Voice of Self

There are, at John Self's count, four distinct voices in his head. He tells us this on page 104, and in attempting to dissect his narrative voice, the qualification of his internal polyphony is invaluable. As readers, we can search through the cacophony of the narrator's head (that is, the voices he speaks in which may not be rendered directly on the page) in order to discern what is driving the voice that he presents. John Self presents his voices by order of their primacy within the internal dialogue, which could be thought of as the relative volumes at which these different voices speak. Which one factors most into the final voice? Which one is most powerful? Which one is the most 'Self'? These are questions to be answered by delving into the voices, as John himself presents them:

'First, of course, is the jabber of money, which might be represented as the blur on the top rung of a typewriter,' Self says. If, as readers, we take this at face value, then John's most base level of thought is gibberish--it is devoid of letter-symbols, and consists of the symbols that, when taken on their own, imply something unspeakable, profane. Money, the voice, is the drone of the profane. Clearly, however, this wordless drone is not the narrator on the page--were it, there would be only symbols.

The second voice is Pornography--the explicitly profane. Self initially describes this voice as rhythmic: 'the way she move has got to be good news, can't get loose till I feel the juice--suck and spread, bitch, yeah bounce for me baby...And so on.' Porn possesses a more definite structure than Money (it rhymes, it is composed of recognizable words), at least in the first instance that is provided. There is hope for Porn to be the driving voice--But no! Porn descends out of language as well; it becomes an 'incomprehensible yet unmistakably lecherous...gurgled monologue,' a progression of sounds that imply meaning, but that do not allow for particular meaning to be discerned. So Pornography, as well, drones beneath Self, the narrator, but is not John's narrative self.

And then things get interesting, as there is the 'third, the voice of ageing and weather, of time travel through days and days, the ever-weakening voice of stung shame, sad boredom and futile protest...' This is the voice that would seem to govern the narrative progression, or at least the idea of progression in the narrative: it is the voice that starts the process of interpretation. As John Self could not become a narrator without being aware of the progression of the events he finds himself in, this voice is the bridge. It is the voice of Self's awareness in the moment, but were this voice alone the narrator, the text would lack the language confidence that it possesses. Were it merely the self-deprecating, depressed internal voice, the narrator would accomplish nothing.

Which leads to the final voice, 'the real intruder.' This voice seems to take on the role of blending the first the voices together, and presenting them on their own terms, albeit in mode specifically designed to call attention to their, the voices', farce: 'it has the unwelcome lilt of paranoia, of rage and weepiness made articulate in spasms of vividness: drunk talk played back sober.' Indeed, if there were a single most-apt manner of describing John Self's narrative voice, it would be 'drunk talk played back sober.' It is the honest truth, the unabashed facts simultaneously witnessed through both their initial determination and reflective contemplation. John Self, in his voice, is both convinced of the rightness of his actions and aware of their depravity, their detestability.

So which voice is most Self? They all four mix together, to form an aggregate of Self, yet it seems undeniable that the third and fourth are the most prominent. After all, they're the only two made of words.

Skin

I look after Jed’s Shar Pei while he’s at work. Flub hasn’t grown into his skin yet—his eyes are obscured by the warm maze of wrinkles, and his haunches swell with his rough, drooping horse coat. When he moves his coat forms new crevices, dark and moist and rough, his rolls of subcutaneous fat bunching and folding into each other, begging me to run a mouth-moistened finger through them, these tempting little slots, drawing out whatever concoction of sweat and lint and grime has accumulated. Waiting for Jed to leave in the morning is torture—having Flub that close, loafing across the floor, his black tongue slipping into his water bowl, but not being able to rub my face against his skin, squeeze his wrinkles between my fingers, seek out the depths of his flesh with my tongue, often strains my patience to the point of fraying.

I wish Jed would never return, most days. I wish some animal would eviscerate him, tear him limb from limb and scatter his intestines across the road, park, apartment, wherever it is that it happens. I lust for that phone call from the police more than anything, not because I hate Jed, he is nice enough, but because collapsing to the floor, drawing Flub to me and telling him that everything’s going to be okay, it’s just me and him now, and letting my tears of joy or sadness (I still don’t know which they will be, but there will be tears) seep into his corrugated skin would be the highest pairing of souls that Flub and I could achieve. I don’t know if he understands mortality, but I would help him feel his loss, he would know that I was his and his alone now, that the world only existed now for me to make him happy.

