Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 13

"Cry Hope, Cry Fury," and the Prose of J. G. Ballard

In 1982, I read this comment by Thomas M. Disch in his collection, THE MAN WHO HAD NO IDEA:

"Though critics rarely examine its nuts and bolts, visualization is as crucial to the craft of story-telling as character, plot, or (in the prosodic sense) style. Often, when prose is praised for being 'poetic', it is not for its aural properties but for its power to project images on the camera obscura of the reading mind."

I agreed, but then Disch went on to baffle me:

"J. G. Ballard, for instance, might as well have been born deaf, but few writers paint so persuasively with a typewriter."

Again, I agreed, but only in part. Ballard was indeed a verbal painter, but did he write as if he were deaf? This made no sense to me.

That was almost four decades ago, but this year, having read again THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY and several of my favourite stories about Vermilion Sands, I believe that Disch had a point:

J. G. Ballard writes with keen eyes and keen intellect, but with weak ears.

His keen eyes are obvious in "Cry Hope, Cry Fury," where every page gives a reader something to watch. Intellect comes through in passages like this one, about the properties of photosensitive paintings that record whatever is placed in front of them:

"As always, they recapitulated in reverse, like some bizarre embryo, a complete phylogeny of modern art, a regression through the principal schools of the twentieth century. After the first liquid ripples and motion of a kinetic phase, they stabilized into the block colours of the hard-edge school, and from there, as a thousand arteries of colour irrigated the canvas, into a brilliant replica of Jackson Pollock. These coalesced into the crude forms of late Picasso, in which Hope appeared as a Junoesque madonna with massive shoulders and concrete face, and then through surrealist fantasies of anatomy into the multiple outlines of futurism and cubism. Ultimately an impressionist period emerged, lasting a few hours, a roseate sea of powdery light in which we seemed like a placid domestic couple in the suburban bowers of Monet and Renoir."

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Ballard writes with an almost Elizabethan genius for metaphor and simile, but I have also begun to notice that he often writes as if unaware of sound. For example, "Cry Hope, Cry Fury" echoes with end rhymes and internal rhymes that litter the story from the first page to the last:

"The dunes gave way to a series of walled plains crossed by quartz veins."

"It flew monotonously around me as I sipped at the last of the lukewarm Martini. Despite its curiosity, the creature showed no signs of wanting to attack me."

"Lifted by the wind, her opal hair, like antique silver, made a chasuble of the air."

"Unsure whether this strange craft and its crew were an apparition, I raised the empty Martini flask to the woman."

"Hope had listened closely, as if unsure of my real identity."

"'Guise?' Hope looked up at him with wary eyes."

"For an hour I read to her, more as a gesture to calm her. For some reason she kept searching the painting which bore my veiled likeness as the Mariner...."

"Once, when she was away, sailing the empty dunes with her white rays, I hobbled up to her studio. There I found a dozen of her paintings mounted on trestles in the windows, looking out on the desert below."

"The portrait showed Hope in a conventional pose, seated like any heiress on a brocaded chair. The eye was drawn to her opal hair lying like a soft harp on her strong shoulders, and to her firm mouth with its slight reflective dip at the corners."

"The watery outline of his figure -- the hands hanging at his sides were pale smudges -- gave him the appearance of a man emerging from a drowned sea, strewn with blanched weeds and algae."

"Five minutes later, as we moved arm in arm along the corridor to her bedroom, we entered an empty room. From a cabinet Hope took a white yachting-jacket."

"Almost exhausted by the time I reached the beach, I walked clumsily across the dark sand, eyes stinging from the paint on my hands."

These are echoes I would expect from an early draft, ones that would be detected and revised afterwards. But for this to happen, a writer would need to hear the prose. Perhaps Ballard never did.

Nor did he seem to notice a repetitive structure that often pollutes lazy, bloated styles like George R. R. Martin's, and that I am shocked to see in Ballard's work, even though Ballard never pushes this method to the point of pain, as Martin does. I find Martin unreadable, I consider Ballard a genius, but I would be untrue to myself if I pointed out the disease in one writer's prose while ignoring the minor symptoms of another's.

