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.