money pt 3

I have no idea why but I did my last post on humor instead of the narrator's voice, so I guess this post will be about the narrator's voice instead of humor.

"Lorne had gone on to explore Garfield's sumptuous lifestyle, the art galleries he superintended in Paris and Rome, his opera-nut vacations in Palma and Beirut, his houses in Tuscany, the Dordogne and Berkeley Square, his Barbadian hideaway, his stud ranches, his Manhattan helicopter pad… And as this fizzy old dog bayed and barked into the night, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, with a budget of, say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though, I wasn't so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered."

In this passage, John Self is sentimentally thinking to himself about his movie while Lorne Guyland has been droning on in the background unnecessarily and absurdly trying to change different parts of it. The way he describes the movie as "my project, my poor little project", shows the reader that he thinks of the movie as he would a small puppy who is being abused. In this case, the abuser is clearly Lorne Guyland, who is completely changing his whole character to better fit his maniacally huge ego, even though his alterations would make the movie not make sense at all. John Self's musing here also somewhat contradict his money obsessed lifestyle when he says that the considerably larger budget is actually detrimental to the quality of the end product. However, he immediately contradicts this single reasonable thought in the next sentence, saying that making a good movie didn't matter, the movie itself doesn't even matter. Only money matters to him. I thought this part was interesting because I felt like when he says "But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered."he is trying to convince himself of this, especially at the end when he repeats the line, "Money mattered" twice. Is there a small part of him that we will see later that actually knows that money is not really everything?

money pt. 2

I really enjoyed the series of passages in which Amis introduces the character of Martin Amis into the story. He first comes up when John is describing his neighborhood and neighbors to the reader:

"Oh yeah, and there's a writer who lives around my way too.... He gives me the creeps. 'Know me again would you?' I once shouted across the street, and gave him a V sign and a warning fist. He stood his ground, and stared. This writer's name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all?" (71-72)

He reappears later when John Self actually encounters him face to face at a bar the night before he goes back to America.

"I was just sitting there, not stirring, not even breathing, like the pub's pet reptile, when who should sit down opposite me but Martin Amis, the writer. He had a glass of wine, and a cigarette - also a book, a paperback. It looked quite serious. So did he, in a way. Small, compact, wears his rug fairly long...

I was feeling friendly, as I say, so I yawned, sipped my drink and whispered 'Sold a million yet?'

After this, they have a fairly long conversation that I found humorous because Martin Amis' character is so obviously put off and disgusted by John Self.  For the most part, their interaction consisted of Self making unfunny jokes, asking stupid questions, and at the end, having an unnecessary, confrontational outburst which he directed at Amis. Amis' responses to Self are basically all one word answers, and send a clear message that he does not want to be wasting his time talking to Self at all. My favorite moment like this was when the character Martin Amis replied "Fancy." to Self's statement "I haven't read any of your books. There's, I don't really get that much time for reading." I thought this was funny because by introducing a character who presumably is supposed to be a representation of himself and making him openly dismissive of Self, Amis is showing the reader that he disapproves of the type of person whom John Self is; slovenly, gluttonous, indulgent, and materialistic. I also think that in this conversation, Martin Amis the writer purposely had John Self say and ask things to Amis' character that Amis the writer hates having said to him. For example,

 'Hey,' I said, 'Your dad's a writer too, isn't he? Bet that made it easier.' 

'Oh sure. it's just like taking over the family pub.' 

'Uh?'

Here, the character of Amis openly mocks John Self, and Self doesn't even get it so he can only respond with "Uh?". This conversation, especially at the end when Self drunkenly takes Amis' goodbye the wrong way and screams in his face, makes the reader see Self as even more of an absurd, disgusting fool. I think that this part is more of an example of Quintilian humor because while it is humorous because Self is being made fun of, Amis uses this humor to achieve a "particular end". In addition to being funny, it also "dispels more serious emotions". It is clear that it is no coincidence that a character named Martin Amis who is a writer has appeared in the story. I also saw that a characteristic of Quintilian comedy is that it "refreshes members of the audience and revives them when they have begun to be bored or wearied by the [speech]". While I obviously would not agree that Money is boring to read, the novel is not exactly plot driven and consists mostly of John Self's internal narration so the introduction of Martin Amis as a character certainly made things more interesting and made me want to see how their relationship plays out.

