Skag Overdose

Thair he wis, standing wi his dick in his hand, waiting fir us, waiting fir us tae cook one up fir him.

            - What’s taking so long ye cunt? Cannae fuckin garner the energy tae do it?   Tommy’s got it bad. He cannae even cook up his oon hits, lazy cunt. Evir since Rents gave him that hit, his gone doon hill. It’s a fucking shame.

Nivir take a hit or you’ll be chasing for the same orgasmic sensation fir the rest ay ur perr junky life. It’s mindless, takes ower ur body, ur will, ur motivation. Gone ar the days ay endless shagging wi the lassie, gone ar the days ay playing fitba. Thair’s nae turning back, nae redemption. Eviri day is consumed by the want fir mair skag and thit’s it.

            Ah pass the cunt a fresh syringe. In mere seconds, it is in his bloodstream, circulating tae eviri extremity ay his body. Now it’s ma turn, time tae answer tae the demands ay ma addiction. Mibbe ah could make this ma end, purposefully owerdose, n leave the scum ay the earth tae fend fir thirselves. Top missel aff. In reality, ah’ve got nuthin to lose apart fir the wonderful world ay skag.

            Ah nivir imagined a world wi oot it. It wuld be a world wi oot the Velvet Underground, Iggy, or Bowie. Fucked up world that wuld be. Not worth living in really. If thair ar aw these posh junkies, why ar we shunned, put intae the corner ay society tae rot away? It’s fucking unfair. Sometimes, ah git a little tae philosophical, contemplating ma life. Fuck it. Ah’m jist another junky cunt who needs his fix, thit’s it. Ah’m not special and nivir will be. Ah’ll see missel oan the other side.

            Ah’ve woken up, vomit scattered all about us. What the fuck have ah done, ah puked befair the poison killed me. It must be a sign. A sign telling us tae keep living ma life the way ah have. It cannae kill us. Ah’ve learned that now.

Heroine Brings Out Individuality vs. Monotonous 'Normal' Life

Mark finds himself in between two worlds in “Blowing It”, that of the ‘normal’ Scottish world where his brother Billy is ‘an archetypal model of manhood Ecosse’ as he drinks to sickness and beats his wife Sharron and Mark’s little world of addiction. Forced to go cold turkey, Mark begins to reflect on the reason why he turned to heroine. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t give a clear-cut answer, but rather questions social norm; ‘Why is it that because ye use hard drugs every cunt feels that they have a right tae dissect and analyse ye?’ Renton doesn’t accuse society for being against drugs but rather its inability to mind its own business. He does not comprehend why his heroine addiction becomes the focus of social workers and psychologists who in truth shouldn’t give a shit about him. In his essay New Scottish Writing and the “Queen’s Fucking English”, Jeffrey Karnicky points out Trainspotting’s criticism of normative culture’s tendency to repress marginalized cultures. According to this thought process, Mark feels that his life is threatened by his inability to conform to society’s norms. He attempted to live the ‘normal’ life by attending university but failed to integrate himself into the academic environment and decided to avoid normality and follow his instinct.

Normal Life according to Rents;

“Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life.” Pg. 187

In this context, ‘life’ refers to a normal living. Mark rejects this, he prefers to die with his heroine addiction. If he were to kick heroine, than his ‘dependency [would] shift from the drug to them [society]’. Mark makes a conscious decision, to choose heroine addiction over the need for consumption of material objects and commodities. He prefers being part of a marginalized culture, that of heroine addicts, than be part of ‘them’, the mainstream culture. In a sense, his addiction represents the only quality of individuality that Mark possesses. Therefore, from Mark’s point of view, ‘rehabilitation means the surrender ay the self’.  

Pop Culture & Drug Addictions

            Trainspotting is filled with vibrant characters who are distinct from each other in every single aspect of their personality; Rents is, at heart, a caring person, especially towards his best friend Tommy; Sick Boy is, as his nickname points out, a twisted man who places himself on pedestal above others, claiming numerous times that he was going to kick dope; Spud is the fool of the crew of friends, shyly injecting his remarks into the conversation without expecting direct responses; Tommy is the ‘responsible’ figure in the group, limiting himself to speed until breaking up with Lizzy at which point he becomes a junky; and Begbie is a belligerent, spiteful man with a knack of causing turmoil and chaos. The characteristic that is common within all of these vibrant and colorful characters is that of an addiction. Though they all have a physical addiction, Rents/Sick Boy/Spud/Tommy all do heroine whilst Begbie is a drunk, they are also addicted to popular culture.

