This is by no means an adequate summary of the only hitherto unpublished text in this little garden of Burroughs. Ah Pook is Here is infinitely more thematically complex, more uncomfortable and replete with far more deadpan black humour than I have begun to suggest. But you can’t easily fillet the meaning out of Burroughs’ work because he is against succinct verbal exposition, which he sees as a sinister form of thought control. What he likes to do is hit you with an image and let the image act for itself.
No wonder, then, all these pieces reflect his interest in scripts composed of signs and hieroglyphs. Ah Pook is Here was originally intended as a picture-book based on the Mayan codices. The second piece, ‘The Book of Breething’, actually turns into pictures. In the third piece, ‘The Electronic Revolution’, Burroughs talks approvingly about Chinese, ‘a script derived from hieroglyphs . . . [and therefore] more closely related to the objects and areas described’.
Elsewhere, he defines words as ‘moving pictures’. The dialectic between the concrete and the discrete in Burroughs, between the solidity of the image and the arbitrariness of sequence, is what makes his own prose move, makes it kinetic, gives it, in spite of its obsession with death, mind-death, soul-death, death-in-life, its superabundant life.
(1979)
• 11 •
J. G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun
J. G. Ballard says he’s an optimist, which, given his penchant for apocalypses, initially seems unlikely but is nevertheless reassuring. He convinces me Reagan won’t start World War III because he’s too gaga to locate the whereabouts of the red button. Since, back in the Sixties, Ballard was the only sane person in the entire Western world who predicted the ex-movie actor would one day rise to the dizzying heights of the Presidency, maybe Ballard-the-prophet will hit target on this one too. Cross fingers.
It was in a story titled ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’, written, Ballard thinks, in 1966, that he foretold Reagan would run for the White House and that ‘the profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the US in the coming years’.
Not that he presented it as a prophecy exactly, or that ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ is a short story on the terms of V. S. Pritchett or William Trevor. It is a piece of fiction, a set of ferocious images, a fragment of Swiftian satire, and it subsequently formed part of a book called The Atrocity Exhibition, published in 1970, which is one of the important works of British fiction produced in those exploding years.
I read ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’ to a class of English Literature majors at a liberal East Coast college in one of the four states in the Union that stayed with Jimmy Carter that November day in 1980 when a British science-fiction writer’s mad notion came true. They laughed until they cried, except those who vice versa’d, and then they demanded: ‘Who is this man? He is one of your great writers! Why haven’t we heard of him before?’
Perhaps it was just because they were Eng. Lit. majors that they hadn’t heard of him before. He was certainly big stuff in the semiotics department already. Besides, Ballard doesn’t like to think of himself as a ‘literary man’. He bridles and huffs at the very thought. He is an imagery and ideas man, surreal, troubling – ‘sensitive and enigmatic’, The Times Literary Supplement once characterised his work, making him sound like Denton Welch, for God’s sake. He is not a fine-writing man:
I see myself primarily as an imaginative writer, and the imaginative writer isn’t primarily concerned with his own medium. The fact that I express myself in a prose narrative is in a sense incidental – if I’d had a different facility, it could have been painting. It’s the images I produce, and the ideas enshrined in the images that are the key things – their translation into words is the least important part of the enterprise.
In spite of that, Ballard is one of those rare beings who talk in grammatically correct sentences. His fiction has been characterised by restless and brilliant formal innovation, highly stylised, extreme and shocking violence, pitch-black humour . . . all the post-modernist characteristics. But you are still less likely to find Ballard on the shelf next to Barth and Barthelme and Coover than you are to find him filed along with Bug-Eyed Monster. After the publication of his new novel, Empire of the Sun, however, he will be among the bestsellers.
