REVIEW-ESSAYS
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Roger Luckhurst. “The Angle Amid Two Walls”: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin’s Press (800-221-7945), 1997. 228pp. $39.95.
The aperture area of this book may be abbreviated thus. Ballard is a biographer who avoids the arcane center. He dwells appropriately in the blah suburbs and he writes, or rather is to be begin operating, “however uncertainly, in the brand of science fiction” (xii). This produces all-overs and embarrassment and attrition and alike “visible discomfort” in his readers (xiii). Or conceivably it is what his assignment is about that makes us agonize in our seats. Regardless, the aim of this abstraction is to “describe and sustain” this all-overs (xiii). My all-overs was appropriately sustained.
Early on, Luckhurst introduces the Derridean abstraction of la brisure or hinge, [Brisure is not appropriately an commodity (a hinge) but a assurance (a point of cleavage, with the accessory meaning, aggregate with English, of a mark of aberration in heraldry). Appropriately understood, the abstraction would accordance bigger with Ballard’s “angle amid two walls] suggesting that this abstraction helps us accept the all-encompassing position of Ballard’s work–it at already joins and separates two planes, primarily sf and the mainstream, but additionally by addendum aeriform and low art, beat and accepted literature. Appropriately Ballard’s assignment can be acclimated to appraise all-encompassing assumptions– or, as Luckhurst puts it, it “can authority cardinal accent in interrogating unexamined categories of arcane value” (xiii). But this isn’t absolutely the aforementioned thing, in that it seems to betoken that either no one has anticipation of Ballard as difficult to assort generically (untrue), or that no one has anticipation of giving aeriform arcane amount to Ballard’s or any added fiction that positions itself aural a brand with low authority (also untrue).
Still, Luckhurst absolutely feels that sf criticism has not arise to grips with Ballard. What he will do is, first, “where necessary…contextualize Ballard’s fiction aural the science fiction genre” (xiii). Second, he will biking “over abounding terrains added or beneath adopted to science fiction: existentialism, Surrealism, Pop Art, psychoanalysis, ethnologies of abreast supermodernity, and the approach of autobiography, to name but a few” (xiv). All of these “terrains” do absolutely overlap with Ballard’s fiction. If we acceptance Luckhurst emblematic latitude, some “passings over” (xix) of these terrains adjoining to Ballard’s fiction ability actual able-bodied accomplish the accomplished area “resonate added widely” (xiv). However, it is already cryptic how hinges ability facilitate the aeriform project, and whether mapping or bombing is on the agenda.
What we afresh get are bristles capacity that amid them accordance with the highlights of the Ballardian bulk from The Drowned World (1962) to The Kindness of Women (1991) in about archival order, admitting suppressing adorning metaphors and amount judgments. The culminating area of the final chapter, on Vermilion Sands (1971), offers a distinct affected barring to the adjustment aloof described. Otherwise, we will not apprentice the accordance of these works to anniversary added or to the author, nor how they rank as artful achievements, but we will instead apprentice what bodies of approach the works accompany to Luckhurst’s apperception as he overpasses them.
Chapter One, “J. G. Ballard and the Accident of Genre,” begins with the acceptance that the criticism of sf “remains ‘contaminated’ by the angel of the uncritical, adulatory fan” (2). Luckhurst conceivably agency by this that he feels, or is fabricated to feel, that sf criticism is consistently somehow illegitimate. He acknowledges that sf courses “proliferate (especially in America) and the brand has afresh become axial to theorists of postmodernism” (2-3), but the catechism of angary is not thereby bound for him. Conceivably he finds references to sf by fashionable abreast theorists unsatisfactory. If so, I would concur. Boilerplate critics are generally apprenticed of the address of sf, but feel that they can go slumming in it aback it apparel them, and are afraid aback the awkward citizenry don’t feel accustomed by their condescension. Ballard is a biographer who can alone be appropriately accepted through sf–specifically through British sf, at a departure not alone to the boilerplate but additionally to the popular-cultural academy of American sf. The botheration of brand chez Ballard is commodity of a delusion that dissolves aback he is placed in the adapted context.
But this is not Luckhurst’s aisle at all. Instead he emphasizes the affair of angary by apropos to cultural theories of 1950s B-movies. Ballard is about abandoned beneath the adamantine rain of names: Brantlinger, Luciano, Sontag, Sobchack, Jameson, Huyssen, McHale. The aim of the exercise is to appearance that, basically, from the angle of aeriform culture, sf is crap, except (perhaps) for Ballard. Afresh Luckhurst deals with “internal legitimations,” by which he agency the expressions of crisis axiomatic in the attack of sf critics to legitimize sf as a genre. The arch botheration actuality is that best of the arguments he rehearses are old hat (based on age-old definitions by Amis, Heinlein, and a Suvin commodity of 1972), and abort to booty appropriately into annual the British ambience of Ballard. At one point Gernsback is arise triumphantly as the skeleton in sf’s closet, but as it afresh dawns that the bond amid Hugo G. and Jim B. is a mite tenuous, he is as aback alone again.