            Tommy’s obsession with Iggy Pop pushes him to purchase concert tickets instead of buying birthday present for his girlfriend, Lizzy. His negligence of his lover’s desires inevitably leads Lizzy to dump him, knowing that she could do better. Sick Boy is interested in one thing, getting the ladies. Therefore, it is only natural that his idol would be no other but Sean Connery, the slyest of the womanizing Bonds. Spud is the whipping boy of the group, and for whom everyone feels a necessity to protect. Evidently not a bright person, Spud is grasped by the materialist world pushing himself to do petty crimes of shoplifting.  Begbie is most definitely a masochist, looking for a fight every time he enters a pub. He adheres to social norms of the heavy drinking Scot who doesn’t take shit from anyone, though he gives others a lot of shit for not apparent reason. He believes to be better than his friends who do heroine, claiming that alcohol only does well to him.

            Trainspotting emphasizes every individual’s addiction to popular culture, our dependency on it for daily living. Welsh demonstrates how dependence on pop culture can be as harmful, if not more, to the a person’s soul.

Jargon and Phonetics

            Reading Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is difficult, no doubt about. After struggling through the Scottish dialect’s bizarre spelling, you are then tasked with understanding a jargon that is unique to Edinburgh. Phrases such as ‘she nivir sais nowt tae me, ah whinge, biscuit-ersed’ are bewildering. Over-time, I’ve gotten used to the Scottish vernacular, it is easy to understand the narrator saying ‘she never says nothing to me, I whinged’. However, to understand the term ‘biscuit-ersed’ I had to resort to looking at an urban dictionary (turns out to mean ‘feeble’ or ‘weak’). This relatively confusing phonetic voice is supported by the constant shifts in the narrator’s perception of self.

            Mark, the narrator aka Rent Boy, is a heroine addict and his vice seems to be catching up to already. At various points in the text, Mark refers to himself as ‘us’, suggesting that he has multiple personalities. The ambiguity of his mental condition is evident in the randomness of changes in personal reference. Though the shifts can not occur for pages at a time, it is also possible for it to change within a sentence such as the following; ‘Ay took ma last shot in order tae git us through the horrors ay the shopping trip’. I believe that ‘us’ is primarily used to point out Mark’s inner demons, those who fuel themselves off the smack he injects into his arm. By adding plurality, he assumes his role in his addiction, albeit a less significant one, in company of his inner demons. The ‘us’ is satisfied once its desire for the dream world of heroine is achieved.

            I look forward to reading the remainder of this baffling text.

Conforming Bull

            Bull is a conformist. He has an innate fear of feeling abnormal, of not being accepted into his society and being stigmatized. His initial anxiety stems from his lack of knowledge regarding the aperture behind his left knee, a vagina, and the abnormality that comes with a mysterious injury. However, once has undergone the ‘appropriate treatment’ following his appointment with Dr. Margoulies, he feels ‘almost normal again’. To emphasize his tendency to be more at ease in socially common situations, Bull is comforted when Margoulies sets himself behind his desk, writes medical gibberish on a piece of paper whilst ignoring him, Bull. This is how Bull perceives doctors should act around their patients, supposedly having watched medical soap operas, as opposed to Margoulies intricate examination of his ‘wound’. It isn’t surprising that Bull is a journalist for Get Off!, a pop culture magazine that is at the pinnacle of culture trend coverage.

Bull in a 'cock&bull' World

            From Carol’s unexplained penis growth, on we go to the sudden apparition of a vagina behind Bull’s left knee – what an awkward place to have one… - Will Self knows how to intrigue this reader. The obvious difference between Bull’s and Carol’s moments of metamorphosis is a temporal one, Carol’s frond morphed into a penis over the course of a few weeks whilst Bull wakes up one morning with a newly acquired sexual organ. Bull’s vagina appears to instantly have a mind of its own, a distinction from Carol’s penis, which took time to eventually dominate her behavior.

