{"id":165475,"date":"2023-09-22T10:30:15","date_gmt":"2023-09-22T14:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165475"},"modified":"2023-09-27T23:57:27","modified_gmt":"2023-09-28T03:57:27","slug":"j-g-ballards-brilliant-not-good-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/09\/22\/j-g-ballards-brilliant-not-good-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"J. G. Ballard\u2019s Brilliant, Not \u201cGood\u201d Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Shuets Udono, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Putting Ballard on a master\u2019s course list, as I\u2019ve done a couple of times, provokes a reaction that\u2019s both funny and illuminating. Asked to read Crash<\/em> or The Atrocity Exhibition<\/em>, the more vociferous students invariably express their revulsion, while the more reflective ones voice their frustration that, although the ideas might be compelling, the prose \u201cisn\u2019t good.\u201d This is especially the case with students who\u2019ve been exposed to creative writing classes: they complain that the books are so full of repetition they become machinic or monotonous; also that they lack solid, integrated characters with whom they can identify, instead endlessly breaking open any given plot or mise-en-sc\u00e8ne to other external or even unconnected scenes, contexts, and histories, resulting in a kind of schizoid narrative space that\u2019s full of everyone and no one.<\/p>\n

This second group, of course, is absolutely right in its analysis; what\u2019s funny (and, if I can teach them anything, reversible) about their judgment is that it is these very elements (repetition, machinism, schizoid hypermnesia) that make Ballard\u2019s work so brilliant. Not only are his rhythmic cycles, in which phrases and images return in orders and arrangements that mutate and reconfigure themselves as though following some algorithm that remains beyond our grasp, at once incantatory, hallucinatory, and the very model and essence of poetry; but, mirroring the way that information, advertising, propaganda, public (and private) dialogue, and even consciousness itself run in reiterative loops and circuits, constitute a realism far exceeding that of the misnamed literary genre. If his personae are split, multiplied, dispersed, this is because they are true subjects of a networked and fragmented hypermodernity\u2014ones for whom identification, if it is to amount to anything more than a consoling fiction, must come through man\u2019s recognition of himself (as Georges Bataille put it) not in the degrading chains of logic but instead, with rage and ecstatic torment, in the virulence of his own phantasms.<\/p>\n

While Ballard\u2019s more outwardly conventional books may give us solider, more stable realities, what these realities often present\u2014in, for example, Empire of the Sun<\/em>, which is digestible enough for a blockbuster Spielberg adaptation\u2014is a child (or childlike figure) frolicking against a backdrop provided by the destruction of an older order of reality that the world previously took for granted. It\u2019s a cipher for his oeuvre as a whole: endlessly playing among the ruins, reassembling the broken or \u201cfound\u201d pieces (styles, genres, codes, histories) with a passion rendered all the more intense and focused by the knowledge that it\u2019s all\u2014culture, the social order, the beliefs that underpin civilization\u2014constructed<\/em>, and can just as easily be unconstructed, reverse engineered back down to the barbaric shards from which it was cobbled together in the first place. To put it in Dorothean: In every context and at every level, Ballard\u2019s gaze is fixed, fixated, on the man behind the curtain, not the wizard.<\/p>\n

Ballard\u2019s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel\u2019s very roots. The presence of Robinson Crusoe <\/em>in Concrete Island <\/em>is glaring, as (I\u2019d say) is that in Crash <\/em>of Tristram Shandy<\/em>, with its fascination for speeding mechanized land yachts and the springs of broken carriages, for the geometry of ramparts, trenches, culverts, all superimposed on Uncle Toby\u2019s genital mutilation, his obsession with restaging assorted topologies of conflict. Or, for that matter, Don Quixote<\/em>, with its hero\u2019s obsessive reenactments on the public highways of iconic moments from popular entertainment, the triumphs and tragedies of those late-medieval movie stars, knights-errant. And doesn\u2019t the same propensity for modulating and monotonously lullabying list-making run through Joyce, the Sinbad the Sailors and Tinbad the Tailors and Jinbad the Jailers parading through Bloom\u2019s mind as he drifts into sleep? Doesn\u2019t the same technoapocalyptic imaginary characterize Conrad\u2019s bomb-carrying Professor, whose \u201cthoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction\u201d? We could drag the literary cursor forward, through Ingeborg Bachmann, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker\u2014or, indeed, all the way back to Homer and Aeschylus, to wheel-mounted wooden horses, flashing beacons, falling towers.<\/p>\n

Ballard\u2019s intelligence (and I use that term in its dual sense of intellectual capacity and source\/input feed or \u201cintel\u201d) is expanded, encompassing a field comprising not just literature but also visual art (most notably the work of the Surrealists), cinema, psychoanalysis, sociology, and technological invention. Given his much-repeated claim that facts, real-world events, and ever-more-pervasive media are taking over from fiction, it seems high time that his own copious nonfiction output should be gathered together and laid bare to the same scrutiny\u2014even if he would have rejected the distinction. Here, no less than in the novels, we\u2019re treated, on repeat, to the forging of connections that, utterly counterintuitive though they may be, leap out like lightning flashes in their ineluctable lucidity: from the Wright brothers to the contraceptive pill via \u201cthe social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat\u201d; or from Hitler to the aforementioned Bloom via their common diet of the half-digested reference library, \u201cvague artistic yearnings and clap-trap picked up from popular magazines.\u201d And here, no less than in the novels, Ballard cements his place as one of English prose\u2019s finest lyricists, conjuring from \u201cthe plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor\u201d an image of \u201cthe glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands\u201d; sounding the desolate immensity of Spain\u2019s R\u00edo Seco, \u201cthe great deck of the drained river running inland, crossed by the white span of a modern motor bridge\u201d beyond which extend \u201csecret basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms, models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth\u201d while \u201cjuke-boxes play in the bars of Benidorm\u201d and \u201cthe molten sea swallows the shadow of the Guardia Civil helicopter\u201d; or (most haunting of all) affirming in a credo that, should I ever become supreme spiritual leader of a postrevolutionary Britain, I will institute as the prime text of national liturgy, replacing the defunct Lord\u2019s Prayer:<\/p>\n

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adapted from the foreword to J. G. Ballard\u2019s <\/em>Selected Nonfiction, 1962\u20132007<\/a>, edited by Mark Blacklock, to be published by MIT Press in October. <\/em><\/p>\n

Tom McCarthy’s <\/em>latest novel, <\/em>The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBallard\u2019s novels are radical in the true sense, in that they reach back to and reanimate the novel\u2019s very roots.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2409,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[3779,67827,8321,5215],"class_list":["post-165475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-crash","tag-featured","tag-j-g-ballard","tag-tom-mccarthy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJ. G. 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