REVIEW-ESSAYS
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Nicholas Ruddick
Falling Between Two Walls
Roger Luckhurst. "The Angle Between Two
Walls": The Fiction of J.G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin's
Press (800-221-7945), 1997. 228pp. $39.95.
The opening section of this book may be
summarized thus. Ballard is a writer who avoids the literary center. He dwells happily in
the banal suburbs and he writes, or rather is to be found operating, "however
uncertainly, in the genre of science fiction" (xii). This produces unease and
embarrassment and resistance and even "visible discomfort" in his readers
(xiii). Or perhaps it is what his work is about that makes us squirm in our seats.
Regardless, the aim of this study is to "describe and sustain" this unease
(xiii). My unease was duly sustained.
Early on, Luckhurst introduces the Derridean idea
of la brisure or hinge, [Brisure is not properly an object (a hinge) but
a sign (a point of cleavage, with the secondary meaning, shared with English, of a mark of
difference in heraldry). Thus understood, the idea would accord better with Ballard's
"angle between two walls] suggesting that this concept helps us understand the
generic position of Ballard's work--it at once joins and separates two planes, primarily
sf and the mainstream, but also by extension high and low art, avant-garde and popular
literature. Thus Ballard's work can be used to examine generic assumptions-- or, as
Luckhurst puts it, it "can hold strategic importance in interrogating unexamined
categories of literary value" (xiii). But this isn't quite the same thing, in that it
seems to imply that either no one has thought of Ballard as difficult to categorize
generically (untrue), or that no one has thought of giving high literary value to
Ballard's or any other fiction that positions itself within a genre with low prestige
(also untrue).
Still, Luckhurst certainly feels that sf
criticism has not come to grips with Ballard. What he will do is, first, "where
necessary...contextualize Ballard's fiction within the science fiction genre" (xiii).
Second, he will travel "over many terrains more or less foreign to science fiction:
existentialism, Surrealism, Pop Art, psychoanalysis, ethnologies of contemporary
supermodernity, and the theory of autobiography, to name but a few" (xiv). All of
these "terrains" do indeed overlap with Ballard's fiction. If we grant Luckhurst
metaphorical latitude, some "passings over" (xix) of these terrains
adjacent to Ballard's fiction might very well make the whole territory "resonate more
widely" (xiv). However, it is already unclear how hinges might facilitate the aerial
project, and whether mapping or bombing is on the agenda.
What we then get are five chapters that between
them deal with the highlights of the Ballardian oeuvre from The Drowned World
(1962) to The Kindness of Women (1991) in roughly chronological order, though
suppressing developmental metaphors and value judgments. The culminating section of the
final chapter, on Vermilion Sands (1971), offers a single bizarre exception to
the method just described. Otherwise, we will not learn the relationship of these works to
each other or to the author, nor how they rank as artistic achievements, but we will
instead learn what bodies of theory the works bring to Luckhurst's mind as he overpasses
them.
Chapter One, "J. G. Ballard and the
Catastrophe of Genre," begins with the assumption that the criticism of sf
"remains 'contaminated' by the image of the uncritical, adulatory fan" (2). Luckhurst perhaps means by this that he feels, or is made to feel, that sf criticism is
always somehow illegitimate. He acknowledges that sf courses "proliferate (especially
in America) and the genre has recently become central to theorists of postmodernism"
(2-3), but the question of legitimacy is not thereby resolved for him. Perhaps he finds
references to sf by fashionable contemporary theorists unsatisfactory. If so, I would
concur. Mainstream critics are often ignorant of the discourse of sf, but feel that they
can go slumming in it when it suits them, and are surprised when the uncouth natives don't
feel honored by their condescension. Ballard is a writer who can only be properly
understood through sf--specifically through British sf, at a tangent not only to the
mainstream but also to the popular-cultural institution of American sf. The problem of
genre chez Ballard is something of a mirage that dissolves when he is placed in
the appropriate context.
But this is not Luckhurst's trajectory at all.
Instead he emphasizes the issue of legitimacy by referring to cultural theories of 1950s
B-movies. Ballard is almost forgotten under the hard rain of names: Brantlinger, Luciano,
Sontag, Sobchack, Jameson, Huyssen, McHale. The aim of the exercise is to show that,
basically, from the perspective of high culture, sf is crap, except (perhaps) for Ballard.