            As Bull tends to his habit of ‘[exploring] all the nooks and crevices of his body’, he comes across the vagina. However, the narrator does not credit this discovery to Bull’s borderline obsessive-compulsive disorder-like practice but rather to the ‘malevolent reality-gashing interloper, [who] chose that moment to prink and snag’. The attribution of it mind gives the vagina another dimension apart from being a character’s body part, but a character in its own right. If the vagina itself is not a character, it could be the result of foreign intruder in Bull’s body. Who knows, it might be the symptom of a new pathogen yet to be discovered by modern science? Bull is thrown into a ‘stereoscopic zone’ where factuality no longer coheres with rationality and the predisposed conceptions of human anatomy are thrown up in the air. The same could be said about Carol’s story as she made her progression from being a feminist, albeit one with little knowledge or true conviction, to the don, a sex-driven egomaniac with a penchant for storytelling. It seems as if Bull shall be going through a similar alteration of identity though in the opposite direction, male to female.

           

Humdrum Lady

            Christine was an ordinary housewife; up at seven in the morning to cook a scrumptious breakfast for her brute of a husband, a work out session wearing her favorite tangerine neoprene leotard in front of her beloved Richard Simmons at eight, cleaning up the muck, caused by her husband’s belligerent tendency of spilling his food at dinner and then playing soccer with it when the food was not up to his standard of deep-fried crispiness, around the house between nine and two in the afternoon, and spending the remainder of the afternoon gossiping with the local housewives till her husband returned home for another spell of tender beatings. She had attended a Cosmetology School as a young woman, with the aspiration of becoming a world-renowned make-up artist for celebrities. In the end, her knowledge was only used on herself, in an attempt to withhold the truth of her blissful marriage from her suburban acquaintances. Though deep inside, she knew the regular poundings were potentially hazardous to her health, she disregarded them as a quotidian occurrence that was ordinary and natural; the man is supposed to govern the woman whatever the means. No, this was far from her primary concern. In fact, having become a predictable part of her existence, it was the last of her anxieties.

            Six months before, the pool cleaning company sent a new set of hands, a handsome Guatemalan with bronze skin adorning his bulging muscles. On a weekly basis, he arrived at the house while Christine was just about finishing her household chores, around one thirty, to sweep his titanic net across the pool’s surface, gathering fallen leaves and pinecones, ants that had lost their way back to the colony and the occasional rat. Though limited at first – the polite ‘How do you do’ and glass of water – Christine and the Guatemalan began having conversations about the mundane like the weather and the local murder that happened a few weeks prior. As small-talk topics began to dry up, Christine began learning about his past; where he was from, how he arrived in Southern California, what he has done to survive… She never talked about herself, in fear of repulsing him with her humdrum past. He represented an aperture from her monotonous life, an opening to the audacious world outside her gated community. It was a gateway that she refused to close.

                        

Mocking and Fearing the 'Cock'

The story of Cock from Will Self’s Cock & Bull, is, as the book’s title suggests, a claptrap short story of a newlywed British woman, named Carol, who unsuspectingly begins growing a penis. As the size of her penis grows, so does her aggressiveness, machoism, and lack of concern for her husband, Dan, a drunk who has just joined Alcoholics Anonymous, in a plight to battle his addiction. Near the end of the novel, Carol begins to be dominated by violent urges and the sexual tenacity of her new penis, resulting in the rape and death of her husband on her behalf. A character, referred to as the don, recites the entire tale to a university graduate during a train ride. It is only at the end of the story, that we discover the don’s true identity, and it is at that point that the true horror of the story takes place.

Cock was a joy to read due to the range of emotions that are evoked. Though the majority of the narration remains in a flat, objective tone, I went from laughing out loud to squirming at the bottom of my seat. The writing style effectively allows the reader to feel comfortable, chuckling at small details such as the fact that Dan ‘had never troubled to examine Carol’s cuntal area with any kind of attention’ only to be dazed, to say the least, when Carol begins her murderous spree. The degeneration of the lead protagonist mirrors the 'recovery' of her husband who is in fact losing all of the social pillars of manhood.

I would highly recommend anyone in search of an entertaining, ghastly, wicked and hilarious story to read with an afternoon to read Will Self’s ‘Cock’. 

