Money Talks in Different Voices

A passage I found particularly striking in “Money” is the sudden break in the narrative on page 104. Amis sends readers on a discourse into an analysis of the “four distinct voices" inside of John Self's head. It is evident that the reader has a sense of the voice of John Self by the 104^th page of the novel; however in this particular passage Amis uses an array of literary devices to articulate various components that make up that narrative voice.

The first voice of John Self is the “jabber of money.” Amis uses the phrase the “blur on the top rung of a typewriter” as figurative use of language to describe the feeling of jabber that the reader so often experiences in John’s narration. He includes denotations of imagery to further describe this feeling – “%1/4@=&$!” Amis is attempting to convey two forces cause these jumbled thoughts: emotion and numbers; this is pointed out in the phrase “sum, subtractions, compound terrors and greeds” to describe the voice of the “jabber of money.”

In his description of John Self’s second voice, pornography, Amis uses diction of speech to aid the reader in a visualization: “The way she moves has got to be good news, can’t get loose till I feel the juice-suck and spread, bitch, yeah bounce for me baby.” This speech is intended to give the visual of a “demented DJ” that is juxtaposed in the following sentences with the image of a “retard in Times Square”. The gurgled monologue to aid the readers visual is presented in the form of “Uh guh geh yuh tih ah fuh yuh uh yuh fuh ah ah ah yuh guh suh muh fuh cuh.” In these various forms of speech by a “demented DJ” and a “retard”, Amis establishes a nonsensical and unpleasant rhythm attached to John Self’s “pornographic” inner voice.

The third voice is of “ageing and weather.” Here, Amis does not rely on figurative language, diction of speech, imagery, or denotation to describe this voice. Instead it is poetically stylized with the negative connotations often experienced by John Self’s pitiful character: “Time travel through days and days, the ever-weakening voice of stung shame, sad boredom and futile protest.” The rhythm, here, seems to provoke a sense of longing for the reader and the stories main character.

The last voice, described as an intruder. However, I couldn’t help but feel as if Amis coped out on the hard-hitting, “voice-driven” way in which the narration of the passage relayed the other voices. At first the intruder voice is described as “the unwelcome lilt of paranoia, of rage, and weepiness made articulate in spasms of vividness: drunk talk played back sober.” Here, he is making a comparison: where drunk talk as an unwelcome lilt of paranoia, of rage, and weepiness, and sobriety is spasms of vividness. The contradictions of these denotations of language are followed by a description of two images on a television screen: “hysterical ads” and the “fucking news.” By describing John Self’s “fourth voice” in such a way that it is not clearly defined, only cluttered with misleading contradictions, perhaps is a way to make the reader feel as if the narration of the passage has hit the point where “all the voices are coming from somewhere else.”

The voice shifts back to the narrative voice of John Self from which most of the novel has been told. He compares the intruding voice to a vampire and advises: “not to let them in, these crashers. Don’t let them in, whatever you do.” Perhaps, a warning and foreshadowing for the reader to beware of the events, as well as narrative shifts that will occur as the novel unfolds.

On Movies and Money

The Unsuccessful Car Crash?

On Crash: Novel vs. Movie

The all-at-once, blunt, matter-of-fact, bizarrely weird movie Crash, accomplishes the beguiling ambivalence to “apotheosis” as the novel did.However, I recently read a quote by Barbara Shulgasser of the San Franscisco Chronicle that stated,

“Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.”

I felt like the movie was more open ended in meaning than Ballard’s carefully constructed novel. This openness, to an already intensely interpretive novel, made the film feel nearly pointless. Without a doubt it incorporates most all of the sexual images of the novel, but leaves out important plot points and themes. I felt like the “electric highway” universe was more vividly pictured in the novel, with all the emphasis on images like the clutter of traffic, to depict the imposing technological age that traps everyone in a particular space. Cinematically, this could have been accomplished in the film easily, but I did not feel it was pushed hard enough.

The ambiguity in the movie of the viewer attaching onto any particular character’s consciousness, does mimic that of the novel. However, the way in which Ballard’s character perceives events occurring, does not match up to how I felt he perceived things in the novel. There's such a vividness of detail in Ballard's perception, that Cronenberg tried to replicate in the film with odd shots like a finger stroking a seat belt, or attention to things happening off screen away from the main action, but it could have been done more effectively so that the viewer is not just watching through the eye of the camera as their limitation, but also develops a perception of the camera's own consciousness as Ballard creates in his novel.

