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Goodbye America?
Author: Simon Sellars • Jun 7th, 2008 •Category: America, Ballardosphere, consumerism, cyberpunk, medical procedure
Over at Barnes & Noble, SF writer Paul Di Filippo makes a valiant attempt to get Americans interested in Ballard, making some pertinent remarks about market forces in the US:
One of the most visionary, autocatalytic, and influential writers of the past five decades, a genuine nonpareil and prophet, a true diagnostician of our postmodern malaise, is courageously but inexorably dying of advanced metastatic prostate cancer at the age of 77. He announced this sad news in the concluding chapter of his autobiography, published in February of this year.
But if you’re an American reader — even if you’re a fan of this author’s many classic books and knowledgeable about his career — chances are good that you don’t know this sad fact, that you simply haven’t heard. That’s because the author is British, and his autobiography, in the eyes of U.S. publishers, has merited no U.S. edition — no more than his last two neglected novels did. And North American press coverage of his plight has been limited to a few genre journals… a sad testament to the privileging of marketplace concerns over art, and also a hurtful slight to a writer whose main topic, in whatever elaborate guise, has always been the American Century.
‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes and Noble, 2/6/2008.
It’s great to see Paul champion Kingdom Come (after all, it has only recently survived a fresh round of new-pleb point-scoring):
[In Kingdom Come] Ballard’s complex brief, simplistically rendered, maintains that the banishment of spirituality and the suppression of many primal human drives in favor of status seeking and the most limited hunter-gatherer reflexology has resulted in a crippled and clinically insane culture — a culture fated to erupt in irrational and often violent compensatory ways.
…
Ballard’s stock troupe of actors who have been his loyal partners forever — brutishly intellectual doctors, damaged femmes fatales, Fisher King sacrificial heroes — speaking their often hilariously out-of-sync lines, enact a perverse vest-pocket apocalypse. As always, Ballard’s vivid metaphors entice, and his acerbic aperçus provoke…‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo’, Barnes & Noble.
Paul’s passion for Ballard’s writing is obvious, drilled into every line, and while none of the info will be new to readers of this site (the piece is ostensibly used to promote both Kingdom Come and Miracles of Life), think of it as smart-bomb planted in the fertile plains of the mighty Barnes & Noble. Let’s hope the message gets through one day (and hopefully before 2080, when Ballard predicts America will fall into ruin):
A Blakean Cassandra honored in his own country, Ballard deserves equal laurels in America, a dream country whose portrait and influence he has so indelibly etched in his books, and which exists in no truer form than in his skull.
‘J.G. Ballard. Essay by Paul Di Filippo.’
Paul’s been a long-time champion of Ballard’s work and his imaginative criticism is notable for the fact that it pays equally incisive attention to the less well-known artefacts in Ballard’s armoury. In this 1990 article, for example, Paul links The Drowned World with The Day of Creation with pleasing results:
Nowhere, I believe, is the nature of Ballard’s art more evident than in the simultaneous junction and disjunction between one of his oldest works, The Drowned World, and one of his latest, The Day of Creation. What I would like to do here is, first set forth the similarities — ranked roughly in importance from most significant to least — in a kind of catalog for our hypothetical exhibition, and then deal with the differences between the two works — which, in the end, are almost more important than the recurrent themes and patterns.
In no way do I mean to suggest that the latter work is some rip-off or mere re-write of the earlier piece, anymore than one Dali canvas is a rehash of another simply because both contain soft clocks. In fact, The Day of Creation strikes me as the more mature and esthetically satisfying of the two, although lacking The Drowned World’s obsessive, world-shattering dementia.
Twenty-Five Years Of Drowning: Mapping J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World onto The Day of Creation. Paul Di Filippo, Quantum Science Fiction & Fantasy Review, No 37, Summer 1990, pp 13-15.
It’s well worth reading.
Also worth scrutinising is Paul’s wonderful 1991 interview with Ballard, which cheekily renders the conversation as a cut-up anatomy textbook (an anatomical marriage of science and pornography of course being one of Ballard’s main obsessions):
III. “WHENEVER I HEAR THE WORD ‘ART,’ I REACH FOR MY CHECKBOOK.”
The TRIFACIAL NERVE may be affected in its entirety, or its sensory
1) Have you ever read a contemporary genre fantasy? If so, do you feel saddened by the degeneration of the fantasy mode from the work of such visionaries as George MacDonald and Charles Williams and David Lindsay to its current state of endless Tolkien-trilogy ripoffs?