Different Metamorphoses in The Golden Ass and Cock & Bull

The tradition of metamorphosis in literature has been prevalent throughout written history and has been a key element in the mythology of ancient civilizations ranging from the Phoenicians and Egyptians, to the Greek and Romans. Perhaps the most famous story involving the metamorphosis of the main character from the great Roman Empire era is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. The story follows Lucius, a man driven by his curiosity and voracious desire to see and practice magic. Inevitably, his snoopiness gets him into trouble when, trying to replicate the magic of Milo’s wife, he turns himself into an ass, or donkey. The remainder of the story revolves around Lucius’ quest for his old self while being punished (rightfully and wrongly) for his past misdeeds and eventually returns to his old body when he joins the cult of Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess of nature and magic and the symbol of the ideal mother. Apuleius uses metamorphosis in the traditional sense as a means to teach an over-arching moral and lesson to the reader. On the other hand, up to now at least, it appears as if the metamorphosis used in Cock and Bull by Will Self is a metaphor for the discovery of one’s sexuality. The protagonist, Carol, is a young woman who has near to no sexual experience when she first sleeps with Dan, her husband to be within a year. Already not able to completely satisfy his newlywed (‘three sandpapery strokes’ is all he needs to cum), Dan plunges into alcoholism causing him to constantly have a ‘brewer’s droop’, therefore unable to even perform for a measly ten seconds. As a result, spurred by the sexual mentoring of her quasi-lesbian friend, Beverley, Carol learns how to satisfy her newly found sexual urges. It is at this point that Carol begins her metamorphosis, but unlike Lucius, it is not her entire body that is transforming, but only her reproductive organ, her vagina. The ‘gristly frond’ that continuously keeps growing is described as being like a testicle. She begins to feel ‘with her probing digit, actually  feel some kind of structure to the frond; some internal viscosities of its own that suggested that it was not simply a raggle-taggle end of gristle.’ Sentences such as this one lead me to believe that Carol is undergoing a change in sexuality, in parallel with the increasingly ‘manly’ point of view she has towards her sexuality. Just like men who pride themselves in the power of their penis, Carol begins to be enthralled by ‘the access of power’ found by masturbating. This is the same sense of power that young teenage boys experience when first discovering that the rubbing of their penis brings pleasure which leads to the abuse of the power of masturbation. Likewise, Carol begins to masturbate on a daily basis, a replacement for the sex that her husband is supposed to satisfy her with.

It is definite that Self’s use of metamorphosis breaks away from the traditional use, that of teaching a moral through the loss of a character’s ordinary body. Instead, I believe that he is using metamorphosis as a means to critique the differences found in the male and female social norms of sexuality. Beverley already appears to be Carol’s mentor as she begins to masturbate on a daily basis, a stereotype for young men but not for young women. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent Will Self pursues this metamorphosis. 

Desire in Palahniuk's 'Guts'

Auto-asphyxiation, candle wax up the urethra, greased up carrot used as a dildo; these are the bizarre, yet sadly common in modern society, methods of masturbation that Chuck Palahniuk describes before one-upping all of them by the technique used by the narrator of Guts; the pool circulatory water pump at the bottom of the pool. This was the first, and probably the last, time that I had encountered anything referring to such a method of fulfilling one’s sexual desires. The method, dubbed ‘Pearl Diving’, used by the narrator however, does not seem to be the central aspect of the short story. Instead, it is the reaction of the family’s in relation to the ‘invisible carrot’, a source of shame for the family. In the first example about the boy who used a lubricated carrot as a dildo, it is assumed that his mother found the soiled, oily carrot while picking up the boys dirty laundry. Despite the undeniable evidence of what her son had done with the carrot, it goes unmentioned for the remainder of his life, an object that has essentially been deemed invisible by the parents due to the truth it would potentially reveal about their son, a truth that is barbed and which could destroy the delicate fabric of the ideal American family. The same is true about the narrator’s family. When the pool boy is hired to clean out the narrator’s large intestine from the pump, his father conceals the truth by claiming that the ‘family dog fell in and drowned’. This lie was not meant as a means to uniquely protect the thirteen year-old narrator from potential mockery at school, but to protect the entire family’s image. This behavior from the narrator’s father and carrot-boy’s parents, points to an American social tendency of keeping what has happened in a household within the premises. In a way, the saying ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’, can be true about traumatizing events within a family that may be a source of embarrassment. It is better to just sweep them under the rug and never be referred to again.

                Palahniuk’s writing style is simple and free-flowing as if he was reciting the story in person. Despite having written Guts when in his mid-forties, he is able to mimic the voice of a smart teenager. Apart from the very beginning and the end when he asks the reader to inhale and then exhale at the end, I could easily imagine hearing this story in a high school cafeteria. Ridiculous, gory, and painful tales are exceptionally fun for teenage boys in particular, especially if an element of sex is added to the mix. Teenage kids are always attempting ways to realize their social, physical and sexual desires.The only difference is that in real life, no boy would admit that he was the victim of such a twisted masturbation session.