In a later work like THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY, Ballard seems to have steered away from unconcious rhymes, but in that book, as in "Cry Hope, Cry Fury," he still falls prey to sentences that feature one clause with an often vague or weak verb in the simple past tense, followed by a present participle afterthought. This repetition crops up in page after page:

"Each morning she sailed off in the schooner, her opal-haired figure with its melancholy gaze scanning the desert sea. The afternoons she spent alone in her studio, working on her paintings."

"When she had gone, hunting across the dunes in her schooner...."

"Hope Cunard stepped through the open window, her white gown shivering around her naked body like a tremulous wraith. She stood beside me, staring at my face on the portrait."

Sentences like these can become worse than insect-whine distractions; they can also reduce meaning. One potential risk of a broken-spine afterthought is the violation of simultaneous action -- a simultaneity that is, after all, the one good reason in the first place to use a present participle:

"She came into the cabin half an hour later. She sat down on the bunk at my feet, touching the white plaster with a curious hand."

A second risk would be a misplaced modifier:

"Coming ashore for cocktails, his stay had lasted for several weeks, a bizarre love-idyll between himself and this shy and beautiful painter that came to a violent end."

A third risk would be a non-sentence of non-sense:

"The paint annealed, the first light of the false dawn touching the sand-blown terrace."

For Ballard, for Martin, for writers good and bad, the best way to avoid these repetitive afterthoughts is to read with ears as well as eyes.

Ears might have also warned Ballard of another tendency. He often avoids useful or even essential prepositions, and this habit can reduce the clarity of a subordinate clause:

"One hand pressed to his heavy mouth, he gestured sceptically at the portraits of Hope and myself."

It can also burden a sentence with two subjects, when one would have offered more unity, concision, or even sense:

"My hands and arms smeared with wet paint, I went down to the bedroom. Hope slept on the crossed pillows, hands clasped over her breasts."

"Standing against the skyline on the terrace behind Hope was the image of a man in a white jacket, his head lowered to reveal the bony plates of his forehead."

"Skirting a wide ravine whose ornamented mouth gaped like the door of a half-submerged cathedral, I felt the yacht slide to one side, a puncture in its starboard tyre."

"Her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses, Miss Quimby nodded promptly."

"I lay back stiffly on the sofa, waiting for the painting to be exposed, when Hope’s half-brother appeared, a second canvas between his outstretched hands."

Why would Ballard remove prepositions from a sentence that needed them? I have no idea, but I can hear a gap in every case, like one chord chopped out of an otherwise haunting melody.

All that I have pointed out, here, should be seen within a context of admiration. For me, Ballard remains a central figure not only of the past, but of the present, and I suspect that if we survive as a species, if we continue to read, then our descendants will read Ballard.

Yet I also feel that admiration must never be deaf, and that prose can appeal through sound as well as through sight. Ballard is a writer for the eye, and for many readers, this will be more than enough to guarantee his greatness. I can only regret, in the smallest of ways, that his keen eye was not matched by a keen ear.

J. G. Ballard's Unlimited Dream Company

Someday, I hope to review this book. Having now read it for the second time after decades, I struggle to put my thoughts together, all for the sake of a few stray comments.

-- There are fantasies of consolation and fantasies of vision. Vision has always been less popular, less applauded, than consolation, perhaps because visions, like dreams, are essentially amoral and have no concern for politeness or propriety:

"I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature."

-- Ballard's hero, Blake, is at heart a selfish, destructive man, a sex maniac, perhaps even a psychopath, and throughout this book he alludes constantly to his troubling intentions. At the end, however, what he does is quite different; this makes the final chapters moving and haunting in ways I had not anticipated.

"I was the first living creature to escape death, to rise above mortality to become a god.

"Again I thought of myself as an advent calendar -- I had opened the doors of my face, swung back the transoms of my heart to admit these suburban people to the real world beyond. Already I suspected that I was not merely a god, but the first god, the primal deity of whom all others were crude anticipations, clumsy metaphors of myself...."

