On Guts, and The Guts Effect

With Guts, Chuck Palahniuk wanted to take the everyday, the mundane, and turn it into a horror story. In that, he certainly did succeed. As I read the story I found myself thinking back to some of the labels we've given so-called transgressive fiction over the semester. One constant trope seems to be an element of unease - something about these stories makes us uncomfortable. That certainly could be said for Crash, which presented us with a singular and peculiar take on human behavior and human sexuality - a portrait that was graphic but also rather detached and almost clinical in its approach.

What struck me about Guts was the mixture of the ick factor, and humor. It was almost like a sort of highbrow, twisted scene from some teen sex comedy like American Pie. Compared to the British authors we've read who've used humor in their pieces, Palahniuk employs to me a much more matter-of-fact but in many ways subtle brand. The humor is not a trick or a trinket in the story that he pulls out from time to time to show how clever he is. It is deliberate, and instills within the reader a sort of false sense of security. You think you're reading one story, then by the end everything shifts - there is still an element of the absurd, but it's not absurd enough not to make one feel squeamish as one reads about the "corn and peanuts" in the narrator's large intestine.

There's also a sense of "truthiness" to Palahniuk's story that we've yet to really see in other work we've read. The worlds of Crash, Money, and Nights at the Circus seem otherworldly and foreign to us in many ways. The world of Guts and even The Guts Effect, despite their absurdities, seem very steeped in reality - perhaps because the author goes to such lengths in both pieces to insist that they are things that have really happened, and perhaps that lends itself as much to the feeling of discomfort as anything else - to think that, yes, there are some people out there crazy(?) enough to try this stuff.

I was delighted by The Guts Effect which, just like Guts, began as one thing and ended up as something different altogether. This idea of the author's explanation for his work has always interested me - that's why I'm fascinated by DVD commentaries and Q&A's - for every artist their is always the question of intent. Of what they intended by their work. Of what they intend for their audience/reader/whatever to take away from it. And there is also the strange aftermath of taking in a painting or a movie or a book that will always, always, have nothing to do with the author at all. So then, there is the question - what is the point in the author's explanation? Who, exactly, does it serve? Is it useful in any way?

I think The Guts Effect is a fascinating look at the author in dialogue with his own work, and with his audience - spelling out his intent, but also anticipating the reaction to his work - in fact, making the reaction so very cartoonish that he seems to lampoon the whole exercise altogether. The piece, too, is transgressive - it takes an old form and turns it on its head, it points a finger directly at we, the readers of the piece. It turns the world into fiction into fiction into fiction.

In that way, I think the pieces are like little echoes of what we've already been reading. I do feel that there is a quality in all our books, especially in the recent Nights at the Circus, which seems to be trying to make sense of the world through storytelling. And by taking the traditional forms of storytelling and turning them on their heads, taking literary allusions and placing them in new contexts, using suicide notes to explain the story of a life, challenging the seam between reality and magic - they create new ways of looking at literature and the world we're living in today, tomorrow, whenever.

Martin Amis on JG Ballard

I found a review Martin Amis did on JG Ballard's Crash and the movie adaptation by Cronenberg. Interesting to read the thoughts of one author we've discussed on another author we've discussed. I found his thoughts on the film in contrast to the movie especially interesting, I think a lot of his gripes with how the film was executed really hit the nail on the head as far as what the film was missing, for me at least. An excerpt from the piece:

Cronenberg had to take this vision and submit it to the literalism of film. He
has also chosen to transport it through time: close to a quarter of a century.
And it seems to me that all the film’s dissonances arise from that shift. In 1973
the automobile could be seen as something erotic, conjuring up freedom and
power. In 1996 the associations point the other way, towards banality: car
pools, leadless fuel and asthma. Nowadays the poor old jamjar conjures up
nothing more than a frowsy stoicism. Cronenberg might as well have gone with
tail-fins, flared trousers, mini-skirts and beehives, so remorselessly does the
piece insist on its historical slot. The sex feels pre-Aids; the work-shy
sensualism feels pre-inflation; even the roads feel pre-gridlock. These cavils
may seem pedestrian -- but car culture feels pedestrian, too, as the millennium
nears.
On the other hand it feels delightfully nostalgic, and triumphantly retro, to sit
in a theatre watching an intelligent and unusual art movie. Cronenberg has
somehow found the cinematic equivalent of Ballard’s hypnotic gaze: the
balefulness, the haggard fixity. By excluding all common sense (and therefore
all humour), obsession invites comedy, and Crash is almost a very funny film.
By a similar logic, the monomaniacal interestingly frail. Cronenberg’s ending
isn’t there in the Ballard; it achieves a tragic modulation among all the
gauntness and passivity.

If you want to read the entire essay, you can view/download it here.

