After reading the accompanying essay, I suppose what's most horrifying about "Guts" isn't that its based on true stories, or that it makes people faint but that it takes something this graphic to induce physical trauma in contemporary audiences when Oliver Twist and Ciderhouse Rules caused the same reaction a few decades ago. What is about today that makes audiences more jaded and less susceptible to "light" horror?
"Guts" is next level graphic. As Palahniuk pointed out in his essay it was usually the "corn and peanuts" detail that pushed people over the edge. Maybe its the intricacy that causes the discomfort. When I think of other contemporary stories that are gratuitously gory I consider Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and that skinning scene in Murikami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In both books the big horror scenes are about skinning; a totally irregular act that very few people encounter in this day and age. Masturbation on the other hand is one of those societal taboos that everyone has (at least) dealt with.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Nights at the Circus and Feminist Portrayal
There are many different portrayals of the feminine body or "type" in Nights.
Fevvers
Lizzie
Ma Nelson and the six prostitutes (Louisa & Emily, Annie & Grace, Jenny, Esmeralda)
Madame Schreck and the five museum exhibits (Fanny, Sleeping Beauty, Wiltshire Wonder, Albert/Albertina, Cobwebs)
The baboushka and her murderess daughter
Mignon
The Princess
Sybil, the green-bowed monkey and the tigress (??)
"To sing is not to speak, if they hate speech because it divides us from them, to sing is to rob speech of its function and render it divine..." (Page 153).
Monday, March 19, 2012
Nights at the Circus
Portrayal of females, fairy tale, high-low factors, fantasy/reality, unconventional sentences that confuse the reader, complicated vocabulary
After Crash and Money I was surprised at the tame attitude of Angela Carter's Night at the Circus; I was expecting something much ruder. After contemplation the transgressive tendencies of the novel become apparent but they aren't like those of Amis and Ballard. Carter's blending of genres and fictional realities and use of unconventional sentence structures (with an academic vocabulary) push her into this new authorial category in a surprisingly subtle way. There are folk story qualities to her writing with the blatant foreshadowing (the mysteriously intellectual chimps, Fevver's eyes, and the midnight clock) and grimy glamour but her use of almost incorrect syntax is delicately arresting.
To tackle the syntax: Nights could easily be read for its entertainment factor without any thought to literary hierarchy but Carter's purposefully choppy or repetitive sentences prod reconsideration of author intention. There are a lot of commas in this book. "Her geniality evaporated; she squinted at him beneath her thick pale lashes with almost hostility, seemed ill-at-ease, reached out to toy with her bunch of violets in a bored fashion" (page 43). There is something slightly off-putting about this sentence; why are there no "ands"? Also, for someone who grew up in a Cockney brothel, why is Fevver's vocabulary so advanced? How does she know what a "Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism" is?
The narrator's vocabulary is interesting for its obscure items: "steatopygous" is on the first page. How can a clock have a "prolegomena" (page 89)? Not unlike Money in this way, Carter makes sure her reader is aware that her characters are abnormal in ways beyond their physical characteristics. The repetitive use of the word "surely" coupled with Walser's doubts about Fevver's narrative enforce the reader's unease with the story's validity.
There is a feminist undercurrent masked by folk story traditions in the form of Madame Schreck's performers, Fevver's intense femininity, the sacrificial incident with Rosencreutz, and this quote said by Nelson: "Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground" (Page 25).
After Crash and Money I was surprised at the tame attitude of Angela Carter's Night at the Circus; I was expecting something much ruder. After contemplation the transgressive tendencies of the novel become apparent but they aren't like those of Amis and Ballard. Carter's blending of genres and fictional realities and use of unconventional sentence structures (with an academic vocabulary) push her into this new authorial category in a surprisingly subtle way. There are folk story qualities to her writing with the blatant foreshadowing (the mysteriously intellectual chimps, Fevver's eyes, and the midnight clock) and grimy glamour but her use of almost incorrect syntax is delicately arresting.
To tackle the syntax: Nights could easily be read for its entertainment factor without any thought to literary hierarchy but Carter's purposefully choppy or repetitive sentences prod reconsideration of author intention. There are a lot of commas in this book. "Her geniality evaporated; she squinted at him beneath her thick pale lashes with almost hostility, seemed ill-at-ease, reached out to toy with her bunch of violets in a bored fashion" (page 43). There is something slightly off-putting about this sentence; why are there no "ands"? Also, for someone who grew up in a Cockney brothel, why is Fevver's vocabulary so advanced? How does she know what a "Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism" is?
The narrator's vocabulary is interesting for its obscure items: "steatopygous" is on the first page. How can a clock have a "prolegomena" (page 89)? Not unlike Money in this way, Carter makes sure her reader is aware that her characters are abnormal in ways beyond their physical characteristics. The repetitive use of the word "surely" coupled with Walser's doubts about Fevver's narrative enforce the reader's unease with the story's validity.
There is a feminist undercurrent masked by folk story traditions in the form of Madame Schreck's performers, Fevver's intense femininity, the sacrificial incident with Rosencreutz, and this quote said by Nelson: "Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground" (Page 25).
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