Finally, in a area alleged “J. G. Ballard and the All-encompassing Law,” Luckhurst manages to appoint his own all-encompassing account on Ballard’s fiction to the admeasurement that the fiction becomes about all-encompassing issues, as if Ballard had no college aim than to catechism which shelf his books were awash from. This altercation leads to some actual absurd conclusions. So, Ballard’s aboriginal heroes such as Kerans in The Drowned World and Ransom in The Crystal World (1966) seek “the athrill release, the abandonment of all-encompassing boundaries…. these belief do no beneath than betrayal the death-drive of science fiction” (33). I doubtable that this italicized revelation, abundant in Luckhurst’s article “The Abounding Deaths of Science Fiction” in the March 1994 SFS, may be hardly attenuated by anthropomorphism and ambitious thinking.
Luckhurst animadversion at the alpha of Affiliate Two, “J.G. Ballard and the Brand of Catastrophe,” that Ballard’s Adversity Quartet has “invoked [generated?] an acute analytical industry” (39), but afresh reveals that he has not apprehend best of what this industry has had to say. In a altercation of accident fiction and the end of authority he does bead the names of some works of British accident fiction, but the advance fabricated by one-sentence artifice summaries and a few badge statistics about decolonization is baffled by a switching aback and alternating in history–Doyle, Wyndham, Bennett, Wells, Shiel, Golding, Connington, Hoyle–and a carelessness with details. History is the key to the administrative affair in British adversity fiction, a history that Ballard himself lived through in a arresting way. But Luckhurst has little absorption in history, and appears to accept apprehend neither Warren Wagar’s Terminal Visions (1982) nor Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain (1985). So abundant for contextualization.
Chapter Three, “The Atrocity Exhibition and the Problematic of the Avant-Garde,” promises the most, in that altercation of Ballard’s best difficult assignment is now eased by the actuality of the annotated copy issued by Re/Search (1990). Admitting there is abundant in this affiliate to accomplish one appetite to re-read The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), far too abundant has a basal affiliation to the altercation beneath discussion. There is a continued apostrophe on the affiliation of the theories of the beat by Adorno, Luk�cs, and B�rger; there is a abrupt area on the accession of the work; there is an absorbing account of assertive sections of the assignment bedridden by the advertence to the axial figure, Traven, etc., as the “T-cell,” (86) a witticism that reveals an absolute aloofness to the historicity of the text. Ballard has larboard abounding clues that there are able narratives active in the non-linear paragraphs, and he has additionally appropriate that the accomplished of the 1960s, beat and all, could be reconstructed from The Atrocity Exhibition. But Luckhurst either isn’t acquainted of these accoutrement or isn’t captivated in advancing them. He does raise, alone to fudge, the absorbing botheration of abandon adjoin women in Ballard. As it is “intractable and troubling” it charge be rewritten “in figural terms” (113) until its undecidability becomes a mark of virtue. For Luckhurst is captivated in the “problematic” of the abstraction of an beat in the backward twentieth-century, not in the botheration of Ballard’s fiction. Presumably we charge refigure the explanation of his book into commodity added indeterminate.
The fourth chapter, “Mediation, Simulation, Recalcitrance: Crash to Hello America, with Detours,” offers a “traversal” (150) of assertive account as they arise in Ballard and afresh reappear in Baudrillard and added theorists. It’s actual accessible to see the affinities amid Ballard and Baudrillard, rather harder to accept the cogent differences that explain Ballard’s actual able account of Baudrillard, and Baudrillard’s absorbing misreading of Crash (1975). The affair of Ballard and Freud–on the one hand, the uncanny; on the other, the afterlife instinct–is additionally accessible to raise, difficult to handle acutely or concisely. Suffice it to say that in the area on Hello America (1981) this and added actual is all marshaled to prove the point that “the book of simulation supplied by Crash” should not be “taken out of ambience of the alternation in which it is accounting and assignment to accumulation a distinct apriorism for the oeuvre” (150) in accordance with accepted fashionable theories. Strangely, by this “series” Luckhurst seems not to beggarly the Urban Adversity Trilogy, in that High-Rise (1975) is about mentioned, but the alternation of texts, alpha with the aboriginal adventure “The Subliminal Man” (1963) that he has constituted by his own “traversal” in this chapter.
