Ballardian

There has been a Ballard backlash. Here are two of the more aggressive memes.

Ballard vs The Blogosphere

Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric [typewriter]. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.’

Predictably, a phalanx of bloggers leapt on this detail, including:

+ David Rothman at TeleRead:

So it harms literature when you can more easily shuffle around sentences and paragraphs and chapters? I can recall writing pre-computer, and it was not nearly as much fun or efficient. How many other TeleBloggers remember composing on paper in single-space, then snipping and pasting the results together? Of course, the classic defier of Luddites was Mark Twain, who used a then-newfangled device known as a typewriter. Meanwhile, horror of horrors, J.G.’s Crash, described by one reader as “about car-crash sexual fetishism,” is available as an e-book, and at least several other works are as well.”

+ Crayola Thief at Death on the Installment Plan:

JG Ballard … [makes] a rather idiotic assertion… The reason this makes me flinch is because it attributes the value of art to its tools. A writer captures the ideas pouring out of the brain. What difference does it make whether those ideas are recorded with computer, typewriter, fountain pen, dictation, quill, bloody finger, or chisel and clay tablet? If Ballard finds writing by pen the most effective for his craft, more power to him. But to suggest others must follow suit is a little too Stalinist for comfort. Might as well claim no good poetry can be written lefthanded.

I’ll wager that following the invention of the typewriter, a few squinty crustaceans grumbled that no great book could be written on one of those either.”

+ Paul at The Joy of Raki:

I read something by J.G. Ballard the other day, where he said that no truly great novel has so far been written on a computer. Bollocks. I bet someone said that a couple of years after the invention of the typewriter.”

+ Saleem, at The Neocrats:

The Guardian has … a running feature of “Writers’ Rooms”… Its effect is entirely other than intended: we see the absurd vanity and self-indulgence of novelists. Consider … J.G. Ballard, having detailed the ancient desk at which he writes long-hand, then transcribes an electric typewriter. “I distrust the whole PC thing … I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.” And so, the usual refrain, that everything needs to be done differently. Especially the writing of books!”

In the comments box, Saleem’s readers relentlessly kick the corpse, like nemoDreamer who says, ‘What a silly remark, Mr Ballard’.

Although reader Dorian Gray is more even:

Even though I love my PowerBook I empathise with this nostalgia for simpler times. I’d think twice before making a one-way journey to 1965 (by the way, I hope we’ve all seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046), but why should I not take what was beautiful from that era and combine it with the more moral society we live in today? … A certain kind of artist has always been concerned with the process. It may be a little self-indulgent, but it’s not illegal, immoral or fattening so we should probably indulge them too.”

However, he then goes on to make this baffling statement: ‘By the way, I find Ballard’s room to be an oppressive horror that reeks of Colonialism, but I won’t begrudge him his typewriter.’

Interesting. Where is the oppressive horror in this? It’s a little messy, perhaps, but still.

+ Meanwhile, Matt Merritt at Polyolbion was in two minds:

I was interested to read JG Ballard’s comments … especially his assertion that no great novel has yet been written on a PC. It struck me that I’ve absolutely no idea whether he’s right, simply because I’ve no idea how most writers write. Was he being a bit of a grumpy old man (why should a PC be considered less ‘authentic’ than a typewriter), or was he making a point about the particular way a computer allows you to write? I know a lot of writers, even if they have no qualms about computers generally, like to get their first drafts down on paper by hand, maybe because it makes you think that little bit harder about every word if there’s not the option to delete and rewrite straight away.”

+ While sixteenbynine at Qwerty Dept. sounded a rare note of sympathy (like his novels, Ballard’s latter-day public utterances are treadmilled; he’s made the exact same typewriter claim before, and sixteenbynine is responding to a pre-Writers’ Rooms instance):

J.G. Ballard … threw down [the argument] that no good novel was ever written with a word processor (his drafts are done entirely in longhand). I don’t personally agree with taking it to that extent, but I can understand where all of this comes from. One of the things the word processor enables (along with the Internet, and blogs, and all the rest of it) is uninhibitedly bad writing. Anyone can write anything and publish it in a way that can now be theoretically read by the whole of the world. I saw countless examples of this not just when the web was in its infancy, but even before that — on BBSes, on CompuServe, and on USENET (where a tremendous amount of horrifically bad writing continues to proliferate). This is not simply because there is no professional editorial oversight, but because there is no personal editorial oversight.”