I don’t read either fantasy or SF anymore. Tolkien has had a disastrous influence.
or motor root may be affected, or one of its primary main
2) What do you think of the current state of SF?
Much healthier since the arrival of the so-called cyberpunks. They [are] An important sign that SF is returning to reality again. Most encouraging.
divisions. In injury to the sensory root there is anaesthesia of the
3) Do you find any validity in the term “postmodern,” as applied to fiction, architecture, etc., or do you believe it is merely a facade for retrogressive techniques and concerns?
Yes, [it's retrogressive]. Bogus nostalgia and theme-parkism, as far as architecture is concerned. As for the novel, post-modemism represents a dead-end, a desperate admission that the author has nothing to say and can only think of evermore devious ways of disguising the fact.
half of the face on the side of the lesion, with the exception of
4) What has happened to the experimental urge among writers? Can you point to a single innovator equal to, say, Beckett, among contemporary authors?
Burroughs [is such an innovator]. [But] bourgeois life is crushing the imagination from this planet. In due course this will provoke a backlash, since the imagination can never be wholly repressed. A new surrealism will probably be born.
‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, an interview by Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.
Thank you very much, Paul Di Filippo!
Illustrations by Ferret, from Paul DiFilippo’s interview with Ballard.
Author:
Simon Sellars
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As an American, I’m always disappointed that most of my country seems to be oblivious to the Oracle of Shepperton. Kudos to DiFilippo for trying to change this. I especially like the line about how America “exists in no truer form than in his (Ballard’s) skull.”
With Millennium People and Kingdom Come, Ballard has turned his focus to England, and perhaps this is why those novels have not been published in the U.S. Admittedly, the British class system is something of an enigma to me, a lifelong Anglophile, so it is no surprise that publishers think these books would be lost on the rest of America, which normally assume that America is the center of the known universe. Still, much of what Ballard has to say about violence and consumer culture applies to both sides of the pond, and of course the rest of the world as well.
I also feel that DiFilippo is spot on with the comparison of The Day of Creation and The Drowned World. When I read The Day of Creation, I immediately thought it was something of a return to the style of all those disaster novels, especially The Drowned World and The Drought, sans the disaster of course. The surreal landscapes, the obsessive actions of the characters. His works have a remarkable internal cohesion.
Mark, even though it seems an obvious point — that the England setting is why he doesn’t have a US deal right now — I hadn’t actually thought of that. Even so, it doesn’t excuse American publishing insularity and it certainly doesn’t excuse the non-publication of the autobiography, Miracles of Life.
Having said that, Ballard has never ‘cracked America’, even when he was published there. It’s a constant note of regret in his interviews from the 80s and the 90s.
A certain amount of Americans will always be drawn to what here (USA) is marginal. We love it because of its recognition of our awareness of our strange society. Ballard will always appeal to those Anericans who can feel it and are not afraid to be led into the guts of who and what we are.
Good point. I think that is also why there are people like the American photographer Troy Paiva, who embodies that Ballardian ‘recognition of our awareness of our strange society’.
Troy’s interview:
http://www.ballardian.com/light-painter-mojave-d-troy-paiva
I don’t want to come off wrong, to me it is inexcusable that Ballard’s last three books have not been published in the US, but there is probably even less pressure on the companies now with being able to get things from overseas so easily via the internet. I certainly got my hands on those three books easily enough.
I hope Ballard doesn’t have too many regrets about this. He probably has more American fans than he realizes. Heck, even the clerk at the video store knew enough to ask “the one based on the Ballard novel?” when I asked if they had a copy of Crash. (They did! Apparently there is another film with the same title as well.)
Mark makes some excellent points, though I think that the English setting of the novels has little to do with their lack of American distribution. Hell, Russian settings never prevented anyone from selling Dostoievski novels.
Here in New York, which has some of the best bookstores in the world, you can usually find Crash, Emperor of the Sun, and Kindness of Women on the shelves. I’m guessing that Kindness was published because it was a follow-up to Emperor — but then Kindness wasn’t very successful, which may well have scared off other would-be publishers.
There is one bookstore — the Shakespeare & Co on Broadway in Greenwich Village — which regularly stocks the English editions of Ballard’s books. Maybe the manager particularly likes Ballard, or maybe his books sell because the bookstore’s primary clientele consists of NYU students. However, that’s literally the only place I know of that stocks a good selection of Ballard books. It is, as Mark says, inexcusable — especially given what other bullshit lines the shelves.
