Ballard: another last modernist

Rhys Tranter has posted several blogs in response to the death of JG Ballard. So far I have managed to avoid comment. However, the latest links to Chris Petit's appreciation The Last Modernist and now I have something to say.

What is it with this title? In 1996, Anthony Cronin published The Last Modernist, a biography of Beckett and, three years ago, James Wood wrote an article about Henry Green entitled The last English Modernist (to which I responded at the time). We can assume it's a muted overstatement to assert the importance of a writer even when writing - certainly in these three cases - means the erasure of the author as a distinct personality. Here though, in its blithely confident use, it reveals the anxiety with which British literary culture regards modernism (the case, by the way, is lower to maintain the present tense).

In the two tributes, the word is used in its most general sense: a modernist is a writer concerned with the modern world. Ballard was certainly that. What's more, he insisted that he was "not a literary man" - that is, uninterested in writing in itself. His concern instead was for precise representation of his subject: "He transcribed the images that unspooled in his head with an intense reverence and literalness, with no hint of po-mo irony, the last modernist." Petit places the focus on Ballard observation of "a world teetering on the brink of crash and catastrophe" and the epidemic of psychosis it provokes. This is reiterated in his tribute by Martin Amis:

[Ballard] kept asking: what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches - the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography and technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme.

This is certainly the climate of modernism and it cannot be denied that, in their novels, both Ballard and Amis raise a terrible caricature that might be called modern life and might thereby be called modernistic. Yet why isn't writing also subject to modernity as much as "our psyches"? In both appreciations, the writers demonstrate their own distance from the caricature. They are able to remove themselves from modernity in order to explain why its fictional presentation is worth celebrating. What does this tell us about the reach of modernity?

Amis refers to his father's friendship with the writer "did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism" but the only forms mentioned are the perversely mental. Perhaps it was that Ballard's novels display "very little interest in human beings in the conventional sense" and are "remorselessly visual", both necessary symptoms of modernity. I suspect these are individual features of the author's style rather than experiment, although the unrelenting boredom of The Unlimited Dream Company might be an exception. So, again, what about the distance of the author; the remove from what is taking its course in the novel? Since his death we've read how Ballard himself was a very conservative character, in contrast to his imagination. This is told with a mixture of amusement and unreflective perplexity. Yet the refusal to investigate that separation is - for me at least - what finally limits such fiction; not interesting as fiction. Ballard's is a form in which the author and his means are not subject to the threat of chaos and castastrophe, always able to maintain a knowing distance. People in novels are never writers, just as characters in soaps never watch soaps. In this way, fiction can be more easily assimilated by the culture of journalism and presented as attention to the world while remaining a comforting escape.

We might compare all this to a classic modernist work, Kafka's The Judgment. The final action - in which Georg Bendemann leaps from a bridge into a river - returns the story to its origins or, rather, its pre-origins; its non-existence. Judgment has been made on the imagination that has produced the story and thereby betrayed the lie of its efforts to enter the world; the story is condemned to a release that is also a sentence of death. It is sentence that is, for the writer and reader, both swift and endless. "Last" is thereby also a misconstrual and misrepresentation of literary modernism; hence perhaps its popular repetition.

Distance from Ballard

This is an interview with JG Ballard published in the NME in October 1985. It lives in a scrapbook of articles I kept as my interest shifted from music to books.


According to my records, 1985 was the year before I started reading novels; my records being a slip of paper from 1986 with twenty-four books listed and scored, not one of which is by JG Ballard. And yet I know in that library spree I read The Drowned World (which I first typed as The Drowned Sea, a more intriguing title), The Crystal World, High Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Hello America, Empire of the Sun, and the story collection Vermillion Sands. Back then the interview stirred me with the idea of a novel that watches England from a train window. I borrowed these books hoping for a narration from this vantage point, and was always disappointed, no doubt because it is not meant to describe Ballard's novels literally. I soon realised, though not soon enough, that I was allergic to hyperrealism, indeed to genre fiction in general. It was the word distance that stirred me, and that word has recurred in my writing many times since.

