wytchcroft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wytchcroft) wrote2009-04-27 09:55 pm
wytchcroft) wrote2009-04-27 09:55 pm
Ballard in plain JG
JG Ballard, was a particularly English God of small things; an irony, considering his international and somewhat epic background, in the Far East during WW2. An irony not lost on him of course.
So perhaps he would have appreciated the somewhat humble nature of one of my personal 'Ballardian’ moments, whilst most likely wincing at the way in which I blew it.
“Of course, muse of my heart,” I complied, turning up my Wytch’s mits for a good perusal by said lover and their wanton gypsy eyes, those eyes that looked up at me so dark and wetly luminescent like Chinese ink. “Ah…I’ve seen these markings before…” in a voice that did that low trembling thing that some voices can.
Not mine though, it sort of snores mainly.
“Really?” I asked, sort of snoring – but intently so.
“Yeah – it looks exactly like the Leeds ring-road. I’d know that bloody place anyway.”
I was, somewhat, taken aback.
But – being a Ballard fan – I could appreciate where such a remark was coming from. The neo-arcane of today’s post-structural simulacrum, as played out on a grainy tv in the back of car dumped in the lot of an abandoned test-site.
I felt quite good imagining myself as the typical hero of one of his tales, darkling brooding on some elliptical obsessive quest.
On the other hand, being a Ballard fan meant (I knew) that I should have been able to predict the admittedly surprising description of my mandibles. I should have read them for myself and deduced the meaning before the words were uttered, simply by noting the concise way my legs met the edge of the bed, my arms forming an equation against the wild hair of my lover and the pillows that were edging the scene like sand-bags or the crash shielding of a motorway fly-over.
But I didn’t.
Still, that’s just the way these things go sometimes.
Ballard I’m sure would have acknowledged as much. His heroes were equally capable of transforming into ethereal hunter killer Neanderthal post-modern Arcadian rune reading flying scientists... as they were at cocking things up completely.
Or maybe I’m just projecting like the man in the Ballard story alone with his repeated video loops watching the same Hitchcock clip over and over on his wall.
Hitchcock of course was also typically English, that unique, and to be treasured, specimen of Englishman, who actually lives in the USA and is popular in Europe where he spends much time and soaks up a lot of influences. This breed includes Ballard himself, and is currently personified by Neil Gaiman.
And Ballard certainly had his European sensibilities and influences; Running Wild may well be Lord of the Flies in a conservative English cul-de-sac and it may have well predicted both Hollyoaks and the James Bulger tragedy, but it plays out like a Goddard flick.
Ballard as a writer has long been an inspiration to me – but I have yet to attempt any kind of emulation of his prose style; a style that stays lean and sober as it describes the dead-pan surreality within his works, it is uniquely his. The ability to have a character’s thoughts read like essential but bewildering map directions would be a hard task to replicate.
I even wrote a song inspired by his collection of stories, Vermillion Sands, an ignominy he shares with one other SF writer, Phil K Dick*; unsurprisingly perhaps. As a thinker, philosopher and imaginer – one whose layered thoughts unwind through the books like celluloid reels or the tapes from old style computers – he was bold, and insightful, examining and exploring the modern psyche, technology, power and language – all the elements that make up reality.
I haven’t read any but I would hazard a guess that most Ballard tributes will be talking about how "today is a Ballard world" – his sci-fi is "now", which, post Baudrillard, is a bit obvious really and doesn’t do justice to his strengths as a miniaturist, to catch and elongate an environment and a span of time, days, hours, an instant – he was capable of seeing eternity in a grain of sand as easily as Blake – it just never quite offered him as much, seemingly. But there is richness enough for the reader to enjoy.
Atrocity creates an immense landscape of hardly anything, buildings and billboards standing like the bones of oxen found in the Arizona sand – it is possible to walk (rather than drive) around the prose environment and just as one can inhabit the book so too it is possible to find it leaking from the pages and transforming everything around you. It creeps into the reader's perceptions like the 1978 Body Snatchers movie does.
And elsewhere – the updating of Robinson Crusoe adrift on his ‘Concrete Island’ is as profound a work and in some ways more subtle, more lasting and, I would imagine, more moveable as a piece of cultural merchandise. It’s certainly a great read – and it is a real shame that no/one adapted it to the screen, it would have to be retro-fitted now, an episode of Life on Mars with Gene going off the hard shoulder and tracking around in consequence.
High Rise is another – with civilisation breaking down in an immaculate apartment block. But High Rise has been (unofficially) reworked by countless zombie flicks (see below for payback), Crash Cronenberg’s Shivers and even Dr Who’s Paradise Towers… none are as good as Ballard’s acrid novel.
If I lost him slightly in his later books it only because they describe a particular class, the super-rich and European, with which I have limited empathy and no experience. And when he brought those issues home (to the UK) and used a shopping mall for his metaphor – well, Dawn of the Dead had already been there as far as I was concerned. And it’s true he never wrote a female character worth a damn – though he had a mind like a cryptographer when it came to deploying them as symbols, mythic signs or syntax.
Those new to Ballard might do well to begin with his early novels such as The Crystal World, which are fiendishly well written, very accessible and filled with exotic landscapes and description. Or you might care for the short stories collected in Vermillion Sands, The Venus Hunters and Low-Flying Aircraft (of which I am inordinately fond) the transformation of his writing is laid bare by these works. Reading them is like watching the 1968 movie The Swimmer – as Burt Lancaster compulsively swims from one house to another pool by pool. It is like watching the swimmer only this time the cast disappear one by one – with the exception of a woman, a NASA worker of some sort, possibly a therapist, possibly Lancaster is her patient, possibly she is his. Gradually though, she too fades and then finally so does he, and all that is left is the empty geometry of the vacant yards and pools.
*Hello America is easily the nearest Ballard comes to the black comedy and cartoon narratives of Dick.
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I knew very little about him, much to my dismay, but thanks to you, I now know more.
And I appreciate the recommendations for first-time readers- um, that would be me.
:)
Oh, and thanks!
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have you seen the movie Empire of the Sun? The little boy in that film is Ballard, thebook s an autobiograhical account of his experiences - and a good read! :)
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:)
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and of course, a big THANKS for reading all the recent entries here:)))i'm glad you think it worth the time:))
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I feel as if I've been enlightened on many things since becoming your friend!
And honestly, you are just TOO good NOT to read!
:)
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p.s. love Cliffie there... ;)
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