One immediate link between this short story and the British transgressive novels that we’ve been reading is the need for the narrators or lead characters to accomplish their desire; in Crash, James Ballard seeks the erotic thrill of near-death car accidents and the thrill of the morphed sexually of man and human; in Money, John Self pursues many desires, ranging from alcohol, sex, drugs, fame, recognition of his new social status, but is driven by his craving for as much money as possible; in Nights at the Circus, Walser is propelled by his yearning to unveil Sophie Fevvers has a hoax.

The Allusion of Martyrs

An allusion that is constantly repeated throughout the opening 125 pages of the novel Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is that of Jesus Christ. Just like Christ, numerous of the characters are portrayed as martyrs, those who suffer for the benefit of others. The two notable examples of such characters are Fevvers, the aerialist who sacrifices her own comfortable life at the Battersea ice cream shop dignity to become one of the girls under the charge of Madame Schreck, the head of a brothel that ‘caters for those who were troubled in their…soul’, and Buffo the Great, the leader of the troupe of clowns in the Colonel’s circus, the Ludic Game. Both of these characters have different reasons for becoming a martyr like Christ however; Fevvers is pushed by the need to help her new adopted family, the cousins of her trusty mother-figure, Lizzie; Buffo has become by choice, a ‘subject of laughter’ who’s personal feelings does not matter. Having made his decision to adopt a face that is not his, Buffo, whose real name is George Buffins, has ‘condemned [himself] to be “Buffo” in perpetuity’ and be the ‘subject of laughter’ for the rest of his life. Like wise, by making the choice to enter Madame Shreck’s house, Fevvers appears to have condemned herself to a life of ‘sorrow of exile and of abandonment’ yet she still proceeds with the hope of making money for her starving and sickly adoptive family. In their roles as martyrs, both characters also become whores, albeit different kinds. Fevvers has become a whore for the men with damaged souls, who seek to satisfy their twisted fetishes by observing ‘freaks’ of human nature (ranging from a dwarf woman to a woman with eyes instead of nipples) whilst Buffo has become, like all other clowns, a ‘whore of mirth’, obliged to appear joyful and silly at all times for the benefit of others, while suppressing his ‘constant companion’, despair (thus resulting in his alcoholism). It will be interesting to see if Carter decides to portray more characters in her novel as martyrs and relate them to other scapegoat figures of history such as Socrates, who died for his philosophy, and Nathan Hale, who acted as a spy for the Americans during the revolution against the British.

Amisesque Writing about Biking

The raw wind flew over the smooth, albeit scarred, plastic curvature of my helmet. If it were summer, the air would have battled through my hair, finding its way to the exit of the labyrinths of locks, hair knots, and critters. Not in this cold…A blanket of nail biting frost, the cold that makes your body scream, “Move your fucking ass!!” And so I went, pushing myself to the breaking point for every revolution of the back wheel. I have encountered many of such nights, riding my Fuji (God bless you, you 100 dollar speed demon) in the desolate concrete world of 4 o’clock New York City on a Tuesday morning…the city that never sleeps my ass. It’s eerily quiet at that time of night; nothing can be heard except for the blowing wind and the distant cry of a woman being raped. I don’t care. In fact, I love it; the ability to go as fast as I can without fear of having an immigrant cabbie run over me or an innocent leg-user nonchalantly appear right in front of me just to piss me off. I fucking hate walkers while I’m biking. The ground continuously sped by, constantly changing the background to my life: one block after another. I began to play with the painted marks on the pavement. Zigzagging between the intervals of fluorescent lane lines, I tried to slalom a bit too quickly. Next thing I knew it, my front wheel launched me forward. After an extravagant front flip, I landed smack on my back. Oh I forgot to mention, I’m usually smacked during these late night rides. Slowly, my body heated up, sweat drenched clothes began sticking to my skin - Ugh, this is annoying, I truly hate it when it happens – and almost instantaneously, the sweat freezes. I’m in a tropical jungle yet on a vast plain of frozen tundra. The humidity was killing me, I needed to strip naked in that blistering cold.  After that not much happened…I’m actually not too sure about that. The only thing I'm sure of is that I'm the mother fucking speed king of 4 o'clock New York City on a Tuesday morning.