In 1986 my list began with the novel that set me on the path that I knew at once was mine to take, but still I think of the interview each time I travel by train to stare vacantly at the landscape and the objects and lives within it. I glimpse a thousand curtained windows of homes and with each one, or all of them combined, I imagine a retreat from the relentless pressure of a journey and the infernal genres of human busyness; a quiet room where one can be at peace, thinking, reading, listening to the stillness; a room somehow nothing like my own. Bill Callahan's song suggests this thought is not unique.


The last JG Ballard book I read was The Day of Creation in 1987, reviewed here by Martin Amis.

His suggestion that Ballard's novels "address a different–a disused–part of the reader's brain" rings true and must be close to what Victoria Best calls the "extraordinary elasticity" of some narratives that she says "open up spaces" in her mind, which is something other than flights of the imagination, and not quite Proustian reveries either, but something like a clearing in the forest. This would mitigate the otherwise lamentable influence Ballard has on the current generation of British writers, but this, what seems to be the most valuable and most obscure gift of the novel, is not something that can be easily discussed from a distance, from within the forest. However, as demonstrated by my apparent need to note down the first novel on my first book list, it is the only thing worth writing about.

A loss of problems

Martin Amis' novels were among those I read when I began reading novels – one read what was being talked about on television and in newspapers. Money was the first quickly followed by each and every one that preceded it, including the journalism in The Moronic Inferno, which I may have read twice, and London Fields in the year it was published. This was when I realised that reading Amis had been time well spent; time that from then on I would no longer waste. This was forgotten and reaffirmed several years later when I borrowed copies of The Information and Experience, and it was only out of duty that I read The Zone of Interest when I wrote something about Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The same can be said of the novels of Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, and JG Ballard, the big names of Britain’s literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, and Philip Roth and John Updike of the USA’s (the exception was Saul Bellow). Why did I feel mild indifference reading their novels compared to the entirely different feeling I got reading various European novels (and Saul Bellow)? To my surprise, the names of Amis, McEwan and Ballard have appeared several times on this blog over the years, often as I seek an answer to this question. The news of Amis’ death brought those early days back to me and now, with the death of Milan Kundera whose Unbearable Lightness of Being was the catalyst of recognition, I am thinking about it again. 

I read various postmortem articles invariably focusing on Amis' style, many of which Jack Arden says in an excellent piece create "the impression that style was also more than this – something supra-personal”. I was certainly seduced by Amis’ style in Money – I remember the effect of reading the verb "sharking" on the first page (coincident no doubt with the "Martian" poetry I was reading at the time) – but evidently there wasn’t, for me, much more than style, and while I could assume this was because, as Terry Eagleton says, Amis "was the great poet of the postmodern metropolis", subject matter that sparks nothing in me, one could also say Proust was a great poet of the modern metropolis (in Sodom and Gomorrah at least), and my discovery of Proust never became a waste of time. Eagleton’s article would also suggest my lack of interest in their novels follows distaste for the liberal politics of "the Amis group" – to which he adds Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Clive James – except the writers whose work excited me did not do so for political reasons; Saul Bellow’s reactionary tendencies being evidence of that. But it’s here that Eagleton gets closer to the difference when he describes the rightward trajectory of the group: Hitchens, for example, moved from being a "practising Trotskyist at Oxford" to "dining with the architects of Western butchery in Iraq". But, he says, "the relation between politics and letters is more complex than that, as a glance at the great modernist writers would suggest":

Joseph Conrad was a deep-dyed conservative and misogynist with a virulent hatred of the political Left. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis supported the fascist cause, while W.B. Yeats, a champion of plans to stop the poor from breeding, flirted with fascism as well. D.H. Lawrence was racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic, while T.S. Eliot was a high Tory who championed a quasi-fascistic French movement. Yet all of these figures were radicals — radicals of the Right rather than the Left — and the fineness of their work is related to the depth and breadth of their challenge to a liberal democracy in profound crisis. Besides, there were plenty of modernist experiments on the political Left as well.

