Copyright
2002 Michaela Grey
Don't be a bad-karma-havin', plagiarizin' fool, OK?
If you wanna reprint me,be considerate & ask me.
Metaphor and its Discontents:
Subversive Narrative and the Breakdown of Meaning in Two Texts
Introduction
If we turn toward Freud, it is not in the attempt to psychoanalyze
authors or readers or characters in narrative, but rather to suggest that
by attempting to superimpose psychic functioning on textual functioning,
we may discover something about their psychic equivalences. — Peter
Brooks, "Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative" (90)
Why, when we read a novel considered to be "classic" or of substantial
literary merit, are we virtually guaranteed a discomfiting experience
replete with tragic (ir)resolutions, foreclosed loves, and violent deaths?
What compels us to seek out narratives that sadden, nauseate, disturb,
or anger us? How is the trauma of reading these difficult texts placed
in the service of our sense of meaning, of self? In seeking to expose
the psychic underpinnings of narrative structure via Freudian analysis,
Peter Brooks hopes to understand the drive to read — and produce—
specific types of plot in narrative, and perhaps gain insight into the
drive to (re)produce plot in our own lives.
The essay begins with a review of the traditional criteria by which texts
are considered "whole", or psychically satisfying to a reader;
the success of a well-developed plot is central to this determination.
Brooks recalls Todorov’s assertion that the plot "is constituted
in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance",
(91) which, over the course of the text, synthesize to create an overarching
sense of metaphor, of meaning, of predestination. In this account, novels
are satisfying because they feel total, complete; this sense of completion
is obtained via a formalized plot structure in which all signifiers eventually
find their sign.
According to Brooks, Todorov allows for "sequence and succession
as well as the paradigmatic matrix" (91) in which the novel’s
transformations simultaneously suspend and activate temporality, "if
only because the meanings developed by the narrative take time; they unfold
through the time of reading." The middle of the novel, with all its
metonymy, is valued primarily for its promise of a meaningful end. Brooks
then turns to Barthes and his claim that "meaning [...] resides in
full predication, completion of the codes in a ‘plenitude’ of
signification which makes the ‘passion for meaning’ ultimately
desire for the end." (92) For Barthes, the "dilatory space"
of narrative is condensed at the novel’s end into a "retrospective
light" which, when shed upon the plot, imbues the text with meaning.
Noting Roquentin’s insight that the novel cannot even begin without
the presupposition of an ending (93), Brooks reverses the traditional
order of promising beginnings leading to satisfying endings, since "we
are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension,
in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them
in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively
give them the order and the significance of plot." (94) To understand
how we derive our sense of satisfaction from reading, Brooks suggests
that we pay close attention to the ways in which the end, and our anticipation
of it, inform our reading of the beginning and middle of a text.
Attending to textual desire and "inquiring into the problem of ends"
(95) logically leads Brooks to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which
Freud "lays out most fully a total scheme of how life proceeds from
begining to end, and how each individual life in its own manner repeats
the masterplot and confronts the question of whether the closure of an
individual life is contingent or necessary." (96-7) Generally even
the most painful novels, in the end, "become [their] own obituary"
(Sartre, in Brooks 95), offering a transformative moment in which the
lessons of the text can be absorbed and applied to the reader’s own
effort to make sense of his or her life as a totality. Brooks sees this
as a possible motive for our quest for the comforting, embracing metaphors
produced by a fully-resolved plot.
But what of those texts that seek to destabilize this formalization of
plot? What happens when a text rejects an easily penetrable completeness,
or subverts its own metaphorical authority? How can a reader safely approach
a text which defiantly defers its own death? Two texts, separated by half
a century, undertake just such a transgressive subversion of the plot,
in entirely different ways which nonetheless uncannily resemble eachother;
reading these texts underscores many of the points made by Brooks and
seems to justify his application of Freudian analysis to narrative architecture.
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: An Act of Repetition
Narrative, we have seen, must ever present itself as a
repetition of events that have already happened, and within this postulate
of a generalized repetition it must make use of specific, perceptible
repetitions in order to create plot, that is, to show us a significant
interconnection of events. (Brooks 99)
Freud suggests that we repeat experiences which we find unpleasurable
as a means to "[claim] mastery in a situation to which [we have]
been compelled to submit", (98) that actively choosing death, for
example, is a means of asserting mastery over that which we cannot avoid.
