We Are All Willing On The Catastrophe

I think this is accurate, and I say this as a ballardophile.

The alienation of people within such a society and their increasing obsession with catastrophic death is a subject for deep exploration, and this is the primary subject of Ballard's subsequent fiction. The greatest strength of this late fiction is that it penetrates profoundly into the morbid psychology that comes from living in such a society; its most critical weakness is that in pursuing this exploration, Ballard loses sight of the underlying causation of the psychopathology of everyday life in decaying capitalism. He leaves behind his own best insights, in stories such as "The Overloaded Man," "The Impossible Man,” “Build Up," and "The Subliminal Man," which show the individual human being as the victim of an inhuman social structure, and begins to stand the world on its head, making the psychology of the individual the cause rather than the product of the death-oriented political economy.

Underlying the elaborate verbal structure of the late fiction are some fairly simple, in fact simple-minded, ideas about social reality. Indeed, the formal pyrotechnics disguise as much as they reveal of the ideational content. Clad in an elegant costume is the tired old idea that human nature is basically brutish and stupid, that people are inherently perverse, cruel, and self destructive, and that's why the modern world is going to hell. High-Rise, his latest novel, is virtually a parody of this notion. Such a vision, I believe, is merely a projection of Ballard's own class point of view, a myopia as misleading as the national and racial point of view in the earlier novels and intimately related to that narrow outlook.

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I think that misses the point, Ballard is all about empathising with the protagonist, in fact Id argue that was his main gift, a very careful and precise use of language to elicit sympathy for generally awful characters.

Regardless, even without that dynamic, the underlying worldview of much of Ballard's work is undeniable.

Franklin's 'What are we to make of J.G. Ballard’s Apocalypse?'

https://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/ballard_apocalypse_1979.html

Perhaps the most cited Ballard essay.

I guess what Im trying to say is that much as I love his work and value his insights I don't trust the ability of a problematic, apocalypse obsessed misanthrope to definitively diagnose the psychology of the human race (and yes, Im aware of the irony here).

luka said:

This is so often the problem with Marxist lit crit isn't it. That they want to have writers churning out Marxist propaganda and any deviation from that programme is intolerable. It doesn't strike me as a helpful approach. It's cool he thinks the assassinations of the Kennedys, king, Malcolm X etc were committed by "the secret government of America" though

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Not to get sidetracked, but this doesn't seem like a substantive critique.

One point regarding his conspiracy theory. He actually says 'Kennedy', singular, referring to Robert, and there's certainly a reasonable argument to be made in each of those cases, especially King - at least as plausible as Ballard's 'morbid psychology'.

I... really dont think it is, or at least not just that.

A critique of Ballard on the basis that he reduces human motivation down to a number of repressed & unconscious desires based around various psychoanalytical theories, is reasonable, in fact that's one of his distinguishing features. At a time when science fiction was moving outward at an ever expanding rate, he chose to look inward and speculate about the internal psychology of future humanity rather than its external adventures.

If you're gonna miss, miss big. . . .

It isn't quite in line with the rest of the thread but I caught some of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow the other night and it got me thinking about the appeal of spectacular failures. There's definitely something about the people who fly too close to the sun. The legendarily disastrous Apocalypse Now shoot, Richard Kelly wrecking his career with Southland Tales, Lynch's Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune. Those huge projects and undertakings which are forever threatening to collapse under their own weight and often do.

luka said:

It's true that the move is inward rather than outward but, like, so what? What I mean is, if you were to read a Christian essay on Ballard, which, instead of scolding him for failing to see the redemption of humanity lay in the revolutionary strivings of the proletariat, he was scolded for failing to see the redemption of humanity lay in Jesus, you would rightly scoff.

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I hate to labour the point, but you're just using Franklin's politics to sidestep the substantive nature of his criticism. That Ballard's focus on the inner to explain the corruption of the outer, could very easily be flipping cause and effect, that its the systemic nature of the outer which causes the corruption of the inner, something which, as Franklin points out, Ballard was quite aware of in his earlier works.

This is why issues of character empathy and the worldviews of his protagonists are important. You may not be expected to emulate their actions, which are often irrational and unexplainable even to them - but there is never any question around their worldview, the assumptions behind their attitudes, the ground on which they stand - which is taken as a given. And it is invariably one of a nihilistic, alienated upper middle class professional, often allied or sympathetic with deeply reactionary forces. This is the character that desires catastrophe, someone warped by class and culture, threatened by the other, whose lifestyle allows him the luxury of the fetish - Franklin's 'bourgeois solipsism'.

This is not a suitable avatar for the desires of a species, it is a very particular and peculiar product of a very specific set of societal and cultural circumstances.

You might also suggest that its crazy to extrapolate the worldview of Ballard's characters as an insight into the group consciousness of the entire human race, but that seems to be the basis of this conversation.