Baxter, Jeannette, ed.: J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.

Wilson, D. Harlan

Baxter, Jeannette, ed. J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2008. 151 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9726-0. $29.95.

This reader of critical essays on J. G. Ballard is the first installment of Continuum's Contemporary Critical Perspectives series, which has since tackled the writing of Ian McEwan (2009), with a volume on Kazuo Ishiguro (2010). Addressing issues of methodology, effect, and historicity, the book studies novels, short stories, journalistic essays, and film adaptations in an attempt to provide fresh readings of Ballard. His death in April 2009 is a coincidence; the essays were written beforehand, and editor Jeannette Baxter does not capitalize on it. J. G. Ballard nonetheless appears at an auspicious time for the publisher as when all major artists die, interest in their work spikes. Despite the series' goal to "offer readers of current fiction a comprehensive critical account of each author's work, presenting original, specially commissioned analyses of all aspects of their career" (xi), perhaps some material here will be familiar to scholars of Ballard. Overall, however, the book presents unique and compelling scholarly analyses in a user-friendly format.

Baxter's introduction, "J. G. Ballard and the Contemporary," is preceded by a short chronology identifying publication dates and key moments in Ballard's personal and professional life. She frames the introduction with a twopronged dictionary definition of the term "Ballardian," the second of which underscores the coordinates of his oeuvre: "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak manmade landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments" (1). She then elaborates on this definition while providing context for the author's life and the "objects and architectures" that constitute his narrative diegeses. Ultimately, Ballard is portrayed as an eccentric author who doesn't fit neatly (or even, in some cases, sloppily) into established genres. His interest in the effects of technology on the human condition drew him towards the sf genre, namely as a New Wave author, in the 1960s and '70s. He refused to employ conventional sf tropes, however, rendering his oeuvre doubly estranging--yet still resonant and widely read. Ballard's experimental, hybrid prose exhibits a visual and imagistic texture in the vein of Surrealist and Pop art, two of his major influences that he combined with the machinery of sf in an essentially modernist effort to, Ezra Pound would say, "make it new." And this distinctive cyborgian technique and style reflects the cyborgian characters in many of his narratives.

Baxter's general thesis is that Ballard has been misread as "a nihilistic and solipsistic voyeur whose writing is emotionally detached and morally vacuous. This is a historical picture of J. G. Ballard which many of the essays in this collection confront and challenge" (7). One way the authors of J. G. Ballard enact this confrontation is by interrogating Ballard himself, reading into the "fictionalized versions" that materialize in his writing (9). From one theoretical perspective, this angle of incidence falls short. What matters, after all, is not Ballard the man (or the "illustrated man")--the biography/identity of the Author is, if only from a postmodern perspective, unstable, schized, always-already slipping away. Baxter even admits it, calling the question of who is J. G. Ballard "hollow because, in a sense, there is no one J. G. Ballard to be found" (9). Yet this book makes efforts to "find" him. More interesting though is how the book "finds" his texts, i.e., how it dynamically analyzes what Ballard's texts do.

Like Baxter, a senior lecturer in English at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, the authors of the eight chapters that follow Baxter's introduction are primarily scholars at UK universities, with the exception of two fiction writers and a Rome-based independent scholar. The focal novels they study, in no particular order, include The Atrocity Exhibition (1972), Crash (1973), Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), Miracles of Life (2008), The Drowned World (1962), Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), and Kingdom Come (2006) as well as select short stories and essays, such as the New Worlds manifesto, which is used in the first chapter to contextualize Ballard as a central New Wave writer and mainstream sf deviant. Each chapter begins with a handy, 50-100 word chapter summary and list of keywords that make it easier for research. For instance, the precis for chapter 3, Victor Sage's "The Gothic, the Body, and the Failed Homeopathy Argument: Reading Crash," looks like this:

Chapter Summary: Approaching the Baudrillard/Ballard relationship from a new angle, this chapter revisits Crash as a site of Gothic horror and humour. Sage argues how Baudrillard's essentially metonymic reconstruction of Crash overlooks the impact of Ballard's deadpan use of language which is also full of lurking metaphor.

Key Words: Crash; Gothic; the Body; the 'Other'; the Double; Homeopaty; transparency, metaphor; metonymy; humour; 'death of affect'; car crash; sex; perversion; technology; David Cronenberg; Jean Baudrillard

Precises of this nature will make the book particularly suitable for graduate courses and studies.

While chapters like Sage's focus on a single novel, others read multiple texts by way of a dominant theme. Representative is Corin Depper's "Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard," which addresses the relationship between the author's fiction and the film industry. For Ballard, film functions as an incarnation of mass/media culture as well as "a form that has allowed for the very refiguring of both experience and narrative; one that permits new modes of thinking and being to emerge" (50). Depper examines three novels and their film adaptations: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and Empire of the Sun. His reading is appropriately informed by the philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze, who, like Ballard, developed new kinds of narrative situations and techniques by thinking about the history of cinema. Depper concludes that there is a fundamental tension between the novels' indebtedness to cinema and resistance to cinematic adaptation. In broader terms, Ballard both celebrates and critiques cinematic consciousness. This may be the anthology's most important chapter. Any thorough understanding of Ballard is contingent upon a basic understanding of film theory and Ballard's dynamic extrapolation of film as representation and perversion of reality.

Toby Litt supplies a short, somewhat disposable afterword to J. G. Ballard regarding, once again, the identity/biography of the author, although Litt rightly alludes to Ballard as a fluid Deleuzoguattarian line of flight and "tunnel-builder" (120). The book ends with a short interview conducted by Baxter in 2007; she focuses on Kingdom Come and asks Ballard to talk about themes of Englishness, utopia and dystopia, language and meaning, religion, consumer-capitalism, fascism, and the aestheticization of violence. While not for a general audience, J. G. Ballard is a valuable academic resource for serious scholars of a seminal postmodern author.