NYC, the Grand Stage

The theme of acting is ever-present in Money, the characters seem to be playing their own dysfunctional role in what at times seems to be a mockumentary on the production of a big budget Hollywood movie; Lorne Guyland is the ageing past his prime who still wishes to stamp his authority as a senior (even though he would despise being labeled as such) member of the cast; Caduta Massi, the motherly figure on the set who is beginning to have self-confidence issues regarding her body having been a sex icon for the majority of her career; Butch Beausoleil, the young actress who would be more suitable for pornography but convinces John Self to employ her by having sex with him; Spunk Davis, the young up-and-coming actor who is so into his ‘art’ that it becomes ridiculous and sucks up to the director; and finally, the director himself, John Self, a schizophrenic mess/drunk (though he begins to drink less near the end) who could have a breakdown at any moment. This ensemble of characters leads to a hilarious story in which each person is attempting to outdo the other in their absurdness and craziness. The protagonist himself, John, constantly puts on a different persona when he is in New York City than when he is in London. Being his home, John cannot put up a fake appearance whilst in London; he’s just another fat, ugly bloke who has honed his brutish fighting skills after years of street and bar brawls. However, when he’s in New York City, he becomes a respectable figure, despite his terrible rug and his protruding beer gut, almost solely due to his British accent. In NYC, others inevitably give him the role of the intelligent, artistic, European director even though all evidence points to the exact opposite. New York City is his grand stage, the place where he can be the man he wished he was, a man with power, money, respect, and loads of women.

MEDIA

            In the second half of Money, John Self begins to continually bring up Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s upcoming wedding. His obsession with the royal family’s affairs is linked to another of John’s addictions: the media. He can’t get enough of it. When he watches the news, he is over flooded with information, much of which he doesn’t process and analyze, but rather repeats what has been said by the reporter to the reader; ‘TV’s Val has been rushed to the hospital with a mystery illness. On page five blonde Ulla sports big tits and cool pants. Sissy Skolimowsky turns out to be a diesel, and an ex-chick of hers is suing Siss for galimony’ (Amis 225). Overconsumption is a recurring theme in John’s interaction with all aspects of life. All of these news snippets have only one thing in common; they are random and have to do to with TV personalities’ gossip. Amis depicts modern entertainment as a brainwasher; something that offers so much random and useless information to the masses that ‘cretinizes’ people like John Self (31). Thus his inclusion of 1984 by George Orwell, a critic of the modern television and mass media as a means of mind control, as John’s present/reading assignment from Martina. On the day of the wedding, he is with Selina Street, his gold-digging lover, at his ‘sock’. Feeling the romantic mood arising from the royal wedding, John elaborates his intention to marry and then go on a honeymoon to exotic places such as Barbados, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Bali. Given her past record of essentially demanding John to marry her, it is surprising that Selina doesn’t react positively. Instead she yells at John ‘look, get off. Anyway I want to watch the royal wedding on television’ (225). The reality that exists on the television, the luxurious reality of royalty, overpowers Selina’s sense of reality. In the television, she finds an escape to the world she wishes she was part of, a world where money is not merely an essential part of life, but a mainstay and normality. In his essay on Money’s satirical critic of Thatcherite England, Miracky comments on the use of the media as a means of consolidating two of John’s favorite topics: money and sex. Being a TV commercial director, John made his fortune by mixing his addictions of money and pornography in order to convince millions of viewers to purchase his product. However, this hasn’t harbored him from the negative effects of television. He still idolizes members of that unreal world, the world of television where everyone is young, virile, beautiful, and most importantly, rich.