He has no surface I would not explore with my tongue—I have licked a yeast infection from underneath his ears. The taste of his sweat festering with anaerobic bacteria is an affirmation of life, a gift of divine nectar, an experience that has no substitute. When Jed ranges over me at night I call out ‘yes!’ not in response the maneuverings of his cock but to the thought of grinding my thighs over Flub, his sand-paper skin prickling my vulva, tickling my clitoris. I think about writing on the floor with Flub, bringing my self to orgasm with his sweet rolls, the come pulsing out of me, mixing with his sweat and canine grime into a delectable concoction that I can tongue out later—the taste of his and my conjunction. I spend each moment longing for this release. There is no sound so sweet as the door closing behind Jed, leaving Flub and I in our private paradise, and none so awful as the door opening. He is the bane of my existence; he is my only connection to Flub. So I endure him. I endure him, and run my tongue along the back of my teeth where Flub’s grime ends up deposited.

Maybe Jed thinks the same things I do, does the same things when I’m not here. Maybe we’re both too scared of judgment to admit it—maybe the taste I think is Flub’s sweat is mixed with Jed’s semen, and we commit true and passionate sexual congress without realizing it. Maybe, then, I do love Jed. Maybe we love each other by accident. Maybe Flub really only loves Jed, and tolerates me in his absence—but no, that’s too much to think about. Flub is mine, and I am Flub’s. Anything else is pointless, irrelevant. Only his corrugated surface matters, only my tongue inside his skin. That is all. That is all that I allow myself to think.

Crash

In Crash, Ballard seems to be using the novel as space in which to re-orient the physical spaces that he is familiar with into the forms that they take in his mind. The setting is almost constantly being constructed out of or defined by modes of transportation or communication. That is, the modern technologies which occupy a significant percentage of a person's mental capacity--as transportation is a pressing need, one which must be contended with on a daily basis, it comes to take on a structuring role in the setting of the novel.

Ballard's linking of sexuality and technology appears as an attempt to find a realm of human interaction within technology and transportation. As people spend more and more of their lives involved in the act of transportation, a process where they are constantly in close proximity to other human beings, and yet generate no sense of connection with those they travel near, more of what it means to be human becomes embodied in the act of solitary transportation. Ballard takes this to the extreme, and makes everything in his novel revolve around transportation, so that the goal cannot be to find interaction that occurs despite isolation, but instead must be to turn the isolation of technology into a medium for advanced human interaction. Essentially, if technology heightens human progress, it must also heighten the human experience.

So he resorts to sexuality, and an unvarnished one. He strips down his narrator-counterpart to the point where everything is inevitably reduced to sex. James, the narrator, sees potential sexuality in everything, and every person, around him. Most importantly, even before his first crash, James' sexuality was based heavily on isolation, or disconnectedness: the game he plays with his wife, in which they describe their affairs while having sex, is a demonstration that for James, sex can no longer be about the other that is present, but the other that is intangible at the moment. And so in his search for a stimulating sexuality, he finds it in an incredibly violent act.

By constructing a world of extremes, where the physical space is defined solely by modes of transportation, and the mental space is defined solely by the pursuit of sexuality, Ballard manages to bring together the poles of modern isolation and physical, meaningful, human interaction. In doing so, Ballard is making the point that the only time we even notice that extent of our isolation from our physical nature is when some aspect of the system breaks down--the more isolated we are, the faster the deceleration into reality.

Bikini Atoll

At the test bungalows, there is an atom in the middle. Hydrogen. Tasted like potential for waning floor, glossy syntax; the fire our ripple relation hallelujah. Ideas decompose on the maggoty shelf; fear spurs us on. Beneath the sheen, church is our criminal, amateur discretion--voting against raring circulation, bioengineering, we breath death. There is no replacement, Major, this is the act of now. This test is but an ingate, silt to a beautiful harvest, verification for destruction.