Narrative uses thematic repetition to build a cohesive plot, to make sense
of what would be otherwise inscrutably unconnected events. In other words,
narrative also uses repetition to assert a kind of mastery of meaning
over an unreadable sequence of experiences. This repetition carries the
reader inexorably toward a specific, carefully chosen end: "If repetition
is mastery, movement from the passive to the active, and if mastery is
an assertion of control over what man must in fact submit to—choice,
we might say, of an imposed end—we have already a suggestive comment
on the grammar of plot, where repetition, taking us back again over the
same ground, could have to do with the choice of ends." (98) The
very act of writing—and reading—the narrative can be said to
represent an effort to master the end by linking the events recorded into
a symbolic sequence with only a single possible outcome. The end thus
necessarily determines how the beginning and middle of a plot are developed
and read.
You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite
many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack
of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what
they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations
infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their
heads. (Ford, Soldier 9)
As John Dowell, a wealthy expatriate American widower, sits at his desk
to record the story of two disastrously failed marriages — his own,
and that of Leonora and Edward Ashburnham — he is clearly attempting
a "significant interconnection" of the events which have left
several people dead and himself the bitter warden of a mad girl. What
he calls "the saddest story I ever heard" (7) is written some
time after the drama itself has occurred. Dowell, although a direct participant
in the tale, can only construct a speculative, fragmentary story out of
comments made by the Ashburnhams long after the fact .
Consequently, Dowell is incapable of forming a coherent understanding
of his situation; the reader, addressed throughout as "you,"
is explicitly requested by Dowell to help him decipher an open-ended narrative
that is at least as opaque to the author as it is to the reader . The
reader, in fact, is invited to exchange places with Dowell, who would
prefer to inhabit the role of reluctant reader of the tale he tells. The
confusing and often contradictory chronology of the story, Dowell’s
conflicted emotions about his own role in the drama, his passions for
the other players, and his own wry hindsight all challenge the reader
to actively enter the story and determine which signs lead to the story’s
end, and which lead only to another confused snarl in Dowell’s memories.
Dowell’s writing and rewriting, and the reader’s necessarily
repeated rereadings, eventually produce an intricately layered narrative,
if not the neat closure Dowell, or the reader, might have hoped to achieve.(9)
The narrative Dowell finally manages to piece together, Ford’s The
Good Soldier, maps in several significant ways to a Brooksian, psychoanalytic
framing of plot. Why, for example, do the confused chronology, the refusal
of narrative authority, and the conflicting portrayals of key characters
and scenes disturb us as readers? While these patterns provide an extremely
realistic represention of a man’s struggle to make sense of events
which in some cases occurred almost a decade ago, the story’s readers—including
Dowell himself—continue to debate the intentionality, the meaning,
and most interestingly, the "truth" of it all, despite the seemingly
complete ending.
Returning to the Todorovian notion that a "good" story is reassuringly
"metaphoric insofar as it is totalizing" (91), it becomes clear
that Dowell’s self-contradicting, sometimes rambling, completely
out-of-order narration disrupts the traditional organization of the novel,
brilliantly reflecting the psychic instability of the very process of
narrative, and setting the stage for the ultimately non-narratable metonymic
"truth" beating in the breast of The Good Soldier.
Dowell begins his story by describing it as a need to understand the "breaking
up of [the] little foursquare coterie" (9) of the two marriages,
and makes it known that his wife and Ashburnham are already long dead
as he writes (11). The end of the novel is thus pushed forward to the
beginning; there will be no standard mystery to unravel, no wondering
which character will meet an untimely, if fitting, end. Applying Beyond
the Pleasure Principle to this paradoxical end-to-beginning novelistic
structure links the desire for fictional resolution to the desire to find
meaning in one’s own death (and therefore life, since the end is
at the beginning of the story): "The further we inquire into the
problem of ends, the more it seems to compel a further inquiry into its
relation to the human end." (95) Until a fictional character dies,
his prior actions have no "transmissible form" (Benjamin, in
Brooks 95). Since Dowell, our only broadcaster, is unsure how he feels
about the prior actions of Edward Ashburnham or Florence Dowell, their
final transmission is garbled at best.
