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- Author: Andrzej Gasiorek x
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This book is a part of a series titled Contemporary British Novelists, which explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction. Science fiction provided one escape route from the social limitations and stultifying conventions of literary realism. It opened the door to preoccupations typically ignored by the mainstream writers from whom Ballard was alienated, and it enabled him to align himself with a 'popular' genre that mocked the overweening pretensions of so-called 'high' art. This book provides a darker reading of self-deification as the expression of the untrammelled monstrous ego, a reading that looks ahead to Ballard's exploration of nihilism in Millennium People. Ballard has suggested that 'our talent for the perverse, the violent, and the obscene, may be a good thing' and that we 'may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side, it's a mistake to hold back and refuse to accept one's nature'. This commitment to the logic of the quest can then be read as a form of optimism, and enables Ballard to claim that his is 'a fiction of psychic fulfilment' because it encourages his characters to discover 'the truth about themselves' even if this process of discovery culminates in their deaths Ballard's late novels lay bare the psychopathologies of everyday life in a post-humanist world. His writing traces the sinister trajectories often taken by a potentially world-annihilating technology, it also explores the emancipatory hopes and the uneasy pleasures unleashed by the juggernaut of modernity.
Ballard's alter ego David sees him as a classic case of repression and denial, as a man unable to face up to the 'true' character of his deviant nature, whereas his substitute-mother Peggy considers that through a process of sympathetic identification he has taken upon himself the destructive violence of the war, becoming a human embodiment of the death-instinct. The controlled regime at the estate places its inhabitants in a social straitjacket, giving them no space for self-expression outside carefully structured activities. But estates like Pangbourne are also products of late capitalism: the gated enclave functions as the site of a rigidly formalised rest and recuperation that services individuals in order to enable them to work. Human life is a programmed code from which emotion, autonomy and spontaneity have been evacuated.
The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard's most demanding and most unsettling work. An experimental text that eschews the codes of realist narrative, it is a heteroglossic and open-ended artefact that works on multiple levels and refuses the closure of meaning. The exorbitation of consciousness all the way through the book is significant because it draws attention to the erosion of taboos, the deadening of affect, and the spectacularisation of social life at the heart of this deviant logic. In Crash it is self-evidently a psycho-social unconscious that is visible through the aperture of the wound. Dynamic in structure and manifesting multiple relays and links, it functions as an assemblage that attests the novel's moral ambivalence. The search for an ostensibly charitable psychopathology takes place within a libidinal economy that is well beyond the pleasure principle. Dissociation from affects and from the meaning of events is a predominant feature of Crash.
It has often been noted, not least by Ballard himself, that his most abiding concern was with the theme of time. Perverse not because they revolve around the pleasures of domination and subjection but because these pleasures depend on the establishment of an unbreachable distance between individuals – a distance that precisely measures the extent of his alienation from others. Maitland's account of his own experience must then be treated with scepticism. His desire at the end of the novel to remain on the island, even as he continues to delude himself that he is looking for a way to escape it, reveals a protagonist who has scarcely begun to grasp what has taken place. The Unlimited Dream Company's Blake is the unheralded avatar of pantheism, a pagan god come to fecundate this pale copy of an animate world with his phallic power.
Ambiguity and ambivalence are the hallmarks of J. G. Ballard's short stories. The economy of form offered by the short story has enabled him to concentrate tightly on particular topics while opening them to further speculations. The Drought, Ballard's novel, is drawn to a different strand within Surrealism – the cool, spectral forms of Tanguy and the fluid, deliquescing images of DalÃ. In The Drought calligraphic patterns, brittle ciphers, collapsing messages – all attempts at communication, but with no easily decodable meaning, as though this topographic inarticulacy is in itself a rebuke to the arrogance of human speech. Perhaps this is the impulse behind the image of 'the crying land', which discloses its suffering wordlessly and inaugurates linguistic conventions that call the entire human enterprise into question. Ransom began to speak, but this cryptic alphabet seemed to overrule anything he might say.
Uneasiness characterises Ballard's relationship with his adopted country and with all the literary modes he has deployed. He has repeatedly expressed his disapprobation of the prevailing literary culture of the 1950s, and he has heaped scorn on the overt moralism associated with the then hegemonic Leavisite tendency. Because realism seemed inadequate to the task of creative mapping Ballard was drawn to a style of writing that communicated much of what it had to say through its evocation of physical landscapes with symbolic, mythic and psychological connotations. But despite Ballard's oft-repeated alignment of his writing with Surrealist painting, his work should not be seen as little more than an off-shoot of Surrealism. Surrealism plays a role in his imaginative landscapes and offers potent ways of seeing through the surface truths of social phenomena but is not the master-key that unlocks the door to his fictional world.
This chapter discusses three novels that belong to the genre of detective fiction, although the centre of interest lies not in identifying the perpetrator of the crime but in grasping its wider ramifications. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes the culprit is known, and in Millennium People it becomes obvious who is responsible for the murders that have been committed. The loss of the future as a horizon toward which human activity might be projected results in an increased sensitivity to the category of space, conceived now as all that there is. By drawing attention to the link between egoism and a monadic view of subjectivity Ballard suggests that a separation of the subject from others and a rejection of the external world sanctions an instrumentalist view of those others and that this permits the unleashing of terrorist violence.
A dynamic of violence propels Ballard's late works. Violence drives their narratives, motivates their protagonists, and functions as a fantasised means of re-enchanting the world. The novels of the early 1970s are all in different ways attempts to grasp the nature of the dominative regimes that were recoding the human being as a bio-mechanical entity. The problem of totalisation at the level of narrative is then inextricable from that of subjectivity as it is represented within narrative. What Ballard defends as the 'morally free psychopathology of metaphor, as an element in one's dreams', is an id-driven psychopathology that lays waste to human life. All that is then left are solitary id-driven wills proclaiming their right to assert themselves through acts of motiveless violence in which any notion of ethical truth or programmatic social change has long since been obliterated.