Ballard’s novel contained a particular articulation of events, and their overlap; contrasting repetitive themes through their collision that adds up to some over-all collective meaning. At the end of the movie however, I felt like I had seen an ineffective psychological take of sex in relation to the machines in which the acts occurred in, and how car crashes can affect someone’s consciousness.

What the fuck is Crash? A meticulous realism or free-floating psychodrama? Wish fulfillment or cautionary tale? Diagnostic or symptomatic? Satirical or speculative? The answer, H.G. Ballard might have said is: YES. Crash doesn’t operate by either/or; it follows the logic of chance in a universe that has raised its stakes against the occurrence. Cronenberg, on the other hand, had a different take and the movie felt undeniably incomplete to me.

MONEY $$

After beginning the first 50 pages of Money, it is evident that Martin Amis, is appealing to some sort of "common" human experience, as Ballard did in Crash. I feel as though, however, it is transforming into a nesting story of dimensions, putting the reader onto different planes of the “common” experience.

John Self, a largely unread media slickster who describes himself as ‘200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food’ (31) assumes that his listener is his contemporary; they are somebody who lives in the year 1981 and is familiar with current affairs. However, there are general qualities attributed to this narrate's listening that does not obviously guarantee that he/she will be exactly like the narrator. Self seems to assume or rather suspect that the narratee is different from him, even though they are living in the same world.

He often interrupts his narrative with questions concerning the narratee’s habits and cultural background, such as:

“About me and reading (I don’t really know why I tell you this - I mean, do you read that much?): I can’t read because it hurts my eyes.” (42)

Self projects a narratee who is better educated then he is, his own knowledge of the world not extending beyond the current news presented by tabloids and the fast-food culture of the media.The cultural gap between John Self and the narratee is emphatically underlined in his self-conscious confessions of his attitude to people who are better educated than he is:

“As a rule, I hate people who are the beneficiaries of a university education. I hate people with degrees, O- levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand diplomas ... And you hate me, don’t you. Yes, you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind that has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money.” (47)

By creating a narrator who attributes to the narratee a number of contradictory properties and positions, Amis has put his readers in the communicative situation in which they must continually re-adjust his/her position in relation to the text. Furthermore, by inscribing himself into his own novel, Amis blurs the borderline between fiction and reality and intensifies the reader’s disorientation. The reader thus becomes involved in a metafictional game in which he/she is forced to experience directly rather than merely observe. This seems the novel’s central themes: the dissolution of the self in a (post)modern world, where everything and nothing is known and can be known; particularly through our often main focus on money.

Thoughts on Finishing "Crash"

Crash leads readers on an exploration through a land of dystopian modernity, with its bleak man-made landscapes. It highlights the psychological effects of technological, social, and environmental developments, through a type of “personal hauntedness." This "hauntedness", Ballard states, is “ the complete confinement in [one’s] own panicky universe, yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world” (123).

Through focus on sexual fetishism in connection to automobile accidents, the novel encompasses a reoccurring metaphor: the effect on human desires in connection to the technological society they have been produced in. For Ballad, sex is a symbol of the “the ecstasies of head-on collisions” (15) Yet, Ballard’s intention seems to stretch well beyond this metaphor. He gives his reader no moral compass or timeline in which the events throughout the novel are happening, and in this way, the reader themselves become the spectators.

Ballard wants his readers to wander, like the characters, through the endless field of mundane, deviant strains of our personalities and the process in realizing them. Our only guide seems to come through the perspective of a character, who views the world almost through the lens of a camera: the images are presented in a particular space that cannot be expanded. Within this limited vision, the reader receives information in an input/output method of the series of events taking place. This relates to Ballard’s idea of the individual's loss of imagination in the "artificial horizon"; We are simply “holding [our] position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame [us] (88).

The character of Ballard depicts Vaughan as a symbol representing technology, and he “senses that Vaughan was controlling us all, giving each of us what we most wanted and most feared” (96).Marooned on a traffic island, the characters operate as machines of their own invention. Their goal is to test the boundaries of human limitlessness and limitation, through a non-subjective and formulaic procedure of thinking.

So, is Crash a comedy or a tragedy? It is neither. Using a word that Ballard’s character repeats in descriptions of things, it is a “parody”. Fragmented and precise detailed images are placed into a formless structure. This is the main component of this carefully constructed universe: not to reveal the entire picture, but allow the reader to read between the colliding spaces, that intersect and disconnect over and over again. We are left trying to solve an imaginary equation, where the answer is cluttered by real numbers. By deconstructing a formula of sex, and car crashes, Ballard leads readers to no end point, but into the center of his colliding fragments. This establishes the idea that in modern society we are traveling in a never-ending paradox of the “electric highway of technology”, where it becomes “difficult to know where the centre of [the] personality is” (115). Here, the creation of ideas are only mirror images of imitation, and we truly have “entered an immense traffic jam” (151), where our ending and beginning are one in the same thing.

