Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

Fragments of Sussex

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

He, Suspension, Darkness Ballard's "condensed novels," brief snapshots of the century in turmoil, began in New Worlds in the early 1960's, were aggregated into The Atrocity Exhibition, a collection at the end of that decade and probably had more effect upon science fiction than any other work from that period. Ballard fractured narrative, he was disdainful of character, leery of progression; Ballard had a different idea of narrative. Images, surreal or stenographic, were juxtaposed in seemingly arbitrary ways. Dead actresses inflated to enormous proportions floated over skyscrapers; dead politicians' fatal wounds were measured and compressed. Automobiles and corpses floated equidistant in the timeless river without banks; the assassination of JFK was considered as a motor race. Easier to reproduce (or parody) than explain, the condensed novels were widely imitated (there was a period where almost every writer in New Worlds was working in that style), widely condemned, occasionally censored, often reviled. Nelson Doubleday saw an advance reading copy of The Atrocity Exhibition and demanded that the work be scrapped. (Years later Grove Press published it under a different title.) The condensed novels share with Beethoven's Quartets or Picasso's Guernica one of the distinct marks of advanced (if not completely successful) art; they are just as ahead of their time decades after their creation as they were at inception. Much of the supposed avant-garde—think of Gertrude Stein, of DuChamp—becomes rancid, self-conscious, dated to later generations. The real avant-garde does not. It remains dangerous.

Ballard's was a dangerous vision all right; he cooled a little after Crash in the mid-seventies but he always stayed above lukewarm, and desperate little fragments like the Kafkaesque "The Autobiography of J.G.B." (an early nineties fragment republished by The New Yorker a week after his death) showed him circling the site of the Atrocity Exhibition thirty years later with no less keenness of vision. He complemented his desperate, fragmented work with a quiet widower's life in the suburbs, raising young children and living unobtrusively. Never a better proponent of Flaubert's prescription: "We must live like the bourgeois so we may be dangerous in our work."

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Me, Coma, Boorman: Apollo 10 circled the planet at Christmas in 1968 and its occupants read verses from the Bible; control broadcast the reading to all of the continents. "What this proves," Donald Wollheim said to me that month, laughing bitterly (he knew no other form of laughter) "is that the banality of reality will always outdo the most banal predictions of our science fiction hacks." We were essaying our first trembling steps into space with the sanctimony and equipment of a revivalist tent. This spiritual impoverishment in the name of spiritual feeling struck me as a signal and perhaps inevitable outcome of overwhelming technology. Ballard's condensed novels seemed to be obsessed by this very point; the deeper we probed, the sillier we got. The image of Ronald Reagan, to Ballard, was the salient prop of our time; the washed-up old actor was disguised as Intrepid and this is one of the reasons why the unnamed narrator of that condensed novel wanted to have intercourse with him. (Ballard had a somewhat blunter title and it was Doubleday's acquaintance with this work which inspired his order that all copies be destroyed before publication.) The further out we went, the dumber and more sentimental we would become. The cosmos was just too much for us, or at least for the devices we had developed to tame the cosmos. That seemed to be Ballard's point. The machines of loving grace had the power to inflate a dead actress to enormous proportions, to send her zooming—like Woody Allen's later caricature of Mom—zooming over the parapets. The engines of fire (developed by legions of the lowest bidders) had the power to put the New Testament into fixed order for international broadcast. All that we were learning was now capable of obliterating self-knowledge. The Terminal Beach yawned toward infinity; geology's most sophisticated devices could not assess its origin or predict its sprawl. The geography could be explained but it could not be understood.

This was what I took to be Ballard's point, and I found that it led to other conclusions on the subject. ("The Mask of the dead Chief Clerk hung in the Town Square long after his departure." "Control has made clear to us that cursing in orbit is absolutely unacceptable.") Ballard's point seemed inevitable, at least to me, and at this time, in his wake, I felt that he in Sussex and I in New York were the only writers in the language who were coming to terms with the Apollo program in just that way . . . who saw that the spiritual impoverishment countering technology was so deadening that it would eventually deaden and destroy the project itself. To me this was not such an original or signal insight, any fiction writer reading the newspapers with fair alertness would seem capable of understanding this . . . but with these two exceptions none of them were.

That all began to quickly change after 7/20/69 and the Apollo Moon landing of course. Then, Apollo 13's unprecedented public near disaster and Apollo 13's unprecedented public near disaster did indeed seem to make the obvious obvious. Mailer's 1972 Of A Fire On The Moon pretty well conveyed this set of possibilities to the public. But there was a period of about five years—from, say, the earlier Apollo missions to Boorman—when Ballard and I seemed alone in our understanding that the technological embrace of technology would involve the spirit's retreat from the spirit.

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The Voices of Time. Well, of course, all of this was a long time ago. Forty years is also the distance from the Wright Brothers to the B-29. A few weeks ago, a 20-year-old in a University class asked of my story "Triptych," the "Control says there will be no cursing in orbit" story (Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1969) which the class had been compelled by their Professor, an old friend, to read for their Politics & Technology course, "Did you get a big reaction to this story? What did readers think of it? Was it controversial in science fiction?" "I can only answer that by quoting the late Donald Barthelme," I said, "He compared publishing short stories in the United States to dropping feathers in a well. And Barthelme was publishing in The New Yorker, not science fiction magazines."

Feathers in a well. You, Coma, Marilyn Monroe.

J.G. Ballard: The Drowned Giant.

May 2009

—New Jersey

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