The end of the novel "should" reflect the death-transformation
of the narrative. When we reach the last page, we expect a satisfying
completion that gives meaning to the rest of the story. "It is in
this sense that the death of the ending quickens meaning: death in narrative,
says Benjamin, is the ‘flame’ at which we as readers, solitary
and forlorn because cut off from meaning, warm our ‘shivering’
lives" (96). Little wonder that Dowell’s inability to make meaningful
sense of his own story leaves his readers nearly frantic to impute any
meaning possible to what he has revealed to them. A fitting place to seek
what meaning there may be is in the novel’s development of metaphor
through repetition.
Tropes of repetition pervade the novel. Dowell’s story is only that
which he has heard from others and is repeating; the narrative itself
uses repetition of key events, such as Maisie Maidan’s death (61,78,
81, 88), to build the reader’s (and Dowell’s) layered comprehension
of them. Dowell’s writings are punctuated by "I don’t knows"
and "I leave it to yous" that draw the reader into repetitive
speculation. The characters, too, are consigned to lives of repetition.
The specter of the heart and its mysterious troubles return again and
again to haunt the story. Florence cannot keep away from Jimmy, whom she
no longer desires, until she has found another paramour—or so Dowell
tells us. Edward’s compulsive, unhappy adulteries would be sufficient
in current times to land him in a sex-addict’s recovery group. The
couples revisit the same upscale spa towns year after year. Ashburnham’s
final act of suicide recalls Florence’s self-annihilation from several
years prior. Nancy Rufford’s madness takes the form of a few endlessly
repeated phrases. (292) And Dowell wails that he is ending his story much
as he began it, a nursemaid to a beautiful girl he cannot possess. (272)
Brooks explains that in Freudian terms, infantile repetition indicates
a movement from passivity to mastery, which "reminds us of another
essay, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913), where Freud...decides
that the choice of the right maiden in man’s literary play is also
the choice of death". (98) Brooks, with Freud, then links this repetition
to the death drive: "Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling
back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of:
for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed."
(Brooks 100) In either case, the repetitions speed us toward a somehow
conclusive end and the unavoidable death of the text.
If repetition suggests an attempt at mastery, then many of the seemingly
extraneous repetitions in The Good Soldier can be read as (indeed, the
reader is itching to read them as) rehearsals for the inevitable conclusion.
Sexual repetition particularly lends itself to metaphor. Edward’s
affairs are represented in a roughly sequential, somewhat class-based
order of suitability from working-girl, to duke’s courtesan, to officer’s
wives, to American socialite, culminating in Nancy Rufford, his ideal
love. But why is this young girl—his own ward—the focal point
for such passion?
As Sartre and Benjamin compellingly argued, the narrative must tend toward
its own end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the
right death, the correct end. The complication of the detour is related
to the danger of short-circuit: the danger of reaching the end too quickly,
of achieving the improper death. The improper end indeed lurks throughout
narrative, frequently as the wrong choice: choice of the wrong casket,
misapprehension of the magical agent. (Brooks 104)
Ashburnham’s romantic career can be read as a series of near-misses
and potentially fatal "wrong" object choices; only his wife’s
firm hand and the relative impotence of husbands such as Dowell prevent
him from dropping out of the text before it has even formed into narrative.
But Ashburnham is meant for Nancy Rufford, and evades the threat of murder
or imprisonment to reach his destiny.
Brooks suggests that the tension of the novel’s middle lies partly
in the reader’s awareness that the plot could at any moment be cut
short or permanently derailed by
[…] the mistaken erotic object choice, who may be
of the ‘Belle Dame sans merci’ variety, or may be the too perfect
and hence annihilatory bride. Throughout the Romantic tradition, it is
perhaps most notably the image of incest (of the fraternal-sororal variety)
that hovers as the sign of a passion interdicted because its fulfillment
would be too perfect, a discharge indistinguishable from death, the very
cessation of narrative movement.(109)
Leonora will not do as an object choice for Edward in part because she
is too incestuously like him; too masculine, too similar in class and
breeding and competence. Although beautiful, she is not "young and
slender and dark, and gay at times, at times mournful" (Ford 242).