In Crash the readers are the test subjects of Ballard’s madman invention. To what extent is our analysis relevant to discovering Ballard’s true intention in writing Crash? It isn’t. His intention may be only to create a mirror that shows us we may be the spectators of our masked disguises. He presents our own strengths and weaknesses, through what may be considered "unlikeable" characters that we have always kept our eyes closed to.Here, in this technological society, sex images must be removed from the human body that gives them meaning. Ballard captivates our longing to discover what impact we truly make in a digital society, where realities truth is shoved in our face to speculate. At the end of the novel, we can only watch from our generic distance that technology has created. The collisions in time and space that continuously occur may remain a mystery in this technological landscape of the mind.

A Letter to Snow

- a story inspired by J.G. Ballard.

He stood in front of the trailer park watching it bellow a smoky sigh of relief, as the fire finally diminished.He could only manage to get a single tear to trickle from his eye, though he wished to cry a thousand. Then again even shedding one tear had probably been too much.Men do not cry. Men do not wallow. So, he wiped the tear away, pulled out a camel, and flicked its tip adding to the pile of ash. He found himself unconsciously skimming the rubbish for her body. He didn’t know why, I guess because he had never seen an actual dead body. The only time he had come close was when he was six and his grandfather died. They had an open casket at the wake but when it was his turn to go up and say goodbye, or whatever it is that you’re supposed to do in those situations, he closed his eyes. He stood there for a few minutes pretending to pay his respects, his eyelids clenched so tightly together not a single ray of light could make its way through. Sometimes he’d look back and couldn’t help but think what a little bastard he had been. The guy was dead; he owed it to him to see him one last time. Maybe he just wanted to remember his grandfather for what he was like when he was alive, and not as some dolled up body displayed in a box; or maybe he was just scared.

His eyes darted in every direction, looking for that singed body: eyes melted out of the sockets, hair strands crisp and broken from her head, those burn marks scattered over her bruises. Oh God, her body, her eyes, her hair… those bruises. He couldn’t help but wonder how this could have happened to him. Him: a forty three year old male with a wife, kids, a job. He had a Lexus for Christ’s sake! How could he have fallen in love with a prostitute? He had never been a “one night stand” man, sure, but this was different; she was just a cheap whore.

It was peculiar to him that she burnt down the object that made him fall in love her in the first place. He had first requested her services during a business trip to the city, and every time he came back he couldn’t resist calling her up. It was always the same hotel, same all-knowing glances from the doormen’s eyes, same pinstripe wallpaper, the same duck soap. But the first time they had sex in her mobile home changed everything. Suddenly she was showing him something he had never seen: herself. She was its metal jagged roof, its broken windowpane, the bees nest in the corner of the ripped screen door, the 1970s molding carpet. It was there in the mobile home that he spent hours, probing through her uterus sewage walls complied with unidentifiable smells and scraps with his hard-on. Once as he was reaching his climax, paint chips fell from the ceiling, sprinkling his naked body with artificial snow. It in this moment of ecstasy that the realization of his love for her finally set in. For although she was overused and trashy, she was one of a kind like the mobile home.

She had no limits, no boundaries, no necessities beyond surviving, and he liked it; he liked it a lot. She was not involved in the same heart scheming game of money he had mastered in his day-to-day commonplace reality. He remembered that five-dollar, garage sale snow globe that she kept on the nightstand beside the bed. Her fascination with it he could never understand. What had once been city of Las Vegas inside of it, now had become a bumblefuck ghost town, eroding slowly as the days passed from unprovoked snow. The miniature dice inside were suddenly missing their dots; the city lights, white-faced and faded, containing only a few traces of long gone yellow. He remembered that he had offered to purchase her a brand new snow globe once, but she simply glared at him in retaliation and said, "No amount of money could buy a snow globe greater than this."

Then she shook it as he smoked a cigarette and watched her intently; her eyes trailing each flake of tiny morsel of snow falling onto the crumbling rooftops. Somebody else’s trash, it was her personal treasure… and she was his.

I guess she had known he’d never leave his wife for her, and I guess he knew he never would either. He knew it now too, so he wiped away his nostalgia and began to walk away from the burnt down mobile home…like a man would do. As he walked a glimpse of her crooked mailbox caught the corner of his eye, and he noticed it was wide open.