-- If gods actually existed, would they learn to overcome themselves? Would they develop beyond their own worst impulses, and move beyond fantasies of unlimited power toward acts of human compassion?

"Already I knew that I was guilty of many crimes, not only against those beings who had granted me a second life, but against myself, crimes of arrogance and imagination. Mourning the young woman beside me, I waited as my blood fell from the air."

-- As a stylist, Ballard is not always elegant, but he has an almost Elizabethan genius for simile and metaphor. Every page offers quotable passages that seem strikingly new and logically familiar. Ballard looks at the world that we all inhabit, but like the best of poets, he sees what we often overlook, often forget.

"My frozen veins were pencil leads in my arms."

-- The book is too long, and until the final chapters, lacks any of the conflict that propels most other stories. The wheel-spinning middle section remains readable and even compelling because of Ballard's genius for metaphor, but it does repeat the same ideas, the same implications. To its credit, the book then develops these ideas for an ending of emotional power.

"My blood lifted from my open heart in black crepes, streamers that trailed through the darkening forest. A strange fungus coated the feeble trees, feeding on the nitrogenous air. A foul miasma hung over the park and deformed the dying blossoms. I sat in the aircraft in a cockpit of dead birds. On all sides I was surrounded by a garden of cancers."

-- Consolation, or vision? Many read fantasy to discover an alternative world that, unlike ours, could actually make sense. Other fantasies can smash our world apart, scatter the fragments like shards of stained glass onto a concrete floor, then stare at the play of reflected blues, reds, greens, and purples on a grey stone wall.

A fantasy of vision can remain true to life, but finds more fascination in the down-to-earth ordinary than we allow ourselves to perceive. We often turn aside from beauty when it gets in the way of business, but J. G. Ballard goes on staring at the broken glass.

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage."

[William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence."]

False Face, False Life

Observations:

1) For all of my life, I've been considered "not quite like anyone else," and this might be caused by my refusal (or perhaps inability) to put on a happy face when I feel grief.

2) Yet here on the margins of Canada, we have many people, like me, who never seem able to wear that mask. Perhaps our visibility is part of a traditional Canadian sadness that has not yet been corporatized and marketized out of sight. After all, we spend half the year in a deep freeze, with short days and long nights, in a country that hides any number of seasonal stings behind a calm white wall. We have social space, then, to frown when life creeps up on us.

Jason E. Rolfe: Life is a play, but everything is improvised

THE PUPPET-PLAY OF DOCTOR GALL.
From the original 1832 manuscript of Sebastian Haarpuder.
Translated faithfully from the original German of Doctor Gall
by Jason E. Rolfe.

"I believe the world is a stage. I believe we are mere players. I do not, however, believe in playwrights. I do not believe in scripts and rehearsals. The world is a stage, my dear readers. Life is a play, but everything is improvised."

It can be hard to specify the appeal of certain writers; we like their stories because we like their stories. Jason E. Rolfe provides an exception. I can point to the clarity of his prose, the playfulness of his wit, the endlessly-quotable sentences, but I can pin down three more qualities that make his work stand out for me.

"Ernst took himself far too seriously. He was, if I am being honest, a bit player on life’s stage. His lines were those he gave himself, and while he played his role admirably it was invariably uncredited."

Jason E. Rolfe never thinks in the ways that I do, yet no matter which pathways he follows into strange meta-textual mazes, he leaves behind footprints easy to recognize and to follow.

He works within a heritage of Absurdist fiction that rarely communicates to me, perhaps because I remain unsteeped in its history and its methods, yet he compels me to turn pages and to laugh at his puns, his jokes, his wordplay. His writing never fails to keep me reading with a smile:

"He is dressed in a fine suit. Not, I can assure you, a fine suit by my estimable, if not flamboyant standards, but fine to those of the clerical persuasion. I refer, of course, to dismally formal daywear -- a tailcoat with the front cut straight across his waist while its tails hang down in the back. It is black because he is dreadfully unimaginative. His trousers are beige because he is monotonously boring. Waistcoats, of which there are two, shirt and cravat are white because white requires no thought whatsoever, and our Stranger is unwaveringly thoughtless."