Nancy Rufford, however, is all these things and more. She is not attached
to another man, although desired by many. She is his young ward, and appealingly
vulnerable. She has a passionate "heart" that rises dangerously
to his own. But most importantly, she is the last straw for Leonora, the
affair to definitively destroy the marriage which keeps him financially
and socially grounded. He cannot have Nancy, which is precisely why he
cannot contain his wild fantasy that she would make him finally happy.
Edward’s unquenchable desire for the ideal lover can be understood
in Lacanian terms as a phallic quest, destined to be forestalled onto
the next dark, sighing young woman he meets. Read in this light, his own
(not coincidentally masculine) wife is undesirable because he knows that
he possesses her love entirely, but since he possesses and needs her,
he cannot lose her. His numerous affairs with married women and engaged
courtesans hold appeal precisely because these women can only give him
a partial love, into which he can read a fantasized future fulfillment.
His affair with Florence proves unsatisfying to both because she, a masculinized
vampire (in Dowell’s account), is also in pursuit of the phallus
and will not serve as his. If Edward’s affairs are his way of seeking
to close the "gap or split between need and demand," (Brooks
105) and if he understands that possessing/not possessing Nancy would
expose this as an impossibility (a fact he confirms in his efforts to
send her away before she ceases to love him), then he is not exaggerating
when he tells Dowell, "I am so desperately in love with Nancy Rufford
that I am dying of it." (287)
Brooks claims that "desire necessarily becomes textual by way of
a specifically narrative impulse, since desire is metonymy, a forward
drive in the signifying chain, an insistence of meaning toward the occulted
objects of desire. "(105) Nancy is the ideal lover, then, because
his desire for her will destroy him. Edward’s death is the inevitable
end of the narrative, the event which promises a metaphorical finale.
"The organism must live in order to die in the proper manner, to
die the right death. One must have the arabesque of plot in order to reach
the end. One must have metonymy in order to reach metaphor." (107)
And so we strive to apprehend meaning in Dowell’s story, meaning
he actively encourages us to find. We note that Florence’s method
of suicide (poison) cleaves seamlessly to her husband’s final judgment
of her as a "contaminating influence" (214) upon the Ashburnhams.
We observe Edward slitting his throat with a "small penknife"
(294) after he has been effectively unmanned by his wife, and easily connect
this to castration. We seek, with Dowell, to form a simple chronological
narrative out of a collection of memories, hearsay, and assumptions, and
we may come to an agreement with the bitter, envious Dowell that the grasping
Florence and the frigid Leonora are at "fault" in this drama,
are to blame for Nancy’s madness and Edward’s death. We may
choose to critique Leonora, along with Dowell, for the fatal silence and
propriety of her class. And we may, as Dowell does, conclude that Edward
Ashburnham is a tragic figure of sentiment, an ideal man of action and
masculinity destroyed by a new century with alien values. In sum, we may
read a brilliantly completed plot, a totalized metaphoric structure, a
tale in which all ends are the correct ends, a tale which Dowell has successfully
mastered by retelling.
But to accept all this, we would have to take Dowell at his word, and
uncritically accept his transparently unreliable, tangled account of the
story. If Dowell cannot be relied upon even to master the telling of his
own narrative, and if we have no other narrative voice with which to make
sense of the plot, then at its end, The Good Soldier presents not satisfyingly
total metaphor, but a slyly subversive deferral of the metaphoric resolution
that "should" come at the novel’s end. Dowell ultimately
fails as reader-master of his own narrative and frustrates our wish to
do the same; this brilliant ploy gives a fleeting voice to the unspeakable
truth of the essential non-narratibility of life and death.
Brooks states that "the most effective or, at the least, the most
challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most highly bound,
most painful" (101-2) thus drawing out the linked metonymies to produce
a grandly resolved metaphor. In this light, The Good Soldier’s stubborn
unwillingness to provide satisfyingly clean conclusions, both for its
characters and for its readers, render it not merely the "Saddest
Story," but also one of the most effective.
