Ballardian

Over at Transatlantis, Tom Kaczynski ruminates on the relationship between Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering manga, and — of all things — Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere. It’s apparently a good fit, as Tom notes the similarities between Yokoyama’s ‘massive architectural projects … realized by gigantic machinery’ and the construction of the giant pyramid in Wind.

Tom doesn’t really say, but could it be possible that a Japanese manga artist was influenced by Ballard’s most obscure novel?

[Ballard's] description of the building process has an uncanny resemblance to the [sic] Yokoyama depicts the massive feats of engineering in his stories.
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Ballard totally dispenses with a human perspective. The construction is apprehended from a series of unnatural vantage points that allow us to experience the massiveness of the endeavor. Humans at this scale are “like frantic ants.” Since Ballard doesn’t have any visuals accompanying his prose, we have to imagine the scene. With Yokoyama, we are provided with vague glimpses.
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What distinguishes New Engineering from The Wind from Nowhere is that Ballard eventually tells us what is being built and why: a gigantic steel pyramid designed to withstand the force of the wind. Hardoon, the builder, hopes not only to survive the catastrophe but thrive in it as well. But his motives aren’t entirely clear and sometimes the reader is led to believe the pyramid exist solely so Hardoon can comfortably sit in his steel cage, watch the world turn to dust and listen to the savage howl of the hurricane.

Hardoon is a typically Ballardian character who transforms and adapts as best he can to circumstances on the ground (disasters in this case and in his early novels, but in his later work modernity and technology are enough). We encounter these characters in what we recognize as ‘our’ world, but they already belong to another, hidden world, emerging in our midst like one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. And with the new world come new psycho(patho)logies. This is what’s missing from Yokoyama’s structures. The author consciously avoids depicting the psychology of his world.

The post ends with a meditation on the role of Dubai’s ‘context-less plastic mega-structures’ and is well worth considering.