THE "ATROCITY EXHIBITION" DISCUSSIONS

7: THE GREAT AMERICAN NUDE

[MH: 6 February 2007]

Here's the latest thoughts on At Ex:

A striking aspect of "The Great American Nude" is the lack of much of the modern-day mythology that characterised the preceding stories. There's no car crashes, no JFK assassination or Jackie Kennedy, no atrocity films, no gigantic billboards; and the couriers of Talbert's unconscious are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the subject matter here relates almost entirely to the erotic; in a way this story returns to the more restricted content that characterizes "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe".

Talbert's concern, as explained by Dr. Nathan, is to seek 'the key to a new sexuality', and he goes through an appropriate range of activity: showing porno films to the patients and then getting them to fill in questionnaires; filming Karen Novotny, both on her own and as they copulate; devising a 'sex kit' that represents the essential aspects of Karen; and he tries to match Karen to the surrounding architecture: "Talbert pushed her against walls and parapets, draped her along balustrades. ... Amatory elements: nil. The act of love became a vector in an applied geometry".

Most importantly, he organizes the building of an abstract sculpture of Elizabeth Taylor: "An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves." Says Nathan: "... you're looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. ... Surely it's self-evident - Talbert's intention is to have intercourse with Miss Taylor, though needless to say not in the literal sense of that term."

To this end, Talbert leads Karen into the maze formed by the enormous sculpture. But she seems unable to fulfil the function that Talbert expects of her, "helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. ... Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting."

As usual Karen is killed (a helicopter crashes into the sculpture), but the effect on Talbert is rather different from the denouement to previous stories: "Geometry of Guilt. ... Once again Karen Novotny had died, Talbert's fears and obsessions mimetized in her alternate death. Dr Nathan decided not to speak to him. His own identity would seem little more than a summary of postures, the geometry of an accusation. ... The following week, when Dr Nathan returned, Talbert had not moved. He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta. His emaciated figure was by now little more than a collection of tatters."

What are we supposed to make of this ending? The references to 'guilt' and 'accusation' suggest that the emaciated, unmoving Talbert is not sitting there in a state of peace and psychic fulfilment (as he is, perhaps, at the end of "The Assassination Weapon"), but instead indicate that something has gone wrong with the enactment, an impression heightened by the 'miscasting' of Miss Novotny's role. Unfortunately, there isn't that much in the text to suggest why Talbert's enactment has misfired. Two possibilities occur to me, though I'm not entirely convinced by either, since they seem at odds with Ballard's bon mots on the uses and benefits of psychopathology and of pornography. Anyway, here goes ..

Here's one possibility. Perhaps a hint is given by the list of landscapes that Talbert believes will provide him with the key he is seeking: "(1) The melancholy back of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. As a child he rowed out to the rusting ships, waded through saloons awash with water. Through the portholes, a regatta of corpses sailed past Woosung Pier. (2) The contours of his mother's body, landscape of so many psychic capitulations. (3) His son's face at the moment of birth, its phantom-like profile older than Pharaoh. (4) The death-rictus of a young woman. (5) The breasts of the screen actress." This list, unlike most of the lists in Atrocity Exhibition, relates specifically to the human experience of birth, childhood, and death.

If these scenes can indeed provide Talbert with the key to a new sexuality, then he seems to have missed his opportunity. Instead of concentrating on these human experiences, he has objectified Karen - not only in terms of the sex kit, but also in his overall attitude, pulling her around here, there, and everywhere (and in more ways than one). And he can't help reminding her "You're a mere modulus, my dear." (In similar vein, Ballard also joshes around on male reactions to the nude sculpture of the actress - the technicians nickname her 'Elizabeth', and Captain Webster is afraid to 'climb up on her' in case he falls into 'some unpleasant orifice'.)