J.G. Ballard’s Crash: A Problem of Ends
All narrative may be in essence obituary in that, as our
reading of La Peau de chagrin suggested, the retrospective knowledge that
it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the
end, in human terms on the far side of death. The further we inquire into
the problem of ends, the more it seems to compel a further inquiry into
its relation to the human end. (Brooks 95)
James Ballard, a disaffected middle-class British ad-man, bears more than
a passing resemblance to John Dowell. A conflicted authorial stand-in
who does not necessarily relish the part of narrator, he tells the convoluted
story of a man he loved, admired, feared and envied, a man who dies by
suicide at the novel’s beginning. Both Dowell and Ballard (I refer
to the novel’s fictional narrator unless otherwise stated) make explicit
the marriage of sex and death as metaphor for something quite beyond either
trope, and both seek a mastery they cannot hope to achieve in the repetition
of the unpleasurable.
But meaningfully, Ballard inhabits not the spas and grand hotels of the
beginning of the 20th century, but the roadways, junkyards and parking
garages of its latter years. While Dowell and his friends mount a futile
attempt to arm themselves with literature (49) and archeological ruins
against a future which threatens only chaos, Ballard’s group of car-crash
survivors absolutely embraces the fatal impersonality of the mechanical,
reveling in the nihilistic present in which psychic and physical trauma
are celebrated as art. Ashburnham meets his fate, Dowell suggests, because
he is an anachronistic relic of another era and its values, doomed to
insert himself endlessly into romantic, obsolete plots ; by contrast,
Vaughan is the quintessential product of the postmodern present, a detached
master of metonymy and abstraction. If The Good Soldier seeks in its conclusion
to undermine our faith in the possibility of a satisfyingly reliable narrative,
Crash shatters even the suggestion that narrative conclusion can be produced
— or used in a palliative or self-authoring manner by readers.
"In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain
dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside
and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die."
(202)
Brooks speaks of the ambiguity of narrative repetition, which "appears
to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate
shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle
that might turn forward or back." (100) In drawing out the metonymic
middle by repeating traumatic events, a text temporarily masters time,
suspending its characters and readers in a frozen moment of possibility
and forestalling the inevitable, unspeakable end. Brooks notes that this
type of "repetition works as a process of binding toward the creation
of an energetic constant-state situation which will permit the emergence
of mastery and the possibility of postponement." (101) By repeatedly
rehearsing their own deaths (15) and by envisioning the lives of others
as pre-deaths (187), Ballard and his friends seemingly hope for a similar
forestallment of their own ends. If they cannot prevent death itself,
they can at least, in their stylized sexualization of its presence, transform
its finality into endless repetition.
This repetition is not, however, the "same-but-different" (Brooks
91) of sexual reproduction—or of typical narrative—, but rather
a closed system in which sameness reproduces itself. Reproductive organs
and their functions are described throughout the text in
clinical, detached terms, while erotic possibility is reserved for scars,
wounds, and vehicles(102). As Ballard recovers from his first crash, he
fantasizes that a sexual encounter with Helen Remington will "re-conceive
her dead husband in her womb" or will "somehow conjure her husband
back from the dead"(44). Ballard anoints his car, in which Vaughan
dies, with semen, recalling the sex act in which his semen marries Vaughan’s
rectum to the car, and promises a re-birth of Vaughan’s crash-fixation
in Ballard’s own mind: "I knew that Vaughan could never really
die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted
radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass." (209-10) This "same-but-same"
structure, which halts a true forward movement of the text, recurs whenever
metaphor is promised, and discourages a reading of the text’s middle
as an inevitable route to its end—an end which has already occurred
in the novel’s first sentence.
These potent confusions of fiction and reality, summed up in the pathetic
but sinister figure of Seagrave disguised as the screen actress, remained
in my mind all afternoon, even overlaying my response to Catherine when
she came to collect me. (111)
For Brooks, "textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy
and possibility in a text, can become usable by a plot only when it has
been bound or formalized. It cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to
significant discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged
with doing." (101) Vaughan’s devotees also utilize repetitive
substitution and simulacra to bind the plot they are weaving; without
these substitutions, neither sexual nor narrative discharge is possible.