Natasha

What we see in Nabokov's Natasha is an embodiment of the idea that narratives lie in the specific voices that tell them, and anything fundamentally true or false about them is revealed when the narrative is put into conversation with another voice. That is, a heteroglossic conflict. Also, it subverts the authority of the narrator by communicating stories which, from the perspective of the narrator, are composed of un-true facts. The story allows for multiple 'truths' within it by lending legitimacy, on a very basic level, to an idea of individual chronotropies. That is, as each character tells their story, the not only show their distinction from the narrator, but also demonstrate their particular expression of their experience in time and space is legitimized by the act of expression. That is, a story teller is naturally embodied within his or her story and manner of telling.

While the polyphony of the story is found, naturally, in the dialogic digressions and tales, it also exists in the narrative itself. When Natasha is seen crawling into bed, early in the story, she is described as 'sensing, like a bystander' her own physical form and its relationship to her world. In this moment, Nabokov is demonstrating that they only way for this voice, which is not Natasha's, to communicate the physical sensations that Natasha feels is to say how she would feel if a consciousness which does not possess her body were to describe her body's sensations. That is, the closest that the narratorial voice can get to Natasha, in any ideal sense, while remaining a voice distinct from hers, is by describing what she thinks someone else might think about what she feels. The nod of 'like a bystander' is that narrator's communication of Natasha's imitation of the narrative voice--it is showing that two voices cannot discuss the same action in the same way, because as soon as they engage in the process of mimesis, they enter into speculation.

And is this ever a story about speculation--Wolfe is a story-teller, and prefers to engage with his fanciful imagination than with the actual events of his life. So he relates stories that bear all of the functional resemblances to traditional adventures: foreign landscapes, unusual creatures, feats of bravery, and, above all, the sense of timelessness. It is this sense of the dissociation of time and place, Bakhtin's chronotope, which reigns supreme in Wolfe's stories. Not only because it seems impossible that Wolfe would have been able to accomplish all of these feats, but because these stories are being told. When a story is told, it exists in a place where it can be infinitely altered, edited, and re-told--while the words telling it have to be presented in order, the story itself does not, and, often, is not. The speaker reigns supreme over the story-world, and as such re-molds the time and space within that story in order to accomplish one essential goal: the effective communication of all pertinent information to the listener, in a decipherable. The satisfactions of speaking, in this light, are that of deciding what information is pertinent, and how decipherable the form is to be.

The reader eventually discovers that Wolfe is telling stories that factually bear no resemblance to his life. Before that moment of admission, Wolfe gives an almost more telling confession: 'Oh, Natasha, I sometimes felt like a god.' In the light of Wolfe not having physically participated in his related experience, this is a tricky line to decipher. This line refers to the general feeling that Wolfe was overcome with when in the spaces that he describes--as such, it cannot be as easily discounted as the facts of his stories. Wolfe is actually describing the feeling of what it is like to embody the story-space, wherein he is actually a god, a deity elevated to a status above that of any one man. In order to give the appearance of internal consistency, he puts 'felt' in the past to identify it with the dissociated story-time--Wolfe actually embodies the stories that he tells, and, as he an Natasha come to decide, it doesn't matter that his stories didn't happen. They are his stories, and he lives them each in the telling.

Nabokov's technique is notably distinct from Burroughs'--where Burroughs made language deliberately un-intelligible, and destroyed the act of reading to call the reader's attention to the falsifying nature of storytelling, Nabokov takes the supposition that people can never communicate perfectly in language and suggests that as language's greatest attribute. He is enamored with the ability to live in private conceptions of time and space, and applies that ability to every day life. He is not destroying language, but suggesting that its ability to expose its subjective nature, in presentation, is its greatest quality and a testament to its validity.

rough bur(s)

The cut-up calls attention to the act of reading as an interpretation of arbitrary signs, assembled in an arbitrary order. The reader's first reaction is to declare it non-sensical, and yet the cut-up is composed of words and phrases that, in their original order, the reader would have had no issue taking as a direct discussion of the concepts or things that they, the word-signifiers, represented. That is, the words in their initial arrangement were oriented so as to provide no break in the reader's interpretive process. The reader did not have to think about what the words meant in specific, but what they meant as a whole as ascribed by their assigned linear arrangement. In the cut-up, the reader becomes aware that they are reading, and when confronted with the task of interpreting utterances in specific, and not as a whole, the quest for meaning breaks down.

