited narration.  For much of Natasha we do not know what is real or imagined, what is truth or lie.  This becomes particularly apparent when Natasha returns home and sees her father outside the apartment.  Although the reader knows that Natasha is one who creates fantasies, nothing in particular indicates that she was imagining her father.   Bkahtin understood this kind of narration as polyphonic.  Nabokov creates a narrator that “grants the voice of the main characters as much authority as the narrator.”  So when Natasha sees her father outside the apartment, we, and the narrator as a separate functioning entity within the story, truly believe it; although the narrating persona is a separate entity from the characters, it is objective, and has no knowledge beyond that which the reader has.  In other words, there is no “narrative authority beyond that of the character.”