Then Luckhurst deals with "internal legitimations," by which he means the
expressions of insecurity evident in the attempt of sf critics to legitimize sf as a
genre. The chief problem here is that most of the arguments he rehearses are old hat
(based on hoary definitions by Amis, Heinlein, and a Suvin article of 1972), and fail to
take properly into account the British context of Ballard. At one point Gernsback is
revealed triumphantly as the skeleton in sf's closet, but as it then dawns that the
linkage between Hugo G. and Jim B. is a mite tenuous, he is as suddenly dropped again.
Finally, in a section called "J. G. Ballard
and the Generic Law," Luckhurst manages to impose his own generic ideas on Ballard's
fiction to the extent that the fiction becomes about generic issues, as if
Ballard had no higher aim than to question which shelf his books were sold from. This
argument leads to some very unlikely conclusions. So, Ballard's early heroes such as
Kerans in The Drowned World and Ransom in The Crystal World (1966) seek
"the ecstatic release, the abandonment of generic boundaries.... these stories do no
less than expose the death-drive of science fiction" (33). I
suspect that this italicized revelation, elaborated in Luckhurst's essay "The Many
Deaths of Science Fiction" in the March 1994 SFS, may be slightly tainted by
anthropomorphism and wishful thinking.
Luckhurst remarks at the start of Chapter Two,
"J.G. Ballard and the Genre of Catastrophe," that Ballard's Disaster Quartet has
"invoked [generated?] an intense critical industry" (39), but then reveals that
he has not read most of what this industry has had to say. In a discussion of catastrophe
fiction and the end of empire he does drop the names of some works of British catastrophe
fiction, but the progress made by one-sentence plot summaries and a few token statistics
about decolonization is undone by a switching back and forth in history--Doyle, Wyndham,
Bennett, Wells, Shiel, Golding, Connington, Hoyle--and a carelessness with details.
History is the key to the imperial theme in British disaster fiction, a history that
Ballard himself lived through in a remarkable way. But Luckhurst has little interest in
history, and appears to have read neither Warren Wagar's Terminal Visions (1982)
nor Brian Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain (1985). So much for
contextualization.
Chapter Three, "The Atrocity Exhibition and
the Problematic of the Avant-Garde," promises the most, in that discussion of
Ballard's most difficult work is now eased by the existence of the annotated edition
issued by Re/Search (1990). Though there is enough in this chapter to make one want to
re-read The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), far too much has a minimal relation to
the text under discussion. There is a long digression on the relation of the theories of
the avant-garde by Adorno, Lukács, and Bürger; there is a brief section on the reception
of the work; there is an interesting reading of certain sections of the work marred by the
reference to the central figure, Traven, etc., as the "T-cell," (86) a witticism
that reveals an utter insensitivity to the historicity of the text. Ballard has left many
clues that there are strong narratives buried in the non-linear paragraphs, and he has
also suggested that the whole of the 1960s, avant-garde and all, could be reconstructed
from The Atrocity Exhibition. But Luckhurst either isn't aware of these threads
or isn't interested in pursuing them. He does raise, only to fudge, the interesting
problem of violence against women in Ballard. As it is "intractable and
troubling" it must be rewritten "in figural terms" (113) until its
undecidability becomes a mark of virtue. For Luckhurst is interested in the
"problematic" of the idea of an avant-garde in the late twentieth-century, not
in the problem of Ballard's fiction. Presumably we must refigure the subtitle of his book
into something more indeterminate.
The fourth chapter, "Mediation, Simulation,
Recalcitrance: Crash to Hello America, with Detours," offers a
"traversal" (150) of certain ideas as they appear in Ballard and then reappear
in Baudrillard and other theorists. It's very easy to see the affinities between Ballard
and Baudrillard, rather harder to understand the significant differences that explain
Ballard's very qualified admiration of Baudrillard, and Baudrillard's interesting
misreading of Crash (1975). The issue of Ballard and Freud--on the one hand, the
uncanny; on the other, the death instinct--is also easy to raise, difficult to handle
lucidly or concisely. Suffice it to say that in the section on Hello America
(1981) this and other material is all marshaled to prove the point that "the
scenario of simulation supplied by Crash" should not be "taken out of
context of the series in which it is written and work to supply a single thesis for the
oeuvre" (150) in accord with current fashionable theories. Strangely, by this
"series" Luckhurst seems not to mean the Urban Disaster Trilogy, in that High-Rise
(1975) is barely mentioned, but the series of texts, beginning with the early story
"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 question of what makes his texts
Ballardian. In an attempt to answer this question without easy recourse to the obviously
Ballardian motifs, stylistic tics, obsessive subjects and themes, Luckhurst moves from
those suspiciously transparent autobiographical texts, Empire of the Sun (1984)
and The Kindness of Women, back to Vermilion Sands, which supposedly
offers the Ballardian signature at its purest. The aim of this chapter will be to get at
the quintessential Ballard, and for Luckhurst that is the unreadable Ballard.