Or rather, the literal meaning breaks down--are not the same concepts, as embodied by their word-signifiers, being put into conversation? They are, but lacking the adornment and comfort of the qualification of a supposedly 'logical' order. The reader must confront them as a direct communication between the ideas within the larger utterance (the passage being cut-up). This is difficult, and jarring, for a reader--the reader trolls for intention, re-reading in search of the one phrase, the key, that will expose the reason behind this new orientation of words. The reader seeks the author; the author presents himself not in a fresh assignation of meaning to particular words, but in the very act of the cut-up.

And so the cut-up becomes as much about the act of authorship as it is about the designations of meaning associated through word order. Burroughs, then, is calling attention to himself. What he thinks about himself as an author, and about the role of authorship, can be difficult to discern in the cut-up--mostly, he is establishing himself as one who cuts-up, and offering it as a role analogous to authorship.

Then, to find a discussion of his role as an author, we can look to a passage in which Burroughs writes about one who cuts-up: namely, the provided excerpt from Naked Lunch concerning surgery.

Is Burroughs, he who cuts-up, embodied in Dr. Tetrazzini, hurling a single sharp word into language, emotion, narrative (the reader) to indicate his balletic entrance? or the espontaneo, leaping into the ring to put an end to artifice, authority? With his surgical cut-up, he is both. To create what he calls a 'myth for the Space Age,' he must ascribe to a certain degree of artifice, of performance. After all, he is using myth in the conventional meaning, and so functions with at least a nod to its conventional parameters.

That is, the 'hero' must be superior in kind to both other men and his environment: he must border on the divine; Tetrazzini is precisely that, able to operate at such a velocity as to not 'give [his patients] time to die.' Tetrazzini proves his superiority not only over other men, other doctors, but over death itself--an attribute of the deific. So then Dr. Tetrazzini is a mythic hero, or, if the analogy of cut-up man and author is to be continued, he is the mythic author whom the reader can be sure to rely on because he is faster than they are; he is aware of exactly how a breakdown of interpretation could occur, and he fixes it at precisely the moment before it happens. And, as each word marks a potential moment for the corruption of interpretation (be it through poor grammar, word-choice, or misspelling), he chooses each one perfectly, and the reader remains prostrate, unaware of their proximity to danger.

Then, if Burroughs were to be Dr. Tetrazzini, then he would be describing himself as a traditional author--something he does not wholly deny, citing Satyricon, Petronius' famously ribald picaresque novel, as an influence from antiquity. Yet that does not seem to fully satisfy his authorial intentions: where as Satyricon is not a complete narrative arc, and is composed of a series of set pieces, small vaguely related scenes, the linear flow, word-to-word, remains functionally intact. With his cut-ups, Burroughs takes the picaresque to its logical conclusion--placing each word in its own context, forcing each one to stand on its own, independent of grammatical fortification. So Burroughs is demonstrating his connection to the tradition, to Tetrazzini, but he is extending it, or, if you will, simplifying it. He makes words solely about words.

And what is more of a simplification than the espontaneo? He wishes to bypass artifice and gut the patient, to bring death, and, by analogy, enact the disruption of interpretation. He does not play by the rules of tradition, and wishes to call that what it is: a wound a wound, a scalpel a tool for the infliction thereof. He wishes to cut-up for the purpose of calling attention to the cutting-up. Here, Burroughs is easily found. He desires to be the espontaneo, to wield the words of others in such a way that the reader must read each word for what it is: death as death, time as time, cancer as cancer.

He wants the reader to wrestle with the concepts behind their word-signifiers, to feel the gravity and depravity of life. To witness the inadequacy of language, as a system of symbols, to effectively and completely reveal the truth behind the things which it purports to discuss; to see that as soon as two words are connected grammatically, logically, the reader becomes focused primarily on that connection, that linear progression, and as our cogitation possesses a certain shallow depth of field, the words themselves become fuzzy, indistinct. He both wields and undermines artifice simultaneously, as he must, given that his commentary on the imprecision of language is voiced in language. Because language, like any fundamentally flawed thing, is its own ultimate detractor.