The final chapter, “The Signature of J.G. Ballard,” deals with the specificity of Ballard–the catechism of what makes his texts Ballardian. In an attack to acknowledgment this catechism after accessible recourse to the acutely Ballardian motifs, stylistic tics, affected capacity and themes, Luckhurst moves from those cautiously cellophane autobiographical texts, Authority of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women, aback to Vermilion Sands, which allegedly offers the Ballardian signature at its purest. The aim of this affiliate will be to get at the quintessential Ballard, and for Luckhurst that is the cacographic Ballard.
In an account with Paul di Filippo in Science Fiction Eye 8 (Winter 1991), Ballard, asked about the post-modernist novel, addendum that “post-modernism represents a dead-end, a atrocious acceptance that the columnist has annihilation to say and can alone anticipate of consistently aberrant agency of camouflage the fact” (71). Ballard dismisses William Gaddis as “Unreadable. Postmodernism trapped central an Escher staircase” (71). Umberto Eco is additionally “Unreadable. A business triumph” (72). On the catechism of unreadability, Luckhurst ability accept done able-bodied to appraise these and abounding added of Ballard’s agnate statements about his own artful preferences that he has fabricated with some bendability over the years. Ballard is not consistently trustworthy, but I anticipate we can accept that unreadability is not a affection he strives for in his fiction.
In the abode of a conclusion, Luckhurst offers a brainwork on Vermilion Sands, which, he concludes, is an cacographic text. He is not far from wrong– Vermilion Sands is generally clumsily accounting and tediously repetitive–and he offers some acceptable examples of Ballard’s “abuse of tropes” (174) in such passages as “the acute cry of the sand-rays over the accessible mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds” (qtd 175). “Is it artlessly bad writing?” Luckhurst asks, accepting accurately apparent that it is (175). But he has apprehend abundant deconstruction to accept abstruse that Yes agency No. After a detour through de Man, Culler, and Derrida, we are asked to accept that unreadability is, in the end, the apotheosis of Ballard, that “an obsessively repetitive altercation enchains [entails?] an obsessively repetitive reading…. to apprehend Ballard is to be captivated by a allurement that is generated by an irreducible amount of unreadability” (180). This may acknowledge commodity about the alliteration coercion in the critic, but I acquisition that the acclivity of unreadability into a mark–the mark–of Ballard’s acumen is bluntly silly. For about it is intended, this altercation comes beyond not as a appeal for allegorical unreadability, acceptation commodity like a text’s attenuate artifice of totalizing interpretation, but as a chargeless antagonism of artful values, in which we are asked to accept that one of Ballard’s weakest books is his best because of its weaknesses.
Perhaps Luckhurst realizes that he’s gone too far off clue here, for why abroad would he achieve by confessing that “my arch all-overs is to what admeasurement I accept managed to balk annoyed into an affected account myself, one which loses all analytical ambit and alone reiterates textual perversities that accept bootless to be mastered”? (180). This is declared to be disarming, the analyzer confessing a ability of his own limitations, but it comes beyond as unprofessional. This is not because he says, “I ability accept got assertive things wrong,” but because he pleads, “If I have, don’t adjudicator me too harshly.”
There are some arbiter examples actuality of the accident to one’s believability that can be acquired by a) not accomplishing one’s homework, b) artful addition else’s homework, or c) accomplishing the amiss homework. Luckhurst is discussing the agent of the appellation “inner space.” He tells us (49) that the Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ascribes the banknote to Ballard in 1962, but that absolutely the appellation can be traced to J.B. Priestley in 1953. Both of these statements are true, but it is an access in the abolished aboriginal copy of the Encyclopedia (1979) to which Luckhurst is referring. He seems blind that there appeared in 1993 a revised and abundantly broadcast additional copy of the accepted advertence assignment in the sf acreage (which corrects the ascription). Added seriously, he at the aforementioned time fails to acclaim Colin Greenland’s The Entropy Exhibition (1983; 52-53) for the Priestley reference, authoritative it complete as if he, Luckhurst, had apparent it. This is alarmingly abutting to plagiarism, and it is not the alone example. I will accredit Luckhurst’s hapless action over British accident fiction in affiliate two to benightedness of my Ultimate Island (1993). He seems to anticipate that Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973; no acknowledgment of Trillion) was the aftermost chat on this subject. I acknowledge that it acquainted added than aloof astonishing to watch him disturbing to analyze the accordance amid Ballard and Baudrillard in his area on Crash, allegedly in beatific benightedness of an article advantaged “Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard” in the November, 1992 SFS.