But up until now, Ballard has lived – very happily; he’s not one of those sf writers who grumble about being ghettoised – in the privileged seclusion of genre. That is, as a science-fiction writer, he’s been able on occasion to be as adventurous with narrative as he may be; to refer to Hans Bellmer or Max Ernst or Alfred Jarry as often as he feels the need without anybody putting him down for pretension. In fact, to carry on with all the freedoms of the ‘experimental’ writer who has an intelligent and sympathetically critical audience ever eager to find out what he has been up to, this time.
The price of all this? Even if he is greatly admired by Kathy Acker, has been a massive influence on performance art, and an inspiration to musicians and painters, Ballard is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, as such peers as Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. Fans such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess praise Ballard to the skies but they themselves are classified differently, as, God help us, ‘serious writers’ in comparison.
This is a price Ballard has been happy, nay, positively ecstatic to pay. He has fans at the very top end of the market, and fans in the pulps. The mainstream parts around him, leaving his feet comfortably dry. It has been thus ever since the delirious days of Michael Moorcock’s magazine, New Worlds, twenty years ago, when science fiction started to excavate a whole new era – inner space, i.e. the unconscious – and joined hands with surrealism.
Ballard was attracted to science fiction in the early days because, when he arrived in Britain from China, where he was born, after the war was over and as a stranger with a strange, cold eye, he found that the reality of British society seriously overstretched the traditional resources of British naturalistic fiction:
I wanted a revolutionary fiction; I wanted the recognition of the whole domain of the unconscious, something British naturalistic fiction never attempted. I wanted a fiction of the imagination which would tell us the truth about ourselves. I wanted the future, not the past – I wanted the future of the next five minutes.
One of the results of this desire was that Ballard became the great chronicler of the new, technological Britain. A man prone to thrust himself into the grip of obsessions – ‘I am my obsessions!’ – he grew increasingly obsessed by the aspects of our landscape those of us who grew up with the culturally programmed notion of Britain as a ‘green and pleasant land’ conspire to ignore. Motor-ways. High rises.
There eventually ensued novels of pure technological nightmare – Crash!, High Rise, The Concrete Island. These were the vinyl and broken glass, sex ’n’ violence novels, describing a landscape of desolation and disquiet similar to that of the novels of William Burroughs; the fame they brought was of a kind distinctly parallel to the norm of the world o’ books. Burgess and Kingsley Amis could go on admiring him in comfort, free from the suspicion he might creep up behind them and pinch their laurels, even if the younger Amis, as big a fan as his father, showed signs of picking up a trick or two from his hero.
Ballard’s thirty-odd-year career as a cult classic is, however, about to come to an end. He has, in his mid-fifties, produced what they call a ‘breakthrough’ novel. No doubt the ‘literary men’ (and women) will now treat Ballard as the sf writer who came in from the cold. Who finally put away childish things, man-powered flight, landscapes of flesh, the erotic geometry of the car crash, things like that, and wrote the Big Novel they always knew he’d got in him.
Yet Empire of the Sun, which is indeed a Big Novel, is manifestly the product of the same unique sensibility as his last major novel, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), and has a great deal in common with it. They share the theme of death and resurrection, the earlier one in a radiant, visionar
y mode, the later one as delirious obsession. But Empire of the Sun is a recreation of the recent past, not a myth of the near future, and the well-loved Ballardian leitmotifs, confinement, escape, flight, have the gritty three-dimensionality of real experience. The novel is even about a kind of apocalypse, the destruction of the British community in Shanghai by the Japanese.
All the same, the chapters have titles that recall those of earlier Ballard short stories: ‘The Drained Swimming Pool’, ‘The Open-Air Cinema’, ‘The Fallen Airman’. It is a shock to find so much of the recurrent, hypnotic imagery of J. G. Ballard moored to the soil of an authentic city, at an authentic date in real time – Shanghai, as the European residents of that city of salesmen are engulfed ineluctably in war. It was the place of Ballard’s childhood.
