J. G. Ballard's decomposition
Of course I came to Ballard through science fiction, but I could never finish his books. I started them well enough and ploughed on. But the subtext said to me. No. This isn't it really. Not yet.
The Drowned World
The Wind from Nowhere
The Drought
The Crystal World
And then came:
Crash, which was an artificial and stellar conjunction of his obsessions. And I read it when it came out in 1973 and I read:
The Terminal Beach
The Day of Forever
The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard
And Empire of the Sun much later, (after the movie)
What do you think of books when you are 13? What do you think of the "textures" of Hal Clements, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Aldous Huxley and J. G. Ballard?
And then what do you think of books like Crash. Or when you inadvertantly pick up the biography of Frank Harris or after having heard Suzanne try to read Leonard Cohen's Beautiful losers or scan through John Updike's Couples or read Anais Nin's Delta of Venus in your early teens? I think, depending on the writing, that these books become strange outcroppings of an adult landscape varying in solidity and visibility.
Couples for example was awful, when I was 13. Why? Not because of a supposed maturity required to read it. My intuition spotted false sophstication. And Couples, on reflection, was a sort of template for people who were in their mid twenties in the 60s. Repressed US war babies who never experienced war, trying on a sophistication they might never possess except through joining the Hlisty - by becoming corrupt and then seeking redemption - and screwing over a lot of people close to them before, after and during the redemptive process.
But there was something much too allegorical about Ballard's SF to be right. His writing was deictic rather than descriptive. It merely pointed. The paper like taut skin across the ridiculous bones of his plots primed his Science Fiction books for decomposition. Despite Martin Amis's declaration on the 6 o'clock news that Ballard wrote "hard SF". He didn't. And it wasn't that J. G. Ballard outgrew SF, he was ever really an SF author, he was an SF symbiont.
The Science Fiction in the writing functioned a little like the use of the past tense does in the conditional. Generalised catastrophe merely distanced Ballard a little from personal catastrophe, the subject he was working his way towards: his war time trauma in boyhood. When he was 13. he too saw an adult landscape that he was forced to accept as reality and yet one that melted away with the end of the war in the Pacific.
And, finally, out some of it comes in Crash. This machinery and death, this focus of bodily survival and the atomic flash. Totaled loss totaled gain. Hurricanes and Zeros and Mustangs. Mustangs and the Fords. The memory of toys in his Shanghai bedroom.
If his politics were Thatcherite then that is logical because both Thatcher and Ballard were nihlists at root. They both found truth through the reduction of modern life to cultural trash. Of course Thatcher thought her doily view of the world was real. Ballard knew his view wasn't. If you took Thatchers symbolic trinkets and placed them all on a shelf. That is all that would have remained, semiologically, of Britain in the end if she had been allowed to govern Britain for another decade. Girlish trinkets on a dusty shop shelf.
Ballard's authorial victory was a victory of decomposition. Yes and what remains? What is essential is what is left in the end. The toys I left on the shelf in my bedroom in Shanghai and this is what my life amounts to, this and the booming of guns and roaring of engines and the hissing of radiators and breath.
Of course I came to Ballard through science fiction, but I could never finish his books. I started them well enough and ploughed on. But the subtext said to me. No. This isn't it really. Not yet.
The Drowned World
The Wind from Nowhere
The Drought
The Crystal World
And then came:
Crash, which was an artificial and stellar conjunction of his obsessions. And I read it when it came out in 1973 and I read:
The Terminal Beach
The Day of Forever
The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard
And Empire of the Sun much later, (after the movie)
What do you think of books when you are 13? What do you think of the "textures" of Hal Clements, John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, Aldous Huxley and J. G. Ballard?
And then what do you think of books like Crash. Or when you inadvertantly pick up the biography of Frank Harris or after having heard Suzanne try to read Leonard Cohen's Beautiful losers or scan through John Updike's Couples or read Anais Nin's Delta of Venus in your early teens? I think, depending on the writing, that these books become strange outcroppings of an adult landscape varying in solidity and visibility.
Couples for example was awful, when I was 13. Why? Not because of a supposed maturity required to read it. My intuition spotted false sophstication. And Couples, on reflection, was a sort of template for people who were in their mid twenties in the 60s. Repressed US war babies who never experienced war, trying on a sophistication they might never possess except through joining the Hlisty - by becoming corrupt and then seeking redemption - and screwing over a lot of people close to them before, after and during the redemptive process.
But there was something much too allegorical about Ballard's SF to be right. His writing was deictic rather than descriptive. It merely pointed. The paper like taut skin across the ridiculous bones of his plots primed his Science Fiction books for decomposition. Despite Martin Amis's declaration on the 6 o'clock news that Ballard wrote "hard SF". He didn't. And it wasn't that J. G. Ballard outgrew SF, he was ever really an SF author, he was an SF symbiont.
The Science Fiction in the writing functioned a little like the use of the past tense does in the conditional. Generalised catastrophe merely distanced Ballard a little from personal catastrophe, the subject he was working his way towards: his war time trauma in boyhood. When he was 13. he too saw an adult landscape that he was forced to accept as reality and yet one that melted away with the end of the war in the Pacific.
And, finally, out some of it comes in Crash. This machinery and death, this focus of bodily survival and the atomic flash. Totaled loss totaled gain. Hurricanes and Zeros and Mustangs. Mustangs and the Fords. The memory of toys in his Shanghai bedroom.
If his politics were Thatcherite then that is logical because both Thatcher and Ballard were nihlists at root. They both found truth through the reduction of modern life to cultural trash. Of course Thatcher thought her doily view of the world was real. Ballard knew his view wasn't. If you took Thatchers symbolic trinkets and placed them all on a shelf. That is all that would have remained, semiologically, of Britain in the end if she had been allowed to govern Britain for another decade. Girlish trinkets on a dusty shop shelf.
Ballard's authorial victory was a victory of decomposition. Yes and what remains? What is essential is what is left in the end. The toys I left on the shelf in my bedroom in Shanghai and this is what my life amounts to, this and the booming of guns and roaring of engines and the hissing of radiators and breath.
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