In an interview with Paul di Filippo in Science
Fiction Eye 8 (Winter 1991), Ballard, asked about the post-modernist novel, notes
that "post-modernism represents a dead-end, a desperate admission that the author has
nothing to say and can only think of evermore devious ways of disguising the fact"
(71). Ballard dismisses William Gaddis as "Unreadable. Postmodernism trapped inside
an Escher staircase" (71). Umberto Eco is also "Unreadable. A marketing
triumph" (72). On the question of unreadability, Luckhurst might have done well to
ponder these and many other of Ballard's similar statements about his own aesthetic
preferences that he has made with some consistency over the years. Ballard is not always
trustworthy, but I think we can assume that unreadability is not a quality he strives for
in his fiction.
In the place of a conclusion, Luckhurst offers a
meditation on Vermilion Sands, which, he concludes, is an unreadable text. He is
not far from wrong-- Vermilion Sands is often clumsily written and tediously
repetitive--and he offers some convincing examples of Ballard's "abuse of
tropes" (174) in such passages as "the piercing cry of the sand-rays over the
open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds" (qtd 175). "Is it simply bad
writing?" Luckhurst asks, having correctly shown that it is (175). But he has read
enough deconstruction to have learned that Yes means No. After a detour through de Man,
Culler, and Derrida, we are asked to believe that unreadability is, in the end, the
quintessence of Ballard, that "an obsessively repetitive text enchains [entails?] an
obsessively repetitive reading.... to read Ballard is to be held by a lure that is
generated by an irreducible core of unreadability" (180). This may reveal something
about the repetition compulsion in the critic, but I find that the elevation of
unreadability into a mark--the mark--of Ballard's distinction is frankly silly.
For however it is intended, this argument comes across not as a plea for metaphoric
unreadability, meaning something like a text's subtle evasion of totalizing
interpretation, but as a gratuitous inversion of aesthetic values, in which we are asked
to believe that one of Ballard's weakest books is his best because of its weaknesses.
Perhaps Luckhurst realizes that he's gone too far
off track here, for why else would he conclude by confessing that "my principal
anxiety is to what extent I have managed to evade collapsing into an obsessive reading
myself, one which loses all critical distance and merely reiterates textual perversities
that have failed to be mastered"? (180). This is supposed to be disarming, the critic
confessing a knowledge of his own limitations, but it comes across as unprofessional. This
is not because he says, "I might have got certain things wrong," but because he
pleads, "If I have, don't judge me too harshly."
There are some textbook examples here of the
damage to one's credibility that can be caused by a) not doing one's homework, b) copying
someone else's homework, or c) doing the wrong homework. Luckhurst is discussing the
origin of the term "inner space." He tells us (49) that the Nicholls Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction ascribes the coinage to Ballard in 1962, but that actually the
term can be traced to J.B. Priestley in 1953. Both of these statements are true, but it is
an entry in the superseded first edition of the Encyclopedia (1979) to which
Luckhurst is referring. He seems unaware that there appeared in 1993 a revised and greatly
expanded second edition of the standard reference work in the sf field (which corrects the
ascription). More seriously, he at the same time fails to credit Colin Greenland's The
Entropy Exhibition (1983; 52-53) for the Priestley reference, making it sound as if
he, Luckhurst, had discovered it. This is perilously close to plagiarism, and it is not
the only example. I will ascribe Luckhurst's hapless sortie over British catastrophe
fiction in chapter two to ignorance of my Ultimate Island (1993). He seems to
think that Aldiss's Billion Year Spree (1973; no mention of Trillion) was
the last word on this subject. I confess that it felt more than just uncanny to watch him
struggling to clarify the relationship between Ballard and Baudrillard in his section on Crash,
apparently in blissful ignorance of an essay entitled "Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard"
in the November, 1992 SFS.