Almost all of these writers thought deeply about politics, philosophy and the shape of a whole civilisation, which is hardly true of Clive James. Some of them were powerful visionaries, which is not quite how one would describe Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan. This is one reason why their work, taken as a whole, has never been equalled in the century or so which has passed since it appeared, and certainly not by the Amis group.

While I would dispute that the work of "the great modernist writers" has not been equalled, it's understandable that it appears this way, especially if one's focus is on the Anglophone sphere, as thinking deeply here has been replaced by a condition Wittgenstein defined in his own time:

Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. (Translated by GEM Anscombe)

One can discern this condition across the entirety of Britain's public discourse. Behold in awe and reverence the deep thought underwriting this insight from an honorary member of the Amis group:

Amis himself said he never finished either one of Kafka's novels, but then again neither did Kafka. Very witty, of course, and characteristic: George Steiner once said an Englishman's corner-of-the-mouth "come off it" would have stopped Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven composing the Fifth Symphony. Kafka's "failure" is thereby judged in the context of literary mastery rather than in relation to anything larger; Walter Benjamin, for example, said "it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings".

One may object and point out the novels of Amis and McEwan address important issues, with former's books about terrorism, Stalin's Gulag and the Shoah (although curiously not one about crimes closer to home), and the latter's narrativised punditry drawing attention from literary journalists like never before; hardly shallow and trivial. Except the larger questions have been settled, as the Pope of scientism and Cardinal Hitchens insist, which leaves the novel seeking relevance in terms of a public profile, in an absurd war on cliché – the eternal return of a goldfish in its bowl – and in ambulance-chasing pseudo-journalism.

One might characterise the form of the novel as a search for an authority for itself, with genre providing prefab solutions, so a focus on parochial animations is an inevitable development of its Humanism; it demands constant movement to keep up with the times. But the shock of Martin Amis' death should remind us of the thin ice upon which such movement proceeds. Amis described the impulse behind his 1995 novel The Information as "an hysterical overreaction to the certain knowledge that you're going to die" and Julian Barnes, said to be the Gwyn Barry of that novel, wrote a book on the same knowledge. The horror of the self before the ultimate problem is an intensification of the writer's anxiety before the blank page, hence the blossoming of autofiction in the confluence of both. 

The problem of the recognition of the death for writers was addressed by Kierkegaard in his 1848 book On Authority and Revelation, an appropriate title given the expressed impulse and subject of those two books:

Since our age … is supposed to be an age of movement, it then is not unlikely that many people's lives go on in such a way that they have premises for living but do not arrive at any conclusion – just like the age, which is an age of movement that has set the premises in motion but is also an age of movement that has not come to the conclusion. The lives of such people go on until death comes and puts an end to life, yet without, in the sense of a conclusion, bringing the end with it.     [Translated by Hong and Hong]

The revelation of death provides authority from the outside for the lack of ultimate meaning in one's life.

Such a person can, in proportion to his gifts...go on and become an author, according to his opinion of it. But this opinion is an illusion. For that matter, he may...possess extraordinary talents, exceptional knowledge, but he is not an author, even though he produces. His writing will be just like his life, material; perhaps this material will be worth its weight in gold, but it is only material. ... No, although he writes, he is not essentially an author; he can write the first part, but he cannot write the second part; or, lest there be misunderstanding, he can indeed write the first and second parts, but then he cannot write the third part – the last part he cannot write.     

What then is to be done to complete a work?

In order to find the conclusion, it is first and foremost necessary to perceive very vividly that it is lacking and thereby in turn very vividly to miss it. 

No doubt giving up on Kafka's novels is in keeping with what one aspect of what their incompletion reveals, but it also suggests an unwillingness to face the other because of what it would mean for authoring novels, and perhaps a wish for novels to face the other is why I turned away from the Amis group and why, for me at least, Kafka's fragments remain a living presence despite the increasing obscurity of his problems.