Empire of the Sun is, very notably, a novel about the fragility of the human body, and the dreadful spillability of that body’s essential juices, shit, piss, blood, pus. It is also about the resilience of children; and about the difficulty experienced by the British in adjusting to changing circumstances. More specifically, it is about one child’s war, and hence an investigation of twentieth-century warfare, in which non-combatants such as children and also the old, the weak, the sick increasingly fare worst. It is about one child’s war in a prison camp, and how he came to feel at home there.
There has, notes Ballard, been surprisingly little fiction about the war in the Far East, perhaps because the British lost it. No, he hasn’t read J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, which is an account of the fall of Singapore. ‘Was Farrell there?’ Ballard asked sharply. He obviously doesn’t trust book-based research in this area. A note at the front of Empire of the Sun says the novel ‘draws on my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre) where I was interned from 1942–45’. The strange, cold eye which Ballard turned on Britain when he first came here was evidently trained to look on, unflinching, in Lunghua.
He says:
I always intended to write a novel about China and the war, but I put it off because I always had more urgent things to do, in fiction. Then, two or three years ago, I realised if I didn’t write the China book soon, I would never do so. Memory would fade, apart from anything else. It took a very long time, 20 years or so, to forget the events that took place in Shanghai and it took a very long time to remember them, again . . . I don’t just mean to bring them to mind, but to flesh them out, to remythologise them.
Jim, ‘my young hero’, misses his Scripture exam because the Japanese attack Shanghai; at first that missed exam seems the most important thing. Although he mislays his parents early on, it is a long time before he finally surrenders his school cap and blazer. This well-brought-up boy goes to the Cathedral School. His father’s house in Amherst Avenue has a swimming pool (soon to be drained) and nine servants. Jim has the sense of security only privilege can bring.
He is too young to be surprised when he finds the servants gone and the house deserted. He is on his own; it is an adventure. Trying to surrender to the Japanese is more of a problem. They don’t really want any more prisoners, but the camp, for all its privations, offers more safety than the dangerous chaos of the city, where a thief will cut off your arm for the sake of a watch, kill you for your shoes, where there is no food left, where the water is full of cholera. Where privilege has evaporated.
Once in the camp, Jim adjusts quickly. Too young to feel nostalgia, he focuses his memory forward. Soon he will be reunited with his parents! One day. Soon. Until then, he lives in the present. He scavenges. He runs errands. He keeps himself busy. He sneaks and wheedles extra sweet potatoes. If his ingratiating smile drives the Japanese guards into paroxysms of fury and all the other children are afraid of him, he is free from self-pity, sustained by the very business of living, and his dreams are nourished by contraband copies of Readers Digest scrounged from American prisoners.
Jimmy Ballard lived in Lunghua Camp; he lived in the very hut that his young hero inhabits. The entire context of the novel is true, but Jim’s adventures are invention. The book is by no means autobiographical. Ballard was with his parents and his sister in the camp and he knows that children, particularly when they are with their parents, can witness appalling events and feel no fear.
It was a peculiar life for the business community in Shanghai, before the war, after the war, even during the war – until the crunch came and internment began.
‘Like my young hero,’ Ballard says,
one witnessed, on a daily basis, the most appalling events – starvation, disease, brutality – but through the window of a chauffeur-driven car. So that one was very, very close to the terrible brutalities inflicted on the Chinese by the Japanese, who surrounded Shanghai, and by the Chinese themselves on one another, but one could do nothing about it. And one wasn’t directly involved. And, in a way, writing the book may be an attempt to go back and put emotion in.
Only at the end of the novel, reunited with his parents, about to leave China forever, does Jim, now sixteen, a child no longer, see that Shanghai is now and always was a ‘terrible city’; and these, the last words of the novel, restore to the adjective ‘terrible’ all its original force. The last image of the novel is the haunting one of the paper flowers that decorate the coffins the Chinese, too poor to afford burial, launch into the sea, the drowned flowers that come back to the city, along with the corpses.