The Train of Self

Further insight on John Self’s evident problem with alcohol appears between the pages of 107 and 108 (not to say there aren’t other examples of his lack of acumen with liquor), where he finds himself caught up in his own time yet again; ‘You know what time it is, my time? Four o’clock in the afternoon’. This complete disregard of the actual time, as opposed to the time in which his jetlagged body is set in, translates perfectly to his lack of concern for his own health. Caught up in the conflict of what to do, John turns to repetition in order to systematically line up all ‘six realistic options’ of activities he could do in that ‘afternoon’ (it is impossible to know whether or not it actually is the afternoon) while in New York City; ‘I could sack out right away […] I could go back to the Happy Isles […] I could call Doris […] I could catch a live sex show […] I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.’ The repetition of ‘I could’ appears to be John’s manner of empowering himself, proving to the readers that with his money, he has the choice of either getting shitfaced at one point in his activities, or be somewhat responsible and call Doris Arthur, perhaps to talk about his film, Bad Money in Europe and Good Money in the United States. With our previous knowledge of John’s alcoholism, it is fair to assume that he will be getting drunk. Again to show his ‘power’, John then claims to have done every possible option. He feels a necessity to over consume on every level of his life, ranging from his drinking and eating habits to his generous tipping policy (he gave 50$ in tip to Felix on his last trip in NYC). From his perspective, he feels as if he’s the one forcing his life forward, as if the natural force of time had no impact on his physical. He describes himself as ‘the train’ that is ‘doing all the moving’. Unlike us, regular human beings, John believes that he is in control of his entire life, the speed, direction, and final destination, California and the world of extravagant luxury and money.

C.R.E.A.M

Almost immediately, reading Money made me think of this song where C.R.E.A.M is an abbreviation for 'Cash Rules Everything Around Me', a motto that definitely rings true in the opening 50 pages of the novel.

Man + Money = Gorgeous Women

What first struck me reading Martin Amis’ Money, was his style of writing, a mix of a conversation with me, the reader, and a stream of consciousness. It is often the case that the narrator, John Self, a high-class (in his mind at least) London socialite and director of commercials, will go off random on a tangent rant, in which he often contradicts himself.  He is obsessed with physical attractiveness and is only distracted from it by extreme wealth.  Inevitably, the two elements combine into the cosmetic industry, an industry that greatly interests John since he has one of his two favorite elements in life; that is money.

In the passage I have chosen, John is at a lunch meeting with Fielding Goodney, a born-in-riches 26 year old, who is going to be the producer for John’s first film. As the conversation enters the realm of finances, John’s love of money isn’t enough to keep him concentrated on Fielding’s finance tirade. He tells the reader that he found himself wondering about the potential affair between Selina Street, his ‘girlfriend’, and Alec Llewellyn, his best friend. What’s strange is that he is not imagining them having sex, but imagines what Alec and Selina are doing post-coital, as if he was sure they were having an affair. He uses his own memories of being with Selina and simply places Alec into his own shoes. Ironically, he then proceeds to describing the lust that exists naturally between himself and Selina’s best friends. In them, he sees Selina with the additional excitement of being different bodily shapes. The fact that he has sex with Selina as a daily routine empowers her in his eyes, but at the same, adds an aura of excitement of the unknown to her best friends who are so similar to Selina, a part from the having sex part. It is then that he bombards the readers with questions, which we have no way of answering, only to answer them himself with evident confidence in his response.  Unlike the ‘normal’ lover, he does assume that Selina loves or even like him, but that instead, she a gold digger scheming to live off of his money. He sees no problem in this due to his belief that money brings beauty to even the repugnant of people, whether it is through ‘state-of-the-art cosmetic labs’ or squadrons of trophy wives. He concludes that the only reason his ‘girlfriend’ Selina Street would not cheat on him, an over-weight and pale middle-aged man, with Alec Llewellyn, because Alec doesn’t have the wealth that he does. Simply put it, John’s interpretation of life is the following: MAN + MONEY = GORGEOUS WOMEN.

Money by Martin Amis, p. 29

 

And he was away, his voice full of passionate connoisseurship, with many parallels and precedents, Italian banking, liquidity preference, composition fallacy, hyperinflation, business confidence syndrome, booms and panics, US corporations, the sobriety of financial architecture, the Bust of ’29, the suicides on La Salle and Wall Street…And I found myself wondering whether Alec has seen the single dead flower in the jamjar beside Selina’s bed, or heard her peeing and humming in the quiet bathroom, the black pants like a wire connecting her calves. There seems to be a thing about girls and best friends. I always fancy their best friends too, come to think about it. I certainly fancy Debby and Mandy, and that Helle from the boutique whom Selina hobnobs with. Perhaps you fancy your girl’s best friends because your girl and her best friends have a lot in common. They’re very alike, except in one particular. You don’t go to bed with the best friends all the time. In the sack she can give you one thing your girl can’t give you: a change from your girl. Not even Selina can give you that. Is Alec fucking her? Well, what do you think? Is she doing him all those nice favours? Could be, no? Here’s my theory. I don’t think she is. I don’t think Selina Street is fucking Alec Llewellyn. Why? Because he hasn’t got any money. I have. Come on, why do you reckon Selina had soldiered it out with me? For my pot belly, my bad rug, my personality? She’s not in this for her health, now is she? … I tell you, these reflections really cheered me up. You know where you are with economic necessity. When I make all this money I’m going to make, my position will be even stronger. Then I can kick Selina out and get someone better.