I have a little sympathy with the negative view — it’s a provocative statement, guaranteed to raise the hackles of anyone born with a mouse in their hand. Still, I don’t think we should take everything he says entirely seriously; perhaps this particular backlash is a consequence of the image that’s been thrust on Ballard, that he’s some kind of sage or techno-prophet. Could it be that this statement of his is merely the generation-specific opinion of someone born in 1930? Or perhaps he’s being deliberately reactionary, the literary equivalent of the old Surrealist provocation: firing a gun into the crowd.

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Ballard vs the Guardian’s Readership

Now let’s move on to the backlash surrounding Ballard’s recent piece on Dali and film [thanks to Tim C for directing my attention to all of this]. In response to Ballard’s eulogy, Guardian readers were up in arms.

First up, Michel Faber of Ross-shire wrote in to say:

Ballard’s conception of Dalí as an ultra-modern dude energetically engaged with the zeitgeist (in contrast to old fuddy-duddy Pablo) is a little surreal. Apart from anything else, Dalí painted in the style of Velázquez and Vermeer, 17th-century artists he venerated far above the modernists, whose efforts he disdained. Equally peculiar is Ballard’s assertion that Picasso “seems to have seen nothing of the world on the far side of the windscreen” of a chauffeur-driven car. The phrase “self-enclosed mind” could have been invented for Dalí.”

Alan Burns, via email, was short but sharp:

JG Ballard has Picasso being uninterested in the world while being driven around Cannes, but over the border in Spain was a town called Guernica.”

While Ben Murray of Brighton challenged Ballard’s accuracy:

JG Ballard’s article on Dalí’s early cinematic work grossly overstates his role in the production of both Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or, giving the impression that they were his creations. In fact, the films were more fully the work of Luis Buñuel, who directed, edited and co-scripted them. The eye-slashing sequence was not “probably thought up” by Dalí, but based on a dream of Buñuel’s. A rift developed between the pair before the completion of L’Âge d’Or, and it is acknowledged that the film is almost solely the work of the man who went on to become one of the greatest film-makers of the 20th century.”

But that wasn’t all. A week later, Eduardo de Benito of Cley next the Sea, Norfolk had this to say:

Who is JG Ballard trying to kid by offering an image of Dalí as some kind of revolutionary seer who “fully grasped the deranged unconscious forces that propelled Hitler and Stalin into the daylight”? As most people know, the only things that Dalí ever managed to grasp were wads of greenbacks. He spent the last decades of his life sucking up to the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie and kowtowing to general Franco, a not insignificant chum of one of the two tyrants whose “deranged unconscious forces” he had allegedly grasped in the 1930s. And indeed, Franco - notorious for, among many other things, his crap taste in art - bestowed no end of honours on the “revolutionary seer”.”

Pretty strong meat.

But let’s leave the last word to David Pringle, over at the JGB Yahoo Group:

See, they’re still at it! Criticizing Dali for being Avida Dollars. Why don’t they condemn Warhol or Damien Hirst on the same grounds? (They were/are worse.) Or even Francis Bacon — who, as I understand it, ended life a very rich man?

“He spent the last decades of his life sucking up to the wealthy Catalan bourgeoisie and kowtowing to general Franco…”

Ah, I think that’s the real explanation for the spleen still vented at Dali. They disapprove of him on political grounds — and for being what he was, a Catalan bourgeois. It’s not a judgment on his art, nor even, really, on his money-making propensities (the latter is just a blind — wealth is OK if it’s enjoyed by people who make the right political noises).”

Those were my thoughts, too — Ballard was commenting on Dali’s art, not his politics. So what’s the problem? In reference to the Bunuel/Dali films, Bunuel’s role is fully stated.
Ballard clearly does not imply that they were solely ‘Dali’s creations’, except to say that he ‘probably’ thought up the eye-slashing scene. ‘Probably’ is not a synonym for ‘definitely’.

As for the Picasso riposte, well, it’s apples and oranges really, isn’t it? Pick a side.

Now, what’s really interesting about this backlash is that it’s not really aimed at Ballard, is it? Dali is the real target of reader scorn. And within the white heat of that scorn something very complex appears to be churning, something rooted in centuries-old class struggles and political divisions. Something that people — of a certain age? a certain breeding? — just can’t seem to let go. However, Dali’s art and his influence, as strong today as ever, remain, and I’m pretty sure — unless I’ve missed some steaming great elephant in the room — that was the focus of Ballard’s piece. There’s simply no pleasing some people.

Let’s end it there, but not before this classic Orwell quote: “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.”

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So, there you have it: two very public backlashes against the Seer of Shepperton. This, in England at least, probably all started with the negative notices Ballard received for Kingdom Come — for the first time in his later career, Ballard appears to be really up against it.

In Australia, we call this the Tall Poppy Syndrome.