Ballardian

Here’s another completely random Ballard-referencing quote plucked completely from its context in time and space. It’s from Mr Will Self himself this time, and it’s taken from an interview he did to promote his novel How the Dead Live:

PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire?

WILL SELF: I do have some very defined and precise influences on my work and on how I see my work as a writer. Of the post-war writers, I stand most in thrall to J G Ballard, to his vision of an apocalyptic world. A world in which effect and in which feeling is to some extent deadened or even destroyed by alienation and by technology. I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes.

No intentional jokes in Ballard? Maybe not; but his work is full of keenly applied and intentional humour. Here’s a favourite ‘passage’ (oooh err, sounds a bit rude) from Crash: “…she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers grovelling at her pubis, as if rolling to death some small venereal snot…” (p. 180).

Then there’s the description of being serviced in The Kindness of Women: “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia” (p. 250). I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read these, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Granted, these examples aren’t exactly thigh slappers. There’s no punchline. And they’re different in execution (if not conceit) from the classic Self sex farce, typified by this passage from Self’s Cock:

“Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the estuarine sand; her great buttocks were shoved against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming” (pp. 25-26).

In terms of comedy value maybe it’s like comparing Terry Jones with John Cleese, but Ballard makes me laugh, that’s all there is to it, by underscoring the absurd stylisation sex can descend into.

James “Gags” Ballard does have his critics, though, like Brigette Frase. In her summation of Cocaine Nights (worst book of 1998, according to Brigette), she wrote that it was “a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really funny novel”.