[Deathwatch] J.G. Ballard, novelist, 78

[Deathwatch Central]

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died this morning
of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely
be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle
for art. That’s true enough, I suppose, in a certain small-bore manner,
but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his
entire career stood against.

A member of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, Ballard
started out writing proto-environmental thrillers that highlighted the
prescience of his imagination: “The Wind From Nowhere” posits a
world-wide windstorm that becomes apocalyptic, while “The Drowned
World” is about a planet swamped by risen seas.

It was really in the 1970s, however, that Ballard found his voice as a
writer, focusing on the dangers of mechanization and socialization, the
tension between the veneer of civilization and the animal brutality it
sought to conceal. Novels such as “Crash” and “High-Rise” uncovered the
orgiastic possibilities of violence years before the concept became
common cultural currency; “Vermilion Sands” and “Running Wild”
investigated a nightmare suburbia where chaos simmered beneath the
landscaped surfaces of subdivisions and lawns.

It’s easy, from the perspective of the present, to minimize just how
revolutionary all this was — we now live, after all, in Ballard’s
world. Ballard, though, produced work that not only challenged his
audiences but also actively provoked them, in some cases literally
moving people to vandalism, as when he staged a 1970 exhibition of
crashed cars at a London art gallery. This show, intended to illustrate
the fetishization of machinery and violence, was a seminal moment for
Ballard: It led to the publication of “Crash” in 1973.

“The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th
century,” the author wrote in a 1974 introduction to the French edition
of the novel, “has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across
the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies
and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and
soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising
and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the
great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century — sex and paranoia.”

Ballard is best known for his autobiographical novel “Empire of the
Sun,” which described his boyhood experiences in a Japanese internment
camp in Shanghai; it was filmed by Stephen Spielberg in 1987.

But for me — as well as, I suspect, most Ballardites — the signal text
remains “The Atrocity Exhibition,” a book so strange it’s nearly
impossible to describe. Collecting 15 “stories,” all of them so
compressed and fragmentary as to render traditional concepts of
narrative or character moot, it provoked its own kind of violent
reaction: After the book was published in 1970, notes the 1990
RE/Search Publications edition, “Nelson Doubleday saw a copy and was so
horrified he ordered the entire press run shredded.”

According to Ballard, the story that pushed Doubleday over the edge was
a piece about Ronald Reagan, the title of which I can’t reproduce here.
This same story was the subject of a 1968 British obscenity trial,
after the Unicorn Bookstore in Brighton published it as a pamphlet;
when asked by his attorney why it was not obscene, Ballard replied
“that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so.” Needless to
say, he did not appear as a witness in his own defense.

That’s a funny moment, but it’s also deadly serious, suggesting the
essence of Ballard’s aesthetic, his point-of-view. For him, obscenity
was a matter of cultural obsession; it was not his work per se, but our
fixation on the figure of Reagan that made the story fit the charge.

“The Atrocity Exhibition” is full of such revelations: The final story,
“The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill
Motor Race” (after Alfred Jarry’s “The Crucifixion Considered as an
Uphill Bicycle Race”), is as transgressive a piece of fiction as can be
imagined, seven years after the death of the president. “Oswald was the
starter,” Ballard begins, then takes us through a schematic of the
shooting, concluding, “Without doubt Oswald badly misfired. But one
question still remains unanswered: who loaded the starting gun?”

Here, we see Ballard’s preoccupations come together: violence,
spectacle and mass imagination, examined in a prose as flat and
unaffected as an autopsy report.

“[I]n a totally sane society,” he once wrote, “madness is the only
freedom” — an idea that sits at the center of “The Atrocity
Exhibition,” and, indeed, of his entire career.

-- David L. Ulin

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary