Pedro Groppo reviews The JG Ballard Book for Rob Latham at Science Fiction Studies --- well done Mike Holliday & Mike Bonsall & everyone mentioned! A JGB Grab Bag. Rick McGrath, ed. The J.G. Ballard Book. Toronto: Terminal Press, 2013. 191 pp. The title of the newest entry in the secondary literature on J.G. Ballard can be a little off-putting at first. It either implies some sort of definitiveness or it exposes the lack of an organizing principle. A quick look at the table of contents suggests the latter possibility: The J.G. Ballard Book is an impressive grab bag of essays, interviews, personal accounts, fanfiction, and memorabilia, designed with the Ballard aficionado in mind. The editor, long-time Ballard collector Rick McGrath, admits in his introduction that the volume has no theme: “if nothing else, let the contents be eclectic. No point being specific—let’s see what the wind from everywhere blows in”. And indeed it blows in all sorts of things, none of which could be considered essential. The volume is fashioned after V. Vale and Andrea Juno’s groundbreaking RE/Search issue on Ballard, published in 1984, whose mixture of artwork, interviews, uncollected pieces, criticism, and fiction made it a perfect introduction to the author. The J.G. Ballard Book, while taking its design cues from the RE/Search volume, has its audience at the opposite end of the spectrum. Tom Hunter, in his online ’zine Arc: The Journal of the Future, shrewdly likens the collection to an exhibition catalogue of a contemporary art gallery that never took place, and this is apparent in the lavish devotion to archival materials, with full-page blow-ups of handwritten letters and annotations. The main draw is two rediscovered interviews. One, from 1975, is Ballard at his most entertaining: he interacts with a dog that is trying to fellate himself and spins yarns about arguing with the hospital staff after his car accident over the copyright of his skull x-rays. Things get more serious with a discussion of electronic media in the future, ideas that would resurface a couple of years later in his short story “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977). The other interview, conducted by David Pringle after the release of Empire of the Sun (1984), is mainly about science and science fiction, and it is good to read Ballard’s takes on H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as his idiosyncratic views on Gerard O’Neill, Carl Sagan, and Freeman Dyson: “It seems to me [they] belong in the territory of flying saucer fanatics, Seventh-Day Adventists and millennial end of the world religious cults—a bizarre warping of the human imagination around some strange personal obsession”. The most striking of the essays is Mike Bonsall’s “J.G. Ballard in the Dissecting Room,” in which illustrations from an anatomy manual Ballard probably had some familiarity with in his year as a medical student are juxtaposed with passages of anatomic description from his novels and stories. Bonsall’s piece fits well with the “exhibition” aspect of the volume, even if the accompanying collage is nothing new to Ballard fans (see, for example, Phoebe Gloeckner’s anatomy drawings for the 1990 RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]). Ballardians will certainly be interested in Mike Holliday’s thorough history of the texts that comprise Atrocity Exhibition, which reveals a great deal about the relationship among the stories in that book, often considered a novel. Particularly revealing is the probable origin of the messianic motif of “You and Me and the Continuum” (1966), later echoed in Crash (1973) and The Unlimited Dream Company (1979): a suggestion by Kyril Bonfiglioli, the editor of Science Fantasy magazine, that Ballard write a story on the theme of “sacrifice,” which got the author thinking about “a botched second coming ... with the Messiah never quite managing to come to terms with the twentieth century”; as Holliday rightly notes, this is a core theme of The Atrocity Exhibition as a whole. McGrath’s own piece, about his Shanghai pilgrimage to find Ballard’s house and the camp where he was interned, narrates an intriguing adventure, encouraged by none other than Ballard himself (his letters are faithfully reproduced). But what is left of Ballard’s Shanghai? Not much, as it appears: the Ballard home is now a restaurant and Lunghua camp a school. When Ballard visited the city in 1991 (an event documented in the poignant BBC special Shanghai Jim, available on YouTube), it still resembled the places he knew. The most interesting aspect of McGrath’s project is Ballard’s own recollections and how they might compare to their fictional counterparts. Another outstanding piece is Rick Poynor’s “Visualizing the Ballardian Image,” which analyzes the book covers and related visual material associated with Ballard’s fiction. This essay was previously published in two parts as “What Does J. G. Ballard Look Like?” in Design Observer, the online version 452 Science Fiction Studies, Volume 41 (2014) featuring even more images. The other pleasures to be found in The J.G. Ballard Book are the extensive, full-page reproductions of Ballard’s hand-written answers to an interview (he writes with a fountain pen, blue ink), and his edits to the James Goddard 1970 bibliography and the 1975 interview by Goddard and Pringle. Here we get a sense of Ballard the meticulous editor, certainly reinforcing the idea that his interviews are as painstakingly composed as his fictions. These are, however, minor documents that yield limited insights. As a visit to the Ballard archives at the British Library (one can get a glimpse of a page of a heavily annotated typescript of Crash on their website) will show, there is still a lot we do not know about the way Ballard wrote. What is in The J.G. Ballard Book is only the tip of the iceberg, and there is more to be learned here about Ballard fandom than about Ballard’s work itself. Nevertheless, this volume is an admirable achievement and proof that the interest in Ballard is as high as it has ever been, and that we “Ballardians” have still a lot to look forward to. —Pedro Groppo, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Minas Gerais.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 12:29:22 +0000
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