JGB vs HPL
Author: Simon Sellars • Jul 27th, 2008 •Category: Ballardosphere, H.P. Lovecraft, science fiction
Surreal Documents has posted a great response to the Lovecraft/Ballard diversion. I was hoping someone would do this. As I’ve only read a couple of Lovecraft stories, yet keep seeing his name connected or intersecting with Ballard’s, I was merely asking the question. Surreal Documents has answered it, and then some:
Simon Sellars investigates whether connections can be found between the oeuvre of HP Lovecraft and that of JG Ballard. The post comes up with only “…vague parallels between the two writers”… The post misses out on a pair of short stories which evince quite clear parallels between the two writers: HP Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Color Out Of Space” and JG Ballard’s 1964 short story “The Illuminated Man”. In both stories, a cosmological event infects a rural area, warping color, threatening to mutate the world… Both stories highlight the vulnerability of man in an inhumane cosmic environment…
Both Lovecraft’s and Ballard’s story focus on a fictive world into which classificatory ambiguity is introduced by a cosmological event — by a deus ex machina. In both stories, the effect is contagious, and threatens to mutate the world. In Ballard’s story, it is made clear at the very beginning of the story that the effect is spreading on a cosmic scale…
Where the two stories differ is in the attitude of the protagonist towards the ambiguity. On the one hand, Lovecraft’s surveyor is repelled by the cosmological pollution. Ballard’s protagonist on the other hand is attracted by the boundary-dissolving effect, and in the finale of the book seeks to dissolve the boundaries of his own self…
To recapitulate: both stories present a numenous cosmological event which destabilizes classificatory boundaries in a rural area. In both stories, ‘warped color and light’ are the central metaphor for this destabilizing effect, which both attracts and repels. Other than Simon Sellars, I’d say that the parallels between these two stories are far from vague: they are clear and distinct.
Much more at SD.
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Have followed the HPL stuff with interest. I came to his books as a teen through the RPG of his universe “Call of Cthulhu”.
However, a brief period of research into his life, views and other works explain a lot about the stories. To look as his texts purely from their visual imagery and narrative as you find them - in relation to other sci-fi - is highly misleading.
Check it out.
A.
I’ve read “The Illuminated Man” (in fact, I have the issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—May 1964—in which it originally appeared). Ballard expanded on the story’s concept in his novel THE CRYSTAL WORLD. Does “The Illuminated Man” appear in any of Ballard’s short story collections? If so, which collection? I’ve only seen it in that issue of F&SF.
By the way, “numenous” is correctly spelled “numinous.”
‘The Illuminated Man’ can be found in J. G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories(Flamingo, 2001) as well as the earlier anthology The Terminal Beach (Penguin, (1964) reprinted 1974).
As a devoted student of both Ballard and Lovecraft I find the attempt to draw links and parallels between them fascinating. Certainly, Lovecraft’s notion of ‘cosmic horror’ can be observed in the writings of later authors such as Ballard. Central to the Lovecraftian worldview was the rejection of the significance of humanity on a cosmic scale. The blasphemous notion that the origins of humanity may be no more than a joke or mistake by a more powerful entity is explored in Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. Ballard has explored related notions in some of his stories.