J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

From the beginning he scrupulously surveyed a landscape the rest of us strive to keep at bay. He spent a pivotal portion of his youth in a Japanese internment camp, where violence, death and collapse were regularly on display. He lost the love of his life and mother of his young children while still in his early 30s. Yet despair and hopelessness seemed other to him. In his stories and novels he rendered with great precision and unfettered imagination what other writers merely drape in bathos. In his second novel The Drowned World (1962), he described a London visible only by the tips of its tallest buildings, the remainder completely submerged following a global catastrophe spurred by melting icecaps. “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown by wild orchids.” Later in the novel we’re given a tour of an underwater planetarium, which is to say we’re given the stars far below the surface of the sea. Such gifts are common in the work of J.G. Ballard.

When characterizing Ballard’s tales, whether fantastically dystopian or chillingly realist, one’s repeatedly tempted by the term “alienating,” yet what makes the work so arresting and provocative is the fact that his protagonists aren’t really alienated at all. They witness horrors that, rather than simply deadening affect, awake a new level of fascination with phenomena far grander in scale than individual lives or even civilizations. Like the experimental plants and animals bred in the laboratory of Ballard’s ‘The Voices of Time’ (60), his characters break away from conventional responses to their environment by utilizing some dormant impulse locked inside all of us, perhaps in our very genes. To read his books is to stimulate, as Martin Amis described it, “a disused part of the reader’s brain.” Transcending genre, form and, most gleefully, taste, Ballard remains singular. He died last Sunday morning in London, following a long struggle with cancer. He was 78.

James Graham Ballard was born to British parents in Shanghai in 1930. They lived luxuriously in an enclave upon whose fringes existed a world both “extravagant and cruel,” boasting a wild assortment of exotic crime. “Anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold,” Ballard wrote. “In many ways, it seems like a stage set, but at the time it was real, and I think a large part of fiction has been an attempt to evoke it by means other than memory.” In a transformation that would echo again and again in images of abandoned buildings, empty pools and grounded aircraft, their protected world would be left a spectral cavity once the Ballards were placed in internment in 1943. Ballard received lessons in poverty, charity, starvation, solidarity and pettiness. He ate maggots for protein. And he was always curious, amazed and basically cheerful. “Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life.”

In 1946 Ballard returned to England, bombed-out and miserable, a victorious nation that behaved as though defeated, a place where “hope itself was rationed.” Ballard went to medical school, where he became transfixed by the cadavers he was assigned to dissect, seeing in their faces a palimpsest of experience. He then went to Moose Jaw with the RAF, and it was on the Canadian prairie that he discovered science fiction, the genre that would ignite his mind. He married Mary Matthews in 1955 and settled in Shepperton to have three kids and start in earnest his prolific writing career. Mary would die suddenly of pneumonia in 1963, leaving Ballard to do all the domestic and money-earning duties while still engaging in a dynamic social life in swinging London. His memoir Miracles of Life (08) is dedicated to and named after his beloved children, who he remained close to all his life. Yet happy families, or even unhappy families, were never to be a significant subject of his work.

Apocalyptic scenarios fuelled many of the early novels, yet the more Ballard interacted with the familiar contemporary world, the more truly unnerving his fiction became. The Kennedy assassination, his wife’s death, Vietnam, his memories of wartime Shanghai, and his interest in new feats of consumerism, fetish-making and media sensationalism merged to create the image/event/prose graft of The Atrocity Exhibition (66), aligning Ballard far more with Jean-Luc Godard or Andy Warhol at the peak of their powers than with the likes of Isaac Asimov. One of Ballard’s most infamous novels, Crash (73) encompasses the radical approach to speculation Ballard had taken, subverting our response to trauma into an obsession with configurations of modern embodiments of affluence and glamour. His characters survive car crashes only to then crave and even design more of them, erotically, wholly, seeking some psychotic communion. When David Cronenberg adapted the novel into an equally controversial film of the same name (96), it made for one of the most fruitful collaborations between two uncannily like-minded artists of the late 20th century.

Empire of the Sun (84) ushered him into the literary mainstream. A fictionalized retelling of his Shanghai experiences, it melded Ballard’s crisp, coolly poetic language with nostalgia and tenderness. From here, the bulk of remaining body of work would stick largely to the format most clearly outlined in High Rise (75), tales of cloistered, antiseptic colonies—gated communities in Running Wild (88) and Cocaine Nights (96), an elite business park in Super-Cannes (00), a giant exurban shopping mall in Kingdom Come (06)—where the deadening effects of modern life invites transgression, the promise of control invites tacit agreements to lose control, and a state of anarchy is longed for by exactly those who sought to maintain order. I reviewed most of these when they came out, and it never ceased to amaze me how these explicit variations on a theme in each case the same story could yield fresh insights.