Here are some of the technical problems that mar
this study. There is an excessive use of ironic quotation marks around such phrases as
"postmodernist," "thetic," and "science fiction." If you
don't really mean the word you're using, use a better word--buy a thesaurus. There is a
tendency to the tautologous: "useless, futile junk" (139); "coercive
Fascism" (140); "repetitive recurrence" (168). Words are made up
inadvertently: "allusionistic" (for allusive, 74); "volatizing" (for
volatilizing, but meaning blurring, 142); "surveyal" (for survey, 143);
"fantasmatic" (for phantasmal or phantasmic, 143). Metaphors are mixed:
intolerable oscillation is inserted into borders that patrol (75); a terrain announces
(140); entrapment is shattered (148). The critical jargon becomes at times unreadable:
"the landscape of [Hello America] is at once a knowing and
disadjusted reiteration of colonial projections, satirizing neo-colonial repetition via
disjunctive post-colonial temporal effects, but the extent of that satire remains
undeterminable--the space between identical and differential repetition of colonial images
uncertain" (149-50). This is probably not pure nonsense, but it is a very good
imitation of it.
We are told early on that this book is not a
survey of Ballard's oeuvre because David Pringle and Peter Brigg have already done surveys
of "Ballard's vast output over forty years of writing" (xiii). Well, this isn't
quite true. Pringle's 64-page booklet Earth Is the Alien Planet (1979)
gets as far as the stories of Low-Flying Aircraft (1976). Brigg's J.G.
Ballard (1985), a short monograph in the Starmont series, gets to Empire of the
Sun. Ballard studies cry out for an extensive examination of the oeuvre to date,
building on the large body of critical work that has already been done, chiefly by sf
critics. Sweeping statements about Ballard's major status have been made (I have been
guilty of them myself), but no critic has yet proved energetic enough to test 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 view
is incorrect and requires a full response. Stephenson's book at least has a clear thesis
and does try to offer a consistent reading of Ballard's oeuvre.
Luckhurst, disagreeing with Stephenson, fails to
build a thesis of his own, and indeed offers very little that is new or interesting about
Ballard--on occasion he triumphantly reinvents the wheel only to use it as a treadmill. He
begins with a mystification of an obvious and frequently-rehearsed idea: Ballard's fiction
doesn't quite fit most people's idea of sf. Then he abandons it to make a few global
sweeps of theoretical territory using certain texts by Ballard as his launch pad. Then he
attempts to come back to earth to justify the aimlessness of his divagations, burning up
on reentry. His book is useful only as a set of hints about how some of Ballard's fiction
anticipates or echoes the ideas of certain contemporary theorists.
Luckhurst, a British academic, wants to write on
sf but be taken seriously by his mainstream colleagues. Perhaps that is currently
difficult in Britain, but if so, he has the exciting prospect of being a pioneer in a
perfectly justified struggle for recognition. But this book will not win him many allies
in either camp, in that it adds almost nothing to our understanding of Ballard's literary
achievement or of sf as a genre. It often seems an unashamed and rather humorless attempt
to reveal how much high-powered contemporary literary, cultural, sociological, and
psychoanalytical theory Luckhurst has absorbed. If enough names are dropped, enough jargon
used, enough theory trotted out in Ballard's name, then perhaps the critic won't be
scoffed at by his colleagues as that sci-fi fellow.
If we can read through his clashing metaphors and
ponderous gallicisms, we can tell that Luckhurst likes Ballard, has read the Ballard works
he deals with (though not necessarily the Ballard criticism), and has processed a huge
body of theory. The "terrains" he "traverses" all do have a bearing on
Ballard. But he has helped perpetuate the very problem of legitimacy he is supposedly
struggling with. From the perspective of sf studies, this book has very little
credibility, as it ignores a large body of existing work on the author. Given what he says
about "internal legitimations" in this book, we can only assume that this is
because Luckhurst feels that sf criticism is always already illegitimate as serious
scholarship. To mainstream literary studies, whether he intends it or not, his book sends
this message: "Do you wonder why you find sf unreadable? Well, unreadability is a
crucial part of the aesthetics of good sf. And to prove my point, much of my argument will
be unreadable."
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