money pt. 1

I was really intrigued by the first 50 pages of Martin Amis' Money mostly because of the writing style he used. The first person point of view, stream of consciousness style, and the fact that the John Self frequently addresses the reader really pulled me in and made me personally invested in his problems, especially his problems with his girlfriend, Selina. I'm actually still trying to really figure out who he is, what his motivations are, what his relationship with Selina is like, and why he is in New York. I love that he mentions things, like something bad he heard about Selina or the strange phone call he received at his hotel, but then tells us he'll explain it all later and waits until you almost forget to do so. This obviously made me think of so many questions about what was going on and made me want to keep reading and find out what it is he was keeping from me. Usually in novels, I've noticed that the reader is usually exposed to more information than the characters and might find out important information before the characters do, but in Money, Amis makes sure that we are always just as ignorant of what is going on as John Self is, or even more so.  Here is a passage that really grabbed my attention:

"My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is going to burst."

This initially grabbed my attention because I like the way he uses different areas of New York City to reference different parts of his face (he does this in other parts too, not just this). It also intrigued me because so far I have not yet gotten a real read on what he thinks of New York. It kind of seems to me like he doesn't want to be here, so the fact that he is referring to parts of his body as parts of New York was interesting, especially since it is also apparent that he does not take good care of himself at all. I'm glad that this is a continuing metaphor because it makes it so the way he views himself affects the way he sees the city, and vice versa. Overall I'm really excited to read more.

cronenberg's crash

I think that Cronenberg's movie adaptation of Crash would have been much better if I had watched it without already having read the novel. I will admit that I think it did a really good job of bringing to life the small world that centered around the highway that Ballard created for his characters, although it ended up not being set in England as it was in the novel. It is easy to create such a limited setting for a novel, because all Ballard had to do was think of it, but for a movie it seems like it would be rather difficult to confine the action of the film to such a small number of places: the road, James' house, the hospital, etc. However, I think that this aspect of the film is what stayed the most true to the novel. One thing that I did have a problem with however was the absence of James Ballard's narration. What makes the book so interesting is the fact that he is constantly describing in the smallest detail all of his sexual fantasies, analyzing everything that happens to him, and projecting his thoughts onto others. In the film, none of this was done so it made the character of James much less arresting than he was in the novel. We never really know what his motivations are in the movie because we cannot experience his thoughts like we can while reading the book and this makes him and really all of the characters much flatter and two dimensional. Also, the ending of the movie clearly differentiated from that of the novel, which made it so I came away from each experience with a completely different idea of what it was really about. At the end of the novel, James and Catherine are walking away from Vaughan's crash and James begins to plan out his own crash, presumably to end his life as well. But the last scene of the movie is James following Catherine in Vaughan's car, driving her off the road and making her crash, then having sex with her. To me, the conclusion of the movie has a much different meaning than the ending of the novel was meant to and it changed the whole experience of the movie for me in a negative way.

crash ending

Throughout the majority of Crash, I never really called into question the realness of Vaughan as a character. Actually I did once, but wrote it off thinking it was too "fight club-y", then remembered that Crash was actually written a long time before Fight Club. Anyway, at the end of the novel it became really unclear to me whether Vaughan is supposed to be a real character or a manifestation of some part of James Ballard's subconscious, especially during the last time they see each other before Vaughan dies when they do acid and have sex. First of all, during the "last period" of James' relationship with Vaughan, he describes Vaughan as always being subdued, depressed, and indifferent, not the way that Vaughan has acted throughout the rest of the novel. He also describes seeing signs of self mutilation on Vaughan's body. Vaughan as a character seems to be slipping away and losing his will to keep existing. Second, the way in which James describes Vaughan's body and scars is so familiar that if you didn't know better, you'd think he was describing his own body because of the level of detail that he goes into. Also, since Vaughan is a more dominant character than James, and kept a lot of people such as Seagrove, Vera, and Gabriella "under his thumb", it seems like when they had sex, it shouldn't have been James who was dominating Vaughan, but Vaughan who was dominating James. Also out of the ordinary for Vaughan's character- throughout that whole scene, there is nothing that describes Vaughan as doing anything at all, not even reacting to James fucking him. He was completely passive and submissive to James and didn't even try to have an orgasm himself at all. In fact, the way Ballard wrote it, it kind of doesn't even seem like anyone else is there. This makes more sense to me under the assumption that Vaughan is a part of James' being that he started to experience after his initial car accident. If we think back, after the accident, James first sees Vaughan in the hospital, then repeatedly after that, like Vaughan is following him, which he finds out was the case. The way James dominates Vaughan in the car feels like James' efforts to fight off the dangerous ideas and obsessions that Vaughan had implanted in his mind. After their sexual encounter and after Vaughan tries to hit James with his car, James never sees nor comes in contact with Vaughan again except for when he follows Catherine daily as she drives to and from work. He is almost like a ghost. He has a presence with them but has stopped taking direct action in their lives and controlling them. Then he dies, and at the end they seem more at ease than they did at any other point of the novel. However, what bothers me about the ending is when James narrates, "Already I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car crash". This one line makes it seem like Vaughan actually was real, and that his death is causing James to start to think more seriously about what his death will look like in the form of a crash.