Given the relative lack of American interest in Ballard’s books, we should all be especially grateful to Re/Search for their long-term championship of his work. They’ve put out Atrocity Ex, which was difficult to find before ebay, interviews, conversations, etc. They’ve done Ballard and his readers a tremendous service. Hats off, Vale.
Dead on. I am also baffled by the American -seemingly deliberate- literary world’s ignorance of Britain’s greatest living writer. I had to run across his work by pure chance, in the now-defunct science fiction magazines of the 1960s. Given that his observations not only describe but have in the past predicted accurately the bizarrely depersonalized, techno-dominant world Americans live in today, it’s inexcusable!
The only editions of his work I can get in the USA are the ReSearch publications, and an occasional find of a UK-published edition in an eclectic bookstore. JGB is generally only known here because of Spielberg’s and Cronenberg’s movies. I found only ONE domestic edition of “Cocaine Nights” published by Counterpoint, which bought the rights to it from HarperCollins’ London Flamingo subsidiary.
Unlike Mr. Roth’s fortuitous experience, I am always presented with the utterly forgettable American ove entitled “Crash”, when I ask for it at video rental outlets.
Some of this is explicable by the fact that Americans, in general, do not read serious literature or even many books at all anymore. An actual conversation overheard at the doorway of a New York bookstore sums up the “culture of ignorance” that characterizes America - A couple approaches the doorway and the man asks his lady if she would like to go in and shop for a book. She actually answered “No, thank you. I already have a book.”.
I have traveled very widely, but have never encountered a culture so self-absorbed and mentally isolated as my own - it’s pitiful. Here we sit bored to death, isolated in our all-pervasive automobile-dominated culture, living in high-rise condos and gated communities, communicating only through technological means and quite satisfied with motoring back and forth between the sterile cubicles of our workplaces and the little nests of our homes, experiencing the world mostly through 500-channel cable or satellite television, various forms of canned virtual “entertainment” and the Internet. No purer form of the boring, isolated, dehumanized visions of our techno-life that JGB predicts and presents is imaginable. And of course we are the leaders in displaying all the outbursts of psychopathology that he predicted would result from such a lifestyle: random inexplicable gun massacres in schools and shopping malls, bizarre crime, strange new addictions, and the largest per capita prison population in the world- by far.
The Oracle of Shepperton has perfectly predicted and described us, yet we ignore him. Paradoxically and even perversely, this is also predictable from a Ballardian viewpoint - the last thing we want is to be reminded of how ignorant and isolated, both individually and as a nation, we have become.
Increasingly I encounter younger people who live in this strange American mental prison - if it’s not on TV, at the Mall, or on the Internet, they don’t know about it. Foreign countries are viewed almost reflexively as automatically inferior to the USA, and only of brief interest, worthy at most of a quick sightseeing tour. It’s horrible to live here, actually. The literary, cultural, and intellectual wonders of the rest of the entire planet are viewed as insignificant. I had the similar good fortune as JGB had - by the chance employment postings of my father, I grew up as an expatriate, and returned to the USA as a fairly mature adolescent - and I still feel like a stranger in my own native culture, like JGB did upon his return to the UK from Shanghai and Lunghua camp internment. I also had the good luck to grow up with an early love of reading and art, especially science fiction and the European Surrealist movement.
One final personal anecdote that might interest my fellow Ballardians here who also feel strangely dissociated amid their own culture: My best friend -who has also lived in several countries and was the product of a cross-cultural marriage- had a girlfriend once that was wholly American, and had never known any other place. She was curious about me, and asked him once “Why does he just sit there all the time, doing nothing, for so many hours every day?”
It took him some time to realize what she was referring to, since I am in fact a normally active and social person. She was talking about my habit of reading constantly. To her, reading a lot and often going through several books a day, was “doing nothing”. This, my friends, is the sadly pervasive American cultural baseline: had I been going to movies, watching TV or immersing myself in the American habit of shopping for endless, useless consumer-culture garbage, that would have been “doing something”. But actually reading, acquiring knowledge, tapping into the vast storehouse of Mankind’s accumulated wisdom and insights that all writers from Aristotle to JGB have left us, was “doing nothing.”
There you have it: America today. If it’s not at the shopping malls, on television, or shown in the movies, they don’t know about it. Period, or as JGB might say in the British manner: “Full stop.”