guts

Let me just start off by saying that if I had not been laying in bed while reading Guts, I unquestionably would have fainted too. Palahniuk's first anecdote, about the lost butthole carrot, gave me the idea that Guts was going to be a funny short story because other than a bit of lifelong familial awkwardness, nothing bad really happened to the kid. The second, about the kid who got wax in his bladder while trying to replicate "how the Arabs get off", was still pretty funny to me except for the fact that he didn't get to go to college because of it. Basically, nothing could have prepared me for what happens in the third anecdote of the story. I didn't even know that was possible. In Palahniuk's essay, The Guts Effect, he says that the majority of the people who fainted dropped when they heard the bit about corn and peanuts, but for me it was when my confusion about what was going on lifter after I had to reread the three paragraphs before the corn and peanuts part three times, where he describes the "snake, blue-white and braided with veins" that has attached itself to his asshole. For the rest of the story, I just felt numb and made no effort to conjure up any emotional response to what happened after. I was just too scarred. Palahniuk's style here reminds me of Martin Amis' in Money because he is telling the story from a first person point of view, and manages to do so in a way that, especially in the not okay part, I felt just as thoroughly confused and then panicked about what was happening as the character/real life person (still can't believe this) did when it was happening to them. Similarly, in Money, particularly in the parts where John Self is drunk, I definitely felt like I was in his shoes: wasted, bewildered, interpreting situations 100% the wrong way. This is quite obvious when you think about it, but I also thought it was smart how Palahniuk organized the story to have the three anecdotes in order of severity in order to build up the drama of the story and to keep readers caught up in it.

nights at the circus x spectacle of her gluttony

Reading The Spectacle of her Gluttony was really interesting to me because while I was reading Nights at the Circus, I did take note of Fevvers monstrous appetite and the gluttony with which she devoured everything ut in front of her. I can definitely see how this is meant to make her seem stronger and more confident as a woman than if her character just stuck to eating salads or if there was really no mention of how much she ate. It is clear that her bad manners and large appetite are her way of showing that she doesn't need anyone and doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks either. However, after reading the article, the part when they are lost in the woods and Fevvers refuses to eat becomes more significant.

"They gave us hot tea and ardent spirits and offered us cold roast, I think, moose, but I could eat nothing, I was overcome by silly weeping at the sight of food, which Liz said, then, was the effect of shock, but afterwards assured me that to see me off my feed was the first real cause of concern I'd given her since I was a baby."

At this point in the story, we know that she and Jack Walser both have feelings for each other that each are also unaware of, and with Jack missing in the Russian wilderness, she is finally acknowledging her emotional dependence on someone other than herself. Before this, both Fevvers and Liz were both very Feminist characters in the fact that they were adamant that they didn't need men, like the woman murderesses who escaped from there prison, but after the separation from Jack, Fevvers takes on a new form of Feminism. Instead of becoming the maiden in distress who waits to be rescued by her prince, she decided to reverse the roles and set out to find Jack and make him hers. This, I thought, was a good way for Carter to end the book on a note that would be satisfying to the reader (Fevvers and Walser get together), but would not compromise the Feminist message of the novel by having Sophie melt in the arms of a handsome man at the emd.

nights at the circus

There is definitely a discrepancy between the way Sophie Fevvers sees herself and the different ways that others see her.  During her shows, Fevvers puts on this completely regal act full of carefully rehearsed showmanship. The dramatic buildup to the show with her in a cage, the elaborate costume and hair, the corny show music, and the end when she seems to stay on stage waving and blowing kisses for so long. "Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvelous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch.... Look! Hands off! Look at me!" She puts on this really over it and confident persona onstage because she knows that "on the street, and the soirée, at lunch in expensive restaurants with dukes, princes, captains of industry and punters of like kidney, she was always the cripple, even if she always drew the eye and people stood on chairs to see." She is self conscious because she knows she's a freak. However, because Jack Walser is investigating her and trying to figure out if she is real or not, the way he sees her is completely different from the way her audiences do. While they see her as a kind of enigma, he scrutinizes and judges everything about her. We can tell that he is really trying quite hard to figure her out because of the amount of long passages in which he is going over and analyzing her every more, trying to find somewhere where he can poke a hole in her identity. He questions the fact that she has arms, analyzes the unnaturally slow speed of her flips, and ponders whether or not she has a belly button. Unlike her audiences who suspend their disbelief for entertainment's sake, Walser sets out to expose her as a fraud, so her can never really take her at face value and will always be questioning something.

money pt 4

I read Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man by Elie Edmondson in addition to the Money reading and while I'm actually pretty pissed that it gave away the ending of the novel, it also gave me a lot of good insight into Amis' decisions as the author. The article also answered some general questions about the novel as a whole that I had been thinking about, such as "Why would an author make the main character/narrator of a novel such an incompetent slob?" and "Why did Amis introduce himself as a character in the novel?"

Edmondson explains in the article that Amis does two main things in Money that make it such a strong narrative. First, he "introduces a protagonist who is so obsessed with an illusion that he cannot function in his world, cannot even recognize his real environment when it is encountered." This of course, is John Self, whose obsession is money. I began to understand Self more as a character when I read the Saul Bellows excerpt in the article describing the Postmodern Man. "He is certainly in many respects narrow and poor, blind in heart, weak, mean, intoxicated, confused in spirit--stupid." John Self is clearly meant to represent the Postmodern Man here. He is obsessed with money, therefore he has no real center and his "primary emotions are fear and shame". In the midst of his narrative, he has flashes of self awareness that are very distinct from the way that he normally thinks, and that confuse him because he doesn't even know why he is not happy, even with so much money.  He sometimes comes very, very close to realizing what is wrong with his life, but even if he did have that realization, he still would most likely fail at improving his life because he is literally so stupid that he wouldn't even now how.

The second thing that Amis does is "[distance] the reader from anything resembling authority within the text". Usually, a narrator is either omniscient, or is just a character telling the story from their first person point of view. In Money, however, John Self is clearly not omniscient, and isn't even trustworthy enough to narrate objectively, so the audience really gets no sense of security about what is going on in the story at all since the narrator is blacked out/delusional/just wrong for most of it. However, I feel like when Amis introduced the character of Martin Amis into the story, I found myself looking to him to be the voice of reason or moral authority for the novel. To explain the presence of Martin Amis as a character in Money, Edmondson writes, "in Money, Amis himself appears as a character in the text and speaks to the protagonist, John Self. Self then directly addresses the reader, giving his gloss (always wrong) on what the author-character meant. Amis therefore implicates the reader in the narrative by putting him inside the character's head, and at the same time distances the reader by drawing attention to the text as a piece of fiction.... As creator, he shows that the concept of a fully refined and omnipotent consciousness is, by definition, deluded: Consciousness is at one level a narrative that the individual creates through action, but on another level, that individual's reality is constituted by a larger narrative."