Reading Note: Ballard
Just for the record — this record of reading New Yorker stories, something that I’ve either done or not done over the past fifty years, but either way with great passion; something that I should like, belatedly, document — I have nothing to say about “The Autobiography of JGB,” JG Ballard’s posthumous contribution to the current issue.
Having nothing to say about it, I will say of it that it is not (even) written in a language that I do not understand; on the contrary, I fear that I understand it all too well. But it is written in a language that I do not find engaging. The only way to “square” it is to read it as a dream, and I find the discussion of dreams to be the last word in loathsome talk. All dreams become nightmares when they are shared: to be the only person who signifies (as one always is in dreams) is to be a passive monstrosity. And to be, as Ballard’s alter ego seems to be, content to find that one is the only person left alive on earth, and thereby quite actually to be the only signifier — that is simply contemptible. The want of outgoing interest evident in Ballard’s “autobiography” would have stopped me from keeping a diary, much less publishing fiction.
I may have been born alone, and I will probably die alone, but in between there has been and there will be no being alone.
I do love Jean-François Martin’s illustration, though. A lot. Has he worked his name into the hoardings, d’you think?