Here's another take on the ending. Koester, the alter-ego from "The University of Death", makes another appearance, but this time it's Talbert himself who appears as the more dynamic personality of the two. At one point, Karen Novotny finds that "she could barely touch [Talbert's] shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity." And when Koester approaches him, Talbert beats him up: "As they grappled he could feel the exploding musculature of Talbert's shoulders. A flurry of heavy blows beat him to the floor." Koester himself is much more reticent than in the previous story, so I still see him as a form of alter-ego but with the psychological roles reversed from "University of Death". Towards the end, Koester runs forward to try and help Karen Novotny, trapped in the maze of the gigantic sculpture, but this time there's no suggestion that the Koester alter-ego is subsumed back within Talbert's psyche.

In the discussion of "University of Death", Rick asked 'does it matter that much who is the most active?' And in this story, perhaps, we see that it does matter. When Talbot left Koester to take the active role in "University of Death", he attained some sort of psychic peace, a neural calm. But when Talbert allows his dominant side to take over and manipulate Karen and organize the enactment of the union with Liz Taylor in the sculpture, he's in some way too single-minded or heavy-handed for the enactment to be successful. It needed the less active side of the psyche to conceive of some alternative view of things before the more forceful alter ego could fulfil its role and allow the two sides to be reintegrated, as in "University of Death".

As I said, I'm not really convinced by either of these possible interpretations. In any event, the circuit of sex/love/eroticism was evidently on Ballard's mind at the time, as in the next issue of Ambit, three months later, he published "Love: A Printout for Claire Churchill", a grid-like concrete poem based simply on the words "Girl", "Love", "Suck", "Fuck", "Kiss", "Anus", etc.

On the whole, I felt that "Great American Nude", with its limited subject matter, and a relative lack of imaginative force, was the least successful of the stories to date. The ending is intriguing, but I'm not sure that it's much more than that - despite my rather desperate manoeuvrings to try and make sense of it.

[DP: 6 February 2007]

I think JGB dropped the "couriers" (usually, but not always, named as Kline, Coma and Xero) at this point, and they don't come back. I believe I'm correct in saying there's no mention of them in the next two stories either, "The Summer Cannibals" and "Tolerances of the Human Face."

Since those couriers were first mentioned in the "Project for a New Novel" collage in 1958, they were obviously a hangover from something early -- as was the title "You and Me and the Continuum." Arguably, there are also faint echoes of them in such stories as "The Voices of Time" (a girl called Coma, and a man with a "K" name, Kaldren) and "The Terminal Beach" (an unnamed girl -- could she be Coma? -- who messes around in a "solar rig" on the island). But JGB seems to have worked the couriers out of his system by 1968.

Yes. And I find that list particularly fascinating because it's so autobiographical. Apart from item (5) -- the reference to the "breasts of the screen actress," which I find somewhat bathetic in this context, all the items could be seen as referring to Ballard's own experience. He wasn't actually present at the birth of his son, but he was there -- "practically elbowing aside the midwife" -- at the births of his two daughters, and he has used the "Pharaoh" simile several times to describe his first sight of his daughter Fay's face. As for the "death-rictus of a young woman," well, I hardly need rub that one in -- he presumably witnessed such in 1964.

I find it a moving passage -- perhaps slightly let down, as I say, by the mention of "the screen actress."

P.S. Item (1) is geographically misleading, though: "The melancholy back of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund." For years after reading that, and before I'd actually bothered to look at a map of China, I assumed that the "boom of sunken freighters" was in the Yangtse, and that the Yangtse flowed past the Bund at Shanghai. In fact, the Bund, and the whole of Shanghai, stand on the Whangpoo River (or Huangpu, in today's spelling), a tributary of the Yangtse. The latter, the seriously big river with its "melancholy back," is something like 20 miles away to the north. The sunken freighters young Jim is depicted as exploring in _Empire of the Sun_ are described as being in the Whangpoo, near the Bund.

