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