And finally, he experiments with fiction in ways that I never do; he bends time, causes personalities and identities to shift and spread, plays games with settings and voices, and all because he can. That seems to be the sole reason for his methods, and I am happy to see where the test results might lead.

"There is no singular organ, no faculty of the mind that explains the perception or the creation of beauty."

True? False? No idea. I only know that Jason E. Rolfe has written something new, that I have read it twice, that I have grinned and laughed all the way through it.

Losing

At the end of a long and complex dream last night, a stranger told me that I must confront the problems of creativity as if I were a lawyer pleading cases.

"And if you need to know where to plead the hardest, then just think of a case you're losing."

Hateful In My Silence

"Never do to others that which is hateful to you."

Yet so much is hateful to me that I often fall into silence and isolation as an alternative to hatred. I like people -- sometimes, within limits, and mainly women -- but holding myself back to spare others the worst of myself denies me the chance to be myself, in all of my hateful splendour.

A puzzle!

Lost in the Baxian Bog

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No matter how often I try, I cannot hear Bax. Not even a great conductor with a great orchestra, beautifully recorded on a great label, can make this music work for me.

And yet, I love the uncharacteristically firm Symphony no. 1, which is unlike anything else he wrote, and which comes to life under any baton. Bryden Thomson with Chandos, David Lloyd-Jones with Naxos, Myer Fredman with Lyrita: all of these recordings bring out the power and structure of no. 1, qualities I have never found elsewhere in Bax, not in the other symphonies, not in the tone poems.

I would never deny the sudden sparks that flicker up in "Tintagel" or in "November Woods," until the music sinks back into a glutinous Celtic bog. People love these tone poems; I want to love them, too, but I can only think of how much more I find in Sibelius, and of how many times I have heard these Baxian efforts without epiphany and without pleasure.

Walt Kelly and Mervyn Peake: the Teachers

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In the summer of 1979, when the gruelling work on the final exams of high school gave way to the sweating, aching work of the farm, I was finally able to sit down and read the Titus books by Mervyn Peake. During the last few months of school, I had tantalized myself by tasting passages here and there; now, given the chance to sink into the books without mental distraction, I took them slowly.

Peake had arrived with an echo. In the spring, while stalking through the library at Carleton University with my father's card, I had found a book by Walt Kelly, TEN EVER-LOVIN' BLUE-EYED YEARS WITH POGO. I recalled the strip from childhood; it had seemed like a shipwreck from the past on the tidy modern beach of PEANUTS: elaborate, incomprehensible, crowded with panels and words, with an ink and colour style that looked like nothing else in the newspaper. With all of this in mind, I borrowed the book, fell in love, and read it repeatedly.

The Titus books made me realize how little I knew about writing. After the duel between Flay and Swelter, which fattened page after page after page with obsessive detail yet still excited me as few action scenes had before, I put down the book, stared out the window at the Gatineau Hills, and wondered why no one had ever told me that such writing was possible.

At the same time, Walt Kelly revealed an anger at the world that somehow found ways to laugh, even if the laughter rang a bit crazed and desperate. He showed me dishonest, delusional, dysfunctional idiots, lunatics trapped in their own obsessive mazes; he made me love the mazes and the fools.

That was then. Decades later, both Peake and Kelly remain a living influence and a constant challenge. My wrestling with the candour and strangeness of Peake's verse is one of the foundations for ICE AND AUTUMN GLASS. Kelly's angry laughter suggests a more healthy response than my own seething bitterness.

Kelly and Peake were teachers in 1979, and remain teachers now. I still need to learn from their lessons.

If You Say, Miss: I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE

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BETSY [voice over]:
It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua. We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian. It was all just as I'd imagined it. I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek. I breathed deep and every bit of me inside myself said, "How beautiful!"

