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epitome of incomprehensibility
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By J. G. Ballard. Trying to read all of the book this time.
One of the difficulties in comprehension that I hadn't really noticed the first time on account of being chronically sleep-deprived (surgeon general's warning: one-year MAs can be bad for your health, even when you take an extra semester) was that the main character's name changes across different chapters. Talbot and Talbert and Traven and so on. I'm reading it again and seeing my confused pencil annotations: "dif. character?" Also: "assymetry?"
Assymetry! Excellent. It's the symmetry or perhaps asymmetry of the buttcheeks. If symmetry is a beauty standard, good assymetry may make one callipygous.
I'm almost as immature as James Joyce. Speaking of which. In Finnegans Wake - not that I've read it all - and the Circe sequence of Ulysses, characters change names all the time. Why the difficulty for me in this book? I guess it's more confusing, at first, when only one of the characters changes names. As if you had The Animorphs with only one shapeshifter. Sort of. Or, say, a novel about the Vietnam War with one of the Animorphs thrown in. I guess it comes in handy to turn into an armadillo?
Question marks everywhere. Surrealism's supposed to be about destabilizing expectations, isn't it?
But one thing that made it hard for me to get into it was that I didn't know how to feel about it. Beginner's excuse, I know. I couldn't get "emotionally invested." Was I supposed to laugh? be disturbed? It seems to encourage both responses, but the images still often leave me indifferent. Though I get the part about car parks looking like alien landscapes, bright and lonely.
And Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" is much funnier (to me) than Ballard's similar "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race." You can even compare them: http://www.evergreenreview.com/102/fiction/duo.html
One of the funnier lines in The Atrocity Exhibit is "the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader." It causes giggles in the dictionary-wielding Canadian female. My notes ask, Why Ralph Nader?! Well, past self, because Nader wrote a book about car safety problems before he got into presidential politics. Now you know!
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