J. G. Ballard’s brilliant, “not good” writing
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
> 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.
On a page-by-page level, Ballard's prose is honestly pretty bland. Which is okay! But I don't think it's an intentional act of genius. There were so many paragraphs in High-Rise where 3+ sentences would start with a participle phrase, often back to back.
The premise itself of the novel was interesting enough, so I managed to turn off my editor brain and enjoyed it for what it was. But there are novelists whose prose does legitimately mirror themes of alienation or paranoia (Pynchon and DeLillo come to mind) and I don't think Ballard is one of them.
As an aside, I've tried to read Crash at least three times now but the increasingly unbearable sex scenes keep driving me away. Not that I'm scandalized (if anything, I wish I were!)—they're just such a slog to get through. If I have to read the phrase "natal cleft" one more time...
...or PKD.
Just in case there are any "future me's" out there, here's a link to an unpredictable future adventure.
https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Voices-of-...
title is "Complete Short Stories", and yes it's 63 hours long!
I love Ballard, so this is a fine investment.
Some fall flat, but ones like "Studio 5, the Stars" [2] about automated poetry hit hard in the modern context of ChatGPT and AI generated art.
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2020/04/why-we-are-l...
2. https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Studio-5-The-S...
I've been in these kinds of courses. I always found the least helpful part to be hearing people's opinions about books, especially what didn't work for them. The opinions of a group of grad students is pretty worthless to me. Even the hotter takes, which can be entertaining, do not forward my understanding of reading or writing.
What's much more valuable is acknowledging that it is a book, it was published, people did get something out of it—sometimes many people—and then asking why that might be. I always wanted to break apart the mechanics of the style, the architecture of the story's structure, ask why the author did certain things instead of certain other things, etc. What I got instead was an airing of personal grievances, set vaguely against the backdrop of the story, with thin (or nonexistent) textual evidence as support. I always wanted the professor to say "I don't care, what made you think I would care about what you just said?" but they never did.
In fairness, neither did I. But, those classes were my vaccine against academia and literary criticism, so they were not useless and probably saved me from a career of sitting through that.
I think that the answer to that is unknowable to any mind other than the author's, and the best speculation can come from someone who's digested many of their work for a long period of time. It's certainly an interesting discussion to have if you can find enough people like that but it's tough!
Getting too good at it usually means you start automatically spoiling a lot of books for yourself, though. “Why’d this character show up in chapter 3? What do they do for the story? Ohhhh they’re secretly the villain” or “why are we spending so much time with this character right now, in this way? Oh, the author’s gonna kill them.”
I was thinking about something like Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Proust, where the artistic choices are more stylistic and about examining thought itself, rather than structurally about characters and events.
Though if one is not constantly asking “what might be intended here? What might this signify?” and similar questions while reading those kinds of works, I’m not sure what one is doing while reading them. That’s not identical to asking what the author was thinking, but I do believe that considering why the author chose one thing instead of another (why doesn’t the boat get to the lighthouse? What would change if it did?) is often worth doing, and I think sometimes one can arrive at something like the author’s reasons (even if it can’t be known for sure).
[edit] “But who cares if some reading of an episode or element of the story is the one intended by the author?” is the obvious question, then: I’d say if we can get at a plausible intended reading, with some reason and evidence behind it, that’s likely to present a more-useful lens or jumping-off point for unraveling and drawing meaning from other parts of the work, or even the author’s other works, than any given WAG one might think up. It’s not necessary to create and support a hypothesis of what the author had in mind at every turn, but if likely intent can be teased out, it helps direct profitable lines of inquiry elsewhere.
If you write to make money, and people can't identify with your characters, other things being equal, you're going to sell fewer copies.
If you write to make a point, and people can't identify with your characters, other things being equal, you're going to attract fewer readers to whom you can make your point.
Why? In both cases, because people don't like reading stuff where the characters do random things for incomprehensible reasons. That's not an interesting book. You might as well write a book about squares in a video game that move according to the output of a random number generator.
That's not to say that surprising things can't happen. They have to, or again, the book isn't interesting. But the characters have to be recognizably human to us, or it quits being a book about human characters.
It seems like there could be considerable distance between "likable" and "recognizably human". Lots of complaints are around the characters being "unlikable", when they're doing completely human things that are just not nice. If an author is forced to only include friendly and likable characters, there's a pretty substantial limitation on the types of human behavior that can be covered.
Sometimes you can't use "recognizably human" characters to make the point you need to make. Peter Watts is a good example of this; not only in Blindsight but throughout his body of work, the most effective characters are typically those least recognizable as human.
Such works are typically labeled as "high-concept", and I concede they can be an acquired taste. But it's not at all true to say every story is either at heart about human relationships or worthless, else this other sort of stories would never have been common enough to need naming what distinguishes them.
How about to inform, to amuse or entertain, or to tell a story?
Or because the author feels compelled to write things, or is bored and needs something creative to do?
I still disagree with his definitions but Ballard is definitely special.
[edit] also, if you like short stories and novellas, I found the New Hugo Winners series (in which Asimov had taken a back seat as editor, writing in his introduction, to paraphrase, “I do not understand these kids”) has a way higher average quality of writing than the older Hugo Winners series. The ideas didn’t seem a lot worse to me, either. But I’ve also read a lot more of the regular Hugo Winner series so maybe I just got very lucky with the New Hugo volumes I’ve picked up.
In SF, I’d suggest James Tiptree Jr as someone with both great writing skills and great ideas.
J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85 (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25521617 - Dec 2020 (11 comments)
Banham avec Ballard: On style and violence (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22701113 - March 2020 (7 comments)
"I wanted to write about the next 5 minutes, not the last 30 years. The only form of fiction that had the vocabulary of ideas to deal with the next 5 minutes was science fiction. I wanted a science fiction for the present day. It seemed to me that the future was a better key to the present than the past."
"What is so strange about the world we inhabit today is the way in which fiction and reality have become reversed. 20, 30, 40 years ago everybody had a clear idea that reality was the external world around you, the world of work, industry and commerce. Fantasy and the imagination was the world inside our head, the private dreams and hopes for the future. Now that's been reversed. Now the external landscapes of our world are almost entirely fictional, made up of advertising and publicity - an artificial man-made landscape. The only point of reality we each of us have is inside our heads. Our own obsessions are all we have."
He is unique for his tone. "Ballardian" conveys something immediately recognisable to anyone that's read more than a handful of his short stories and it conveys something that is fairly unique.
The recent craze for "liminal spaces" captures some of the flavour. But it's also intrinsically British and very much a 70s thing. Maybe it's just my memory of Britain in the 70s but the movie of Crash failed to capture the right mood, whereas High Rise did remarkably well.
I grabbed a volume of his stories just now, and it starts off with a story that I would say feels very, uh, mid century, The Concentration City. Then Manhole 69, which captures some of that liminal space thing you mention. And then Chronopolis, which seems very mid century to me again.
but yeah. Ballard supplied the imagery for the New Wave.
Seems like all of his novels are about an everyday man who encounters some unsettling kind of wildness or chaos and then "goes native" and achieves some kind of abnormal stability.