Unreality in Carter's Circus

In reading the first chapter's of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, I found a jarring difference in the voice of the narrator to the past books we've read in the class. There isn't the stale, clinical observations of John Ballard nor the frenetic, scattered stream of conscious of John Self. We are not being told the story by a singular character, but by someone outside of the story and outside the time the story is being told, and in this way we are situated in a peculiar way almost in the seat of Walser himself, or more likely in the body of some fly on the wall in Fevvers' stuffy dressing room.

What really struck me about the story so far is its altogether literary-ness - if that makes any sense. Automatically, we're thrust into a rather long and winding story, both "enchanted and disgusted" by Fevvers, stuck in our chairs until she's finished telling her tale. And in the frame of that tale are even more tales, and suddenly her journey takes on a mythic, almost fairy tale like slant.

As her story deepens, there is for the reader and for Walser a sense of pervading unreality. What the hell is going on? You're wrapped up in questions, many of which Walser asks himself throughout the story - in a bid to make sense of what's being told to him. There are the mysteries that are presented by the very existence of Fevvers. There are mysteries that beg practical answers like - does Fevvers have a navel, if she was hatched from an egg? And why should she have arms when wings are in fact arms? etc. But There is also the eerie feeling that stems from the story seeming to just go on and on - highlighted in this passage on page 53 of the novel, Chapter 3:

"On the soundless air of night came the ripple of Big Ben. Lizzie slammed the door as she came back to put the kettle on the hissing stove; the mauve and orange flames dipped and swayed. Big Ben concluded the run-up, struck - and went on striking. Walser relapsed on the sofa, dislodging not only a slithering mass of silken underthings but also the concealed layer of pamphlets and newspapers that lay beneath them. Muttering apologies, he bundled together the musky garments, but Lizzie, chattering with rage, snatched the papers from him and stuffed them away in the corner cupboard. Odd, that - that she did not want him to examine her old newspaper. But, odder still - Big Ben had once again struck midnight. The time outside still corresponded to that registered by the stopped gilt clock, inside. Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong. H'm."

In this passage, we have what is one of the most (seemingly) real things in the world, Time, juxtaposed with a strange sense for both the reader and Walser that time has suddenly stopped or become unreal, taking on the quality of the cherished clock Fevvers managed to save from the Nelson Academy. This is not the first time throughout the night that, outside, Big Ben chimes. And on each occasion, Fevvers and Lizzie seem to be totally uncaring of this strange anomaly, even insisting that Walser is wrong and that, each time is the first time it Big Ben is striking midnight.

By creating this uncertainty of time, Carter creates an uncertainty in the story Fevvers is telling - an uncertainty of whether she is or is not telling the truth. By each chime of the clock, Walser finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the tale. At the first chime, he is greatly disturbed, but by this passage, while it gives him a moment's pause, all he can muster in response to the strange occurrence is a "H'm." Since time in the real world is bending to accomodate Fevvers' tale by mimicking the clock in her story, it seems as if to lend validity to her story or, if anything, at least make whether it is true or not less of an issue. It is the telling of it that is the thing.

Gendered Money Drabble

"In numerous novels, plays, and poems, the culture of 1980s Britain and its people are represented in terms of extremes: rich and poor, empowered and victimized, enlightened and ignorant, enthusiastic and embittered.

So begins J. Miracky's exploration of Martin Amis's Money - an almost pitch perfect description of the juxtaposed Extremes that John Self experiences through the course of the novel, his suicide note. Although Money seems a very Self motivated (pun intended) novel, driven solely by the vulgar and hedonistic character as he navigates through the world, it is a novel that actually depends wholly on that "Royal Wedding/Riots in 1981" world to properly function. It is not so much John Self that the reader is asked to react to but his reactions to a 20th century world and what that world means not only to him and the characters in the book, but to us as well.

I think it's interesting how, in the early pages of Money we experience the world exactly as Self experiences it. Everything is described with a hazy gloss, everything is funneled directly through his eyes with no sense of reality (in some ways, parts of the novel remind me of the unreality of Crash in that respect). Cab drivers, bell-hops, strippers, even smells and sounds all seem to be things that come at him, like a never ending landscape to a driver on a long stretch of highway. It's a sort of constant bombardment of information that's never processed or meditated upon, in keeping, as Miracky says, with the "attention-deficit-disordered quality" of John Self.

I agree that media and the general climate of Thatcher's England, though never addressed in a concrete way, is a huge part of what makes Self's life what it is. His addiction to things, to the very notion of addiction, is an idea that I think many people now living in even this 21st century world with its excesses and its uncertainties can relate to.

In the scene where Self leave's Martin Amis, after telling him about his undoing by Frank the Phone - I saw the breakdown of Self's usual worldview. The world was coming at him - a real, objective world beyond the sheen of television and porno mags. He hears "the streets scream," and indeed this is the most real reaction to the world that he's had throughout the entire book. He says "you're told about street culture," by the media, by the world, and for the first time he actually looks and sees the world for what it is - perhaps not for what it actually is but certainly for what it actually is in relation to him, his actual self, and not the false self that he's built up with the identity of a director, with his addictions, with his obsessions with Martina and Selina. Suddenly he's rejecting that TV is real - and the realization frightens him. Because if TV isn't real, if the shadow of the life he's built for himself isn't real, if the last hundred or so pages of the novel isn't real than that means he isn't real, either.

Cronenberg's 'Crash' - A Reaction

David Cronenberg's 1990s film adaptation of Crash is a movie that, for me, succeeds and fails on two different levels. Like most film adaptations, there are several superficial changes to the landscape of the story in comparison with the JG Ballard book, the biggest change being that the book takes place in and around London, while the movie takes place in Toronto. That's fine. The characters being British or Canadian or American is really irrelevant, because just as in the book we have the same labyrinthine highways and car parks,the same detached, almost surreal atmosphere.

The casting makes sense. Perhaps with the slight exception of Holly Hunter as Helen Remington (who just really annoys me), all the characters felt and looked very much as I'd imagined in my mind. In fact, Elias Koteas was almost exactly like the Vaughn I had pictured in my mind, both physically and in his mannerisms. His performance was my favorite of the film.The overall tone of the film, too, mirrored for me in many ways the tone of the book. Everything was very stark, very gray, very detached. Even presented with the mundane images of an overpass or an airport or a hospital corridor, there was something still very strange and alien about this world.

I think Cronenberg did a very good job of staying true to the book dialogue-wise, there are scenes that lift whole passages from the novel, which you rarely find it book to film adaptations which tend to truncate a lot of important speech. But then, for me, Crash is a book that does not rely heavily on actual dialogue to begin with - it is rather what happens in between and especially what happens in Ballard's mind that is the driving force of the narrative.

And in that way, the film failed as a successful adaptation. It's interesting that throughout the past several weeks everyone has been talking about how "cinematic" the book is. And here we are with the visual representation of the visual manifestation of that cinematic quality and it's like: "Oh, yeah. Traffic. This looks cool." The movie is visually striking (the last shot of Ballard and Catherine is pretty amazing), but it is missing some of the pathos that makes the novel not just a never ending series of violent sexual escapades in cars.

The movie, to me, comes to nothing. It makes a strong effort of capturing and distilling the meaning of these characters' actions, but somehow it all rings even more hollow than the book. It's disturbing, but not in a thought provoking way. It even, at time, got to be a little dull. I think the story also suffered a great deal from the absence of an "Elizabeth Taylor" like figure for Vaughn to be obsessed with. I think it's important that while the Ballard/Vaughn/Catherine dynamic is important, Vaughn's quest for immortality should be embodied in a movie star and not in the couple.

I think Cronenberg made a bold attempt at adapting the novel. Crash is most certainly unlike any film I've ever seen, and I'd very much like a second viewing to try and wrap my head around how I feel about it definitively.

In any case, I've found the last ten minutes of the movie with commentary from David Cronenberg himself. It's interesting to hear him discuss the impetus behind the choices he made - for instance, in the sequence in which Ballard is chasing Catherine, James Spader had originally played it as more predatory and ruthless. But Cronenberg decided that wasn't the right tone, that he should be "playful and exuberant," and so the whole sequence was reshot. Anyway, enjoy:

Final Crash

As I finished the last pages of Ballard's Crash, an acute feeling of uneasiness came over me. Why, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with the strangeness, the eeriness in how we leave the characters. Or perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had no idea what to think, and I generally try to know exactly what I think at the end of any book, any movie, any TV show.

I can't say that I can work through, at least not on a first reading, what Ballard's full "intent" behind Crash was. I think, perhaps, his intent was what we discussed in a past discussion in class: a novel which would serve as a fractured mirror to our own world. From its setting to its characters, to even the way the story is presented, nothing in Crash is recognizable or "right." It's "wrongness," too, is not presented as glamorous or exciting, perverse in the way some late night movie on Showtime is.

The elements of technology, of the melding of flesh and chrome, create a sensibility so odd that all I could really take form it was "OK. This is disturbing." But what's also interesting, what might also speak to what Ballard's intention was, is that after a while...it isn't disturbing. It all becomes just as matter-of-fact and commonplace as Ballard's own descriptions of his world.

The reader is conditioned to and desensitized to the clinical, detached descriptions of human sexuality and behavior. So that, for me, is what I mostly took away from Crash. Perhaps that in fact is what the uneasiness was - an uneasiness with my eventual acceptance of the world in which I was a visitor.

I'm excited to watch David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the book - partly because the book struck me as very cinematic despite its limited and claustrophobic setting, and also because I've always been interested in Cronenberg's own sort of twisted view of reality. Perhaps watching these characters speak, move, and interact with one another will add another layer of understanding to my reading experience.

The Composite

This is great, I found a blog that posts images of literary characters using law enforcement composite sketch software. Below is a composite of Vaughn, using the following description from Crash:

"His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth…As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards…But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence…Heavy black hair…Broken and re-set nose bridge…His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance…His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile."

Is he how you imagined him?