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Monday, January 21, 2008
Ballardian prostate
The news, via The Ballardian, is that J G Ballard has ‘been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer’. As a result, and in the teeth of his personal extinction, he has written an autobiography, although part of me thinks: hasn’t he already done that, in a parallel circuit of soldered and alligned multiple fictions? But it will be a sad day when his cancer (which I understand to be shaped exactly like Richard Nixon) finally claims him. Ballard is a writer who resists assimilation, even the assimilation that adoring fans try to effect upon their best-beloved books. His work is unique, recalcitrant, peculiar. It possesses a beautiful awkwardness. He has always been a stubborn writer, and in an age where authors strain every pip to please their target readership that stubbornness is a rare and lovely quality. He may be the greatest English writer of the postwar period. It’s hard to tell.
Comments
This is sad news. I always mean to read more Ballard. My undergrad senior thesis was about *Crash* and Robbe-Grillet’s *Jealousy*, but I never returned to his work in a scholarly way during graduate school. (Forced to pick a team by the diss committee, I chose America.)
I did read *Hello America* after coming across a reference to it in Mike Davis’s *Ecology of Fear*. A brilliant concept very poorly executed: Ballard couldn’t do the pulp sci-fi novel. But as his writing approached the affectless extremes of the French new novel, Ballard brought a new tone to science fiction. And when we read *Crash* as a London novel, we can see it as a song—perhaps the first—to the inevitably dead, redeveloped parts of the city. Iain Sinclair is up front about the influence Ballard had on his writing.
But I’m not sure I’d go as far as “greatest English writer of the postwar period.” Colin Thubron, though ghettoized as a travel writer, is a far better prose stylist. Iain Sinclair likewise can outwrite Ballard, even if both of them suffer from an obsessiveness of theme and monochromaticism of tone. At her best, Angela Carter cannot be beat.
But this isn’t college football. Ballard is among the greats, no doubt.