The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson

The prospect of a planned, solitary walk can often become off-putting. At first the distance seems daunting, the landscape predictable and the destination uninspiring, so, sitting down, one thinks: what's the point? Better to stay indoors and do something productive, like, say, read a book. But then reading too seems like too much intellectual effort and one has to get out.

For a while I let Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking wait because it looked like a solemn work of study; 264 pages on a mundane subject. Moreover, Lost and Art threaten a New Agey cris de coeur from beneath the rails and road of modernity – all very justified, yet depressingly futile. And then there's the subtitle: what does The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism suggest to you? But then one starts and the doubts fall away. Happy, necessary amnesia is the gift of both walking and reading, and this book is a pleasure to read.



It helps that Geoff Nicholson is almost the perfect walking companion: never boring, cheerfully opinionated but not self-obsessed, and full of engaging examples and personal anecdotes. I say 'almost' because Nicholson is not really a companion; he is the walk, its distance, its landscape and its destination, which is a little odd, so the comparison is not entirely appropriate. The full title is not entirely appropriate either because it suggests an academic procession across the subject rather than what it is: a ramble – an often moving ramble – through various landscapes. The cover design is a better guide to its contents. A review would normally summarise, share some favourite stories and dissent from one or two opinions, but this would miss the nature of the subject. One doesn't criticise cloying mud on a riverside path for not being asphalt, so I won't criticise the careless errors early on – Eliot's poem isn't "The Wasteland", "Oliver Sachs" is not the famous neurologist, it's Sacks; and "Stuart Home" is not the founder of the London Psychogeographic Society, it's Stewart – or gripe about how those with otherwise fine literary judgement inexplicably value JG Ballard's fiction (Ballard's house features in the book), or wish Nicholson had mentioned other novels in which walking is key to its style and content (Bernhard's Walking, Handke's Repetition and, in the London chapter, Josipovici's Moo Pak – the list, after all, may be endless). I want only to point the reader toward the path and recommend one just walks, listens and enjoys the words flying and dissolving in the fresh air.

What I will note is an interesting tension in the book, which may also relate to its apparent lack of interest in literary experiment. Nicholson is unfussy about where he walks and is interested in all ideas about it – he covers Guy Debord's inaugural definition of psychogeography, and then gives Iain Sinclair prolonged respectful attention, yet he is dismissive of the "jejeune philosophising" of the "walking in nature brigade", invariably American New Age mystics writing in Oprah-friendly clichés about "the wonder of creation", how nature "is full of surprises, always changing" and how "the soul is renewed and called to open and grow". "You want to be called upon to open and grow?" Nicholson asks, "Go take a walk through the Isle of Dogs on a Saturday afternoon when Millwall are playing, lady." He decides he lacks the "spiritual gene" because he does not limit his walking to floating through the local wildlife sanctuary. But his earlier impatience with Debord's attempt to unify and communalise what he agrees is unique and ambient experience confirms a love of surprise, a need for change, and a willingness to open himself to both. The New Agers he dynamites in a barrel are, like him, not a brigade but individuals striving to put into words what necessarily escapes them. And what the lady says holds for all landscapes.

How one defines renewal and growth then becomes the important question, a question both begged and resisted by writing. As Nietzsche and Marc Augé have argued, forgetting is as necessary to a healthy life as memory. Walking would then be forgetting and writing memory. Nicholson's fine company thereby has to betray the title's promise of unity in order to do justice to his subject, which he does. Any quibbling can take a hike.

Spurious disengagement

Spurious attempts a 'reading biography':

I read, now, in response to what fascinated me in the interval into which reading, meaning seemed to plunge. It was books in which I'd find that same plunging that I sought - books as they were ringed around a waterfall, the fall of reading into itself.