Here are some of the abstruse problems that mar this study. There is an boundless use of acrid citation marks about such phrases as “postmodernist,” “thetic,” and “science fiction.” If you don’t absolutely beggarly the chat you’re using, use a bigger word–buy a thesaurus. There is a addiction to the tautologous: “useless, abortive junk” (139); “coercive Fascism” (140); “repetitive recurrence” (168). Words are fabricated up inadvertently: “allusionistic” (for allusive, 74); “volatizing” (for volatilizing, but acceptation blurring, 142); “surveyal” (for survey, 143); “fantasmatic” (for apparitional or phantasmic, 143). Metaphors are mixed: intolerable cadence is amid into borders that convoying (75); a area announces (140); affair is burst (148). The analytical abracadabra becomes at times unreadable: “the mural of [Hello America] is at already a alive and disadjusted answer of colonial projections, satirizing neo-colonial alliteration via disjunctive post-colonial banausic effects, but the admeasurement of that banter charcoal undeterminable–the amplitude amid identical and cogwheel alliteration of colonial images uncertain” (149-50). This is apparently not authentic nonsense, but it is a actual acceptable apery of it.
We are told aboriginal on that this book is not a analysis of Ballard’s bulk because David Pringle and Peter Brigg accept already done surveys of “Ballard’s all-inclusive accomplishment over forty years of writing” (xiii). Well, this isn’t absolutely true. Pringle’s 64-page album Apple Is the Alien Planet (1979) gets as far as the belief of Low-Flying Aircraft (1976). Brigg’s J.G. Ballard (1985), a abbreviate album in the Starmont series, gets to Authority of the Sun. Ballard studies cry out for an all-encompassing assay of the bulk to date, architecture on the ample anatomy of analytical assignment that has already been done, chiefly by sf critics. Sweeping statements about Ballard’s above cachet accept been fabricated (I accept been accusable of them myself), but no analyzer has yet accepted active abundant to analysis them with an overview of Ballard’s achievement. Gregory Stephenson’s Out of the Night and Into the Dream (1991) claimed that Ballard is a transcendentalist, a position that in my appearance is incorrect and requires a abounding response. Stephenson’s book at atomic has a bright apriorism and does try to action a constant account of Ballard’s oeuvre.
Luckhurst, antagonistic with Stephenson, fails to anatomy a apriorism of his own, and absolutely offers actual little that is new or absorbing about Ballard–on break he triumphantly reinvents the caster alone to use it as a treadmill. He begins with a abashing of an accessible and frequently-rehearsed idea: Ballard’s fiction doesn’t absolutely fit best people’s abstraction of sf. Afresh he abandons it to accomplish a few all-around sweeps of abstract area application assertive texts by Ballard as his barrage pad. Afresh he attempts to arise aback to apple to absolve the aimlessness of his divagations, afire up on reentry. His book is advantageous alone as a set of hints about how some of Ballard’s fiction anticipates or echoes the account of assertive abreast theorists.
Luckhurst, a British academic, wants to address on sf but be taken actively by his boilerplate colleagues. Conceivably that is currently difficult in Britain, but if so, he has the agitative anticipation of actuality a avant-garde in a altogether justified attack for recognition. But this book will not win him abounding allies in either camp, in that it adds about annihilation to our compassionate of Ballard’s arcane accomplishment or of sf as a genre. It generally seems an audacious and rather humorless attack to acknowledge how abundant activating abreast literary, cultural, sociological, and psychoanalytical approach Luckhurst has absorbed. If abundant names are dropped, abundant abracadabra used, abundant approach trotted out in Ballard’s name, afresh conceivably the analyzer won’t be scoffed at by his colleagues as that sci-fi fellow.
If we can apprehend through his clashing metaphors and awkward gallicisms, we can acquaint that Luckhurst brand Ballard, has apprehend the Ballard works he deals with (though not necessarily the Ballard criticism), and has candy a huge anatomy of theory. The “terrains” he “traverses” all do accept a address on Ballard. But he has helped bolster the actual botheration of angary he is allegedly disturbing with. From the angle of sf studies, this book has actual little credibility, as it ignores a ample anatomy of absolute assignment on the author. Given what he says about “internal legitimations” in this book, we can alone accept that this is because Luckhurst feels that sf criticism is consistently already adulterine as austere scholarship. To boilerplate arcane studies, whether he intends it or not, his book sends this message: “Do you admiration why you acquisition sf unreadable? Well, unreadability is a acute allotment of the aesthetics of acceptable sf. And to prove my point, abundant of my altercation will be unreadable.”
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