[RMcG: 7 February 2007]

(great... I'm just finishing this off and mike's missive comes down the pipe... oh well, I see we disagree (again))

While the Great America Nude revisits many of the themes of the prior stories, it stands out as unique because of its apparent lack of a "redemptive" or "re-enactment" quality, and instead offers us a scenario in which Tman somehow fails to achieve his ultimate goal of conceptually bedding the hollywood actress, Elizabeth Taylor.

The difference is apparent in the first paragraph, in which Catherine Austin, rather than Tman, becomes "conscious of the increasing dissociation of the events around her". Normally, we'd expect Tman to lose contact with the social reality of the institute. Perhaps he's already gone.

At any rate, our lesson this week turns out to be pornography and architecture, with an emphasis on conceptual sex...

Our story begins with Catherine listening in on a Tman lecture to a group of partially paralyzed patients. He's showing them the naughty bits from various porn films and commenting on each position. Catherine finds the images meaningless; Tman is also bored, offering a "less than coherent commentary". Each night he goes thru the patient's questionnaires, as if looking for a "new sexuality"...

Tman is now spending his time on the roof of a car park... his personality "as oblique" as the sloping floors... From here he can voyeur karen notovny in her characteristic white dress... she enters a sculpture garden to watch students construct images from plastic tubing, and Tman follows her... she suddenly throws away her programme and leaves, and is immediately followed by Tman in the pontiac... we learn he's been following her, filming her, and adding the film to his montage of "dirty movies"... he drives behind her into the car park and then returns her programme

koester re-appears in the next para, supervising the unloading of a large tableau sculpture of Tman and karen screwing in a bath... Tman is unhappy with this "ominous" prank and confronts koester, who responds with a catholic-tinged guilt

the next paragraph, A History of Nothing, reveals Tman's "obsession" for this story: geometry expressed in architecture... He explores overpasses, camps out with karen in apartments (and utters the oddly telling remark: "They're exhibits, Karen -- this conception will be immaculate" -- a continuation of the catholic imagery) and then pushes and drapes her over walls, parapets and balustrades... "the act of love became a vector in an applied geometry"... in other words, purely mechanical -- just like the pornography which will supply the "postures"... Tman's machine-like state means good times for karen: "she could barely touch his shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity"... I take this activity to be sex, as a few paras later, in Auto-Zoomar, Tman returns the favour: "Talbert knelt in the a tergo posture, his palms touching the wing-like shoulder blades of the young woman".

In this paragraph we also read the highly unusual sentence: "Some scanning device in his brain had lost a bolt"... not odd, given the circumstances. but odd in the sense it seems to be a stylistic error on JGB's part... the line seems like an explanation from the omnipotent narrator, when it should have come from nathan, the purveyor of all "scientific" explanations

Landscapes of the Dream, the next para, seems to focus on moments of psychological import -- seeing floating corpses on a youthful adventure, seeing his mother naked ("the contours of his mother's body" = sexuality), seeing his newborn son, with the timelessness of the species on his birthface, seeing the deathmask of a girl, seeing taylor's breasts... what is the key that lies in these moments? They're supposedly dreamstate symbols, but they appear as reminiscences which Tman is preoccupied with in the period following his assimilation of karen/architecture into a non-loving sex act. Now he sees death amid ruins, his first sexual desire, his biological immortality, more death, and then another object of sexual desire. Is the key sex or death?

Tman gets something that sounds like neoprene, and builds a huge "geometric construction"... it's a maze of bulbous neoprene "convolutions"... scientific flesh... koester, pissed off, asks if it's an imaginary number... nathan reveals it's liz taylor's face & body revealed "in a private dimension"... then we're foreshadowed: "the most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion". Nathan's example of duchamp's nude vs the rokeby nude, is revealing: cubism vs victorian pornography, science vs passion, concept vs reality, etc etc

In Auto-Zoomar the equation is almost complete: Tman combines sex, voyeurism, pornography and geometry by projecting pix of sex in action, interspersed with liz and architecture... karen's role as a masturbation device is then picked up and modulated by nathan, who calls her a "modulus" in Tman's non-literal mating with taylor.

