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.