I am comfortable in the company of such mannered obliqueness. Colm Toibin says we read Henry James because he was "not given to frankness or indisputability" and I read Spurious because of a corresponding disengagement. You won't find "debate" here - what really should not be called debate but the received rhetoric of the herd. But this time disengagement is mentioned explicitly: "there is the surprise" he writes "that I would never involve myself in the clash between what is called literary and what is called genre fiction". Of course, I'm disappointed, but disappointment is disingenuous as Spurious' post merely reverses into the clash. Nor would he "feel a proud vindication, seeing Ballard revered, or Dick; or Crowley receiving his due, or Wolfe" because (it is clear) genre is not the purpose of his reading. His reading is thereby literary. This is as much as should be said. But I have to go on. All works form a genre in coming into existence. Vindication would both justify and remove that genre's worth. Otherwise all works of genre are vindicated and the particular erased. Resistance to genre marks the literary. Hence perhaps Spurious's recognition that many of his admired authors

have a small pallette of concerns, of moods, of characterisation, of plot. A small palette, painting dark grey on black - but that is enough, for it is in the wearing away of plot, of character, in the exacerbation of mood that I find I can discover [a] kind of non-reading, the inward waterfall that draws me to its edge.

The great year of reading

Spurious has often referred to his "Great Summer of Work" of a couple of years ago. This year marks the 20th anniversary of what could be called my Great Year of Reading; the year the dam of not-reading was finally breached. In 1985, the first cracks appeared. I read lots of JG Ballard. Never again. But it started something. In 1986, a trickle ran over the parched earth. 24 books. Plenty of Milan Kundera, Martin Amis, David Lodge, Philip Roth and, someone who was still well-known then, DM Thomas. In 1987 the waters broke.

It began with Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits before reverting to type with lots of JM Coetzee, Primo Levi, Updike, Nabokov, Peter Carey, VS Naipaul, and Amis and Roth again. In June, I discovered Chomsky. In September, I read Joseph Brodsky's sublime essays Less Than One. In November, I finished Swann's Way. Can such discoveries ever be made again?

1988 was a disappointment after that; what did I expect in reading three Joyce Carol Oates novels?! But the list does include Josipovici's The Lessons of Modernism, Janouch's Conversations with Kafka and Bryan Magee's The Great Philosophers. And I re-read Less Than One.

Looking at the '87 list, I wonder about novels that have little or no resonance in memory: Maggie Gee's Light Years, Omar Rivabella's Requiem for a Woman's Soul, Irini Spanidou's God's Snake, Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature, and those that I recall as excellent yet contain no remembered detail: Jayne Anne Phillip's Machine Dreams and Jane Rogers' The Ice is Singing. Perhaps, since then, everything has been a re-reading, a return in search of the truth to an enchantment whose fulfilment is apparently only a gloomy repetition of the conditions requiring its presence.

The most embarrassing part of the list is the recurrence of the name Colin Wilson. I read a lot of him that year. The Outsider of course, but also things like Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution and innumerable, mercenary books about crime. Today I see he is interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions about his taste in music. Go there for some no-nonsense good cheer.

Milestones: a first anniversary post

It was this day in 2004 when this blog began. To mark it, I shall break from tradition and write about … books. Had you worried there.

Bookworld recently took up a challenge to write about the books which "have shaped, or even defined, the reader". How can one resist such a challenge? Yes, it would easy for me to join in. However, regular readers can guess what authors I am bound to select. The list in the last entry would cover it, in terms of authors at least. So I thought I’d do something different.

When I began reading (circa 1985), I looked everywhere for what I was looking for. Guidance came mainly through reviews and events such as the Booker Prize (though it didn’t take me long to get disillusioned!).

Elsewhere I’ve written about patiently and perplexedly going through JG Ballard’s back catalogue after I had read an article in the New Musical Express. And thinking back to that time, I recall reading a novel that was one of the greatest novels in the whole world ever, or something, so I read it. And that Malcolm Bradbury was hilarious, so I read Rates of Exchange. They were, to say the least, not what I was looking for. (I soon realised that the London newspapers were full of such middlebrow hyperbole).

