Ballardian

I’ve just come across news of a collection of essays, City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. It came out in April 2007, but completely flew under my radar. If you click on ’sample pdf’ at the bottom of that link, you’ll come across this:

Chapter 11: Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature — David Cunningham

David Cunningham organizes his essay around a contemporary pairing: Sinclair and J. G. Ballard. Sinclair, of course, has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to and interest in Ballard’s work, not least through his BFI book on Crash. Cunningham however, displays the same distrust of maps of writerly influence as Robert Sheppard does in his essay for this volume. Rather than emphasizing the similarities between the two, Cunningham suggests that their meeting point in Sinclair’s work is marked by a tension: the “textual presence of Ballard is a rather more disturbing presence within Sinclair’s writing than are the familiar allusions to Blake, Dickens, Conrad, et al.” For Cunningham, this tension is created by the two writers’ differing apprehensions of contemporary space and place. While Ballard writes a London characterized by the “non-places” of undifferentiated spaces of global capital (Castell’s “space of flows”), Sinclair continually asserts the specificity of place (and place-myth, as Brian Baker points out) and seeks its reenchantment.

The Sinclair-Ballard connection, in Cunningham’s reading, is not a straightforward question of influence, still less a decision readers must make between persuasive versions of the same city, but an opportunity to trace, “through their immanent confrontation, the role of writing, and of cultural production more generally, at an historical moment marked by the particular spatial relations generated by the dialectic of places and flows.”

Has anyone read the book, and this chapter in particular? I’m curious to know if David Cunningham refers to the Sinclair interview that Tim conducted for this site, but of course I’m also keen to read what sounds like a very interesting piece. Unfortunately, the book appears to be only available in hardcover — a little beyond my budget for the time being.