a transgressive fictional story

It started on the roof, I was staring up at the sky trying to find at least one star when the faint scent of something sour, like lemons and something earthy hit my nose and I came back down to earth. That smell. It's so familiar to me, every time I'm instantly back at home surrounded by trees and mountains in every direction. Whenever I smell it walking around here I pause and look around in every direction for a quick moment, then keep walking. I shook my head fast two times to clear my mind of thoughts of home and looked down at that little brown tube in my hand. This is my favorite part. Sticky little green leaves wrapped up so carefully and neatly in brown leaves, like a newborn baby tenderly wrapped in it's warm, soft blanket by loving parents. Not too loose and not too tight. Just right. No loose parts or weird edges sticking out anywhere, nothing falling out or anything like that. A perfect little cylindrical package almost ready to be sent into the sky. I heard someone speak and looked to my right; someone was trying to give me a lighter so I took it. It was cheap, made of transparent green plastic and there was little to no fluid left in it. I tried to flick it on a few times, but when it didn't light I threw it off the roof dismissively and extended my hand again. This time the lighter that landed in my outstretched palm was heavy, made of black matte metal, and it seemed much more trustworthy. When I flicked it on the sound was so satisfying, the unpleasant smell of lighter fluid briefly met my nostrils but was almost immediately replaced by the strong, slightly sweet, smell of the thin stream of smoke that had started to stream out of the tip of the perfect little brown cylinder in my hand. It's always at this point that I feel a small tinge of sadness, like the way one feels when they realize their efforts are going to waste. In this case, my effort was literally being burned and soon there would be nothing left. This feeling only lasted as long as it took for my hand to reach my mouth, for me to breathe in, breathe out, and watch my little cloud rise into the sky.

"I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."

 J.G. Ballard on the reasons why he wrote Crash, as quoted in "From Wales, A World Apart" by Jeff Miers in Buffalo News (7 January 2005); also in "The Body Horrific : Cronenberg Classics at the IFC Center" by David Sharko at Tribeca Film (17 February 2009)

kjhflkshf

The ideas of negative theology and apophasis in the Menippean Satire reading reminded me of the way morals and sexualities of the characters in Crash are portrayed by Ballard. So far in the novel, there have not been any outright declarations of what is considered right and wrong in the characters' minds or in the world in which they live. However, we can get a pretty clear but hard to articulate idea of the characters' moralities based on their actions and reactions to different events in the novel. For example, when James gets in his first car crash, he is never guilty, shocked, or repulsed by the fact that he had killed a man and was covered in his blood. He and his wife openly cheat on each other, and in the case of his affair with Helen Remington, even encourage the affairs. He and the other characters think of the world in such detached and "abstracted" ways that almost nothing is off limits to them. For example, on page 102 James talks about the possibility of a sexual act happening between Vaughan and himself in an unemotional and unaroused tone: "However carnal an act of sodomy with Vaughan would have seemed, the erotic dimension was absent. Yet this absence made a sexual act with Vaughan 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 and abstracted as those recorded in Vaughan's photographs." The characters of the novel are not connected on any emotional level, none of them truly care for each other. Even James is pleasantly surprised when his wife Catherine acts slightly worried for him after his crash. They see everything in such analytical and abstract terms that while gaining freedom, they lose connection with others, a critical aspect of being human. Anyway, back to the main point, although we are never told straight out what these characters' belief systems are, we are able to find out through their actions, which makes the novel much more engaging for the reader. Why keep reading if we already know why these people do what they do? I also thought that the part about that "withdrawal of the author as an identifiable presence" was definitely applicable to Crash. The fact that Ballard named the main character after himself makes the intent and mood of the novel that much more real and visceral because it feels like the events in Crash really happened and the novel is really a memoir that was written by James Ballard, the main character. This feeling also comes from the indicate details and explanations that Ballard weaves in and disperses throughout James Ballard's narrative. It is almost as though he is remembering tiny things that he hadn't before just because he is going back in his memory to recall the events of the novel.