Extreme Metaphors: Interviews with JG Ballard
Simon Sellars/Dan O’Hara (editors) [Fourth Estate]
J.G. Ballard is one of only a few truly great literary writers of post-war Britain, but his influence is felt as heavily upon popular culture as it is upon so-called ‘high’ culture. References to his work dot the landscape of popular music like so many wrecked cars of the apocalypse. Joy Division named a song after *The Atrocity Exhibition*, his early experimental collection of condensed novels. The Klaxon’s first album, Myths of the Near Future, borrows its title from a collection of Ballard’s short stories. Radiohead’s OK Computer was heavily influenced by Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash, and David Bowie’s Always Crashing the Same Car was clearly influenced by it, too. Empire of the Sun apparently deny taking their name from Ballard’s most popular work, Empire of the Sun – but who do they honestly think they’re fooling?
With all this in mind, one of the funniest moments in Extreme Metaphors, a collection of some forty-four excellent interviews with the great man, comes when Jon Savage, speaking to Ballard in 1978, enthuses at length about The Velvet Underground and punk rock. He notes the way both attack “media and technological conditioning” before pausing to allow Ballard to comment. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t listen to music. It’s just a blank spot.” Speaking to The Paris Review four years later, he comments: “I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record.”
Despite this, he listens to Savage with interest, and speaks with as much consideration and insight about the sociological aspects of contemporary music as he does elsewhere about his own personal obsessions – the suburbanisation of the soul, surrealist painting, his notion of ‘inner space’, consumerism, urban decay, the sexual fetishisation of car crashes, etc., etc.. He will return to these themes again and again and again over the course of these interviews. The fact that his doing so never once grows tiresome is a testament both to Ballard as a speaker, and to Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara as editors. Ballard was a very generous subject, speaking a combined estimate of 650,000 words in interview, often to tiny fanzines that never came to be made digital. Just tracking them all down sounds like hard work; selecting from them, another thing altogether. The editors of Extreme Metaphors are so thoroughly immersed in Ballard’s discourse, in fact, that they themselves start to borrow unconsciously from his store of recurring metaphors. Sellars writes at one point about something serving “as a kind of grit”, a metaphor Ballard revisits several times throughout the collection.
Many assessing these interviews have focused – and will continue to focus – on Ballard’s success rate as a prophet of the near-future. In 1963, for instance, he predicted that Ronald Reagan would become president of the United States. In 1978, he predicted that homes would one day be transformed into mini-television studios. He even saw social media coming and, more obliquely, the destruction of the Twin Towers. And yet, impressive as such prescience no doubt is, there’s only so long we can sit gawping at a man speaking in the past describe our present condition before it comes to seem like a very limited, almost provincial, sort of reading. “Look everybody! Look! He’s talking about us!”
As Ballard’s predictions become our lived reality and, later, our past, it is important that we draw some sort of method from Ballard’s thinking, so that we, too, might see so clearly. His vision of the future seems to have come as a side-effect of the close attention he paid to his own present. “What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to look at the present and to get away from the notion of yesterday, today, tomorrow.” He observed his present with a clinical eye, dissecting it like the corpse he worked on as a medical student in the early 1950s. In 1968, he noted how the media landscape of “advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising” had made it almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the false. “It’s not necessary for the writer to invent fiction,” he concluded. “It’s the writer’s job to find the reality.” – Kevin Breathnach
Best European Fiction 2013
Aleksandar Hemon (editor) [Dalkey Archive]
The concept of European-ness has evolved from a tight-meshed intellectual tradition to an economic shorthand. With regional autonomy on the rise, the continent veers more towards a Holy Roman Empire sense of state – it is no wonder the Aleksandar Hemon, editor of this annual collection of short fiction, cannot seem to grasp at any defining characteristic that binds these works together. Fairly rote plays with metafiction such as Lasha Bugadze’s Sins of the Wolf, where a promising concept (a pulp author is plagued by a fan who believes his characters exist i.r.l.) descends into self-indulgence and smart-arsery in the grand tradition of dilettantish absurdism, and the fairly transparent metaphors of opener Before The Breakup from Slovakia’s Balla bogs down the collection’s opening sections. The revelations come in the darkest of exercises. A.S Byatt’s Dolls’ Eyes is a kind of British domestic rendering of Patti Smith’s Redondo Beach, quietly moving and disquietingly sinister, and Dragan Radulovic’s The Face, a philosophical noir, rollicks through several layers of narration with story-telling verve. Danish Christina Hesselholdt’s piece doesn’t just demand attention because of its hookers and Berlin hotel rooms, but due to its accurate rendering of the multifariousness of consciousness, its narrator swaying from one death fantasy to the next over the course of a paragraph with a blurry, druggy subjectivity that thinks in four dimensions, brief fixations surfacing and resurfacing as it crashes towards a denouement that works as a sort of gender-reversed spin on The Dead; the best in this suitably patchwork show. -Daniel Gray
Orkney
Amy Sackville [Granta]
A professor of 19th-century literature marries his silver-haired student who, some forty years his junior, has enchanted him like so many wild-eyed women of Romantic poetry. They go on their honeymoon to Orkney, where the sea acts as a dark, consuming force upon the pair. What is immediately striking about Orkney is its use of language. Sackville is a skilled stylist, writing in that portentous lyrical mode that is commonly referred to as ‘painterly’; indeed, by casting its scenes in the vocabulary of the visual arts, the novel asks to be read as such. “I will have no drowning, I said, however picturesque.”
With this frame of reference in place, paintings become everywhere apparent. “Her view is encompassed by mine,” says the narrator; “it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing.” This image, which to my mind recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, asks us to consider the perspective of the narrator’s wife in our reading of the text. And so, when the narrator describes something as “raven, sable, pitch” and she responds “black and cold”, we start to see the narrator’s prose as excessively ornate. The perspective of the narrator’s wife subverts his beautiful but fragile lyricism; deconstruction is always already at work within the text. When she indisputably contradicts his first memories of her, it feels as if the image the narrator maintains of his wife as some mysterious enchantress is merely a projection brought on by too much book-reading. And then, just as we are about to cry Bovary, the narrator is proved right. This is not to say that no narrative subversion took place. Instead it means that, in accordance with its epigraph by Hélène Cixous, Orkney is: “…the portrait of a story attacked from all sides, that attacks itself and in the end gets away.” Sackville’s triumph is to realise that a beauty that admits itself as fragile is much less fragile for it. -Kevin Breathnach
Ways of Going Home
Alejandro Zambra [Farrar, Strauss and Giroux]
Alejandro Zambra’s third translated novel, Ways of Going Home, switches between two narratives. One is told by a writer resembling Zambra, who is currently at work on a novel about his life growing up in Chile. This work-in-progress is presented to us as the secondary narrative. The spectre of Pinochet hangs over the entire work; its characters sense something like remorse at their own belatedness with regards to the dictatorship. “While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats,” writes the narrator. “While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek.”
This distinction informs the novel in structural terms. Now that the dictatorship has passed, it has become inappropriate to portray everyday life in the terms of the traditional, unified novel. Zambra turns to narratives within narratives, the use of doppelgängers and the suggestion of pseudonymity in an attempt to turn his work into a sort of literary hide-and-seek. “The book was her disguise,” he writes, “a precious mask.” And yet, these tricks have grown old, too. Zambra’s meta-narrative is knowingly fatigued. Little is concealed. No thrill comes upon seeing Las Maninas hanging in the narrator’s childhood home. All know the terrain too well. This is one of the novel’s small tragedies. “Perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost,” says the narrator. “The time when all the streets were new.” – Kevin Breathnach