Ballard’s wife Catherine is "unable to reach an orgasm without
an elaborate fantasy of a lesbian sex-act"(34-5), the retelling of
which is far more satisfying than its consummation . Indeed, Ballard suspects
that his wife’s numerous affairs "took place merely to provide
the raw material for [their] sexual games (31). Vaughan’s vast photographic
collection of crash victims serves a similar purpose, pornographically
abstracting the visceral reality of the crash and its results into frozen
tableaux. Vaughan’s incessant, crash-inspired couplings with prostitutes
in the back seat of Ballard’s car hold erotic value only as substitutes
for his fantasized "maximum sex act within the automobile" (172)—a
fatal collision with Elizabeth Taylor’s car in which he will die
at the moment of her orgasm. (9) The static, controllable memory or fantasy
of a sexual act holds more potential than the act itself, because there
is no more textual middle after the novel’s (or character’s)
end.
I looked out at the drivers of the cars alongside us, visualizing
their lives in the terms Vaughan had defined for them. For Vaughan they
were already dead. (Ballard 137)
Death is equally subject to substitution and simulacra.Watching the videotaped
reruns of plastic crash-test dummies simulating fatal accidents at the
Road Research Laboratory produces a sexual response in Vaughan that is
indistinguishable from those he experiences when witnessing an actual
crash (125). The observers of this simulated crash, reflected on the screen,
"seem less real than the mannequins in the car." (128) Ballard
watches as a makeup artist "worked for more than an hour on the simulated
wounds" (108) of Taylor, who is filming a crash sequence for a film.
Vaughan kills first a dog (12), then later begins running over pedestrians
(150, 157) and finally attempts to drive over Ballard in his own car.
Neither Vaughan nor Ballard seem to distinguish between any of these acts,
since everyone is equally "already dead." Of course, if everyone
is already dead, then in a sense no one can really die; this awareness
leads Ballard and Vaughan to crash sites, where the moments of injury
and death can be memorialized, the victims rendered immortal in memory.
"Her mutilation and death became a coronation of her image at the
hands of a colliding technology, a celebration of her individual limbs
and facial planes, gestures and skin tones […] the automobile crash
had made possible the final and longed-for union of the actress and the
members of her audience. "(189-90)
It is not coincidence that Vaughan is a photographer, Ballard a television
producer, and the epitome of their violent fantasies the highly stylized
deaths of celebrities; in capturing moments of pain and death on film
or by carrying away fetishes from a crash (187), Vaughan hopes to "fix
his identity by marking it upon some external event." (168) Ballard
finds "the human inhabitants of [the] technological landscape no
longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of
identity." (48-9) Unable to locate an authorial sense of identity—a
plot, as it were—within their own interiorities, the characters of
Crash seek meaning as witnesses or readers of external events. Even their
own physical experience, be they deaths or sex acts, cannot take on a
sense of meaning until they are externalized as photographs,(102) television
footage, or the bodily fluids they leave smeared on wrecked autos. Ballard’s
response to his perceived unreality of everyday life (39) is to replace
it with another simulacrum of unreal hyper-reality, of sensation without
meaning. Vaughan’s delight in the automobile’s "subordination
of function to gesture"(170) extends to the fetishization of the
extruded, abstracted physical body as it is penetrated by the impersonal
mechanical.
Seagrave, a stuntman who "is doubling now for all the actresses"
(94) is the very embodiment of substitution, and the character most determined
to obliterate the line between sex and death, having in his fantasies
"built an abbatoir of sexual mutilation" (135). He dies while
attempting to appropriate Vaughan’s own fantasy of crashing into
Elizabeth Taylor while dressed as the actress; his failure to die with
Taylor is fitting since "Vaughan was clearly using [Seagrave] as
an experimental subject" (93) in rehearsal for Vaughan’s own
(failed) death . Is Seagrave’s death then a success in the Brooks-Freud
sense of having been narratively apropos, or does his foreclosure on Vaughan’s
chosen death set the stage for the authorial Ballard’s final destruction
of the novel’s formalizing metaphor? Brooks might speculate that
in either case, Seagrave’s death and its outcome represent a novelistic
theme of the "abrupt and perhaps arbitrary end in such a way as to
suggest a permanent deferral and evasion of the problem of the end."
(110) But Seagrave and Vaughan do not seem to see their own deaths as
arbitrary or abrupt, or even as ends, and Ballard’s rhapsodic, adulating
descriptions of these deaths gives the reader no foothold from which to
survey this seemingly alien world.
We are taught as readers to interpret scenes of sex or death metaphorically,
since these transformative events usually signal a "pattern of anticipation
and completion which overcodes mere succession" (Brooks 94), and
which will later prove crucial to the closure of the plot. Ballard’s
narrative, fixated as it is on endless sexual acts and death scenes, appears
at first glance rife with metaphor, but metaphor relies on subtle similarity,
not explicated overidentification: "Even as I had placed my penis
in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display
of his casual love for me." (210) The collision of the narrative’s
two most powerful metaphorical tropes—sex and death—shatters
both, resulting in a hail of shimmering fragments that obliterate the
very idea of totality. Like the roadside detritus of "spurs of deformed
metal, the triangles of fractured glass" which Vaughan and Ballard
ecstatically read as "signals" and "ciphers," (200)
the novel’s pretended metaphors are as reflective, impenetrable,
and useless as broken glass.
The desire for the text is ultimately the desire for the end, for that
recognition which is the moment of the death of the reader in the text.
Yet recognition cannot abolish textuality, does not annul that middle
which is the place of repetitions, oscillating between blindness and recognition,
between origin and ending. Repetition toward recognition constitutes the
truth of the narrative text. (Brooks 108)
Ballard’s obsession with ends, practiced and replayed endlessly throughout
what is normally the metonymic middle of the text, forecloses the very
idea that the text could end. If the text never ends, hasn’t ever
properly begun, and has a middle consisting of infinite ends, where is
our readerly reassurance of metaphor? When repetition leads not to mastery
or recognition, but only to endlessly self-reproducing metonymy, the textual
end can never truly arrive, and the reader’s satisfying totality
of metaphor is not merely deferred, but obliterated. In their merging
of identity and interiority with the visible, the reproducible, and the
artificial, Crash’s characters expose the void that awaits in the
breakdown of narrative metaphor. By reconstituting the desired "death
of the reader in the text" as a closed-system simulacrum from which
no meaning can be derived and no escape is presented, the authorial Ballard
has birthed an uncanny anti-novel which requires the astute reader to
admit the impossibility of self-authorship and face the threat of being
psychically torn apart by the Freudian death drive-pleasure instinct tension
without the illusory defenses of a mediating metaphor.
Conclusion
Because it concerns ends in relation to beginnings and
the forces that animate the middle in between, Freud’s model is suggestive
of what a reader engages when he responds to plot. It images that engagement
as essentially dynamic, an interaction with a system of energy which the
reader activates. (Brooks 112)
In Thomas C. Moser’s introductory notes on The Good Soldier, Ford
is quoted as making a claim that the American poet H.D. "fainted
several times" as he dictated "the most tragic portion of [his]
most tragic novel" to her. While the text is unquestionably tragic
and narratively disruptive, it would be unlikely to cause such a strongly
aversive reaction in the present era. By contrast, the infinitely more
transgressive Crash, while received with general revulsion when first
published over 30 years ago, has always enjoyed a cult following and was
recently, ironically, made into a film. What has changed?
While it would be accurate, to a point, to attribute this willingness
of readers to accept increasingly violent assaults on their narrative
sensibilities to the passage of time or to postmodernist values, the question
bears a final return to Brooks and Freud. The history of textual narrative
has its own narrative, a narrative which, like the process of analysis,
is "inherently interminable, since the dynamics of resistance and
transference can always generate new beginnings in relation to any possible
end." (109) As readers, we find ourselves in the middle of this interminable
narrative of literary history. As human beings, we find ourselves in the
middle of the definitely temporal narrative of our own lives. In the juncture
between the "contradictory human world of the eternal and the mortal"
(Brooks 112), the reader seeks some sense of control or mastery of both
narratives via a dynamic engagement with the plot. Subversive texts which
threaten to break out of the boundaries of narrative structure, while
terrifying, also promise new beginnings, and their related possible endings—you
may reverse this structure if it suits you. Having exhausted so many other
narrative possibilities, the reader turns, like Vaughan and Ballard, to
the re-opening of old scars, to a world that is "beginning to flower
into wounds" (146) in the urge to finally reach the end of the story
and return to origin.
Works Cited
Ballard, J. G.. Crash: A Novel. New York: Picador USA, 1973.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