Back at the hanger, and koester has followed Tman to the bubbly boudoir... they fight & Tman whallops him before chasing after karen..

The Sex Kit is a brutal shot at women conceptualized into a sex machine, an inventory of parts Tman will no doubt use in his increasingly perverse intentions. Nathan explains that's it's all part of sex becoming "an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike" -- neither emotional nor pleasurable -- which must now rely on perversion -- displacement from the genitals -- to excite the "few taste buds left in our jaded palates."

right on, doc. but what comes next? a helicopter, which for me signals Tman's shift into whatever delusionary state he's in. Tman and karen are driving, and Tman attempts to reassure karen that she's not just a go-between... then he gets in the chopper.

meanwhile, nathan is still explaining away, this time to a captain webster... "talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union... all junctions... are equivalent to one another... (he) is searching for the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space"... is this the Big Bang? Creation? Self-awareness? Consciousness?

And again, nathan hints that the true atrocity exhibition is a collection of bodies: "for the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence... our bodies... are ... monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate."

and then the kicker: "the inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit" -- an ultimate irony, as the "sex kit" in no way resembles either sex or a woman...

once again it becomes apparent that Tman is a Thought-Man trying desperately to escape Body-Man, with its messy, restricted, timelocked phenomenology..

the point is again presented in the next para when, after having sex with koester, catherine muses, "perhaps, like koester, she was merely a vector in tman's dreams"

back to nathan on a catwalk in the hanger... he looks down... yes, the construct is of liz taylor... and now Daedalus, the mythic inventor of the maze who is said to have invented the first image, (Tman) arrives in his chopper...

Next thing we know a young woman, unidentified, naked, is wandering the roof off the maze while Tman paces within... koester attempts to reach her; webster does not... Tman's point now is to see of karen can "break the code" of the maze... when it appears the woman can't do it, Tman blames the casting dept.

In a sudden shift, karen is dead in the crashed and burning helicopter... she now appears as she did in koester's tableau, "the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders"

question: would the "young woman" not be karen? we know karen starts in the chopper with Tman... could she and Tman leave the chopper, have her crawl around the top of the maze, and then mysteriously end up back in the chopper? well, we could, if karen is unsuccessful in her code-breaking... that could flip her back into the chopper

Geometry of Guilt is interesting... again karen dies, and again Tman's "fears and obsessions" have been mimetized in her "alternate death"... but his fears and obsessions have not be "assuaged" as in previous stories, and nathan decides not to speak, as it would form the "geometry of an accusation" for Tman, now looking like a pensive architect.

The final paragraph almost reminds me of the ending of kafka's "Hunger Artist", in Tman's lethargy, and the uncaring attitude of his "audience"... it's hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it seems karen's inability to enter/become the Liz maze results in both her death and no liz taylor for Tman to conceptually sexualize...

so, what's happening? aside from the sex the only other symbolic structure is JG's linking of the maze, minotaur and daedalus into a "conceptual" message

a quick peruse of wiki reveal this: "In the period of Romanticism, Daedalus came to denote the classic artist, a skilled mature craftsman, while Icarus symbolizes the romantic artist, an undisputed heir of the classic artist, whose impetuous, passionate and rebellious nature, as well as his defiance of formal aesthetic and social conventions, ultimately prove to be self destructive."

