Transgressive Fiction by R. Mookerjee

Author:R. Mookerjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

“Not yet. I need to meet her, Ballard.”

“As part of your project? I doubt she’ll be able to help you.”

Vaughn sauntered around the room on his uneven legs.

“She’s working at Shepperton now. Aren’t you going to use her in a Ford commercial?” (103)

Ballard is revealed in this conversation to be the sensible one; he knows that a famous actress would have no interest in a celebrity death cult. It seems possible that the narrator’s associative descriptions may have been in Vaughn’s language rather than his own. “The clear equation he had made between sex and the kinaesthetics of the highway,” Ballard recalls, “was in some way related to his obsessions with Elizabeth Taylor” (172). When the crippled Vaughn saunters around the room, driven by his need to achieve the legendary status actors obtain through glamorous death, the reader understands that he is far from glamorous. Vaughn’s associates, the casualties of his staged crashes – Seagrave, the brutish stuntman who eventually dies behind the wheel dressed as Elizabeth Taylor, and the wheelchair-bound Gabrielle, whose semi-mechanical body Ballard eroticizes – show that the performances are ruthless and destructive.

Doppelgängers in an important way, Vaughn and Ballard have an important difference. Vaughn seeks to recreate public events that, because they loom large in the collective imagination, are more real than any private tragedy. Ballard senses a coming collective apocalypse, an “autogeddon,” and seeks to understand it through a libidinal engagement with the specifics of mechanical devices, through befriending the machines. While he gains the key to this technique from Vaughn, their different priorities are clearest when they talk about Elizabeth Taylor:

“Ballard, she’s central to the fantasies of all the subjects I’ve tested. There’s a limited amount of time, though you’re too obsessed with yourself to realize it. I need her responses.”

“Vaughn, the likelihood of her being killed in a car-crash is remote. You’ll have to follow her around till doomsday.” (148)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.