He leaned down, looking onto the metal platform covered in empty darkness, and saw it: the five-dollar garage sale snow globe. Underneath it there was a folded piece of notebook paper with a burnt corner. He opened it and began reading:

Dear snow inside the snow globe,

I’m writing to you because I think you can understand me. You, like me, are falling down inside of a world your not supposed to be in. You are so pure, so untouched. But I guess no one sees that. They just see the trashy city of Las Vegas that hides how truly beautiful you really are. But I see you. And I’m sorry snow, I really am, because I know what that feels like be looked at for what you are, and not who you are. I wish I could be inside of there with you, and you could fall on me and make another piece of trash look beautiful too. But I can’t. I have to go. I don’t know what’ll happen I just know I can’t stay. It’s all just… too much.

Maybe where I’m going I’ll find my own snow.

Maybe.

Love,

Lily

He crunched the paper into a ball and grasped the snow globe into the palm of his hands. He shook it vigorously, a mad man brewing a blizzard, as tears trickled unconsciously from his eyelids. He stood, in front of the burnt down mobile home and waited for the snow storm to end, watching intently.

As the last microscopic flake of snow slowly fell onto the base of Las Vegas,

he closed his eyes.

The Paradises of the Electric Highway

After reading Robin’s essay “Chapter One: Nothing Declare”, I found myself in a state of questioning. As a fiction writer, whose style resembles that of Transgressive Fiction writers, I felt it hard to establish a true perspective on a non-fiction analysis of this particular kind of genre. Reflecting on the “moral chaos” of the works, and in my own writing, I am aware of one thing:

The intention is anything but formulaic, and moral attention must be paid.

A phrase in the essay that stuck out to me was “imaginative libertinism.” I had never read the word “libertinism” in any piece of literature before. A definition in an online dictionary read,

"A dissolute person; usually a person who is morally unrestrained.”

The literary structures created by the “classics”, such as the Aeneid of Vigil, mentioned in the essay, is hard to compare to Transgressive literature, where “formlessness exists at a cosmic level.” I feel as though the trangressive writers intention may exist for the “soul” purpose of examining consciousness, whether it be theirs, their characters, or the collective.

Trangressive writing seems to me to operate within a similar type of “metaphysical” space I strive for in my writings; to create a “sense that control is located outside of human agency.” This aspect of Tragressive Fiction can easily be compared, to say, the Bible.

It is true that J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash, is overwhelming with a “propensity to misbehave” through what may be considered post-modern innovations in style and language.However, we are living in a “glamour of rebellion” age. Ballard’s novel is written in the “articulation of social standards”, or in a sense realistic and relatable “modern” language. Ballard uses raunchy, sexual fantasies produced by car crashes from the perspective of the main character “James” who may be the voice of Ballad himself.

In a passage James reflects, “The crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union (29)”.

Ballard has found an imaginative way to articulate a perspective that can be related to the society it was written in. James's obsession with car crashes transforms over the novel into a metaphor. It depicts an underlying message of a “spectator” society that has been created by technology.

“The technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the boarder zones of identity” Ballard establishes an ideology in this novel, that seems to be found in a “landscape of [his] life that was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon… the paradises of the electric highway.” (49)

I do believe these writers are “architects whose minds conceal either laudable or wicked intentions.” Perhaps, the chaos attached to their message cannot then be directly stated, and this “elusiveness prevents the work form being associated with a specific perspective or viewpoint.” The viewpoint is the readers, allowing them to read through the lines these daring writers have left wide open.

We must realize the blanks are only to be filled by a "common" relation to them.This may generate an “unclear moral perspective, with the “willingness to accept the author’s philosophical preconceptions.”

Is it truly a key component of these works that they must always cross a moral line for the sake of writing beyond preexisting literary limitations?

As Ballard says in Crash, “there’s a certain moral virtue in being materialistic” (78).

Does satire truly “abandon good taste with a minimum of soul-searching”? Or does the flexible space of interpretation, and “art of distance” used in various Trangressive works, a tactic towards establishing an audience-friendly, relevant approach to literature. Their works may be more accessible in modern society towards finding their own interpretive genuine meaning; maybe even a moral code.

The works of Transgressive writers may very well be “complicated fictional machines that are full of blind alleys for critics.”

But if so, how does one then begin an analysis, without asking only more and more questions?

“I was convinced that the key to this immense metalized landscape lay somewhere within these constant and unchanging traffic patterns” (65). - J.G. Ballard