I also discovered that daedalus make statues that walked of their own accord...

what to make of this? Tman is certainly an accomplished craftsman in this story, building a huge neoprene maze that all agree looks like liz taylor... he also builds a sex kit, and creates movies... quite clever, indeed... why does he fail? or is the ending a failure at all? in all the other stories Tman is assuaged, but basically still or nearly comatose, usually trying out different "postures"...

in this case history, Tman plots to have sex with liz, but not in the literal sense... perhaps the point is that Tman was able to recreate "the primary act of intercourse" -- the creation of time and space, -- in the "alternate" or imaginary death of karen...

perhaps karen has become an icarus figure for Tman, and he mourns her loss as he celebrates his freedom

ahh... it's just not a satisfying ending

Overall, I don't think this story is as interesting as the others we've discussed. Ballard's writing seems a little sloppier -- he simply comes out and narrates facts to us -- and the obsession with media and media fictions is limited only to liz taylor, who was, during the 1960s an icon of facial beauty, big breasts and torrid romances... she is a potent image, but it's funny how JG's stuff loses a lot of its power when he gears back from the pure mania of his other AX stories.

[RMcG: 7 February 2007]

gee, dave... that's analysis in the rear-view mirror... in the late 60s readers would not recognize the (perhaps) autobiographical nature of that list... as for the "breasts of the screen actress" being bathetic (nice alliteration), well, he had to add one reference to liz into the mix, otherwise it would appear Tman had gone off-topic... this story is sorta carried on her magnificent breasts... I find myself wondering more about those "psychic capitulations" his mother engendered... what's that about?

[RMcG: 7 February 2007]

great analysis, mike... we both have trouble with the ending... maybe you're on the right track, tho:

let's look at the times Kman appears...

first, with the "prank" tableau... this pisses Tman off... kman is guilty;
second, at the studio with nathan... kman is "irritated", and asks if the construction is the square root of minus one... (a concept?) nathan replies "cooly";

third, kman follows tman, confronts him at the studio and gets the vomit beat out of him;

fourth, kman screws catherine outside, then they both run into the hangar when the chopper arrives;
fifth, kman runs forward to save the young woman atop the maze.

so, he's pretty active... but not dominant... regardless, I don't see JGB being that interested in having the story hinge on the "balance" between these two... given everything else that's going on...

why doesn't it work? or, more to the point, why don't we think it works?

what is the minotaur reference? is it important?

apparently: Minos sent to the oracle at Delphi to discover how he could hide evidence of the shame to the royal family. The oracle answered that he ought to have Daedalus build a suitable cage; Minos thereupon had Daedalus build the Labyrinth, an enormous maze, and placed the Minotaur at the center of it. Minos also arranged to sacrifice young men and women to the flesh-eating Minotaur by shutting them into the Labyrinth, where they would wander, hopelessly lost, until the Minotaur caught and devoured them.

so the classic labyrinth is a place of sacrifice... if you're caught inside, you die... but karen can't even seem to get inside the liz maze... let's go back to the speech about what nathan says is gonna happen: "a most tender act of love... bridal suite.... nuptial" ... this is marriage talk... he doesn't want to screw liz, he wants to marry her and then screw her in the maze...

this is romantic, not scientific -- the fatal flaw! Tman has spent all this time creating a sterile, dead, "helpless" sex (death) kit of a woman, and she can't be the "alternate" liz -- all curves, all cleavage, all the time... karen can, however, die... and by so doing "imitate" (not assuage) Tman's "fears and obsessions" (wonder what his fears are)...

karen's death, however, ruins Tman's conceptual search for "the primary act of intercourse" and the first apposition of space and time -- which may account for his death of affect-like behaviour following the failure...

it's an odd melange, with no really mindwrenching speeches... it's all a tad flat, even to the concept of liz as the michelin man, or the doughboy in ghostbusters...

too conceptual?

[MH: 7 February 2007]

There's one bit of apparent symbolism in the last couple of paragraphs that's worth mentioning. Talbert is seen by Nathan on the roof of the sculptural maze, "surveying the contours of the sloping basin below", and then when Nathan returns we're told that Talbert "sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta. His emaciated figure ..."

