Ballardian

REMINDER: The ‘call for papers’ deadline for ‘Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard’ is three days away. See here for details, and here for more on the conference.

J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, has posted a long and thoughtful rebuttal of Rob Liddle’s recent dismissal of Kingdom Come. I posted about Liddle’s piece earlier, but J. Carter’s articulate response cuts far quicker and deeper to the heart of the matter:

First and foremost, anyone who thinks Ballard’s fiction fits comfortably with a New Labour mindset has either absolutely no idea about literature or has to provide proof that Blairism is a far more kinky and interesting ideology than is generally acknowledged.

More to the point though, in Kingdom Come, many of the ‘plebs’ who run riot in the book are of the ‘professional classes’ themselves, and the dividing lines between good and bad are hardly drawn by income alone. Moreover, in books such as High-Rise, Super-Cannes and Millennium People (and others) Ballard has long made clear that the darker aspects of humanity (i.e., those upon which he tends to dwell) are something to which the cappuccino swilling middle-classes have at least as much access to as anyone else.

Indeed, if I had to name any single class which comes off badly in Ballard’s books, it would be the pretentious middle classes. The silly, Guardian-reading, Habitat-shopping revolutionists of the ‘upholstered apocalypse’ depicted in Millennium People are a prime example.
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A closer reading … might have pointed out to [Liddle] that what binds the members of the riotous mob in Kingdom Come more than anything else is not that they are working class but rather that they are largely a consuming class to whom few of the traditional social ties which used to bind people together are available.”

It’s an excellent point. Football is pure commodity. Ballard reports this fairly and accurately, including cataloguing his own weaknesses as a so-called “middle-class” writer observing Liddle’s so-called “working-class pleasures”. Maybe there’s more invested in supporting a club (or nation) by, say, someone who grew up during the Depression era where sport was something to really believe in, but to many present-day observers, it looks far more ominous.

Liddle takes exception with KC’s depiction of sporting mobs “dressed in identical St George’s shirts and interested only in consumerism and sport.” But football is a supply line that leads directly to the Bentall Centre (or Kingdom Come’s sinister equivalent — the Metro-Centre), if a club (or nation) can sell enough strips by conning supporters that they are part of a Liddle-style “noble tribe” rather than supporters of a corporate brand.

It’s not just an English thing, either, and it’s not confined to sport — the “religion of consumerism” does not discriminate. At the recent Big Day Out music fest, the organisers called on attendees to leave Australian flags at home for fear of riots and racial tension, after various mass-flag-waving violent incidents over the past year or so.

This from the ABC website:

The Australian Democrats say political leaders should face up to the fact that the Australian flag has been misused by racists and ultra-nationalists. … Prime Minister John Howard has called the move stupid and offensive… But Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett says the Big Day Out organisers have made a sensible decision because some people misuse the flag in a racist way.
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Jeremy Smith says he was the victim of an attack by a man carrying an Australian flag at last year’s Big Day Out… “Looking back, it was definitely prevalent during the day and from the other Big Day Outs I’d gone to,” he said. “It … turned into more of a sporting hooligan event more than anything.”

Music as sport; violence as patriotism — on the face of it, is it really drawing that long a bow to suggest that consumerism can lead to fascism? I’m taking Ballard’s stripped-down perception over Liddle’s reactionary romanticism any day.

Final words… On the matter of Ballard’s politics, Iain Sinclair, in Tim’s interview for Ballardian, manages to hit the nail right on the head:

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that … are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue.

In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.”