Logging my Reading

J.G Ballard – Crash (1973)

At first glance, Crash is a hands-down symphorophiliac handbook arriving with no consumer product warning. In my perusal, however, I realised that Ballard’s agenda unearths the psychopathologies of life in a technological landscape, and the alien influence they exercise on our daily existence. The protagonist, James Ballard, recounts the story of Robert Vaughan whose fantasies of motorcar wreckages acquire a paradoxically sexual form. Burrowing below the "normal" identity, he and a host of other car-wreck-enthusiasts demonstrate how their sexual fetishism over accidental collisions can function as a liberatory agent.

Crash is an avant-garde literary gem that explores the modern human mind. The leitmotif of the ‘Death of Affect,' describing an inability to feel in a society that favours aesthetics at the expense of ethics, informs my affinity for dystopian fiction. Drawing on the extreme conceit of erotically converging the human and automotive technology so to elicit an emotional response, Ballard derides the hyperboles of mass culture; in which any demand, from travelling to communication, can be satisfied with minimum effort. When equating violent car crashes with burgeoning sexualities, and perversion with liberation, Ballard suggests that psychic fulfilment in our superficial, media-savvy world requires corporal and cognitive trauma.

Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners (1956)

In Sam Selvon’s novel, post-war migration has a ringside seat. The Lonely Londoners are a group of West Indians that settle to London, circa 1950, seeking the prospect of a better life unavailable at home. Selvon offers a panorama of a local sub-culture of young men who strive to dismantle otherness and attain upward mobility in a white metropolis.

The text is innovative in focalisation and language. It's not simply a story that foregrounds racism, but an amalgamation of dialectic narratives that detail the growing disillusionment of foreigners. It was Selvon’s encounter with immigrants from other West Indian islands that initiated him to the full riches of Caribbean speech, and facilitated this episodic, multi-perspectival structure. I was reading about diaspora but through diverse migrant eyes that reinvented London to a somewhat familiar locality in unfamiliar terms. The linguistic register in Big City’s story, for instance, and the way he misnames certain locations altered my perception of the British society in the fifties. Selvon’s resistance toward a conventional English mode of expression is a feature I aspire to incorporate in my own work. His use of dialect and idiomatic language aptly capture the texture of West Indian life, for it's representative of Caribbean literacy.

George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Orwell's memoir deviates from the travelogue route while documenting his interactions with the poor in Paris and London. The text is hybrid. Darting peripatetically between the boundaries of "fiction" and "non-fiction", Orwell ventures some a kind of literary journalism in which facts are presented embellished.

Although the genre is grounded on factual information, I didn't feel that the fusion of personal experience with literary devices detracted from his credibility. To the contrary: Orwell is aware of the pitfalls of poor writing, while this truth-with-style literary pattern ensured a more compelling output, rendering me equally engaged in fact as in fantasy. Also, this genre-crossing formula enabled him to interrupt the action and ponder over his fieldwork on the underground man. Not only does this technique builds momentum, but it also redefines the conventions of memoir writing.

Rather than a diaryesque, verbatim retelling, Orwell deploys nonfiction as a contemplative tool that plays an instructive role. In the final chapters, we see him re-evaluating his prejudices, and even proposing a reformist plan to benefit the marginalised. The distinction between the two genres is easy to voice but hard to maintain, with memory being a protean medium. So, why viewing Orwell’s account as a checklist of accurate recording of events instead of a social exposé that educates readers on poverty-stricken lives?

Daniel Clowes – Ghost World (2000)

Ghost World arrives in a series of small vignettes that follow the-coming-of-age journey of two best friends who end up growing apart. Enid and Rebecca mooch about at a heavily commercialised urban city, channelling all their energy into the most footling of tasks—mocking the decor of the diner (of which they are regulars) and gossiping about anyone they happen to bump into.

Even though the Ghost World is an imaginative graphic novel with polished artwork, it's in its entirety devoid of subject-matter. In a maundering plot as such, my takeaway was initially reduced to a critique of the sorry state of America as a total sell-out to malaise-filled consumerism. That is, in the face of adolescent alienation, the nation employs the renounce-your-values-to-succeed mechanism (as John Ellis commits to when defending a child molester on TV) and ties the individual to a culture lacking morals. However, scratching below the sardonic adolescent vernacular, I realised that dialogue is in fact the work's driving force. In fact, it's laid out as a portal for the girls’ psyche, embodying the Freudian trinity of the Mind. While Enid, the reckless misfit personifies the ‘ID,’ the ‘EGO’ is best exemplified through Rebecca, an admittedly more circumspect persona. Lastly, the ‘SUPEREGO’ is their learned conscience: given the ever-changing suburbia they occupy, they soon figure out they no longer share anything in common, which gradually drifts them away from one another.

Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep (1946)

I wasn’t familiar with the tropes of the "cynical detective" or the "Femme Fatale" until I read The Big Sleep. Chandler rivals the canon of the "hard-boiled" genre and sets himself apart from other chronicles of murder who seek a premise. His plot is deliberately convoluted, while the mysteries deliberately remain unsolved so to denote that none of them are his focal matters.

As a great prose stylist, he prioritises on character, atmosphere, psychology and dialogue. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, differs from his fellow sleuths; he makes shrewd deductions, akin to Holmes and Dupin, but I feel that he is more an autobiographer than a private investigator. Otherwise, he wouldn't undermine the element of suspense as mandated by the noir style of crime writing and begin three consecutive sentences with "I". Chandler’s evocation of 1930s LA is scintillating in equal measures, demarcating the novel’s status as high literary art.

The Big Sleep could be as a microcosm of our current socio-political climate in which legal systems are corrupted and people are reluctant towards any emotional attachment. Nonetheless, Marlowe epitomises the "macho man" with his ironic commentary holding an archaic feel of ingrained homophobia—one which I feel fails to contextualise it as a product of its time.

---

Logging my Reading last modified: 17 December 2020

#criticaltheory #literarycriticism #literature #readinglog #critique #analysis