April 23, 2009
J.G. Ballard: A Visionary Leaves Us, But the
Atrocity Exhibition Continues
It seems a strange and ironic thing to think
of J.G. Ballard in the past tense.
The visionary British author, who died this
past Sunday at the age of 78, always seemed
to reside in the near future, rather than
the present. His books, stories and
reportage seemed to be dispatches from
time’s front lines, firsthand accounts of
the looming horror creeping ever closer to
the edges of our increasingly uncomfortable
contemporary lives.
His passing seems ironic in light of the
fact that the nightmarish brave new world of
ecological ruin, consumer ennui and murder
as entertainment is only now coming fully to
life, and it leaves us without a reliable
correspondent capable of warning us of the
next round of incipient perils lurking just
beyond the horizon.
“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do
not publish!” With these words, a clueless
editor once consigned thousands of
already-printed copies of Ballard’s landmark
short story collection The Atrocity
Exhibition to the shredder or the
landfill in a futile effort to protect the
world from one of the most dangerous and
uncompromising literary imaginations of the
past century. But like the future itself,
Ballard was inexorable, a force of nature:
His voice, that of a media-age prophet
heralding the advent of a new era of
technological barbarism, was too clear and
resonant to be silenced. Thus, in novels
such as Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise
and Running Wild, Ballard
proceeded to extrapolate upon the
psychological, social and technological
trends already in motion to draw the
outlines of the dystopic hell humankind was
busy feverishly and blindly creating.
That is, the world of 2009: A world in which
the mass of humanity toils senselessly and
meaninglessly in service of grey corporate
entities void of any purpose beyond their
own profit and self preservation at all
costs; wherein a bored and spoiled middle
class fidgets uncomfortably in the glow of
their flat-screen televisions, itching for
some new, indefinable kick to reassure
themselves that they are, in fact, alive; a
world in which armed-to-the-teeth high
school students slaughter their classmates
for thrills and Sunday school teachers
senselessly murder their children’s friends;
a world in which a vast island of garbage
roughly the size of Texas swirls ceaselessly
in the midst of the Pacific Ocean; a world
that has already corroded to the point where
it cannot be bothered to care about its own
slow suicide.
Were Ballard the sadist his harshest critics
accused him of being, he would have left the
Earth laughing, or triumphantly smug at
having seen his most nightmarish visions
realized. In actual fact, he was a writer of
both courage and compassion. The unblinking
narrative eye that stared horror full in the
face in a novel such as Crash and
dispassionately recounted its observations
was that of a man both fascinated and
horrified by the fearsome monstrosity that
his species was inexorably evolving into,
and who took it as his responsibility to
offer a clear-sighted warning to the rest of
us.
I had the pleasure and privilege of
interviewing J.G. Ballard in the early
1990s. Speaking with candor, grace and
humility, this legend of British letters
spoke by transatlantic telephone for some
two hours to a minor-league reporter he did
not know, willingly sharing ideas, insights
and occasional laughter. Asked about life’s
habit of imitating his art through
dehumanization, senseless crime and
collective mental malaise, he spoke ruefully
and compassionately, his voice dropping at
times. He had, as the Leonard Cohen lyric
states, “seen the future and it was murder,”
and had hoped against hope that the era of
Dehumanized Man might not arrive quite so
soon.
In the end, James Graham Ballard was felled
by cancer, that most egalitarian and
thoroughly modern of diseases – the gift
bestowed by heavy metal-tainted water, toxic
air, hormone-laced foodstuffs, and other
unavoidable byproducts of the corporatist
age. He’d had a successful career, a rich
range of personal experiences, a long and
productive life and a singular authorial
talent that served as an inspiration and
influence upon legions of his successors. It
seems doubtful that he would have left this
world with many regrets. In perhaps his
final discomfiting gift, he leaves us with a
lingering legacy of anxiety: We are left to
navigate our own way forward into entropy
without his singular voice to guide us,
pointing out the pitfalls.
©
2009 North Star Writers Group. May not
be republished without permission.
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