PAUL HOLLAND [aloud]:
It's not beautiful.

BETSY:
You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

PAUL:
It's easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer. Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand. Those flying fish -- they're not leaping for joy. They're jumping in terror. Bigger fish want to eat them. That luminous water -- it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies. The glitter of putrescence. There's no beauty here. Only death and decay.

BETSY:
You can't really believe that.

[Cut to the shot of a falling star.]

PAUL:
Everything good dies here -- even the stars.

Of all the Lewton films, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE might be the most dreamlike and mysterious. It owes much of this mood to the shadowy, often iridescent images of Jacques Tourneur, to long moments without dialogue punctuated by the skittering of wind in the leaves and dry sugarcane, to the sparse and elegiac music of Roy Webb, to the broken family relations on this island with a long history of suffering:

COACHMAN:
Times gone, Fort Holland was a fort, and now, no longer. Holland's was the most old family, miss. They brought the colored folks to the island. The colored folks and Ti-Misery.

BETSY:
Ti-Misery? What's that?

COACHMAN:
A man, miss. An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland. With arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful, weeping look on his black face.

BETSY (alarmed):
Alive?

COACHMAN:
No, miss. He's just the same as he was in the beginning. On the front side of an enormous boat.

BETSY:
You mean a figurehead.

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. And the enormous boat brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.

BETSY (gazing around):
They brought to you to a beautiful place, didn't they?

COACHMAN:
If you say, miss. If you say.

The other source is a narrative strategy that offers an event long-completed before the film begins, one that is interpreted with conflicting views by the people involved, but never shown to the audience. In films, we believe what we can see, but when we are denied this authoritative perspective on what happened, we can only hear about it from second-hand accounts.

A few of the characters explain this event in the framework of modern medicine, others, in the framework of religious belief. At the end of the film, we are shown magical intentions to manipulate events, but we have also been shown, earlier, that identical results have been caused by ordinary means: one character is known to wander aimlessly; another does exactly what he had asked someone else to do before the climax. Just because magic is being used does not imply that magic is a cause; all too often, instead, people can mess up their lives through typical sorrows, obsessions, and addictions.

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In a similar way, the film denies itself narrative clarity by refusing any firm opposition between cultures. The Houngan, the Voudou priest, uses religious rites to apply practical psychological therapy to ordinary human suffering, while the Western doctors use religious terms for medical advice. Two of the Western characters believe in magic, while others do not, but in the end, neither science nor magic are given authority. We can see the result, but we cannot specify the cause.

Even during the final moments, the one character who might be given authority, the Houngan, offers no explanation, no clarification, but only a prayer in hope that the sorrows of the island will be healed. In the face of the island's long history, in the face of ordinary human suffering, such a hope seems impossible:

"Everything good dies here -- even the stars."

How to Stop the Leopard Man

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Even when extremely well made, slasher films have never appealed to me. For example, when I watch Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, I can respect the astonishing use of light, colour, and texture, but I cannot respect the use of human beings.

I respond in the same way to THE LEOPARD MAN, a small film that improves every time I see it, and one that confirms, again, that Jacques Tourneur was born to direct stalking scenes by night. The film offers one sequence in particular that must have shocked viewers in 1943, and that still kicks hard today. You know the sequence: every critic of the Lewton films raves about it, and for damned good reason.

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Yet despite all of the cinematic skill that can go into such material, killings are not for me. What I do like about THE LEOPARD MAN is the sense of a small town in danger; I like the rapid ways in which the film sets out its characters in a place where they all know everyone else. At a running time of 66 minutes, the film packs in many people and many sub-plots without losing sight of its overall story.

Above all, what gives the story meaning is a sub-theme about the necessity for compassion. The two lead characters have lived through hard times, and reject any hint of being "softies," but that is exactly what they are, and in their empathy, their basic human goodness, they find the courage to confront evil. In that sense, THE LEOPARD MAN, for all of its emphasis on death and fear, is actually one of the more optimistic of the Lewton films: it shows that a community matters, and that strength comes from caring.