Empire of the Sun is a rich, complex, heartrending novel, in characteristically Ballardian prose – a prose with a curiously metallic quality, cold as steel, that makes the imagery shine out, as he wants it to, with the hallucinatory clarity of that of naive painters. The image of those paper flowers decorating the corpses, not of the Chinese dead, but of British sailors dying in the Yangtze River; the mask of flies on the face of the dead airman; the silvery shapes of the American bombers Jim sees from the corner of his eye when he is sick with fever, that are the emissaries of death.
It is easy to think of Empire of the Sun as the logical culmination of a career, the book towards which Ballard has been working all his life. Since he is far too young to retire, to think that would be an error. The novel has the look of a significant change of direction for Ballard, yet its appearance of naturalism is only superficial – it is, once again, a triumph of the imagination. The imaginative recreation of that ‘terrible city’ and the resurrection of its teeming population of dead are to do with the notions of transformation that have always informed his work.
It is hard to imagine – top that! – what he will do next. But, then, it always has been. Meanwhile, here is the fruit of that obsessiveness Ballard so much admires, the obsessive single-mindedness of, as he puts it, ‘long-incarcerated mental patients who remain totally faithful to their few obsessions throughout their long lives, the sort of dedication shown by Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle for 30-odd-years . . .’ The obsessive pursuit of his own imagery to its origins has brought us this riveting and sombre and, yes, funny (humour blacker than black, this time) and humane novel, that is the kind of novel we used to think we no longer had the energy to write, that Ballard was writing all the time.
(1984)
• 12 •
Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget
Memoirs of a Midget presents itself as the first-person account of the early life, in particular the tempestuous twentieth year in the life, of a Victorian gentlewoman who has the misfortune to be, although pretty and perfectly formed, of diminutive size. This year includes death, passionate infatuation, some months as a lion of high society, suicide, and attempted suicide. It ends in temporary madness. This summary gives the impression of melodrama yet Memoirs of a Midget seduces by its gentle charm and elegant prose. It may be read with a great deal of simple enjoyment and then it sticks like a splinter in the mind.
Miss M.’s fictional autobiography is introduced with the nineteenth-century imitation-documentary device of an editor’s preliminary note. Here the reader lear
ns something of Miss M.’s life after the end of her own narrative, and of her – not death, but vanishing. She has, she explains to her housekeeper in a note, been ‘called away’. Called away, perhaps, to a happy land where all are the same size as she, where she is not a stranger in a world designed for clumsy giants with sensibilities of a cruel clumsiness to match.
For Miss M. is always a stranger in this world. She, literally, does not fit in. The novel is a haunting, elegiac, misanthropic, occasionally perverse study of estrangement and isolation. Miss M. herself describes her predicament: ‘Double-minded creature that I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit.’ She may stand as some sort of metaphor for the romantic idea of the artist as perennial stranger, as scapegoat and outcast – the artist, indeed, as perpetual adolescent, with the adolescent’s painful sense of his own uniqueness when alone and his own inadequacy when in company. In some ways, the novel is about making friends with loneliness, which is not quite the same thing as growing up. And, of course, it is impossible for Miss M. to grow up.
The narrative is imbued with that romantic melancholy which was de la Mare’s speciality in both prose and poetry. The novel has all the enigmatic virtues of repression; what is concealed or disguised speaks more eloquently than what is expressed.
Walter de la Mare evaded some of the more perilous reefs of literary criticism in his lifetime by simply casting a spell of charm over his readers. He also liked to suggest elements of religious allegory, which is as good as putting up a ‘No Trespassers’ sign. Kenneth Hopkins, in a British Council pamphlet on de la Mare published in 1953, entirely abandons discussion of Memoirs of a Midget, claiming that ‘the work is its own interpretation’. The adjectives, ‘beloved’ and ‘magical’ were frequently applied to de la Mare’s work; his poetry for children, in particular Peacock Pie and his anthology, Come Hither, remain beloved cornerstones of the middle-class nursery. Nevertheless, the middle-class nursery is a rapidly dwindling constituency and his reputation as poet and writer for adults has softly and silently vanished away since his death in 1956.