I was also influenced by specific publishers. I thought Faber & Faber was fab because it published a book on my forthcoming list, so I was attracted to its books. Maggie Gee’s Light Years rather reversed that judgement. Eventually, my judgement became more discerning (I like to think). This list includes milestones along the way. I might have stopped and set up camp, but I no longer live there.

So, the list.

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
First of all, this surname must be pronounced Kun-dur-uh. Death to those who say ‘Kun-dare-er’!

What drew me to this novel, of course, was its extraordinary title. I remember reaching for it on the library display in January 1986, the day of my birthday in fact. The book could easily have been like the movie: shallow and pretentious. And it probably got its notoriety anyway for its promiscuous sex and political sexiness rather than its literary daring. What made the book extra special for me - took it beyond the merely fashionable - was the way it began. Yes, there’s the opening section on Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence (which I didn’t understand), but more importantly for me there’s also the passage where Tomas is introduced looking out of a window, introduced, that is, looking out of a window as seen through the writer’s imagination; not as an obvious figment or a postmodern plaything, but a living presence who begins the narrative. This simple moment of honesty felt like a gift; the key to the door.

Noam Chomsky: Turning the Tide
I used to make a round cycle journey of eight miles to visit the nearest-town-to-my-town’s library. When Robert Wyatt mentioned (in another NME article) that he was reading Noam Chomsky, I looked him up despite my conservative assumptions. Turning the Tide, subtitled United States Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace was new on these shelves. Nowadays his books are everywhere but then, only here. It was more than a political realignment. What Chomsky did for me was to compare word and action. The result was an unexpected juxtaposition revealing that, in the case of those who had influenced me until that point, one obliterated the other. Everyone around me began to speak in code. In political terms, one can hear it everyday. The invasion of Iraq was ‘a mistake’, for example, or President Bush’s delayed response to Hurricane Katrina was ‘a mistake’. Both of these ignore the quite deliberate rationale for each: both invasion and delay were done to enable Bush to carve the reconstruction up among his corporate sponsors. For Katrina, see this article. No mistake at all. Apparent criticism of power, then, is seen to be really the profoundest kind of support. In literary terms, one way among many that we can see this in action is in the infantilisation of novels – symbolised by the rise of JK Rowling. It’s the bad faith of people who read the most simplistic, reductionist fiction and then insist they do it only for escapist purposes when really it only reinforces the conditions from which they feel the need to escape, and to which they are also deeply wedded.

Henry James: The Beast in the Jungle
I don’t remember when I read this for the first time. Actually, it feels like I’ve never read it. In this way it’s like Blanchot’s Death Sentence, which coincidentally I’ve also read three times. This is perhaps because it’s a story that never really gets beyond its beginning. This isn’t a criticism! The stifling restraint of the relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram is matched by the way the story is told. Marcher’s misunderstanding of his fate – which is really also a terrible appreciation – is present also in the logic of our reading. We get to the end only to find the deep ravage is in the face of the other, not in the story. It is outside. We have held ourself apart in reading a book.

In the introduction to my story collection, the editors (including a pre-fame Tom Paulin) sneer at Marchers disdain for reality and his ‘retreat’ into a morbid imagination. They include the story for contrast. But really Marcher’s response is one of excessive respect for reality! He allows the mythical beast to dominate his life. His morbidity emerges in the projection of a world elsewhere. Instead, he needed to be more selfish. James is aware of the irony, hence the necessity of form and content: life always lives in the ironic denial of life.

Richard Ford: The Sportswriter
It still amazes me now. I read this novel three times in the late 80s. I also loved its successor Independence Day. Everything else Ford has written has left me non-plussed. What I liked here was the voice of failure seeking and refusing to seek. I liked the flatness of it all. It is a flatness that isn’t as smug and precious as in Raymond Carver’s stories. Apparently Ford is working on the third volume.

Colin Wilson: The Outsider
I have no memory of the content of this book except wondering why the Henri Barbusse novel it discusses wasn’t available. But it certainly excited me. I read dozens of Wilson’s other books, all of them products of cynical hack work and/or English philistinism. It embarrasses me to mention it.