Cronenberg's Disappointing Adaptation

            For all its cinematographic appeal, ranging from the eerily beautiful motorway landscape to the unique choice of cars for each character, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash failed to emulate my favorite part of J.G. Ballard’s novel, the inner conflict and mental processes that the main character, and narrator, James Ballard has. At many points while watching the film, I felt as if there was a vital element keeping all the aspects of the story together. For example, during the scene when James meets Helen Remington at the police junkyard, the movie failed to evoke the thoughts that James projects on Helen and assumes are her actual motives. The thought that she had undergone a rebirth through her accident with Vaughan and her husband, revealing a new sexuality, born from the fusion of her and James’ automobiles colliding with her husband dead on James’ bonnet, is one that cannot be perceived by the audience members who had not read the novel. I believe that the movie cannot be truly understand without having read the novel first, which is, in the end, a major shortcoming of the film. Although the film does evoke the sentiment that the characters live in a small, yet large, world dominated by technology and that a new form of sexuality, the union of machine and man, is arising, the film fails to portray the most vital element of the novel, the thought processes and analysis that only the novel’s narrator, James Ballard, has. In the end, I’d say that the film was a superficial adaptation of the novel, translating the aura of this strange world very nicely. However, the vital interpretations of this world seen through the eyes of James, in detail description of events with lesser importance and the excruciatingly descriptive crash fantasies, are completely missing. 

Mind Boggling End

Having finished reading the excruciatingly detailed, and at times painful, sex and technology induced exploits of James and Vaughan in the novel Crash, I have found myself still in shock by the world that J.G. Ballard has inhabited with his characters. Centered around the airport, the world in which James roams the streets is a massive labyrinth of highways, fly-overs, and major avenues. No matter where James is going, whether its Seagrave’s auto shop or Helen Remington’s home, the airport is used as a point of reference; ‘We were moving through a development zone on the southern fringes of the airport’ (pg. 92). The airport appears to be the center of James’ technology-dominated, a place where thousands of people interact on a daily basis with the greatest of transportation technologies, planes. James often describes ‘aircraft taking off from London Airport across the western perimeter [as] constellations of green and red that seemed to be shifting about large pieces of the sky’ (pg. 139). James recognizes that like cars, planes are on invisible highways as they cross the large sky, only with the capability of reaching greater distances than cars. There is a sense of continuity in the traffic, as if it could not be halted to a full stop, regardless of how heavy it is. In the end, a car accident, irrespective to the amount of cars involved, will never be able to fully halt the flow of traffic. Does James’ crash instigate the burgeoning of a life philosophy based on the flow of traffic? Is Vaughan nothing but a figment of James’ imagination, an attempt to comprehend the fairness of his own car crash?

Near the end of the novel, I began to doubt Vaughan existence as a physical human. There are a few passages that feed my suspicion of James creating Vaughan’s character just like the narrator from Fight Club does when he creates his alter ego Tyler Durden. The fact that James’ often makes absurd assumptions of what other people are thinking promotes the untrustworthiness in his story telling. For example, at the end of Crash, James explains that Vaughan follows his wife constantly with the possible intention of killing her in an accident, James feels ‘uncertain whether Vaughan would try to crash his car into Catherine’s, [yet he] made no attempt to warn her’ (pg. 218). The failure to tell a person you love that the ‘nightmare angel of highways’ (pg. 84) was after them seems to be an indication that James is either crazy or that he has no love for Catherine, which is simply not true. In addition, Catherine must have noticed if a man, that she supposedly knows, had followed her by car on a daily basis yet she ‘never referred to Vaughan’s pursuit of her’ (pg. 216). J.G Ballard has left me in a state of confusion, not knowing whether James and Vaughan are their own men, or if Vaughan and the whole story were only the result of James’ post traumatic stress disorder caused by his crash. Was James trying to escape his reality and find meaning behind his crash by creating this accident enthusiast, Vaughan?