So we have another bit of birth symbolism. *Pre-partum* the placenta is the source of nourishment to the foetus, but *post-partum* it's the detritus of the birth process that can be discarded. So which way do we read the reference here? On balance I'd guess the latter: whatever conception has or has not taken place in the sculpture, Talbert is sitting there as much part of the discard of that process as the placenta he sits by. (... but then why describe its depths as lucid?)

At the end, Talbert is "standing on the roof of the maze". Is *he* now the Minotaur, the beast that has just devoured the young woman?

As with the placenta reference, I think that piece of symbolism is intended to be there, but I can't see that it helps that much with the interpretation of what's going in with the rest of the story.

Yes, that's along the lines of my first stab at understanding what's going on in the ending to GAN - and I think that's supported by David's comments on the autobiographical nature of the "Landscapes of the Dream" paragraph, which Talbert feels should provide him with some sort of key. But I'm still not fully convinced by it. I'd agree with Rick when he says that in this story "Ballard's writing seems a little sloppier".

[RMcG: 7 February 2007]

is the birth symbolism that tough? Tman wants to create a new sexuality -- anything new could be considered a "birth"... but what is this new sexuality? it seems to be geometric (scientific) rather than emotional -- Tman does convert karen into a series of architectural shapes, then into a Sex Kit, and then he blends her with liz taylor as a final step before... what? karen becomes the gigantic bellmer-like liz construct?

the point for Tman is for karen to "break the code of this immense body", and Tman has gone to some effort to set this up... remember, he's dragged karen around, hunting the overpasses, exploring apartments, camping in sitting rooms... Tman tells her these rooms are "exhibits" and that "this conception will be immaculate" -- well, of course it will be -- there's no actual physical sex involved... as she will be married to the "seventh-floor balcony unit of the Hilton Hotel"...

these passages take me back to The Atrocity Exhibition (TAE), in which liz is similarly treated... in this story tman seeks the "lost symmetry of the blastosphere" and equates the hilton hotel balcony to taylor's now-lost gill slits... at any rate, it's an attempt to move back in time to a symmetrical world and the acceptance of the "mythology of the amniotic return", which seems to have something to do with the myth of the birth of the hero (more on this later).

also, in TAE it is liz taylor's image on the immense billboards... she is called "the presiding deity of their lives" and provides a "set of operating formulae for their passage thru consciousness"... again there is an attempt at fusion: "In some way tman would attempt to relate his wife's body... to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape"... he attempts this fusion by blowing up his wife in TAE... he tries again in GAN by having karen attempt to fuse with his construct of liz...

but let's return to the concept of "amniotic return"

the web has lots of stuff on it...

according to Otto Rank:

yeah, yeah, a lotta psycho blather, but certainly Tman in GAN falls into the category of pervert -- mike's analysis of tman's activity levels shows he is the "realizer" in this story, whereas he was passive in university of death... perhaps this might also help us understand the tman/koester relationship: hysterical vs pervert; passive paranoid vs criminal

the minotaur reference does work into this, as ultimately the minotaur and king minos are killed by thesus, the main athenian "hero" of myth...

[MH: 7 February 2007]

Hmm ... as Nathan awaits the denouement, he ponders the "huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur. In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew, the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus."

But I'm not sure that delving into the detail of the symbolism is much help in this instance. I mean, if Talbert is Theseus, and Liz Taylor is Ariadne, showing him the way through her labyrinth, then who or what is the Minotaur? Karen (who certainly dies, but I can't really make sense of her being the beast)? Talbert's erotic drive (which will be killed off if he finds the key to a new, geometric/scientific sexuality)?

Anyway - in the myth doesn't Theseus abandon Ariadne?

I feel I'm at the flogging it to death stage ...

[RMcG: 8 February 2007]

now, now, mike... I believe it was your idea to try and make rational sense of the plot... there always was/is the chance it's purposefully irrational, and that for us to make the necessary links to have it make sense may be a creative task equal to its inception...

with JGB, ya never know

I'm starting to read Scott Bukatman's "Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction", and he's a big JGB fan... credits the entire cyberpunk thing to JG & burroughs... anyway, he has some interesting things to say about AX... one of which, I was surprised to read, was that the whole thing is a strange collection of ad copy from J Walter Thompson, "the world's greatest supplier of fiction"... insofar as the outer mediascape of AX is entirely formed from TV ads, ad media (billboards, etc) and TV news... I just watched a bio of marilyn monroe, and we've all forgotten or never knew the incredible aura society put on her... she said she always knew she was "of the world, because that was the only home or family she had"... a media concept...

anyway, JG is not writing ad copy, even if that's the grist for his mill (and not in a duchamp way)... in many ways, AX is a concoction of advertising, pop art and surrealism, all blended and condensed into a time-shrinking literary form which repels as much as it fascinates

[MH: 8 February 2007]

Well, success is not guaranteed!

Actually, I don't really think that I'm 'trying to make rational sense of the plot'. It's more that I'm trying to extract what I can out of a set of marvellously rich texts, much of which was probably opaque even to JGB when he wrote them.

We've got lots of commentaries that concentrate on the manifest content - the 20th century mythology, as JGB calls it at one point - Gasiorek, Peter Brigg, that K-Punk thing that Simon pointed us to (which I thought was excellent, by the way), Pippa's stuff on Ballardian. So I didn't want to just repeat what others have already done.

But I'm encouraged by JGB's own comments, especially those regarding the latent content, the different 'roles' or psyches that T-Man displays, and on the way in which individuals use this manifest content and psychopathology to achieve certain ends (both in the book and more generally). I'm also encouraged by the autobiographical elements that creep into the stories, some obvious and some not so obvious - because they emphasize that what JGB is writing about is how an individual person might come to terms with a 'meaningless world'.

So that means concentrating on what T-Man might be trying to achieve in a particular story and how he tries to do it. Those aims and methods may be quite nebulous (at least to us!), but the clues are in the specifics. In particular, I'd look at T-man's behaviour (especially how he deals with others) which indicates the type of role he may be playing or the parts of his psyche that he may be 'using', and at the symbolism, which may provide clues as to his aims and methods ... or in specific instances it may not.

I'm not bothered by apparent irrationalities in the stories. Take for example Great American Nude: we see Karen standing on top of the gigantic sculpture/maze, and then the helicopter crashes into it, and she's found lying next to the helicopter controls. I think the only reason for asking why Karen ends up in the helicopter is to see if there is some symbolism that might be revealed ... symbolism which might suggest something about T-Man's aims or methods, and about why he succeeds or fails. So the alternatives in this instance are: (i) Karen ending up in the helicopter might not mean anything, JGB just wrote it that way. (ii) There might be some symbolism there, but that symbolism can't really be followed through to any wider implications; (iii) We find some interesting symbolism which suggests different views of what's happening to T-Man and what he's trying to do in that story, or why he apparently fails. (In the case of Karen in the helicopter, I think it's (i), by the way! ... Although the helicopters are pretty ubiquitous in At Ex - didn't you suggest, Rick, that they represent T-Man's psychological disturbances ... they always depart when he achieves some sort of peace, etc?)

Anyway, you've obviously 'got me rattled' as JGB would put it, since I've gone to such length on this. But, then I'm very conscious of the suggestion that I might be over-rationalizing the text, since it is a book that is most definitely about dealing with the world in a way that is other than rational, and as JGB says in one of the annotations - "reason rationalizes reality for [Nathan, but] there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable."

[RMcG: 8 February 2007]

I'll leave ya with one last minotaur/daedalus link... I was checking research 8/9 to see if the Tarshis interview was listed (it isn't), and I took another look at the list of books on JG's shelves whenever vale et al were there...

I note these two:

The Icarus Complex
The Dream of Icarus

hmmm... isn't that odd? maybe there's more later

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