The Paris Evaluation – J. G. Ballard’s Sensible, “Not Good” Writing
Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0, through Wikimedia Commons.
Placing Ballard on a grasp’s course record, as I’ve carried out a few occasions, provokes a response that’s each humorous and illuminating. Requested to learn Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, the extra vociferous college students invariably specific their revulsion, whereas the extra reflective ones voice their frustration that, though the concepts is perhaps compelling, the prose “isn’t good.” That is particularly the case with college students who’ve been uncovered to artistic writing lessons: they complain that the books are so filled with repetition they change into machinic or monotonous; additionally that they lack strong, built-in characters with whom they’ll establish, as an alternative endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-scène to different exterior and even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, leading to a type of schizoid narrative house that’s filled with everybody and nobody.
This second group, after all, is totally proper in its evaluation; what’s humorous (and, if I can train them something, reversible) about their judgment is that it’s these very components (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard’s work so good. Not solely are his rhythmic cycles, by which phrases and pictures return in orders and preparations that mutate and reconfigure themselves as if following some algorithm that is still past our grasp, without delay incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very mannequin and essence of poetry; however, mirroring the way in which that info, promoting, propaganda, public (and personal) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, represent a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary style. If his personae are break up, multiplied, dispersed, it’s because they’re true topics of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity—ones for whom identification, whether it is to quantity to something greater than a consoling fiction, should come by way of man’s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not within the degrading chains of logic however as an alternative, with rage and ecstatic torment, within the virulence of his personal phantasms.
Whereas Ballard’s extra outwardly typical books could give us solider, extra steady realities, what these realities typically current—in, for instance, Empire of the Solar, which is digestible sufficient for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation—is a baby (or childlike determine) frolicking towards a backdrop supplied by the destruction of an older order of actuality that the world beforehand took with no consideration. It’s a cipher for his oeuvre as a complete: endlessly enjoying among the many ruins, reassembling the damaged or “discovered” items (types, genres, codes, histories) with a ardour rendered all of the extra intense and targeted by the information that it’s all—tradition, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization—constructed, and may simply as simply be unconstructed, reverse engineered again all the way down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled collectively within the first place. To place it in Dorothean: In each context and at each degree, Ballard’s gaze is fastened, fixated, on the person backstage, not the wizard.
Ballard’s novels are radical within the true sense, in that they attain again to and reanimate the novel’s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe in Concrete Island is obtrusive, as (I’d say) is that in Crash of Tristram Shandy, with its fascination for dashing mechanized land yachts and the springs of damaged carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby’s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of battle. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote, with its hero’s obsessive reenactments on the general public highways of iconic moments from standard leisure, the triumphs and tragedies of these late-medieval film stars, knights-errant. And doesn’t the identical propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run by way of Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading by way of Bloom’s thoughts as he drifts into sleep? Doesn’t the identical technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad’s bomb-carrying Professor, whose “ideas caressed the pictures of destroy and destruction”? We may drag the literary cursor ahead, by way of Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker—or, certainly, all the way in which again to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted picket horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.
Ballard’s intelligence (and I take advantage of that time period in its twin sense of mental capability and supply/enter feed or “intel”) is expanded, encompassing a discipline comprising not simply literature but in addition visible artwork (most notably the work of the Surrealists), cinema, psychoanalysis, sociology, and technological invention. Given his much-repeated declare that information, real-world occasions, and ever-more-pervasive media are taking on from fiction, it appears excessive time that his personal copious nonfiction output needs to be gathered collectively and laid naked to the identical scrutiny—even when he would have rejected the excellence. Right here, at least within the novels, we’re handled, on repeat, to the forging of connections that, totally counterintuitive although they might be, leap out like lightning flashes of their ineluctable lucidity: from the Wright brothers to the contraceptive capsule through “the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat”; or from Hitler to the aforementioned Bloom through their frequent weight loss program of the half-digested reference library, “obscure inventive yearnings and clap-trap picked up from standard magazines.” And right here, at least within the novels, Ballard cements his place as one among English prose’s most interesting lyricists, conjuring from “the airplane of intersection of the physique of this lady in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor” a picture of “the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands”; sounding the desolate immensity of Spain’s Río Seco, “the good deck of the drained river operating inland, crossed by the white span of a contemporary motor bridge” past which prolong “secret basins of cracked mud the scale of ballrooms, fashions of a frame of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth” whereas “juke-boxes play within the bars of Benidorm” and “the molten sea swallows the shadow of the Guardia Civil helicopter”; or (most haunting of all) affirming in a credo that, ought to I ever change into supreme non secular chief of a postrevolutionary Britain, I’ll institute because the prime textual content of nationwide liturgy, changing the defunct Lord’s Prayer:
I imagine within the mysterious great thing about Margaret Thatcher, within the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her decrease lip; within the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; within the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that younger Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.
Tailored from the foreword to J. G. Ballard’s Selected Nonfiction, 1962–2007, edited by Mark Blacklock, to be printed by MIT Press in October.
Tom McCarthy’s newest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was printed in 2021.