I never met J.G. Ballard but I’ll miss him nonetheless. His voice so rarely gave comfort, but there is a sort of vertiginous exhilaration to be found in his probing of our collective psyche and precarious ambitions. His body of work is too alive with possibility to be considered fatalist. His fecund mind sought to unearth the secret contract between surrealism and social commentary. And he did his part in ensuring that the British novel would not succumb to quaintness. Like the protagonist in ‘The Garden of Time’ (61), he has felt the final crystal of life dissolve in his hands, but he’s left us a vast field of jewels to pick through and marvel at in his absence.

There's plenty more on Ballard to be found at The Daily. 

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.

Death of a Cyclist: screening the delicate balance between pure polemic and pure pleasure

It opens on a stretch of country road so gray, stark and forsaken as to feel pulled from a dream—even the two or three trees look cold and lonely. The image of this landscape stays fixed as the cyclist passes us by, exiting the frame not long before the car enters it, the collision between the two happening off-screen in the eerie, phantasmagoric interim. The car stops and the couple within exits to survey the damage. The man, Juan (Alberto Closas), surmises that he cyclist is dying—all we can see in the framing is the still-spinning wheel. The woman, Maria (Lucia Bosé), urges the man to leave. They drive away, abandoning the cyclist, and the titular event of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released by the Criterion Collection, has transpired with bracing efficiency.

Accompanied by a score of Herrmannesque portent, a tone of an unmistakably noir melodrama has been set. Yet right there within this brooding atmosphere lies the first of numerous overt, pointed allusions to a troubling class disparity: a humble-looking man on a bike is knocked down by a well-dressed couple in a sleek automobile; the couple, we learn immediately after, are having an affair, and are more concerned with maintaining their secrecy—and with it their comfortable bourgeois existence—than with the welfare of the victim of their negligence.

With each subsequent scene come further layers of social critique: the insularity and nepotism that allows Juan to hold an enviable position at a university; the appearance of a nefarious art critic, a self-described “good for nothing” who lurks in elevated social circles sniffing out opportunities for blackmail with an ingratiating smile (there is the sense that the art critic’s vocation is itself deemed a product of bourgeois decadence); the fact that Juan looks conspicuously similar to Miguel, Maria’s wealthy husband, implying that her extramarital activities are so automated that she doesn’t even require a lover that embodies a genuine variation of her husband. The accumulative effect, made complete by the sudden development of Juan’s class-consciousness, spurred by guilt over the accident, is a depiction of a Spain well-settled into Franco’s triumph, sinking into its own turgid morass of Fascist reactionism.

If Death of Cyclist reads as schematic, that’s because it is, and the supplementary texts in Criterion’s package, including one from Bardem himself, emphasize the director’s schema all the more. Bardem had publicly declared the Spanish cinema as “politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled,” and Marsha Kinder’s essay ‘Creating a Modern Spanish Cinema’ shows in great detail how Death of a Cyclist was designed as the antidote, a work that would subversively exploit the trappings of Hollywood thrillers as a way to synthesize and heighten Bardem’s polemical call to arms, its true stylistic genre being that of neorealism.

The problem with this sort of reading is that is renders the movie as an airless manifesto in which the artist only reluctantly lowers himself to entertaining us. It also does a great discredit to Hollywood—American film noir, for all its compromises, was already a great source of social criticism, frequently pulling back the curtain of American prosperity to reveal the corruption at the heart of the capitalist impulse, and the typical noir already possessed many of the same innovations as neorealism, such as its use of location shooting. Death of a Cyclist arrived right at the climax of the original noir cycle, the same year of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Maria, its femme fatale, even attempts to secure her social standing using the same shocking method as Margo in the superb poverty row noir Decoy (46).

Regardless of Bardem’s personal aspirations, focusing all one’s attention on its political promptings can make Death of a Cyclist feel somewhat academic, while the best compliment one can give it is to in fact call it a very elegant, highly effective, often fascinating noir. The film moves superbly, the brisk pacing enhanced by the consistent use of shock cuts, those transitions where one image weirdly matches another in an entirely different scene, as though the storytelling itself infuses disparate events with some creepy synchronicity; exposition is handled with tremendous economy; and there’s a bizarre, fascinating morbidity to the way the accident influences the love affair, which reaches its natural erotic climax in a spray of blood and mechanical impact, acting as a subtle precursor to the bizarre equations of David Cronenberg’s Crash (96).

Death of a Cyclist in the end did not signal much of a revolution in Spanish cinema—not even Luis Buñuel’s return to Spain to make the deliriously perverse Viridiana (60) could manage that. Sweeping changes wouldn’t arrive until the 70s while Franco was either in decline, dying or dead. But Bardem’s film can be admired greatly for the way it gives us a portrait of his country in a period of deep repression and stagnancy, and delivering this portrait in the shape of a thriller sculpted from desire, coincidence, small dreams and the never quite squashed undercurrent of social unrest.